IN: Pyle was born to William Clyde Pyle and Maria Taylor near Dana, Indiana, on August 3, 1900. After attending local schools, he joined the United States Navy Reserve during World War I at age 17. He served three months of active duty until the war ended, then finished his enlistment in the reserves and was discharged with the rank of Petty Officer Third Class. After the war Pyle attended Indiana University, editing the Indiana Daily Student newspaper and traveling to the Orient with his fraternity brothers of Sigma Alpha Epsilon.

In 1926, Pyle, tired of working at a desk, quit his job. Over the following two years he and his wife traveled over 9,000 miles across the United States in a Ford roadster. In 1928 he returned to The Washington Daily News, and for the following four years served as the country's first and best-known aviation columnist. As Amelia Earhart later said, "Any aviator who didn't know Pyle was a nobody."  In 1932 Pyle once again became managing editor of The Washington Daily News. Two years later he took an extended vacation in California to recuperate from a severe bout of flu. Upon his return, to fill in for the paper's vacationing syndicated columnist Heywood Broun, he wrote a series of 11 columns about his stay in California and the people he had met there.  The series proved unexpectedly popular with both readers and colleagues. G.B. ("Deac") Parker, editor-in-chief of the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain, said he had found in Pyle's vacation articles "a Mark Twain quality that knocked my eye out." In 1935 Pyle once again resigned his position as managing editor to accept an offer from the Scripps-Howard Alliance to write his own national column. Traveling the highways and back roads of the country and the Americas, he wrote about the unusual places and people he met. Selected columns were later published posthumously in Home Country (1947).  Perpetually dissatisfied with his writing, Pyle suffered from bouts of deep depression. He continued his daily column until a few months after the United States entered World War II on December 8, 1941.
QUESTION: Why did he like writing about aviation
IN: Norman Ernest Borlaug (March 25, 1914 - September 12, 2009) was an American agronomist and humanitarian who led initiatives worldwide that contributed to the extensive increases in agricultural production termed the Green Revolution. Borlaug was awarded multiple honors for his work, including the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal. Borlaug received his B.Sc. in Forestry in 1937 and Ph.D. in plant pathology and genetics from the University of Minnesota in 1942.

Initially, Borlaug's work had been concentrated in the central highlands, in the village of Chapingo near Texcoco, where the problems with rust and poor soil were most prevalent. He realized that he could speed up breeding by taking advantage of the country's two growing seasons. In the summer he would breed wheat in the central highlands as usual, then immediately take the seeds north to the Yaqui Valley research station near Ciudad Obregon, Sonora. The difference in altitudes and temperatures would allow more crops to be grown each year.  Borlaug's boss, George Harrar, was against this expansion. Besides the extra costs of doubling the work, Borlaug's plan went against a then-held principle of agronomy that has since been disproved. It was believed that to store energy for germination before being planted, seeds needed a rest period after harvesting. When Harrar vetoed his plan, Borlaug resigned. Elvin Stakman, who was visiting the project, calmed the situation, talking Borlaug into withdrawing his resignation and Harrar into allowing the double wheat season. As of 1945, wheat would then be bred at locations 700 miles (1000 km) apart, 10 degrees apart in latitude, and 8500 feet (2600 m) apart in altitude. This was called "shuttle breeding".  As an unexpected benefit of the double wheat season, the new breeds did not have problems with photoperiodism. Normally, wheat varieties cannot adapt to new environments, due to the changing periods of sunlight. Borlaug later recalled, "As it worked out, in the north, we were planting when the days were getting shorter, at low elevation and high temperature. Then we'd take the seed from the best plants south and plant it at high elevation, when days were getting longer and there was lots of rain. Soon we had varieties that fit the whole range of conditions. That wasn't supposed to happen by the books". This meant that the project would not need to start separate breeding programs for each geographic region of the planet.
QUESTION: What does Double wheat season mean?
IN: Indigenous languages of the Americas are spoken by indigenous peoples from Alaska and Greenland to the southern tip of South America, encompassing the land masses that constitute the Americas. These indigenous languages consist of dozens of distinct language families, as well as many language isolates and unclassified languages. Many proposals to group these into higher-level families have been made, such as Joseph Greenberg's Amerind hypothesis. This scheme is rejected by nearly all specialists, due to the fact that some of the languages differ too significantly to draw any connections between them.

Although both North and Central America are very diverse areas, South America has a linguistic diversity rivalled by only a few other places in the world with approximately 350 languages still spoken and an estimated 1,500 languages at first European contact. The situation of language documentation and classification into genetic families is not as advanced as in North America (which is relatively well studied in many areas). Kaufman (1994: 46) gives the following appraisal:  Since the mid 1950s, the amount of published material on SA [South America] has been gradually growing, but even so, the number of researchers is far smaller than the growing number of linguistic communities whose speech should be documented. Given the current employment opportunities, it is not likely that the number of specialists in SA Indian languages will increase fast enough to document most of the surviving SA languages before they go out of use, as most of them unavoidably will. More work languishes in personal files than is published, but this is a standard problem.  It is fair to say that SA and New Guinea are linguistically the poorest documented parts of the world. However, in the early 1960s fairly systematic efforts were launched in Papua New Guinea, and that area - much smaller than SA, to be sure - is in general much better documented than any part of indigenous SA of comparable size.  As a result, many relationships between languages and language families have not been determined and some of those relationships that have been proposed are on somewhat shaky ground.  The list of language families, isolates, and unclassified languages below is a rather conservative one based on Campbell (1997). Many of the proposed (and often speculative) groupings of families can be seen in Campbell (1997), Gordon (2005), Kaufman (1990, 1994), Key (1979), Loukotka (1968), and in the Language stock proposals section below.
QUESTION:
What were some of the popular languages being spoken?