Pilgrims have been travelling the Pilgrim's Way to Canterbury since before the invention of the printing press.  Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is well-known to be amongst the first books printed in English, by Caxton, in the mid-15th century.  Such pilgrimages were sedate affairs; it wasn't the done thing to get the pilgrimage over quickly by racing to the shrine.  The 'Canterbury pace', otherwise called the 'Canterbury trot', the 'Canterbury gallop' etc. was dignified and stately.  It has left us a legacy--the word 'canter' derives directly from 'Canterbury pace'.  https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/canterbury-pace.html



The Canterbury Tales is a collection of 24 stories that runs to over 17,000 lines written in Middle English by Geoffrey Chaucer between 1387 and 1400.  In 1386, Chaucer became Controller of Customs and Justice of Peace and, in 1389, Clerk of the King's work.  It was during these years that Chaucer began working on his most famous text, The Canterbury Tales.  The tales (mostly written in verse, although some are in prose) are presented as part of a story-telling contest by a group of pilgrims as they travel together from London to Canterbury to visit the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral.  The prize for this contest is a free meal at the Tabard Inn at Southwark on their return.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Canterbury_Tales



A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg
If you ever find yourself feeling hopeless, feeling what you do is futile, feeling you are just a cog in the system, pick up a deck of cards and shuffle it.  There!  You produced something that was unique in the history of the universe and chances are it would never be repeated ever.  You arranged those cards in a sequence that happened for the first and last time.  Welcome to the power of combinatorics.  There are so many ways those 52 cards can be arranged (about 80 unvigintillion ways, roughly, the number 80 followed by 66 zeros) that your feat was a once-in-a-lifetime event.  That’s once in the lifetime of the universe (about 14 billion years)!  Chances are no one would ever come up with that sequence in a random shuffling of cards. 

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From:  Barry Brunson  Following your nifty intro about shuffling cards, I can’t resist calling attention to a brief aside on the subject in Isaac Asimov’s essay “Exclamation Point!”*, wherein he recalls a day playing bridge in the Army.  He quotes one friend as saying “We’ve played so many games, the same hands are beginning to show up.”  Asimov proceeded to do the calculations, both for the number of shuffles of the entire deck, and for the number of distinguishable bridge hands (52!/((13!)^4), along with decimal approximations.  After telling his friends, “We could play a trillion games a second for a billion years, without repeating a single game.”  To which the same friend gently replied “But, pal, there are only fifty-two cards, you know”, and proceeded to lead Asimov “to a quiet corner of the barracks and told [him] to sit and rest awhile.”  Of course, Asimov was quite right.  Along similar lines, once during a job interview, I heard mathematician Joe Diestel tell an anecdote about his days in a parochial school.  n response to a question about eternity, the nun had said “Joe, imagine a sparrow, flying around the world, and each time this sparrow crosses Mount Everest, it whacks that mountain with its wing.  Joe, by the time that sparrow has leveled Mount Everest, that is not even one second in eternity.”  Inspired by that story, I developed a brief talk that I gave for several student audiences with a title “How Big is Big?”.  In one part of the talk, I related Joe’s story, then made realistic assumptions about the shape and dimensions (and hence volume) of Mount Everest, the speed of a sparrow, the length of its path around the Earth, and about the size of the particle that said sparrow would dislodge on each pass.  Then I defined “one e-second” as the length of time for leveling Mount Everest.  I would have to dig up my notes (written by hand; this was before routine consumer computer availability), but suffice it to say that, even with a trillion shuffles a second, it would take a vast number of e-years to come close to 52!.  *“Exclamation Point!” appears in the collection Asimov on Numbers (ISBN 0-571-371456), and is available in its entirety at the Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/AsimovOnNumbers



A Keith Haring mural that adorned the stairwell at Grace House Youth Center in Manhattan is expected to fetch between $3 million and $5 million at auction next month.  The work, which features Haring’s seminal character, the “radiant baby,” took pride of place in the youth center since the early ’80s.  According to the auction house, Haring painted the work using black industrial house paint and did so without first working out the composition in a sketch or an underpainting.  Gary Mallon, who was the director of the youth center told The New York Times, “When new kids came to that building and they saw all that stuff, they said, ‘Oh my god, this is Keith Haring.  Is this real?’”  Grace House has since closed however the work has been preserved.  According to the NYT, the church next door spent $900,000 to extract the 13 figure work from the 90-year-old building.  Isabelle Hore-Thorburn  https://www.highsnobiety.com/p/keith-haring-auction-mural-bonhamm/  The auction is scheduled for November 13, 2019. 

Luigi Galvani, (1737-1798) Italian physician and physicist who investigated the nature and effects of what he conceived to be electricity in animal tissue.  His discoveries led to the invention of the voltaic pile, a kind of battery that makes possible a constant source of current electricity.  Galvani followed his father’s preference for medicine by attending the University of Bologna, graduating in 1759.  On obtaining the doctor of medicine degree, with a thesis (1762) De ossibus on the formation and development of bones, he was appointed lecturer in anatomy at the University of Bologna and professor of obstetrics at the separate Institute of Arts and Sciences.  Beginning with his doctoral thesis, his early research was in comparative anatomy—such as the structure of renal tubules, nasal mucosa, and the middle ear—with a tendency toward physiology, a direction appropriate to the later work for which he is noted.  Galvani’s developing interest was indicated by his lectures on the anatomy of the frog in 1773 and in electrophysiology in the late 1770s, when, following the acquisition of an electrostatic machine (a large device for making sparks) and a Leyden jar (a device used to store static electricity), he began to experiment with muscular stimulation by electrical means.  Galvani delayed the announcement of his findings until 1791, when he published his essay De Viribus Electricitatis in Motu Musculari Commentarius (Commentary on the Effect of Electricity on Muscular Motion).  He concluded that animal tissue contained a heretofore neglected innate, vital force, which he termed “animal electricity,” which activated nerve and muscle when spanned by metal probes.  He believed that this new force was a form of electricity in addition to the “natural” form that is produced by lightning or by the electric eel and torpedo ray and to the “artificial” form that is produced by friction (i.e., static electricity).  He considered the brain to be the most important organ for the secretion of this “electric fluid” and the nerves to be conductors of the fluid to the nerve and muscle, the tissues of which act as did the outer and inner surfaces of the Leyden jar.  The flow of this electric fluid provided a stimulus for the irritable muscle fibres, according to his explanation.  Galvani’s scientific colleagues generally accepted his views, but Alessandro Volta, the outstanding professor of physics at the University of Pavia, was not convinced by the analogy between the muscle and the Leyden jar.  Deciding that the frog’s legs served only as an indicating electroscope, he held that the contact of dissimilar metals was the true source of stimulation; he referred to the electricity so generated as “metallic electricity” and decided that the muscle, by contracting when touched by metal, resembled the action of an electroscope.  In the last years of his life, Galvani refused to swear allegiance to the new Cisalpine Republic established by Napoleon.  Thereupon he was dropped from the faculty rolls, and his salary was terminated.  Soon, however, the politicians recanted, and the professorship was again offered to Galvani without the requirement of an oath.  But the affront had cut short his days:  Galvani died in the house of his birth at age 61, at a time when the world was on the threshold of the great electrical revolution.  Galvani provided the major stimulus for Volta to discover a source of constant current electricity; this was the voltaic pile, or a battery, with its principles of operation combined from chemistry and physics.  This discovery led to the subsequent age of electric power.  Moreover, Galvani opened the way to new research in the physiology of muscle and nerve and to the entire subject of electrophysiology.  Bern Dibner   https://www.britannica.com/biography/Luigi-Galvani/Last-years



Oktoberfest was originally a horse race.  Andreas Michael Dall’Armi, Member of the Bavarian National Guard, had the idea of celebrating a wedding a little differently for a change.  Prince Regent Ludwig of Bavaria, the later King Ludwig I, and Princess Therese of Saxony-Hildburghausen were to be honored with a huge horse race.  The financier and cavalry major shared his idea with King Max I Joseph of Bavaria who was impressed from the get-go.  The couple were married on 12 October 1810 with the festivities taking place on 17 October on the grounds of Theresienwiese, to be later named after the bride, and featuring the exact horse race suggested.  It marked the birth of Oktoberfest.  In 1824, Munich city awarded Andreas Michael Dall’Armi the first gold citizens medal for ‘inventing’ Oktoberfest. https://www.oktoberfest.de/en/magazine/tradition/the-history-of-oktoberfest  In 2019, its 209th year, the festival ran from September 21-October 6.



Ruth Bader Ginsburg has long championed human rights.  Now, the 86-year-old's decades of service have earned a nonprofit of her choosing $1 million.  The Supreme Court associate justice won the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy & Culture for her contributions to social justice and general equality, the prize jury announced October 23, 2019.  Known in some circles as the Notorious RBG, the feminist trailblazer, cancer survivor and octogenarian athlete was selected from a list of more than 500 nominees who've made cultural and ethical advances.  But ultimately, it was Ginsburg's storied career that won her the honor.  "By grit and determination, brains, courage, compassion and a fiery commitment to justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg rose from modest beginnings to become one of the most respected, and most beloved, jurists of our time," prize founder Nicolas Berggruen said in a statement.  Ginsburg is the fourth Berggruen Prize honoree since its inception in 2016, and the third woman to win the award.  Berggruen, a billionaire philanthropist, founded the awards through the Berggruen Institute to honor pioneers making political, social and economic advances that shape the world.  Scottie Andrew  https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/23/politics/ruth-bader-ginsburg-wins-award-trnd/index.html



WORD OF THE DAY croft  noun  An enclosed piece of land, usually small and arable and used for small-scale food production, and often with a dwelling next to it; in particular, such a piece of land rented to a farmer (a crofter), especially in Scotland, together with a right to use separate pastureland shared by other crofters.  https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/croft#English The action-adventure video game Tomb Raider, which features the fictional archaeologist Lara Croft, was launched October 25, 1996.



http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2173  October 25, 2019