Ten largest islands in the world

Greenland - (840,004 sq miles) (2,175,600 sq km) 
New Guinea - (303,381 sq miles) (785,753 sq km) 
Borneo - (288,869 sq miles) (748,168 sq km) 
Madagascar - (226,917 sq miles) (587,713 sq km) 
Baffin - (194,574 sq miles) (503,944 sq km) 
Sumatra - (171,069 sq miles) (443,066 sq km) 
Honshu - (88,982 sq miles) (225,800 sq km) 
Great Britain - (88,787 sq miles) (229,957 sq km) 
Victoria - (85,154 sq miles) (220,548 sq km) 
Ellesmere - (71,029 sq miles) (183,965 sq km) 

NOTE:  Australia is widely considered as a continental landmass, not an island.  In reality, it certainly is the largest island, with a size of (2,941,517 sq miles) (7,618,493 sq km).   Link to map of the 15 largest islands in the world and find other information at http://www.worldatlas.com/aatlas/infopage/islands.htm

The Great Lakes has 35,000 islands, among them the largest lake island in the world:  Manitoulin in Lake Huron (Ontario), which has 1,068 square miles.  The Thirty Thousand Islands of Georgian Bay, Ontario, actually include around 17,500 islands.  The Thousand Islands between New York and Ontario number about 1,500.  Lake of the Woods, shared by Ontario, Minnesota and Manitoba, is said to contain 14,000 islands.  Finland claims to have more islands than any other country, with a stated total of 179,584.  However, Canada probably exceeds this number with its immense areas of island-strewn lakes and thousands of miles of rocky coastline.  The largest island created by human action is the Ile Rene-Lavasseur, a 780-square-mile island in Manicouagan Reservoir, Quebec.  The reservoir was formed by the damming of a river to flood a 210 million-year-old meteor crater.  The crater's central uplift became the island.

http://www.great-lakes.net/envt/air-land/isle.html

A designer who has dyslexia has created a font to help dyslexic readers navigate text, designing letters in a way that avoids confusion and adds clarity.  And in England, two researchers are compiling a dictionary that favors meaning over alphabetical order.  Dutch designer Christian Boer's Dyslexie font has been around for a while, but it's been getting new attention thanks to being featured in the Istanbul Design Biennial.  The font defaults to a dark blue color, which Boer's website says "is more pleasant to read for dyslexics."  "When they're reading, people with dyslexia often unconsciously switch, rotate and mirror letters in their minds," Boer tells British design magazine Dezeen.  "Traditional typefaces make this worse, because they base some letter designs on others, inadvertently creating 'twin letters' for people with dyslexia."  To avoid confusion, Boer designed letters that have a heavier bottom half, making it less likely that a reader might flip them.  He also made some openings larger, and slightly tilted some letters that closely resemble others — such as a "b" and a "d."  Dyslexie also incorporates more space between letters and words, to help prevent a dyslexic reader from seeing a confused jumble of text.  Boer's font works with both Apple and Microsoft-based systems; it can also be added to a Web browser as an extension.  The font is free for home users and available for a fee to schools and businesses.  It's not clear what font education researchers Neville and Daryl Brown will use for their new dictionary, which will cater to dyslexic readers' needs.  The father-and-son team say the project builds on decades of research — and the understanding that the standard dictionary isn't very helpful for dyslexics.  Instead of using a strict alphabetical order, words in their dictionary will be organized according to their meanings, as the pair explained in a recent article in British newspaper the Litchfield Mercury.  So far, they've organized nearly 50,000 words, sorting them by some 3,700 morphemes.  "For another example, the traditional dictionary places the words 'signature,' 'resign' and 'assignation' many pages apart," the Mercury reports.  "But they are connected by the common morpheme 'sign,' pronounced differently across the three words."  The two researchers recently told BBC London that they've been working on the dictionary since 1982, when their research school, Maple Hayes Hall, was founded.  They hope to finish the book by the end of 2015.  Bill Chappell  http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/11/11/363293514/for-dyslexics-a-font-and-a-dictionary-that-are-meant-to-help

Newhart is an American television situation comedy starring comedian Bob Newhart and actress Mary Frann as an author and wife who owned and operated an inn located in a small, rural Vermont town that was home to many eccentric characters.  The show aired on the CBS network from October 25, 1982 to May 21, 1990.  Find cast, theme music composer, guest stars, and awards at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newhart

"The Last Newhart" (airdate:  5/21/90), directed by Dick Martin; written by Mark Egan, Mark Solomon, and Bob Bendetson.  Newhart boasts one of the most memorable series finales in television history, entitled "The Last Newhart."  Link to interviews discussing the "red herring" ending written to elude the press and to the last ten minutes of the last show at http://www.emmytvlegends.org/interviews/shows/newhart-the-last-newhart 

Mark Strand, whose spare, deceptively simple investigations of rootlessness, alienation and the ineffable strangeness of life made him one of America’s most hauntingly meditative poets, died November 29, 2014 at his daughter’s home in Brooklyn.  Mr. Strand, who was named poet laureate of the United States in 1990 and awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1999 for his collection “Blizzard of One,” made an early impression with short, often surreal lyric poems that imparted an unsettling sense of personal dislocation.  In 1980, Mr. Strand felt that he had reached an impasse and stopped writing poetry for several years.  He wrote children’s books, beginning with “The Planet of Lost Things” (1982), and short stories, 14 of them collected in “Mr. and Mrs. Baby” (1985).  “I didn’t like what I was writing,” he told the magazine Ploughshares in 1995.  “I didn’t believe in my autobiographical poems.”  Chafing at the restrictive vocabulary and tight boundaries he had imposed on himself, he began writing longer poems and packing more of the outside world into them, a turn reflected in “A Continuous Life” (1990), whose poems showed a more expansive dramatic scope, and “Dark Harbor” (1995), a single poem divided into 45 sections and encompassing an entire life’s voyage.  Mark Apter Strand was born on April 11, 1934, in Summerside on Prince Edward Island in Canada.  His father’s job with Pepsi-Cola entailed many transfers.  Mr. Strand spent his childhood in Cleveland, Halifax, Montreal, New York and Philadelphia and his teenage years in Colombia, Mexico and Peru.  He initially set his sights on becoming an artist.  After earning a bachelor’s degree at Antioch College in Ohio in 1957, he enrolled in the Yale School of Art and Architecture, studying under Josef Albers.  By the time he received his bachelor of fine arts in painting in 1959, he had discovered his vocation as a poet.  He spent a year in Florence on a Fulbright Grant studying 19th-century Italian poetry and was accepted into the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, from which he graduated with a master of fine arts in 1962.  Mr. Strand’s interest in visual art remained constant. He wrote books on the painters Hopper and William Bailey, and a collection of critical essays, “The Art of the Real” (1983).  About five years ago he began making collages, using paper he made by hand.  The work was exhibited in New York by Lori Bookstein Fine Art in Chelsea.  Mr. Strand had been living in Madrid and was in the process of moving to Brooklyn.  William Grimes  http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/30/nyregion/mark-strand-80-dies-pulitzer-winning-poet-laureate.html

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1224  December 1, 2014  On this date in 1862, in his State of the Union Address, Abraham Lincoln reaffirmed the necessity of ending slavery as ordered ten weeks earlier in the Emancipation Proclamation.  On this date in 1913, the

Ford Motor Company introduced the first moving assembly line.