Wednesday, April 22, 2015

English speakers say, “It’s all Greek to me,” when they find something hard to understand.  Shakespeare used the phrase in “Julius Caesar”.  The phrase actually comes from a Medieval Latin proverb, “Graecum est; non potest legi,” meaning “It is Greek; it cannot be read.”  From there, the phrase filtered into many European languages.  Today, English, Spanish, Polish, Norwegian and Swedish all use Greek as a metaphor for incomprehensibility.  http://knowmore.washingtonpost.com/2015/03/25/the-equivalent-of-its-all-greek-to-me-in-30-other-languages/  See The directed graph of stereotypical incomprehensibility filed by Mark Liberman at http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1024

The official dictionary of the Swedish language will introduce a gender-neutral pronoun in April, 2015, editors at the Swedish Academy have announced.  “Hen” , coined in the 1960s, will be added to “han” (he) and “hon” (she) as one of 13,000 new words in the latest edition of the Swedish Academy’s SAOL. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/24/sweden-adds-gender-neutral-pronoun-to-dictionary

April 14, 2015  Now in its fourth week on the New York Times Best Sellers list, Pioneer Girl:  The Annotated Autobiography by Laura Ingalls Wilder, edited by Pamela Smith Hill, continues to defy expectations.  As the industry news source, Publishers Weekly, stated in its story “Not-So-Little Sales on the Prairie,” on March 30, transactions numbered close to 40,000 out of the 75,000 units printed, and the book remains on top-selling lists throughout the nation.  http://pioneergirlproject.org/

April 16, 2015  Multnomah County's Library has made huge environmental strides in an often overlooked area.  The system has become the first major library operation in the country to sustainably source the paper it uses to print patron receipts and hold slips.  Whereas most receipts are printed on paper that contains bisphenol A or bisphenol S, Multnomah has switched to an alternative paper made by Wisconsin-based Appvion Inc. That paper uses a vitamin C formulation in place of phenols like BPA or BPS.  http://www.bizjournals.com/portland/blog/sbo/2015/04/orange-is-the-new-library-receipt-multnomah.html?ana=twt

The rise of relatively inexpensive digital audio and video recording software such as Apple's Garage Band and Adobe's Premiere Pro has made it possible for libraries to offer access to technology never thought possible even a decade ago in state-of-the-art recording studios.  It's happening nationwide:  Brooklyn (N.Y.) Public Library, Chicago Public Library, Hillsborough County (Fla.) Public Library, Joliet (111.) Public Library, Lawrence (Kans.) Public Library, Madison (Wis.) Public Library, and St. Louis Public Library, among many others, all offer such facilities.  The technical capabilities vary at each location, but the mission is consistent: to offer a place where patrons of every age and skill set can learn new skills or hone existing ones.  The Garfield Heights branch of the Cuyahoga County (Ohio) Public Library, Lane Edwards, manager, has an audio recording studio offering a variety of musical instruments and digital recording equipment patrons can use to record and mix their own music.  Novices to professionals have used the studio to record works in genres from rap to jazz, Edwards says.  The video recording studio is fashioned like the set of a television station, complete with audio recording equipment, lighting equipment, a green screen, and a computer capable of editing and publishing videos.  The studio draws an equally diverse crowd--teenagers to local businesses have taken advantage of the technology.  https://www.questia.com/magazine/1G1-404446950/lights-camera-create-library-recording-studios  See full article at

Onomatopoeia is a term for a word that mimics a sound--for instance:  buzz, hush, fizz, hiss and click.  Find examples of memorable poems using onomatopoeia at http://examples.yourdictionary.com/examples-onomatopoeia-poems.html  NOTE that words written by Bernard Zaritsky for the song Little White Duck include "I'm a little black bug floating in the water Bzz, Bzzz, Bzzz." and "I'm a little red snake playing in the water Hiss, Hisss, Hisss."  A similar song, Over in the Meadow, has verses with buzz, hiss, caw, and quack

In geometry, a torus (plural tori) is a surface of revolution generated by revolving a circle in three-dimensional space about an axis coplanar with the circle.  If the axis of revolution does not touch the circle, the surface has a ring shape and is called a ring torus or simply torus if the ring shape is implicit.  When the axis is tangent to the circle, the resulting surface is called a horn torus; when the axis is a chord of the circle, it is called a spindle torus.  The ring torus bounds a solid known as a solid torus or, alternatively, a ring toroid. The adjective toroidal can be applied to tori, toroids or, more generally, any ring shape as in toroidal inductors and transformers.  Real-world examples of (approximately) toroidal objects include inner tubes and swim rings.  A torus should not be confused with a solid torus, which is formed by rotating a disk, rather than a circle, around an axis.  It is the torus plus the volume inside the torus.  Real-world approximations include doughnuts, vadais, many lifebuoys, and O-rings.  The word torus comes from the Latin word meaning cushionSee graphics (several of them moving) at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torus

On April 22, 2015 the Supreme Court will hear a case on whether the government can seize a chunk of a business’s product to regulate prices.  Horne v. USDA has its roots in the Great Depression and federal programs to prop up the price of goods by controlling supply.  To create raisin scarcity, the government established a Raisin Administrative Committee that manages the supply of raisins through annual marketing orders.  Raisin handlers must set aside a portion of their annual crop, which the feds may then give away, sell on the open market, or send overseas.  Among the targets were Fresno, California raisin farmers Marvin and Laura Horne, who have been in the business for decades.  In 2003-2004 the family farm was required to give some 30% of its raisin crop to the government—some 306 tons—without compensation.  The previous year they had to hand over 47%, and they were paid less than the raisins cost to produce.  The Raisin Administrative Committee sent a truck to seize raisins off their farm and, when that failed, it demanded that the family pay the government the dollar value of the raisins instead.  The Hornes say this raisin toll is an unconstitutional seizure of their property.   Under the Fifth Amendment’s Takings Clause, “private property” shall not “be taken for public use, without just compensation.”   That clause is typically understood to make it illegal for the government to grab houses, cars or even raisins.  http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-incredible-raisin-heist-1429570964

April 21, 2015  Anthony Doerr’s second world war novel All the Light We Cannot See has won the Pulitzer prize for fiction.  Worth $10,000 (£6,700), the fiction Pulitzer goes to “distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life”.  The judging panel of journalist Elizabeth Taylor, author Alan Cheuse and English professor David Haynes, called Doerr’s book “an imaginative and intricate novel”, which is “written in short, elegant chapters that explore human nature and the contradictory power of technology”.  Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction won the non-fiction Pulitzer, cited by judges as “an exploration of nature that forces readers to consider the threat posed by human behaviour to a world of astonishing diversity”.  Gregory Pardlo’s Digest took the poetry Pulitzer, and the history honour went to Elizabeth Fenn’s history of the Native American tribe the Mandans, Encounters at the Heart of the World.  The biography award went to David Kertzer’s The Pope and Mussolini, a dual biography of Pius XI and Mussolini which judges said “uses recently opened Vatican archives to shed light on two men who exercised nearly absolute power over their realms”.  Alison Flood   http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/apr/21/pulitzer-prize-fiction-all-the-light-we-cannot-see-anthony-doerr

April 22, 2015  Happy Earth Day!  More than one billion people participate in Earth Day campaigns every year and it is the largest civic event in the world, celebrated simultaneously around the globe by people of all nationalities, faiths and backgrounds.  In observance of Earth Day, Google changed its home page.


http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1287  April 22, 2015  On this date in 1876, the first ever National League baseball game was played in Philadelphia.  On this date in 1889, thousands rushed to claim land in the Land Rush of 1889.  Within hours the cities of Oklahoma City and Guthrie were formed with populations of at least 10,000.

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