While the humble and hearty potato is inextricably linked to Ireland in many people's minds, the tubers were first domesticated in present day Peru and Northern Bolivia nearly 8,000 years ago, according to the BBC.  The Inca and other indigenous people consumed potatoes in many of the same ways we do today.  But they also commonly made something called chuño, which is made by repeatedly freezing potatoes in the cold Andes night air then thawing them the next day.  People would squeeze all of the moisture out of them, which made them light, soft and juicy and added years to their shelf life.  The preservation process made them perfect for long expeditions and provided security against future bad harvests—both qualities that appealed to the Spanish upon their invasion in the region in 1532.  "The invaders took tubers (the underground parts of the plant we call potatoes) across the Atlantic, as they did with other crops such as tomatoes, avocados and corn, in what historians call the Great Columbian Exchange.  For the first time in history, the potato ventured beyond the Americas," the BBC reports.  Since then, the BBC says, the potato has become the world's fourth-most important crop after rice, wheat and maize, and the first among non-grains.  Smithsonian Magazine reports that the word chocolate stems from the Aztec "xocolatl," which referred to the bitter drink brewed from cacao trees that was often mixed with chilis, special herbs, honey and flowers.  The liquid was beaten into a foam, and both inhaled and drunk as part of sacred rituals.  It's well documented that the drink has been around some 2000 years, but anthropologists from the University of Pennsylvania say they've found an even earlier use of cacao—the source of modern day chocolate—somewhere between 1400 and 1100 B.C.E.  Ancient pottery discovered in present day Honduras indicates that cultures there made a fermented, alcoholic beverage from the sweet pulp of the cacao fruit.  Vanessa Romo  https://www.npr.org/2021/09/21/1039153054/if-you-love-potatoes-tomatoes-or-chocolate-thank-indigenous-latin-american-cultu 

Topology is the study of geometric properties that are preserved under deformation.  Sometimes topology is referred to as “rubber sheet geometry”, because it does not distinguish between a circle and a square (a circle made out of a rubber band can be stretched into a square) but does distinguish between a circle and a figure eight.  You cannot stretch a figure eight into a circle without tearing.  Topology deals with the ways that surfaces can be twisted, bent, pulled, or otherwise deformed from one shape to another without tearings.  A topologist is interested in the properties that remain unchanged after all these transformations have taken place.  Topologically speaking there is no difference between a doughnut and a coffee cup since either one can be deformed into the shape of the other.  Many string and wire puzzles, like Torquato puzzle, are based on topological principles.  Gianni A. Sarcone & Marie-Jo Waeber.  Read more and see graphics at https://www.archimedes-lab.org/workshoptorquato.html 

Here’s your first challenge:  go a week without writing very, rather, really, quite, and in fact.  *  If words are flesh, muscle and bone of prose, punctuation is the breath.  *  Dreyer's English:  An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style  Thank you, Muse reader! 

Potions, Pills, and Patents:  How Basic Healthcare Became Big Business in America--Alexander Zaitchik on the Rise of Medical Moneymaking.  The Great War was a short one for the United States.  But in sixteen months of fighting alongside the Entente powers, 116,000 American soldiers were killed.  Contemporaries grasped that a break had occurred, forming two distinct periods in the political and cultural life of the country.  The defining novel of the prewar decade was Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, a work of social protest and journalism that captured the tone and preoccupations of the Progressive Era. Sinclair’s depiction of the Chicago meatpacking industry will forever be paired with the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, signed by Teddy Roosevelt six months after the novel’s publication.  In the postwar decade, the shrunken public imagination and concerns of the Harding Era were indelibly recorded by the other Sinclair of American literature.  Sinclair Lewis’s 1922 novel Babbitt depicted America’s stultifying embrace of the idea, expressed with pith by Calvin Coolidge in 1925, that the country’s natural concern is not civic duty or social improvement, but “the business of business.”  The celebration of commerce and its values colored the drug patent debate when it resumed shortly after the war.  But the main theater of this debate shifted from the drug companies to the American university, where a collision of science and commerce spurred development of institutions and mores to manage and rationalize the new business of “ethical” academic patenting.  https://lithub.com/potions-pills-and-patents-how-basic-healthcare-became-big-business-in-america/ 

Sitting in the heart of Europe, Ukraine celebrated its 30 years of independence in 2021.  While it may seem like a young state, it has a thousand-year history.  Akvile Petratyte and Ieva Gailiūtė  See 50 beautiful pictures of Ukraine at https://www.boredpanda.com/beautiful-ukraine-pics/ 

On March 30, 2022 ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, named Jack J. Dongarra recipient of the 2021 ACM A.M. Turing Award for pioneering contributions to numerical algorithms and libraries that enabled high performance computational software to keep pace with exponential hardware improvements for over four decades.  Dongarra is a University Distinguished Professor of Computer Science in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the University of Tennessee.  He also holds appointments with Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Manchester.  The ACM A.M. Turing Award, often referred to as the “Nobel Prize of Computing,” carries a $1 million prize, with financial support provided by Google, Inc.  It is named for Alan M. Turing, the British mathematician who articulated the mathematical foundation and limits of computing.  https://www.eagletribune.com/region/acm-a-m-turing-award-honors-pioneer-of-high-performance-computing/article_d712c63f-ca5d-5f15-93d6-fd70b2ebd63d.html 

Christopher Alexander, a towering figure in architecture and urbanism—one of the biggest influences on the New Urbanism movement—died on March 17, 2022.   Alexander was the author or principal author of many books, including A Pattern Language, one of the best-selling architectural books of all time.  He is considered to be the father of the pattern language movement in software, which is the idea behind Wikipedia.  In 2006, he was one of the first two recipients, along with Leon Krier, of CNU's Athena Medal, which honors those who laid the groundwork for The New Urbanism movement.  ROBERT STEUTEVILLE    https://www.cnu.org/publicsquare/2022/03/18/christopher-alexander-1936-2022 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2514  March 30, 2022