Dominique Ansel's At-Home Cronut--The Pastry That Changed the World   Find the At-Home Cronut recipe from his new cookbook, "Dominique Ansel: The Secret Recipes." at  http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/recipe/home-cronut-recipe-dominique-ansel-25948902

Ob is a prefix meaning “toward,” “to,” “on,” “over,” “against,” originally occurring in loanwords from Latin, but now used also, with the sense of“reversely,” “inversely,” to form Neo-Latin and English scientific terms:  object; obligate; oblanceolate.  http://www.dictionary.com/browse/ob-

See also http://people.sc.fsu.edu/~jburkardt/fun/wordplay/obnoxious.html

obverse  noun  1.  the side of a coin, medal, flag, etc., that bears the principal design (opposed to reverse).

2.  the front or principal surface of anything.  3.  a counterpart.  4.  Logic.  a proposition obtained from another by obversion.  adjective  5.  facing the observer.

6.  corresponding to something else as a counterpart.  7.  having the base narrower than the top, as a leaf.  http://www.dictionary.com/browse/obverse

ROSS and AI:  The Next Step in Legal Tech?; Can AI tools like ROSS' legal research platform revolutionize law for practitioners and consumers? Law Technology News (Online) April 14, 2016    Artificial intelligence as a term has lent itself to a variety of definitions, most hyperbolic and many missing the point.  "Nowadays that term gets thrown around a lot," noted Andrew Arruda, CEO and cofounder of ROSS Intelligence.  "Today, I want to get ourselves situated and reveal what it really is."  The venue for this revelation was "Watson, Esq.:  Will Your Next Lawyer Be a Machine?", a Vanderbilt Law event covering how artificial intelligence impacts the legal world both now and in the future.  In its early phases of impact, AI is already altering traditional approaches to law, and the pace is set to increase.  Currently, Arruda explained, we can see AI in machine learning, as machines are now "able to draw connections;" in speech, as emergent with simple platforms like SIRI, has paved the way for "bigger strides" as offered by Google and Microsoft's Cortana; in vision, as computers, albeit imperfectly, can identify things and individuals resent in an image; and in language, or more precisely, "training computers to speak the same language we do."  Thank you, Muse reader!

The Librarian Who Saved Timbuktu’s Cultural Treasures From al Qaeda by Joshua Hammer   For custodians of the ancient heritage of the Middle East and North Africa, the recent rise of Islamist extremist groups has posed a dire challenge.  Since its seizure of the historic Iraqi city of Mosul in early 2014, Islamic State has pillaged and demolished mosques, shrines, churches and other sacred sites across the region.  The group continues to launch “cultural cleansing” operations from Tikrit to Tripoli.  In this grim procession, there have been occasional victories for culture over extremism, like the recapture last month of the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra, which may now be restored to something of its previous glory.  A less familiar case of cultural rescue features an unlikely hero:  a 51-year-old book collector and librarian named Abdel Kader Haidarain the fabled city of Timbuktu, in the West African country of Mali.  The story begins in April 2012, when Mr. Haidara returned home from a business trip to learn that the weak Malian army had collapsed and that nearly 1,000 Islamist fighters from one of al Qaeda’s African affiliates, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, had occupied his city.  He encountered looters, gunfire and black flags flying from government buildings, and he feared that the city’s dozens of libraries and repositories—home to hundreds of thousands of rare Arabic manuscripts—would be pillaged.  The prizes in Mr. Haidara’s own private collection, housed in his Mamma Haidara Commemorative Library, include a tiny, irregularly shaped Quran from the 12th century, written on parchment made from the dried skin of a fish and glittering with illuminated blue Arabic letters and droplets of gold.  His collection also boasts many secular volumes: manuscripts about astronomy, poetry, mathematics, occult sciences and medicine, such as a 254-page volume on surgery and elixirs derived from birds, lizards and plants, written in Timbuktu in 1684.  “Many of the manuscripts show that Islam is a religion of tolerance,” he told me.  Read more at http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-librarian-who-saved-timbuktus-cultural-treasures-from-al-qaeda-1460729998?mod=itp&mod=djemITP_h

Brooklyn Baseball Cantata (1949)   George Kleinsinger’s comic cantata is a stirring depiction of team and civic pride as well as a rousing, nail-biting account of the last half of the ninth inning with the bases loaded, two out, and the home team down 7-4.  Cities and places mentioned in the text can be easily replaced with your local names.  http://www.musicsalesclassical.com/composer/work/29661  I was reminded of this piece when watching Jackie Robinson, a two-part, four-hour  documentary on PBS.  Our high school performed the Brooklyn Baseball Cantata.

If you missed it, you can watch Ken Burns'Jackie Robinson documentary that aired on PBS on April 11 and 12, 2016.  Titled simply "Jackie Robinson," the film--co-directed and produced by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns and David McMahon--memorializes the life of the legend, who was the first African American player in Major League Baseball.  In addition to family members Rachel, Sharon and David Robinson, "Jackie Robinson" features interviews with President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama; former Dodgers teammates Don Newcombe, Carl Erskine and Ralph Branca; writers Howard Bryant and Gerald Early; Harry Belafonte; Tom Brokaw; and Carly Simon.  Jamie Foxx is the voice of Jackie Robinson, reading excerpts from his newspaper columns, personal letters and autobiographies.  Tambay A. Obenson  http://blogs.indiewire.com/shadowandact/if-you-missed-it-watch-ken-burns-4-hour-comprehensive-documentary-on-life-of-jackie-robinson-now-20160415

Casey at the Bat, A Baseball Cantata (1976)   Notes from composer William Schuman:  Casey at the Bat was completed in January 1976 and is a concert version of The Mighty Casey, my Baseball Opera, first produced in May of 1953.  It was Leonard Bernstein who suggested to me that the Casey music should also be made available as a cantata which could be performed by symphony orchestras with chorus and soloists.  As I was planning music for the Bicentennial, my original enthusiasm for the Casey legend was rekindled, and I felt a strong urge to issue the alternate version.  I agree wholeheartedly with Jacques Barzum’s penetrating observations on baseball in his book, God’s Country and Mine:  “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball . . .  The wonderful purging of the passions that we all experience in the fall of ’51, the despair groaned out over the fate of the Dodgers, from whom the League pennant was snatched at the last minute, gives us some idea of what Greek tragedy was like. Baseball is Greek in being national, heroic, and broken up in the rivalries of city-states . . . Americans understand baseball, the true realm of clear ideas.”  In transferring Casey at the Bat from the stage to the concert hall many changes were made, some of them major.  For example, the entire work had to be expanded for a full symphony orchestra and orchestrated for some hundred players to replace the original pit band of some 20-25 players.  New music had to be composed for the soprano and baritone as well as a new ending for the chorus and orchestra.  http://www.musicsalesclassical.com/composer/work/32743

The American Philatelic Research Library (APRL) has one of the world's largest and most accessible collections of philatelic literature.  Its nearly three miles of shelving contain more than 21,000 book titles and 5,700 journal titles.  Researchers are welcome to visit the library at the American Philatelic Center in Bellefonte, Pennslvania.  For those who cannot travel to Bellefonte, the APRL offers photocopy and scanning services as well as reference assistance by phone and e-mail.   APS and APRL members may borrow books directly by mail and non-members may borrow books through interlibrary loan.  The APRL publishes a quarterly journal, the Philatelic Literature Review.  This periodical contains indexes and bibliographies, reviews of current philatelic literature, publications in progress, news from the APRL, and “The Clearinghouse,” a forum for subscribers to list literature they want to buy or sell.  http://stamps.org/about-the-library

April 15, 2016  One of two long-missing “Inverted Jenny” stamps from a block of four stolen 61 years ago from an exhibit by New York City arts patron Ethel B. McCoy has been recovered, the American Philatelic Research Library (APRL) announced yesterday.  The world’s most famous and coveted postage stamp error is the United States 1918 red-and-blue 24¢ Curtiss Jenny airmail stamp mistakenly printed with an inverted center that makes it appear the biplane is flying upside down.  The Scott catalog, the stamp hobby’s influential reference book, lists it as No. C3a and indicates a 2016 value of $350,000.  The McCoy Inverted Jenny block was stolen in 1955 and subsequently broken apart.  Two of the four stamps were recovered in the 1970s and 1980s and returned to the APRL, to which McCoy donated all four stamps nearly 40 years ago.  The third stolen stamp suddenly surfaced April 1, 2016  when it was consigned for sale to the Spink auction firm in New York.  It was certified as authentic by the Philatelic Foundation in Manhattan.  Details of its whereabouts since the theft were not immediately known.  Read more and see pictures at http://stamps.org/NewsItemDetail.aspx?id=132

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1457  April 18, 2016  On this date in 1923, Yankee Stadium, "The House that Ruth Built", opened.  On this date in 1924, Simon & Schuster published the first crossword puzzle book.