The James Logan Courier

By Adam Phillips
VOA News

We tend to create new words to describe our changing world. WIRED magazine’s Jargon Watch editor Jonathon Keats attempts to guide us through the thicket of emerging terms in his book, “Virtual Words.”

Keats, who tracks such terms for WIRED, offers “spam” as one now-familiar example. It was first used as a brand name for canned luncheon meat but has come to mean the unwanted email that clutters our in-boxes.

“The term came about because "spam," being junk e-mail, and Spam luncheon meat many consider to be junk food, there was a resonance between the two," Keats says. "So that people began to call their junk email "spam." Spam was a term that people could rally around and they could rally against this email they didn’t want.”

By Don Lee, Noam Levey
and Alejandro Lazo
Tribune Washington Bureau (MCT)

WASHINGTON — In a grim portrait of a nation in economic turmoil, the government reported that the number of people living in poverty last year surged to 46.2 million — the most in at least half a century — as 1 million more Americans went without health insurance and household incomes fell sharply.

The poverty rate for all Americans rose in 2010 for the third consecutive year, matching the 15.1 percent figure in 1993 and pushing many more young adults to double up or return to their parents' home to avoid joining the ranks of the poor.

By Candace Laxamana and Gurpreet Bhasin, Courier Staff Writers

Before the 2010-2011 year ended, the students of James Logan High School were informed that a new bell schedule was going to be enforced the this year. The news about minimum days every Wednesday spread quickly, but not everyone knew that class was going to start earlier every day.

School currently starts at 8:15 and ends at 3:20 everyday except for Wednesdays, opposed to starting at 8:40 and ending at 3:30 the previous year. The minimum days have the same starting time but ends at 1:45.

MISCELLANEOUS
Any student who would like to see their semester final from Mr. Fletcher’s class last semester, come to Room 224 after school.

Do you want to join the FEAR THE COLT/ASB program? Stickers are on sale NOW in Colt Court or Room 67 at lunch ONLY. The cost is $25. With your sticker, you will get FREE admittance to the Back to School Dance (9/23), a “Fear the Colt” shirt, class color t-shirt, $1 entrance into all home games for all sports, and $5 entrance into all other dances. See any Leadership student or Ms. Walton for more information. The class that purchases the most ASB stickers will receive bonus Spirit Week points. Don’t miss out!

Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander Freiherr von Humboldt (September 14, 1769 – May 6, 1859) was a German naturalist and explorer, and the younger brother of the Prussian minister, philosopher and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835). Humboldt's quantitative work on botanical geography laid the foundation for the field of biogeography.

Between 1799 and 1804, Humboldt travelled extensively in Latin America, exploring and describing it for the first time in a manner generally considered to be a modern scientific point of view. His description of the journey was written up and published in an enormous set of volumes over 21 years. He was one of the first to propose that the lands bordering the Atlantic Ocean were once joined (South America and Africa in particular). Later, his five-volume work, Kosmos (1845), attempted to unify the various branches of scientific knowledge. Humboldt supported and worked with other scientists, including Joseph-Louis Gay-Lussac, Justus von Liebig, Louis Agassiz, Matthew Fontaine Maury and, most notably, Aimé Bonpland, with whom he conducted much of his scientific exploration.

Read COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 by Humboldt, one of several of his works in English and German available free from Project Gutenberg.