Coma is Robin Cook's first major published novel, published by Signet Book in 1977. Coma was preceded in 1973 by Cook's lesser known novel, The Year of the Intern.  The story was made into a highly successful film, Coma by Michael Crichton in 1978.  The story has been adapted again into a two-part television miniseries aired in September 2012 on A&E television network.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coma_(novel)  Robin Cook (born 1940 Robert Brian Cook) is an American physician and novelist.  Michael Crichton (1942-2008) born John Michael Crichton, was an American best-selling author, physician, producer, director, and screenwriter.  Crichton wrote under his own name and also the pen names John Lange, Jeffrey Hudson and Michael Douglas.

The Google Ngram Viewer is an online phrase-usage graphing tool originally developed by Jon Orwant and Will Brockman of Google, inspired by a prototype (called "Bookworm") created by Jean-Baptiste Michel and Erez Aiden from Harvard and Yuan Shen from MIT.  It charts the yearly count of selected n-grams (letter combinations)^[n] or words and phrases, as found in over 5.2 million books digitized by Google Inc (up to 2008).  The words or phrases (or ngrams) are matched by case-sensitive spelling, comparing exact uppercase letters, and plotted on the graph if found in 40 or more books during each year (of the requested year-range).  The Ngram tool was released in mid-December 2010 and now supports searches for parts of speech and wildcards.  The word-search database was created by Google Books and was based originally on 5.2 million books published between 1500 and 2008.  Collectively, the corpus contained over 500 billion words^[ in American English, British English, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Hebrew, and Chinese.  Italian words are counted by their use in other languages.  A user of the Ngram tool has the option to select among the source languages for the word-search operations.   

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Ngram_Viewer  See also Google's Ngram Viewer Goes Wild by Ben Zimmer at http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/10/googles-ngram-viewer-goes-wild/280601/

The origin of the word "tomfoolery" according to most dictionaries and etymologists dates back several centuries in England, where the name Thom Foole referred to any half-witted man.  According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Tom, short for Thomas, was a name frequently used among the common peasantry and was "often a generic name for any male representative of the common people."  Anyone acting like a fool could be Tom fool.  Though the phrase Thom Foole, or Tom fool, purportedly originated in the Middle Ages during the 13th or 14th century, the word tomfoolery was not recorded until centuries later in 1812.  Tomfoolery is the action or behavior of a tomfool, which is playful or foolish behavior considered silly and trifling.  An alternative theory about the origin of the word claims that tomfoolery is named after a real person.  Thomas Skelton was the jester of the Pennington family of Muncaster Castle In Cumbria, England, in the 16th century.  Another name for jester is fool, as jesters are known for silly antics and foolish behavior in attempts to amuse their kings.  Thus, the Muncaster Castle jester, Thom the Fool, allegedly is the origin for the phrase tomfool and later the word tomfoolery.  http://www.ask.com/question/origin-of-tomfoolery

QUOTES from Heartland, a Billy Tree novel by David Wiltse

"Anyone who believed in things enough to stand up for them offered a certain impediment to the freedom of others."  "It's intoxicating to have people really pay attention, isn't it?"

David Wiltse was born in 1940 in Lincoln, Nebraska.  He graduated from the University of Nebraska and currently lives in a small town in Connecticut.  He has written plays for stage, screen and television and won a Drama Desk award for most promising playwright for Suggs (first produced at Lincoln Center in 1972).   His novels include the John Becker novels and Billy Tree/Falls City novels.  http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/134651.David_Wiltse

Does handwriting matter?  Not very much, according to many educators.  The Common Core standards, which have been adopted in most states, call for teaching legible writing, but only in kindergarten and first grade.  After that, the emphasis quickly shifts to proficiency on the keyboard.  But psychologists and neuroscientists say it is far too soon to declare handwriting a relic of the past.  New evidence suggests that the links between handwriting and broader educational development run deep.  Children not only learn to read more quickly when they first learn to write by hand, but they also remain better able to generate ideas and retain information.  In other words, it’s not just what we write that matters — but how.  “When we write, a unique neural circuit is automatically activated,” said Stanislas Dehaene, a psychologist at the Collège de France in Paris.  “There is a core recognition of the gesture in the written word, a sort of recognition by mental simulation in your brain.  Handwriting is being dropped in public schools — that could be bad for young minds.  “And it seems that this circuit is contributing in unique ways we didn’t realize,” he continued.  “Learning is made easier.”  A 2012 study led by Karin James, a psychologist at Indiana University, lent support to that view.  Children who had not yet learned to read and write were presented with a letter or a shape on an index card and asked to reproduce it in one of three ways: trace the image on a page with a dotted outline, draw it on a blank white sheet, or type it on a computer.  They were then placed in a brain scanner and shown the image again.  The researchers found that the initial duplication process mattered a great deal.  When children had drawn a letter freehand, they exhibited increased activity in three areas of the brain that are activated in adults when they read and write:  the left fusiform gyrus, the inferior frontal gyrus and the posterior parietal cortex.  By contrast, children who typed or traced the letter or shape showed no such effect.  The activation was significantly weaker.  Dr. James attributes the differences to the messiness inherent in free-form handwriting:  Not only must we first plan and execute the action in a way that is not required when we have a traceable outline, but we are also likely to produce a result that is highly variable.  That variability may itself be a learning tool.  “When a kid produces a messy letter,” Dr. James said, “that might help him learn it.”  Our brain must understand that each possible iteration of, say, an “a” is the same, no matter how we see it written. Being able to decipher the messiness of each “a” may be more helpful in establishing that eventual representation than seeing the same result repeatedly.  “This is one of the first demonstrations of the brain being changed because of that practice,” Dr. James said.

Maria Konnikova  Read about other studies at http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/03/science/whats-lost-as-handwriting-fades.html?hpw&rref=science&_r=0

What was fake on the Internet this week by Caitlin Dewey  May 30, 2014  Installment 13 in a weekly series  The first story appeared on CNN’s iReport, which crowd-sources personal accounts, photos and other content from users.  Per its user policy, CNN doesn’t “edit, fact-check or screen” iReport submissions before they post, making it a potentially fertile ground for pranksters.   http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2014/05/30/what-was-fake-on-the-internet-this-week-giant-asteroids-one-direction-and-kids-who-think-maya-angelou-is-rosa-parks/

New Nigeria money scam comes supposedly from a person you know with "request" in the subject line.  After asking for a transfer of money to pay for a sick relative's operation, you are directed to contact the actual e-mail address of the person you know.

For a small institution, the Delaware Art Museum is wrestling with a big conundrum.  The museum is moving ahead with plans to sell at least two paintings to pay off a debt, including a popular piece by American master Winslow Homer.  The rare move has roiled the art world, where a collection is considered a public trust.  The museum says selling as many as four works is the only way it can retire a $19.8 million debt and replenish its endowment.  It says the alternative would be closing the century-old Wilmington institution and its 12,500-object collection.  Disposing of art for a reason except to buy more art violates the ethics policy of the Association of Art Museum Directors.  The group warns it may sanction the museum, which could block it from sharing works with most other U.S. museums.  "It's a tragedy when works that belong to the community get sold," said Ford Bell, president of the American Alliance of Museums, which also decried the planned sale.  Delaware museum officials say their decision was made with the community in mind.  "I am sad about this, but as a trustee of the museum—not any one piece of art the museum holds—I am in support of doing what is necessary to keep the museum open," said Paula Malone, one of 19 trustees.  Other institutions have faced similar struggles. In March, the museum directors association, which represents 240 directors in North America, sanctioned Randolph College in Lynchburg, Va., and its Maier Museum of Art after the school sold the George Bellows painting "Men of the Docks" to the National Gallery in London for $25.5 million.  In Detroit, some creditors are pushing to sell off at least some city-owned works at the Detroit Institute of Arts to restructure roughly $18 billion in long-term obligations as part of the nation's largest municipal bankruptcy case.  Scott Calvert and Kelly Crow  See picture at http://online.wsj.com/articles/delaware-art-museums-planned-sale-of-homer-work-draws-ire-1401846718

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1157  June 4, 2014  On this date in 1783, the Montgolfier brothers publicly demonstrated their montgolfière (hot air balloon).  On this date in 1792, Captain George Vancouver claimed Puget Sound for the Kingdom of Great Britain.