Duff is a Bahamian cuisine dessert dish made with fruit (especially guava) in a dough.  Fruit is folded into the dough and boiled, then served with a sauce.  Ingredients include fruit, butter, sugar, eggs, nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves, flour, rum, pepper, and baking powder.  The dessert is often accompanied by switcha (a lemon, water and sugar mixture) or beer.  Duff is also an english (possibly slang) term for pudding.  Examples are Christmas duff, Plum duff and Suet duff.  In the 1901 short story by Henry Lawson, The Ghosts of Many Christmases, published in Children of the Bush, plum pudding is referred to both as pudding and duff:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duff_(dessert)

Metaknowledge, and essay by George Musser   Dražen Prelec, a behavioural economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), is working on a way to smarten up the hive mind.  One reason that crowds mess up, he notes, is the hegemony of common knowledge.  Even when people make independent judgments, they might be working off the same information.  When you average everyone’s judgments, information that is known to all gets counted repeatedly, once for each person, which gives it more significance than it deserves and drowns out diverse sources of knowledge.  In the end, the lowest common denominator dominates.  It’s a common scourge in social settings:  think of dinner conversations that consist of people repeating to one another the things they all read in The New York Times.  In many scientific disputes, too, the consensus viewpoint rests on a much slenderer base of knowledge than it might appear.  For instance, in the 1920s and ’30s, physicists intensely debated how to interpret quantum mechanics, and for decades thereafter textbooks recorded the dispute as a lopsided battle between Albert Einstein, fighting a lonely rearguard action against the new theory, and everyone else.  In fact, ‘everyone else’ was recycling the same arguments made by Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, while Einstein was backed up by Erwin Schrödinger.  What looked like one versus many was really two on two.  Very little fresh knowledge entered the discussion until the 1960s.  Even today, Bohr and Heisenberg’s view (the so-called Copenhagen interpretation) is considered the standard one, a privileged status it never deserved.  Read more at https://aeon.co/essays/a-mathematical-bs-detector-can-boost-the-wisdom-of-crowds

knar  noun  A knot or burl on a tree or in wood.  from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License   A knot or burl in a tree; a knurl, a gnarl.  from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English  Middle English knarre, probably from Old English *cnear or from Middle Dutch and Middle Low German knorre.  (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)  Middle English knar (14th century, original sense “a stone”), from which also knurl (diminutive suffix) and later gnarl (variant).  (Wiktionary)   https://www.wordnik.com/words/knar

From:  Keith Allen  Subject:  knar  This word also means rough or complex and difficult terrain.  Commonly used by mountain bikers:  “That was some knar (or gnar) terrain!”

From: Anthony Shaw  Subject:  Knar  My late wife was of Armenian descent and was thus given an Armenian name, Knar, which is an Armenian musical instrument, usually a harp.  She was tiny, therefore I called her Knarig, “little harp”.

Bob Morris (born 1950) is an American novelist who writes Caribbean themed mysteries.  He is also the author of several collections of nonfiction, including "Gut Check," "Short Road to Hell," "The Man with the Fish on His Foot," "All Over the Map," and "The Whole Shebang."  Morris is president of Story Farm, a custom publishing company that creates books, magazines and other publications for a wide variety of clients.  He is an adjunct professor at Rollins College and teaches courses in food writing and crime fiction.  Bob Morris is a fourth-generation Floridian who forsook the family farm—a fernery in Lake County—to pursue a career in journalism.  The route was indirect.  After failing two consecutive terms of organic chemistry, Morris decided he was not cut out to be a marine biologist and set out to travel around the world instead.  His travels took him to a farming commune in Israel where his responsibilities included shoveling out the daily deposits of 12,000 chickens and 12,000 turkeys.  After graduating from the University of Florida, Morris went on to work at a number of newspapers, including the Florida Keys Free Press, the Fort Myers News-Press, the Orlando Sentinel, and the New York Times Regional Newspaper Group.  Among his achievements—founding the annual Queen Kumquat Sashay, a parade in downtown Orlando founded in 1986 and discontinued in 1997.   Morris and his family spent two years in Santa Barbara, California, where he created and launched AQUA, an international travel magazine for watersports enthusiasts.  Upon returning to Florida in 1999, he was editor in chief of Caribbean Travel & Life magazine and Gulfshore Life magazine.  Now a freelance writer and editor, Morris continues to travel widely and contributes to a number of publications, including National Geographic Traveler, Bon Appetit, Islands, Robb Report, Latitudes and Men's Fitness.  These travels have inspired his recent series of mystery novels from St. Martin’s Press, each of which takes place on a different Caribbean island.  The first one, Bahamarama, was released in November 2004 and was a finalist for the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best First Mystery Novel and chosen by the Library Journal as one the year’s Top Five Mysteries.  Morris’s second novel, Jamaica Me Dead, was released in October 2005 and was a BookSense Pick by the American Booksellers Association. His third book, Bermuda Schwartz, a Florida Book Award bronze medal winner released in February 2007.  His fourth book in the series, A Deadly Silver Sea, published in late 2008 and his fifth book in the series, Baja Florida, in January 2010. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Morris_(author)

State Voter Identification Requirements: Analysis, Legal Issues, and Policy Considerations   About 60% of U.S. voters live in the 33 states that require a voter at a polling place to produce an identification document (ID) before casting a ballot.  Among those states, 20 permit voters without ID to cast a ballot through alternative means, such as signing an affidavit; 13 strictly enforce the ID requirement.  The other 17 states and the District of Columbia have a range of nondocument requirements instead.  Read 37-page report at http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R42806.pdf

Canada has a voter registration system that is worth looking at.  Voter registration is an option on your annual tax return, which is a cheap way to capture/update accurate voter data.  Every employer is required by law to give employees up to three consecutive hours off work (paid) to vote.  Not a “national holiday”, but it does get the message across that voting is important.   Malcolm Wynden

First but not the Last:  Women Who Ran for President, an online exhibit from the National Women's History Museum  https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/beta/u/0/exhibit/zAJim2pJexmPJw

Another word to denote a meal:  What about Brinner?  Breakfast for dinner.  My kids loved it!!!  Thank you, Muse reader.

Marni Nixon, a singer who ghost sang for leading actresses in films including "The King and I" and "West Side Story," died July 24, 2016.   She was 86.  Nixon, who was born Margaret Nixon McEathron Feb. 22, 1930, in Altadena, California, also acted in films and on TV and Broadway.  Her film credits include "The Sound of Music" and "I Think I Do."  She also appeared on TV's "Law and Order."  Her greatest fame, however, came after she dubbed the singing voices for Deborah Kerr in the Rodgers and Hammerstein film adaptation of "The King and I," for Natalie Wood in "West Side Story," and Audrey Hepburn in "My Fair Lady."  Many years would pass before Nixon could talk about her unsung film roles, as she explained in an interview.  "You always had to sign a contract that nothing would be revealed," Nixon said in an interview on the ABC's "Nightline" news program in 2007.  "Twentieth Century Fox, when I did 'The King and I,' threatened me.  "They said, if anybody ever knows that you did any part of the dubbing for Deborah Kerr, we'll see to it that you don't work in town again."  http://www.legacy.com/news/celebrity-deaths/notable-deaths/article/marni-nixon-1930-2016  See also http://www.playbill.com/article/marni-nixon-voice-of-my-fair-lady-on-screen-dead-at-86

Poem of the week: The Beautiful Librarians by Sean O’Brien  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/16/the-beautiful-librarians-by-sean-o-brien-poem-of-the-week?CMP=share_btn_link  Thank you, Muse reader!

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1503  July 27, 2016  On this date in 1940, the animated short A Wild Hare was released, introducing the character of Bugs Bunny.  On this date in 1949, the initial flight of the de Havilland Comet, the first jet-powered airliner, took place.  Quote of the Day  In any free society, the conflict between social conformity and individual liberty is permanent, unresolvable, and necessary. - Kathleen Norris, novelist and columnist (27 Jul 1880-1966)