Serena T.

If you keep a book, it auto renews two times. Then it comes up as overdue. If your overdue items exceed a certain amount, your account freezes. You can’t use any of the local libraries anymore until you return the items or claim them lost and pay for them. If someone else is waiting for the book, you can’t renew. Its that simple.

And guess what. Not only did we save money, but we /got more materials back/. More materials were turned in than declared lost as compared to before. There was no stigma to it. If you had already paid for the item, the money was credited back to you.

Because the people late fees actually affected were children and elderly adults - people unable to regularly get to the library. And the stigma of late items was dropped. Attitude and mindset are important.

we still have no late fees. And we are considered to be one of the top public systems in our state. People from out of state PAY to get library cards for a year because our online Overdrive system is amazing, and we have a ton of partnerships and interlibrary loan systems in place. AND we suffer less losses of both materials and patrons due to our “no late fee” policy.

1. Vincent van Gogh was born on March 30, 1853, in Holland. He was named after his grandfather and his stillborn brother who died one year before Van Gogh was born.

2. Van Gogh was 27 years old when he painted his first piece.

3. When Van Gogh first began painting, he used peasants as models. He would later paint flowers, landscapes and himself, mostly because he was too poor to pay the models.

4. Van Gogh suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy, a chronic neurological condition characterized by recurrent, unprovoked seizures.

5. In a short period of ten years, Van Gogh made approximately 900 paintings.

6. During one of his seizures, Van Gogh attempted to attack his friend Paul Gauguin with an open razor. This ultimately resulted in Vincent cutting off a piece of his own ear – but not the whole ear as is often rumored.

7. Van Gogh created his most famous work The Starry Night while staying in an asylum in Saint-Remy-de-Provence, France.

8. Vincent Van Gogh visually depicted turbulence, an incredibly complex (and still unsolved) mathematical principle in several paintings during a particularly chaotic time in his life.

9. Vincent shot himself in a wheatfield in Auvers, France, but did not die until 2 days later at the age of 37. His brother Theo, at his side when he died, said that Vincent’s last words were “La tristesse durera toujours” which means “the sadness will last forever.”

10. Vincent only sold one painting during his lifetime and only became famous after his death.

Happy Birthday, Vincent van Gogh.

From the TED-Ed Lesson The unexpected math behind Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” - Natalya St. Clair

Sabah

Mexico-based design studio Futura . has created an identity for Sabah, an authentic food shop located in Kuwait. Its menu goes from artisan donuts and pies, to specially selected products from all over the world.