TRIVIA  White zinfandel is made from red grapes, not white.  Pennsylvania:  Pittsburgh has 89 neighborhoods and the natives say they have two seasons:  winter and construction.  Ohio:  Sandusky County's county seat is Fremont.  Erie County's county seat is Sandusky.  Remuddling refers to misguided remodelling done on an old building . . . "improvements" that rob the house of its original charm and character.  The first Remuddling Column of the Month was in The Old-House Journal, October 1981.

Sinopia (also known as sinoper, named after the Turkish city Sinop) is a dark reddish-brown natural earth pigment, whose reddish colour comes from hematite, a dehydrated form of iron oxide.  It was widely used in classical antiquity and the Middle Ages for painting, and during the Renaissance it was often used on the rough initial layer of plaster for the underdrawing for a fresco.  From Ancient times through the Renaissance, the pigment was mined in Cappadocia, and exported to Europe through the port of Sinop, a Greek colony on the Black Sea.  The pigment was valued for its quality and the genuine product was marked with a seal to show its authenticity.  In the Renaissance "sinopia" or "sinoper" meant any of a range of different shades and hues, and the colour had a variety of names; it was sometimes called Venetian red, or Terra di Siena (Sienna earth), or Ocra rosso (red ochre).  Read more and see graphics at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinopia

Macaron or macaroon—do you know the difference between these two popular cookie types?  Aside from both being delicious and similar in spelling, macarons and macaroons are entirely different cookies.  First off, a macaroon is coconut based, whereas a macaron is meringue based.  The amount of difficulty in making them are extreme opposites—one will have you stressing in the kitchen for hours while the other can be whipped up in minutes.  Macarons range in color and flavors and macaroons are limited in variety.  French macaron comes from the Italian word macaroni.  Macaroon is an English derivative of the French word macaron.  http://www.berries.com/blog/many-differences-macarons-macaroons  Find recipes for macarons and macaroons at https://fearlessfresh.com/what-is-the-difference-between-macarons-and-macaroons/

From:  Helen Pringle  Bullets cannot be recalled. They cannot be uninvented.  But they can be taken out of the gun. - Martin Amis, novelist (b. 25 Aug 1949)   Personal corollary for Martin Amis’s trenchant thought:  Harsh words cannot be recalled.  They cannot be unthought.  But they can be unspoken.

FILM REVIEW  Frederick Wiseman, who can reasonably be called one of the most groundbreaking film-makers still working, has spent his entire career taking deep dives on very specific topics.  It’s maybe something of a punchline that now, at age 87, his latest subject is everything.  For over 50 years Wiseman’s all-seeing, fly-on-the-wall cinema has visited institutions (a psychiatric hospital, a park, a museum, a concert venue, a school), gobbled it all up and served it back in an edited form that, while avoiding a traditional three-act structure, links sequences that build to a rich, almost-transcendent understanding.  Lord knows others ape the style, but few compare.  Ex Libris:  New York Public Library has the drive of a vociferous reader checking out and renewing the maximum number of books their card will allow.  Its running time of three hours and 17 minutes is generous enough to succeed on multiple levels.  The most prominent theme is the divide between rich and poor, and what the NYPL means in different neighbourhoods.  The gorgeous main branch on Fifth Avenue with its marble lions serves a different function than the outposts in the economically disadvantaged outer boroughs.  On Fifth Avenue, a “Books at noon” guest like Richard Dawkins will wax about the Enlightenment; off Kingsbridge Road in the Bronx, the community huddles up for job interview tips.  The only recurring characters are the caring and determined administrators (some googling puts faces to names; by and large Wiseman doesn’t care for formal introductions) who agonise over the budget and try to anticipate changes in digital technology.  There are side trips to speciality branches, such as Lincoln Center’s Library for the Performing Arts, Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Mid-Manhattan Library’s fabled picture collection and the Braille and Talking Book Library in Lower Manhattan.  Jordan Hoffman  Read more and see pictures at https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/sep/03/ex-libris-new-york-public-library-review-documentary-frederick-wiseman

heuristic  adjective  enabling a person to discover or learn something for themselves  Computing  Proceeding to a solution by trial and error or by rules that are only loosely defined  noun   heuristic process or method  heuristics  the study and use of heuristic techniques  Origin:  Early 19th century:  formed irregularly from Greek heuriskein ‘find’  https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/heuristic

Stanley Kubrick’s epic 2001:  A Space Odyssey has very few characters and one of the most famous lines ever:  “I’m sorry, Dave.  I’m afraid I can’t do that.”  With his monotone voice, HAL, the ship’s homicidal computer, may be the most memorable of the film’s explorers:  AFI named the too-smart-for-his-own-good computer the 13th greatest film villain of all time.  But HAL wasn’t always a HAL.  In fact, in earlier drafts of the script HAL was named Athena and had a woman’s voice.  The Computer History Museum has some early sketches of the spaceship where Athena is described.  “The computer maintains a “log” of the journey, making its own entries plus those of Bowman, which he records verbally.  The computer takes verbal instructions and replies through a “speech synthesizer” (female voice).”  Eventually, Athena turned into HAL—a mashup of the words heuristic and algorithmic, the two main types of computer learning.  (HAL is not, according to Kubrick, a simple cypher for IBM, as film lore has it.)  In the French version of the movie, HAL is named CARL, Cerveau Analytique de Recherche et de Liaison (Analytic Brain for Research and Communication).  In the final movie, HAL was voiced by Douglas Rain—a Canadian actor known mostly for his stage work.  http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/2001-a-space-odysseys-hal-9000-was-originally-a-female-7623079/

Douglas Rain (born 1928) is a Canadian actor and narrator.  Though primarily a stage actor, he is also known for providing the voice of the HAL 9000 computer for the film 2001:  A Space Odyssey (1968) and its sequel, 2010 (1984).  Rain was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba.  He studied acting at the Banff School of Fine Arts in Banff, Alberta and The Old Vic theatre school in London, England.  As a stage actor, his association with the Stratford Festival of Canada spans more than four decades.  He has performed in a wide variety of theatrical roles, most notably in a Stratford, Ontario production of Henry V, which was adapted for television in 1966.  https://alchetron.com/Douglas-Rain-348810-W  See also The Origins Of HAL 9000's Singing Revealed  at http://www.cinemablend.com/new/Origins-HAL-9000-Singing-Revealed-15581.html and The IBM 7094 is The First Computer to Sing (1961) at http://www.historyofinformation.com/expanded.php?id=4445

September 19, 2017  The Library of Congress is experimenting with information crowdsourcing through a new project from the just-launched labs.loc.gov, the library’s new home for digital experiments.  An early featured project is called “Beyond Words,” which asks the public to find cartoons and illustrations from the library’s collection of old American newspapers and digitally add a “caption” that will allow the images to become searchable.  “What I like about crowdsourcing is it gives people a chance to discover hidden gems in the collection,” Tong Wang, the IT specialist who created Beyond Words during a three-month pilot innovator-in-residence program, said in a statement.  “You never know what you’ll find poking through old newspapers.”  In order to support future projects like this, the library has also released application programming interfaces (APIs) for a selection of its digital collections.  “These windows to the Library will make the collections and data more accessible to automated access, via scripting and software, and will empower developers to explore new ways to use the Library’s collections,” a press release states.  Labs is managed by the Library of Congress’ National Digital Initiatives office, which was created in 2015 to encourage and promote use of the library’s digital assets.  Tajha Chappellet-Lanier  https://www.fedscoop.com/library-congress-digital-labs/

On Tuesday, September 25, micro-blogging juggernaut Twitter lifted its longtime limit on tweets for a small group of beta testers.  Instead of the traditional 140 characters per tweet, those users get 280 characters.  Twitter’s character limit was originally designed for compatibility with SMS cellphone messaging, the Twitter app’s first supported medium, and became one of its defining characteristics.  The first 20 of the 160 characters were originally reserved for the username, but Twitter has since carved out exemptions for it and other embedded forms of media including images, videos, attachments, and links.  Japanese Twitter users butt up against the 140-character limit just 0.4 percent of the time, according to Twitter, compared to 9 percent of the time for English users.  It’s not the first time Twitter has experimented with expanded tweet lengths.  In 2016, the social network considered introducing tweets up to 10,000 characters in length before ultimately deciding against it, according to Recode.  And in early September, it began testing a “tweetstorm” feature that let users draft multiple tweets as part of a single thread.  Twitter says it won’t flip the switch on expanded character limits right away.  Instead, it will collect data over the next few months before rolling the test out to other “languages impacted by cramming (which is all except Japanese, Chinese, and Korean).”  Kyle Wiggers  https://www.digitaltrends.com/social-media/twitter-280-characters/

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1776  September 27, 2017  On this date in 1908, the first production of the Ford Model T automobile was built at the Ford Piquette Avenue Plant in Detroit, Michigan.  On this date in 1962, Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring was published, inspiring an environmental movement and the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency  On this date in 1968, the  stage musical Hair opened at the Shaftesbury Theatre in London, where it played 1,998 performances until its closure was forced by the roof collapsing in July 1973.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_27