Liu Jiakun (born 1956) is a Chinese architect known for his focus on minimalism, humanism, and locally contextual design.  Liu's work emphasizes the integration of local context, traditional craftsmanship, and sustainable design, while avoiding flashy flourishes.  His projects often make use of local materials and the aesthetic of imperfection.  After the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, he repurposed earthquake rubble into new building materials.  The material and its essence are revitalized and enhanced with local straw fibers and cement, resulting in bricks that are physically superior and more cost-effective than the original material, demonstrating community resilience.  Liu's designs have been exhibited internationally, including at the Venice Architecture Biennale and a solo exhibition at Berlin's AEDES Gallery.  In 2018, he was commissioned to design the Serpentine Pavilion in Beijing, which draw international attention.  In 2025 Liu was awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize; he was the third Chinese architect to receive the award, after Wang Shu in 2012 and I.M. Pei in 1983.  The Pritzker jury praised Liu's "reverence for culture, history and nature, chronicling time and comforting users with familiarity through modern interpretations of classic Chinese architecture."  The award citation read "Through an outstanding body of work of deep coherence and constant quality, Liu Jiakun imagines and constructs new worlds, free from any aesthetic or stylistic constraint."  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liu_Jiakun    

A paradox is a logically self-contradictory statement or a statement that runs contrary to one's expectation.  It is a statement that, despite apparently valid reasoning from true or apparently true premises, leads to a seemingly self-contradictory or a logically unacceptable conclusion.  A paradox usually involves contradictory-yet-interrelated elements that exist simultaneously and persist over time.  They result in "persistent contradiction between interdependent elements" leading to a lasting "unity of opposites".   In logic, many paradoxes exist that are known to be invalid arguments, yet are nevertheless valuable in promoting critical thinking, while other paradoxes have revealed errors in definitions that were assumed to be rigorous, and have caused axioms of mathematics and logic to be re-examined.  One example is Russell's paradox, which questions whether a "list of all lists that do not contain themselves" would include itself and showed that attempts to found set theory on the identification of sets with properties or predicates were flawed.  Others, such as Curry's paradox, cannot be easily resolved by making foundational changes in a logical system.   Examples outside logic include the ship of Theseus from philosophy, a paradox that questions whether a ship repaired over time by replacing each and all of its wooden parts one at a time would remain the same ship.  Paradoxes can also take the form of images or other media.  For example, M.C. Escher featured perspective-based paradoxes in many of his drawings, with walls that are regarded as floors from other points of view, and staircases that appear to climb endlessly.  Informally, the term paradox is often used to describe a counterintuitive result.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox  

In journalism and blogging, a listicle is an article that is structured as a list, which is often fleshed out with additional text relating to each item.  A typical listicle will have a title describing a specific number of items contained within, along with subsequent subheadings within the text for each entry.  The word is a portmanteau of list and article.  A ranked listicle (such as Rolling Stone's "The 100 Best Albums of the Last 20 Years") implies a qualitative judgement, conveyed by the order of the topics within the text.  These are often presented as a countdown, with the "number one" item as the last in the sequence.  Other listicles impart no overt rank, instead presenting the topics in an ad hoc, associative, or thematic order.  Alex Johnson, writing for The Independent, suggested that an 1886 speech by Sir John Lubbock which gave a list of around 100 books "which on the whole are perhaps best worth reading" was an early form of listicle, and that Lubbock should be considered the 'godfather' of the format.  Steven Poole suggested that listicles have literary precursors like Jorge Luis Borges's "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins".  He also compares it to more high-art versions like Umberto Eco's The Infinity of Lists, a book composed entirely of lists.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Listicle    

Cabaret is an American musical with music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb, and a book by Joe Masteroff.  It is based on the 1951 play I Am a Camera by John Van Druten, which in turn was based on the 1939 novel Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood.  Set in 1929–1930 Berlin during the twilight of the Jazz Age as the Nazis rise to power, the musical focuses on the hedonistic nightlife at the seedy Kit Kat Klub and revolves around American writer Clifford Bradshaw's relations with English cabaret performer Sally Bowles.  A subplot involves the doomed romance between German boarding house owner Fräulein Schneider and her elderly suitor Herr Schultz, a Jewish fruit vendor.  Overseeing the action is the Master of Ceremonies at the Kit Kat Klub, and the club itself serves as a metaphor for ominous political developments in late Weimar Germany.  The original Broadway production opened on November 20, 1966, at the Broadhurst Theatre in New York City and became a box office hit that ran for 1,166 performances.  The production won eight Tony Awards and inspired numerous subsequent productions around the world as well as the 1972 film of the same name.  Cabaret (musical) - Wikipedia  Thank you, Muse reader!   

March 1, 2025  MARIETTA, Ohio—A southeast Ohio city was named one of HGTV's most charming small towns in America.  Sitting along the convergence of the Ohio and Muskingum Rivers, HGTV says Marietta has become a thriving town.  Marietta is a two-hour drive away from Columbus and has a population of about 13,000.  HGTV says the town revitalized its historical downtown area to boast its art galleries, music hall, museums and unique shops.  Marietta, established in 1788, is the oldest city in Ohio and the first permanent settlement in the Northwest Territory.  https://www.wtol.com/article/news/local/ohio/marietta-ohio-hgtv-charming-town-list/530-b50cc93d-f63c-49d9-a6ed-00a98524d27f    

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  March 10, 2025

In its original sense, a shaggy-dog story or yarn is an extremely long-winded anecdote characterized by extensive narration of typically irrelevant incidents and terminated by an anticlimax.  In other words, it is a long story that is intended to be amusing and that has an intentionally silly or meaningless ending.  Shaggy-dog stories play upon the audience's preconceptions of joke-telling.  The audience listens to the story with certain expectations, which are either simply not met or met in some entirely unexpected manner.  A lengthy shaggy-dog story derives its humour from the fact that the joke-teller held the attention of the listeners for a long time (such jokes can take five minutes or more to tell) for no reason at all, as the long-awaited resolution is essentially meaningless, with the joke as a whole playing upon humans' search for meaning.  The nature of their delivery is reflected in the English idiom spin a yarn, by way of analogy with the production of yarn.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaggy_dog_story   

Short shaggy dog stories

A tall, weather-worn cowboy walked into a saloon and ordered a beer.  The regulars quietly observed the drifter through half-closed eyelids.  No one spoke, but they all noticed that the stranger's hat was made of brown wrapping paper. Less obvious was the fact that his shirt and vest were also made of paper.  As were his chaps, pants and even his boots, including the paper spurs.  Truth be told, even the saddle, blanket and bridle on his horse were made entirely of paper.  The sheriff walks in and of course he arrests him immediately--for rustling.   

A king carried environmentalism too far when he prohibited hunting of any kind. Soon the realm was overrun with lions and tigers and bears.  "Oh My!" shouted the people.  They revolted and threw the king out of the country.  It was the first time the reign was called because of the game.   

Find more short shaggies at http://www.macscouter.com/stories/ShaggyShorts.asp 

March 4 2025  Never-before-seen short stories by Harper Lee will be published later this year, it has been announced.  Eight short stories written before the author started the novel that would become To Kill a Mockingbird were found in Lee’s New York City apartment after she died in 2016.  They will be published in a collection titled The Land of Sweet Forever, alongside eight previously published non-fiction pieces by Lee, and an introduction by Casey Cep, author of Furious Hours:  Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee.  Dr Edwin Conner, Lee’s nephew, said he and his family are “delighted that these essays, and especially the short stories, which we knew existed but were only recently discovered, have been found and are being published.  She was not just our beloved aunt, but a great American writer, and we can never know too much about how she came to that pinnacle.”  The Land of Sweet Forever “broadens our understanding of Lee’s remarkable talent” and “will prove an invaluable resource for anyone interested in Lee’s development as a writer”, according to the book’s UK publisher Hutchinson Heinemann, an imprint of Penguin Random House.  The stories contain Lee’s “signature wit, that splash of darkness and those heartwarming characters for which she is beloved,” said Ailah Ahmed, Hutchinson Heinemann publishing director.  “The pieces take us from Alabama to less familiar territory for Lee in Manhattan.”  Just two books by Lee were published in her lifetime, 1961 Pulitzer Prize winner To Kill a Mockingbird, and Go Set a Watchman, which began life as an earlier draft of Mockingbird.  There was controversy when that was published in 2015, with some raising questions about the extent of Lee’s involvement in the decision.  At the time the author was 88 years old and profoundly deaf and blind.  Born in 1926 in Monroeville, Alabama, Lee was 34 years old when To Kill a Mockingbird, loosely based on observations of her family and neighbours in Monroeville was published.  Since then, it has been translated into more than 40 languages and more than 46m copies have been sold worldwide.  Lee won numerous awards throughout her lifetime, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom.  She died on February 19, 2016.   https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/mar/04/unseen-harper-lee-stories-to-kill-a-mockingbird-the-land-of-sweet-forever    

This year’s Turing Award, an honor often dubbed the “Nobel Prize of Computing,” goes to two A.I. researchers who laid the foundations for tech breakthroughs like OpenAI’s GPT.  Andrew Barto, a researcher at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Richard Sutton, a professor at Canada’s University of Alberta, will share the $1 million prize, as announced March 5, 2025.  Barto and Sutton won this year’s award for their contributions to the field of reinforcement learning, a process used to improve the behavior of machines.  “Their work has been a lynchpin of progress in A.I. over the last several decades,” said Jeff Dean, Google’s chief scientist, in a statement.  “The tools they developed remain a central pillar of the A.I. boom and have rendered major advances, attracted legions of young researchers, and driven billions of dollars in investments.”  Barto and Sutton won this year’s award for their contributions to the field of reinforcement learning, a process used to improve the behavior of machines. “Their work has been a lynchpin of progress in A.I. over the last several decades,” said Jeff Dean, Google’s chief scientist, in a statement.  “The tools they developed remain a central pillar of the A.I. boom and have rendered major advances, attracted legions of young researchers, and driven billions of dollars in investments.”  The duo began working together in 1978 at UMass Amherst, where Barto served as Sutton’s Ph.D. and postdoctoral advisor.  In the following years, they collaborated on numerous papers that shaped key algorithms and techniques of reinforcement learning and published the 1998 textbook Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction, which has been cited more than 75,000 times and remains the field’s standard reference.  https://observer.com/2025/03/andrew-barto-richard-sutton-win-turing-award/    

March 7 is the eve of International Women’s Day, which is commemorated by the United Nations to recognize women’s achievements and to promote their rights and participation in economic and political spheres.  March 8 was declared a holiday in Russia in 1917 after a huge demonstration on that date led by the Russian feminist and politician Alexandra Kollontai culminated in the Russian Revolution and to women gaining the right to vote.  Wikipedia   

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2916  March 7, 2025 

The Załuski Library was established in Warsaw in 1747 by Józef Andrzej Załuski and his brother, Andrzej Stanisław Załuski, both Roman Catholic bishops, was a public library nationalized and renamed upon its founders' death into the Załuski Library of the Commonwealth which existed until the final demise of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the Third Partition of Poland in 1795.  The library was the first Polish public library, the largest library in Poland, and one of the earliest public libraries in Europe.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Za%C5%82uski_Library   

rhyme or reason (uncountable)  noun   (idiomatic, chiefly in the negative)  Logic; common sense.  Almost always used in a negative form, particularly with no and, adverbially, without.  May also occur as rhyme nor reason, e.g. after neither. 

Alternative form  rhyme nor reason

Calque of Middle French n'y avoir ryme ne raison (Eustache Deschamps), attributed to the poet Edmund Spenser in a conversation with Queen Elizabeth I.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/rhyme_or_reason    

Microsoft Copilot is a generative artificial intelligence chatbot developed by Microsoft.  Based on the GPT-4 series of large language models, it was launched in 2023 as Microsoft's primary replacement for the discontinued Cortana.  The service was introduced in February 2023 under the name Bing Chat, as a built-in feature for Microsoft Bing and Microsoft Edge. Over the course of 2023, Microsoft began to unify the Copilot branding across its various chatbot products, cementing the "copilot" analogy.  At its Build 2023 conference, Microsoft announced its plans to integrate Copilot into Windows 11, allowing users to access it directly through the taskbar.  In January 2024, a dedicated Copilot key was announced for Windows keyboards.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Copilot   

In 1883, U.S. and Canadian railroads adopted a four-zone system to govern their operations and reduce the confusion resulting from some 100 conflicting locally established “sun times” observed in terminals across the country.  States and municipalities then adopted one of the four zones, which were the eastern, central, mountain, and Pacific Time zones.  Local decisions on which time zone to adopt were usually influenced by the time used by the railroads.  Federal oversight of time zones began in 1918 with the enactment of the Standard Time Act, which vested the Interstate Commerce Commission with the responsibility for establishing boundaries between the standard time zones in the continental United States.  This responsibility was transferred from the Interstate Commerce Commission to DOT when Congress created DOT in 1966.  Today, the Uniform Time Act of 1966 (15 U.S.C. §§ 260-64) establishes a system of uniform Daylight Saving Time throughout the Nation and its possessions, and provides that either Congress or the Secretary of Transportation can change a time-zone boundary.  The U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) oversees the Nation's time zones.  The oversight of time zones was assigned to DOT because time standards are important for many modes of transportation.  DOT regulations at 49 CFR part 71 contain the official listing of the Nation's time zones.  DOT also oversees the Nation's uniform observance of Daylight Saving Time; however, DOT does not have the power to repeal or change Daylight Saving Time.  Nor does DOT have any role to play in a State's determination whether to observe Daylight Saving Time.  If a State chooses to observe Daylight Saving Time, it must begin and end on federally mandated dates.  Under the Uniform Time Act, States may choose to exempt themselves from observing Daylight Saving Time by State law.  States do not have the authority to choose to be on permanent Daylight Saving Time.  https://www.transportation.gov/regulations/time-act    

coddle (also Dublin coddle, Irish coddle) noun  an Irish dish made with sausages, bacon, sliced potatoes, and sliced onions cooked slowly together in liquid

coddle verb  to protect someone or something too much 

coddle verb  to cook food, especially eggs, in water just below boiling temperature  https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/coddle     

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2915  March 5, 2025

Fingal's Cave is a sea cave on the uninhabited island of Staffa, in the Inner Hebrides of Scotland, known for its natural acoustics.  The National Trust for Scotland owns the cave as part of a national nature reserve.  It became known as Fingal's Cave after the eponymous hero of an epic poem by 18th-century Scots poet-historian James Macpherson.  Fingal's Cave is formed entirely from hexagonally jointed basalt columns within a Paleocene lava flow and is similar in structure to both the Giant's Causeway in Northern Ireland and Ulva.  In these locations, cooling on the upper and lower surfaces of the solidified lava resulted in contraction and fracturing, starting in a blocky tetragonal pattern and transitioning to a regular hexagonal fracture pattern with fractures perpendicular to the cooling surfaces.   As cooling continued these cracks gradually extended toward the centre of the flow, forming the long hexagonal columns we see in the wave-eroded cross-section today.  Similar hexagonal fracture patterns are found in desiccation cracks in mud where contraction is due to loss of water instead of cooling.   Romantic composer Felix Mendelssohn visited in 1829 and wrote an overture, The Hebrides, Op. 26, (also known as Fingal's Cave Overture), and was said to be inspired by the weird echoes in the cave.  Mendelssohn's overture popularized the cave as a tourist destination.   Other famous 19th-century visitors included author Jules Verne, who used it in his book Le Rayon Vert (The Green Ray), and mentions it in the novels Journey to the Center of the Earth and The Mysterious Island.  Poets William Wordsworth, John Keats, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Romantic artist J. M. W. Turner, who painted Staffa, Fingal's Cave in 1832 also made the trip.  In 1860 the German novelist Theodor Fontane visited the cave and described it in his travel report Jenseit des Tweed (Beyond the Tweed, Pictures and Letters from Scotland), Queen Victoria also made the trip.  The 19th century Austro-Hungarian guitarist and composer Johann Kaspar Mertz included a piece entitled Fingals-Höhle in his set of character pieces for guitar Bardenklänge.  The playwright August Strindberg also set scenes from his play A Dream Play in a place called "Fingal's Grotta".  Scots novelist Sir Walter Scott described Fingal's Cave as "one of the most extraordinary places I ever beheld.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fingal%27s_Cave    

“Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.”  This line is spoken by Marcellus in Act I, Scene 4, as he and Horatio debate whether or not to follow Shakespeare's Hamlet and the ghost into the dark night.  The line refers both to the idea that the ghost is an ominous omen for Denmark and to the larger theme of the connection between the moral legitimacy of a ruler and the health of the state as a whole.  The ghost is a visible symptom of the rottenness of Denmark created by Claudius’s crime.  Find characters as Marcellus and Claudius and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (may be played by two individual actors on stage, but given that they always appear together, they essentially function as a single character).  Childhood friends of Hamlet, Claudius and Gertrude summon them to Elsinore with the hope that they can determine why their son is acting strangely.  While they may have once been genuine friends with Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s behavior throughout the play suggests that they care more about themselves than anyone else.  The pair first arrives at the castle in Act 2, Scene 2, and in addition to emphasizing what great friends they are to Hamlet, Claudius and Gertrude offer them a substantial reward for spying on their son.  The fact that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are willing to betray Hamlet’s trust in exchange for compliments and a bribe highlights their questionable moral code.  Link to characters at https://www.sparknotes.com/shakespeare/hamlet/character/rosencrantz-and-guildenstern/   

• An idiom is an expression whose meaning is not predictable from its constituent elements (as in “kick the bucket”);
• A proverb is a popular saying, usually of an unknown or ancient origin (such as, “a friend in need is a friend indeed”);
• An axiom is a self-evident truth that requires no proof (for example, “blood is thicker than water”)  https://www.prdaily.com/35-idioms-axioms-and-proverbs-to-chew-on/    

Founded in 1877, Fleet Library at Rhode Island School of Design is one of the country's oldest independent art college libraries.  Its circulating collection of more than 150,000 volumes offers unusual depth and richness in the areas of art, architecture, design and photography.  The collection provides strong historical and contemporary perspectives and specialized materials in landscape architecture, ceramics, textiles and jewelry to support upper-level research.  RISD’s specialized library is also noted for its artist’s books collection, rare books, some 400 periodical subscriptions and collection of outstanding visual resources.  https://www.jstor.org/site/risd/  

quockerwodger noun

Synonym of jumping jack (“a toy figure of a person with jointed limbs that can be made to appear to dance or jump by pulling an attached string”) (figurative, slang) A person whose actions are controlled by someone else; a puppet

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/quockerwodger#English    

http://librariansuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2914  February 28, 2025