11 Google Tricks That Will Change the Way You Search by Jack Linshi

1.   Use quotes to search for an exact phrase.

2.   Use an asterisk within quotes to specify unknown or variable words. 

(“* is thicker than water”).

3.   Use the minus sign to eliminate results containing certain words.

4.   Search websites for keywords.  Think of the “site:”.  If you want to see every time TIME.com mentioned Google, use the search “Google site: TIME.com”.

5.   Search news archives going back to the mid-1880s.

6.   Compare foods using “vs.”  Type in “rice vs. quinoa,” and you’ll receive side-by-side comparisons of the nutritional facts.

7.   Filter search results for recipes.  If you search your favorite food, and then click “Search Tools” right under the search bar, you’ll be able to filter recipes based on ingredients, cook time and calories.

8.   Use “DEFINE:” to learn the meaning of words—slang included.

9.   Tilt your screen by searching “tilt.”  Try it out yourself (search without quotes).

10.  Play Atari Breakout by searching it on Google Images.  Search “Atari Breakout” (without quotes) on Google Images.

11.  Search images using images.  If you save the image, and then search it on Google Images (with the camera button), you’ll be able to see similar images on the web.

http://time.com/3581399/google-search/

The rondeau began as a lyric form in thirteenth-century France, popular among medieval court poets and musicians.  Named after the French word for “round," the rondeau is characterized by the repeating lines of the rentrement, or refrain, and the two rhyme sounds throughout.  The form was originally a musical vehicle devoted to emotional subjects such as spiritual worship, courtship, romance, and the changing of seasons.  The rondeau’s form is not difficult to recognize: as it is known and practiced today, it is composed of fifteen lines, eight to ten syllables each, divided stanzaically into a quintet, a quatrain, and a sestet. The rentrement consists of the first few words or the entire first line of the first stanza, and it recurs as the last line of both the second and third stanzas.  

An example of a solemn rondeau is the Canadian army physician John McCrae’s 1915 wartime poem, "In Flanders Fields":

In Flanders fields the poppies grow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place, and in the sky,
The larks, still bravely singing, fly,
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the dead; short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe!
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high!
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/poetic-form-rondeau  Hear Jean Joseph Mouret's "Rondeau" (used as the theme from PBS Masterpiece Theater) at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVUJjPzRb2U  2:06

Find a list of words with all five vowels including dialogue, equation, euphoria, authorize and inoculate at http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/may22013/index.html 

SOUTH AMERICA is the only continent with all 5 vowels in its name.  EUNOIA is the title of a book by Canadian poet Christian Bok which contains a series of univocalic prose poems.  The first 20 or so poems use only the letter A, the next 20 use only E, and so on through I, O, and U.  The book claims that eunoia means “beautiful thinking” and that it is shortest word using all five vowels.  However, the word does not appear in English language dictionaries.  The shortest word with the five vowels in alphabetical order is AERIOUS (7 letters), meaning "airy."  http://jeff560.tripod.com/words6.html

Unlike a lot of other headline-grabbing debut novelists, Taylor Stevens did not graduate from a prestigious creative-writing program.  In fact, she attended school only sporadically until sixth grade, when she stopped going entirely.  Ms. Stevens does not pepper her conversations with literary references or philosophical musings about her “craft.”  She estimated that she had read only about 30 novels in her life.  She cited Robert Ludlum’s “Bourne Identity” as the primary influence on her novel, “The Informationist.”  What this Dallas-based divorced mother does have, however, is the sort of bizarre, twist-filled back story that makes everyone who hears it pay attention.  She was born into and raised as a member of the cult Children of God (now called the Family International), founded by David Berg.  Growing up, she bounced from city to city, often living in cramped and impoverished conditions, rarely spending more than a few months at a stretch at one of the cult’s dozens of communes around the world.  After Mr. Berg’s death, in 1994, the cult changed its rules, allowing members newfound independence.  Ms. Stevens and her husband at the time moved to Africa, where they set up a small commune in Equatorial Guinea.  They remained there until the late 1990s, when they left the cult.  Christopher Kelly  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/us/13ttstevens.html

The College Football Playoff (CFP) is the system in American college football that will determine a national champion for the NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) beginning in the 2014 season.  Under the playoff, four teams play in two semifinal games, with the winners advancing to the new College Football Championship Game.  Six bowl games — the Rose Bowl, Sugar Bowl, Orange Bowl, Cotton Bowl, Fiesta Bowl, and Peach Bowl — rotate as hosts for the semifinal games.  The rotation is set on a three-year cycle with the following pairings:  Rose/Sugar, Orange/Cotton, and Fiesta/Peach.  The two semifinals plus the other four top-tier bowls are marketed as the "New Year's Six", with three bowls played per day, typically on consecutive days that include New Year's Day.  The championship game is played on the first Monday that is six or more days after the semifinals.  The game's venue is selected based on bids submitted by cities, similar to the Super Bowl or NCAA Final Four, with AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas hosting the first title game on January 12, 2015.   The winner is awarded the College Football Playoff National Championship Trophy instead of the AFCA "crystal football" trophy, which had been regularly presented after the championship game since the 1990s; officials wanted a new trophy that was unconnected with the previous championship systems.   Unlike college football's title system used from 1998 to 2013, the Bowl Championship Series (BCS), the new format does not use computer rankings or polls to select the participants. Rather, a committee of 13 experts will select and seed the teams.  The playoff system is the first time the top-level NCAA football championship is determined by a bracket competition.  The new format is a Plus-One system, an idea which became popular as an alternative to the BCS after the 2003 and 2004 seasons ended in controversy.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College_Football_Playoff  Note that families who want to take a possible second postseason game trip will be faced with big bills.

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1235  December 26, 2014  On this date in 1871, Gilbert and Sullivan collaborated for the first time, on their lost opera, Thespis.   The two would not collaborate again for four years.  On this date in 1898, Marie and Pierre Curie announced the isolation of radium.