Colophon may refer to:  Colophon (publishing), a brief description of the manuscript or book to which it is attached; The Colophon, A Book Collectors' Quarterly, published 1929–1950; Colophon (city) in ancient Greece, located in modern Turkey; or Colophon (beetle), a genus of stag beetle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colophon

confit  Borrowed from French confit, p.p. of confire (“to preserve”), from Latin cōnficere (perfect passive participle cōnfectus).  noun  confit (plural confits)  Any of various kinds of food that have been immersed in a substance for both flavor and preservation.  verb  confit (third-person singular simple present confits, present participle confiting, simple past and past participle confited)  (transitive) To prepare (food) in this manner.  https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/confit

Before Washington, D.C., became America’s capital in 1800, the Congress met in a number of different locations, including Baltimore, Trenton and New York City.  After years of debate by the new nation’s leaders about the selection of a permanent seat of government, Congress passed the Residence Act in July 1790, which declared that the capital would be situated somewhere along the Potomac River and granted President George Washington the power to choose the final site.  The president also was given the authority to appoint three commissioners to oversee the federal city’s development, and a deadline of December 1800 was established for the completion of a legislative hall for Congress and residence for the chief executive.  In January 1791, George Washington announced his choice for the federal district:  100 square miles of land ceded by Maryland and Virginia (in 1846, the Virginia land was returned to the state, shrinking the district by a third).  In September 1791, the commissioners named the federal city in honor of Washington and dubbed the district in which it was located the Territory of Columbia.  The name Columbia, derived from explorer Christopher Columbus, was used during the American Revolution era as a patriotic reference for the United States  (In 1871, the Territory of Columbia officially was renamed District of Columbia.)  https://www.history.com/news/how-did-washington-d-c-get-its-name

Massimo Listri. The World’s Most Beautiful Libraries, published by Taschen, gathers the incredible work of photographer Listri, who traveled far and wide to celebrate their art and architecture.  Moving from Baroque and Rococo interiors to the sumptuous wood shelving of 19th-century libraries, these images demonstrate the care and thought placed into creating a sanctuary of learning.  “At once a bibliophile beauty pageant, an ode to knowledge, and an evocation of the particular magic of print, Massimo Listri. The World’s Most Beautiful Libraries is above all a cultural-historical pilgrimage to the heart of our halls of learning, to the stories they tell, as much as those they gather in printed matter along polished shelves.”  Monasteries, universities, public, and private libraries dated as far back as 766 are included in Listri’s masterful collection.  The photos highlight the best of the interiors, showing off the ornate decor, the walls lined with books, and the beautiful symmetry of these learning centers.  Each photograph is accompanied by details about the individual library, allowing readers to go inside the history of the location.  Over 560 pages, Listri reminds us of the magic and wonder of libraries, and just how powerful their atmospheres can be.  See pictures at https://mymodernmet.com/massimo-listri-most-beautiful-libraries/

As many of you have undoubtedly heard by now, bridge–the last pure sport in America and beyond–has been rocked by a drug scandal of Cansecoian proportions.  Geir Helgemo, the world’s No. 1 bridge player, recently was given a one-year ban after testing positive for synthetic testosterone and the female fertility drug clomifene at the 2018 World Bridge Series in Orlando, Florida.  The 49-year-old Norwegian, currently serving prison time for tax fraud, could not be reached for comment.  Norman Chad  http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2019/mar/18/no-1-bridge-player-banned-for-using-performance-en/      

José Canseco Capas Jr. (born July 2, 1964), is a Cuban-American former Major League Baseball (MLB) outfielder and designated hitter.  Canseco admitted using performance-enhancing drugs during his playing career, and in 2005 wrote a tell-all book, Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant 'Roids, Smash Hits & How Baseball Got Big, in which he claimed that the vast majority of MLB players use steroids.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jose_Canseco

Why was Pondicherry under French rule when most of India was under the British?  The French East India Company set up a trading centre at Pondicherry in 1674.  The Dutch captured Puducherry in 1693 but returned it to France by the Treaty of Ryswick in 1699.  During the Anglo-French wars (1742–1763), Puducherry changed hands frequently.  On January 16, 1761, the British captured Puducherry from the French, but the Treaty of Paris (1763) at the conclusion of the Seven Years' War returned it.  The British took control of the area again in 1793 amid the Wars of the French Revolution, and returned to France in 1814 as part of Treaty of Paris.  When the British gained control of the whole of India in the late 1850s, they allowed the French to retain their settlements in the country.  Pondicherry, Mahe, Yanam, Karaikal and Chandernagar remained a part of French India until 1954.  https://www.quora.com/Why-was-Pondicherry-under-French-rule-when-most-of-India-was-under-the-British

Spanish Chicken by Rebecca Seal and John Vincent  serves 4  20 minutes prep, 1 hour cooking  Find recipe including orange juice, red onions, smoky paprika, cherry tomatoes, potatoes and fennel seeds at https://www.splendidtable.org/recipes/spanish-chicken

In the late 1980s, Yoshua Bengio became captivated by an unfashionable idea.  A handful of artificial intelligence researchers were trying to craft software that loosely mimicked how networks of neurons process data in the brain, despite scant evidence it would work.  “I fell in love with the idea that we could both understand the principles of how the brain works and also construct AI,” says Bengio, now a professor at the University of Montreal.  More than 20 years later, the tech industry fell in love with that idea too.  Neural networks are behind the recent bloom of progress in AI that has enabled projects such as self-driving cars and phone bots practically indistinguishable from people.  On March 27, 2019, Bengio, 55, and two other protagonists of that revolution won the highest honor in computer science, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Turing Award, known as the Nobel Prize of computing.  The other winners are Google researcher Geoff Hinton, 71, and NYU professor and Facebook chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, 58, who wrote some of the papers that seduced Bengio into working on neural networks.  Asked what winning the Turing Award means, Hinton expresses mock surprise.  “I guess neural networks are now respectable computer science,” he says.  The joke is that in computer science, there isn’t anything more respectable than a Turing Award.  It has been awarded annually since 1966 and is named after Alan Turing, the British mathematician who laid some of the early foundations for computing and AI in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s.  Tom Simonite  https://www.wired.com/story/godfathers-ai-boom-win-computings-highest-honor/

The Best Bookstores in All 50 States

http://mentalfloss.com/article/577201/best-bookstores-all-50-states  Thank you, fellow librarian!  The article, in addition to naming best bookstores, mentions "other bookstores we love".

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2071  April 2, 2019