Which letters in the alphabet are used most often?  The inventor of Morse code, Samuel Morse (1791-1872), needed to know this so that he could give the simplest codes to the most frequently used letters.  He did it simply by counting the number of letters in sets of printers' type.  However, this gives the frequency of letters in English text, which is dominated by a relatively small number of common words.  For word games, it is often the frequency of letters in English vocabulary, regardless of word frequency, which is of more interest.  An analysis of the letters occurring in the words listed in the main entries of the Concise Oxford Dictionary (11th edition revised, 2004) came up with its own list.  Find the lists of Samuel Morse and the Concise Oxford Dictionary at https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/explore/which-letters-are-used-most  See also http://letterfrequency.org/ and https://www.math.cornell.edu/~mec/2003-2004/cryptography/subs/frequencies.html  There is general agreement that ETAOIN are the first six of the most frequently used letters in English.

The English language is constructed of many different sounds:  vowels, consonants, long vowels and short vowels.  Consonant blends (also called consonant clusters) are a collection of two or three different consonant sounds that are each heard when the word is pronounced.  For example, let's look at the word "drink."  Both the letters "d" and "r" are consonants.  When the word "drink" is pronounced, you can clearly hear the sounds of both of these letters, making it a consonant blend.  When two consonants make a distinct sound it is called a "consonant digraph."  When three consonants are combined to form a sound it is called a "consonant trigraph."  Letters commonly mixed together:   bl, cl, fl, gl, pl, sl, br, cr, dr, fr, gr, pr, tr, sc, sk, sm, sn, sp, st, sw, and tw.  http://examples.yourdictionary.com/examples-of-consonant-blends.html  See also https://www.thoughtco.com/consonant-sounds-and-letters-1689914

Dictionary of American Regional English, the six-volume study of America’s dialects, affectionately known as dare.   There’s nothing terribly mysterious about the process of writing a dictionary.  You figure out what you want to include, research it, and then write it up.  But there are a lot of ways to do your research.  Several nineteenth-century projects, most notably the English Dialect Dictionary, managed this by sending surveys through the post and hoping to get useful answers back.  A modern option is to remain in one’s office and telephone people around the country, the process used by the Atlas of North American English (which focusses almost entirely on pronunciation).  The other obvious thing to do is go everywhere in person.  In the late nineteenth century, Edmond Edmont rode by bicycle around France, and corners of Belgium and Switzerland, conducting seven hundred interviews to research what became the Atlas Linguistique de la France.  When dare began its fieldwork, in 1965, its teams travelled in “Word Wagons”:  campers outfitted with detailed surveys, recording equipment, and linguistics graduate students.  The wagons travelled to more than a thousand communities, which were not always ready to welcome sixteen-hundred-question surveys, massive reel-to-reel tape recorders, or graduate students.  But they persevered, completing almost three thousand interviews, with a total of 2.3 million answers that were keyboarded in a prominent early example of the value of computing in the humanities.  Recordings of the interviews, and of a story called “Arthur the Rat,” which was written to elicit important pronunciation features, show the variation in speech sounds.  This fieldwork, combined with extensive original textual research, formed the core of the dictionary, which was ultimately published from 1985 to 2013.  Jesse Sheidlower  Read more at https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-closing-of-a-great-american-dialect-project

The Mohs scale of mineral hardness was created by German mineralogist, Friedrich Mohs in 1822 to measure the relative hardness or scratch resistanceof various minerals.  He based it on ten readily available minerals.  As it is an ordinal scale, two minerals must be compared to decide which is harder.  The scale is neither linear nor logarithmic.  For example, corundum is twice as hard as topaz, but diamond is almost four times as hard as corundum.  The hardness of a material is measured against the scale by finding the hardest material that the given material can scratch, or the softest material that can scratch the given material.  Find  the Mohs scale ratings for 144 types of gemstones:  at https://www.gemselect.com/gem-info/gem-hardness-info.php

"I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice!  And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!"   Barry Goldwater's 1964 speech at the 28th Republican National Convention, accepting the nomination for president.  "Well, you can thank your pistol of a young lawyer here for bringing me around.  She reminded me that there's no virtue in absolutism."  Reverend Dale, a fictional character in the series Designated Survivor, "Outbreak," season two, episode three

Reader question:  Was the Robert Lucas who became the first gov of Iowa Terr the person for whom Lucas County was named?  Answer:  Yes.  Robert Lucas was born in Shepherdstown, Virginia (modern-day West Virginia), on April 1, 1781.  When he was nineteen years old, he moved with his family to the Northwest Territory and settled near Portsmouth.  Three years later he worked as a surveyor, determining the boundary between Scioto and Adams Counties.  Lucas also joined the state militia, rising in the ranks to brigadier general by the time of the War of 1812.  He briefly served under Major General Duncan McArthur before joining General William Hull's campaign against Canada.  He also held a rank of captain in the regular army for a short time but resigned from that position in early 1813 to devote his time to his militia duties.  Lucas saw no additional combat during the war, although after the war he was promoted to major general and made commander of the Second Militia Division.  In addition to his military service, Lucas also became involved in state politics.  Prior to the War of 1812, he had served one term in the Ohio House of Representatives. In 1814, he was elected to the Ohio Senate for the first time.  He served as a state senator for several terms (1814-1822, 1824-1828, and 1829-1830) before returning to the lower house for a term in 1831-1832.  During the 1820s, Lucas became a supporter of Andrew Jackson and joined the Democratic Party.  His political and military reputation made him a widely respected figure in the state, and he even served as the first president of the Democratic National Convention.  By 1830, Lucas had become interested in the governorship.  He ran unsuccessfully against Duncan McArthur in 1830, losing the election by fewer than five hundred votes.  In 1832, he was more successful, winning against Darius Lyman.  In 1834, he was reelected as governor over Whig Party candidate James Findlay.  Much of his tenure as governor was relatively uneventful, but he did hold office during the dispute known as the "Toledo War".  Both Ohio and the Michigan Territory claimed a small strip of land along the northern border of Ohio, no more than eight miles wide.  This area was very important to Ohio because it included the community of Toledo, a port on Lake Erie that was expected to become a part of the state's canal system.  In his position as governor, Lucas called out the state militia and personally led them to defend Ohio's border with Michigan.  In the end war did not take place, as President Andrew Jackson intervened.  The United States Congress eventually decided that the land belonged to Ohio and compensated Michigan by giving it additional land in the Upper Peninsula.  In 1838, President Martin Van Buren named Lucas the governor of the new Iowa Territory.  He held this position until 1841, when Whig President William Henry Harrison chose to replace him with someone from his own political party.  Lucas briefly returned to Ohio and ran for Congress in 1843, but after his defeat, he returned to his new home in Iowa City, Iowa.  He was a member of Iowa's state constitutional convention in 1844, but after that point, he no longer actively served in politics.  http://www.ohiohistorycentral.org/w/Robert_Lucas 

For those of you blocked when you clicked on the recipe for Dutch Baby Pancakes from The New York Times, go to your favorite search engine and type in Dutch Baby Pancake--you will find many recipes including the NYT one.

Lawrence Argent, the acclaimed sculptor who created the 40-foot-high “big blue bear” sculpture that has become an artistic icon for the Mile High City, died on October 4, 2017.   Argent was born Jan. 24, 1957, in Essex, England, and grew up in Australia, later attending the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.  He received a master’s degree in fine arts from the Rinehart School of Sculpture in Baltimore in 1986, according to a biography on his website.  http://www.lawrenceargent.com/bio/  He joined the staff at the University of Denver in 1993 and, through his work, helped bring global awareness to Denver’s contemporary art scene—which in turn helped land high-profile exhibits and residents such as the Clyfford Still Museum.  But his biggest contribution—literally and figuratively—remains the big blue bear, which has been seen by countless people since it joined one of Denver’s busiest tourism and convention thoroughfares 12 years ago.  I See What You Mean” depicts a geometrically rendered—and originally 3D-printed—blue bear peering into the east-facing windows of the Colorado Convention Center.  It was installed in 2005 and has since become a marketing mainstay and popular item of merchandise for Denver Arts & Venues, which plays on its tourist-friendly reputation.  The $425,000 sculpture was part of more than $2.4 million for nine pieces of art commissioned for the convention center under the city’s 1-percent-of-art ordinance.  John Wenzel  http://theknow.denverpost.com/2017/10/06/lawrence-argent-big-blue-bear-sculptor-dies-2017/161342/

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1784  October 16, 2017   Of all the orchestral works of Richard Strauss, the one that premiered in Dresden on today's date in 1925 ranks amount the least-known.  For starters, it has an odd title, "Parergon to the Symphonia Domestica."  "Parergon" means "an ornamental accessory or embellishment," and so Strauss meant his new work, written for piano left-hand and orchestra, was a follow-up to his earlier "Symphonia Domestica," a tone-poem written two decades years earlier, and a musical depiction of one day in the Strauss family household, complete with baby's bath.   For Paul Wittgenstein, the wealthy one-handed concert pianist who commissioned it, the new work was one of several he had requested from leading composers of his day, all designed as a public showcase for his talent.  Composers Datebook