From Kurzweil AI:

Elon Musk, chairman of SolarCity, America’s largest solar power provider, announced Tuesday with other SolarCity executives that the company plans to acquire Silevo, a solar panel technology and manufacturing company whose modules have “demonstrated a unique combination of high energy output and low cost. “Our intent is to combine what we believe is fundamentally the best photovoltaic technology with massive economies of scale to achieve a breakthrough in the cost of solar power.” The announcement caused solar panel stocks to skyrocket, said Forbes. Musk said the company is in discussions with the state of New York to build the initial manufacturing plant, continuing a relationship developed by the Silevo team. “At a targeted capacity greater than 1 GW within the next two years, it will be one of the single largest solar panel production plants in the world. This will be followed in subsequent years by one or more significantly larger plants at an order of magnitude greater annual production capacity.”

“SolarCity was founded to accelerate mass adoption of sustainable energy. The sun, that highly convenient and free fusion reactor in the sky, radiates more energy to the Earth in a few hours than the entire human population consumes from all sources in a year. “This means that solar panels, paired with batteries to enable power at night, can produce several orders of magnitude more electricity than is consumed by the entirety of human civilization. A cogent assessment of sustainable energy potential from various sources is described well in this Sandia paper. “Even if the solar industry were only to generate 40 percent of the world’s electricity with photovoltaics by 2040, that would mean installing more than 400 GW of solar capacity per year for the next 25 years.

More here.

He Considers His Wife's Three cats

A different nation lives within our walls, cats.
Sent from God in triplicate, easy as envoys
Of a great power, my wife’s cats enjoy the sun
As it fills each evening the bristling chaise longue.

I eye them in their un-translated power and they,
In turn, suffer me, a provincial merchant.
One rises like a green ceramic vase become liquid,
One sneezes neatly as if all the spice of Zanzibar

Had fallen upon her russet cloak. The cinnamon
Of their being fills their mistress’s room
While I, mere man, could never coax such affection,
Such ecstatic welcome, from a Callanan woman.

Only some un-Christian force, primeval nation,
Could feed upon the certainty of human loves.
Cats upon cushions; envoys whose only purpose is
To stretch, to yawn in sequence, to be luxurious.

by Thomas McCarthy
from Merchant Prince
Anvil Press, London, 2005

Leland de la Durantaye in the Boston Review:

Just over a hundred years ago the first great novel of the twentieth century was published to absolutely no fanfare. After being turned down by a host of French publishing houses—including Gallimard, on the advice of André Gide—the first volume of À la recherche du temps perdu was printed at Marcel Proust’s own expense in November 1913. Half a year later war broke out, paper was rationed, the lead used to set the book was melted down for munitions, and public attention was drawn far away from the miracles of memory related therein.

During the war Proust expanded his novel from a projected three volumes to seven. By 1919 Gide had changed his mind about this work in progress, and Gallimard proudly published its second volume. Within a Budding Grove promptly won France’s most prestigious literary prize, Le Prix Goncourt. National, then international, praise followed—in abundance. A few years later Virginia Woolf would sit down to thank a friend for sending her a slab of nougat from Saint-Tropez, but, put in mind of France by the package, she soon found herself talking only of the novel. “My great adventure is really Proust,” she wrote, “I am in a state of amazement; as if a miracle were being done before my eyes. How, at last, has someone solidified what has always escaped—and made it too into this beautiful and perfectly enduring substance? One has to put the book down and gasp. The pleasure becomes physical—like sun and wine and grapes and perfect serenity and intense vitality combined.”

One of the most striking aspects of the reception of Proust’s work is how far and how fast that serenity and vitality stretched. One might think that a novel of more than 3,000 pages in which nothing of historical note happens would have a hard time finding an audience at home, and a still harder time abroad. But it did not.

More here.

Juan Cole in Informed Comment:

Already in the past week and a half, many assertions are becoming commonplace in the inside-the-Beltway echo chamber about Iraq’s current crisis that are poorly grounded in knowledge of the country. Here are some sudden truisms that should be rethought.

1. “The Sunni radicals of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) are popular.” They are not. Opinion polling shows that most Iraqi Sunnis are secular-minded. The ISIS is brutal and fundamentalist. Where the Sunnis have rallied to it, it is because of severe discontents with their situation after the fall of the Baath Party in 2003 with the American invasion. The appearance of video showing ISIS massacring police (most of them Sunnis) in Tikrit will severely detract from such popularity as they enjoyed.

2. “ISIS fighters achieved victory after victory in the Sunni north.” While this assertion is true, and towns continue to fall to it, it is simplistic. The central government troops, many of them Shiite, in Mosul and in towns of the north, were unpopular because representatives of a sectarian Shiite regime. The populace of Mosul, including town quarters and clan groups (‘tribes’) on the city’s outskirts, appear to have risen up in conjunction with the ISIS advance,as Patrick Cockburn argues. It was a pluralist urban rebellion, with nationalists of a socialist bent (former Baathists) joining in. In some instances locals were suppressed by the fundamentalist guerrillas and there already have been instances of local Sunnis helping the Iraqi army reassert itself in Salahuddin Province and then celebrating the departure of ISIS.

3. “Iraqi troops were afraid to fight the radical Sunni guerrillas and so ran away.” While the troops did abandon their positions in Mosul and other towns, it isn’t clear why. There are reports that they were ordered to fall back. More important, if this was a popular uprising, then a few thousand troops were facing hundreds of thousands of angry urbanites and were in danger of being overwhelmed.

More here.

Rowan Ricardo Phillips in The New Republic:

An average goalscorer lives off of the mistakes of others, rather obvious mistakes like a slip by a defender, a weak attempt at a save by a goalkeeper, a panicked miskick that by fortune finds the forward’s foot. But the thrill of the goal and its relative rarity imbues the goal with the power to minimize rather obvious errors. We don’t tend to recall the miscontrolled pass that turned the ball over to the other team seconds before the vital goal was scored. It would be too much for the mind, which at its best seeks beauty and joy, not mistake and despair. Ninety percent of the glory of the game is the fruit of error. Football is the world’s game in part for this reason: the mistakes made during a game can be worth nothing or worth everything, can be wiped away as of no consequence by a mind in search of consequence or be worth, in the mind of the malevolent, taking a life. Opportunity for the average goal scorer is a cannibal act. What makes us human, that we fail, is what gives them life.

Great goalscorers score average goals, too, of course. But when the moment arrives, that moment to do the unthinkable, to bypass a physical law—that is when you get a glimpse not only into the physical marvel of these players, but also into how they read space and time. Much like when you read a great writer and gain an understanding of their sentences, what they do with incident and predicament, how they introduce a variation into a theme, so it is when we observe a great football player turn the physical—meters of space on a rectangle, centimeters of space between players, the telling spin of a ball moving through the air—into the emotional.

More here. [Thanks to Brooks Riley.]

Jonathan Sacks at the Jewish Review of Books:

We are meaning-seeking animals. And if we can no longer believe in God we will find other things to worship. Eagleton’s book is a brisk, intelligent, and provocative tour of Western intellectual history since the Enlightenment, understood as a series of chapters in the search for a God-substitute. The Enlightenment found it in reason, the Idealists in the human spirit, the Romantics in nature and culture, the Marxists in revolution, and Nietzsche in the Übermensch. Others chose the nation, the state, art, the sublime, humanity, society, science, the life force, and personal relationships. None of these had entirely happy outcomes, and none was self-sustaining.

The end result was postmodernism, a systematic subversion of meaning altogether. Postmodernism is Nietzsche without the anguish, tragedy, or will to power—all the things that made Nietzsche worth reading. Now, in place of the revaluation of values, we have their devaluation. We are surrounded by choices with no reason to choose this rather than that. Postmodern consciousness, in Perry Anderson’s phrase, is “subjectivism without a subject.” Eagleton calls it “depthless, anti-tragic, non-linear, anti-numinous, non-foundational and anti-universalist, suspicious of absolutes and averse to interiority.”

more here.

Mary Beard at The New Statesman:

One evening at a palace dinner party, in about 40AD, a couple of nervous aristocrats asked the emperor Caligula why he was laughing so heartily. “Just at the thought that I’d only have to click my fingers and I could have both your heads off!” It was, actually, a favourite gag of the emperor (he had been known to come out with it when fondling the lovely white neck of his mistress). But it didn’t go down well.

Laughter and joking were just as high-stakes for ancient Roman emperors as they are for modern royalty and politicians. It has always been bad for your public image to laugh in the wrong way or to crack jokes about the wrong targets. The Duke of Edinburgh got into trouble with his (to say the least) ill-judged “slitty-eyed” quip, just as Tony Abbott recently lost votes after being caught smirking about the grandmother who said she made ends meet by working on a telephone sex line. For the Romans, blindness – not to mention threats of murder – was a definite no-go area for joking, though they treated baldness as fair game for a laugh (Julius Caesar was often ribbed by his rivals for trying to conceal his bald patch by brushing his hair forward, or wearing a strategically placed laurel wreath). Politicians must always manage their chuckles, chortles, grins and banter with care.

more here.

Rowan Ricardo Phillips & Jonathan Wilson at Paris Review:

Thursday has turned to Monday. The World Cup has blossomed. The opening gameseemed intent on mocking any potential pleasure or faith you may have had in this tournament—but now it’s become so good, so quickly, that some people are already calling it the best World Cup they’ve ever seen. Eleven games thus far and not a single draw; the matches have been, for the most part, tightly contested. The Swiss threw in a last-gasp winner against an extremely naïve Ecuador; teams have sought to be positive, to attack, sometimes without thinking before rushing forward. But enough of that, Jonathan will no doubt be writing about England; his memoir is called Kick and Run, after all.

Almost all the big players have played up to their lofty status. Almost.

Spain, as you likely know by now, was atomized by the Netherlands to the tune of 5-1. The score flattered Spain: Holland could have, and really should have, scored a few more.

more here.

AN Wilson in The Telegraph:

Can there ever have been a book with a more dramatic publishing history than James Joyce’s Ulysses – written in abject poverty and over a period of seven years during and just after the First World War; printed in Paris (at first, just two copies); vilified as obscene; burnt and impounded at British and American docks; and smuggled like forbidden hooch? (Amusing to read here of Ernest Hemingway’s part in the smuggling.) Kevin Birmingham has a deep love of the novel, and knows everything about Joyce. His learned book is a gripping page-turner. Ulysses might have been indecent – if graphic language and an obsession with lavatorial and sexual functions is rightly so described. But, whether or not the book is indecent, the sheer decency of its early defenders will be what strikes the reader of this story.

There was demure English heiress Miss Weaver – who published early extracts from the book in an avant-garde journal, The Egoist, and gave Joyce £2,000 – a sum that provided him with an income of £350 (the equivalent today of £11,000). There were Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap in New York, whose Little Review published the first half of the novel in episodic pamphlets – until the notorious “Circe” episode was impounded by the authorities. There was the famous Sylvia Beach, proprietress of the Shakespeare and Company bookshop in Paris, who published the first edition of Ulysses in book form. There was Arnold Bennett, a novelist of such a different complexion from Joyce’s, who could see, in an early review, that Joyce was “dazzlingly original. If he does not see life whole he sees it piercingly”.

More here.

Emma Marris in Nature:

To negotiate floods and cross streams, fire ants band together — literally — linking together to form rafts and bridges in a feat of social cooperation and biophysics. Now, engineers have made a close study¹ of the ants' architectural technique, pointing the way towards new approaches for robot designers and materials scientists. To understand the properties of the ant structures, David Hu, a mechanical engineer at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, sought to observe not just the surface of the ant clumps but the structure and joints underneath. First, Hu and his team collected ant colonies — shovelling them, dirt and all, into buckets. After separating out the ants from the dirt, they then put 100 or so ants into a cup and swirled, causing the ants to form into a ball (no water necessary — they come together almost like dough). The researchers then froze the ball with liquid nitrogen so they could examine it in a micro-computed-tomography scanner to come up with a 3-D picture.

But the heat of the scanner melted the ball into a heap of dead ants. After months of experimenting with techniques to keep it together, lead author Paul Foster, now at the University of Michigan, found an unlikely source of inspiration in crack cocaine — specifically, in a method of vaporizing the drug to inhale it. “We did the same process — not with crack, but glue,” says Hu, adding that the authors decided against calling it the ‘crack-pipe method’ in their paper. The researchers heated the glue in an aluminium pot over a flame, with the frozen ant ball suspended on mesh above. The glue vapour rose and lightly coated the ants.Hu and his team found that the ants had grabbed hold of one another with adhesive pads on their legs, which they stretched out to create pockets of air. They also tended to orient themselves perpendicularly to one another, distributing their weight and creating a light, buoyant structure. The formation seems to take advantage of the ants’ different sizes, with smaller ants slotting neatly in between larger ones to add more connections. Each ant averaged 14 connections to fellow ants.

More here.

i like my body when it is with your

i like my body when it is with your

body. It is so quite new a thing.

Muscles better and nerves more.

i like your body. i like what it does,

i like its hows. i like to feel the spine

of your body and its bones,and the trembling

-firm-smooth ness and which i will

again and again and again

kiss, i like kissing this and that of you,

i like, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz

of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes

over parting flesh….And eyes big love-crumbs,

and possibly i like the thrill

of under me you so quite new
.

by e.e. cummings
from Complete Poems 1904-1962

Hello,

The editors of 3QD have made their decision. The 21 semifinalists have been winnowed down to six, and three wildcard entries added. Thanks again to all the participants.

Once again, Carla Goller has provided a “trophy” logo that our finalists may choose to display on their own blogs.

So, here it is, the final list that I am sending to Mohsin Hamid, who will select the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd prize winners: (in alphabetical order by blog name here)

1. 3:AM Magazine: Honest work: an experimental review of an experimental translation
2. 3 Quarks Daily: The Short Bus
3. Gilded Birds: Kwame Anthony Appiah
4. Los Angeles Review of Books: How Auden Was Modified in the Guts of the Living
5. Medium: The Death of the Urdu Script
6. n + 1: Everywhere and Nowhere
7. Northeast Review: Mofussil Junction
8. Paris Review: Drinking in the Golden Age
9. The Millions: The Fictional Lives of High School Teachers

We'll announce the three winners on June 23, 2014.

Good luck!

Abbas

P.S. The editors of 3QD will not be making any comments on our deliberations, or the process by which we made our decision, other than to simply say that we picked what we thought were the best posts out of the semifinalists, and added three others which we also liked.

Andrew Esiebo. Soccer World. 2006.

More here, here, and here.

Bill Gates in his blog, Gates Notes:

The car I drive to work is made of around 2,600 pounds of steel, 800 pounds of plastic, and 400 pounds of light metal alloys. The trip from my house to the office is roughly four miles long, all surface streets, which means I travel over some 15,000 tons of concrete each morning.

Once I’m at the office, I usually open a can of Diet Coke. Over the course of the day I might drink three or four. All those cans also add up to something like 35 pounds of aluminum a year.

I got to thinking about all this after reading Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization, by my favorite author, the historian Vaclav Smil. Not only did I learn some mind-blowing facts, but I also gained a new appreciation for all the materials that make modern life possible.

This isn’t just idle curiosity. It might seem mundane, but the issue of materials—how much we use and how much we need—is key to helping the world’s poorest people improve their lives. Think of the amazing increase in quality of life that we saw in the United States and other rich countries in the past 100 years. We want most of that miracle to take place for all of humanity over the next 50 years. As more people join the global middle class, they will need affordable clean energy. They will want to eat more meat. And they will need more materials: steel to make cars and refrigerators; concrete for roads and runways; copper wiring for telecommunications.

More here.

Mallory Ortberg in The Toast:

Fall in love with whoever criticized you. Don’t walk away until you’ve ruined their marriage.

Whisper their criticism every night to yourself until you have it memorized, word for word. Remember it forever. Have the words stitched into the shroud that covers your body before you’re lowered into the tomb so you and your criticism can embrace one another for eternity.

Do not rise above it. Never rise above anything. The sky is no place for a human.

Be sure not to separate the tone of the criticism from the content. If it was said ungracefully, it cannot be true. If it was said reasonably, it cannot be false.

Send an email explaining why you don’t deserve to be criticized, then another six emails after that, each one explaining the last, like a set of Russian nesting dolls that don’t think it’s your fault.

Set fire to something that was once beautiful.

More here.

Joe Gelonesi at The Philosopher's Zone:

Insects don’t seem to count for much. They bite, buzz around, and wreck picnics. They don’t trigger our moral sensibilities in the way that higher order animals might. In fact, for some, insects generate downright moral revulsion. Yet these small presences are closer to our lives than we care to consider.

Not only are they in the rooms we inhabit, but also in our food. At a special event held at the Melbourne Museum in 2012 diners were given an unusual menu. Courses at Bugs for Brunch included scorpions, mealworms and crickets. Also on the menu was a packet of polenta, described as containing ‘up to 10 insects per packet’ and a chocolate bar with ‘up to 80 microscopic insect fragments’.

In the audience that day was Launceston-based philosopher and performer Undine Sellbach. For her, it was the start of some big thinking on small things.

‘What fascinated me is that what appeared to be an event about science and philosophical argument had this very powerful other level where children and their parents were connecting disgust with ambivalence, making new connections and affinities with the bugs,’ she says.

In this moment of realisation a strange reversal came into view, which Sellbach terms an ‘upside- down ethics’.

More here.

Jason G Goldman at the BBC:

Sex, we are told, is pleasurable. Yet you probably wouldn’t think that if you waded through the scientific literature. That's because most scientific accounts of sexual behaviour rest upon evolutionary explanations rather than the more immediately relevant mental and emotional experiences. To say that we have sex because it helps us to preserve our genetic legacies would be entirely accurate, but the more fleeting, experiential, pleasurable aspects of that most basic of social urges would be missing. It would be like staring at a painting with half the colour spectrum removed from it.

One thing we have been curious about, though, is whether we are the only species that experiences sexual pleasure. The question of whether non-human animals enjoy it too is a perennial – and scientifically legitimate – question to ask.

In the last 10 to 15 years, scientific evidence has begun to accumulate that animals do experience a general sensation of pleasure – as anybody who has stroked a cat will know. In 2001, for example, psychologists Jeffrey Burgdorf and Jaak Panskepp discovered that laboratory rats enjoyed being tickled, emitting a sort of chirpy laugh outside the range of human hearing. And not only that, they would actively seek out the feeling.

But does that include carnal pleasure too? One way to find out is to study instances of sex that can't possibly result in procreation – for instance, among two or more males, or females; where one or more individual is sexually immature, or sex that occurs outside of the breeding season.

More here.