The Free Software Foundation (FSF) on March 19, 2016 announced the winners of the 2015 Free Software Awards.  The Award for Projects of Social Benefit is presented to a project or team responsible for applying free software, or the ideas of the free software movement, in a project that intentionally and significantly benefits society in other aspects of life.  This award stresses the use of free software in the service of humanity.  This year, it was given to the Library Freedom Project, a partnership among librarians, technologists, attorneys, and privacy advocates which aims to make real the promise of intellectual freedom in libraries.  By teaching librarians about surveillance threats, privacy rights and responsibilities, and digital tools to stop surveillance, the project hopes to create a privacy-centric paradigm shift in libraries and the local communities they serve.  Notably, the project helps libraries launch Tor exit nodes.  Project founders Alison Macrina and chief technology wizard Nima Fatemi accepted the award.  The Award for the Advancement of Free Software is given annually to an individual who has made a great contribution to the progress and development of free software, through activities that accord with the spirit of free software.  This year, it was presented to Werner Koch, the founder and driving force behind GnuPG. GnuPG is the defacto tool for encrypted communication. Society needs more than ever to advance free encryption technology.  Werner Koch was unable to attend, so the award was accepted on his behalf by David Shaw, a GnuPG contributor since 2002.  http://www.fsf.org/news/library-freedom-project-and-werner-koch-are-2015-free-software-awards-winners

What is Opte about?  This project was originally created to generate a picture (or map) of the Internet.  Since the Internet is basically a vast constellation of networks that somehow interconnect to provide the relatively seamless communication of data, it seemed logical one could draw lines from one point to another.  The visualization is a collection of programs that collectively output an image of every relationship of every network on the Internet.  The result was an award-winning representation of the Internet that now hangs in the Museum of Modern Art in NYC.  The idea turned into a 10+ year labor of love under the moniker of The Opte Project.  The map has been used an icon of what the Internet looks like in hundreds of books, in movies, museums, office buildings, educational discussions, and countless publications.  http://www.bespacific.com/47752-2/  See also http://www.opte.org/the-internet/  Opte (pronounced op-tee) comes from the Latin word opti meaning optical.

The 20 Most Beautiful Libraries on Film and TV  http://flavorwire.com/392753/the-20-most-beautiful-libraries-on-film-and-tv  16 GREAT LIBRARY SCENES IN FILM

http://bookriot.com/2013/01/23/great-library-scenes-in-film/  MOVIE LIBRARIANS: NOTABLE LIBRARIANS & LIBRARIES IN FILMS  http://movielibrarians.com/

Q.  What do Eek, Embarrass, Okay, Ordinary, and Peculiar have in common?  A.  All are names of towns in the U.S.  http://www.infoplease.com/spot/wackytowns.html

The Rock of Gibraltar (Spanish and Llanito: Peñón de Gibraltar, sometimes called by its original Latin name, Calpe,) is a monolithic limestone promontory located in the British overseas territory of Gibraltar, off the southwestern tip of Europe on the Iberian Peninsula.  It is 426 m (1,398 ft) high.  The Rock is Crown property of the United Kingdom, and borders Spain.  Most of the Rock's upper area is covered by a nature reserve, which is home to around 300 Barbary macaques. These macaques, as well as a labyrinthine network of tunnels, attract a large number of tourists each year.  The Rock of Gibraltar was one of the Pillars of Hercules and was known to the Romans as Mons Calpe, the other pillar being Mons Abyla or Jebel Musa on the African side of the Strait.  In ancient times, the two points marked the limit to the known world, a myth originally fostered by the Greeks and the Phoenicians.  Gibraltar is surrounded by the Mediterranean Sea and has no contact with the Atlantic Ocean.  Read more and see graphics at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_of_Gibraltar

Sulfites are a naturally occurring class of compounds and they’re everywhere:  most living organisms, including humans, produce sulfites.  Our bodies produce about 1,000 mg of sulfites each day—a level that’s 100 times higher than the amount in your average glass of red wine.  In our bodies, sulfites act as antioxidants—scavenging the free radicals that damage cells.  They serve a similar function in food and wine, preventing the chemical reactions that cause off flavors to develop.  And the fact is, even if a winemaker doesn’t add sulfites to a wine, some sulfites are created naturally during the winemaking process.  So why aren’t sulfites allowed in certified organic wines?  “When the USDA was developing standards for certified organic wine, a few winemakers who were already making wines without adding sulfites lobbied to keep added sulfites out of certified organic wine,” says Glenn McGourty, M.S., a University of California Cooperative Extension winegrowing and plant science advisor.  Their argument was that organic foods shouldn’t contain added preservatives.  And they won.  While some winemakers were creating wines specifically for the less than 1 percent of the U.S. population with sulfite allergies, others ­believe adding sulfites hides the wine’s delicate flavors and its terroir—the authenticity and sense of place you can taste in a wine.  “Adding sulfites to wine can mask subtle flavors that would’ve otherwise added to the natural bouquet of the wine,” says Paul Frey of ­certified organic Frey Winery in Mendocino, California.  Corison agrees that using too many sulfites can negatively affect a wine’s flavor.  But she, like many other winemakers, argues that it’s impossible to make premium wines without using any added sulfites.  (In fact only about 1 percent of wine sold worldwide is certified organic.)  Sulfites are added to suppress wild yeasts and bacteria and minimize byproducts of chemical reactions, all things that can lead to off flavors.  Corison uses only as many sulfites as she needs and as a result, her wines have only 50 parts per million of total sulfites at bottling (the upper limit is 350 ppm), 20 of which are produced naturally by the yeast (most wines contain 25 to 150 ppm).  Just adding this small amount of sulfites helps to preserve the fruity character of Corison’s wines.  Sulfites also slow the oxidation process, helping to preserve wine’s flavor as it ages.  Organic wines with no added sulfites age unpredictably, notes McGourty.  “The downside to not using sulfites is that those wines are notoriously unstable over time.”  http://www.eatingwell.com/healthy_cooking/wine_beer_spirits_guide/the_hype_about_sulfites

In the desert of northwest Australia, about 10 miles east of the small mining town of Newman, lies a natural wonder.  If you fly overhead, you’ll see vast carpets of green spinifex grass, pockmarked by barren red circles, as if some deity had repeatedly stubbed out a cosmic cigar on the parched landscape.  These disks of bare soil are called “fairy circles,” and they’re not unique to Australia—they also exist 6,000 miles away in Namibia.  There, the circles number in the millions, and extend over some 1,500 miles of desert.  They comprise different grasses but their patterns are the same:  low-lying vegetation freckled by circles of empty soil.  They almost seem alive, growing and shrinking with a lifespan of 30 to 60 years.  Ed Yong  Read much more and see pictures at http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/03/mysterious-fairy-circles-australia-namibia/473625/

Tesco, Britain's biggest retailer, pledged on March 11, 2016 to give any left-over food from its stores to charity so that by the end of 2017 nothing is thrown away.  "We believe no food that could be eaten should be wasted--that's why we have committed that no surplus food should go to waste from our stores," said Tesco Chief Executive Dave Lewis, who is trying to improve its image after an accounting scandal.  Some 55,400 tonnes of food were thrown away at Tesco stores and distribution centres in Britain last year, of which around 30,000 tonnes could otherwise have been eaten, equivalent to around 70 million meals, it said.  James Davey  http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-tesco-food-waste-idUKKCN0WD22N

Electoral politics are, in the best ways and also in the worst, reality shows.  They are heavily structured.  They thrive on “competition” that’s more accurately framed as “Darwinian struggles for survival.”  Megan Garber  http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/03/americas-next-top-president/474936/

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1445  March 23, 2016  On this date in 1792, Joseph Haydn added a startling loud chord to the generally soft second movement of Symphony No. 94 in G Major at its London premiere.  The "surprise" was retained in later performances.  http://www.britannica.com/topic/Surprise-Symphony  On this date in 1806, Lewis and Clark departed from Oregon--Clark recorded that ". . . we loaded our canoes and at 1 P.M. left Fort Clatsop on our homeward bound journey.  At this place we had wintered and remained from the 7th of December 1805 to this day and have lived as well as we had any right to expect, and we can say that we were never one day without 3 meals of some kind either pore Elk meat or roots . . . "  Drouillard and a party of hunters were sent out ahead, and the two pirogues and three canoes began the return voyage up the Columbia River. http://lewisandclarktrail.com/section2/ndcities/timeline1805.htm