SOME YEARS AGO, the science writer George Johnson was wrapping up work on his book “The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments” and looking for illustrations to accompany the text.  One chapter dealt with Isaac Newton’s demonstration that white light was made of many colors.  Johnson wanted to include a drawing of the experiment from Newton’s journal, in Newton’s own hand.  “Considering that the experiment was done in the 17th century, you might assume that it was in the public domain and I could use it,” Johnson told me.  And that’s what he assumed.  What he didn’t foresee was that the journal in which the drawing appears is owned by New College, at the University of Oxford., and that he would have to pay Oxford for the drawing.  The college told Johnson it would grant permission to use the drawing in return for a copy of Johnson’s book; plus a “facility fee” of £200—about $400 at the time.  Johnson already had a high-resolution copy of the drawing that he’d found on the web.  But his publisher, fearful of legal action, insisted that he pay New College.  In a series of email exchanges, Johnson bargained the New College bursar down to £150 and a promise of dinner when the bursar next visited the U.S.  (The bursar hasn’t yet collected on the meal.)  Johnson is not the only writer who’s been plagued by problems with fair use.  Last month, I wrote about two University of California professors who had to pay $1,844 to use three quotations from The New York Times in a book about public health.  Each was 90 to 100 words long.  The authors have launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise the money and call attention to what they think was unfair treatment a reasonable point, especially since The Times (like other news media) quotes from published sources all the time, and seldom has to pay for the privilege.  The legal term for such free quotation is “fair use.”  In the United States, copyright protection for authors and other creators comes with the explicit understanding that others have “the right to use copyrighted material without permissions or payment under some circumstances—especially when the cultural or social benefits or the use are predominant.”  That seems straightforward enough.  But it has puzzled and worried journalists for decades.  Not everyone agrees that fair use is complicated.  I asked Peter B. Hirtle, an archivist at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard, and a former intellectual property officer at Cornell, how he made decisions about what constitutes fair use.  “That’s really easy,” said, “You can use as much info as you need in order to tell a story, but no more than that.  It might be 10 words, it might be 50 words, it might be longer.”  But to many science writers and other journalists, it doesn’t seem nearly that easy.  That’s especially true for podcasters, who are concerned about how copyright applies to that relatively new medium.  The trouble is that questions about fair use arise on a case-by-case basis.  There is no scale by which to measure it.  You find out only when a copyright holder sues you for unfair use, and a court makes a ruling (or the case is settled out of court).  Paul Raeburn  http://undark.org/article/fair-use-become-unfair/

Panhandle appears to have originated as a reference to part of Virginia, but it became established in print during the 1880s to describe the Texas panhandle (often capitalized Panhandle).  There’s at least one Texas reference back to 1870, but the term was not exclusive to that state:  an Indiana legal dispute dating to 1877 involved the Panhandle and Junction railroad, and there’s an Alaska panhandle source from 1896.  Our friends at Oxford English Dictionary  date panhandler as slang for beggar to 1893.  The Inland and American Printer and Lithographer, Volume 23 from April, 1899, includes this comment in an anecdote describing a tramp (itinerant) printer:  Technically, he was what is called a panhandler; that is, his arm was the handle and his hat was the pan.  This isn’t definitive, but it offers believable clarification of the metaphor behind panhandler:  the handle (arm) isn’t sufficient, it’s the pan (hat or other receptacle) at the end that completes the image.  Data reveals that panhandle (geographic sense) was lightly used beginning in the 1880s.  It was probably a regionalism, growing slowly after 1900 to a peak in 1942 that it didn’t reach again until almost 1970; it then crept upwards, reaching a new plateau from about 1992 to 2003, after which use has dropped.  Panhanlder has seen even less use, slowly increasing from around 1900 to a peak around 1937.  It faded, reached a similar frequency again in 1979, then crept to a new peak in 1998, from which it’s been slowly retreating.  Christopher Daly  https://thebettereditor.wordpress.com/2016/07/30/panhandler-its-origins-are-unclear-but-its-meaning-isnt/

In Thomas Pynchon's novel Vineland (1990), addicted ''tubefreeks'' are pursued by the National Endowment for Video Education and Rehabilitation (NEVER).  The organization sends out agents to detain and de-tox those most severely afflicted with tubal abuse and other video-related disorders. 

Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. (born 1937) is an American novelist.  A MacArthur Fellow, he is noted for his dense and complex novels.  His fiction and nonfiction writings encompass a vast array of subject matter, genres and themes, including history, music, science, and mathematics.  For Gravity's Rainbow Pynchon won the 1974 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.  More commonly classified as a postmodernist author, Pynchon's work has also been described as "high modern".  Along with its emphasis on sociopolitical themes such as racism and imperialism, its awareness and appropriation of many elements of traditional high culture and literary form, Pynchon's work explores philosophical, theological, and sociological ideas exhaustively, though in quirky and approachable ways.  Pynchon has revealed himself in his fiction and non-fiction as an aficionado of popular music.  Song lyrics and mock musical numbers appear in each of his novels, and, in his autobiographical introduction to the Slow Learner collection of early stories, he reveals a fondness for both jazz and rock and roll.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Pynchon   See also Advice for Thomas Pynchon Newbies at http://thomaspynchon.com/pynchon-newbies/

Nacre, also known as mother of pearl, is an organic-inorganic composite material produced by some molluscs as an inner shell layer; it also makes up the outer coating of pearls.  It is strong, resilient, and iridescent.  Nacre is found in some of the most ancient lineages of bivalves, gastropods, and cephalopods.  However, the inner layer in the great majority of mollusc shells is porcellaneous, not nacreous, and this usually results in a non-iridescent shine, or more rarely in non-nacreous iridescence such as flame structure as is found in conch pearls.  Both black and white nacre are used for architectural purposes.  The natural nacre may be artificially tinted to almost any color.  Nacre sheets may be used on interior floors, exterior and interior walls, countertops, doors and ceilings. Mother of pearl buttons are used in clothing either for functional or decorative purposes.  Nacre is also used to decorate watches, knives, guns and jewellery.  Nacre inlay is often used for music keys and other decorative motifs on musical instruments.  Many accordion and concertina bodies are completely covered in nacre, and some guitars have fingerboard or headstock inlays made of nacre (as well as some guitars having plastic inlays designed to imitate the appearance of nacre).  The bouzouki and baglamas (Greek plucked string instruments of the lute family) typically feature nacre decorations, as does the related Middle Eastern oud (typically around the sound holes and on the back of the instrument).  Bows of stringed instruments such as the violin and cello often have mother of pearl inlay at the frog.  It is traditionally used in the valve buttons of trumpets and other brass instruments as well.  Mother of pearl is sometimes used to make spoon-like utensils for caviar, so as to not spoil the taste with metallic spoons.  See pictures at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nacre

The ancient Romans knew how to keep the interior of their villas dry when it rained.  They covered their roofs with overlapping curved tiles so the "imber" (Latin for pelting rain or "rain shower") couldn't seep in.  The tiles were, in effect, "rain tiles," so the Romans called them "imbrices" (singular "imbrex").  The verb for installing the tiles was "imbricare," and English speakers used its past participle--"imbricatus"--to create "imbricate," which was first used as adjective meaning "overlapping (like roof tiles)" and later became a verb meaning "to overlap."  http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/imbricate

imbricate structure  (1) A sedimentary structure characterized by imbrication of pebbles all tilted in the same direction, with their flat sides commonly displaying an upstream dip.  Synonym of:  shingle structure  (2) A tectonic structure displayed by a series of nearly parallel and overlapping minor thrust faults, high-angle reverse faults, or slides, and characterized by rock slices, sheets, plates, blocks, or wedges that are approx. equidistant and have the same displacement and that are all steeply inclined in the same direction (toward the source of stress).

http://www.mindat.org/glossary/imbricate_structure  See also Patterns of imbricate thrusting at http://projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/harvardshell/files/shaw_gsa99.pdf

America's love affair with the automobile and the development of a national system of superhighways (along with the occasional desire to seek out paths less-traveled) is a story belonging to the 20th century.  So the word shunpike, too, must be a 20th-century phenomenon, right?  Nope.  Toll roads have actually existed for centuries (the word turnpike has meant "tollgate" since at least 1678).  In fact, toll roads were quite common in 19th-century America, and "shunpike" has been describing side roads since the middle of that century, almost half a century before the first Model T rolled out of the factory.  http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/shunpike

August 27, 2016  John Ellenby has died at 75 by Robert X. Cringely  John Ellenby was a British computer engineer who came to Xerox PARC in the 1970s to manufacture the Xerox Alto, the first graphical workstation.  He left Xerox in the late 1980s to found Grid Systems, makers of the Compass—the first full-service laptop computer.  In the 1990s he founded Agilis, which made arguably the first handheld mobile phone that wasn’t the size of a brick.  Finally he set up a company in both New Zealand and San Francisco to do geographical mapping data before most of us even knew we needed it.  The man pioneered four technology industry segments, putting him on the same level as Steve Jobs.  http://www.cringely.com/2016/08/27/john-ellenby-dies-75/

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1519   August 29, 2016  On this date in 1915, Ingrid Bergman, Swedish actress, was born.  On this date in 1920, Charlie Parker, American saxophonist and composer, was born.