In the early part of the twentieth century, there were several types of wall board materials that were quite different than the traditional interior wall finish--plaster.  Most were made with compressed wood fibers or pulp.  Some were smooth-surfaced, some manufactured with a wood grain texture and some were striated to look like boards.  The wall boards were simply nailed to studs and joists in unfinished work or nailed over previously finished surfaces.  The joints were typically covered with thin wood batten strips and the assembly was then painted.  There were many types and several manufacturers, but the most well known product today is Beaver Board.  Over a century after this product was first developed, most folks refer to all of these older fiber board products as Beaver Board.  Beaver Board just had the best advertising.  In 1903 J. P. Lewis, a paper product maker, glued layers of mat board used for picture framing to make boards for lining his attic.  This took place in Beaver Falls, NY.  In 1906, he formed the Beaver Manufacturing Company.  Later wallboards made of layered wood fibers include Upson Board, Cornell board, Sterling, and Fibro-Wallboard.  Some people claim Homasote, made from recycled paper waste, was the original fiber board wall product.  It was originally manufactured for lining railroad carriages, then automobile tops.  It wasn’t until 1925 that it was marketed as a building product.  Bill Kibble  https://www.oldhouseweb.com/blog/beaver-board/  The painting American Gothic by Grant Wood was painted on a beaverboard panel.

Somen are thin wheat noodles, as thin as vermicelli, more delicate than buckwheat.  Twirled around chopsticks and dipped in a sauce made with soy sauce and dashi, the noodles don't require much prep, and are utterly refreshing.  Each noodle, dipped in sauce, is cold, firm, and rich.  Chichi Wang   Find recipe serving four at https://www.seriouseats.com/cold-somen-noodles-with-dipping-sauce-recipe 

An echo is the reflection of sound waves off of some distant object.  If you shout in a canyon, the sound waves travel through the air, bounce off the rocky walls and then come back to you.  Sonar (SO-nahr) is the most similar to this scenario.  This technology also relies on sound waves to detect objects.  However, sonar is typically used underwater.  Scientists made up the words radar, sonar and lidar.  Each reflects a technology’s usefulness:  Radar: ra(dio) d(etection) a(nd) r(anging); Sonar: so(und) na(vigation) (and) r(anging); and Lidar: li(ght) d(etection) a(nd) r(anging).  Detection (or navigation) refers to locating objects.   Radar, sonar and lidar  can determine an object’s distance, or range.  For that measurement, time plays an important role.  Lidar, radar and sonar systems all include timing devices.  Their clocks record the length of time needed for a wave to travel to an object and back.  The farther the distance, the longer it takes for an echo to return.  Andrew Bridges  https://www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/article/explainer-what-are-lidar-radar-and-sonar 

An airborne lidar survey has  revealed hundreds of long-lost Maya and Olmec ceremonial sites in southern Mexico.  The 32,800-square-mile area was surveyed by the Mexican Instituto Nacional de Estadistica y Geografia, which made the data public.  When University of Arizona archaeologist Takeshi Inomata and his colleagues examined the area, which spans the Olmec heartland along the Bay of Campeche and the western Maya Lowlands just north of the Guatemalan border, they identified the outlines of 478 ceremonial sites that had been mostly hidden beneath vegetation or were simply too large to recognize from the ground.  “It was unthinkable to study an area this large until a few years ago,” said Inomata.  “Publicly available lidar is transforming archaeology.”  Over the last several years, lidar surveys have revealed tens of thousands of irrigation channels, causeways, and fortresses across Maya territory, which now spans the borders of Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize.  Infrared beams can penetrate dense foliage to measure the height of the ground, which often reveals features like long-abandoned canals or plazas. T he results have shown that Maya civilization was more extensive, and more densely populated, than we previously realized.  The recent survey of southern Mexico suggests that the Maya civilization may have inherited some of its cultural ideas from the earlier Olmecs, who thrived along the coastal plans of southern Mexico from around 1500 BCE to around 400 BCE.  Kiona N. Smith  https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/10/lidar-reveals-hundreds-of-long-lost-maya-and-olmec-ceremonial-centers/ 

Sportswashing is the practice of an individual, group, corporation, or nation-state using sport to improve their tarnished reputation, through hosting a sporting event, the purchase or sponsorship of sporting teams, or by participation in the sport itself.  At nation-state level, sportswashing has been used to direct attention away from a poor human rights record and corruption scandals within government.  While at the individual or corporate level sportswashing is used to cover up and direct attention away from said person's or company's vices, crimes, or scandals.  Sportswashing has been called a form of whitewashing.  See graphics at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sportswashing 

In the spring of 1973, just after enrolling as a graduate student at Stanford University, David Boggs began an internship at Xerox PARC, a Silicon Valley research lab that was developing a new kind of personal computer.  One afternoon, in the basement of the lab, he noticed another researcher tinkering with a long strand of cable.  The researcher, another new hire named Bob Metcalfe, was exploring ways of sending information to and from the lab’s new computer, the Alto.  Mr. Metcalfe was trying to send electrical pulses down the cable, and he was struggling to make it work.  So Mr. Boggs offered to help.  At PARC, as Mr. Metcalfe and Mr. Boggs pieced together a blueprint for Ethernet technology, borrowing ideas from a wireless network at the University of Hawaii called ALOHAnet.  This work dovetailed with one of Mr. Boggs’s oldest interests:  radio.  David Boggs, an electrical engineer and computer scientist, died on Feb. 19, 2022.  https://death-obituary.com/dave-boggs-death-co-inventor-of-ethernet-has-died/  

Duvall Hecht, audiobook pioneer and founder of Books on Tape, died  February 10, 2022 at the age of 91.  In the early 1970s, Hecht was working at a brokerage firm in Los Angeles and commuting to his office each day from Newport Beach.  Bored with music and news on the car radio, he rigged up a reel-to-reel tape player on the passenger seat and listened to recordings of books that had been created for the blind.  He enjoyed this aural pastime so much that he came up with the idea to create unabridged recordings of books on cassette—the emerging portable technology of the day.  Hecht used money from the sale of his 1965 Porsche to launch Books on Tape in 1975 initially as a tape-rental business that he ran with his wife Sigrid out of their home.  The proliferation of in-dash cassette players in the 1970s and the advent of the Sony Walkman in 1980 helped the company take off as part of a growing audiobook industry.  Random House acquired Books on Tape and its then-6,000-title catalog in 2001 for an estimated $20 million.  BoT remains a Penguin Random House Audio’s imprint serving the school and library market.  Hecht was born April 23, 1930 in Los Angeles.  While at Stanford University, he took up rowing, and he rowed in his first Olympics in 1952, the same year he graduated from college.  Hecht made the U.S. rowing team again in 1956 and took home a gold medal in the two-man crew event in Melbourne.  After his Olympic triumph, Hecht earned a master’s degree in journalism at Stanford and taught English at Menlo College in Atherton, Calif., where he started a rowing club.  He served in the Marines as a fighter pilot and later became a commercial pilot.  He maintained ties to rowing throughout his life, launching the crew program at UC Irvine in 1965, and later coaching the team there following a coaching stint at UCLA.  In more recent years, Hecht pursued a longtime dream of becoming a long-haul trucker, a career allowing him ample time on the job to listen to audiobooks.  Shannon Maughan   https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/Obituary/article/88620-obituary-audiobook-pioneer-duvall-hecht-91.html 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2502  March 2, 2022