Michael Dumiak in the Architectural Record:

A sunny morning at the new Haus der Forschung in Vienna brings more than another day’s work. Through a system of mirrors, prisms, and fiber cables, sunlight itself is funneled into the foyer. Snaking through the Forschung ceiling is the latest experiment in heliostatic lighting—bringing the sun inside the building.

Heliostats are mirror arrays that track the sun, following preprogrammed sequencing directions from software or responding to exterior-mounted sensors. Sunlight can be reflected from a large, high-quality, žroof-mounted circular tracking mirror to a secondary mirror or mirrors, and then directed inside a building, letting sunshine appear as if it were provided by electrical sources.

The mirrors have been around for decades. However, only recently, with increased interest in green energy and CNC cutting processes, which have reduced the costs of machining specialty optics, have architects begun to seriously consider using the mirrors for light and energy sources.

More here.  [Incidentally, I thought of the same idea to pipe sunlight from the roof of my building into my too-dark apartment last year, and even researched the prices of fiber optic cable bundles, but abandoned the project after calculating that the concentrated sunlight would melt the cables–I couldn’t afford too large a bundle–and be a fire hazard.]

From The Harvard Gazette:

Hunter-gatherer instincts set loose in a world of modern food abundance are at the root of today’s obesity crisis, according to a Harvard psychologist. Deirdre Barrett, psychologist with the Harvard-affiliated Cambridge Health Alliance and assistant clinical professor of psychology in Harvard Medical School’s Psychiatry Department, says food manufacturers and advertising campaigns play to our Paleolithic instincts.

Our bodies evolved in a world where salt, sugar, and fat were scarce and desirable. We live, however, in a word where those substances are not only plentiful, but in which images of them in different forms are beamed at us constantly. “You really can’t just trust your instincts or listen to your body unquestioningly in today’s environment,” Barrett said. Barrett, who has treated many cases of eating disorder over her years in the field, said she advocates radical change for those seeking to eat healthier and lose weight. Simply cutting down on unhealthy french fries or sugary snacks requires more willpower, she said, than does eliminating them entirely: more painful in the first few days but ultimately easier to maintain. Barrett’s advice comes in her latest book, “Waistland,” published in July. Barrett said in an interview Tuesday (June 26) in her Cambridge home that for years she looked for a book that said what she felt needed to be said. Finally, she wrote it herself.

More here.

From The Guardian:

In episode two of Nigel Hamilton’s scintillating biography, our hero has left behind the hick town of Hope, Arkansas – and his humble roots – and travelled, with his lady, to Pennsylvania Avenue. It has not been a journey without incident (or other ladies strewn in various states of undress across his path). But Mrs C, as ever, has stood by her man – which is when she enjoys most traction over this slovenly, sheepish political genius. So here we are in the White House, sorting out office space. That’s the Vice-President’s room over there. Oh no it’s not! says Hillary angrily. That’s the office you said was mine, ‘you motherfucker’. Whereupon, before stunned witnesses, the 42nd President of the United States calls his wife a ‘fucking bitch’. Yes: we have transition … The shambles begins.

Hamilton’s speciality, with a few nods to psychoanalysis, lies not just in telling us what happened but why and how it happened. As he follows William Jefferson Clinton from straitened beginnings to glorious success, he tries to burrow inside the man, to think as he thought, to see through his eyes the decisions that had to be made. But, frankly, the first hundred rotten days were, and remain, an almost inexplicable mess.

Clinton has huge charm, great gifts and high intelligence.

More here.

Tyche Hendricks in The San Francisco Chronicle:

As night fell and migrants at the shelter behind the Holy Family Catholic Church prepared to bed down, Roberto Valenzuela threw his powerful baritone into the old folk song “Cielito Lindo.”

“Ay, ay, ay, ay!”

The other men — most of whom had landed at the shelter after being caught by the U.S. Border Patrol as they tried to cross into the United States — paused to listen: “Canta y no llores!” Valenzuela sang. “Sing and don’t cry!”

Valenzuela, 47, had made his living for years as a mariachi in Phoenix and Los Angeles. He would head north illegally for a few months and be set for the rest of the year. But by late fall, the Border Patrol had caught him twice and he planned to try crossing once more before heading home to Huachinera, two hours south.

More here.

Steve Rose in The Guardian:

Why are so many architects snapping up ‘land’ in Second Life, the virtual world with almost eight million residents?

It is a boom-town like no other in history. In less than four years, Second Life, the virtual metropolis where anyone can become a “cyber citizen” simply by logging on, has grown from nothing to a city four times the area of Manhattan, frequented by nearly eight million people. Its population is spiralling and real-estate prices are going through the roof as its virtual land is sold to users for Linden dollars, which can now actually be exchanged for US dollars.

It is one of the web’s most extraordinary creations. At first glance, SL, as most residents call it, resembles a computer game – a 3D landscape you navigate with your own customised character or “avatar” – but there are no dragons to slay or points to score. In fact, it’s not clear what you’re supposed to do at all. Most citizens engage in decidedly first-life activities: socialising, shopping, gambling, even sex. One thing SL is well primed for, however, is building: anyone can make anything, from teapots to skyscrapers.

The essential building blocks are “prims”, short for primitives. These are geometric solids – cubes, spheres, cones – that can be dragged off a template then stretched, positioned, sized, textured and combined to form anything imaginable. Unlike the real world, there’s no gravity, weather, site preparation, sloppy workmanship, or planning committees to worry about. It should be an architect’s paradise.

More here.

Budapest, Hungary: A giant millipede rests on a log on ‘bug day’ at the city’s zoo.

Photograph: Attila Kisenedek/AFP

More here.

Richard Dawkins has started a social network over at his website, Richard Dawkins Social.

Welcome to the RichardDawkins.net Social Network!

We hope this new site feature will help you meet and connect with like-minded people from around the world or in your area.

A dominant strategy for checkers, in news@nature:

Long-time world checkers champion Marion Tinsley consistently bested all comers, losing only nine games in the 40 years following his 1954 crowning. He lost his world championship title to a computer program in 1994 and now that same program has become unbeatable; its creators have proved that even a perfectly played game against it will end in a draw.

Jonathan Schaeffer and his team at the University of Alberta, Canada, have been working on their program, called Chinook, since 1989, running calculations on as many as 200 computers simultaneously. Schaeffer has now announced that they have solved the game of American checkers, which is played on an 8 by 8 board and is also known as English draughts.

The team directed Chinook so it didn’t have to go through every one of the 500 billion billion (5 * 10^20) possible moves. Not all losing plays needed to be analysed; instead, for each game position, Chinook needed to work out only a move that would allow it to win. In the end, only 1/5,000,000 of the moves were computed.

In Argentina, echoes of LIP? Production for Use? kibbutzim? or Mondragon? Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis in The Nation:

There were many popular responses to the crisis, from neighborhood assemblies and barter clubs, to resurgent left-wing parties and mass movements of the unemployed, but we spent most of our year in Argentina with workers in “recovered companies.” Almost entirely under the media radar, workers in Argentina have been responding to rampant unemployment and capital flight by taking over traditional businesses that have gone bankrupt and are reopening them under democratic worker management. It’s an old idea reclaimed and retrofitted for a brutal new time. The principles are so simple, so elementally fair, that they seem more self-evident than radical when articulated by one of the workers in this book: “We formed the cooperative with the criteria of equal wages and making basic decisions by assembly; we are against the separation of manual and intellectual work; we want a rotation of positions and, above all, the ability to recall our elected leaders.”

The movement of recovered companies is not epic in scale–some 170 companies, around 10,000 workers in Argentina. But six years on, and unlike some of the country’s other new movements, it has survived and continues to build quiet strength in the midst of the country’s deeply unequal “recovery.” Its tenacity is a function of its pragmatism: This is a movement that is based on action, not talk. And its defining action, reawakening the means of production under worker control, while loaded with potent symbolism, is anything but symbolic. It is feeding families, rebuilding shattered pride, and opening a window of powerful possibility.

Arendt might have fucked a philosopher, but she didn’t want to be registered as one. That was her final position. But what her work on Plato, Kant, Hegel, and Marx (the main subject of the first half of her book) offers is a philosophy that has what she in her teens brought to Heidegger’s stale world: fresh air. The essays in The Promise of Politics are not musty or suffocating from dread—but very much alive, affirmative, and, at times, as easy on the mind as a breeze on the skin. Nietzsche once spoke of philosophizing with a hammer; Arendt philosophized with an open window.

more from The Stranger here (via Bookforum).

Among the collected letters of Patrick White, the sole Australian to be awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, is a 1977 note to the editorial director of the Viking Press. “There’s an Australian writer at last who I think has it,” White wrote. “His name is David Malouf, his origins mostly Lebanese, part London-Jewish. He was born and grew up in Queensland. He is a poet, who wrote a kind of autobiographical novel called ‘Johnno,’ which to me is one of the best books about Australia. He has now written another very imaginative novel based on Ovid in exile. It will not be the big money-spinner, but it is literature and perhaps Viking can still afford that.”

more from the LA Times here.

From Nature:

Grey matter in the brains of people with bipolar disorder is destroyed with each manic or depressive episode. This was the finding of an MRI study of 21 patients with bipolar disorder, a mental illness marked by successive episodes of mania followed by deep depression. The patients’ brains were scanned at either end of a four-year period, during which time each patient had at least one episode and some as many as six. In all cases, the amount of grey matter in the temporal lobe and the cerebellum decreased compared to the grey matter in control subjects. These areas of the brain are associated with memory and coordination.

Patients that had suffered more episodes over the four years had the most marked difference in the amount of grey matter that had disappeared.

More here.

It’s truly a French specialty. I do not know a ranking French politician who has not considered at one time or another writing and publishing a book, one with ideological and often even literary ambitions, as an essential rite of passage in his or her career.

Is it the prestige, more acute in France than elsewhere, accompanying the creation of a book, a real book, and not merely a political platform?

Is it the link between the pen and the sword, between politics and literature, which has been particularly close ever since the Encyclopedists and the French Revolution?

Could it be because of writers who, like Chateaubriand, dreamed of being in the cabinet? Or those who, like Malraux, wanted to be renowned for their use of arms as much as for the books they wrote? Or could it be the opposite, Stendhal’s syndrome of lamenting the battle of Waterloo, since because of it he missed by a few days being named prefect of Le Mans?

more from the NYT Book Review here.

From The Washington Post:

As an Egyptian pharaoh, Ptolemy V was a glorified placeholder. Just to preserve his royal title and protect his status as a god, he gave tax breaks to priests and performed favors for two sacred bulls, worshipped by commoners, named Apis and Mnevis. We know this because it is written, in three languages, on the Rosetta Stone.

Before the Rosetta Stone was found by Napoleon’s army in 1799, Ptolemy’s ploys were understandably forgotten, yet he wasn’t the only pharaoh whose feats were unknown: Even the legacy of Ramses, builder of the great temple at Karnak, had sunk into hieroglyphic obscurity. For many centuries, nobody could read hieroglyphics.

As Cambridge professor John Ray writes in The Rosetta Stone, the fractured granite slab “gave us back one of the longest and most romantic chapters of our history, a chapter which had been thought lost beyond recall.” Ray’s brief book evokes the process of rediscovery, succinctly capturing the story of the stone’s recovery and decipherment and passionately, albeit unoriginally, arguing for the slab’s iconic status. Like Ptolemy V, the Rosetta Stone is of accidental significance.

More here.

Yu Rongfu in China Now.

“Either Chinese characters die or China is doomed.”

The author of these words-penned in the same ideographic text he wished to see scrapped—was none other than the writer and rebel Lu Hsun. Lu was one of China’s greatest 20th century writers, its most influential promoter of vernacular fiction, and a key proponent of the New Writing movement of the 1930s.

Although often remembered for donning multiple hats-medical student, artist, activist and political icon-few would associate the author of The Diary of a Madman with the proposed eradication of China’s most unique contribution to the world’s linguistic heritage–the more than 55,000 ideographs (hanzi) that make up the Chinese written language…

Like other reformers, Lu Hsun therefore called for a “Latinized” vernacular phonetic system to replace hanzi entirely, thus expediting a system whose goal was to effect a crucial expansion in literacy and a leveling of the unfair linguistic advantage of the undemocratic literati.

Michael Balter in ScienceNOW Daily News:

The fight over modern human origins is heating up. A new study of thousands of human skulls claims to confirm genetic evidence that our species arose in Africa and then spread over the globe. But some researchers say that an alternative scenario has not been ruled out.

Researchers have long debated two opposing hypotheses for modern human origins. According to the Out of Africa hypothesis, our ancestors appeared in Africa about 200,000 years ago and then replaced all other human species, including Homo erectus and the Neandertals, with little or no interbreeding. The multiregional hypothesis holds that modern humans emerged from populations of “archaic” hominids in Africa, Europe, and Asia that evolved locally but also exchanged genes. Numerous genetic studies support the single-origin model, finding that the genetic diversity of today’s human populations is greatest in Africa and decreases steadily with distance from that continent. The idea is that diversity declined because each group of migrants founded a new population, creating genetic bottlenecks. But some researchers see traces of mixing between moderns and archaics in the genetic data.

Joshua Cohen looks at the question, in Christine Sypnowich, ed., The Egalitarian Conscience:Essays in Honour of G. A. Cohen.

Is there a human right to democracy? My answer, in brief, is ‘no’. Five interconnected claims will play a role in my argument for this conclusion:

1. Justice requires democracy.

2. Human rights are a proper subset of the rights founded on justice: so a society that fully protects human rights is not ipso facto just.

3. A conception of human rights is part of an ideal of global public reason: a shared basis for political argument that expresses a common reason that adherents of conXicting religious, philosophical, and ethical traditions can reasonably be expected to share.

4. That conception includes an account of membership, and human rights are entitlements that serve to ensure the bases of membership.

5. The democracy that justice requires is associated with a demanding conception of equality, more demanding than the idea of membership associated with human rights.

An underlying thought that runs through the argument is that democracy is a demanding political ideal. The thesis that there is a human right to democracy—while it may seem to elevate democracy—threatens to strip away its demanding substance.

In the Chronicle of Higher Ed:

Along with his intellectual legacy, a voluminous paper trail of Derrida’s thought remains. Most of those papers — 116 boxes and 10 oversized folders taking up 47.8 linear feet — are housed at the University of California at Irvine. Derrida, who held a professorship at Irvine, had, more than a decade before his death in 2004, chosen the university’s library as the final resting place for his manuscripts. But there are more papers that remain in the office and attic of his house outside Paris, including his later writings, letters to colleagues, books from his personal library, and so on.

Last fall the university sued Derrida’s widow and his children after they refused to turn over the remainder of his papers. It was a startling move, considering the almost casual way in which the deal was struck: Neither Derrida’s initial gift of his papers to Irvine, nor an amended version of it, was witnessed by a lawyer or notary public. The dispute between Derrida’s heirs and the university had gone on in secret for more than two years. The lawsuit brought it into the open and, at the same time, infuriated scholars who were close to him.

Until this year, Zbigniew Herbert was hardly known, if at all, by English-speaking readers. An excellent selection of his Selected Poems, translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Peter Dale Scott in 1968 and reprinted in 1986, was almost impossible to find. We can be grateful that Ecco Press has brought out a long-overdue edition of Herbert’s Collected Poems, which include the Milosz-Scott translations with new translations by Alissa Valles. Herbert, who won the T.S. Eliot Prize in 1995, is a titan of not only Polish poetry, but of twentieth-century European poetry. His celebrated alter ego, Mr. Cogito, ranks as the one of the most original characters in modern poetry. Mr Cogito first appeared in 1974 and Herbert added poems by or about him in every book until his last in 1998.

The name of the alter ego derives from Descartes’ famous line: “Cogito ergo sum.” (“I think, therefore, I am.”) Mr. Cogito is ironic, droll, humble, self-deprecating, stubborn, valiant and philosophical. Many of the Mr. Cogito poems treat grand philosophical and metaphysical themes with a down-to-earth, no-nonsense attitude that is at once hilarious and profound; such poems include, among others, “Mr. Cogito Reflects on Suffering,” “Mr. Cogito on Virtue,” “Mr. Cogito and Pure Thought,” “Mr. Cogito’s Reflections on Redemption,” “Mr. Cogito and the Imagination,” and “Mr. Cogito Tells of the Temptation of Spinoza.”

more from Brooklyn Rail here.

Of all the great English poets, Dryden must be the least enjoyed. Once honoured ‘rather in the stiffness than in the strength of his eminence’, he was soon ‘laid carefully away among the heroes’, according to Mark Van Doren, the critic who is still, nearly a century on, the most persuasive of his would-be resurrectors. The same melancholy afflicts his most authoritative modern biographer, James Anderson Winn: ‘Any candid teacher of English literature must admit that many students find little pleasure or stimulation in those few selections from Dryden we now ask them to read.’ The difficulty is not confined to students, or to recent times. ‘I admire his talents and Genius highly, but his is not a poetical Genius,’ Wordsworth said; perhaps predictably, since his notion of poetry differed from Dryden’s as much as Romantic ‘imagination’ differed from Augustan ‘wit’. But here is Dr Johnson: ‘to write con amore . . . was . . . no part of his character.’ Verse starved of parental love may well have problems attracting affection later. T.S. Eliot took a charitable interest in the case in 1921, but his contribution is rather reminiscent of Mr Brocklehurst in Jane Eyre enjoining the Lowood girls to be glad of their burned breakfast: ‘We cannot fully enjoy or rightly estimate a hundred years of English poetry unless we fully enjoy Dryden.’

more from the LRB here.