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 cushion.
See 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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