The Laurentian Library (Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana)
is a historic library in Florence, Italy containing more than
11,000 manuscripts and 4,500 early printed books. Built in a cloister of the Medicean Basilica
di San Lorenzo di Firenze under
the patronage of the Medici pope Clement VII,
the Library was built to emphasize that the Medici were
no longer merchants but members of intelligent and ecclesiastical society. It contains the manuscripts and books
belonging to the private library of the Medici family. The library is renowned
for its architecture, designed by Michelangelo,
and is an example of Mannerism. The Laurentian Library was commissioned in
1523 and construction began in 1525; however, when Michelangelo left Florence
in 1534, only the walls of the reading room were complete. It was then continued by Tribolo, Basari, and
Ammannati based on plans and verbal instructions from Michelangelo. The library opened by 1571. Notable additions to the collection
were made by its most famous librarian, Angelo Maria Bandini, who was appointed in
1757 and oversaw its printed catalogues.
The Laurentian Library houses about 11,000 manuscripts, 2,500 papyri, 43
ostraca, 566 incunabula, 1,681 16th-century prints, and 126,527 prints of the
17th to 20th centuries. The core
collection consists of about 3,000 manuscripts, indexed by Giovanni Rondinelli
and Baccio Valori in 1589, which were placed on parapets (plutei) at the
library's opening in 1571. These
manuscripts have the signature Pluteus or Pluteo (Plut.). These manuscripts include the library Medici family collected during the 15th
century and re-acquired by Giovanni di Medici (Pope Leo X)
in 1508, and moved to Florence in the 1520s by Giulio di Giuliano de' Medici (Pope
Clement VII). The Medici library was joined by collections by Francesco
Sassetti and Francesco Filelfo and manuscripts acquired by Leo X and by the
library of the Dominican convent of San Marco.
The Library conserves the Nahuatl Florentine
Codex, the major source of pre-Conquest Aztec life. Among other well-known manuscripts in the
Laurentian Library are the sixth-century Syriac Rabula
Gospels; the Codex
Amiatinus, which contains the earliest surviving manuscript of the Latin Vulgate Bible;
the Squarcialupi Codex, an important early musical
manuscript; and the fragmentary Erinna papyrus containing poems of the friend
of Sappho. Read more and see beautiful graphics at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurentian_Library
A rip
current, often referred to simply as a rip, or by the misnomer rip tide, is a specific kind of water
current which can occur near beaches with breaking waves. A rip is a strong, localized, and narrow
current of water which moves directly away from the shore,
cutting through the lines of breaking waves like a river running out to sea,
and is strongest near the surface of the water.
Rip currents can be hazardous to people in the water. Swimmers who are caught in a rip and who do
not understand what is going on, and who may not have the necessary water
skills, may panic, or exhaust themselves by trying to swim directly against the
flow of water. Because of these factors,
rips are the leading cause of rescues by lifeguards at beaches, and in the US
rips are the cause of an average of 46 deaths by drowning per year. A rip current is not the same thing as undertow,
although some people use the latter term incorrectly when they mean a rip
current. Contrary to popular belief,
neither rip nor undertow can pull a person down and hold them under the
water. A rip simply carries floating
objects, including people, out beyond the zone of the breaking waves. A rip current
forms because wind and breaking waves push surface water towards the
land, and this causes a slight rise in the water level along the shore, which
will tend to flow back to the open water by the route of least resistance. When there is a local area which is slightly
deeper or a break in an offshore bar or reef, this can allow water to flow
offshore more easily, and this will initiate a rip current through that
gap. Read more and see graphics at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rip_current
In botany and horticulture, parthenocarpy (literally meaning virgin fruit) is
the natural or artificially induced production of fruit without fertilization of ovules. The fruit is therefore seedless. Stenospermocarpy may also produce apparently seedless
fruit, but the seeds are actually aborted while still small. Parthenocarpy (or stenospermocarpy)
occasionally occurs as a mutation in nature; if it affects every flower the
plant can no longer sexually reproduce but might be able to propagate by apomixis or by vegetative means.
However, parthenocarpy of some fruits on a plant may be of value. Up to 20% of the fruits of wild parsnip are parthenocarpic. The seedless wild parsnip fruit are preferred
by certain herbivores, and thus serve as a "decoy defense" against seed
predation. Utah juniper has a similar defense against bird
feeding. The ability to produce seedless
fruit when pollination is unsuccessful may be an advantage to
a plant because it provides food for the plant's seed dispersers. Without a fruit crop, the seed dispersing
animals may starve or migrate. Seedlessness is seen as a desirable trait in edible
fruit with hard seeds such as banana, pineapple, orange and grapefruit. Parthenocarpy is also desirable in fruit
crops that may be difficult to pollinate or fertilize, such as fig, tomato and
summer squash. In dioecious species,
such as persimmon,
parthenocarpy increases fruit production because staminate trees do not need to
be planted to provide pollen.
Horticulturists have selected and propagated parthenocarpic cultivars of
many plants, including banana, fig, cactus
pear (Opuntia), breadfruit and eggplant. Some plants, such as pineapple, produce
seedless fruits when a single cultivar is grown because they are
self-infertile. Most commercial
seedless grape cultivars, such as 'Thompson Seedless', are not seedless because
of parthenocarpy, but because of stenospermocarpy.
EPONYMS
Mercerize John Mercer
(1791-1866) worked in his father’s cotton mill in Lancaster, England, and,
through a fellow worker, learned to read and write when he was ten years
old. John’s primary interest, which had
been music, changed to the art of dyeing and, because he was a handloom weaver,
he worked on and invented devices that wove stripes and checks. Mercer got a job as a chemist to make calico
prints at a fabric printshop. Mercer was
so talented with fabrics that he was eventually admitted to partnership in the
business. After thirty years the
partnership was dissolved, freeing Mercer to continue his experiments. In 1850, at the age of fifty-nine, he
perfected a process for treating cottons with caustic soda, sulphuric acid, and
zinc chloride, which shrinks, strengthens, and gives a permanent silky luster
to the fabric. Furthermore, cloth so
treated made the fabric more absorbent so that it held dyes more readily. Mercer’s process was not so successful as it
might have been, however, because of the shrinkage of the fabric. He had overlooked the treating of the
material under tension. Long after his
death, a correction was made, and the shrinkage was virtually eliminated. But Mercer’s name remained as the inventor of
the treatment process. http://eponym.ru/content/mercerize
Mesmerize Franz Mesmer (1734–1815) was German physician who developed a
theory and clinical practice of 'animal magnetism' or 'mesmerism'. It's from Mesmer that we get the word
"mesmerize". He owned a
particularly fine glass armonica, played it well, and it was an integral part
of his 'mesmerizing' practice. Mesmer,
Franklin and Mozart were all Freemasons, a group that enthusiastically welcomed
glass music for the promotion of human 'harmony'. Mesmer and Mozart knew each
other, and Mesmer and Franklin knew each other (alas Mozart and Franklin never
met). Mesmer was born in the village of Iznang, Swabia. After studying at the
Jesuit universities of Dillingen and Ingolstadt, he took up the study of
medicine at the University of Vienna in 1759. In 1766 he published a doctoral dissertation
with the Latin title De planetarum influxu in corpus humanum ("The
Influence of the Planets on the Human Body"), which discussed the
influence of the Moon and the planets on the human body and on disease. This wasn't 'medical astrology',
however—relying largely on Newton's theory of the tides, Mesmer expounded on
certain tides in the human body that might be accounted for by the movements of
the sun and moon. Mesmer
apparently plagiarized his dissertation from a work by Richard Mead
(1673–1754)—an eminent English physician and Newton's friend. In
all fairness, however, in Mesmer's day doctoral theses were not expected to be
original. http://www.glassarmonica.com/armonica/mesmer.php
It all began rather simply. "Mr. and
Mrs. Brown first met Paddington on a railway platform," goes the opening
line in the opening book of Michael Bond's Paddington Bear series. Readers, for their part, first met the orphan
bear from Peru in 1958, in the pages of A Bear Named Paddington. Bond died June 27, 2017 at age 91, according
to publisher HarperCollins. Bond
was prolific—both with Paddington and an assortment of other characters—and
wrote not only for children, but also for adult readers. He published more than 200 books, including
roughly one Paddington book a year for the first decade of the series, and
Bond's publisher says his books sold more than 35 million copies. "I bought him, and because we were
living near Paddington station at the time, we christened him Paddington. "He sat on a shelf of our one-roomed
apartment for a while, and then one day when I was sitting in front of my
typewriter staring at a blank sheet of paper wondering what to write, I idly
tapped out the words 'Mr. and Mrs. Brown first met Paddington on a railway
platform. In fact, that was how he came
to have such an unusual name for a bear, for Paddington was the name of the
station.' "It was a simple act, and
in terms of deathless prose, not exactly earth-shattering, but it was to change
my life considerably." Looking back
on that moment, Bond told The
Guardian in 2014 that he was also likely inspired by another
memory, at another train station: the
evacuee children he would see come through Reading Station during World War II. "They all had a label round their neck
with their name and address on and a little case or package containing all
their treasured possessions," Bond told the paper. "So Paddington, in a sense, was a
refugee, and I do think that there's no sadder sight than refugees." Colin Dwyer
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/06/28/534702099/michael-bond-the-giant-behind-paddington-bear-dies-at-91
"Sea pickles" to be precise, millions of them,
clogging fishing nets, snagging hooks and littering the Northwest's beautiful
beaches. The gelatinous critters, called
pyrosomes, are actually colonies of multi-celled animals known as zooids. Pyrosomes can grow to more than 30 feet in length, but
most washing up on beaches resemble transparent, tubular worms ranging from a few
inches to over a foot long. Covered with
small bumps, they are firm like cucumbers, but when touched they ooze a
jelly-like pus, the National Geographic's
Craig Welsh notes. During a cruise to
study the creatures off the Oregon coast two weeks ago, one team of researchers
reportedly scooped up 60,000 pyrosomes in five minutes. "There were reports of some pyrosomes in
2014, and a few more in 2015, but this year there has been an unprecedented,
insane amount," researcher Olivia Blondheim told
the Guardian. No one knows where the gummy, bioluminescent
critters are coming from or what is fueling their population boom. If fact, little is known about pyrosomes at
all, other than that reproduce assexually. What they eat or what eats them largely
remains a mystery, writes Welsh. Previously,
their range has been limited to tropical or semi-tropical areas such as parts
of the Mediterranean Sea or off Australia.
Mike Moffitt See pictures at http://www.sfgate.com/science/article/Bizarre-sea-pickles-invade-the-West-Coast-by-11248251.php?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter
http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com Issue 1733
June 29, 2017 On this date in 1956,
the Federal
Aid Highway Act of 1956 was signed, officially creating the
United States Interstate
Highway System. On this date
in 1974, Isabel Perón was
sworn in as the first female President of
Argentina.
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