Purdue University, Indiana’s flagship public school, is acquiring for-profit giant Kaplan University in order to launch a new, public online university aimed at enrolling non-traditional degree seekers and people looking to beef up their work credentials.  As part of the deal, Purdue will absorb Kaplan’s 15 campuses and learning centers, 32,000 students, and 3,000 employees.  All currently enrolled students and employed faculty will transition to the new university, which will use the Purdue name in some fashion not yet identified.  Kaplan is currently accredited through the 2025-2026 school year by the Higher Learning Agency, which also accredits Purdue University.  Kaplan, which has been owned by the Washington Post Company since 1984 and where Don Graham is currently chairman of the board, has largely skirted the intense federal scrutiny and sanctions that ultimately befell ITT Technical Institute and Corinthian Colleges, similar for-profit giants accused of defrauding students.  However, Kaplan was named by the Obama administration earlier this year, along with hundreds of other schools, as an institution of higher education that loads students with more debt than they can afford to repay.  Lauren Camera  https://www.usnews.com/news/education-news/articles/2017-04-27/purdue-university-acquires-for-profit-giant-kaplan-university?int=news-rec

Military general and first emperor of France, Napoleon Bonaparte was born on August 15, 1769, in Ajaccio, Corsica, France.  One of the most celebrated leaders in the history of the West, he revolutionized military organization and training, sponsored Napoleonic Code, reorganized education and established the long-lived Concordat with the papacy.  He died on May 5, 1821, on the island of St. Helena in the South Atlantic Ocean.  Read much more and see pictures at http://www.biography.com/people/napoleon-9420291

The legal system of Louisiana is largely based on the Napoleonic Code.  Find a list of 18 countries whose laws are based on--or influenced by--the Napoleonic Code at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_legal_systems

A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg  A story is like a magic carpet.  It can take us across oceans, over the mountains, and to exotic places.  And each word in a story has its own story.  Think of it as a rolled-up carpet.  This week we’ll take words from Greek mythology and unroll them and take you on a ride to the world of magical stories.

orphic  (OR-fik)  adjective  1.  Melodious; entrancing.  2.  Mystical; occult.   After Orpheus, a musician, poet, and prophet in Greek mythology.  His lyre playing and singing could charm animals, trees, and even rocks.  After his wife Eurydice, a nymph, died of a snakebite, he traveled to the underworld to bring her back.  His music melted the heart of Hades, the god of the underworld, who allowed him to take his wife back on the condition that he not look back at her until they had reached the world of the living.  They had almost made it when he looked back and lost her again.

nemesis  (NEM-uh-suhs)  noun  1.  A formidable opponent or an archenemy.  2.  A source of harm or ruin.  3.  Retributive justice.  In Greek mythology, Nemesis was the goddess of vengeance.  From Greek nemesis (retribution), from nemein (to allot).

amazon  (AM-uh-zon, -zuhn)  noun  A tall, strong, powerful woman.  In Greek mythology, Amazons were a race of women warriors in Scythia (in modern Russia).

muse  (myooz)  noun:   A source of inspiration.  A state of deep thought.  verb intr.:  To be absorbed in thought.  verb tr.:  To think or say something thoughtfully.  In Greek mythology, the Muses were nine goddesses, each of whom presided over an art or science.  A museum is, literally speaking, a shrine to the Muses.

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From:  Andrew Pressburger   Subject:  orphic  The eighteenth-century opera by Christoph Willibald Gluck, Orfeo ed Euridice, is a typical rococo take on the original story.  In it the deus-ex-machina appearance of Amore, Goddess of Love, makes for a happy ending in which the lovers’ abiding love is allowed to reunite them in happy harmony, despite the mutual desire they had mistakenly succumbed to at the first try of exiting Hades.  Jacques Offenbach’s operetta a century later mercilessly satirizes this saccharine version of the actual myth.  What both works share in common though is the delightful music that supersedes the two composers’ respective agenda.

From:  Stephen Posey  Subject:  muse  It might aMUSE folks to know there are a series of streets in New Orleans devoted to the nine muses.  In order along St. Charles Ave. starting at Lee Circle.

What is the purpose of Quote Investigator?  This blog records the investigatory work of Garson O’Toole who diligently seeks the truth about quotations.  Who really said what?  This question often cannot be answered with complete finality, but approximate solutions can be improved over time.  Articles on the Quote Investigator website have been cited by journalists and writers at The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Economist, The Washington Post, Slate, The Chicago Tribune, The Guardian, Real Clear Politics, The Jacksonville Times-Union, A Way With Words (Public Radio Program), ABC Television News, ABC (Australia), and more.   Send your requests for a quote investigation to garsonotoole@gmail.com.  (Because of the volume of requests, not all will be answered.)  As measured on December 12, 2016 more than 1.2 million words were written in the posts on the website.  This figure included the bibliographic notes.  Learn how to effectively search the Quote Investigator website at http://quoteinvestigator.com/about/

April 26, 2017  Seven years ago, Garson O’Toole started Quote Investigator, a popular website where he traces the origins of well-known sayings.  This month, he published “Hemingway Didn’t Say That:  The Truth Behind Familiar Quotations,” a book in which he collected and updated many of the posts from his site and offers new theories on how misquotations form.  “When I started off, it was mysterious exactly where these misquotations were coming from, and it was interesting that sometimes you could find these clues that pointed to how they may have originated,” said Mr. O’Toole, an alias for Gregory F. Sullivan, a former teacher and researcher in the Johns Hopkins computer science department who now spends his time writing.  Niraj Chokshi  Read about the ten common “mechanisms” that Sullivan says lead to misquotation and incorrect attribution at https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/26/books/famous-misquotations.html

For a confluence of mathematics and art, see these articles comparing Jackson Pollock’s art with fractals.  I read a similar article in Scientific American a few years ago, and it instantly gave me a deep appreciation of his art.  The second article has some great photos. 

http://discovermagazine.com/2001/nov/featpollock  https://blogs.uoregon.edu/richardtaylor/2016/02/08/fractal-analysis-of-jackson-pollocks-poured-paintings/  Thank you, Muse reader!  From the two articles:  In 1999, Richard Taylor and his research team published the results of their scientific analysis showing Jackson Pollock’s poured patterns to be fractal.  Consisting of patterns that recur at increasingly fine magnifications, fractals are the basic building blocks of nature’s scenery.  Labelled as “Fractal Expressionism,” Pollock distilled the essence of natural scenery and expressed it on his canvases with an unmatched directness.  A retrospective of Jackson Pollock's work several years ago at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City drew lines around the block, and an award-winning film of his life and art was released at the end of 2000.  Apparently "Jack the Dripper" captured some aesthetic dimension—some abiding logic in human perception—beyond the scope of his critics.  That logic, says physicist and art historian Richard Taylor, lies not in art but in mathematics—specifically, in chaos theory and its offspring, fractal geometry.  Click on the links themselves for more information.

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1701  May 1, 2017  On this date in 1785, Kamehameha I, the king of Hawaiʻi, defeated Kalanikūpule and established the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi.  On this date in 1786, in Vienna, Austria, Mozart's opera The Marriage of Figaro was performed for the first time.