No one knows exactly how it started, but a coal vein has been burning under the Pennsylvania mining town of Centralia since 1962.  Some trace it back to careless trash incineration in a landfill next to an open pit mine, which ignited a coal vein.  The fire crawled, insidiously, along coal-rich deposits far from the miner's pick, venting hot and poisonous gases up into town, through the basements of homes and businesses.  With dawning horror, residents came to realize that the fire was not going to be extinguished, or ever burn itself out--at least not until all the interconnected coal veins in eastern Pennsylvania were spent in some epic, meatless barbecue.  As the underground fire worked its way under rows of homes and businesses, the threat of fires, asphyxiation, and carbon monoxide poisoning became a daily concern.  The government eventually stepped in, and Centralia joined an elite club of communities, including Love Canal and Times Beach.  Declared municipalis non grata, Centralia was slowly abandoned as houses were demolished or burned, and citizens relocated.  http://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/2196

David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas is a popular choice for book groups around the world.  But it turns out that American readers may be enjoying a rather different experience to those in Britain, after an academic uncovered “astonishing” differences between the US and UK editions of the award-winning novel.  Professor Martin Paul Eve of Birkbeck, University of London was writing a paper on Cloud Atlas, working from the UK paperback published by Sceptre, and from a Kindle edition of the novel, when he realised he was unable to find phrases in the ebook that he could distinctly remember from the paperback.  He compared the US and UK editions of the book, and realised they were “quite different to one another”.  Shortlisted for the Man Booker prize in 2004, Cloud Atlas is already complicated enough:  telling the story of six interlocking lives and hopping back and forth across centuries and genres.  But differences between the US and UK editions highlighted by Eve in a journal article published on the Open Library of Humanities run to 30 pages of examples.  https://olh.openlibhums.org/article/10.16995/olh.82/  Mitchell himself explains the reasons for the discrepancies in an interview quoted in Eve’s paper:  they occurred because the manuscript of Cloud Atlas sat unedited for around three months in the US, after an editor there left Random House.  Meanwhile in the UK, Mitchell and his editor and copy editor worked on the manuscript, but the changes were not passed on to the US.  Alison Flood  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/10/cloud-atlas-astonishingly-different-in-us-and-uk-editions-study-finds

The country of Mongolia is among the world's most sparsely populated—twice the size of Texas with about one-tenth the state's population of about 27 million.  Its roads, even in the capital city of Ulaanbaatar, often lack well-known names, making navigation difficult and street addresses unreliable.   To make matters even more complicated, about a quarter of the country's residents are nomadic, with no permanent homes.  All of that means it can often be incredibly challenging for the Mongol Post to locate people.  Things are looking up, though.  The Mongolian government has partnered with a British startup called What3Words to overhaul its postal and address systems.  Now, instead of an address—like, say, 1600 Pennsylvania Ave —each 9-square-meter plot in Mongolia will receive its own three-word identifier.  "What we've done is we've cut the world into 3-meter squares, so that's 57 trillion 3-meter squares," Chris Sheldrick, co-founder of What3Words, tells NPR's Rachel Martin.  "And there's enough words in the dictionary—so, I'm talking words like table, chair, spoon—that you can actually assign three words to every 3-meter square in the world and you don't run out of combinations."  So, to bring it back to Pennsylvania Avenue—want to write a note to the president?  Better address it to Engine.Doors.Cubs.  How about the British prime minister?  That'd be Chief.Score.Locked.  Eric McDaniel  http://www.npr.org/2016/06/19/482514949/welcome-to-mongolias-new-postal-system-an-atlas-of-random-words#Where

Coming to Terms with Secret Law by Dakota S. Rudesill  Ohio State University (OSU) - Michael E. Moritz College of Law  November 01, 2015  7 Harvard National Security Journal 241 (2015)   Ohio State Public Law Working Paper No. 321    Abstract:  The allegation that the U.S. government is producing secret law has become increasingly common.  This article evaluates this claim, examining the available evidence in all three federal branches.  In particular, Congress’s governance of national security programs via classified addenda to legislative reports is here given the first focused scholarly treatment, including empirical analysis that shows references in Public Law to these classified documents spiking in recent years.  Having determined that the secret law allegation is well founded in all three branches, the article argues that secret law is importantly different from secrecy generally:  the constitutional norm against secret law is stronger than the constitutional norm against secret fact.  Three normative options are constructed and compared:  live with secret law as it exists, abolish it, or reform it.  The article concludes by proposing rules of the road for governing secret law, starting with the cardinal rule of public law’s supremacy over secret law.  Other principles and proposals posited here include an Anti-Kafka Principle (no criminal secret law), public notification of secret law’s creation, presumptive sunset and publication dates, and plurality of review within the government (including internal Executive Branch review, availability of all secret law to Congress, and presumptive access by a cadre of senior non-partisan lawyers in all three branches).  Download paper at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2687223

Christian Andreas Doppler (1803–1853) was an Austrian mathematician and physicist.  He is celebrated for his principle—known as the Doppler effect—that the observed frequency of a wave depends on the relative speed of the source and the observer.  He used this concept to explain the color of binary stars.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Doppler  See also http://www.whonamedit.com/doctor.cfm/3039.html and http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3743612/

Conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly, best known for being the voice of opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment, died on September 5, 2016.    She was 92.  According to The Associated Press, Schlafly's self-published book, A Choice Not an Echo, brought her into the national spotlight in 1964.  The news service reports the book, which sold 3 million copies, became a manifesto for many conservatives and boosted Sen. Barry Goldwater's bid for the 1964 GOP presidential nomination.  Yet Schlafly's legacy is perhaps most tied to her outspoken criticism of the Equal Rights Amendment, a proposed amendment to the Constitution that would have explicitly prohibited gender discrimination.  It was passed by Congress in 1972 but defeated in the years to come, when it failed to be ratified by enough states—partly because of Schlafly's fierce opposition.  "Since the women are the ones who bear the babies and there's nothing we can do about that, our laws and customs then make it the financial obligation of the husband to provide the support," she said in 1973.  "It is his obligation and his sole obligation.  And this is exactly and precisely what we will lose if the Equal Rights Amendment is passed."   "I really spent 25 years as a full-time homemaker before I did any particular traveling around," she said in 2014.  "And by that time, the children were well along in school or college.  And they were very supportive.  My husband was very supportive.  I told the feminists the only person's permission I had to get was my husband's."  Despite the key role she played in championing conservatism and helping to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment, Schlafly told The Associated Press in 2007 that perhaps her greatest legacy was the Eagle Forum, the conservative group she founded in the 1970s.  Schlafly held three degrees—a bachelor's in political science from Washington University, a master's in government from Radcliffe, and a law degree from the Washington University School.  Tanya Ballard Brown  http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/05/492748832/conservative-icon-phyllis-schlafly-dies-at-92

September 5, 2016  Braconid:  a parasitic wasp and winning 176-point, eight-letter, triple-triple scoring word in the 2016 World Scrabble Championship.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Scrabble_Championship  In the final at Lille’s Grand Palais, Londoner Brett Smitheram beat fellow Briton Mark Nyman with this perfectly obscure, delightful Scrabble specimen.  Compare it to other Scrabble moves:  Quetzals (365) Guatemala’s national bird and one of its monetary units. Quixotry (365) a visionary idea or scheme. Caziques (392) Caribbean tribal chiefs or a black and red or black and yellow tropical birds. Flatfish (239) any fish of the order Heterosomata (Pleuronectiformes), including halibut, sole, flounder.  Muzjiks (126) Russian peasants. Cothurni (92) Footwear worn by actors in ancient Greece. Felty (35) resembling felt.  Oxyphenbutazone (1778) Anti-inflammatory medication used to treat arthritis and bursitis. OK, it has never actually been played but it’s thought to be the highest scoring word possible under American Scrabble rules.  Chitra  Ramaswamy  https://www.theguardian.com/global/shortcuts/2016/sep/05/braconid-brett-smitheram-2016-world-scrabble-championship-quixoty-felty

Children’s author, illustrator, and educator Anna Dewdney, whose toddler-centric picture books starring wildly expressive Baby Llama are multi-million-copy bestsellers, died at her home in Vermont on September 3, 2016 at the age of 50.  Dewdney did many school, library, and event appearances, where she spoke passionately about her work and children’s literacy.  In her role as a literacy advocate, Dewdney wrote a 2013 opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal, emphasizing that “empathy is as important as literacy” when it comes to educating children.  “When we read with a child, we are doing so much more than teaching him to read or instilling in her a love of language,” she wrote.  “We are doing something that I believe is just as powerful, and it is something that we are losing as a culture:  by reading with a child, we are teaching that child to be human.  When we open a book, and share our voice and imagination with a child, that child learns to see the world through someone else’s eyes.”  Dewdney had recently completed a new picture book, Little Excavator, which is scheduled for June 2017 publication from Viking.  http://publishersweekly.tumblr.com/post/150056066571/childrens-author-illustrator-and-educator-anna

Queen guitarist Brian May says an asteroid in Jupiter's orbit has been named after the band's late frontman Freddie Mercury on what would have been his 70th birthday.  May says the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Centre has designated an asteroid discovered in 1991, the year of Mercury's death, as "Asteroid 17473 Freddiemercury."   Mercury, born Sept. 5, 1946, wrote and performed hits including "Bohemian Rhapsody" and "We Are The Champions" with Queen, releasing over a dozen studio albums between 1973 and 1991.  http://phys.org/news/2016-09-far-away-asteroid-freddie-mercury-birthday.html

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1523  September 7, 2016  On this date in 1963, the Pro Football Hall of Fame opened in Canton, Ohio with 17 charter members.  On this date in 2008, the US Government took control of the two largest mortgage financing companies in the US, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.  Quote of the Day  America has been called a melting pot, but it seems better to call it a mosaic, for in it each nation, people, or race which has come to its shores has been privileged to keep its individuality, contributing at the same time its share to the unified pattern of a new nation. - King Baudouin of Belgium (7 September 1930-1993)