Monday Musings

In contemporary slang, “according to Hoyle,” means  correctly or properly according to a rule or authority . The phrase originated with the 17th-century work of lawyer Edmond Hoyle, an English writer who published “A Short Treatise on the Game of Whist” as well as other books on the rules and play of card games. Eventually, books were written by other authors on games that hadn’t even been invented during Hoyle’s lifetime. One text is the “Bible” of card game rules. The phrase has expanded in general usage to mean  keeping in the way something is usually done . The rules can vary depending on regional cultures and mores. Have you recently used the phrase “according to Hoyle?” Were you playing a card or board game or referring to a local custom? You can follow the Author at her  Website  or on  Twitter .

What is happiness? Happiness is an emotional state characterized by feelings of joy, satisfaction, contentment, and fulfillment. In general, it’s considered to be “subjective well-being,” which consists of two components: (1) the balance of emotions, i.e., experiencing more positive than negative feelings, and (2) life satisfaction. According to Aristotle, happiness can be achieved via the  golden mean : the balance between deficiency and excess. He also differentiated between “hedonia,” happiness derived from  pleasure,  and “eudaimonia,” satisfaction derived from virtue and  meaning . We can cultivate happiness in our lives by pursuing intrinsic goals, i.e., personal growth rather than status or money, enjoying the moment, for example, by practicing gratitude and the process rather than the destination, and reframing negative thoughts to a positive outlook. It’s not a “one and done” endpoint; it’s a constant pursuit that needs continuous sustenance and nurturing. Maslow characterized

On July 23, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared monkeypox a global health emergency. Only four previous disease outbreaks have received this designation: Polio, Ebola, Zika, and Covid-19. Two weeks late, on August 4, Biden declared monkeypox a public health emergency in the US. What is monkeypox?  Monkeypox virus is a member of the same family of viruses as the variola virus, the smallpox virus. It’s NOT related to chickenpox.  In 1958 there were outbreaks of a “pox-like” disease in colonies of research monkeys, hence the name; however, the disease source is unknown. African primates and rodents may harbor the disease and infect humans. Monkeypox was first recorded in people in 1970, and before 2022, it had spread in areas of Central and Western Africa. Previous cases in other countries on multiple continents besides Africa were linked to international travel to endemic regions or via imported animals. What are the signs & symptoms?  The physically prominent symptom is a b

Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University developed internal sharing systems; however, the WWW proposal, “an idea of linked information systems,” was created in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research, a large particle physics laboratory in Geneva Switzerland). He worked with Belgian Robert Cailliau, a computer scientist & info engineer. Their idea was for physicists of different facilities to be able to share data via hyperlinks; the concept was not initially meant for the public. Berners-Lee used a NeXT computer, an early Steve Jobs product, to write the first web browser. This computer served as the first web browser. To facilitate this process, Berners-Lee and Cailliau created: (1) HTML (HyperText Markup Language) — the web formatting language (2) URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) is a unique “address” used to identify each resource on the web, i.e., common name URL (3) HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) released in 1992 (