What book are you taking to the beach or the field this summer? Science’s books editor Valerie Thompson and host Sarah Crespi discuss a selection of science books that will have you catching comets and swimming with the fishes. Sarah also talks with Mira Moufarrej of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, about her team’s work on a new blood test that analyzes RNA from maternal blood to determine the gestational age of a fetus. This new approach may also help predict the risk of preterm birth. This week’s episode was edited by Podigy. Listen to previous podcasts. [Image: William Warby/Flickr; Music: Jeffrey Cook]

South superstar Vijay Deverakonda, who set the screens on fire with his performance in ‘Arjun Reddy’, is celebrating his 31st birthday today. Post the success of his film, he became a known name all over. After a lot of speculations of him making Bollywood debut, he has finally signed a film opposite Ananya Panday which is directed by Puri Jagannadh.

Find a new and historic recipe for a dish to put on your Thanksgiving table in What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking. This cookbook, published in 1881, is highlighted in a recent post on the Library of Congress Blog. Abby Fisher perfected her culinary skills as an enslaved cook on a South Carolina plantation but went on to establish a successful catering business in San Francisco and publish a compilation of her recipes—one of the first by an African-American. Learn more about this remarkable woman and, this Thanksgiving, sample a taste of history!

Click here to go to the Library of Congress Blog post, "Sample a Taste of History This Thanksgiving!"

Reminder!!

Please join us for our May topical webinar:

Happy Birthday Walt!: Digitized Walt Whitman Collections from the Manuscript Division

May 2019 marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of poet Walt Whitman, who revolutionized the style and content of American poetry with his 1855 publication of Leaves of Grass. Whitman was also a journalist, printer, publisher, orator, and prose writer.

The Library of Congress holds the largest group of Whitman-related special collection materials in the world, including printed materials, rare books, photographs, and manuscripts. In this webinar program, Manuscript Division historian Barbara Bair highlights the content and research use of three digitized Whitman manuscript collections as well as programs celebrating Whitman’s birthday at the Library of Congress.

Date: Thursday, May 30
Time: 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm EDT
Registration (required): Please register via Eventbrite.

This program will be held in real time via webinar software, which allows participants from around the country and the world to join us. Confirmation and log-on instructions will be sent via email. Please read the Library of Congress Comment and Posting Policy.

ADA: Request ADA accommodations five days in advance at (202) 707-6362 or ada@loc.gov. Registration for the program is also required.

Questions? Ask A Librarian!

Cham : Springer International Publishing : Imprint: Birkhäuser, 2014

The Thai's victory over his Ferrari rival gave Red Bull something to celebrate on a day that should have seen the return of Max Verstappen's home Dutch Grand Prix after a 35-year absence.

Nenye, Vesa, author

Robinson, Chase F., author

Garnsey, Peter, author

The authors developed a mathematical model based on a cost-of-illness approach to estimate the impacts of exposure to untreated PMADs on mothers and children.

Dewey Library - SB191.R5 R4 2019

Online Resource

In Muzaffarnagar, three of the biggest relief camps in Kandhla, Basikala and Malakpur have seen the birth of about 27 babies.

The question of who would replace Lalu as RJD chief should he be convicted was not considered.

Naidu slammed the Congress saying it was treating the Telangana issue as an internal matter.

Nehru was born to Motilal Nehru and Swaroop Rani on Nov 14, 1889, in Allahabad.

Berlin ; New York : Springer, [2006]

Basel ; Boston : Birkhäuser Verlag, [2006]

The company also announced the Swift Student Challenge, an opportunity for student developers to showcase their coding skills by creating their own Swift playground

Maximiliano Firtman is a mobile web developer from Buenos Ares, Argentina. He has been a developer for 24 years and his most recent focus has been on progressive web apps, or PWAs. Steve and Max reflect on the technologies they were using when they first got started in web development and talk about their experience with mobile development. One area that Max emphasized was bringing the web into the mobile space. They discuss the progression of web access on mobile and some of the available tools. Max notes that responsible design has a very high cost in web performance for mobile devices, which requires unique approaches. They discuss some of the issues with latency in mobile, even on 4G. The solution to this latency is PWAs.

Progressive web apps are a set of best practices to create web apps that are installable. They can work offline at high speeds on several operating systems. Once installed, it looks like any other app on the system. Max delves into more details on how it works. He talks about how the resources for your application are managed. He assures listeners that it’s just a website that’s using a new API, they’re not changing the way the web works, and that when that API is there, the app can be installed. It will also generally use your default browser. Steve and Max discuss how local data is stored with PWAs. To write PWAs, you can use Angular, React, JavaScript, or Vue, and it’s a pretty transparent process. Max talks about some common tools used for local storage and some of the PWAs he’s worked on in the past. The benefit of using PWAs is that they generally run faster than regular web apps. To get started, Max advises listeners to install one and start exploring.

Panelists

• Steve Edwards

Guest

• Maximiliano Firtman

Sponsors

• G2i

____________________________

"The MaxCoders Guide to Finding Your Dream Developer Job" by Charles Max Wood is now available on Amazon. Get Your Copy Today!

____________________________________________________________

Links

• Progressive Web Apps

• Appsco.pe

• IndexedDB

• Max's site

Picks

Steve Edwards:

• The Club

Maximiliano Firtman:

• Llama

• Follow Max on Twitter

My JavaScript Story this week welcomes Maximiliano Firtman. Maximiliano Firtman is a mobile web developer from Buenos Ares, Argentina. He has been a developer for 24 years and his most recent focus has been on progressive web apps.

Maximiliano started coding when he was 11 years old by creating games and digital magazines. He got into web development by learning HTML in college.

Host: Charles Max Wood

Joined By Special Guest: Maximiliano Firtman

Sponsors

• Sentry use the code “devchat” for 2 months free on Sentry small plan

• CacheFly

______________________________________

"The MaxCoders Guide to Finding Your Dream Developer Job" by Charles Max Wood is now available on Amazon. Get Your Copy Today!

______________________________________

Links

• JSJ 415: Progressive Web Apps with Maximiliano Firtman

• Maximiliano Firtman Website

• Maximiliano Firtman Twitter

Picks

Maximiliano Firtman:

• Using Trusted Web Activities

Charles Max Wood:

• Generation Z Unfiltered by Tim Elmore

Osterbrock, Donald E

Chapman, Elwood N

Davis, John K., author

Sugirtharajah, R. S. (Rasiah S.), author

Sugirtharajah, R. S. (Rasiah S.), author

The following is an interesting extract from Straw Dogs by John Gray (pp. 109–116) discussing some of the differences between Western and Taoist philosophical traditions.

The fetish of choice

For us, nothing is more important than to live as we choose. This is not because we value freedom more than people did in earlier times. It is because we have identified the good life with the chosen life.

For the pre-Socratic Greeks, the fact that our lives are framed by limits was what makes us human. Being born a mortal, in a given place and time, strong or weak, swift or slow, brave or cowardly, beautiful or ugly, suffering tragedy or being spared it – these features of our lives are given to us, they cannot be chosen. If the Greeks could have imagined a life without them, they could not have recognised it as that of a human being.

The ancient Greeks were right. The ideal of the chosen life does not square with how we live. We are not authors of our lives; we are not even part-authors of the events that mark us most deeply. Nearly everything that is most important in our lives is unchosen. The time and place we are born, our parents, the first language we speak – these are chance, not choice. It is the casual drift of things that shapes our most fateful relationships. The life of each of us is a chapter of accidents.

Personal autonomy is the work of our imagination, not the way we live. Yet we have been thrown into a time in which everything is provisional. New technologies alter our lives daily. The traditions of the past cannot be retrieved. At the same time we have little idea of what the future will bring. We are forced to live as if we were free.

The cult of choice reflects the fact that we must improvise our lives. That we cannot do otherwise is a mark of our unfreedom. Choice has become a fetish; but the mark of a fetish is that it is unchosen.

Animal virtues

The dominant Western view…teaches that humans are unlike other animals, which simply respond to the situations in which they find themselves. We can scrutinise our motives and impulses; we can know why we act as we do. By becoming ever more self-aware, we can approach a point at which our actions are the results of our choices. When we are fully conscious, everything we do will be done for reasons we can know. At that point, we will be authors of our lives.

This may seem fantastical, and so it is. Yet it is what we are taught by Socrates, Aristotle and Plato, Descartes, Spinoza and Marx. For all of them, consciousness is our very essence, and the good life means living as a fully conscious individual.

…

Western thought is fixated on the gap between what is and what ought to be. But in everyday life we do not scan our options beforehand, then enact the one that is best. We simply deal with whatever is at hand. …Different people follow different customs; but in acting without intention, we are not simply following habit. Intentionless acts occur in all sorts of situations, including those we have never come across before.

Outside the Western tradition, the Taoists of ancient China saw no gap between is and ought. Right action was whatever comes from a clear view of the situation. They did not follow moralists – in their day, Confucians – in wanting to fetter human beings with rules or principles. For Taoists, the good life is only the natural life lived skillfully. It has no particular purpose. It has nothing to do with the will, and it does not consist in trying to realise any ideal. Everything we do can be done more or less well; but if we act well it is not because we translate our intentions into deeds. It is because we deal skillfully with whatever needs to be done. The good life means living according to our natures and circumstances. There is nothing that says that it is bound to be the same for everybody, or that it must conform with ‘morality’.

In Taoist thought, the good life comes spontaneously; but spontaneity is far from simply acting on the impulses that occur to us. In Western traditions such as Romanticism, spontaneity is linked with subjectively. In Taoism it means acting dispassionately, on the basis of an objective view of the situation at hand. The common man cannot see things objectively, because his mind is clouded by anxiety about achieving his goals. Seeing clearly means not projecting our goals into the world; acting spontaneously means acting according to the needs of the situation. Western moralists will ask what is the purpose of such action, but for Taoists the good life has no purpose. It is like swimming in a whirlpool, responding to the currents as they come and go. ‘I enter with the inflow, and emerge with the outflow, follow the Way of the water, and do not impose my selfishness upon it. This is how I stay afloat in it,’ says the Chuang-Tzu.

In this view, ethics is simply a practical skill, like fishing or swimming. The core of ethics is not choice or conscious awareness, but the knack of knowing what to do. It is a skill that comes with practice and an empty mind. A.C. Graham explains:

The Taoist relaxes the body, calms the mind, loosens the grip of categories made habitual by naming, frees the current of thought for more fluid differentiations and assimilations, and instead of pondering choices lets the problems solve themselves as inclination spontaneously finds its own direction. …He does not have to make decisions based on standards of good and bad because, granted only that enlightenment is better than ignorance, it is self-evident that among spontaneous inclinations the one prevailing in the greatest clarity of mind, other things being equal, will be best, the one in accord with the Way.

Few humans beings have the knack of living well. Observing this, the Taoists looked to other animals as their guides to the good life. Animals in the wild know how to live, they do not need to think or choose. It is only when they are fettered by humans that they cease to live naturally.

As the Chuang-Tzu puts it, horses, when they live wild, eat grass and drink water; when they are content, they entwine their necks and rub each other. When angry, they turn their backs on each other and kick out. This is what horses know. But if harnessed together and lined up under constraints, they know how to look sideways and to arch their necks, to career around and try to spit out the bit and rid themselves of the reins.

For people in thrall to ‘morality’ , the good life means perpetual striving. For Taoists it means living effortlessly, according to our natures. The freest human being is not the one who acts on reasons he has chosen for himself, but one who never has to choose. Rather than agonising over alternatives, he responds effortlessly to situations as they arise. He lives not as he chooses but as he must. Such a human has the perfect freedom of a wild animal – or a machine. As the Lieh-Tzu says: ‘The highest man at rest is as though dead, in movement is like a machine. He knows neither why he is at rest nor why he is not, why he is in movement nor why he is not.’

The idea that freedom means becoming like a wild animal or machine is offensive to Western religious and humanist prejudices, but it is consistent with the most advanced scientific knowledge. A.C. Graham explains:

Taoism coincides with the scientific worldview at just those points where the latter most disturbs westerners rooted in the Christian tradition – the littleness of man in a vast universe; the inhuman Tao which all things follow, without purpose and indifferent to human needs; the transience of life, the impossibility of knowing what comes after death; unending change in which the possibility of progress is not even conceived; the relativity of values; a fatalism very close to determinism; even a suggestion that the human organism operates like a machine.

Autonomy means acting on reasons I have chosen; but the lesson of cognitive science is that there is no self to do the choosing. We are far more like machines and wild animals than we imagine. But we cannot attain the amoral selflessness of wild animals, or the choiceless automatism of machines. Perhaps we can learn to live more lightly, less burdened by morality. We cannot return to a purely spontaneous existence.

Runion, Meryl

Huggett, Cindy, author

Dewey Library - K3240.B496 2019

A poem by Sharon Olds from the Library's Poetry 180 Project.

Posters and presentations can be uploaded to SciMeetings starting on March 19

Large, disordered pores allow the gel to capture soil without damaging pigments

Members of the Division of Colloid and Surface Chemistry presented 155 virtual talks over 3 days

Online Resource

Hayden Library - QC773.3.U5 L66 2019

Rotch Library - HT133.C713 2018

Online Resource

Deftly uses the experience of Kannadiga doctors in the U.S. to examine issues of race, religion, gender, medical ethics