French author Patrick Modiano, whose work focuses on the Nazi occupation and its
effect on his country, was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature October 9,
2014. The Swedish Academy gave the 8
million kronor ($1.1 million) prize to Modiano "for the art of memory with
which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the
life-world of the occupation." Modiano,
69, whose novel "Missing Person" won the prestigious Prix Goncourt in
1978 — was born in a west Paris suburb two months after World War II ended in
Europe in July 1945. His father was of
Jewish Italian origins and met his Belgian actress mother during the occupation
of Paris — and his beginnings have strongly influenced his writing. Modiano, who lives in Paris, is known to shun
media, and rarely gives interviews. http://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/books/patrick-modiano-wins-nobel-prize-literature-n221911
Has Floating Architecture’s Moment Finally Arrived? by Rachel Keeton
In a quiet, shady street
in Rijswijk, the Netherlands, Koen Olthuis and the design team at Waterstudio are
changing the world. From this deceptively
nondescript headquarters, Waterstudio is designing the cities of the
future. If Olthuis has his way, they
will be safer, more flexible and more resilient than current cities. How will he do this? Olthuis is designing floating cities. As we sit down at the table, the busy office
buzzing around us, my first question to Olthuis is direct: “How realistic are floating cities?” Olthuis grins and nods, he’s heard this
question before. Floating cities have
captivated society’s imagination for centuries, from the development of Venice
a millennium ago to Triton, designed for Tokyo Bay by Buckminster Fuller in
the 1960s. But it wasn’t until the last
decade or so that more fully realized, just-might-actually-happen sea-based
urban endeavors have emerged, made more urgent by rising sea levels and
rural-to-urban migration. In the last
six months, Business Insider, Bloomberg and The
Guardian have all run
stories asking the same question: “Has
the time come for floating cities?”
See
a picture of "The Sea Tree" and read much more at http://nextcity.org/daily/entry/floating-architecture-cities-build-on-water
redundant
ATM machine (automated teller machine machine); LCD display
(liquid crystal display display); PIN number (personal identification number number); Lake Tahoe (lake lake);
La Brea tar pits (the tar
tar pits); Minnehaha Falls (waterfall falls); Sahara Desert (deserts
desert); El Camino Way (the way way); Mississippi River (big
river river); East Timor (east east).
Find a list of redundant acronyms and initialisms at http://www.fun-with-words.com/redundant_acronyms.html
Q: Which state has been home to more U.S. presidents: Ohio or Virginia?
A: It’s either Virginia, Ohio or a tie, depending on how you count.
FULL QUESTION Your Thursday, Feb. 28, 2008, Fact of the Day stated,
"More U.S. presidents have been from Ohio than any other state. Eight Ohio natives have been elected to the
top office." But the Washington
Post’s Fact Checker, Michael Dobbs, says that only seven Ohioans have been U.S.
presidents. Who is right?
FULL ANSWER First a mea culpa:
Our answer was inaccurate. It’s
not true that eight Ohio "natives" have been elected to the top
office. Nor is it entirely accurate to
claim that Ohio has produced more U.S. presidents than any other state. We found three different ways of counting:
one results in a Virginia win, one in an Ohio win, and one in a tie.
We took the information
for our Fact of the Day from the Ohio
Secretary of State and the Ohio Public Library Information Network,
which lists eight presidents who have been "elected from the Buckeye
State." Their list: William Henry Harrison, Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B.
Hayes, James A. Garfield,
Benjamin Harrison, William McKinley, William H. Taft, and Warren G. Harding.
The Fact Checker maintains
that it’s Virginia that leads the way with eight U.S. presidents, offering this
list as evidence: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James
Madison, James Monroe, William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, Zachary Taylor, and
Woodrow Wilson. You’ll notice that both
lists contain William Henry Harrison.
That’s because he was born in Virginia and studied at Virginia’s
Hampden-Sydney College. But in 1791,
Harrison joined the Army and spent much of his remaining life in what was then
the Northwest Territory (later Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin and
part of Minnesota). After a stint as the
territorial governor of the Indiana Territory, Harrison moved to Ohio, where he
served as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives and as a U.S. senator
before being elected the 9th U.S. president in 1840. So Dobbs is correct that, counting from place
of birth, Virginia has produced the most U.S. presidents. But Ohio also has a claim, since W.H.
Harrison was actually living in Ohio when he was elected. Unfortunately, it gets complicated here. You see, to get its eight presidents, Ohio
has added W.H. Harrison to its seven native-born Ohioans. That’s reasonable enough, since the elder
Harrison was in fact living in Ohio when he was elected. But using that standard, Benjamin Harrison
would not count as an Ohio president, since he was living in Indiana at the
time of his election. For
that matter, Ulysses S. Grant had
moved to Illinois before he was elected president, so it’s not clear that he
should count, either. Ohio can claim
eight U.S. presidents only by employing a hybrid standard: everyone either born in the state or living
in the state at the time of his election counts. But that standard results in a tie with
Virginia. There is, however, a way of
counting under which Ohio can claim the title of having produced more U.S.
presidents than any other state, but it requires giving up two of its
eight. If we use living in a state at
the time of election as our standard, then Ohio can claim six presidents to
Virginia’s five (Harrison, Taylor and Wilson lived elsewhere at the time of
their election). So we’re going to rule
that both states have sufficient bragging rights and call it a day. Joe Miller
The U. S. Government Printing Office (GPO) annually recognizes an
exceptional Federal depository library with a Library of the Year Award. These
libraries further the Federal Depository Library Program’s mission of ensuring
that the American public has free access to its Government's information in
extraordinary ways. Link to Library of the Year recipients from 2003-2014
at: http://www.fdlp.gov/library-of-the-year
Two villages estimated to be 1,300 years old have
been discovered in the high desert of northern Arizona. The sites, recently acquired by Petrified
Forest National Park, feature walls and floors lined with slabs of sandstone. “Last year we found a large habitation site,
and this summer we found a match, less than a mile away, a site that has dozens
and dozens of different features. We
have now two large groups of pit house structures, both of them with probably
more than 50 structures associated with them,” park archaeologist William
Reitze told Western Digs. He and his
team also recovered ceramics and stone points from the late Basketmaker period,
when the residents of the village were transitioning from nomadic foraging to a
more sedentary society based upon agriculture.
http://www.archaeology.org/news/2562-141002-arizona-basketmaker-settlements
http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com Issue 1202
October 10, 2014 On this date in 1964,
the opening ceremony of the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, Japan, was broadcast live in
the first Olympic telecast relayed by geostationary communication satellite. On this date in 1971, sold, dismantled and
moved to the United States, London Bridge reopened in Lake Havasu City, Arizona.
No comments:
Post a Comment