The United States ten-dollar bill ($10) is a denomination of United States currency.  The first U.S. Secretary of the Treasury (1789–95), Alexander Hamilton, is currently featured on the obverse of the bill, while the U.S. Treasury Building is featured on the reverse.  Hamilton is one of two non-presidents featured on currently issued U.S. bills, the other being Benjamin Franklin on the $100 bill.  Large size note history includes 1869:  A new $10 United States Note was issued with a portrait of Daniel Webster on the left and an allegorical representation of Pocahontas being presented to the Royal Court of England on the right side of the obverse.  This note is nicknamed a "jackass note" because the eagle on the front looks like a donkey when the note is turned upside down.  Small size note history includes 1942:  Special World War II currency was issued.  hawaii was overprinted on the front and back of the $10 Federal Reserve Note, and the seal and serial numbers were changed to brown.  This was done so that the currency could be declared worthless in case of Japanese invasion.  A $10 Silver Certificate was printed with a yellow instead of blue treasury seal; these notes were given to U.S. troops in North Africa.  These notes, too, could be declared worthless if seized by the enemy.  Read more history and see pictures at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_ten-dollar_bill

A woman will appear on redesigned $10 bill in 2020.  Who will it be?  Will it be Susan B. Anthony or Harriet Tubman?  Eleanor Roosevelt or Rosa Parks?  Or another important woman from American history?  These will be among the names the nation ponders after the Obama administration’s announcement on June 17, 2015 that a woman will be featured on the $10 bill, the first time in well over a century that a female portrait will grace the United States’ paper money.  The redesigned bill will be unveiled in 2020 to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the right of women to vote.  The Treasury Department is launching a massive public campaign to solicit suggestions through social media and town halls for what the bill should look like and who should be on it.  http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/woman-to-appear-on-10-bill-in-2020/2015/06/17/90f7c3ee-153c-11e5-89f3-

Crater Lake is a caldera lake in the western United States, located in south-central Oregon.  It is the main feature of Crater Lake National Park and is famous for its deep blue color and water clarity.  The lake partly fills a nearly 2,148-foot-deep caldera that was formed around 7,700 years ago by the collapse of the volcano Mount Mazama.  There are no rivers flowing into or out of the lake; the evaporation is compensated for by rain and snowfall at a rate such that the total amount of water is replaced every 250 years.  At 1,943 feet, the lake is the deepest in the United States, and the seventh or ninth deepest in the world, depending on whether average or maximum depth is measured.  Crater Lake is also known for the "Old Man of the Lake", a full-sized tree which is now a stump that has been bobbing vertically in the lake for over a century.  The low temperature of the water has slowed the decomposition of the wood, hence the longevity of the bobbing tree.  Two islands are in Crater Lake; Wizard Island formed from a cinder cone that erupted after Crater Lake began to fill with water, and the smaller Phantom Ship has seven different trees living on it.  There are also colonies of violet green swallows and several varieties of wildflowers and lichens living there.  While having no indigenous fish population, the lake was stocked from 1888 to 1941 with a variety of fish.  Several species have formed self-sustaining populations.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crater_Lake  See 15 of the most beautiful crater lakes in the world at http://twistedsifter.com/2012/05/the-most-beautiful-crater-lakes-in-the-world/  Find lists of volcanic, meteor, artificial, and crater lakes of unclear origin at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crater_lake

A Celebration of Reading by Karen Muller  May 18, 2015  The Mother of All Booklists: The 500 Most Recommended Nonfiction Reads for Ages 3 to 103, by William Patrick Martin, is basically a crowdsourced book list.  The author gathered 155 authoritative and influential lists of award-winning books and recommended reading lists from a spectrum of organizations, including parenting groups, state commissions on libraries, libraries, library publishers, library reviewing journals, school districts, and museums. The resulting 20,000 titles, categorized by age range, were ranked by frequency of recommendation.  This is the companion volume to A Lifetime of Fiction: The 500 Most Recommended Reads for Ages 2 to 102.  In 2012 Maura Kelly wrote “A Slow-Books Manifesto” in The Atlantic.  In The Slow Book Revolution:  Creating a New Culture of Reading on College Campuses and Beyond, editor Meagan Lacy picks up the theme and offers ways for academic libraries to support it.  “Slow books” is reading a book slowly, so as to savor the language, the plot development, and the messages.  Classics and works of literature hold up to the scrutiny and engagement—and on college campuses, they afford students with reasons to think and discuss in ways that assigned coursework reading may not.  Thirty essays covering everything from e-reading to marginalia to vampires make up The Pleasures of Reading: A Booklover’s Alphabet, by Catherine Sheldrick Ross.  Some essays draw on interviews conducted by graduate students that Ross, now a professor emerita of library science, taught in genre fiction and reading classes.  Other essays draw on Ross’s own extensive research and interviews of avid readers to answer a range of questions.  The result is a celebration of readers and the pleasures of reading, with musings on why we love to read, how books are marketed, how people choose their reading, and even a charming essay about unreadable books.  http://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/2015/05/18/a-celebration-of-reading/

GOOD NEWS from the Nature Conservancy  (1) On March 23, 2014, all but one of the Morelos Dam’s 20 gates lifted, releasing a pulse of water into the Colorado River’s historical channel in Baja California, Mexico’s northwestern state, for the first time in more than a decade, thanks to an unprecedented international agreement.  Weeks later, a trickle met the ocean tides, and by late May the channel was dry again.  The delta had gulped down its long-deferred drink.  In late September 2014, scientists investigated the effects of all that water by looking for changes in the vegetation—the growth of cottonwood and willow saplings and plant life in general.  (2)  In eastern Oregon, sagebrush habitatas have been reduced to about half of their historic range.  When Jay Kerby and a team of Dept. of Agriculture scienctists used an industrial pasta extruder to encase multiple seeds in a pilow of soil--a dirt ravioli--the seedlings fare better than single seeds do.   (3)  By the Numbers:  40 million seedlings to be planted in Sao Paolo Brazil; researchers and volunteers have planted 5,000 nursery corals on ailing reefs in the Bahamas and the U.S. Virgin Islands; 271 acres along the Pawcatuck River added to the Francis Carter Preserve in Rhode Island; 38 miles along the Clearwater River in Washington now protected; 36 acres bought on St. Martin Island in Lake Michigan--will become part of the Green Bay National Wildlife Refuge.  (4)  Patterson Clark of Washington, DC makes wood block prints from inner bark, leaves, and pulped stems of unwanted invasive species.  Nature Conservancy magazine  June / July 2015

From a Muse reader  June 26, 2015  Last October we rode the maglev train from Shanghai to the airport and back, just for fun.  It topped out at 430 kph, about 267 mph.  We were about 20 feet off the ground with a glass-smooth ride and steeply banked turns.  We passed the oncoming maglev—both trains being six cars and closing at some 500 mph—in less than a second.  

As hundreds of people outside the court cheered in approval, the U.S. Supreme Court on June 26, 2015 swept away the last bans on same-sex marriage in Ohio and 12 other states, ruling that the U.S. Constitution requires states to not only permit same-same marriages but recognize those performed in other states.  In a 5-4 landmark opinion written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, the justices ended what just a decade ago was a searing debate between conservatives opposed to same-sex marriage and liberals who argued it discriminated against gay couples.  With the ruling, the court invalidated a ban against same-sex marriage approved by Ohio voters in 2004.  By doing so, the justices overturned a decision by a federal appeals court in Cincinnati which upheld same-sex marriage bans in Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee and Michigan.  Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, and Elena Kagan joined Kennedy to form the majority while Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito, and Clarence Thomas dissented.   Jack Torry & Samuel Votaw  http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/public/2015/1-gay-marriage.html

U.S. Supreme Court opinions since 2009:  http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/opinions.aspx

Job Opening--New Librarian of Congress by Sabrina I. Pacifici on June 26, 2015  The Atlantic – Robinson Meyer:  Experts say that a new librarian should digitize more works, raise more money—and use email.  “The current librarian, James Billington, has held the title since his appointment by President Reagan in 1987.  Though named by the president and confirmed by the Senate, the Librarian doesn’t change with every new White House.  After being appointed, Librarians are free to serve as long as they want—that’s why there have been only 13 of them since 1802.  In other words, this will be the first time a new Librarian has been appointed since the invention of the web.  The Librarian is a surprisingly powerful role.  In addition to claiming one of the best titles in government (though The Atlantic’s staff is split on whether “Senate Sergeant-at-Arms” or “U.S. Chief Justice” trump it), the new Librarian assumes considerable powers.  This person will not only run the largest library in the world, with thousands of staff of its own, but also oversee the Copyright Office, the department which manages the U.S. copyright system.  This gives them the power to declare what constitutes a copyright violation and what doesn’t. And the new Librarian could hold a potentially transformative role:  They could be the first Librarian, many experts say, to truly embrace the Internet as core to the Library’s mission.  For although Billington sometimes used the web in innovative projects like Thomas.gov—a source of Congressional information online—the last decade had been marked by less expansion…The Library has already shown a willingness to digitize some of its holdings.  It says it now has 52 million primary sources online.  Thirty million of those are book pages, and more than 10 million of those are newspaper pages.  Its print and photos collection, which exceeds 1.1 million items, is a treasure.  And the Library has also absorbed other institution’s important digital archives, including the complete Twitter archive and the September 11 digital archive.  But those numbers pale against other efforts.  HathiTrust, a consortium of  university research libraries that have digitized their holdings, claims to have more than 4.7 billion pages digitized, from 13 million total volumes.”  http://www.bespacific.com/job-opening-new-librarian-of-congress/

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1317  June 29, 2015  On this date in 1889, Hyde Park and several other Illinois townships voted to be annexed by Chicago, forming the largest United States city in area and second largest in population.  On this date in 1956, the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 was signed, officially creating the United States Interstate Highway System.