Via Good:

The man-made canopy, much like its natural counterparts, will serve as air venting ducts for nearby conservatories, collect rainwater, and provide shade to park tourists. Eleven of the Supertrees are adorned with photovoltaic cells that will harvest solar energy to light up the trees in the evening, providing energy and lighting, to conservatories throughout the park, and serving as air and temperature regulators.

More here.

From Harvard Magazine:

This past winter, a class of ’73 graduate asked me whether students still spend hours lingering over meals. He recalled his Harvard as heady and carefree, a place for reading great books and whiling away days in conversation. He had been saddened by an article in this magazine that chronicled the over-programmed lives of Harvard undergraduates today; among other alarums, it had mourned the death of the two-hour lunch. I looked up the piece (“Nonstop” ) and likewise found it upsetting. It painted Harvard undergraduates as so over-scheduled, they barely shower or sleep, let alone linger over lunch. But I knew it was not entirely accurate. At the very least, the article did not accurately reflect my Harvard experience. One of the greatest delights of my two years here has been dawdling in dining halls, listening, talking, and laughing with friends. I now realize the article bothered me in the same way I’m bothered by people who talk too much. I see in their annoying behavior a shade of something I fear I also do. Likewise, reading about Harvard’s “superstars” who “do it all” reminded me of a role I’d once tried to fill, now consciously refused, feared falling back into, and also was terrified of abandoning. I arrived at Harvard as a successful student who never slacked off. I liked to think my life well-balanced—I played sports, kept close friends, spent time with my family, and even slept. But as I outwardly checked off markers of a good, happy life, inside, I was all turmoil. That “carefree” lifestyle was a daily struggle, a purposeful act. I was terrified of “not doing everything right.” Schedule, schoolwork, social life, family, fitness, eating, clothes, even demeanor: everything had to be just so. Everyone believed I was happy-go-lucky (except maybe my parents, lone witnesses of biweekly meltdowns), and I was largely happy. But the harder I tried to be perfect, the more my perfectionism became torture.

Of course, in a sense it worked out. Affectation of effortless perfection got me into Harvard.

More here.

Steven Pinker in Edge:

Human beings live in groups, are affected by the fortunes of their groups, and sometimes make sacrifices that benefit their groups. Does this mean that the human brain has been shaped by natural selection to promote the welfare of the group in competition with other groups, even when it damages the welfare of the person and his or her kin? If so, does the theory of natural selection have to be revamped to designate “groups” as units of selection, analogous to the role played in the theory by genes? Several scientists whom I greatly respect have said so in prominent places. And they have gone on to use the theory of group selection to make eye-opening claims about the human condition.[i] They have claimed that human morailty, particularly our willingness to engage in acts of altruism, can be explained as an adaptation to group-against-group competition. As E. O. Wilson explains, “In a group, selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals. But, groups of altruistic individuals beat groups of selfish individuals.” They have proposed that group selection can explain the mystery of religion, because a shared belief in supernatural beings can foster group cohesion. They suggest that evolution has equipped humans to solve tragedies of the commons (also known as collective action dilemmas and public goods games), in which actions that benefit the individual may harm the community; familiar examples include overfishing, highway congestion, tax evasion, and carbon emissions. And they have drawn normative moral and political conclusions from these scientific beliefs, such as that we should recognize the wisdom behind conservative values, like religiosity, patriotism, and puritanism, and that we should valorize a communitarian loyalty and sacrifice for the good of the group over an every-man-for-himself individualism.

More here.

Branch Library

I wish I could find that skinny, long-beaked boy
who perched in the branches of the old branch library.

He spent the Sabbath flying between the wobbly stacks
and the flimsy wooden tables on the second floor,

pecking at nuts, nesting in broken spines, scratching
notes under his own corner patch of sky.

I’d give anything to find that birdy boy again
bursting out into the dusky blue afternoon

with his satchel of scrawls and scribbles,
radiating heat, singing with joy.
.

by Edward Hirsch
from The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems
publisher: Knopf, 2010

Adam Mann in Wired:

One of the biggest debuts in the science world could happen in a matter of weeks: The Higgs boson may finally, really have been discovered.

tantalizing hints of the Higgs turned up in December at the LHC – CERN”>Large Hadron Collider, scientists there have been busily analyzing the results of their energetic particle collisions to further refine their search.

wrote mathematician Peter Woit on his blog, Not Even Wrong. According to Woit, there are rumors of new data that would be the most compelling evidence yet for the long-sought Higgs.

The possible news has a number of physics bloggers speculating that LHC scientists will announce the discovery of the Higgs during the International Conference on High Energy Physics, which takes place in Melbourne, Australia, July 4 to 11.

The new buzz is just the latest in the Higgs search drama. In December, rumors circulated regarding hints of the Higgs around 125 gigaelectronvolts (GeV), roughly 125 times the mass of a proton. While those rumors eventually turned out to be true, the hard data only amounted to what scientists call a 3-sigma signal, meaning that there is a 0.13 percent probability that the events happened by chance. This is the level at which particle physicists will only say they have “evidence” for a particle.

In the rigorous world of high-energy physics, researchers wait to see a 5-sigma signal, which has only a 0.000028 percent probability of happening by chance, before claiming a “discovery.”

The latest Higgs rumors suggest nearly-there 4-sigma signals are turning up at both of the two separate LHC experiments that are hunting for the particle.

More here.

When an NPR Music intern admitted to paying for almost none of the 11,000 songs in her iTunes library, David Lowery, of Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven fame and lecturer for the University of Georgia's music business program, took it as an opportunity to explain the ethics of a sustainable music industry, and the debate went viral. Here's the initial blog post, with links to the professor's response and NPR's coverage of the debate below.

A few days before my internship at All Songs Considered started, Bob Boilen posted an article titled “I Just Deleted All My Music” on this blog. The post is about entrusting his huge personal music library to the cloud. Though this seemed like a bold step to many people who responded to the article, to me, it didn't seem so bold at all.

I never went through the transition from physical to digital. I'm almost 21, and since I first began to love music I've been spoiled by the Internet.

I am an avid music listener, concertgoer, and college radio DJ. My world is music-centric. I've only bought 15 CDs in my lifetime. Yet, my entire iTunes library exceeds 11,000 songs.

David Lowery's response and NPR's coverage.

Jemima Khan in New Statesman:

General Pervez Musharraf, former president of Pakistan, former chief executive of Pakistan, former army chief and former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff committee, is watching the England v West Indies Test series in his neat, unostentatious flat off the Edgware Road in west London. He has spent the past three years living between here and Dubai, in self-imposed exile, watching cricket, keeping fit, playing golf, giving lectures for large fees and plotting his return to Pakistani politics. There are no armed guards, no entourage and no fanfare. His private secretary, Anjum Choudhry, a friend I’ve known as “Jim” for many years, sits quietly and reads a paper at the dining room table as the general, in a brown suit and pink shirt, welcomes me into his home and invites me to ask him anything I want. Which, given the rumpus that resulted from my last interview with him (when, on the eve of the 2007 presidential election, he told me a number of things that he later regretted), is very trusting indeed. In this way, Musharraf differs from most politicians I have met. He is unguarded, forthcoming and at times appears disarmingly naive. He tells me of his imminent return to Pakistan to contest elections, as his housekeeper offers samosas, meethi (Pakistani sweets) and chai. “I think one can look after one’s security. There will be danger but not as much as all my family and all my friends think.” Already there have been many attempts on his life.

Musharraf thinks that politically he is in with a good chance. In October 2010, he launched a new party, the All Pakistan Muslim League, of which he is the president, and he plans to return to contest elections in Pakistan next year. He tells me that according to a recent, informal poll, conducted by a friend from Lahore, 91 per cent of respondents want him to be president and Imran Khan, the leader of Tehreek-e-Insaf (“Movement for Justice”), to be prime minister. “I strongly believe this is the feeling. Even my own supporters tell me Imran is the person who should be with us. I think we can turn the tables if we are together. If he is alone and if I am alone I don’t think we can turn the tables.”

I pass this on to Imran later. He laughs, and says: “And then did he wake up . . . ?”

More here.

Rich Benjamin in The New York Times:

His dashing ascot billowing, his flat cap perched just so (to hide his bald spot), the cleft-chinned Harry Hay had some impressive head shots. As a student at Stanford in the early 1930s, he had come out to his classmates as “temperamental,” code for “homosexual.” In 1934, having dropped out of Stanford and moved to Los Angeles to try a career in pictures — and having already begun to hone his identity as sensualist and agitator — he joined the Communist Party. Around 1936, he turned up at a Halloween party dressed as “the demise of fascism.” The other homosexual bons vivants were stumped: none were terribly turned on to politics, so none knew what Harry’s costume meant. These men, and others like them across America, had no core ideology, no political groups to join, no leaders. Hay changed that. In 1950, he helped create the Mattachine Society, the country’s first gay rights organization, and demanded that the people it represented “be respected for our differences, not for our sameness to heterosexuals.” This year, the Human Rights Campaign, America’s largest advocacy and lobbying organization for gay, bisexual and transgender rights, appointed Lloyd Blankfein, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, as the first national corporate spokesman for its same-sex marriage campaign. “Ameri­ca’s corporations learned long ago that equality is just good business and is the right thing to do,” Blankfein says in a Web video. The organization also bestowed on Goldman Sachs its 2012 “corporate equality award.”

How does a movement get from there to here — from Hay to Blankfein? Linda Hirshman’s “Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution” sets out to explain, tracing the history of gay rights from the early 20th century to the present.

More here.

Reviewed by Timothy Snyder in the New York Times Book Review:

One man volunteered for Ausch­witz, and now we have his story. In September 1940 the 39-year-old Polish cavalry officer Witold Pilecki deliberately walked into a German roundup in Warsaw, and was sent by train to the new German camp. His astounding choice was made within, and for, Poland’s anti-Nazi underground.

Poland had been destroyed a year earlier by its two powerful neighbors: eastern Poland had been annexed by the Soviet Union; the western half, including Warsaw, was taken by Nazi Germany. The Soviets overwhelmed Polish attempts at resistance in their zone, but under the Germans, officers like Pilecki managed to establish confidential networks that would come to be known as the Underground State and the Home Army. Ausch­witz was set up to render Polish opposition to German rule impossible, and the first transport from Warsaw, in August 1940, had included two of Pilecki’s comrades. He went to Ausch­witz to discover what had become of them, and what the camp meant for Poland and the world. This he learned and conveyed.

Pilecki’s report on Ausch­witz, unpublishable for decades in Communist Poland and now translated into English under the title “The Ausch­witz Volunteer,” is a historical document of the greatest importance. Pilecki was able to smuggle out several brief reports from Ausch­witz in 1940, 1941 and 1942, and wrote two shorter reports after his escape in 1943.

More here.

Nathan Thrall in The New York Times's Sunday Review:

EARLIER this month, at a private meeting with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his security advisers, a group of Middle East experts and former intelligence officers warned that a third Palestinian intifada was imminent. The immediate catalyst, they said, could be another mosque vandalized by Jewish settlers, like the one burned on Tuesday, or the construction of new settlement housing. Whatever the fuse, the underlying source of ferment in the West Bank is a consensus that the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, has reached a dead end.

Mr. Abbas’s political strategy was premised on the notion that security cooperation between the Palestinian Authority and the Israeli government would make Israel feel safer and remove its primary justification for continuing to occupy the West Bank, thereby clearing the way for a Palestinian state. Ironically, owing to the success of his efforts, many Israelis have had the luxury of forgetting that there is an occupation at all.

Thanks to the American- and European-financed peace that Mr. Abbas’s government has been keeping in the West Bank, Israelis have come to believe they can eat their cake and have it, too. A majority of citizens polled earlier this year said their state could remain Jewish and democratic without relinquishing any of the West Bank. Years of peace and quiet in Tel Aviv allowed hundreds of thousands of Israelis to take to the streets last summer to protest the high price of cottage cheese, rent and day care without uttering a word about Palestinians in the West Bank. The issue has ceased to be one of Israel’s primary security concerns. Mr. Netanyahu would have to be either politically suicidal or exceptionally forward-thinking to abandon a status quo with which a vast majority appears satisfied.

By contrast, Palestinians today see their leadership banging its head against a wall, hoping against reason that a bit more good behavior will bring about an independent state. As a result, longstanding debates over how to achieve national liberation — by comforting Israel or confronting it — have now been resolved. Palestinians of all political stripes are no longer arguing about whether to make Israel’s occupation more costly, but how.

Maria Popova in Brain Pickings:

Little about your day so far, including reading this, would be the same were it not for logician, mathematician, avid reader, and computer science pioneer Alan Turing, who was born 100 years ago tomorrow. While he remains celebrated as instrumental in the invention of the computer, responsible for coining the very concepts of “computation” and “algorithm” in their present form, Turing — who has shaped nearly every facet of our modern lives — is also one of history’s most tragic figures. Beyond his intellectual prowess, another aspect of his character permeated his intellectual contribution and ultimately led to his untimely death, yet it remains at best a silent echo.

In 1952, Turing was criminally prosecuted by the U.K. government for his homosexuality, illegal at the time, and forced to take female hormones to “cure” his unlawful “disorder” — a process known as chemical castration — as an alternative to a prison sentence. Less than two years later, shortly before his forty-second birthday, Turing committed suicide. In The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer (public library), David Leavitt offers a poignant lens on how Turing’s homosexuality factored into his intellectual and creative triumphs and tribulations:

In a letter written to his friend Norman Routeledge near the end of his life, Turing linked his arrest with his accomplishments in an extraordinary syllogism:

Turing believes machines think
Turing lies with men
Therefore machines cannot think

His fear seems to have been that his homosexuality would be used not just against him but against his ideas. Nor was his notion of the rather antiquated biblical locution ‘to lie with’ accidental: Turing was fully aware of the degree to which both his homosexuality and his belief in computer intelligence posed a threat to organized religion. After all, his insistence on questioning humankind’s exclusive claim to the faculty of thought had brought on him a barrage of criticism in the 1940s, perhaps because his call to ‘fair play’ to machines encoded a subtle critique of social norms that denied to another population — that of homosexual men and women — the right to a legitimate existence. For Turing — remarkably, given the era in which he came of age — seems to have taken it as a given that there was nothing wrong with being homosexual; more remarkably, this conviction came to inform even some of his most arcane mathematical writings. To some extent his ability to make unexpected connections reflected the startlingly original — and at the same time startlingly literal — nature of his imagination.

Inability

Seeing you off at the edge of the city, leaving forest trees behind
wandering about in neighbourhoods of an entirely different city,
on the streets
inventing the forgotten city in the layers of my mind, all over again
building new houses, new quarrels, doors and streets, all new
I think I’ve been leaving empty spaces in between

When I go back one day I see – in an empty patch
someone has dug a hole in the ground and in the rain
children of the neighbourhood could drown there
I grieve that I can’t quite invent
the city in the same way –
In every attempt some patches remain empty
where just anyone could come and dig a hole,
let thorns grow.

by Kamlesh
from Jaratkaroo
Satvahan Publications, New Delhi, 1985

Christopher Lydon interviews John Lanchester at the ever-excellent Radio Open Source:

John Lanchester has written a sprawling neo-Dickensian novelCAPITAL about London in the age of funny money and the crash of 2008. He got the germ of it five years ago, noticing a parade of “florists, dog-walkers, pilates instructors” on his own once-modest street south of the Thames, being radically made-over for bankers and the blooming investment-services class — “manifestly symptomatic,” as he says, “of a boom that would turn into a bust.” Like Bleak House or Our Mutual Friend, CAPITAL has what the Brits call a “state of the nation” feel, delivered in the voice attributed to Dickens of the “special correspondent for posterity.” But of course he’s illuminating an affliction gone global by now, describing life as lived in New York, too, or Shanghai, or Boston for that matter. One moral that Lanchester has given his tale is: “We are not in this together,” inverting the Tory slogan. In conversation he adds a touch from the Gospel of Mark: “To them that hath shall be given.” I marvel at how casino capitalism and its costs come clearer, stranger, more ridiculous, more destructive, more outrageous in fiction than in fact – how the right novels can feel truer than the news.

More here.

Via Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt at Wonders & Marvels:

It is not often that my research is topical. Most people feign polite interest when I tell them I study sixteenth-century Spanish convents. But with the recent controversy over the Catholic Church’s scrutiny of the behavior and activities of American nuns, the subject of female monasticism has enjoyed an unprecedented timeliness.

My goal in this essay is not to enter the twenty-first century polemic; I’m much more comfortable in the sixteenth century. I would offer, however, the following observation: that certain assumptions and even stereotypes undergird the remarks of some of the participants in the current debate. And here is where history can be so useful. Arguably, we root some of our modern interpretations of nuns in what we think convents were like in the premodern period.

Read more here.

Kathryn Schulz in Vulture:

Whose woods these are I think you know. Because, really, how could you not? Other than the ones where Dante got lost, they might be the most famous woods in the history of verse; certainly they are the most famous woods in American literature. I am talking, of course, about the forest in Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”

I can recall with some clarity my first encounter with those woods, which was also my first encounter with Frost. I was in the fourth grade. The poem was on the blackboard, and my teacher asked for a volunteer to read it aloud. Guess who raised her nerdy hand? “My little horse”—oh, damn; too late, I saw it coming—“must think it queer”: My classmates hooted. Eventually I finished, and we discussed the poem for a while. Then we read it aloud again, this time en masse—the way, each morning, we recited the Pledge of Allegiance.

A quarter-century later, I’m sitting at a different desk, looking at the same poem—this time in The Art of Robert Frost, a new book by British professor Tim Kendall. In the annals of Frostiana (and they are vast), Kendall’s book is an unusual hybrid, part anthology, part critical study: 65 poems with two or three pages of understated, illuminating commentary about each. It’s a good way to revisit Frost—and, per Frost, revisiting him is precisely what we should do. Kendall quotes this passage as the epigraph to his book: “A poem is best read in the light of all the other poems ever written. We read A the better to read B (we have to start somewhere; we may get very little out of A). We read B the better to read C, C the better to read D, D the better to go back and get something more out of A.”

For years the Turing Test has been used to compare humans with computers. Now sociologists are using it to compare humans with each other.

Evan Selinger in The Atlantic:

This weekend marks the centenary of Alan Turing's birth. Turing was one of the greatest computer scientist of all time. In a 1950 paper that outlined what has come to be known as the Turing Test he offered a way out of endless philosophical speculation about whether computers could ever be classed as 'intelligent.' He said that if human judges ask interview questions of a hidden computer and a hidden person and cannot tell the difference after five minutes, the computer should be considered intelligent. Nowadays, programmers compete yearly for the Loebner Prize, which is won by the computer that is most often mistaken for a human.

But the Turing Test's application is no longer limited to questions of artificial intelligence: Social scientists too are getting in on the action and using the test in a completely new way — to compare different human subjects and their ability to pass as members of groups to which they do not belong, such as religious and ethnic minorities or particular professional classes. With the Turing Test, sociologists can compare the extent to which subjects can understand people who are different from them in some way.

In the words of sociologists, what they're now studying is called “interactional expertise.” The easiest way to understand what interactional expertise entails is to contrast it with a more common idea, contributory expertise. Contributory experts are the typical array of professionals (physicists, chemists, lawyers, economists, musicians etc.) who develop specialized knowledge and skill through formal education and long experience.

Interactional experts, by contrast, are not primary practitioners.

More here.

Mohammed Hanif in Tehelka:

Sometimes fellow writers and journalists ask me how I choose whether to write in Urdu or English or Punjabi. I usually start my answer with a self-deprecating remark: I can write badly in three-and-a-half languages. Like most self-deprecating remarks this one barely conceals a boast: I read and write Urdu; I can also borrow my ideas from ancient Punjabi, unlike you posh prats who rely entirely on English. But why would someone boast about their ability to read and write in their mother tongue (Punjabi, in my case) or express themselves in their national language?

I guess you show off because most people who write in English cannot pick up a newspaper in their local language to find out what yesterday’s riot was about. It’s not their fault. They went to good schools, sometimes schools so good that the main purpose of their education was to ensure their talents remained unpolluted by local languages and cultures.

When I was growing up in Pakistan, the complete inability to read or write in your mother tongue was a prerequisite for upward mobility. Pakistan’s founding father — the self-made aristocrat Mohammed Ali Jinnah — could barely string a sentence together in Urdu, a language that he imposed on Pakistan as its national language with tragic consequences.

More here.