Monday, March 16, 2015

Jasper Fforde (born 11 January 1961) is a British novelist.  Fforde's first novel, The Eyre Affair, was published in 2001.  Fforde is mainly known for his Thursday Next novels, although he has written several books in the loosely connected Nursery Crime series and has begun two more independent series, The Last Dragonslayer and Shades of GreyHis published books include a series of novels starring the literary detective Thursday Next:  The Eyre Affair, Lost in a Good Book, The Well of Lost Plots, Something Rotten, First Among Sequels, One of our Thursdays Is Missing and The Woman Who Died a Lot.  The Eyre Affair had received 76 publisher rejections before its eventual acceptance for publication.  Fforde won the Wodehouse prize for comic fiction in 2004 for The Well of Lost PlotsThe Big Over Easy (2005), set in the same alternative universe as the Next novels, is a reworking of his first written novel, which initially failed to find a publisher.  Its original title was Who Killed Humpty Dumpty?, and later had the working title of Nursery Crime, which is the title now used to refer to this series of books.  These books describe the investigations of DCI Jack Spratt.  The follow-up to The Big Over Easy, The Fourth Bear, was published in July 2006 and focuses on Goldilocks and the Three Bears.  Fforde's books are noted for their profusion of literary allusions and wordplay, tightly scripted plots, and playfulness with the conventions of traditional genres.  His works usually contain elements of metafiction, parody, and fantasy.  None of his books has a chapter 13 except in the table of contents where there is a title of the chapter and a page number.  In many of the books the page number is, in fact, the page right before the first page of chapter 14.  However, in some the page number is just a page somewhere in chapter 12.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jasper_Fforde

Educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, Nigel McCrery is a film maker and writer.  He created Silent Witness and Touching Evil and produced All the King's Men staring Maggie Smith and David Jason.  He is the author of six Silent Witness books and won the Edgar Allan Poe award for crime fiction.  He is the man who arranged for the remains of Tsar Nicholas and the Russian royal family to be brought to the UK for the forensic tests that showed they were the real bodies.   http://unitedagents.co.uk/nigel-mccrery  
Find Nigel McCrery bibliography divided by fiction, series and non-fiction at

DEMOTIC  adjective   1.  of, relating to, or written in a simplified form of the ancient Egyptian hieratic writing  2.  popular, common   3.  of or relating to the form of Modern Greek that is based on everyday speech  Origin:  Greek dēmotikos, from dēmotēs commoner, from dēmos

The Demotic or popular script, a name given to it by Herodotus, developed from a northern variant of the Hieratic script in around 660 BC.  The Egyptians themselves called it 'sekh shat' (writing for documents).  During the 26th Dynasty it became the preferred script at court, however during the 4th century it was gradually replaced by the Greek-derived Coptic alphabet.  The most recent example of writing in the Demotic script dates from 425 AD.  The Demotic script was used for writing business, legal, scientific, literary and religious documents.  It was written almost exclusively from right to left in horizontal lines and mainly in ink on papyrus.  Demotic inscriptions on wood and stone are also known.  During the Ptolemaic Period it was regularly carved in stone - the most famous example of this is the Rosetta Stone, which is inscribed with texts in the Hieroglyphic script, Greek and Demotic and was one of the keys to the decipherment of Ancient Egyptian scripts.  See Demotic glyphs representing single consonants glyphs at http://www.omniglot.com/writing/egyptian_demotic.htm

Botticelli:  Little Barrel   The painter Botticelli was born at Florence in 1444 in a house in the Via Nueva, Borg' Ognissanti.  This was the home of his father, Mariano di Vanni dei Filipepi, a struggling tanner.  Sandro, the youngest child, derived the name Botticelli by which he was commonly known, not, as related by Giorgio Vasari, from a goldsmith to whom he was apprenticed, but from his eldest brother Giovanni, a prosperous broker, who seems to have taken charge of the boy and who for some reason bore the nickname Botticello or Little Barrel  http://www.nndb.com/people/734/000084482/

In 1706, William Jones – a self-taught mathematician and one of– published his seminal work, Synopsis palmariorum matheseos, roughly translated as A summary of achievements in mathematics.  It is a work of great historical interest because it is where the symbol π appears for the first time in scientific literature to denote the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter.  Jones realised that the decimal 3.141592 … never ends and that it cannot be expressed precisely.  “The exact proportion between the diameter and the circumference can never be expressed in numbers,” he wrote.  That was why he recognised that it needed its own symbol to represent it.  It is thought that he chose π either because it is first letter of the word for periphery (περιφέρεια) or because it is the first letter of the word for perimeter (περίμετρος).  (Or because of both).  The symbol π was popularised in 1737 by the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler (1707–83), but it wasn’t until as late as 1934 that the symbol was adopted universally.   http://www.theguardian.com/science/alexs-adventures-in-numberland/2015/mar/14/pi-day-2015-william-jones-the-welshman-who-invented-pi

Dr. Edwin J. Goodwin, M.D., a physician in the community of Solitude, Posey County, Indiana, was one of a long line of mathematical hobbyists to try to square the circle.  Dr. Goodwin thought he had succeeded, and, apparently a loyal Hoosier, decided that the State of Indiana should be the first beneficiary of this "new mathematical truth."  In 1897, Dr. Goodwin wrote a bill incorporating his new ideas, and persuaded his State Representative to introduce it.  Representative Record submitted the bill, House Bill 246, on January 18, 1897.  Dr. Goodwin had copyrighted his solution to squaring the circle, and his idea was to allow Indiana to use these new facts in its schools free of charge.   People in the rest of the country and the world would have to pay him a royalty.  Petr Beckmann, in his History of Pi, wrote that the bill contained "hair-raising statements which not only contradict elementary geometry, but also appear to contradict each other" (p. 175).  Towards the end of the second of three sections of the bill, it says "the ratio of the diameter and circumference is as five-fourths to four."  Pi is the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of the circle, and the ratio 4 to 5/4 is 3.2.  The House Bill 246 was referred to the House Committee on Canals, also known as the Committee on Swamp Lands.  Representative M. B. Butler, chairman of the Canals Committee, recommended that it be referred to the Committee on Education, and this was done on January 19.  The newspapers followed the debate.  The Indianapolis Sentinel, on January 20, reported that the bill was "not intended to be a hoax."  The House Education Committee, chaired by Representative S. E. Nicholson, reported the bill out of committee "with the recommendation that said bill do pass."  It was taken up by the full House on February 5, and passed unanimously, 67 to 0.  On February 5, the head of the Purdue University Mathematics Department, Professor Clarence Abiathar Waldo, was in the Statehouse lobbying for the University's budget appropriation.  Professor Waldo had been an instructor of mathematics (and Latin) at several seminaries, institutes and colleges in the Midwest for more than 20 years.  He was the author of a book titled Manual of Descriptive Geometry.  He was astonished to find the General Assembly debating mathematical legislation.  The committee reported the bill favorably the next day, and sent it to the Senate floor for debate.  This time its reception was different.  The Indianapolis Journal had Senator Hubbell saying that "the Senate might as well try to legislate water to run up hill as to establish mathematical truth by law."  Senator Hubbell moved to postpone further consideration of the bill indefinitely, and the motion passed.  According to Beckmann, the bill "has not been on the agenda since" (p. 177).  The official history of the Indiana General Assembly (p. 429) gives the credit to Professor Waldo.  Thanks mainly to this alert professor, who convinced the Senate not to tamper with "unsolvable mysteries . . . above man's abilities to comprehend," the Indiana General Assembly failed to do in 1897 what no one before or since has done, i.e. square the circle.  Link to the full text of HB 246, 1897 at

March 14 (3/14) is celebrated annually as Pi Day because the date resembles the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter — 3.14 for short.  And in 2015 the date syncs up with the first four digits after the decimal point, so 3.14.15 looks a lot like 3.14159265359.  
That won’t happen again until 2115.  http://time.com/3743279/pi-day-2015-wackiest-celebrations/  
Link to "Pi Mathematical Pi Song" and "Pi Sightings:  Pi Pie Pan" at http://www.piday.org/

Corned beef gets its name from the corn kernel-sized salt crystals originally used to preserve meat.  Abraham Lincoln chose corned beef, cabbage and potatoes for his inaugural luncheon on March 4, 1861.  
Get a recipe for St. Paddy’s Day Corned Beef and Cabbage Salad at
http://parade.com/382914/parade/st-paddys-day-corned-beef-and-cabbage-salad/  With more vegetables than meat, the ingredients include green beans and potatoes.  The dressing has molasses, apple cider vinegar, and mustard in it.


http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1270  March 16, 2015  On this date in 1750, Caroline Herschel, German-English astronomer, was born.  On this date in 1861, Edward Clark became Governor of Texas, replacing Sam Houston, who had been evicted from the office for refusing to take an oath of loyalty to the Confederacy.

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