What color is the blood in our bodies?  The myth is that blood is red when it is filled with oxygen and blue when it does not have any oxygen in it.  This myth is completely false, and don't believe anyone who tells you otherwise.  Blood receives oxygen from the lungs, flows through the body and then delivers this oxygen where it is needed before making the round trip back to the heart where it is passed again to the lungs.  The oxygen dissolves in your blood, binding to the red blood cells.  Human blood is always red.  The only difference is that when it is oxygenated, it is a bright red, and when it is depleted of oxygen, it is a darker red . The myth of blue blood may have several origins, (1) veins, which carry the blood once it is low on oxygen, look blueish green, but that's because of the tissue that makes up the veins and is not due to the blood itself.  (2) there is a term "blue blooded" which, especially in previous eras, used to refer to someone who was of royal or noble class.  So, if your family was rich or notable, people may have said that you had "blue blood".  Despite these things, nobody's blood has ever been blue.  http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=3964

A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg

Blending is a useful way to name things (vitamin:  vital + amine), places (Mexicali:  Mexico + California), ideas (sitcom:  situational + comedy), companies (Groupon:  group + coupon), and more.  Even the word alphabet is a blend of alpha + beta, the first two letters of the Greek alphabet.

QUOTES by Claude Monet (1840-1928)

"I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers."  "My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece."  Link to other resources at http://www.cmonetgallery.com/quotes.aspx

For a species known for its willingness to leap before looking, humanity has a remarkably long history of “hemming and hawing.”  The phrase in that form first appeared in the late 18th century (“I hemmed and hawed … but the Queen stopped reading,” 1786), but other forms (“hem and hawk,” “hum and haw,” etc.) are a few centuries older, and the “hem” and the “haw” are both considerably older than the whole phrase.  The basic meaning of “hem,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), is “an interjectional utterance like a slight half cough, used to attract attention, give warning, or express doubt or hesitation.”  If this sounds vaguely familiar, that’s because it is the same sound depicted by the interjection “ahem,” the difference being that “ahem” is an actual word used to attract attention to the speaker, rather than producing the sound “hem” itself.  One uses “ahem” in situations where, for instance, making noises with one’s throat might be either rude or ineffective.  The verb “to hem,” meaning to make the noise, dates to the 15th century, and is “echoic” in origin, being an imitation of the sound itself.  “Hem” is also closely related to “hum,” also echoic.  “Haw,” which dates back to the 1600s, is another case of a word imitating a sound, in this case “as an expression of hesitation” (OED).  There are fashions in such things, and today we are more likely to say “uh,” “huh,” or “um” when faced with a sudden decision, but the feeling is the same.  http://www.word-detective.com/2008/10/hem-and-haw/

Edmond Hoyle,  (1671 or 1672-1769) English writer, perhaps the first technical writer on card games.  His writings on the laws of whist gave rise to the common phrase “according to Hoyle,” signifying full compliance with universally accepted rules and customs.  Hoyle’s life before 1741 is unknown, although he is said to have been called to the bar.  For the use of the pupils to whom he began teaching whist that year, he prepared A Short Treatise on the Game of Whist (1742), which went through 13 editions in his lifetime.  His revised laws of 1760 remained authoritative until 1864, when the Arlington and Portland whist clubs in London adopted a new code.  The Hoyle codification of the laws and strategy of backgammon (1743) is still largely in force. He also wrote treatises on chess (1761) and other games.  Familiar with the laws of probability, he appended to one of his books a life table for annuities.  http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/273605/Edmond-Hoyle

remainder  noun: part or portion that is left, as after use, subtraction, expenditure, the passage of time; another name for difference; future interest in property; number of copies of a book left unsold when demand slows or ceases, which are sold 

at a reduced  price by the publisher  http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/remaindered

Zen counting to improve teamwork and communication:  Have the group count from one to ten.  The larger the group, the harder this is and the longer it can take.  Start by giving them instructions and letting them ask questions, but don't allow them to plan any strategy (for example, there should be no designated order).  The rules:  Only one person can talk at a time; if two people speak at once, the group must start over.  No one person can say two consecutive numbers.  No gestures allowed.  If they become good at it, have them try with their eyes closed.  http://www.teampedia.net/wiki/index.php?title=Zen_Counting

Amazon and author story followed up with May 25, 2014 article on Amazon and Apple.  Read the article and link to other articles at http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2014/05/25/apple-amazon-hachette-antitrust/?source=yahoo_quote  Thank you, muse reader.

Scarcely two weeks has passed since we celebrated the partial digitization of the American Museum of Natural History’s jaw-dropping collection http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/style-blog/wp/2014/05/01/19-legitimately-astounding-photos-from-the-museum-of-natural-historys-newly-digitized-archives/, and already another museum is liberalizing its own policies online.  This time it’s New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has announced that more than 400,000 high-res images from the museum’s collections will now be available for free digital download and use in any non-commercial medium — Facebook, Tumblr and personal blogs included.  Copies of the images were online previously, explained Met spokeswoman Ann Bailis, but the new policy is intended to expand access further.  Essentially, the museum is recognizing — much like the Museum of Natural History and the Digital Public Library of America — that the Internet can prove a compelling means to make public domain materials tangibly, usefully public.  The newly freed images are available on the museum’s Web site and tagged with the acronym “OASC,” for Open Access for Scholarly Content; new images will be added to the program on a regular basis.  Caitlin Dewey  See graphics at http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2014/05/21/more-than-400000-pieces-from-the-metropolitan-museum-of-art-are-available-for-download-online/?hpid=z7

Massimo Vignelli, an acclaimed graphic designer who gave shape to his spare, Modernist vision in book covers and shopping bags, furniture and corporate logos, even a church and a New York City subway map that enchanted aesthetes and baffled straphangers, died May 27, 2014 at his home in Manhattan.  He was 83. An admirer of the architects Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, Mr. Vignelli moved to New York from Italy in the mid-1960s with the hope of propagating a design aesthetic inspired by their ideal of functional beauty.  He preached clarity and coherence and practiced them with intense discipline in everything he turned out, whether kitchenware, public signage, books or home interiors.  “Massimo, probably more than anyone else, gets the credit for introducing a European Modernist point of view to American graphic design,” Michael Bierut, a partner at Pentagram, a leading graphic design firm, said.  His clients included American Airlines, Ford, IBM, Xerox and Gillette.  St. Peter’s Lutheran Church in Manhattan had him design an entire church.  His brochures for the National Park Service are still used. Bloomingdale’s, Saks Fifth Avenue and Barneys all gave out Vignelli-designed shopping bags in the 1970s.  He designed the signs for the New York and Washington subways and suggested the name Metro for the Washington system.  Mr. Vignelli described himself as an “information architect,” one who structures information to make it more understandable.  But when the Metropolitan Transportation Authority released his new subway map in 1972, many riders found it the opposite of understandable.  Rather than representing the subway lines as the spaghetti tangle they are, it showed them as uniform stripes of various colors running straight up and down or across at 45-degree angles — not unlike an engineer’s schematic diagram of the movement of electricity.  What upset many riders even more was that the map ignored much of the city aboveground.  It reduced the boroughs to white geometric shapes and eliminated many streets, parks and other familiar features of the cityscape.  Tourists complained of getting off the subway near the southern end of Central Park and finding that a stroll to its northern tip, 51 blocks away, took more than the 30 minutes they had expected.  Gray, not green, was used to denote Central Park; beige, not blue, to indicate waterways.  Douglas Martin  Read more and see graphics at http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/28/business/massimo-vignelli-a-modernist-graphic-designer-dies-at-83.html?_r=0

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1154  May 28, 2014  On this date in 1503, James IV of Scotland and Margaret Tudor were married.  A Treaty of Everlasting Peace between Scotland and England signed on that occasion resulted in a peace that lasted ten years.  On this date in 1588, the Spanish Armada, with 130 ships and 30,000 men, set sail from Lisbon, Portugal, heading for the English Channel.