SWEET POTATOES ARE THE PERFECT FOOD   Sweet potatoes rate high in the list of foods that can help us achieve optimum heath.  You might wonder why.  Wonder no more.  Find 8 reasons why at https://world-food-and-wine.com/worldly/sweet-potatoes-are-the-perfect-food

Antoine-Augustin Parmentier (1737–1813) is remembered as a vocal promoter of the potato as a food source (for humans) in France and throughout Europe.  However, this was not his only contribution to nutrition and health; he was responsible for the first mandatory smallpox vaccination campaign (under Napoleon starting in 1805, when he was Inspector-General of the Health Service), he was a pioneer in the extraction of sugar from sugar beets, he founded a school of breadmaking, and he studied methods of conserving food, including refrigeration.  While serving as an army pharmacist for France in the Seven Years' War, he was captured by the Prussians, and in prison in Prussia was faced with eating potatoes, known to the French only as hog feed.  The potato had been introduced to Europe as early as 1640, but (outside of Ireland) was usually used for animal feed.  King Frederick II of Prussia had required peasants to cultivate the plants under severe penalties and had provided them cuttings.  In 1748 the French Parliament had actually forbidden the cultivation of the potato (on the ground that it was thought to cause leprosy among other things), and this law remained on the books in Parmentier's time.  From his return to Paris in 1763 he pursued his pioneering studies in nutritional chemistry.  His prison experience came to mind in 1772 when he proposed (in a contest sponsored by the Academy of Besançon) use of the potato as a source of nourishment for dysenteric patients.  He won the prize on behalf of the potato in 1773.  Thanks largely to Parmentier's efforts, the Paris Faculty of Medicine declared potatoes edible in 1772.  Still, resistance continued, and Parmentier was prevented from using his test garden at the Invalides hospital, where he was pharmacist, by the religious community that owned the land, whose complaints resulted in the suppression of Parmentier's post at the Invalides.  Parmentier therefore began a series of publicity stunts for which he remains notable today, hosting dinners at which potato dishes featured prominently and guests included luminaries such as Benjamin Franklin and Antoine Lavoisier, giving bouquets of potato blossoms to the King and Queen, and surrounding his potato patch at Sablons with armed guards to suggest valuable goods—then instructed them to accept any and all bribes from civilians and withdrawing them at night so the greedy crowd could "steal" the potatoes.  https://www.geni.com/people/Antoine-Augustin-Parmentier/6000000018276390557

Recherches sur les vegetaux nourissants par Parmentier. 8 ^vo.  1815 Catalogue, page 33. no. 36, as above.  PARMENTIER, Antoine Auguste.  Recherches sur les Végétaux nourissans, qui, dans les temps de disette, peuvent remplacer les alimens ordinaires. Avec de nouvelles Observations sur la culture des Pommes de terre. Par M. Parmentier . . . A Paris: de l’Imprimerie Royale, 1781.  First Edition. 8vo. 309 leaves, folded engraved plate by Gaiette.  Quérard VI, page 605.  This book is on the list of agricultural books supplied by Jefferson to W. C. Nicholas on December 16, 1809, as being desirable for purchase for the Library of Congress.  Entered on Jefferson’s undated manuscript catalogue, with the price, 6 (livres).  Antoine Auguste Parmentier, 1737-1815.  Other works by this French chemist and agriculturalist occur in other chapters.  His researches on the potato were so beneficial to the French people that it was proposed by François (de Neufchateau) that the name should be changed from pomme de terre to parmentière.  For another work by Parmentier on the potato see no. 1199.  http://tjlibraries.monticello.org/transcripts/sowerby/I_344.html

Pochade is a French word meaning a small painted sketch, particularly one painted in oils, out of doors, and often in preparation for a larger, more finished work.  I think it’s one of those French words that’s actually used more commonly among non French speakers.  It’s derived from a 19th Century French verb, pocher, meaning to sketch.  A pochade box, then, is a portable painting box with a built in easel, meant to facilitate the creation of small alla prima paintings or sketches.  A pochade box shouldn’t be confused with a simple painting box, which holds painting supplies and a wooden palette, but has no provision for acting as an easel.  Modern pochade boxes are fitted with tripod mounts which allow them to be set up in an extremely flexible fashion, and carried to the painting site more easily than the traditional outdoor painting box/easel combination known as a French easel.  Charley Parker  Read more and see many graphics at http://linesandcolors.com/2008/08/17/pochade-boxes/

  

December 20, 2017  In 1923, Edwin Hubble discovered the universe—or rather, he discovered a star, and humans learned that the Milky Way wasn’t the whole of the cosmos.  Less than 100 years later, thanks to the telescope named after him, NASA scientists estimate the universe contains at least 100 billion galaxies, and who-knows-what beyond that.  The exponential growth of astronomical data collected since Hubble’s time is absolutely staggering, and it developed in tandem with the revolutionary increase in computing power over an even shorter span, which enabled the birth and mutant growth of the internet.  Modern “maps” of the internet can indeed look like sprawling clusters of star systems, pulsing with light and color.  But the “weird combination of physical and conceptual things," Betsy Mason remarks at Wired, results in such an abstract entity that it can be visually illustrated with an almost unlimited number of graphic techniques to represent its hundreds of millions of users.  When the internet began as ARPANET in the late sixties, it included a total of four locations, all within a few hundred miles of each other on the West Coast of the United States.  By 1973, the number of nodes had grown from U.C.L.A, the Stanford Research Institute, U.C. Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah to include locations all over the Midwest and East Coast, from Harvard to Case Western Reserve University to the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science in Pittsburgh, where David Newbury’s father worked (and still works).  Among his father’s papers, Newbury found the 1973 map https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/found-a-map-of-the-entire-internet-as-of-1973 showing what seemed like tremendous growth in only a few short years.  http://www.openculture.com/2017/12/what-the-entire-internet-looked-like-in-1973-an-old-map-gets-found-in-a-pile-of-research-papers.html

A blockchain is a digitized, decentralized, public ledger of all cryptocurrency transactions.  Constantly growing as ‘completed’ blocks (the most recent transactions) are recorded and added to it in chronological order, it allows market participants to keep track of digital currency transactions without central recordkeeping.  Each node (a computer connected to the network) gets a copy of the blockchain, which is downloaded automatically.  Originally developed as the accounting method for the virtual currency Bitcoin, blockchains–which use what's known as distributed ledger technology (DLT)–are appearing in a variety of commercial applications today.  Currently, the technology is primarily used to verify transactions, within digital currencies though it is possible to digitize, code and insert practically any document into the blockchain.  Doing so creates an indelible record that cannot be changed; furthermore, the record’s authenticity can be verified by the entire community using the blockchain instead of a single centralized authority.  Read much more at https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/blockchain.asp

As the historian Stephen Nissenbaum has explained, the Puritans imposed fines on anyone caught celebrating and designated Christmas as a working day.  These strict rules were necessary since so many men and women engaged in the drunken carousing that accompanied winter solstice festivities, an ancient tradition that the church had failed to stamp out when it appropriated Dec. 25 as a Christian holiday.  In this setting, “Merry Christmas” was born.  The greeting was an act of revelry and religious rebellion, something the uncouth masses shouted as they traveled in drunken mobs.  Troubled by such behavior, the New Haven Gazette in 1786 decried the “common salutation” of “Merry Christmas.”  “So merry at Christmas are some,” the paper lamented, “they destroy their health by disease, and by trouble their joy.”  As retailers, authors and artists in the 19th century invented a holiday of conspicuous consumption and family-centered celebrations, “Merry Christmas” became the favored slogan to sell the day.  The first commercially produced Christmas card, created in 1843 in London, showed not the manger scene but a multi-generational family tossing back goblets of wine above a banner that read, “A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to You.”  But the secular carol, “We Wish You a Merry Christmas,” performed by roving packs that demanded figgy pudding, probably did the most to popularize “Merry Christmas.”  Given the seemingly irreversible prominence of Christmas, churches began to emphasize the day’s religious meaning to their congregants and incorporate “Merry Christmas” into their vernacular.  But observant Christians just as routinely wished each other “Happy holidays.”  “Holiday” is a religious word, after all, derived from the Old English word for “holy day.”  Plus, “Happy holidays” may indicate the entire Advent period, suggesting a more devout reverence for the season than “Merry Christmas.”  Neil J. Young  http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-young-merry-christmas-origins-20171222-story.html

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1816  December 26, 2017  On today’s date in 1734, the second cantata from the “Christmas Oratorio” of Johann Sebastian Bach had its first performance in Leipzig, Germany.  This cantata takes its inspiration from Luke’s Gospel describing the shepherds, and opens with a purely instrumental Sinfonia that sets the scene.  Four oboes take the role of the shepherds.  In Bach’s day, a famous builder of wind instruments lived in Leipzig.  His name was J. H. Eichentopf, and he is credited with inventing an “oboe da caccia”—that’s Italian for "hunting oboe."  This instrument was curved with a big brass horn bell at its end.  Bach calls for this instrument in his Christmas Oratorio, but after Bach’s time, it fell out of use, and knowledge of its exact sound and construction was lost.  Composers Datebook