Q.  Who are the Philippines named for?  A.  King Philip II   Ferdinand Magellan was the first European recorded to have landed in the Philippines.  He arrived in March 1521 during his circumnavigation of the globe.  He claimed land for the king of Spain but was killed by a local chief.  Following several more Spanish expeditions, the first permanent settlement was established in Cebu in 1565.  After defeating a local Muslim ruler, the Spanish set up their capital at Manila in 1571, and they named their new colony after King Philip II of Spain.  http://www.nationsonline.org/oneworld/History/Philippines-history.htm

Q.  Who first owned the Falklands?  A.  The dispute over the south Atlantic islands has brewed for centuries.  Britain and Argentina have both claimed sovereignty.  The root of the problem can be traced to the celebrated Bulls of Donation by which the Borgia pope Alexander VI (1492-1503) exercised what medieval doctrine still told him was a God-given right to divide between Spain and Portugal all the distant lands that European navigators were starting to discover.  The lines he drew (they were revised) went straight through what is now modern Portuguese-speaking Brazil, leaving most of the South American mainland to the Spaniards, whose conquistador armies had not yet arrived in Mexico or Peru.  On the Spanish side of the line, still undiscovered 400 miles off the future Argentinian coast, lay the cluster of islands that the British would name after the naval entrepreneur Viscount Falkland, and the French Les Îles Malouine after St Malo, the favoured embarkation port of predatory privateers which--like their British counterparts--attacked Spanish imperial trade for decades.  The Spaniards later adapted the French name and called them Las Malvinas.  Some authorities claim that a Portuguese voyage, with Amerigo Vespucci on board, first sighted the Falklands around 1500--or that Magellan, another Portuguese, did.  The British would later claim that their own seadogs, Hawkins or Davis, found the uninhabited islands in the 1590s.  A Dutch voyage under Sebald de Weert named them the Sebaldines in 1600.  https://www.theguardian.com/uk/blog/2012/feb/02/who-first-owned-falkland-islands

April 13, 2017  If you do a Google search for "card catalog" it will likely return Pinterest-worthy images of antique furniture for sale—boxy, wooden cabinets with tiny drawers, great for storing knick-knacks, jewelry or art supplies.  But before these cabinets held household objects, they held countless index cards—which, at the time, were the pathways to knowledge and information.  A new book from the Library of Congress celebrates these catalogs as the analog ancestor of the search engine.  There's a huge card catalog in the basement of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.  "There's tens of millions of cards here," says Peter Devereaux, author of The Card Catalog: Books, Cards, and Literary Treasures.  "It's a city block long."  Some highlights from the Library of Congress' collection include cards from Walt Whitman, Samuel Langhorne Clemens (you might know him as Mark Twain), Margaret Mitchell, James Baldwin, William Faulkner ... the list goes on and on.  Some of the cards are handwritten, others are typed with cross out marks and notes scribbled in the margins.  Handwritten cards began to be standardized in the 1800s, when New York State Library Director Melvil Dewey and inventor Thomas Edison perfected a handwriting style called "library hand."  Its goal was to make the cards read the same no matter the library.  Typewritten cards started appearing at the end of the 19th century.  Cataloging wasn't always neat and tidy—even for the old Congressional Library.  An Annual Report from 1897 depicted a chaotic state of affairs:  "The Library was so congested, books were heaped up in so many crevices and out-of-the-way corners, down in the crypt, hidden in darkness from access of observation, that obtaining a volume, and especially, one out of the range of general reading, was a question of time and patience.  Frequently, it depended upon the phenomenal memory of the distinguished Librarian."  That distinguished librarian was Ainsworth Rand Spofford—who had his own "idiosyncratic" approach to cataloging.  He said that without more space, he would be "presiding over the greatest chaos in America."  Spofford got his way, and the library reorganized and expanded that same year.  Andrew Limbong  http://www.npr.org/2017/04/13/522606808/file-this-under-nostalgia-new-book-pays-tribute-to-the-library-card-catalog

Math is beautiful on a purely abstract level, quite apart from its ability to explain the world.  We all know that art, music and nature are beautiful.  They command the senses and incite emotion.  Their impact is swift and visceral.  How can a mathematical idea inspire the same feelings?  Well, for one thing, there is something very appealing about the notion of universal truth—especially at a time when people entertain the absurd idea of alternative facts.  The Pythagorean theorem still holds, and pi is a transcendental number that will describe all perfect circles for all time.  But our brains also appear to respond to mathematical beauty as they do to other beautiful experiences.  In a 2014 study, Semir Zeki, a neuroscientist at University College London, and other researchers used fM.R.I. scanners to observe the brains of 15 mathematicians while they were thinking about various equations.  The subjects were shown 60 mathematical formulas two weeks before they were scanned and during and after the scan.  They were also asked to rate their level of understanding of each equation and their subjective emotional response to it, from ugly to beautiful.  The researchers found a strong correlation between finding an equation beautiful and activation of the medial orbitofrontal cortex, a region of the prefrontal cortex just behind the eyes.  This is the same area that has been shown to light up when people find music or art beautiful, so it seems to be a common neural signature of aesthetic experience.  

Richard A. Friedman   

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/15/opinion/sunday/the-worlds-most-beautiful-mathematical-equation.html

Hamzeh AlMaaytah rarely sleeps, but when he does, it’s usually on the mattress hidden behind a screen in the back of his bookshop.  Hamzeh, 36, is one of Amman’s most dedicated bookshop owners, and certainly its most eccentric.  He tends to leap instead of walk, is prone to poetic pronouncements, and speaks most often in Fusha, the literary form of Arabic, rather than the Jordanian dialect typically used for daily speech. He  reveres the written word.  In response to text messages or Facebook posts he will send back a picture of his handwritten answer.  “There is so much intimacy and knowledge in the handwriting of a friend,” he says, bemoaning that his practice has yet to catch on.  A fourth-generation book owner, Hamzeh describes his work as a calling.  “I run an emergency room for the mind,” he explains, while sipping coffee near the entrance of the shop late one morning.  He wants to ensure there is always a place in Jordan where one can access the healing power of books, no matter the hour or the price.  Hence the mattress in the back. Hamzeh keeps his store open 24/7, a practice he inherited from his father, who moved the family bookstore from Jerusalem to Amman before the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.  He’ll occasionally get late-night relief from two former employees, a pair of Syrian brothers who fled their native Homs.  All of his prices are negotiable, and he has both a generous loan policy and a robust book exchange program, where patrons can swap any book they bring in for one in the store.  The shop, al-Maa Bookstore or Mahall al-Maa in Arabic, is nestled right against the ancient Roman Nymphaeum public water fountain, down the way from the Grand Husseini Mosque and the local Sugar Market, on a street that was once the Amman River.  Al-maa means “water” and, like the once-public fountain, Hamzeh wants his books to be as accessible as water.  An underground well still bubbles at the entrance.  Shira Telushkin  Read much more and see pictures at http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/amman-jordan-24-hour-bookstore

April 27, 2017 (HealthDay News) You can safely dispose of potentially dangerous expired, unused and unwanted prescription drugs on Saturday, April 29.  The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and local agencies are holding Take Back Day events across the country.  rop off your pills or patches between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m.  The service is free and anonymous, but take note:  Needles, sharps and liquids will not be accepted.  Last fall, more than 730,000 pounds of prescription drugs were turned in at about 5,200 Take Back Day sites operated by the DEA and more than 4,000 state and local law enforcement partners.  In the 12 previous Take Back events, more than 7.1 million pounds of pills were turned in, according to the DEA.  Proper disposal of unwanted medicines is important.  Most abused prescription drugs are obtained from family and friends, including from the home medicine cabinet.  They can lead to overdoses and accidental poisonings.  Once-common methods of disposal, such as flushing medicines down the toilet or throwing them in the trash, pose potential safety and health hazards, the DEA said.  Search the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration database for a Take Back Day site near you.  https://consumer.healthday.com/general-health-information-16/misc-drugs-news-218/april-29-is-national-prescription-drug-take-back-day-721832.html

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1700  April 28, 2017  On this date in 1947, Thor Heyerdahl and five crew mates set out from Peru on the Kon-Tiki to prove that Peruvian natives could have settled Polynesia.  On this date in 1948, Igor Stravinsky conducted the premier of his American ballet, Orpheus, in New York City at New York City Center. 

Thought of the Day  The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience. - Harper Lee, writer (28 Apr 1926-2016)   

SCHIST VILLAGES--WHAT ARE THEY? by José Serra   The Schist Villages area is a region of Portugal’s interior that has successfully been promoted to tourists.  The brand is managed by the ADXTUR association, the Agency for the Touristic Development of the Schist Villages, and brings together 21 Municipalities of the central region of Portugal, and more than 100 private local operations, which all share the common strategy of promoting and revitalising an area where schist stone dominates the landscape.  The Schist Villages area is made up of four zones in the country’s interior, Serra da Lousã--with 12 villages, Zêzere--with 6 villages, the Serra do Açor--with 5 villages, and the Tejo-Ocreza--with 4.  These 27 villages are located in 16 of the 21 Municipalities of Central Portugal which are part of ADXTUR.  Read more and see wonderful pictures at https://www.cerdeiravillage.com/en/creative-blog/schist-villages-what-are-they

Schist is a foliated metamorphic rock made up of plate-shaped mineral grains that are large enough to see with an unaided eye.  It usually forms on a continental side of a convergent plate boundary where sedimentary rocks, such as shales and mudstones, have been subjected to compressive forces, heat, and chemical activity.  This metamorphic environment is intense enough to convert the clay minerals of the sedimentary rocks into platy metamorphic minerals such as muscovite, biotite, and chlorite.  To become schist, a shale must be metamorphosed in steps through slate and then through phyllite.  http://geology.com/rocks/schist.shtml

Kappo means “to cut” and "to cook."  The setting of Kappo  is similar to a small sushi bar, with counter seating and a few tables.  The Kappo chef will prepare a variety of dishes--sliced raw, grilled, steamed, braised and deep fried--right before your eyes, and may engage in some lively conversation.  Kappo falls somewhere between the traditional Kaiseki cuisine and the casual Izakaya style cuisine.  Kaiseki offers a seasonal course menu of elaborately prepared dishes, which are served in an environment that is serene.   Izakaya, on the other hand, offers an a la carte menu that consist mostly of small plates.  Drinking is the focal point of Izakaya style of dining.  With Kappo, it’s completely up to the chef.  This can range from formal to casual, classic to modern Japanese.  Fusion can come into play.  Sonoco Sakai   Read more and see pictures at http://www.cooktellsastory.com/apps/blog/show/6204780-kappo-cuisine-a-personal-style

Feedback to A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg

From:  Lynn Goodman  Subject:  Making Plurals  Some time ago I came across a cute story about a youngster who came home from school and announced to her grandmother that the class had learned how to make babies that day.  The little girl said, “It’s easy--you drop the ‘y’ and add ‘ies’.”

From:  Yitzhak Dar  Subject:  Language and Law  You wrote “ . . . that’s what a thousand years of history will do to a language.”  One of the great US minds, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, wrote in his book The Common Law, published in 1881, “The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.”  The same principle was used by him when he wrote in his opinion in NY Trust Co. v. Eisner, 256 US 345, 1921, “A page of history is worth a volume of logic.”  It seems that language and law have some similarities.

From:  Ray Schlabach   Subject:  Irregular plurals  When I was in high school, I often heard the band practicing.  I found in the music room sheet music and recognized it as the tune I often heard.  I memorized the words:  “May my kye come home at even.”  It obviously referred to cows.  But it is not in my dictionary.  I knew the plural kine from reading the Bible.  Recently I went to the Internet and found that kye is used in Scotland and northern England.

From:  Roy McCoy  Subject:  Regular plural in Esperanto  I yesterday read with interest your remarks about irregular plurals, and “what a thousand years of history will do to a language”.  Are you aware that Esperanto has no irregular plurals?  Nor will it ever have them even in a thousand years, because an essential trait of the language is that the plural is invariably formed by the simple addition of j.  Tablo = table, tabloj = tables, for example.

The Graphics Interchange Format (better known by its acronym GIF) is a bitmap image format that was developed by US-based software writer Steve Wilhite while working at the internet service provider CompuServe in 1987 and has since come into widespread usage on the World Wide Web due to its wide support and portability.  The format supports up to 8 bits per pixel for each image, allowing a single image to reference its own palette of up to 256 different colors chosen from the 24-bit RGB color space.  It also supports animations and allows a separate palette of up to 256 colors for each frame.  These palette limitations make the GIF format less suitable for reproducing color photographs and other images with continuous color, but it is well-suited for simpler images such as graphics or logos with solid areas of color.  The creators of the format pronounced the word as "jif" with a soft "G" as in "gin".  Steve Wilhite says that the intended pronunciation deliberately echoes the American peanut butter brand Jif, and CompuServe employees would often say "Choosy developers choose GIF", spoofing this brand's television commercials.  The word is now also widely pronounced with a hard "G" as in "gift".  The American Heritage Dictionary cites both, indicating "jif" as the primary pronunciation, while Cambridge Dictionary of American English offers only the hard-"G" pronunciation.  Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionaryand the OED cite both pronunciations, but place "gif" in the default position.  The New Oxford American Dictionary gave only "jif" in its 2nd edition but updated it to "jif, gif" in its 3rd edition.  On the occasion of receiving a lifetime achievement award at the 2013 Webby Award ceremony, Wilhite rejected the hard-"G" pronunciation, and his speech led to 17,000 posts on Twitter and 50 news articles.  The White House and TV program Jeopardy! also waded into the debate during 2013.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF

Kirkpatrick  ht//caledonianmercury.com/2012/08/22/useful-scots-wor-

Strait-laced means excessively rigid in matters of conduct; narrow or over-precise in one's behaviour or moral judgement.  Origin:  'Strait', which is often confused with its homonym 'straight', is a word that is rarely used alone but has stayed with us in expressions like 'strait and narrow', 'dire straits', 'strait-jacket' and 'straitened circumstances'.  The meaning of those phrases becomes clear when we know that 'strait' means, not 'free from curvature', but 'tight'.  http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/strait-laced.html

In 2016, the solar industry employed many more Americans than coal, while wind power topped 100,000 jobs.  Those numbers come from a Department of Energy report https://energy.gov/downloads/2017-us-energy-and-employment-report published in January by the Obama administration that provides the most complete picture available of American energy employment.  In 2016, 1.9 million Americans were employed in electric power generation, mining and other fuel extraction activities, according to the report--a field we’ll call power creation for short.  More than 373,000 Americans worked part or full time in solar energy, and just over 260,000 of them--or about 70 percent--spent a majority of their time on solar projects.  Most solar energy jobs were in installation, construction and manufacturing, as the relatively new industry continued to add capacity.  Solar power still generated a small share of United States energy output last year.  The coal industry, which has shed jobs since 2012, primarily due to competition from cheap natural gas, employed just over 160,000 workers nationwide.  About 54,000 coal jobs were in mining.  It's important to note that power creation isn’t the only source of energy employment.  The Energy Department report found another 2.3 million jobs in energy transmission, storage and distribution, a number that includes powerline and pipeline workers and more than 900,000 retail jobs, such as gas station workers and fuel dealers.  If non-traditional energy workers are included in the mix--those involved in manufacturing and installing energy-efficient products--the total number of energy-related jobs swells to 6.4 million.  Nadja Popovich  Read more and see a graph showing "power creation jobs in 2016" divided by fossil fuels and renewable and low emission technologies at https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/04/25/climate/todays-energy-jobs-are-in-solar-not-coal.html

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1699  April 26, 2017  On this date in 1862, Edmund C. Tarbell, American painter and educator, was born.  On this date in 1961, Joan Chen, Chinese-American actress, director, producer, and screenwriter, was born.  

Think you know Irn-Bru?  Here are some things you (probably) didn't know by Sean Murphy   As iconic as whisky and as famous as haggis, Scotland’s other national drink is widely enjoyed not just in the land of its birth but also across the globe.  Synonymous with Scottish culture, most Scots claim they couldn’t live without it while others claim it is the best hangover cure around.  The original firm was founded in Falkirk by Robert Barr in 1875, and initially sold ‘aerated waters’, as soft drinks were then called.  Robert’s son Andrew launched the soft drink in 1901 under the name Strachan’s Brew.  The name was originally supposed to be Iron Brew but proposed branding laws forced Barr’s in July 1946 to alter the name as the drink is not actually brewed.  The new ‘Irn-Bru’ trademark was first registered on Thursday 18th July 1946.  Irn-Bru is manufactured in five factories in Russia alone, and has been produced under licence in Canada, the USA and Norway since 2008.  http://foodanddrink.scotsman.com/drink/10-things-you-probably-didnt-know-about-irn-bru/

There’s a tiny “flying saucer” orbiting deep within Saturn’s rings, and a NASA probe has just gotten its most impressive look yet at the strange object.  The saucer is actually a little moon called Pan, and NASA’s Cassini spacecraft captured its distinctive shape on March 7, 2017  in a stunningly detailed series of images.  When she first saw the new pictures of Pan, Cassini scientist Carolyn Porco thought they might be an artist’s representation.  “They are real!  Science is better than fiction,” she later commented.  Named for the flute-playing Greek god of wild places, 21-mile-wide Pan is what’s called a shepherd moon.  It lives within a gap in Saturn’s A ring, which is the farthest loop of icy particles from the planet.  Pan isn’t alone in its bizarre appearance:  Another small moon, Atlas, bears a similar shape for similar reasons.  Nadia Drake  Read more and see pictures at http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/03/saturn-ufo-moon-pan-nasa-cassini-space-science/

Lichens are a complex life form that is a symbiotic partnership of two separate organisms, a fungus and an alga.  The dominant partner is the fungus, which gives the lichen the majority of its characteristics, from its thallus shape to its fruiting bodies. The alga can be either a green alga or a blue-green alga, otherwise known as cyanobacteria.  Many lichens will have both types of algae.  Read more at https://www.fs.fed.us/wildflowers/beauty/lichens/whatare.shtml

Litmus is a water-soluble mixture of different dyes extracted from lichens.  It is often absorbed onto filter paper to produce one of the oldest forms of pH indicator, used to test materials for acidity.  Litmus was used for the first time about 1300 AD by Spanish alchemist Arnaldus de Villa Nova.  From the 16th century on, the blue dye was extracted from some lichens, especially in the Netherlands.  The main use of litmus is to test whether a solution is acidic or basic.  Wet litmus paper can also be used to test for water-soluble gases that affect acidity or alkalinity; the gas dissolves in the water and the resulting solution colors the litmus paper.  For instance, ammonia gas, which is alkaline, colors the red litmus paper blue.   Read more and see graphics at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Litmus

The late New Zealand archaeologist Professor Mike Morwood helped discover skeletal remains of the metre-tall species, known as Hobbit or Flores Hobbit, in a cave on the remote Indonesian island of Flores in 2003.  Since then, researchers have been trying to piece together the story of the intriguing creatures, investigating what it was that brought them to the island--and what caused them to vanish tens of thousands of years ago.  A new study by Australian and US researchers, just published in the Journal of Human Evolution, has now suggested the hobbits were most likely a sister species of Homo habilis, one of the earliest-known species of human found in Africa 1.75 million years ago.   

The most comprehensive study yet on the bones of Homo floresiensis has found that they most likely evolved from an ancestor in Africa and not from Homo erectus, as has been widely believed.  It follows another study http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11653043 published last year by international scientists, including the University of Auckland's Associate Professor Brent Alloway, that used 700,000-year-old remains of what appeared to be the Hobbit's ancestor to confirm them as an entirely separate species, and not simply a deformed forebear of our race today.  Data from the new study concluded there was no evidence for the popular theory that Homo floresiensis evolved from the much larger Homo erectus, the only other early hominid known to have lived in the region with fossils discovered on the Indonesian mainland of Java.  Study leader Dr Debbie Argue, of the Australian National University, said the results should help put to rest a debate that has been hotly contested ever since Homo floresiensis was discovered.  Homo floresiensis is known to have lived on Flores until as recently as 54,000 years ago.  Where previous research had focused mostly on the skull and lower jaw, this study used 133 data points ranging across the skull, jaws, teeth, arms, legs and shoulders.  Jamie Morton  Read more and see graphics at  http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11844795

Robert Pirsig, author of the influential 1970s philosophical novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, has died at the age of 88 at his home in Maine.  Published in 1974 after being rejected by more than 100 other publishers, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, was the father-son story of a motorcycle trip across the western United States.  Loosely autobiographical, it also contained flashbacks to a period in which the author was diagnosed as schizophrenic.  The book quickly became a best-seller.  Pirsig said its protagonist “set out to resolve the conflict between classic values that create machinery, such as a motorcycle, and romantic values, such as experiencing the beauty of a country road”.  Born in Minneapolis, Pirsig had a high IQ and graduated high school at the age of 15.  He earned a degree in philosophy and also worked as a technical writer and instructor of English before being hospitalised for mental illness in the early 1960s.  His philosophical thinking and personal experiences during these years, including a 1968 motorcycle trip across the US West with his eldest son, Christopher, formed the core of the narrative of the novel.  Pirsig worked on the sequel, Lila:  An Inquiry into Morals for 17 years before its publication in 1991.  The story traced a sailboat journey taken by two fictitious characters along America’s eastern coast.   https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/apr/25/robert-pirsig-zen-and-the-art-of-motorcycle-maintenance-author-dies-aged-88

Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, is launching a new online publication which will aim to fight fake news by pairing professional journalists with an army of volunteer community contributors.  Wikitribune plans to pay for the reporters by raising money from a crowdfunding campaign.  Wales intends to cover general issues, such as US and UK politics, through to specialist science and technology.  Those who donate will become supporters, who in turn will have a say in which subjects and story threads the site focuses on.  And Wales intends that the community of readers will fact-check and subedit published articles.  Like Wikipedia, Wales’s new project will be free to access.  The publication is launching on Tuesday 25 April with a crowdfunding campaign pre-selling monthly “support packages” to fund the initial journalists.  The first issue will follow soon after.  Wales, who sits on the board of Guardian Media Group, the Guardian’s parent company, founded Wikipedia with Larry Sanger in 2001, before donating the entire project to a non-profit organisation, the Wikimedia Foundation, that he set up in 2003.  He remains a board member of the Wikimedia Foundation, and is the president of Wikia, a Wikipedia spin-off that allows communities to make their own collaboratively-edited encyclopaedias on topics ranging from Top Gear to Harry Potter.  Alex Hern   https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/25/wikipedia-founder-jimmy-wales-to-fight-fake-news-with-new-wikitribune-site

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1698  April 25, 2017  On this date in 1954, the first practical solar cell was publicly demonstrated by Bell Telephone Laboratories.  On this date in 1959, the Saint Lawrence Seaway, linking the Great Lakes and the Atlantic Ocean, officially opened to shipping.

Author Interview:  Carrie Smith   Q:  What book is a “transformational read” for you?  The one you read (maybe when you were 5 or 10 or 15) that has always stayed with you?  A:  In terms of transformational reads, the first titles that come to my mind are Pride and Prejudice and Great Expectations.  Those probably don’t sound like the titles a crime writer would name, but there it is.  In my “formative” years, I imagined myself becoming a literary writer, not a genre writer (my first novel Forget Harry was definitely in the literary camp).  What I have come to understand is that the best genre writers are literary writers as well.  They bring a depth to the genre that allows them to develop memorable three-dimensional characters.  In the crime genre, P.D. James is the writer who has most influenced me.  I think that her books elevate the mystery genre because her writing is superb and her observations on human behavior are so insightful.  Read the rest of the interview at http://auntagathas.com/aa/2016/01/25/author-interview-carrie-smith/

Calico flower (Aristolochia littoralis) is an evergreen perennial native to Brazil.  Also known as pipevine or Dutchman's pipe because of the shape of the flowers, this vining plant is great for butterfly gardens.  Calico vine climbs and covers chain link and wire structures well, transforming plain structures into a lovely green screen.  Calico flower is a larval host plant for two butterflies, the pipevine swallowtail and polydamus, or tailless, swallowtail.  This plant is also attractive to bees and birds.  The slender, twining stems of this plant grow up to 10-15 feet long and are well-suited to grow up a support structure like a trellis or fence.  This vine sports bright green, heart-shaped leaves that grow up to 3 to 4 inches long.  They grow close together, creating a dense mass of foliage, making this vine ideal for turning an open structure into a green, flowering wall.  Calico flower is quite striking with its bizarre-looking purple and white blossoms.  Nearly 3 inches long and appearing in large numbers along the vines, the tubular flowers are flared at the mouth like a smoking pipe. white veined with purple outside, rich purple-brown marked with white inside, and feature a mottled pattern that resembles calico fabric.  See pictures and read about planting and care at http://gardeningsolutions.ifas.ufl.edu/plants/ornamentals/calico.html

Tips from chef Joe DiGregorio  Mise en place (meeze on plass)  Have all utensils and ingredients in reach before beginning a recipe.  Stay sharp  A sharp knife is much safer than a dull knife.  Cut safe  Always keep fingers and thumb tucked in while slicing and dicing.  Use tips of fingers to steady the food.  Use the knuckles as a guide for the knife. 

GMOs and the Future of the American Diet  The American diet is composed almost entirely of processed foods that are made from two plants--corn and soybeans (and canola, if you want your food fried).  Fully 85 percent of feed given to cattle, hogs and chickens is grown from genetically modified crops.  Ways to reduce food you throw out  Rinse fresh greens, drain in colander, wrap in paper towels before returning to plastic bag and putting in refrigerator.  Put stems of fresh herbs in a cup of water.  Keep in refrigerator or on kitchen counter.  Store an apple with potatoes to keep them from sprouting, and keep in cool dry place.  Keep fresh berries dry and refrigerated.  Check often, removing those starting to mold.  For fresh vegetables nearing the end of their life, chop and freeze--or make vegetable stock--or make juice.  University of Delaware Messenger, v. 25,#1 2017

Two Harvard University researchers announced they had found a parchment copy of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, only the second parchment manuscript copy known to exist besides the one kept in the National Archives in Washington DC.  Professor Danielle Allen and researcher Emily Sneff presented their findings on the document, known as “The Sussex Declaration”, at a conference at Yale on April 21, 2017, and published initial research http://declaration.fas.harvard.edu/resources/sussex-dec online.  Sneff found her first clue of the manuscript in August 2015, while compiling records for a university database.  “I was just looking for copies of the Declaration of Independence in British archives,” Sneff told the Guardian.  But the listing, for the West Sussex record office, struck Sneff as odd because it mentioned parchment, a material suggesting a document made for a special occasion and not simply a broadside copy.  “I reached out to them a bit skeptically,” Sneff said.  “The description was a little vague but once we saw an image and talked to a conservator we started to get excited.”  Before Sneff asked, the British officials had never taken a close look at the manuscript.  They had received it in 1956 from a local man, who worked with a law firm that represented the dukes of Richmond. “The closer we looked at it there were just things that made it a clearly unique and mysterious document,” Sneff said.  Allen and Sneff first tried to deduce when and where the manuscript was made by analyzing handwriting, spelling errors and parchment styles and preparation.  They concluded it dated to the 1780s, and was produced in America, most likely in New York or Philadelphia.  Their next question proved more difficult:  who was the man behind the parchment?  Allen and Sneff believe the leading candidate was James Wilson, a Pennsylvania delegate to the continental congress, one of six men to sign both the declaration and constitution, and, later, one of the original supreme court justices.  The researchers argue that Wilson, who argued vociferously for a popularly-elected president and separation of powers, played a more influential role in American history than most historians have recognized.  The clue that led them to Wilson, Sneff said, was a stark anomaly on the manuscript compared to its counterpart in Washington DC and later copies:  “The names of the signers are all scrambled.”  Unlike previously known copies of the declaration, which have signatures grouped by states, the Sussex copy has its signatures in a patterned jumble.  Sneff and Allen hypothesize that the appearance of randomness was deliberate and symbolic, part of a nationalist argument that the United States was founded by citizens, each created equal, and not by a looser confederation of states.  Wilson drew the researchers’ attention, Sneff said, because of he repeatedly “invoked the declaration but with the understanding that the declaration was signed by one community, one group of individuals, that they were not enumerated by states.”  Alan Yuhas  Read more and see pictures at https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/apr/21/declaration-of-independence-sussex-england-rare  See also http://digitalhistory.hsp.org/pafrm/doc/united-states-constitution-second-manuscript-draft-james-wilson-august-1787 and https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/21/arts/a-new-parchment-declaration-of-independence-surfaces-head-scratching-ensues.html

The U.S. Postal Service on April 21, 2017 celebrated the influence of Central and South America, Mexican and Caribbean foods and flavors on American cuisine with the issuance of new Delicioso Forever stamps during a first-day-of-issue ceremony in conjunction with Salud y Sabor and the National Hispanic Cultural Center.  The Delicioso stamps feature bright and playful illustrations of tamales, flan, sancocho, empanadas, chile relleno, and ceviche. This booklet of 20 stamps includes four of the tamales and flan designs and three of each of the other designs. Though many adaptations of tamales exist throughout North and Central America, the dish typically consists of masa—a starchy dough made from hominy—and various meat or vegetable fillings.  Flan complements the bold flavors found in many of Latin America’s favorite foods.  Sancocho—a hearty, traditional stew—is a culturally significant dish for several Caribbean and Central American countries and their communities in the United States.  Whether sweet or savory, flaky or doughy, fried or baked, the crescent-shaped empanada is a favorite for many.  Chile relleno, meaning “stuffed pepper” in Spanish, is exactly that—a chile pepper filled with meat, cheese, vegetables, rice, beans, or any combination of these ingredients.  Ceviche (or cebiche) is created by adding acidic juices, typically from limes or oranges, to raw fish.  Artist John Parra created each illustration of the Delicioso stamps by applying multiple layers of acrylic paint to his illustration boards, using sandpaper to reveal the hidden layers and give the designs a worn, vintage look.  Through a specialized stencil process, he added the details for each dish to the textured backgrounds.  Parra designed the stamp artwork under the direction of Antonio Alcalá.  https://postalnews.com/blog/2017/04/21/usps-celebrates-latin-american-cuisine-on-forever-stamps/

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1697  April 24, 2017  On this date in 1792, the French national anthem was composed during the French Revolution by Claude-Joseph Rouget de Lisle, a captain of the engineers and amateur musician.  After France declared war on Austria on April 20, 1792, P.F. Dietrich, the mayor of Strasbourg (where Rouget de Lisle was then quartered), expressed the need for a marching song for the French troops.  “La Marseillaise” was Rouget de Lisle’s response to this call.  Originally entitled “Chant de guerre de l’armée du Rhin” (“War Song of the Army of the Rhine”), the anthem came to be called “La Marseillaise” because of its popularity with volunteer army units from Marseille.  The Convention accepted it as the French national anthem in a decree passed on July 14, 1795.  “La Marseillaise” was banned by Napoleon during the empire and by Louis XVIII on the Second Restoration (1815) because of its Revolutionary associations.  Authorized after the July Revolution of 1830, it was again banned by Napoleon III and not reinstated until 1879.  The original text of “La Marseillaise” had six verses, and a seventh and last verse (not written by Rouget de Lisle) was later added.  Only the first and sixth verses of the anthem are customarily used at public occasions.  https://www.britannica.com/topic/La-Marseillaise  On this date in 1800,   the United States Library of Congress was established when President John Adams signed legislation to appropriate $5,000 to purchase "such books as may be necessary for the use of Congress".

Susanna Salter didn't  put her name on the ballot during the 1887 mayoral election in Argonia, Kansas.  A group of men who wanted to humiliate both her and the causes she allied herself with did it for her.  At issue were two new things that happened in the Quaker town, writes Gil Troy for The Daily Beast:  women’s suffrage and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union.  Women had been granted the right to vote in local elections in Kansas four years earlier, he writes.  Voters were shocked to see her name at the top of the ballot, Troy writes—including Salter’s husband Lewis Allison Salter.  Pro-temperance voters rushed to the Salter home, "interrupting Susanna Salter hanging the wash,” he writes.  They proposed turning the prank on itself, and with the help of WCTU members, she was elected with a two-thirds majority.  That made her the first female mayor of a U.S. city.  After winning the election, Salter banned hard cider from the town and served her one-year term (despite mail from across the country either decrying her election or celebrating it).  When she stepped down after her term, more mail accused her of giving up—even though she never intended to be mayor in the first place.  A few years later, the Salter family moved to Oklahoma.  America’s first woman mayor lived to see a lot more change:  she died in 1961 at the age of 101.  Kat Eschner  http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/130-years-ago-men-against-womens-suffrage-put-susanna-salters-name-ballot-180962727/

Kilo, mega, giga, tera, peta, exa, zetta are among the list of prefixes used to denote the quantity of something, such as a byte or bit in computing and telecommunications.  Sometimes called prefix multipliers, these prefixes are also used in electronics and physics.  Each multiplier consists of a one-letter abbreviation and the prefix it stands for.  Find table of prefixes and multipliers at http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/definition/Kilo-mega-giga-tera-peta-and-all-that

Word Origin and History for meta-  word- forming element meaning:  1.  "after, behind," 2.  "changed, altered," 3.   "higher, beyond;" from Greek meta (prep.) "in the midst of, in common with, by means of, in pursuit or quest of.  Third sense, "higher than, transcending, overarching, dealing with the most fundamental matters of," is due to misinterpretation of metaphysics as science of that which transcends the physical."  http://www.dictionary.com/browse/meta-

Lessons for Leaders from a book review of The Accidental Admiral by James Stavridis   Speak and write with simplicity and precision, and don’t accept imprecision from those around you.  Casualness in speech and writing can lead to huge disconnects.  This is particularly true with e-mail, which--when you hit Send--becomes etched in stone . . .  Prepare thoroughly for key events.  Make sure you understand which events truly matter.  Don’t let the chaff floating around in the wind distract you from what is really important to your job . . .  Leaders need to look ahead several months or even a year or two at a time; pick out the events that really matter; and spend an enormous amount of time, energy, and resources ensuring that they are fully prepared.   Be your own spokesperson.  When things go wrong, it is much easier to find reasons why you should say nothing than to step up to your responsibilities . . .  Carve out time to think.  Write down your thoughts.  Share them with others whose opinions you respect.  Don’t lunge at the ball.  Too many decisions are made in haste, under pressure, based on emotional reaction, or with incomplete facts.  Take the time to gather the information you need.  Don’t be driven by anyone else’s timeline unless absolutely required (i.e., by law).  Details matter, but think big thoughts.  Balance the time spent on absorbing and understanding details and that spent sitting back from the thicket of the day to day and trying to think through new ideas, concepts, and necessities for your family, your organization, and the nation.  Look at the new law or regulation for yourself.  Don’t rely on summaries or a staff member’s or lawyer’s opinion as to what the law says.  Get it and read it yourself.  Organize yourself.   Don’t turn over personal organization to assistants, no matter how good they are.  Much of the value of getting organized . . .  Carve out time to read.  Take a balanced approach:  fiction, nonfiction, professional journals, and so on.  Make mentorship a priority.  Listen, learn, educate, and lead . . .  Walk around and listen to your team.  And show up early for meetings.  https://logosconsulting.net/leadership-lessons-accidental-admiral-2/

Adm. James Stavridis and his co-author, R. Manning Ancell, have surveyed over two hundred active and retired four-star military officers about their reading habits and favorite books, asking each for a list of titles that strongly influenced their leadership skills and provided them with special insights that helped propel them to success in spite of the many demanding challenges they faced.  The Leader's Bookshelf synthesizes their responses to identify the top fifty books that can help virtually anyone become a better leader.  Each of the works--novels, memoirs, biographies, autobiographies, management publications--are summarized and the key leadership lessons extracted and presented.  Highlighting the value of reading in both a philosophical and a practical sense, The Leader's Bookshelf provides sound advice on how to build an extensive library, lists other books worth reading to improve leadership skills, and analyzes how leaders use what they read to achieve their goals.  Published March 15th 2017 by US Naval Institute Press  https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31862791-the-leader-s-bookshelf        

A diploma mill (also known as a degree mill) is a company or organization that claims to be a higher education institution but which offers illegitimate academic degrees and diplomas for a fee.  These degrees may claim to give credit for relevant life experience, but should not be confused with legitimate prior learning assessment programs.  They may also claim to evaluate work history or require submission of a thesis or dissertation for evaluation to give an appearance of authenticity.  Diploma mills are frequently supported by accreditation mills, set up for the purpose of providing an appearance of authenticity.  The term may also be used pejoratively to describe an accredited institution with low academic admission standards and a low job placement rate.  An individual may or may not be aware that the degree they have obtained is not wholly legitimate.  In either case, legal issues can arise if the qualification is used in résumés.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diploma_mill  See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unaccredited_institutions_of_higher_education

There’s a plant called capparis spinosa.  When the plant creates a bud--this starts every year in the spring--this bud is going to be a flower.  However, if you pick the bud before it becomes a flower, that’s a caper.  In fact, properly we should call it a caper bud; the whole plant is a caper plant and it has various parts, but what we all call a caper is a caper bud.  If you leave the bud on the plant, then a couple of weeks later it opens up and has a flower--a beautiful purple and white flower.  If you let the flower fall off, it's replaced a little bit later in the season by a fruit.  That fruit is called the caper berry.  They usually come in three sizes:  small, medium and large.  The downside with the larger ones is these are closer to springing open and becoming flowers.  They are not quite as tight in texture, they're not quite as firm, they have a flower inside them waiting to break out.  However, they have developed to the most gorgeous flavor.  David Rosengarten   https://www.splendidtable.org/story/you-cook-with-capers-but-do-you-know-what-they-really-are

The University of Delaware’s Special Collections Library has received the largest and most valuable donation in its history.  The Mark Samuels Lasner collection of British literature and art, worth an estimated $10 million, was officially donated to the library in February 2017.  Samuels Lasner, legally blind and sometimes labeled the “foremost blind book collector in the world,” began collecting at a young age.  His collection, built over 40 years, focuses on British literature and art between 1850 and 1900, with a particular emphasis on the Pre-Raphaelites and writers and illustrators from the 1890s.  In total, the collection includes over 9,500 books, letters, manuscripts, photographs, ephemera, and art.  Lasner has long been attracted to association copies.  Notable signatures on items in the collection include those of Oscar Wilde, George Eliot, Charles Darwin, Max Beerbohm, William Morris, Henry James, Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Aubrey Beardsley.  Nearly 1,000 items alone relate to Max Beerbohm.  Nate Pedersen  https://www.finebooksmagazine.com/fine_books_blog/2017/02/mark-samuels-lasner-donates-10m-collection-to-university-of-delaware.phtml

Harry Huskey, a pioneering computer scientist who worked on early computing systems and later helped universities around the world establish computer centers and computer science programs, died on April 9, 2017 at his home in Santa Cruz.  He was 101.  A professor emeritus of computer science at UC Santa Cruz, Huskey began his career teaching mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania.  There, he worked on the famed ENIAC project in the 1940s.  ENIAC was the first large-scale electronic computer, containing 18,000 vacuum tubes, and Huskey was among the last surviving members of the ENIAC team.  In 1947, Huskey spent a year in England, where he worked with Alan Turing on a prototype of Turing's Automatic Computing Engine (ACE) computer.  He joined the staff of the U.S. National Bureau of Standards in 1948 and was responsible for the design and construction of the National Bureau of Standards Western Automatic Computer (SWAC), the fastest computer of its time.  Huskey later served as a consultant to the Bendix Computer Division of Bendix Corporation, where he was primarily responsible for the design of the Bendix G15 computer.  Designed for use by a single person, the G15 has been called the first "personal computer," although it was the size of a refrigerator, with an equally large tape unit for additional storage.  Huskey had a G15 installed in his home in Berkeley in 1955 and later kept it in his Santa Cruz garage before donating it to the Smithsonian Institution in 1988.  Tim Stephens  http://news.ucsc.edu/2017/04/harry-huskey-in-memoriam.html

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1696  April 21, 2017  On this date in 1960, Brasília, Brazil's capital, was officially inaugurated.  On this date in 1933, Easley Blackwood, Jr., American pianist, composer, and educator, was born.