Monday, April 17, 2017

"Hard drives are like  piñatas.  Every treasure you ever wanted is stored in there somewhere."  The Neighbor, a novel (Detective D. D. Warren Series #3) by Lisa Gardner

Lisa Gardner is an author of fiction.  She is the author of several thrillers including The Killing Hour and The Next Accident.  She also wrote romance novels using the pseudonym Alicia Scott.  Raised in Hillsboro, Oregon, she graduated from the city's Glencoe High School.  Her novel Gone is set in a fictionalized version of Tillamook, Oregon.  As of 2014, Gardner lives in New England with her family.  Find bibliography at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Gardner

A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg  In physics, I learned what happens when light goes through lenses, concave and convex.  It’s the same light but it appears different depending on what lens we have.  In chemistry, I learned what happens when you drop a piece of sodium in water (that experiment wasn’t an official part of the curriculum).  Sodium changes.  Water changes too.  Likewise, when two people meet they should have changed as a result of that meeting.  This week we’ll see words that have meanings specific to chemistry as well as more general meanings.
osmosis  (oz-MOH-sis, os-)  noun  1.  A gradual, unconscious assimilation of information, ideas, etc.  2.  Movement of a solvent through a semipermeable membrane from a lower concentration to higher concentration, thus equalizing concentrations on both sides.  From Greek osmos (a push).  Earliest documented use:  1863.
solvent  (SOL-vuhnt) adjective  1.  Able to pay one’s debts.  2.  Able to dissolve another substance.  noun  1.  Something that dissolves another.  2.  Something that solves a problem.  From Latin solvere (to loosen, to dissolve, to pay).  Earliest documented use:  1653.
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From:  Richard S. Russell  Subject:  osmosis  You wrote:  Likewise, when two people meet they should have changed as a result of that meeting.  The difference between “cut” and “copy” (not original with me, but highly pertinent here):  I had a dollar.  I met a man with a dollar.  We exchanged dollars, and when we parted we each still had only a dollar.  I had an idea.  I met a man with an idea.  We exchanged ideas, and when we parted we each had two ideas. 
From:  Anne Thomas  Subject:  solvent  When told that his owner’s not solvent, unable to pay for his stall rent, Ace Racer cries, “Neigh!  I won yesterday; you’d better explain where it all went!”

The people who live in the Blue Zones—five regions in Europe, Latin America, Asia and the U.S. researchers have identified as having the highest concentrations of centenarians in the world—move their bodies a lot.  They have social circles that reinforce healthy behaviors.  They take time to de-stress.  They're part of communities, often religious ones.  And they're committed to their families.   But what they put in their mouths, how much and when is worth a close look, too.  And that's why Dan Buettner, a National Geographic explorer and author who struck out on a quest in 2000 to find the lifestyle secrets to longevity, has written a follow up to his original book on the subject.  The 2015 book, called The Blue Zones Solution, is aimed at Americans, and is mostly about eating.  A year after that book was published, the team announced they'd narrowed it down to five places that met all their criteria.  They gave them official Blue Zone status:  Ikaria, Greece; Okinawa, Japan; Ogliastra Region, Sardinia; Loma Linda, Calif.; and Nicoya Peninsula, Costa Rica.  In the new book, which was released April 7, Buettner distills the researchers' findings on what all the Blue Zones share when it comes to their diet.  Here's a taste:  Stop eating when your stomach is 80 percent full to avoid weight gain.  Eat the smallest meal of the day in the late afternoon or evening.  Eat mostly plants, especially beans.  And eat meat rarely, in small portions of 3 to 4 ounces.  Blue Zoners eat portions this size just five times a month, on average.  Drink alcohol moderately and regularly, i.e. 1-2 glasses a day.  Eliza Barclay  Link to recipes and photos at http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/04/11/398325030/eating-to-break-100-longevity-diet-tips-from-the-blue-zones

The Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC), a project aiming to make citation data free to all, was formally announced April 6, 2017 by six organizations, including the Wikimedia Foundation, publisher Public Library of Science, and the open-access journal eLife.  So far, the initiative has partnered with 29 journal publishers to enable anyone to access citation data from about 14 million papers indexed by Crossref, a nonprofit collaboration that promotes the sharing of scholarly information.  And more publishers are likely to sign on, says Mark Patterson, executive director of eLife, in Cambridge, U.K.  Conversations about opening up citation data initially took place this past September at the eighth Conference on Open Access Scholarly Publishing, in response to a report that found that just 3% of almost a thousand publishers depositing data on Crossref were making citation data open.  In practice, that meant that citation data were available for just 1% of the roughly 35 million papers on Crossref, says Dario Taraborelli, head of research at the Wikimedia Foundation in San Francisco, California.  Now, that share has risen to more than 40% of Crossref papers as a result of I4OC’s efforts.  Even some publishers that traditionally charge subscriptions to read their journals, including Taylor & Francis and Wiley-Blackwell, have jumped on board.  Citation data are already available for a fee from other providers, including Clarivate Analytics’s Web of Science and publishing giant Elsevier’s Scopus.  And Google Scholar allows users to see citation data but not reuse them.  In contrast, I4OC will allow users to freely access and reuse citation data under CC0, the most liberal copyright license.  Dalmeet Singh Chawla  http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/04/now-free-citation-data-14-million-papers-and-more-might-come

Tamil, a language spoken by about 78 million people and recognized as an official language in Sri Lanka and Singapore, is the only classical language that has survived all the way through to the modern world.  Read "The Ten Oldest Languages Still Spoken in the World Today" by Lani Seelinger at https://theculturetrip.com/asia/india/articles/the-10-oldest-languages-still-spoken-in-the-world-today/

because  conjunction  1.  for the reason that  2.  the fact that   

cause  noun  1.  a reason for an action or condition, something that brings about an effect or a result, a person or thing that is the occasion of an action or state,  sufficient reason   2.  a ground of legal action,  case  3.  a matter or question to be decided  4.  a principle or movement militantly defended or supported,   a charitable undertaking  https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cause

April 12, 2017  After a wet winter, the blooms—tidy tips, poppies, lupine, fiddleneck, shooting star, owl’s clover, baby blue eyes and more—have erupted in San Luis Obispo County and across California.  In fact, this year’s show is so remarkable that clusters of the wildflowers can actually be seen from space.  Megan Henney  See satellite images showing a radical difference between the 2017 and 2016 wildflower seasons at Carrizo Plain National Monument at  http://www.sanluisobispo.com/news/local/article144285749.html


http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1693  April 17, 2017  On this date in 1397, Geoffrey Chaucer told The Canterbury Tales for the first time at the court of Richard II.  On this date in 1524, Giovanni da Verrazzano reached New York harbor.

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