As the polestar of Tuscany, Florence is also one of the region’s 10 provinces. Positioned in central Italy, about 145 miles north of Rome and 190 miles south of Milan, the city is in a dynamic locale.  The Arno River––one of the most significant rivers in Italy––streams through the center, eventually spilling into the Tyrrhenian Sea.  For beach lovers, the east end of the Italian Riviera is about a 90-minute trip.  Meanwhile, beautiful villages amid a verdant landscape—lie within a short drive.  Florence’s gastronomy options include six Michelin-starred establishments and an array of trattorias, ristorantes and spots pouring wine from the region.  “Italy’s most famous wine bar, Enoteca Pinchiorri, is almost as revered as the Uffizi museum,” Emilia Marinig, marketing director at Querciabella said.  Tracey Kaler  https://www.mansionglobal.com/articles/drinking-in-the-charms-of-historic-florence-italy-01674131051   

Google's parent company, Alphabet, lost $100 billion in market value on Wednesday (Feb. 8, 2023) after its new artificial intelligence technology produced a factual error in its first demo.  It's a bruising reception for Bard, the conversational bot that Google launched as a competitor to Microsoft's headline-making darling, ChatGPT.  In the fateful ad that ran on Google's Twitter feed this week, the company described Bard as "a launchpad for curiosity" and a search tool to "help simplify complex topics."  But the James Webb Telescope didn't discover exoplanets.  The European Southern Observatory's very large telescope took the first pictures of those special celestial bodies in 2004, a fact that NASA confirms.  Emily Olson  https://www.npr.org/2023/02/09/1155650909/google-chatbot--error-bard-shares   

sneakernet  (SNEE-kuhr-net)  noun  The transfer of electronic information by physically moving it (storing it on a device and moving the device), instead of doing it over a computer network.  From sneaker (a shoe popular in everyday use) + net, alluding to someone carrying a disk, memory key, etc. from one computer to another.  The shoes were called sneakers because their rubber soles made them very quiet.  Earliest documented use:  1984.  In the beginning, you put data on magnetic tapes and shipped it to wherever it needed to go.  When moving large amount of data, even with today’s gigaspeed networks, sometimes it’s faster to copy data on a device and carry it to its destination.  Even companies like Google and Amazon use sneakernets, transferring large amount of data in trucks.  Amazon, for example, uses special semi-trucks they call Snowmobiles to transfer data from a customer site to their own cloud network.  A.WordA.Day with Anu Garg  

From:  Joe Silber  Subject:  Sneakernet  A concept related to sneakernet is outlined in RFC 1149, Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers, and is known as CPIP (Carrier Pigeon Internet Protocol).
From: P. Larry Nelson  Subject:  Sneakernet   It may well be that the first documented use of sneakernet was 1984, but we in the IT biz were using the term in the 70s.  And it was hauling programs and their input data on 80-column punch cards in boxes across campus to the main computer center to be fed into their big IBM 360/75 mainframe computer or the smaller IBM 1401.  One would wait a day or two, then get a phone call that the job(s) had run and to come pick up the cards and printed output.  There was networking, but it was just the big mainframe that was connected to other universities and national labs over DOD’s ARPANET (forerunner of the Internet).  There was no campus-wide networking for a few years to come.  Then came floppynet a few years later--transferring programs/data on floppy disk drives.  AWADmail Issue 1073   

Super Bowl LVII was an American football game played to determine the champion of the National Football League (NFL) for the 2022 season. It was played on Sunday, February 12, 2023, at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, with kickoff time at 4:30 PM MST (UTC-7).  The American Football Conference (AFC) champion Kansas City Chiefs defeated the National Football Conference (NFC) champion Philadelphia Eagles, 38–35.  It was the fourth Super Bowl hosted by the Phoenix metropolitan area, with the most recent previously being Super Bowl XLIX in 2015, also held at State Farm Stadium (then called University of Phoenix Stadium).  The game was televised nationally by Fox.  The halftime show was headlined by Rihanna.  Fox charged up to about $7 million for a 30-second Super Bowl commercial.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Bowl_LVII

 February 13 is World Radio Day, which is recognized by the United Nations to highlight the importance of radio for sharing information, promoting diversity of ideas, and reaching remote communities and vulnerable people, and its role in emergency communication during disasters.  United Nations Radio was established on Febrary 13, 1946.  Wiktionary   

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2631  February 13, 2023