“Earlier this year an East African newspaper sent a reporter to the region of Siaya, in Kenya, near Lake Victoria, where the father of a forty-three-year-old Chicago Democrat named Barack Obama was born. News that the younger Obama was emerging as one of the brightest lights in American politics had only recently reached the area.” More here from The Atlantic Monthly.

“‘We’re living in the middle of a witch hunt and fat people are the witches,’ said Marilyn Wann of San Francisco, a militant member of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance. ‘It’s gotten markedly worse in the last few years because of the propaganda that fatness, a natural human characteristic, is somehow a form of disease.'” From CNN.

Professor Bill Mitchell gave an excellent talk today in Cambridge on campus design and how it is changing with the spread of new communication technologies like WiFi. He shared a great quote by Charles Moore when showing Gehry’s new MIT Stata Centre: “the fundamental principle of campus design should be to figure out the exact spot that the next revolution should begin.”

For more see the notes on Mitchell’s talk (thanks to blackbeltjones).

“During the past two decades… a few hardy souls have reopened the scientific study of déjà vu. They hope to nail down a persuasive explanation of the phenomenon, as well as shed light on some fundamental elements of memory and cognition. In the new book The Déjà Vu Experience: Essays in Cognitive Psychology, Alan S. Brown, a professor of psychology at Southern Methodist University, surveys the fledgling subfield. ‘What we can try to do is zero in on it from a variety of different angles,’ he says.” From the Chronicle of Higher Education.

“The world has never been overpopulated with humans in any meaningful sense. It seems, though, that it is overpopulated with theoretical fears of overpopulation. The appeal of the overpopulation myth is obvious—who doesn’t love a simple, easily graspable idea that seems to explain a great deal?” From ReasonOnline.

Book review of Do Animals Think? by Clive Wynne, and Animal Talk by Tim Friend. From Discover Magazine.

“Two years ago American scientists created life. Or did they? It all depends on what you mean by life. More specifically, it depends on whether you are prepared to regard viruses as living entities. Viruses have genes, and they replicate, mutate and evolve, all of which sounds lifelike enough. And in August 2002, a team at the State University of New York (SUNY) announced that it had made a virus from scratch, by chemistry alone.” From Prospect Magazine.

“Homosexual Activity Among Animals Stirs Debate“, from National Geographic News.

Gehry has designed a Museum of Tolerance which will be built in Jerusalem. “In the culminating segment of a film made for the Center’s facilities in Los Angeles and New York, for example, a middle-aged man says: ‘Tolerance is based on a conviction there’s room here for everybody.’ That definition is a profoundly American one, reflecting the reality of a nation with vast space and no existential threats. It sounds irrelevant, even ludicrous, in an Israeli-Palestinian context. In this country, almost no one believes that there is enough land or political power for everybody to share equitably.” From the NY Times.