March 5,
2018 For scientists who monitor the health of
the Chesapeake Bay, the nation's
largest estuary, simply watching grass grow underwater can be very, very
exciting. The floor of the Chesapeake
Bay off Solomon's Island "had no grass since 1972," says Robert Orth, a
marine scientist at the College of William & Mary, and there's a undertone
of amazement in his voice. "It was
just last year, for the first time, we saw small patches of grass appear in
front of the lab. Truly
remarkable." This week, Orth and a
dozen other scientists published results from years of monitoring
seagrass in the Chesapeake. And the news
is good. The area covered by beds of
seagrass has expanded dramatically over the past 30 years. There have been setbacks during years,
but Jonathan Lefcheck, the lead author of the new study,
from the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Science, says they were caused by
short-term changes in weather. After
accounting for those effects, he says, there's still a long-term trend of
increasing seagrass cover. What's more,
he says, this trend is clearly the result of success in reducing the amount of
a particular kind of pollution:
nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen.
Federal and state governments have paid farmers to adopt practices that
keep nutrients from flowing into the bay.
are planting "cover crops" to capture nutrients that otherwise
might wash away, installing fences to keep cattle out of streams, and spreading
manure only when it's likely to stay where it belongs. The government also has forced sewage
treatment plants to stop releasing so much nitrogen and phosphorus. When nutrient levels are lower, algae don't
proliferate, which means the water is clearer and more sunlight can reach
seagrass on the floor of the estuary.
"A small change in water clarity, and those grasses can expand to
cover a lot more area," says William Dennison, from the University of
Maryland's Center for Environmental Science, who is one of the new study's
co-authors. Dennison says that expanding
seagrass beds lead to a "positive cascade" of effects on the entire
ecosystem, because seagrass offers food and shelter to many other aquatic
species. "You go down into this
[seagrass] bed, and you just sit still, and you watch the animals come
out," he says. "We call it the
secret garden [for] all kinds of
little animals and small fish and baby shellfish that spend part of their lives
in this underwater forest." In
particular, seagrass plays an "incredible role" in the complicated
life cycle of the blue crab, one of the bay's signature species, says Orth. Among the bay's defenders, there's a lot of
concern at the moment, because the Trump administration is proposing to cut
federal funding for the Chesapeake Bay cleanup by 90 percent. Dan Charles
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/03/05/590347724/grass-is-back-in-the-chesapeake-and-crabs-will-follow
John
Cleese: how to write the perfect
farce In 1966 I saw Feydeau’s A Flea in Her Ear at the Old Vic,
with Albert Finney, directed by Jacques Charon of the Comédie-Française. It was the most brilliant comedy I’d ever
seen. In the following years I took in
more of his work: The Lady from Maxim’s, Cat Among the
Pigeons, Hotel Paradiso, Fitting for Ladies and The
Turkey. Once I had fully realised
what a master of construction Feydeau was (and knowing I could never match him)
I conceived an evil and despicable plan.
In 2008 I began to work my way through Feydeau’s less known works. My original plan was to steal a few of his best
ideas and stitch them together into one play, but early on I read one, Monsieur
Chasse, which the translator had retitled 13 Rue de L’Amour. It immediately struck me as flabby and
shapeless, and when I found Act 1 ended with an unmotivated physical attack, I
discarded it. A week later, though, I
picked it up again, and ploughed on out of a sense of duty. This time, bit by bit, I began to realise
that a good plot was beginning to emerge from the uninspiring dialogue. Excited, I raced through to Act 3, and was
thrilled that I had discovered a heavily camouflaged gem. Read more and see pictures at https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2017/feb/17/john-cleese-farce-bang-bang-fawlty-towers-rat-manuel-feydeau
Georges
Feydeau (1862–1921)
was a French playwright of
the era known as the Belle Époque. He is remembered for his many lively farces. He wrote over sixty plays and was a
forerunner of absurdist theatre. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Feydeau
Lobio, a bean stew, is served at every
table in the Caucasus (the border region between Europe and Asia) for
breakfast, lunch and dinner. It is
traditionally served in a clay pot with lavash bread. Bakeries also sell bread stuffed with lobio
for a delicious snack on the go. Dried
beans make the best stew, but four cans (15–16 ounces each) kidney beans,
drained and rinsed, may be substituted.
Then, rather than bean cooking liquid, use canned vegetable broth to
complete the dish. Ground mustard seed
can be substituted for fenugreek. Find
recipe at https://foodchannel.com/recipes/lobio-red-kidney-bean-stew
Presidents as Poets Whether it be the anguished
love poems of a youthful George Washington, the religious poetry of John Quincy
Adams, the melancholy verse of Abraham Lincoln, or the sturdy, plainspoken
poems of Jimmy Carter, many presidents of the United States have turned to
poetry at certain points in their lives as an outlet for their feelings and
thoughts, or to explore the resources of the English language. Presidents
as Poets: Poetry Written by United States
Presidents is a guide to the poetic endeavors of U.S. presidents. Select a president from a list to learn about
the context in which his poetry was written and to find samples of his poetry. https://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/prespoetry/
Poetic Presidents: We’ve matched 12 commanders-in-chief
with the poets that inspired them. Read essay
by Elizabeth Harball and see pictures at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69875/poetic-presidents
Home in means to direct on a target. The phrasal verb derives from the 19th-century use of homing pigeons,
but it resurged in the 20th century to refer to missiles that home in on their
targets. It’s also commonly used
metaphorically, where to home in on something is to focus on and make progress
toward it. Hone in began
as an alteration of home in,
and many people regard it as an error.
It is a very common, though, especially in the U.S. and Canada—so common
that many dictionaries now list it—and there are arguments in its favor. Hone means to sharpen or to perfect, and we can think of homing in as
a sharpening of focus or a perfecting of one’s trajectory toward a target. So while it might not make strict logical
sense, extending hone this
way is not a huge leap. Outside North
America, home in prevails
by a huge margin. It also prevails in
North America, but only by a ratio of about two to one. Hone in is common even in technical,
scientific, and military contexts, where one might expect home in to prevail. A few American and Canadian publishers
clearly favor home in as
a matter of policy, but most apparently have no strictly enforced policy one
way or the other.
A team of librarians at the White House Historical
Association, which aims to preserve
and provide access to White House history, has spent the past two years working
to digitize about 25,000 behind-the-scenes photographs to offer a revealing
glimpse of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. As
Betsy Klein of CNN reports, the images, which were previously
uncatalogued, capture scenes from 1962 and 1987, spanning the Kennedy
to the Reagan administrations. Since the
only information available for most slides in storage was the month and year
the film was developed, librarians had to work like detectives, paying
close attention to details of the photo slides to identify how the images
fit into the timeline of historical events and other records. For example, librarians were able to
identify civil rights leaders in a photo from a 1966 meeting with President
Lyndon Johnson by using Johnson’s daily diary. A team of historians
fact-checked the photo information, making revisions when neccessary, before
the images were digitzed online. Klein reports the ongoing project is part of a
partnership with Amazon Web Services, which provides cloud storage and support. Other images on the organization’s new
online library include scenes of press reporters during the Johnson
administration--men in workspaces on telephones and reporters relaxing on
leather chairs. The Gemini 4 NASA team also makes an appearance. Not only do the images show
the astronauts being presented with the Exceptional Service Medal, but
they also capture the astronauts at a more candid moment, as they play in
the White House pool with their families at the invitation of Johnson. Founded in 1961 as an effort by Jacqueline
Kennedy, the White House Historical Association works to preserve and
provide access to White House history. The
organization also collects information on first ladies and other important
figures in the White House, art and decorations from the space and
architectural changes throughout the White House’s history. Additionally, it’s charged with
commissioning an annual White House christmas ornament. Klein writes the team is only halfway done
with its digitization project, and many more images are set to make their way
from storage to digital library in the coming months. For now, you can check
out the trove of images at https://www.whitehousehistory.org/digital-library
Julissa Treviño https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/rare-images-depicting-life-work-white-house-being-digitized-180968269/
http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com Issue 1854
March 7, 2018 Find events, holidays
and observances, births, and deaths on this date at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_7
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