Sweating in the Stacks:  University library offers exercise bikes for student use by Christopher Shaffer   In February, 2016, Troy (Ala.) University Dean of Library Services Christopher Shaffer brought fitness to the ­libraries when he made available six exercise bikes for student use.  The endeavor made national headlines.  Here, Shaffer explains his motivations, the bikes’ reception, and plans for the future.  Troy University’s motto is “Educate the mind to think, the heart to feel, and the body to act.”  I was thinking of those words as well as the American Library Association’s Libraries Transform campaign when I came across an article on exercise bikes that featured tables for laptops from a company called FitDesk.  The bikes were reasonably priced at $299 each, so I ordered three for our library in Troy and three for our extension campus library in Dothan, Alabama.  We placed the Troy library bikes in a large space that had been previously used as the archives processing room.  At Dothan, the bikes are in a combination computer room–group study area, but they are being moved to a larger space that is currently being converted from an office into a student space.  We added the hybrid exercise-study equipment to our libraries for a variety of reasons.  To begin with, it just seemed like a cool idea.  There were deeper motivations, though.  There were health reasons as well.  Obesity is a severe problem in the United States, and Alabama has one of the highest rates (33.5%) in the nation. The cause is not just our diets but the fact that technology has made us sedentary creatures. Students and faculty tend to spend the bulk of their day in front of a computer.  We cannot alter that fact, but we can alter what they do while looking at the monitor.  We also wanted to change how academic libraries are perceived.  I want students to view our libraries as places where they want to be.  I like the idea of them coming in, checking out a video for pleasure, and watching it on their computer while they exercise for an hour.  If they enjoy being at the library for reasons other than academics, maybe they will be more comfortable visiting the library—and approaching librarians—in the future.  The response from students, faculty, and others has been overwhelmingly positive.  https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/2016/05/02/sweating-in-stacks/

FitDesk Bike Desks have also been installed at universities including Tulane, Clemson and Penn State Worthington Scranton, according to FitDesk co-founder Ryan Moore, who started the company from his garage in 2010.  http://college.usatoday.com/2016/03/25/students-sweat-it-out-and-study-on-library-exercise-bikes/

Lorn and forlorn are synonyms that can both mean "desolate" or "forsaken." The similarity in form and meaning of the two words is hardly a coincidence.  Lorn comes down to us from loren, the Middle English past participle of the verb lesen ("to lose"), itself a descendent of the Old English lēosan.  Similarly, forlorn comes from the Middle English forloren, a descendent of Old English verb forlēosan, which also means "to lose."  The "for-" in forlorn is a no longer productive prefix meaning, among other things, "completely," "excessively," or "to exhaustion."  Nowadays, forlorn is considerably more common than "lorn."  "Lorn" does, however, appear as the second element in the compound lovelorn ("bereft of love or of a lover").  http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lorn

"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", commonly known as "Prufrock", is a poem by American-British poet T. S. Eliot (1888–1965).  Eliot began writing "Prufrock" in February 1910, and it was first published in the June 1915 issue of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse at the instigation of Ezra Pound (1885–1972).  It was later printed as part of a twelve-poem pamphlet (or chapbook) titled Prufrock and Other Observations in 1917.  The poem's structure was heavily influenced by Eliot's extensive reading of Dante Alighieri and makes several references to the Bible and other literary works—including William Shakespeare's plays Henry IV Part II, Twelfth Night, and Hamlet, the poetry of seventeenth-century metaphysical poet John Donne, and the nineteenth-century French Symbolists.  American composer John Craton set the entire poem to music for tenor and strings in a six-movement work of the same title (2004).  Read more, including references in popular culture, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Love_Song_of_J._Alfred_Prufrock   Find The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock at http://www.bartleby.com/198/1.html

ARCHAIC WORDS  despect  verb  To hold in contempt, to despise, to look down on, to scorn  welkin  ‎noun  The sky, the upper air; the heavens  https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Main_Page

If the purpose of art is to show the mystery and wonder of existence, nothing in our century has done that more suggestively and grandly than the startling new images of nature that science is unveiling almost every day.  Astronomy is not the only scientific discipline uncovering these marvels.  The eerie underwater worlds of “black smokers”--volcanic vents swarming with strange life--and close video encounters with giant squid and other deep sea creaturesreveal the secrets of life on Earth.  The Large Hadron Collider has even released images of subatomic particle collisions.  Science has become art as never before.  Ever since Galileo pointed a telescope at the moon and published his own drawings of what he saw in 1610, astronomy has been a science of enhanced looking. Great art should fill us with a new vision of the world--indeed, the cosmos--and our place in it.  The last professional artists who really did that were Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko.  Today’s greatest artists will never be famous as individuals or sell their work for millions--Nasa’s Hubble images are free to use--because the most beautiful images of today are being created by teams of scientists using advanced technology.  Jonathan Jones   See amazing pictures at https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/jun/12/why-most-important-art-today-made-in-space

American history has just been slightly rewritten.  Previously, experts had believed that the Native Americans of central Massachusetts spoke a single language, Loup (pronounced “Lou,” literally meaning “wolf”).  But new research shows http://www.sunypress.edu/p-6202-papers-of-the-forty-fourth-algo.aspx  that they spoke at least five different languages.  “It's like some European families where you can have three different languages at the dinner table,” says Ives Goddard, curator emeritus and senior linguist in the department of anthropology at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.  The lost languages were re-discovered by taking another look at several manuscripts written by French missionaries who were also working as linguists in the mid 1700s.  While working on her master's thesis at the University of Manitoba, Holly Gustafson compiled lists of verb forms found in one of the manuscripts. Goddard noticed some contradictions in the compilation.  “In the course of doing this [Gustafson] sometimes says there's this set of forms that is this way and another set of forms another way,” says Goddard.  The fact that there were three different words recorded for beaver was also suspicious.  “And I looked at this and thought there is too much difference. That made me think that there was more than one language involved,” he says.  Jackson Landers  http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/five-lost-languages-rediscovered-massachusetts-180959043/?no-ist

Rep. Mike Turner of Dayton won the first round in a battle between House Republicans and the Library of Congress.  The U.S. House approved a spending bill June 10, 2016 that included an amendment backed by Turner which would force the Library of Congress to continue using words such as “aliens” and “illegal aliens” when describing people who entered the United States illegally.  In March 2016, the library announced it would use the phrases “non-citizens” or “unauthorized immigration” to describe undocumented immigrants, who in the past have been referred to illegal aliens.  The library said the new words were less offensive and more accurate.  To House Republicans, the library’s decision was “political correctness” run amuck. So Turner sponsored an amendment that told the library to knock it off and return to “illegal aliens.”  http://www.daytondailynews.com/news/news/local-govt-politics/rep-turner-wants-library-of-congress-to-keep-sayin/nrdj4/  

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1484  June 15, 2016  On this date in 1776, Delaware voted to suspend government under the British Crown and separate officially from Pennsylvania.  On this date in 1919,   John Alcock and Arthur Brown completed the first nonstop transatlantic flight from St. John's, Newfoundland to Clifden, County Galway, Ireland.