Two kinds of criteria distinguish languages from dialects.  The first are social and political:  in this view, “languages” are typically prestigious, official and written, whereas “dialects” are mostly spoken, unofficial and looked down upon.  In a famous formulation of this view, “a language is a dialect with an army and a navy”.  Speakers of mere “dialects” often refer to their speech as “slang”, “patois” or the like.  (The Mandarin Chinese term for Cantonese, Shanghaiese and others is fangyan, or “place-speech”.)  Linguists have a different criterion:  if two related kinds of speech are so close that speakers can have a conversation and understand each other, they are dialects of a single language.  If comprehension is difficult to impossible, they are distinct languages.  Of course, comprehensibility is not either-or, but a continuum—and it may even be asymmetrical.  Nonetheless, mutual comprehensibility is the most objective basis for saying whether two kinds of speech are languages or dialects.  Ethnologue, a reference guide to the world's languages, calls Chinese and Arabic "macrolanguages", noting both their shared literature and the mutual (spoken) unintelligibility of many local varieties, which it calls languages.  For the most part, linguists consider spoken language primary:  speech is universal, whereas only a fraction of the world’s 6,000-7,000 languages are written.  This is behind the linguist’s common-sense definition: two people share a language if they can have a conversation without too much trouble.  http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2014/02/economist-explains-8

Mar. 2, 2014  The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Tier 3 program is part of a comprehensive approach to reducing the impacts of motor vehicles on air quality and public health.  The program considers the vehicle and its fuel as an integrated system, setting new  vehicle emissions standards and lowering the sulfur content of gasoline beginning in 2017. The vehicle standards will reduce both tailpipe and evaporative emissions from passenger cars, light-duty trucks, medium-duty passenger vehicles, and some heavy-duty vehicles.  The gasoline sulfur standard will enable more stringent vehicle emissions standards and will make emissions control systems more effective.  Link to regulations and standards at http://www.epa.gov/otaq/tier3.htm

The Naval War College Library in Newport, R.I. on Feb. 23, 2014  publicly unveiled online the 4,000-page “Gray Book” collection of Fleet Adm. Chester Nimitz communications that started in the wake of the Pearl Harbor attack and ran right up until the closing days of the war.  The Naval War College Foundation funded the endeavor, which started in August 2012.  The documents have been scanned before, but the higher quality scans will offer researchers, scholars and enthusiasts a better way to search through the tome.  The Naval History and Heritage Command (NHHC) directly supported the digitization effort, and is currently actively remediating its archival holdings and facilities in order to both safeguard them, and ultimately to make them safely accessible to improve future naval understanding and decision-making.  The Gray Book was declassified in 1972.  The Naval History and Heritage Command, located at the Washington Navy Yard, is responsible for the preservation, analysis, and dissemination of U.S. Naval history and heritage.  It is composed of many activities including the Navy Department Library, the Navy Archives, the Navy art and artifact collections, underwater archaeology, Navy history, nine museums, USS Constitution repair facility and the historic ship Nautilus.  http://navylive.dodlive.mil/2014/02/23/nimitz-gray-book-unveiling/

Find the Gray Book at http://usnwc.edu/Academics/Library/Naval-Historical-Collection.aspx#items/show/849

Absorb vs. Adsorb  Absorb is a process by which a material imbibes some amount of liquid or gas into it.  Adsorb is a process by which some liquid or gas gets accumulated on the surface of another material.  Read much more at http://www.differencebetween.net/science/difference-between-adsorb-and-absorb/

The prefix ab means away or from.  The prefix ad means movement to, change into, addition or increase  Find much more, including examples, at http://www.englishclub.com/vocabulary/prefixes.htm

We use “versus” to indicate that two entities are opposed to each other—for example, in a courtroom or in sports.  The origin of “versus” is simple:  it comes from Latin and it means “against.”  It’s a preposition, just like the words “above” and “over.”  How about when you want to abbreviate “versus”?  The only time you should use “v.” as an abbreviation [for “versus”] is in legal contexts.  In American law, the widely used citation standard is the Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation, which demands that opposing legal parties be separated by “v.” when referring to a particular case. This usage is also used by the news media and other writers when referring to legal cases.  In other contexts, “vs.” (American English) or “vs” (British English) can be used as an abbreviation.  This usage is more casual than writing out “versus.”  In British law, “v” without the period is the standard.  This is also often the standard in countries whose dialect of English is substantially drawn from British English--for example, in Commonwealth nations like Australia and South Africa.  http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/versus

Feb. 28, 2014  March marks the 25th anniversary of the World Wide Web. Sophie Curtis takes a look at some of the pioneers that have helped make the Web what it is today.  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/internet/10665375/25-years-of-the-World-Wide-Web-25-Web-superstars.html

Pepper and Egg Sandwich

Italian style  http://www.food.com/recipe/italian-pepper-and-egg-sandwich-463555  25 min. time

Chicago style  http://www.squidoo.com/pepper-and-egg-sandwich  10 min. time

Getty Images, the world's largest photo agency, has made vast swathes of its library free to use, in an effort to combat piracy.  Millions of images - including famous shots of Marilyn Monroe and Barack Obama - will now be available without cost to blogs and social media sites.  The photos will be "framed" with a code that links back to Getty's website.  Getty said it had made the move after realising thousands of its images were being used without attribution.  "Our content was everywhere already," said Craig Peters, a business development executive at the Seattle-based company.  "If you want to get a Getty image today, you can find it without a watermark very simply," he added.  "The way you do that is you go to one of our customer sites and you right-click.  Or you go to Google Image search or Bing Image Search and you get it there. And that's what's happening…"  

http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-26463886

The first International Women's Day was held in 1911 and is celebrated annually on 8 March with thousands of events across the world.  The United Nations has its own official theme each year. Their theme for 2014 is 'equality for women is progress for all'.  Heather Saul  See Google Doodles at http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/international-womens-day-2014-google-doodle-compiles-celebratory-video-9176517.html

 Issue 1119  March 7, 2014  On this date in 1850, Senator Daniel Webster gave his "Seventh of March" speech endorsing the Compromise of 1850 in order to prevent a possible civil war.  In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell was granted a patent for an invention he called the telephone.