During his time in Samoa, Robert Louis Stevenson was on friendly terms with some of the colonial leaders and their families.  At one point, he formally donated, by deed of gift, his birthday to the daughter of the American Land Commissioner Henry Clay Ide since she was born on Christmas Day and had no birthday celebration separate from the family's Christmas celebrations.  This led to a strong bond between the Stevenson and Ide families.  Source:  Wikipedia  Thank you, Muse reader!  Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson (1850-1894) was a Scottish novelist, poet, essayist, and travel writer.  His most famous works are Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and A Child's Garden of Verses.

Effectiveness of Commercial and Homemade Washing Agents in Removing Pesticide Residues on and in Apples  http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.jafc.7b03118  Lili He, a chemist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and researchers set out to test three different washing styles.  They sprayed organic Gala apples with the fungicide thiabendazole and the insecticide phosmet—both of which are EPA-approved for use on apples—and let the fruit sit for 24 hours.  They then washed each apple with plain water, a bleach solution typically used by US fruit purveyors, and a solution of water with 1% baking soda.  For each of the three options, they tested both a two- and an eight-minute wash before rinsing each apple again with water.  After two minutes, baking soda had removed more pesticides than the other two methods.  (In fact, plain water was more effective than the bleach solution.)  The baking soda solution cleared off all of the thiabendazole from the apple skins after 12 and all of the phosmet after 15 minutes.  That said, by that point, small amounts of pesticide had seeped through the apple skin and into the flesh, so even washing fruit thoroughly won’t prevent you from low levels of chemical exposure.  Though thiabendazole and phosmet might be toxic in very large quantities, they are safe for human consumption at the levels they’re typically used at for apple farming, according to the EPA.  But if you really want to minimize your exposure, the study suggests, wash them in a mixture of one teaspoon of baking soda for every two cups of water.  Peeling them also works, though trace levels of chemicals will have gone into the fruit itself, and, the researchers note, you’ll be missing out on some of the fiber and vitamins in the skin.  https://qz.com/1110960/how-to-wash-your-apples-according-to-science/

The University of Utah (also referred to as the U, U of U, or Utah) is a public coeducational space-grant research university in Salt Lake City.  As the state's flagship university, the university offers more than 100 undergraduate majors and more than 92 graduate degree programs.  Graduate studies include the S.J. Quinney College of Lawand the School of Medicine, Utah's only medical school.  The university was established in 1850 as the University of Deseret by the General Assembly of the provisional State of Deseret, making it Utah's oldest institution of higher education.  It received its current name in 1892, four years before Utah attained statehood, and moved to its current location in 1900.  The University of Utah was one of the original four nodes of ARPANET, the world's first packet-switching computer network and embryo of the current worldwide Internet.  The School of Computing produced many of the early pioneers in computer science and graphics, including Turing Award winner Alan Kay, Pixar founder Ed Catmull, Atari founder Nolan Bushnell, and Adobe founder John Warnock.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Utah

Tahini and Halva Brownies by Yotam Ottolenghi & Helen Goh  https://www.splendidtable.org/recipes/tahini-and-halva-brownies

The New York Times was founded as the New-York Daily Times on September 18, 1851, published by Raymond, Jones & Company (raising about $70,000); by journalist and politician Henry Jarvis Raymond (1820–69), then a Whig Party member and later second chairman of the newly organized Republican Party National Committee, and former banker George Jones.  Other early investors of the company were Edwin B. Morgan, Christopher Morgan, and Edward B. Wesley.  Sold for a penny (equivalent to 29 cents today), the inaugural edition attempted to address various speculations on its purpose and positions that preceded its release.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times

The Washington Post is an American daily newspaper.  Published in Washington, D.C., it was founded on December 6, 1877.  Located in the capital city of the United States, the newspaper has a particular emphasis on national politics.  Daily editions are printed for the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia.  The newspaper has won 47 Pulitzer Prizes.  This includes six separate Pulitzers awarded in 2008, the second-highest number ever awarded to a single newspaper in one year, second only to The New York Times' seven awards in 2002.  Post journalists have also received 18 Nieman Fellowships and 368 White House News Photographers Association awards.  In the early 1970s, in the best-known episode in the newspaper's history, reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein led the American press' investigation into what became known as the Watergate scandal; reporting in the newspaper greatly contributed to the resignation of President Richard Nixon.  In 2013, its longtime controlling family, the Graham family, sold the newspaper to billionaire entrepreneur and Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos for $250 million in cash.  The newspaper is owned by Nash Holdings LLC, a holding company Bezos created for the acquisition.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Post

USA Today is an internationally distributed American daily middle-market newspaper that serves as the flagship publication of its owner, the Gannett Company.  Founded by Al Neuharth on September 15, 1982, it operates from Gannett's corporate headquarters on Jones Branch Drive in McLean, Virginia.  It is printed at 37 sites across the United States and at five additional sites internationally.  Its dynamic design influenced the style of local, regional and national newspapers worldwide, through its use of concise reports, colorized images, informational graphics, and its inclusion of popular culture stories, among other distinct features.  With a weekly circulation of 1,021,638 and an approximate daily reach of seven million readers as of 2016, USA Today shares the position of having the widest circulation of any newspaper in the United States with The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.  USA Today is distributed in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, with an international edition distributed in Canada, Asia and the Pacific Islands, and Europe.  Read about  the "butterfly" edition of USA Today  as an insert in newspapers at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA_Today

On October 27, 1994, Dennis Russell Davies conducted the Chicago Symphony in the premiere performance of a 23-minute orchestral work by the American composer Steven Mackey.  The new piece was titled "Eating Greens," after a painting of the same name that the composer purchased at an African art store in the French Quarter of New Orleans.  Mackey's "Eating Greens" is a colorful orchestral suite of seven movements.  The fourth movement is only 46 seconds long, and is playfully labeled "The Title is Almost as Long as The Piece Itself."  Other movements' titles acknowledge the influence of the colorful and playful visual artist, Henri Matisse, and the quirky but brilliant jazz composer and pianist, Thelonious Monk.  Composers Datebook

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1790  October 27, 2017  On this date in 1682, Philadelphia was established in the Colonial American Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.  On this date in 1810, United States annexed the former Spanish colony of West Florida.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_27