The Essentials

Physics senior lecturer Robert Lieberman has been touring the East Coast attending sold-out screenings of his film, “They Call it Myanmar – Lifting the Curtain.” The New York Times has also taken notice.

Lieberman writes: “I’ve been doing a show of hands and it looks like about a third of the audience in Philly and even more in NYC were Cornell related –  these are large numbers of Cornell alums and parents of Cornell students. It seems to me that this is an incredible opportunity for Cornell to illustrate its alumni concern in world affairs, to leverage their commitment to Southeast Asia, and to link to a larger community to spread the word about Cornell.”

Screened at Cornell in May 2011, the film captures the heart of Burma and puts a human face on one of the most isolated countries on the planet. It  includes a rare and revealing narration by Aung San Suu Kyi, newly released after 15 years of house arrest.

Two Cornellians are nominated for Oscars this year, and both will attend a Cornell Club of Los Angeles event tonight.

Thelma Schoonmaker ’61, Martin Scorsese’s longtime film editor, is up for “Hugo.” If she wins Feb. 26, it will be Schoonmaker’s fourth Academy Award. She won for “Raging Bull” (1980), “The Aviator” (2005) and “The Departed“ (2006).

Danfung Dennis ‘05 is nominated for best documentary for his film “Hell and Back Again,” the harrowing story of an American soldier’s return to civilian life after service in Afghanistan. Dennis’ film has already won at Sundance and is set to air on the PBS series “Independent Lens“ in May.

Last year all three nominated Cornellians took an Oscar home: David Seidler ’59, for Best Original Screenplay for “The King’s Speech,” producer Ryan Silbert ’02, for Best Live Action Short “God of Love“ and Chris Allen ‘94 for technical achievement.

The Borrow Direct family just got a little bigger, with the addition of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

MIT recently joined the rapid book request and delivery system that enables faculty, staff and students at nine member libraries to search a combined library catalog of 50 million volumes.

Harvard began participating in the system in September along with Cornell, Brown, Columbia, Dartmouth, Penn, Princeton and Yale.

Library users at all nine schools can directly request expedited delivery of circulating items and keep them for six weeks, with the option to renew for another six.

The historic Cornell-Technion partnership.

At 2:30 p.m. today, CornellCast will carry a live event of special interest to all Cornellians. The livestream will also be available on Facebook.

TV science guy Dan Riskin, Ph.D. ’06, is hosting the Discovery Channel Canada’s Daily Planet show.

His previous TV duties have taken him to the sofa of Jay Leno, where he applied leeches to actress Cameron Diaz. Riskin – an expert on bats – also disclosed to TV’s Craig Ferguson that bats have testicles so enormous that, were a human to sport testicles of comparable size, they would be the size of pumpkins.

Super Glue inventor Harry Coover, M.S. ’42, Ph.D. ’44, died March 26 in Tennessee at age 94. Last year, President Barack Obama presented Coover with the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. Super Glue did not make Coover rich, but he was most proud of the adhesive’s use in spray form to stop wounded soldiers in Vietnam from bleeding, which he discusses in the video below.

The Fine Arts Library is one step closer to its new home in Rand Hall. A new Fact Sheet and FAQ offers details about the library’s move from its old digs in Sibley Hall, including a tentative timeframe that has the library in its new Rand location in fall 2014.

Working collaboratively with the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning (AAP), the library will create a world-class, future-oriented fine arts and design library — and plans started early because of a desire to take advantage of Milstein’s current renovations and Rand’s elevator installation. Space was created last spring in the current Fine Arts Library to build temporary faculty offices.

Construction on the new library could begin as soon as early 2012 and will be in full swing by mid-2003. The library will move in during summer 2014 and the library should be ready for use by that fall.

Read the Chronicle’s September update for more background on the library’s move and the construction in Milstein.

“My father always said to me, I would be a late bloomer,” David Seidler ’59 told more than a billion viewers when he won the Oscar for best original screenplay of “The King’s Speech” Feb. 27. “I believe I am the oldest person to win this particular award. I hope that record is broken quickly and often.”

The 73-year-old Seidler — a former stutterer raised in England, who wrote mostly for TV after leaving Cornell — continued, ”I accept this on behalf of all the stutterers in the world — we have a voice, we have been heard.” In his screenplay, Seidler reproduced many of the therapeutic techniques used on him to overcome his own speech defect.

Two other Cornellians walked away with Oscar gold: Ryan Silbert ’02, for producing ”God of Love,” the Best Live Action Short Film; and Chris Allen ’94 won a technical achievement Oscar for helping to develop software for movie making.

“Hell and Back Again,” a documentary directed by Danfung Dennis ’05, won the World Cinema Jury Prize: Documentary and the World Cinema Cinematography Award: Documentary at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival.

The film tells the story of U.S. Marine Nathan Harris and follows him from the start of his 2009 Afghanistan tour to his return and rehabilitation in the United States.