An oast, oast house or hop kiln is a building designed for kilning (drying) hops as part of the brewing process.  They can be found in most hop-growing (and former hop-growing) areas and are often good examples of vernacular architecture.  They consist of two or three storeys on which the hops were spread out to be dried by hot air from a wood or charcoal-fired kiln at the bottom.  The drying floors were thin and perforated to permit the heat to pass through and escape through a cowl in the roof which turned with the wind.  The freshly picked hops from the fields were raked in to dry and then raked out to cool before being bagged up and sent to the brewery.  The word oast itself also means "kiln".  The earliest surviving oast house is that at Cranbrook near Tunbridge Wells which dates to 1750 but the process is documented from soon after the introduction of hops into England in the early 16th century.  Early oast houses were simply adapted barns but, by the early 19th century, the distinctive circular buildings with conical roofs had been developed in response to the increased demand for beer.  Square oast houses appeared early in the 20th century as they were found to be easier to build.  In the 1930s, the cowls were replaced by louvred openings as electric fans and diesel oil ovens were employed.  Hops are today dried industrially and the many oast houses on farms have now been converted into dwellings.  One of the best preserved oast house complexes is at The Hop Farm Country Park at Beltring.  See many pictures at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oast_house

RYE – England’s best preserved village?  Rye was once a major harbour for warships, an important member of the Cinq Ports, and given the title ‘Rye Royale’ by Elizabeth I.  But eventually the sea gave up the battle against the silt and beat a retreat.  Now at low tide small fishing boats lie on their sides in a muddy channel while sheep graze on the Romney Marsh between Rye and the nearest beach, several kilometres away.  It’s all very genteel these days, but Ryers also take pride in their grimy past, the smuggling era in particular.  Rye was the haunt of the owlers, as smugglers were known in the eighteenth century.  In dark back rooms, deals were done on smuggled liquor, tea and luxury goods, and also on wool and banned English language bibles.  ‘Pssst--wanna buy a cheap bale of Romney Marsh and a couple of gospels?’  The Mermaid Inn, now an upmarket hotel, was the hub of these nefarious activities, and night ghost tours are run through the secret passages of the town.  Inspired by a visit to Rye, Rudyard Kipling wrote A Smuggler’s Song, ending, ‘Them that asks no questions, isn’t told a lie, So watch the wall, my darling, while the gentlemen go by!’  See pictures at https://richardtullochwriter.com/2010/01/05/rye-englands-best-preserved-village/  Read A Smuggler's Song at http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_smuggler.htm  Read about the cinque ports of England at http://www.britainexpress.com/History/cinque-ports.htm

Lamb House  The Lamb family were the greatest power in Rye, England for 250 years but their house is probably more famous as the home of the expatriate American writer Henry James and later, the writer E.F. Benson.  It is a modest brick-fronted Georgian house completed by James Lamb in 1723, the same year in which he became Mayor for the first time.  The family sold the house in 1860.  Some thirty years later Henry James visited Rye and was attracted to the house, not expecting he could ever acquire it.  But in 1899, age 55 and already an established literary figure on both sides of the Atlantic, he was able to report ‘It has fallen’ and he bought the property for £2000.  He spent most of the last 18 years of his life in Lamb House of his house and wrote some of his most highly regarded works here, including The Awkward Age, The Wings of a Dove, The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl. In the winter he dictated his work to his secretary in the green Room on the first floor but in the summer months he preferred the Garden House which stood at the top of West Street  at right angles to the main house.  Unfortunately, the Garden House was destroyed by a bomb in 1940.  Henry James entertained many eminent figures of the day at Lamb House, among them H.G. Wells, A.C.and E.F. Benson, Max Beerbohm. Hilaire Belloc, G.K. Chesterton, Joseph Conrad, Stephen Crane, Ford Maddox Ford, Edmund Gosse, Rudyard Kipling, Hugh Walpole and Edith Wharton.  After James’ death in 1916 the house became the home of brothers, A.C. and E.F. Benson.  The view from the bow window of the Garden House was to give E.F. Benson the inspiration for his Mapp and Lucia novels.  In 1950 the widow of Henry James’ nephew and heir, Mrs Henry James Jr., presented Lamb House to the National Trust.  It is open to visitors two days a week April–October.  As for E.F. Benson, regular tours are conducted which connect events and people in the Mapp and Lucia books to their Rye locations.  Benson was not the last eminent literary person to live in Lamb House.  Among those who have resided there since it became a National Trust property are Rumer Godden,  Montgomery Hyde and Brian Batsford.  http://www.ryemuseum.co.uk/lamb-house/

Not surprisingly for an important shipbuilding town, Ryers emigrated, and in Rye ships too.   Besides their  shipbuilding and trading pursuits, economic hard times and the pursuit of religious freedom motivated some to seek a life elsewhere—but to honour their origins by creating new Ryes:   in New York and New Hampshire in the USA and in Victoria, Australia.  "In 1660 three men originally from Rye in Sussex, England, living in Greenwich, Connecticut, purchased a tract of land on the beautiful shore of Long Island Sound from Mohegan Indians.  It cost them eight coats, seven shirts and four pounds ten shillings sterling.  Little did the three--Peter Disbrow, John Coe and Thomas Studwell--realize that they were thereby starting the oldest settlement in what is now affluent Westchester County, New York.  Confusingly, it now includes both the Town of Rye and the City of Rye, separate municipalities.  The former has three times the population of the latter, which in turn has three times the population of Rye, Sussex."  http://www.ryemuseum.co.uk/founding-other-ryes/

If you visited Iceland and asked someone what they called the smelling organ in the middle of their face, they'd tell you, nev.  In Japan, it's hana.  To Sar speakers in southern Chad it's kon, and among the Zuni tribe of the southwestern United States, it's noli.  In fact, you could go to more than 1,400 places around the world, question speakers of more than 1,400 different languages, and hear 1,400 words that contain the sound "n."  But all of them mean the same thing:  nose.  That's one of the findings of a sweeping study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2016/09/06/1605782113 which found evidence of strong associations between the sounds in words and the ideas they represent in completely unrelated languages from all corners of the world.  Despite a long-standing assumption in linguistics that the sounds we pick to signify certain concepts are arbitrary, the researchers argue that at least some associations are more universal than you'd think.  "Most models for how words come into our lexicon are predicated on this assumption that the sound doesn't tell you anything about what it represents," said Jaime Reilly, a cognitive psychologist and speech pathologist at Temple University who was not involved in the study.  "So the really neat thing about this paper is it sort of questions whether that arbitrariness assumption actually holds across all words."  A century ago, Ferdinand de Saussure—one of the founders of modern linguistics—wrote about the arbitrary relationship between signals (or the words we use) and the signified (the concepts we're trying to describe).  For example, there is nothing inherent about the term "cat" that calls to mind the fluffy, mildly standoffish felines we keep in our homes.  That we can say "cat" and other English speakers know what we're talking about is a result of convention.   A series of studies starting in 1929 have documented what's called the "bouba/kiki" effect:  People from societies across the world almost universally associate round shapes with the made-up word "bouba" and spiky shapes with the non-word "kiki."  Within languages, research has shown that sounds can become associated with idea—for example, English words having to do with sight, like "glance," "glimmer" and "glare," all start with the sound "gl."  This notion that vocal sounds carry meaning in and of themselves, and that meaning can be mapped onto the ideas they're used to represent, is called "sound symbolism."  Sarah Kaplan  https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2016/09/12/a-nose-by-any-other-name-biology-may-affect-the-way-we-invent-words/

Q.  What is the opposite of decline?  A.  noun:  improvement, ascent, progress  verb:  accept, advance, develop.   Find many more antonyms for decline at http://www.wordhippo.com/what-is/the-opposite-of/decline.html  

Nikon’s Small World showcases the beauty and complexity of life as seen through the light microscope.  The Photomicrography Competition is open to anyone with an interest in microscopy and photography.  The video competition, entitled Small World In Motion encompasses any movie or digital time-lapse photography taken through the microscope.  See the 2016 winners at http://www.nikonsmallworld.com/  Deadline for 2017 competition is April 30, 2017. 

 http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1540  October 21, 2016  On this date in 1945, women were allowed to vote in France for the first time.  On this date in 1959, in New York City, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, opened to the public.