Animals as verbs  To "horse" around means to goof off, to "crow" means to brag, to "bull" up means to become stubborn, to "snake" around means to be sneaky, to "weasel" into something also means to be sneaky, to "cow" means to be intimidate someone, to "fox" means to outwit, to "rabbit" means to babble about something, to "dog" is to remain persistently attached to.  http://forum.wordreference.com/threads/animal-verbs.130982/

Phubbing refers to the practice of ignoring one’s companion or companions in order to pay attention to one’s phone or other mobile device.  The word is a blend of phone and snub.  It was invented in 2012 as part of a guerrilla marketing campaign to promote the Macquarie dictionary in Australia.  Instead of promoting the word directly, they got other people to use it, targeting journalists through  an astroturfing ‘Stop Phubbing’ campaign which succeeded in generating news stories which used the word.  Phub popped up on Oxford’s New Monitor Corpus, which is designed to identify emerging vocabulary, in July 2013, and it surged in frequency the following month.  By the time the true story behind the campaign was revealed in October of that year, some of my colleagues had even begun to mention it as a potential Word of the Year candidate.  Katherine Connor Martin  http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2016/05/phub-made-eat-words/

Feedback to article on Grace Hopper from a Muse reader:   I remember Grace Hopper attending an ACM Conference in Toledo, February 1981.  Also, really enjoyed the book, The Innovators, which is about computing pioneers.  What an amazing woman.  Oh yeah, I picked her up at the Toledo airport and returned her to the same.

February 4, 2015  In the closing pages of his epic 2007 biography “Einstein: His Life and Universe,” author Walter Isaacson observed that Albert Einstein not only was a scientist who sought a unified theory that could explain the cosmos.  Einstein also was a humanist who believed that freedom was the lifeblood of creativity.  “Perhaps the most important aspect of his personality,” Isaacson wrote, “was his willingness to be a non-conformist.” Isaacson cites a forward that Einstein wrote, late in his life, to a new edition of Galileo.  The theme that I recognize in Galileo’s work,” Einstein wrote, “is the passionate fight against any kind of dogma based on authority.”  “The world has seen a lot of impudent geniuses,” Isaacson concludes.  In his latest work of history, “The Innovators:  How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution,” Isaacson returns to these themes once more.  Impudence, yes. Genius, for sure.  Yet “The Innovators” veers radically away from Isaacson’s exhaustive study of the lone brilliance of Einstein, much less the petulant independence captured in his award-winning biography of Steve Jobs  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXSJzWxh0yo  John C. Hollar  Read much more at http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/insight-into-the-innovators/

Antirhodos (sometimes Antirrhodos or Anti Rhodes) was an island in the eastern harbor of Alexandria, Egypt, on which a Ptolemaic palace was sited.  The island was occupied until the reigns of Septimius Severus and Caracalla and it probably sank in the 4th century, when it succumbed to earthquakes and a tsunami following an earthquake in the eastern Mediterranean near Crete in the year 365.  The site now lies underwater, near the seafront of modern Alexandria, at a depth of approximately five metres (16 ft).  Descriptions of the island were recorded in classical antiquity by Greek geographers and historians.   Strabo described a royal house on Antirhodos in 27 BC and wrote that the island's name ("counter-Rhodes") derived from the island's rivalry with the island of Rhodes.  Antirhodos was part of Alexandria's ancient royal port called the Portus Magnus, which also included parts of the Lochias peninsula in the East and the island of Pharos in the West.  The Portus Magnus was abandoned and left as an open bay after an earthquake in the 8th century.  On the esplanade the explorer Franck Goddio uncovered the remains of a relatively modest (90 metres by 30 metres) marble-floored 3rd century BC palace, believed to have been Cleopatra's royal quarters.  Md. Anwar Hossain Rubel  See many pictures at http://rubeliba.blogspot.com/2016/09/sunken-city-antirhodos-lost-kingdom-of.html

The Pharos at Alexandria was the last structure to be named on Antipater of Sidon's list of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.  It was constructed at the beginning of the 3rd century BCE, begun by Ptolemy Soter, the ruler of the Egyptian region after the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE.  It was impressive in its construction and scale, and legends claim that its light (a reflective mirror) was visible in the harbor from 35 miles away.  The Pharos (which has become a generic term for lighthouse) was actually located on the tiny limestone island of Pharos that sat in front of the harbor of what would become Alexandria.  When Alexander the Great arrived in Egypt in 332 BCE, Pharos was a shrine and home to Proteus, a sea god.  When Alexander and his troops took Memphis (the ancient Egyptian capital) and defeated the occupying Persians, the Egyptian people were elated, and accepted him as their new Pharaoh.  As Alexander and his troops further explored their new territory, they happened upon a small fishing village called Rhacotis.  Its strategic location (on the coast) caught Alexander's eye, and he proclaimed that a new capital city, Alexandria, was to be built there.  Immense and opulent, this city would be home to beautiful art and architecture, as well as all of the most influential literature in ancient history in its fabled Library.  The Pharos at Alexandria stood and remained in use until two earthquakes, in 1303 and 1323 CE, reduced it to rubble.  In 1994 CE, underwater archaeologists located some of the remains of the lighthouse in the Alexandrian Harbor, and more have recently been located using remote imaging.  Some remains of the Pharos were also used in the construction of Fort Qaitbey in the 15th century CE, which stands on the very same spot to this day.  http://www.ancient.eu/article/130/  Find a map of "the conventional list" of the Seven Wonders of the World and a map of Alexandria between a list of principal characters and Chapter 1 in Alexandria, a Marcus Didius Falco novel by Lindsey Davis

Consist, comprise and compose are all verbs used to describe what something is ‘made of’.  We only use the active form of consist of:  Their flat consists of two bedrooms, a kitchen and a bathroom.  Comprise is more formal than consist:  The USA comprises 50 states.  We can also use it in the passive voice in the form ‘be comprised of’:  The course is comprised of ten lectures and five seminars on the theory of economics and banking.  Compose of  is even more formal than consist of and comprise.  Compose of  is only used in the passive voice:  Muscle is composed of different types of protein.

http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/grammar/british-grammar/consist-comprise-or-compose

On January 17, 2017 the National Book Critics Circle announced its 30 finalists in six categories––autobiography, biography, criticism, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry––for the outstanding books of 2016.  The awards will be presented on March 16, 2017 at the New School in New York City.  The ceremony is free and open to the public.  Find the complete list of NBCC Award finalists for the publishing year 2016 and winners of three additional prizes  (The Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, The John Leonard Prize and Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing) at http://www.bookcritics.org/

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com   Issue 1679  January 18, 2017  On this date in 1778, James Cook was the first known European to discover the Hawaiian Islands, which he named the "Sandwich Islands".  On this date in 1886, modern hockey was born with the formation of The Hockey Association in England.

The Left Hand of Darkness is a science fiction novel by Ursula K. Le Guin, published in 1969.  The novel became immensely popular; in 1970 it won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards as the year's Best Novel, and established Le Guin's status as a major author of science fiction.  The novel follows the story of Genly Ai, a native of Terra, who is sent to the planet of Gethen as an envoy of the Ekumen, a loose confederation of planets.  Ai's mission is to persuade the nations of Gethen to join the Ekumen, but he is stymied by his lack of understanding of Gethenian culture.  Individuals on Gethen are "ambisexual", with no fixed gender identity.  The novel is part of the Hainish Cycle, a series of novels and short stories by Le Guin set in the fictional Hainish universe, which she introduced in 1964 with "The Dowry of the Angyar". Among the Hainish novels, it was preceded in the sequence of writing by City of Illusions and followed by The Word for World Is Forest.  During the events of Left Hand, the Ekumen is a union of 83 worlds, with some common laws.  Find plot summary and list of primary characters at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Left_Hand_of_Darkness

Quote from Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuinn  "It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end."  http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/44719-it-is-good-to-have-an-end-to-journey-toward  (quote sometimes mistakenly attributed to Ernest Hemingway)

Indigo, native to Asia,  has been used as a blue dye for millennia.  Indigo has been used in traditional medicine systems to cure a number of ailments, and the plant also contains rotenoids which are effective insecticides against mosquito larvae.  Indigofera tinctoria means dyer's indigo-bearing plant.  There are many plants in the genus, perhaps about 700, which is of the Fabaceae family, making indigo a relative of the pea.  Indigo is sometimes used as ground cover in tea, coffee and rubber plantations, and often crops such as potatoes are interspersed with cultivated indigo.  Read more and see beautiful pictures at http://herbs-treatandtaste.blogspot.com/2011/10/indigo-is-health-giving-plant-history.html

We use a hyphen to distinguish a fraction from a ratio.  For example, "The ratio of girls to boys in a class is 3 to 4."  This ratio is written a 3 to 4, or 3:4.  We do not know how many students are in the whole class.  However, the fraction is written as three-fourths (with a hyphen) because 3 is 3/4 of one whole.  Thus a ratio names a relationship, whereas, a fraction names a number that represents the part of a whole.  When writing a fraction, a hyphen is always used.  See Math Goodies at http://www.mathgoodies.com/lessons/fractions/

La Jolla, California is part of the City of San Diego, bordered by Pacific Beach to the south, Del Mar to the north and the Pacific Ocean to the west.  The exact origin of La Jolla’s name is somewhat uncertain.  Historians dispute whether the name originates from the Spanish word La Joya, which means "the jewel" or from the Native American term Woholle meaning "hole in the mountains".  The La Jolla Playhouse was founded by Gregory Peck, along with actors Dorothy McGuire and Mel Ferrer, in 1947.  Peck was born in La Jolla.  http://www.lajollabythesea.com/visitor-resources/la-jolla-facts

Zorba is a musical with a book by Joseph Stein, lyrics by Fred Ebb, and music by John Kander.  Adapted from the 1952 novel Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis and the subsequent 1964 film of the same name, it focuses on the friendship that evolves between Zorba and Nikos, a young American who has inherited an abandoned mine on Crete, and their romantic relationships with a local widow and a French woman, respectively.  The musical premiered on Broadway in 1968 in a production directed by Harold Prince.  The original production ran for 305 performances, but a 1983 Broadway revival ran for 362 performances with a cast starring Anthony Quinn.  Read more at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zorba_(musical)

Room temp or refrigerate? by Madelyn Fernstrom   (1)  It's best to refrigerate peanut butter made only from ground peanuts because the oils can become rancid and spoiled when left at room temperature for weeks.  To soften, remove from the fridge 30-60 minutes prior to using.  (2)  Nuts contain oils that can become rancid when stored too long at room temperature, especially in a warm kitchen.  Store your leftover nuts in a sealed bag in the refrigerator.  For longer term storage, wrap carefully and store in the freezer for several months.  (3)  Because crusts and sometimes the fillings contain butter, cream, and eggs, store leftover pie in the fridge to avoid spoilage.  Find information on other foods at http://www.today.com/health/room-temp-or-refrigerate-7-foods-always-store-fridge-t101180

Students, faculty and administrators lined the streets surrounding Ringling College in Sarasota January 9, 2017, forming a human chain to pass the final 200 books from Kimbrough Library into the college’s newly opened building up the block.  The ceremonial “Passing of the Books” celebrated the opening of the Alfred R. Goldstein Ringling College Library, an $18 million structure that dwarfs its predecessor.  The first book to begin its 500-yard hand-to-hand journey up the block, across the street and into the new library was “Let Virtue be Your Guide,” by Francis Danny.  The book was followed by about 200 more, each progressing through hundreds of hands until it reached College President Larry Thompson, who held several books aloft for the crowd to see before he placed it on a cart to be whisked away to its new home.  The event gave participants a look at a random sampling of the library’s 75,000 volumes.  Many participants would pause and look at a book before handing it off.  Murmurs of “I need to check that one out” could be heard up and down the line.  Once the bucket brigade of books had concluded, Johnson addressed the crowd outside the new building.  “The library is the brain and the heart of a college campus,” Johnson said, quoting Goldstein, a life trustee with the college whose name adorns several campus buildings.  “That is especially true here at Ringling College.”  Ryan McKinnon  Read more at http://www.bradenton.com/news/local/education/article125498224.html

Night of January 16th is a theatrical play by Russian-American author Ayn Rand, inspired by the death of the "Match King", Ivar Kreuger.  Set in a courtroom during a murder trial, an unusual feature of the play is that members of the audience are chosen to play the jury.  The court hears the case of Karen Andre, a former secretary and lover of businessman Bjorn Faulkner, of whose murder she is accused.  The play does not directly portray the events leading to Faulkner's death; instead the jury must rely on character testimony to decide whether Andre is guilty.  The play's ending depends on the verdict.  Rand's intention was to dramatize a conflict between individualism and conformity, with the jury's verdict revealing which viewpoint they preferred.  The play was first produced in 1934 in Los Angeles under the title Woman on Trial; it received positive reviews and enjoyed moderate commercial success. Producer Al Woods took it to Broadway during the 1935–36 season and re-titled it Night of January 16th.  It drew attention for its innovative audience-member jury and became a hit, running for seven months.   An off-Broadway revival in 1973, under the title Penthouse Legend, was a commercial and critical failure.  A film based on the play was released in 1941; the story has also been adapted for television and radio.  Rand had many heated disputes with Woods over script changes he wanted for the Broadway production.  Their disputes climaxed in an arbitration hearing when Rand discovered he had diverted a portion of her royalties to pay for a script doctor.  Rand disliked the changes made for the Broadway production and the version published for amateur productions, so in 1968 she re-edited the script for publication as the "definitive" version.  Read more and see pictures at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_January_16th

Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968) was a Baptist minister and social activist who played a key role in the American civil rights movement from the mid-1950s until his assassination in 1968.  Inspired by advocates of nonviolence such as Mahatma Gandhi, King sought equality for African Americans, the economically disadvantaged and victims of injustice through peaceful protest.  He was the driving force behind watershed events such as the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the March on Washington, which helped bring about such landmark legislation as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 and is remembered each year on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a U.S. federal holiday since 1986.  Read much more and see pictures at http://www.history.com/topics/black-history/martin-luther-king-jr

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1678  January 16, 2017  On this date in 1964, Hello, Dolly! opened on Broadway, beginning a run of 2,844 performances.  On this date in 1970, Buckminster Fuller received the Gold Medal award from the American Institute of Architects.  Word of the Day:  cereology  noun  The investigation or practice of creating crop circles.  

Electricity is a form of energy and it occurs in nature, so it was not “invented.”  As to who discovered it, many misconceptions abound.  Some give credit to Benjamin Franklin for discovering electricity, but his experiments only helped establish the connection between lightning and electricity, nothing more.  The truth about the discovery of electricity is a bit more complex than a man flying his kite.  It actually goes back more than two thousand years.  In about 600 BC, the Ancient Greeks discovered that rubbing fur on amber (fossilized tree resin) caused an attraction between the two--and so what the Greeks discovered was actually static electricity.  Additionally, researchers and archeologists in the 1930’s discovered pots with sheets of copper inside that they believe may have been ancient batteries meant to produce light at ancient Roman sites.  Similar devices were found in archeological digs near Baghdad meaning ancient Persians may have also used an early form of batteries.  But by the 17th century, many electricity-related discoveries had been made, such as the invention of an early electrostatic generator, the differentiation between positive and negative currents, and the classification of materials as conductors or insulators.  In the year 1600, English physician William Gilbert used the Latin word “electricus” to describe the force that certain substances exert when rubbed against each other.  A few years later another English scientist, Thomas Browne, wrote several books and he used the word “electricity” to describe his investigations based on Gilbert’s work.  In 1752, Ben Franklin conducted his experiment with a kite, a key, and a storm.  This simply proved that lightning and tiny electric sparks were the same thing.  Italian physicist Alessandro Volta discovered that particular chemical reactions could produce electricity, and in 1800 he constructed the voltaic pile (an early electric battery) that produced a steady electric current, and so he was the first person to create a steady flow of electrical charge.  Volta also created the first transmission of electricity by linking positively-charged and negatively-charged connectors and driving an electrical charge, or voltage, through them.  In 1831 electricity became viable for use in technology when Michael Faraday created the electric dynamo (a crude power generator), which solved the problem of generating electric current in an ongoing and practical way.  Read more at http://www.universetoday.com/82402/who-discovered-electricity/

The “staff of life” means a “staple food.”  [1] What is a staple?  According to Merriam-Webster, the word staple used as a noun means “the sustaining or principal element.”  When used as an adjective, it means “principal, chief” and “used, needed, or enjoyed constantly usually by many individuals.”  [2] According to the Oxford English Dictionary, staple means “having the chief place among the articles of . . . consumption.”  [3]  According to the Word of Wisdom, the principal or chief element of our diet should be grains.  Grains include grasses like wheat and rice, but corn and legumes (like beans, lentils, peas, and other pulses) can also be classified as grains.  The “staff of life” is an English idiom.  An idiom is “an expression that cannot be understood from the meanings of its separate words but that has a separate meaning of its own” (Merriam-Webster).  http://discoveringthewordofwisdom.com/about/the-word-of-wisdom/wow-faqs/staff-of-life/

“Windy City” as the nickname of Chicago:  Etymologist Barry Popik (www.barrypopik.com) has found uses of “Windy City” in print as early as 1856, and it was frequently deployed in inter-city rivalry between Chicago and Cincinnati in the 1860s and 70s, in which “windy” had the dual meaning of “literally windy” and being “windy” with bombast and empty boasts.  The song “Chicago,” which begins “Chicago, Chicago, That toddling town, Chicago, Chicago, I’ll show you around,” was written in 1922 by Fred Fisher and has been recorded by numerous artists, the versions by Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett being especially popular.  The verb “to toddle” dates back to around 1600 and initially, as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, meant “to walk or run with short unsteady steps, as a child just beginning to walk [or] an aged or invalid person.”  That’s obviously the sense that gave us “toddler” meaning “a very young child.”  By the early 18th century, however, “toddle” was also being used to mean “to walk in a leisurely fashion, to stroll.”  The roots of “toddle,” incidentally, are unknown, but it may be related to “totter,” which would fit well with that first meaning.  http://www.word-detective.com/2010/10/toddling/

Steel Pier located at 1000 Boardwalk, Atlantic City, NJ featured many entertainment attractions, such as The Diving Bell, The Water Circus, The Marine Ballroom, Movie Theatres, The General Motors Exhibit, Midway Games, Tony Grant’s Stars of Tomorrow and the famous Diving Horse.  It was once considered the greatest entertainment venue in the United States.  First opened to the public in 1898, Steel Pier originally debuted as a theater, but expanded to include attractions, rides, and corporate exhibits.  Steel Pier featured every great entertainer of their day from Frank Sinatra to Al Jolson to The Beatles.  Steel Pier truly was the “Showplace of the Nation.”  Steel Pier and The Diving Horse were featured in a Disney movie titled, Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken.  This was the story of Sonia Carver and her life as a rider on the Famous Diving Horses.  The Steel Pier has been rebuilt many times over its history, including once by Mayor Bader, whose name has been made famous by the HBO Series, Boardwalk Empire.  http://www.steelpier.com/Information/History-Steel-Pier

Steel Pier, An American Fable in 2 Acts 20 scenes.  Music & Lyrics by John Kander and Fred Ebb:  Book by David Thompson:  Conceived by Scott Ellis, Susan Stroman and David Thompson  Richard Rodgers Theatre, Broadway - Opened April 24, 1997.  Closed 28 June, 1997 (76 performances)  See synopsis at http://www.guidetomusicaltheatre.com/shows_s/steelpier.htm

Greenland is an autonomous country within the Danish Realm, located between the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans, east of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago.  Though physiographically a part of the continent of North America, Greenland has been politically and culturally associated with Europe (specifically Norway and Denmark, the colonial powers, as well as the nearby island of Iceland) for more than a millennium.  In 2008, the people of Greenland passed a referendum supporting greater autonomy; 75% of votes cast were in favour.  Its residents are majority Inuit, whose ancestors had migrated from the Canadian mainland beginning in the 13th century, gradually settling across the island.  Greenland is the world's largest island (it is smaller than Australia, which is considered a continent).  Three-quarters of Greenland is covered by the only permanent ice sheet outside of Antarctica.  With a population of about 56,480 (2013), it is the least densely populated country in the world.  See extensive article with many pictures at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland

The United States presidential election of 2016 was the 58th quadrennial American presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 8, 2016.  The Republican ticket of businessman Donald Trump and Indiana Governor Mike Pence defeated the Democratic ticket of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and U.S. Senator from Virginia Tim Kaine.  Trump is scheduled to take office as the 45th President, and Pence as the 48th Vice President, on January 20, 2017.  Voters selected members of the Electoral College in each state, in most cases by "winner-takes-all" plurality; those state electors in turn voted for a new president and vice president on December 19, 2016.  While Clinton received about 2.9 million more votes nationwide, a margin of 2.1% of the total cast, Trump won a decisive victory in the Electoral College, winning 30 states with 306 pledged electors out of 538, and overturned the perennial swing states of Florida, Iowa and Ohio, as well as the "blue wall" of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, which had been Democratic strongholds in presidential elections since the 1990s.  In the Electoral College vote on December 19, seven electors voted against their pledged candidates:  two against Trump and five against Clinton.  A further three electors attempted to vote against Clinton but were replaced or forced to vote again.  Ultimately, Trump received 304 electoral votes and Clinton garnered 227, while Colin Powell won three, and John Kasich, Ron Paul, Bernie Sanders, and Faith Spotted Eagle each received one.  Trump will be the fifth person in U.S. history to become president despite losing the nationwide popular vote.   He will be the first president without any prior experience in public service, while Clinton was the first woman to be the presidential nominee of a major American party.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_2016

The Toledo Museum of Art, 2445 Monroe Street  Masterworks of the 20th Century beginning January 21, 2017  Gallery 6  Twentieth-century masterworks from the Toledo Museum of Art collection will return on view, including visitor favorites by Georgia O’Keefe and Andrew Wyeth.  Also on view will be the acclaimed Edward Ruscha painting Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas on loan from the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College  Read about other exhibits and installations at http://www.toledomuseum.org/exhibitions/  Find events and activities at http://www.toledomuseum.org/events/

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1677  January 13, 2017  On this date in 1794,  The Flag Act of 1794 (1 Stat. 341) was signed into law by President George Washington.  It changed the design of the flag to accommodate the admission into the Union of the states of Vermont and Kentucky.  It provided for fifteen stripes as well as fifteen stars.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_Acts_(United_States)  It was this 15-salthtar, 15-stripe flag that inspired Francis Scott Key to write the poem that later became known as the Star-Spangled Banner, after seeing it fly over Ft. McHenry during the War of 1812.  In 1818, another design went into effect, permanently setting the number of stripes at 13 (in honor of the original colonies) and allowing for new stars to be added ceremonially each July 4 should a new state be admitted.  http://www.history.com/news/history-lists/fast-flag-facts  On this date in 1942, Henry Ford patented a plastic automobile, 30% lighter than a regular car.

Grace Hopper (born Grace Brewster Murray 1906) joined the U.S. Navy during World War II and was assigned to program the Mark I computer.  She continued to work in computing after the war, leading the team that created the first computer language compiler, which led to the popular COBOL language.  After graduating from Vassar in 1928, she proceeded to Yale University, where, in 1930, she received a master's degree in mathematics.  Starting in 1931, Hopper began teaching at Vassar while also continuing to study at Yale, where she earned a Ph.D. in mathematics in 1934—becoming one of the first few woman to earn such a degree.  After the war, Hopper remained with the Navy as a reserve officer.  As a research fellow at Harvard, she worked with the Mark II and Mark III computers.  She was at Harvard when a moth was found to have shorted out the Mark II, and is sometimes given credit for the invention of the term "computer bug"—though she didn't actually author the term, she did help popularize it.  Wanting to continue to work with computers, Hopper moved into private industry in 1949, first with the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, then with Remington Rand, where she oversaw programming for the UNIVAC computer.  In 1952, her team created the first compiler for computer languages (a compiler renders worded instructions into code that can be read by computers).  This compiler was a precursor for the Common Business Oriented Language, or COBOL, a widely adapted language that would be used around the world.  Though she did not invent COBOL, Hopper encouraged its adaptation.  Hopper retired from the Naval Reserve in 1966, but her pioneering computer work meant that she was recalled to active duty—at the age of 60—to tackle standardizing communication between different computer languages.  She would remain with the Navy for 19 years.  When she retired in 1986, at age 79, she was a rear admiral as well as the oldest serving officer in the service.  In 1997, the guided missile destroyer, USS Hopper, was commissioned by the Navy in San Francisco.  In 2004, the University of Missouri has honored Hopper with a computer museum on their campus, dubbed “Grace’s Place.”  On display are early computers and computer components to educator visitors on the evolution of the technology.  The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women In Computing Conference is a technical conference that encourages women to become part of the world of computing, while the Association for Computing Machinery offers a Grace Murray Hopper Award.  Additionally, on her birthday in 2013, Hopper was remembered with a "Google Doodle."  In 2016, Hopper was posthumously honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama.  http://www.biography.com/people/grace-hopper-21406809#later-years-and-legacy

Ralph Branca spent the last 65 years of his life watching that fastball, watching Bobby Thomson hit the Shot Heard ‘Round the World, remembering his own voice fruitlessly plead with the ball—Sink! Sink! Sink!”—before seeing it disappear over Andy Pafko’s head and into the stands, watching his shoulders slump, taking that eternal walk to the visiting clubhouse in center field, destined forever to be one half of the most famous at-bat of all time.  Branca was 25 that day.  He’d been a 21-game winner at 21, started Game 1 of the 1947 World Series for the Dodgers.  There would be a famous picture taken a few minutes after he entered the clubhouse after surrendering the home run to Thomson four years later, him lying on a staircase on his stomach, his arms over his eyes, a Brooklyn coach named Cookie Lavagetto sitting next to him, clearly helpless in trying to make him feel better.  Branca and Thomson became something of a vaudeville act over the decades, regulars on the rubber-chicken circuit, beginning the very next week at Yankee Stadium, where they posed for pictures together.  That winter, the two performed a skit at the New York baseball writers’ dinner, the lyrics to “Because of You”  Bobby Thomson and Ralph Branca remained lifelong friends.  Mike Vaccaro  http://nypost.com/2016/11/23/ralph-branca-gave-shot-heard-round-the-world-its-perfect-dignity/

“The Thomson homer continues to live because it happened decades ago when things were not replayed and worn out and run down and used up before midnight of the first day.  The scratchier an old film or an old film or an old audiotape, the clearer the action in a way."  Underworld, a novel by Don DeLillo

The 25,000-word prologue to Don DeLillo's Underworld first appeared in Harper's magazine as a self-contained novella.  It's a 1951 championship play-off game between the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers, won by the Giants at the last gasp with a home run by Bobby Thomson, celebrated in the next morning's papers as 'the shot heard around the world'.   https://www.theguardian.com/books/1998/jan/10/fiction.dondelillo

Underworld is the title of the archetypal first gangster movie (written by Ben Hecht and directed in 1927 by Josef von Sternberg), from which so many conventions of plot and lighting and characterization and incidental business still employed today directly descend.  The term “underworld” used as the title of Don DeLillo's 1997 novel now carries the title’s sense—that of gangland, of a separate criminal sphere existing just under the skin of ordinary life—almost exclusively, so that its original metaphorical connotation has been nearly lost.  The movie Don DeLillo refers to in his panoramic novel, however, is Unterwelt, the product of Sergei Eisenstein’s period of exile in Berlin in the 1930s.  The film, unlike anything Eisenstein is actually known to have made, seems peculiarly plausible—maybe your imagination, prompted by DeLillo, devises its own montage of fragments from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Dr. Mabuse, intercut with landscapes from Que Viva Mexico.  The book’s historical range is as sweeping as its bulk suggests, from 1951 to some not quite definite present day, which might be right now or might lie a few years hence.  Between those two points, the chronology runs backward; successive clumps of narrative are terraced in stages from 1992 back to 1951.  We enter and leave the 1951 Dodgers and Giants game with Cotter Martin, skipping school for the day to sneak into the Polo Grounds, and make rapid visits to Willie Mays’s inability to shake a radio jingle, the announcer Russ Hodges’s oncoming cold and drift of memories, and the assortment of observations and emotions that succeed each other in J. Edgar Hoover’s mind.  Hoover is attending the game as the unlikely fourth member of a group also composed of Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason, and Toots Shor.  They really were all there together, as DeLillo has noted in interviews.  The significance of the game in both baseball history and New York City folklore—the most dramatic event of the numerous subway series that took place in the 1940s and 1950s, when the city still had three teams and distinct neighborhoods to support them—was buttressed in DeLillo’s mind, he has also said, by a coincidence:  the report of the game in The New York Times was balanced across the page by another story with a headline the same size, an account of a Soviet nuclear test in Kazakhstan.  Hoover receives word of this test from an agent during the game.  People throw paper from the stands in the final innings, including, page by page, an entire issue of Life; a page that falls on Hoover’s shoulder reproduces half of Brueghel’s Triumph of Death.  After Thomson’s homer the ball rolls through the stands as people scramble for it.  Cotter Martin snatches it and takes it home to his family’s Harlem apartment.  He makes the mistake of telling his father about it, though, and the father, Manx Martin, who is unemployed and always looking for an angle, takes the ball up to Yankee Stadium to sell it to someone in the line of those waiting to buy World Series tickets.  Thus the ball begins to roll through the book as a sort of Grail, one of those migratory objects that are part character and part leitmotif, like the overcoat in Gogol’s The Overcoat and in Julien Duvivier’s 1942 film Tales of Manhattan.  Here, though, we’re never exactly sure what happens to the ball.  Luc Sante  http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1997/11/06/between-hell-and-history/

NAME CHANGES  William Jefferson "Bill" Clinton (born William Jefferson Blythe III 1946)  Gerald Rudolph Ford, Jr. (born Leslie Lynch King, Jr. 1913)  Melania Trump (born Melanija Knavs 1970, changed to Melania Knauss)

Country music group Little Big Town performs the Star Spangled Banner at the College Football Playoff National Championship Game between Alabama and Clemson January 9, 2017  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wns9i83CZWM  2:06  See the American Eagle Foundation's free-flying bald eagle towards the end of the song.

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1676  January 11, 2017  On this date in 1759, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the first American life insurance company was incorporated.  On this date in 1787, William Herschel discovered Titania and Oberon, two moons of Uranus.  On this date in 1908, Grand Canyon National Monument was created.

Leo Beranek, a 2003 National Medal of Science recipient and longtime member of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA), died in Westwood, MA, on October 10, 2016, almost a month following his 102nd birthday.  His remarkable life and career were highlighted in a special Fall 2014 issue of Acoustics Today http://acousticstoday.org/issues/2014AT/Fall2014/ index.html)  Leo graduated in 1936 from Cornell College (Iowa) with a BA degree in physics and mathematics.  He received his DSc degree from Harvard in 1940 in acoustics.  His first papers in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America were published in 1940 when he was 26 years old; his last was published in 2016 when he was 101.  Leo remained at Harvard during World War II as director of two laboratories:  first, the Electro-Acoustic Laboratory, which dealt with voice communication in combat vehicles, and second, the Systems Research Laboratory, one of whose missions was to improve the US Navy’s ability to combat Japanese kamikaze aircraft attacks.  In 1948, Leo and colleagues formed the acoustical consulting firm Bolt, Beranek, and Newman (BBN).  In 1965, under Leo’s leadership, BBN became a vanguard of the digital age by putting together one of the most advanced computer software groups in the country, and this group was instrumental in the development of the Internet.  He consulted on many concert halls, among which was the Tokyo Opera City Concert Hall, which was hailed as an “acoustical ‘miracle’” on the front page of The New York Times (4/18/2000).  The Hall is considered one of the five best concert halls acoustically in the world.  Leo published 185 technical papers and 13 books, many of which are discussed in the special issue of Acoustics Today.  http://acousticstoday.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/OBIT-Beranek.pdf

Leo Beranek’s decision to leave Iowa in 1936 for Cambridge, where he revolutionized the field of acoustics, came down to a simple factor:  Harvard University was the only graduate school that offered him a scholarship.  Once there, he planned to go into radio—“that’s what electronics meant in those days,” he once recalled—but he also played timpani in the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra and that “got me going in acoustics.  We were trying to understand how sound behaves in rooms.”  When I try to explain his importance to people who haven’t heard of him, I always say he is like the Sir Paul McCartney of acoustics,” said Tim Mellow, a British acoustical consultant who worked with Dr. Beranek on a book published in 2012, when Dr. Beranek was 98.  “Beranek is the father of modern acoustics, the era of microphones, loudspeakers, and computers.”  Hiawatha Bray and Bryan Marquard  https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/10/13/leo-beranek-accoustics-pioneer-and-founder-bbn-technologies-dies/F732cEPdAE3K00y6cO1U9N/story.html

In 1969, the company Leo Beranek helped found, Bolt, Beranek & Newman, won a contract from the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency to build the first computer-based network, which came to be called Arpanet.  By demonstrating the ability to share data and messages through vast computer networks, Arpanet, a product of government-sponsored research, paved the way for the creation of the internet.  Among its many breakthrough achievements, his company sent the first email message http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/08/technology/raymond-tomlinson-email-obituary.html?_r=0 that used the @ symbol, in 1972.  Dr. Beranek was a sought-after acoustics genius, and Bolt, Beranek & Newman’s first contract was to design the acoustics of the United Nations General Assembly Hall in New York.  He also improved the acoustic environment in such landmark concert venues as the Koussevitzky Music Shed at the Tanglewood Music Center in Lenox, Mass., and Philharmonic Hall (now David Geffen Hall) at Lincoln Center in New York.  Dr. Beranek’s most successful book, “Acoustics,” published in 1954, remains a textbook for acoustic engineering students around the world.  From 1948 to 1958 he did work on noise control, creating standards that are used internationally today.  “I looked into how quiet do spaces have to be to be pleasant for people,” he told an interviewer in 2009.  “In other words, can you write a specification saying that if you’re going to have an office, the noise should not be any greater than so much?  What are acceptable noise standards in a home, in a factory, in a concert hall?   wrote those.”  At the advent of the jet age, Dr. Beranek’s work on noise control became a factor in the controversy over noise levels near the world’s airports when the Boeing 707 jet began flights to Europe from Idlewild (now Kennedy International) Airport in 1958.  Despite claims by the airlines and Boeing that jets were no louder than propeller aircraft, Dr. Beranek’s tests showed otherwise, and the airlines were compelled to install mufflers on their jets and make steep climbs during takeoffs to control the noise levels.  These standards were adopted around the world.  Dr. Beranek was also a founder of a Boston television station, WCVB, and a major donor to arts institutions, including the Boston Symphony Orchestra.  http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/18/business/leo-beranek-dead.html?_r=0

For 50 years, the National Sea Grant College program has worked to create and maintain a healthy coastal environment and economy.  The Sea Grant network includes 33 programs based at top universities in every coastal and Great Lakes state, Puerto Rico, and Guam.  A partnership between universities and the federal government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Sea Grant directs federal resources to pressing problems in local communities.  http://seagrant.noaa.gov/whoweare/seagranthistory.aspx

The National Sea Grant College Program is a program of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) within the U.S. Department of Commerce.  No sea rights have actually been granted (though this was considered), only money.  The program was instituted in 1966 when Congress passed the National Sea Grant College Program Act.  Sea Grant colleges are not to be confused with land-grant colleges (a program instituted in 1862), space-grant colleges (instituted in 1988), or sun-grant colleges (instituted in 2003), although an institution may be in one or more of the other programs concurrently.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Sea_Grant_College_Program  

Raymond James Stadium, also known as the "Ray Jay", is a multi-purpose football stadium located in Tampa, Florida.  It is home to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers of the National Football League (NFL) as well as the NCAA's South Florida Bulls football team.  The stadium seats 65,890, and is expandable to 75,000 for special events.  The stadium also hosts the annual Outback Bowl on New Year's Day; the annual pinnacle of USA equestrian showjumping, the AGA/Budweiser American Invitational; and the Monster Jam monster truck event after the end of football season in January or February.  Raymond James Stadium hosted Super Bowls XXXV and XLIII, and will host the 2017 College Football Playoff National Championship game.  Raymond James Stadium was built to replace Tampa Stadium at the demand of new Bucs owner Malcolm Glazer.  It is located adjacent to the site of the old stadium on the former location of Al Lopez Field, a minor-league baseball stadium that had been demolished in 1989.  It was known as Tampa Community Stadium during construction, but the naming rights were bought for US$32.5 million for a 13–year deal by St. Petersburg-based Raymond James Financial in June 1998.  On April 27, 2006, an extension was signed to maintain naming rights through 2015.  In May 2016 the Buccaneers announced that the naming rights were extended an additional 12 years ensuring that Raymond James Financial's name will continue to appear though 2028.  The stadium officially opened on September 20, 1998, when the Tampa Bay Buccaneers defeated the Chicago Bears, 27–15.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_James_Stadium

The 2017 College Football Playoff National Championship is a bowl game that will be used to determine a national champion of NCAA Division I FBS college football for the 2016 season, to be played at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Florida  between the Clemson Tigers, winners of the Fiesta Bowl and Alabama Crimson Tide, winners of the Peach Bowl.  It will be the culminating game of the 2016–17 bowl season as the third College Football Playoff National Championship.  NO. 2 CLEMSON VS. NO. 1 ALABAMA January 9, 2017 at 8 p.m. on ESPN

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1675  January 9, 2017  On this date in 1839, the French Academy of Sciences announced the Daguerreotype photography process.  On this date in 1859, Carrie Chapman Catt, American activist, founded the League of Women Voters and International Alliance of Women.