Every Wednesday, Miss Kathleen provides links to a variety of things happening at libraries across the country. If there’s something fun going on in your local library this week, leave us a comment!

Well faithful readers, I am back from the ALA conference in our nation’s capital. I saw Russell Freedman, Avi, Kadir Nelson, and Carolyn Mackler, to name a few authors. Of course, I missed Mo Willems and the Ace of Cakes guy. I did get to meet Super Chicken Nugget Boy, so that was a highlight. At the end of this week’s column, you’ll find the little video I made at ALA. Hope you like it! If you watch until the end you will see the reaction of a USA fan upset by the results of the World Cup game — I was pretty happy I caught that on tape! [Photo courtesy of Flickr user leis18.]
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A reader turned me on to a great blog called Love the Liberry, filled with ridiculous questions public librarians are asked. Here’s a recent post:

Concerns

High school guy– I have some concerns about the computer.
Me– What sorts of concerns?
HSG– It won’t type Roman numerals.
Me– What number are you trying to type?
HSG– 2.
Me– I tell him you just need to type two capital i’s.
HSG– I did the capital i, but it wasn’t happenin.

The tagline is “Stranger than fiction…we couldn’t possibly make these things up.” All in a day’s work!
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For your viewing pleasure, I’ve rounded up some awesome videos of ants in captivity. It’s amazing to see what those little guys (um, I mean primarily sterile females) are doing when we’re not watching. Also, the technical term for an “ant farm” (meaning a true captive habitat for ants, not a toy) is: Formicarium.

Leafcutter Ants – San Diego Zoo

A brief intro to leafcutter ants from Paige Howorth of the San Diego Zoo.

Leafcutter Queen Ant

From someone’s personal colony, this video demonstrates how huge the queen is in relation to worker ants.

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Solve the following puzzle and you may win your pick of anything you want from the neatoshop (valued under $25). Because this one might take a little longer than most, we’ll leave the contest open until midnight PT. Ready? [note: there is a missing D in the Mexican leader name, sorry!] Set. GO!

Oh, and don’t forget, even if you’re not the winner, you still need to solve the challenge to compete for next week’s Day 5 final challenge! AND YES! You can play this challenge/contest without knowing a thing about the weekly hunt! It’s sort of a one-off – a stand-alone if you will. Will you?

Ada Lovelace, daughter of the poet Lord Byron and the Countess of Lovelace, is considered the first computer programmer, despite having died in 1852 — long before computers were actually built. Through her collaboration with Charles Babbage, Lovelace wrote “sequences of instructions” (programs) for Babbage’s early mechanical computer (well, computer in theory — it wasn’t actually built until rather recently). Lovelace saw the potential of Babbage’s computer as a device that could do more than arithmetic: she said, “[Babbage's computer] might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.” Here’s a short biographical piece about her life and her contributions to computer science:

Information Pioneers: Ada Lovelace from Information Pioneers on Vimeo.

See also: Happy Ada Lovelace Day!

(Via Kottke.org.)

It’s Reader-Submitted Quiz Week!! We had several people suggest a World Cup Winners quiz, but the first was Daniel Pecoraro of Rosedale, NY. We’ll be featuring quizzes suggested by readers at 5pm EST through Friday. Enjoy!

Since the first tournament in 1930, only seven different countries have won the World Cup. Can you name them all in 2 minutes?

Take the Quiz: Name Every World Cup Winner

As you guys are reading this, I’m out on maternity leave.  But as I write this, I’m really about three weeks away from having a baby.  So you can imagine that my life is revolving around washing tiny pink articles of clothing and putting together previously-foreign objects like Pack ‘N’ Plays at the moment. 

One thing we don’t have to worry about: picking out the baby’s name. We settled on a name pretty early on and we made sure to avoid ones that were on the top 10 list for 2010. Don’t get me wrong – I love some of those names, but I didn’t want our kid to be one of five Avas in her kindergarten class in a few years.  When I checked out the top 10 list, though, I discovered that you can go all the way back to the 1880s and see what was popular back in the day.  I thought you guys might find it interesting, so here are the top 10 boy names in the U.S. from the 1880s.

1.  John, with 89,949 babies named that, which was about 7.6 percent of the male babies born that decade.  Actor John Barrymore – Drew’s grandpa – was born on February 15, 1882.

2.  William – 84,881 babies, about 7.2 percent of male babies. William is #8 on the 2010 list of boy names, so it’s definitely an enduring name!

3.  James – 54,062 babies, about 4.6 percent of male babies.

4.  George – 47,650 babies, about 4.04 percent of male babies.

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Our new issue is on newsstands and in mailboxes (or beach bags or bathrooms or wherever it is you do your _flossing). This week we’ll be sharing a few excerpts from the cover story, “The 50 Most Interesting Places in the Space-Time Continuum,” by Jenny Drapkin and Ethan Trex, plus a few places that ended up on the cutting room floor.

28. Where Antimatter Still Exists
To wrap your head around what antimatter is, take everything you remember from high school science and reverse it. Matter is composed of positively charged protons and negatively charged electrons, whereas antimatter consists of positively charged electrons and negatively charged protons. When fast-moving matter collides with other fast-moving matter, antimatter is formed, releasing energy. After the Big Bang, some antimatter was formed, but it’s pretty hard to find.

Antimatter does exist, though. (more…)

Phil Jackson never saw a movie until his senior year in high school. TV? His family didn’t own one. Dancing? Not allowed. For a while he thought he’d follow his parents, both Assemblies of God ministers in Montana, into soul saving.

But he ended up playing in the NBA, experimenting with LSD, living in Woodstock, coaching the world’s most famous athlete, moving to Los Angeles and dating the boss’ daughter — The Man’s daughter? Did I mention she’s posed nude for Playboy?

OK, so I may have skipped over a few details. (more…)

Not sure if this means Petey and Meria loved mental_floss magazine or despised it:

Thanks to Dave for sharing the pic! We’ll get a replacement issue in the mail today. If you’d like to order a gift subscription for your pooch, here are the details.

It’s an all-new 5-day trivia hunt!

Co-puzzle Master Josh Halbur and I are happy to bring you the next How Did You Know? sponsored by our friends over at neatorama.com.

We’re changing things up again this month, so be sure to read our new rules!
Here’s how it works: Starting today, and every day the rest of this week, we’ll be presenting two challenges at noon ET. They’ll be very similar to the kinds of puzzles you’ve come to expect from me and Josh, and, yes, they will feed into the Day 5 puzzle, as normal. But here’s the difference: Each evening, at 8pm ET, we’ll be putting up a third challenge loosely based on the day’s previous two challenges. You won’t need to solve the first two to solve the third, but knowing the day’s theme might help you be the first to crack Level 3. Also: note that you’ll have to solve Level 3–the bonus–to compete on Day 5

>> Prizes! Each day, one person will win one item from the neatoshop worth $25 or less. Shipping is on the house but the item you pick must be in stock. Oh, and no credit if you don’t use up the full $25. To be eligible for the prize, you need to leave the correct answer to Level 3 on the correct neatorama page before 10pm ET. You also need to tell us in that comment what you want if you’re selected at random.

>> So what’s in it for the person/team who finishes first with all the correct answers? Bragging rights, as always, with your photo/bio posted on our site. But also the chance to win the Day 5 neatorama prize, and, as has been tradition here for the last 28 months of HDYK?, your pick of any one of the amazing t-shirts from our store.

As always, if you’re not a Fan of our Facebook page, be sure to add us so we can keep you updated, and you can get in on some additional nifty clues throughout the week. If you’re new to our five-day hunt, you can read up on our new Rules page here. Oh, and if you missed yesterday’s challenge, that can be found here . Okay, ready to get your Hunt on? Click on through.