Amira

"Atelier is the French word for “workshop”, and in English is used principally for the workshop of an artist in the fine or decorative arts. This is what the book presented below called “Ateliers” is based on by TempMachine and photographers Patrice Normand, Vincent Leroux, and Yannick Labrousse. Commissioned by the city of Saint-Ouen (Seine-Saint-Denis) art studios, they took photographs of artists’ studios located in the territory of the city. Patrice Normand accentuates the gesture of creation by revealing a choreographic series, Vincent analyses the relation between the artist and his own place of creation. Finally Yannick deals with the disappearance of the artist and with the appearance of the work of art." http://the189.com/photogr... - Amira

"A team of Swiss researchers thinks it has created an algorithm capable of tracking almost anything -- from computer viruses to terrorist attacks to epidemics -- back to the source using a minimal amount of data. The trick is focusing on time to figure out who “infected” whom. No, Vanilla Ice isn’t dead — and if he had access to a new algorithm from Swiss researcher Pedro Pinto, the Ice Man could go all techno-ninja and track down who started the rumor claiming he was. That’s because Pinto and his colleagues at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne have developed an algorithm for finding the source of such rumors, as well as viruses (physical and digital) and other maladies, even across highly complex networks. Their method, according to an abstract of a paper just published in Physical Review Letters, is ideal for situations where there is relatively little data to work with, and is “based on the principles used by telecommunication towers to pinpoint cell phone users.” Essentially, the algorithm starts by looking at a small collection of points within a network and working back from there to determine the origin, kind of like how investigators can zero in on a cell phone’s location using triangulation. The more connections, or observers, a particular point has, the fewer that are needed to track down the source point." - Amira

tracked down the original source :-) http://prl.aps.org/abstrac... - Adriano

"Cuban-style salsa, also known as Casino, is a form of salsa dance that originated in Cuba. Dancing Casino is an expression of popular social culture; Latin Americans consider casino as part of social and cultural activities centering around their popular music. The origins of the name Casino are derived from the Spanish term for the dance halls where a lot of social Salsa dancing was done in Cuba during the mid-20th century and onward. Historically, Casino traces its origin as a partner dance from Cuban Son dancing, and its rhythmic body motions from Afro-Cuban Rumba heritage. (...) Culturally, Casino is danced as an interplay between male and female gender and feeling the music ("Sabor") as its main ingredients. Much of the interplay of Casino style dancing is based on the broader Latin cultural context with emphasis on sexual interplay, teasing and everyday experience. (...) Casino is danced in three points which makes up the circular motion as couple face each other in intricate patterns of arms and body movement. This is distinctive from the North American Salsa styles which is danced in a slot (two points) and linear positions as taught by the North American and European dance studios." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - Amira

"There was little serious investigation of the psychological structure or neurological and biological underpinnings of religious belief that determine how religion actually causes behavior. And that’s a problem if science aims to produce knowledge that improves the human condition, including a lessening of cultural conflict and war. (...) Time and again, countries go to war without understanding the transcendent drives and dreams of adversaries who see a very different world. (...) Although this sacralization of initially secular issues confounds standard “business-like” negotiation tactics, my work with political scientist Robert Axelrod interviewing political leaders in the Middle East and elsewhere indicates that strong symbolic gestures (sincere apologies, demonstrating respect for the other’s values) generate surprising flexibility, even among militants, and may enable subsequent material negotiations. Thus, we find that Palestinian leaders and their supporting populations are generally willing to accept Israeli offers of economic improvement only after issues of recognition are addressed. (...) This is particularly promising because symbolic gestures tied to religious notions that are open to interpretation might potentially be reframed without compromising their absolute “truth.” (...)" - Amira

People are bad enough at telling you why they do what they actually do. Asking them why they might do something in a hypothetical situation is hopeless. In contrast, Robert Pape's research examines what people actually did and crunches numbers. Surveying people only collects their pretenses, not their real motives. - Bruce Lewis

"Human aesthetic processing entails the sensation-based evaluation of an entity with respect to concepts like beauty, harmony or well-formedness. Aesthetic appreciation has many determinants ranging from evolutionary, anatomical or physiological constraints to influences of culture, history and individual differences. There are a vast number of dynamically configured neural networks underlying these multifaceted processes of aesthetic appreciation. In the current challenge of successfully bridging art and science, aesthetics and neuroanatomy, the neuro-cognitive psychology of aesthetics can approach this complex topic using a framework that postulates several perspectives, which are not mutually exclusive. In this empirical approach, objective physiological data from event-related brain potentials and functional magnetic resonance imaging are combined with subjective, individual self-reports." - Amira

"Science fiction doesn't just illuminate philosophy — in fact, the genre grew out of philosophy, and the earliest works of science fiction were philosophical texts. Here's why science fiction has its roots in philosophy, and why it's the genre of thought experiments about the universe. (...) People, especially early twenty-first century people, live in a world where strangeness lurks just beyond our frame of vision — but we can't see it by looking straight at it. When we try to turn and confront the weird and unthinkable that's always in the corner of our eye, it vanishes. In a sense, science fiction is like a prosthetic sense of peripheral vision. (...) A lot of allegories are really thought experiments, trying out a set of strange facts to see what principles you derive from them. As plenty of people have pointed out, Plato's Allegory of the Cave is the template for a million "what is reality" stories, from the works of Philip K. Dick to The Matrix. But you could almost see the cave allegory in itself as a proto-science fiction story, because of the strange worldbuilding that goes into these people who have never seen the "real" world. (...)" - Amira

"The philosophy of human nature often seems to depend on conjuring imaginary worlds, whether it be Hobbes' "nasty, brutish and short" world without laws, or Rousseau's "state of nature." A great believer in the importance of science, Hobbes sees humans as essentially mechanistic beings who are programmed to behave in a selfish fashion — and the state is a kind of artificial human that can contain us and give us better programming, in a sense. So not only can you use something like Star Trek's Holodeck to point out philosophical notions of the fallibility of the senses, and the possible falseness of reality — philosophy's own explorations of those sorts of topics are frequently kind of other-worldly. Philosophical thought experiments, like the oft-cited "state of nature," are also close kin to science fiction world building. As Susan Schneider writes in the book Science Fiction and Philosophy, "if you read science fiction writers like Stanislaw Lem, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Sawyer, you already aware that some of the best science fiction tales are in fact long versions of philosophical thought experiments." - Amira

"Launched on 26 November 2011, the one-tonne, nuclear-powered, US$2.5 billion explorer will spend years exploring the planet's surface, searching for clues that Mars might have once have had - or could still have - conditions suitable for primitive, microbial life. NASA TV will broadcast the landing live from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's mission control room in Pasadena, California, along with expert commentary - and you can watch it below." - Amira

NASA - Mars Science Laboratory -- latest news http://www.nasa.gov/mission... NASA - Mars Image Gallery http://www.nasa.gov/mission... - Amira

"Since centuries, Yemenis have built their houses in a defensive way. Much of this can still be seen, and is actually one of the main attractions of the country. Traditional houses are built of stone or mud, and are generally high. In some areas, the ground floor has no windows to keep unwanted visitors out. The higher floors often have beautifully decorated stained windows in all colours. The first floor was traditionally used for storage, and higher floors for living. The top floor, or mafraz, is a communal room where Yemenis have social gatherings in the afternoon. While chewing qat, they discuss all matters people talk about: politics, family, the weather. The view from these rooms is often spectacular. In some cases, traditional houses have been made into hotels and you can experience the beauty of the houses first-hand." http://www.visualgeography.com/categor... - Amira

Amira :-) thank you for the link. Yes, great photos. - Slavomira

"To Peter Turchin, who studies population dynamics at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, the appearance of three peaks of political instability at roughly 50-year intervals is not a coincidence. For the past 15 years, Turchin has been taking the mathematical techniques that once allowed him to track predator–prey cycles in forest ecosystems, and applying them to human history. He has analysed historical records on economic activity, demographic trends and outbursts of violence in the United States, and has come to the conclusion that a new wave of internal strife is already on its way. (...) Turchin's approach — which he calls cliodynamics after Clio, the ancient Greek muse of history — is part of a groundswell of efforts to apply scientific methods to history by identifying and modelling the broad social forces that Turchin and his colleagues say shape all human societies. It is an attempt to show that “history is not 'just one damn thing after another'”, says Turchin, paraphrasing a saying often attributed to the late British historian Arnold Toynbee. (...)" - Amira

"Turchin and his allies contend that the time is ripe to revisit general laws, thanks to tools such as nonlinear mathematics, simulations that can model the interactions of thousands or millions of individuals at once, and informatics technologies for gathering and analysing huge databases of historical information. (...) Turchin and his colleagues are systematically collecting historical data that span centuries or even millennia — and the mathematical analysis of how the variables interact. (...) The researchers found that two trends dominate the data on political instability. The first, which they call the secular cycle, extends over two to three centuries. It starts with a relatively egalitarian society, in which supply and demand for labour roughly balance out. In time, the population grows, labour supply outstrips demand, elites form and the living standards of the poorest fall. At a certain point, the society becomes top-heavy with elites, who start fighting for power. Political instability ensues and leads to collapse, and the cycle begins again. (...) " - Amira

"We find that there is a consistent pattern of higher frequencies at low magnitudes, and lower frequencies at high magnitudes, that follows a precise mathematical formula.” But when it comes to predicting unique events such as the Industrial Revolution, or the biography of a specific individual such as Benjamin Franklin, he says, the conventional historian's approach of assembling a narrative based on evidence is still best." - Amira

also see the special issue of Cliodynamics, the Journal of Theoretical and Mathematical History (2011, v2(1)) http://ff.im/1241lV - Adriano

"It turns out that the pathways in your brain — the connections between neurons — are almost perfectly grid-like. It’s rather weird: If you’ve ever seen a computer ribbon cable — a flat, 2D ribbon of wires stuck together, such as an IDE hard drive cable — the brain is basically just a huge collection of these ribbons, traveling parallel or perpendicular to each other. There are almost zero diagonals, nor single neurons that stray from the neuronal highways. The human brain is just one big grid of neurons — a lot like the streets of Manhattan, minus Broadway, and then projected into three dimensions. (...) “Before, we had just driving directions. Now, we have a map showing how all the highways and byways are interconnected,” says Van Wedeen, a member of the Human Connectome Project." - Amira

“Brain wiring is not like the wiring in your basement, where it just needs to connect the right endpoints. Rather, the grid is the language of the brain and wiring and re-wiring work by modifying it.” Curiously, it seems like this network of highways and byways is laid out when we’re still an early fetus. At a very early stage, our brains form three “primal pathways” that traverse our brains horizontally, vertically, and transversely. The NIH scientists now think that those early connections act as markers, forcing the continued growth of an orderly, grid-like structure. Apparently such a setup is more amenable to evolutionary adaptation, too." - Amira

"Brooklyn, New York based artist Vik Muniz has created an impressive collection of artwork with his new Pictures of Magazine 2 series, currently on display at Galerie Xippas in Paris. Vik arranged a collage of torn pieces from various magazines, along with an extreme abundance of skill, to recreate the likeness of 9 paintings by famed artists." - Amira

“Here is 1,400 years of human culture, all the texts that survive from one of the greatest civilizations human beings have ever built—and it can all fit in a bookcase or two. To capture all the fugitive texts of the ancient world, some of which survived the Dark Ages in just a single moldering copy in some monastic library, and turn them into affordable, clear, sturdy accurate books, is one of the greatest accomplishments of modern scholarship—and one of the most democratic.” http://www.hup.harvard.edu/collect... - Amira

"Every human has limits. You can only run so fast, jump so high, and go for so long without water. But what about restrictions upon our five senses, those tools that we use to perceive and understand our surroundings? Here are ten limitations on human perception that have a direct impact on how we understand the world. (...)" VISION: Field of View, Angular Resolution, The "Visible" Spectrum; HEARING: Hearing Range, Absolute Threshold of Hearing; TASTE & SMELL: Limitations in Wine Tasting, Supertasters, Odor Detection Threshold; TOUCH: Two-point Discrimination - Amira

“Few years ago the city council of Monza, Italy, barred pet owners from keeping goldfish in curved goldfish bowls. The measure’s sponsor explained the measure in part by saying that it is cruel to keep a fish in a bowl with curved sides because, gazing out, the fish would have a distorted view of reality.” - Amira

“According to the idea of model-dependent realism, our brains interpret the input from our sensory organs by making a model of the outside world. We form mental concepts of our home, trees, other people, the electricity that flows from wall sockets, atoms, molecules, and other universes. These mental concepts are the only reality we can know. There is no modelindependent test of reality. It follows that a well-constructed model creates a reality of its own.” - Amira

“Morality is not the product of a mythical pure reason divorced from natural selection and the neural wiring that motivates the animal to sociability. It emerges from the human brain and its responses to real human needs, desires, and social experience; it depends on innate emotional responses, on reward circuitry that allows pleasure and fear to be associated with certain conditions, on cortical networks, hormones and neuropeptides. Its cognitive underpinnings owe more to case-based reasoning than to conformity to rules. (...) Hardware and software are intertwined to such an extent that all philosophy must be “neurophilosophy.” There’s no other way. (...) Morality turns out to be not a quest for overarching principles but rather a process and practice not very different from negotiating our way through day-to-day social life. Brain scans, she points out, show little to no difference between how the brain works when solving social problems and how it works when solving ethical dilemmas. (…)" - Amira

"[Churchland] thinks, with Aristotle’s argument that morality is not about rule-making but instead about the cultivation of moral sentiment through experience, training, and the following of role models. The biological story also confirms, she thinks, David Hume’s assertion that reason and the emotions cannot be disentangled. (...) Churchland describes this process of moral decision-making as being driven by “constraint satisfaction.” (...) roughly speaking it involves various factors with various weights and probabilities interacting so as to produce a suitable solution to a question.” (...) Morality doesn’t become any different than deciding what kind of bridge to build across a river. (...)" - Amira

"Our intuitions about how to get along with other people may have been shaped by our interactions within small groups (and between small groups). But we don’t live in small groups anymore, so we need some procedures through which we leverage our social skills into uncharted areas—and that is what the traditional academic philosophers, whom Churchland mostly rejects, work on. What are our obligations to future generations (concerning climate change, say)? What do we owe poor people on the other side of the globe (whom we might never have heard of, in our evolutionary past)? (...) Several universal “foundations” of moral thought: (...) That strikes her as a nice list, but no more—a random collection of moral qualities that isn’t at all rooted in biology." - Amira

how far to should neurochemistry be taken? cf. Churchland's favorite oxytocin driving emotions -- but surely logic is not exempt from neurochemical influences :-) So the question becomes: which moral imperatives are not biologically driven, and why would they be sustained in society? cf. Churchland v. Haidt. - Adriano

"In a breakthrough effort for computational biology, the world's first complete computer model of an organism has been completed, Stanford researchers reported in the journal Cell. (...) By encompassing the entirety of an organism in silicon, the paper fulfills a longstanding goal for the field. Not only does the model allow researchers to address questions that aren't practical to examine otherwise, it represents a stepping-stone toward the use of computer-aided design in bioengineering and medicine. "This achievement demonstrates a transforming approach to answering questions about fundamental biological processes," (...) "You don't really understand how something works until you can reproduce it yourself." (...)" - Amira

"Even at this small scale, the quantity of data that the Stanford researchers incorporated into the virtual cell's code was enormous. The final model made use of more than 1,900 experimentally determined parameters. To integrate these disparate data points into a unified machine, the researchers modeled individual biological processes as 28 separate "modules," each governed by its own algorithm. These modules then communicated to each other after every time step, making for a unified whole that closely matched M. genitalium's real-world behavior. (...) "This is potentially the new Human Genome Project," Karr said. "It's going to take a really large community effort to get close to a human model." - Amira

"Today in 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon while Michael Collins watched from orbit. Words can't describe the trip the astronauts -- and the nation -- took that day." - Amira

"The editors over at Edge.org asked some of the most influential thinkers in the world — including neuroscientists, physicists and mathematicians — what they believe are the most important scientific concepts of the modern era. (...) The Copernican Principal is the idea that we are not special — that the universe is much larger, and we have a rather insignificant role. "The paradox of the Copernican Principle is that by properly understanding our place, even if it be humbling, we can only then truly understand our particular circumstances. And when we do, we don't seem so insignificant after all." -- Samuel Arbesman (...) Double-blind control experiment: It's a tool that researchers use to prevent against subconscious bias when performing experiments. Understanding the need for double-blind experiments would help the rest of the population understand their inherent subjective, everyday biases, and guard against generalization and impress upon people the need for critical thinking." -- Richard Dawkins - Amira

are the essays in _This Will Make You Smarter_ a compilation of those posted online at edge.org ? - Adriano

yes, most of Brockman's books are a compilation of answers to the Edge's Annual Questions. :-) - Amira

“Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain. There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages from the very beginning, and a book of two hundred pages, which is the result of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred pages are there. Only you don’t see them.” - Amira

“It would be useful if the concept of the umwelt were embedded in the public lexicon. It neatly captures that idea of limited knowledge, of unobtainable information, of unimagined possibilities.” — David Eagleman // Illustration: “Early Scheme for a circular Feedback Circle” from Theoretische Biologie 1920. An organism creates and reshapes its own Umwelt when it interacts with the world. This is termed a ‘functional circle’. - Amira

Maitani, umwelt is rarely heard when the conversation is in English. It does appear sometimes in philosophy papers written in English, where the author is quoting an original text in German -- but hardly in-itself, even as a specialized term in italics :-) As for usage in biology and the sciences, in the last ten years, that term is extremely rare. Visualized http://goo.gl/0l5Zn -- note that adding "environment" would dwarf the terms of interest. - Adriano

"Like pyramid-building itself, the work of the humanities is to create the vessels that store our culture. In this sense, the digitization of archives and collections holds the promise of a grand conclusion: nothing less than the unification of the human cultural record online, representing, in theory, an unprecedented democratization of access to human knowledge. Equally profound is the way that technology could change the way knowledge is created in the humanities. These fields, encompassing the study of languages, literature, history, jurisprudence, philosophy, archaeology, religion, ethics, the arts, and arguably the social sciences, are entering an experimental period of inventiveness and imagination that involves the creation of new kinds of vessels—be they databases, books, exhibits, or works of art—to gather, store, interpret, and transmit culture. Pioneering scholars are engaged in knowledge design and new modes of research and expression, as well as fresh reflection and innovation in more traditional modes of scholarly communication: for example, works in print that are in dialogue with online resources." - Amira

"The ability to analyze a vast body of texts also implies a dramatic expansion of the field of questions humanities scholars can ask. (...) “Most literary historians work on a small corpus of texts where their expertise is manifest through the finesse with which they can demonstrate certain features of that corpus. Those noble skill sets are not about to disappear with a wave of the digital magic wand. On the other hand,” he explains, “there are really exciting research questions on the scale of, ‘How does the socioeconomic history of publishing as an industry relate to the production of certain literary genres?’ And when you start to operate on that scale, of course your data set has suddenly expanded: no human being can possibly read the one million books on the shelf that might document that history.” The use of computational and statistical methods becomes mandatory." - Amira

"“Where does that put us?” he asks. “Well, it puts us at a place where the boundary line between what we have traditionally called the humanities and what we have traditionally called the social sciences becomes awfully porous. For me that’s an expansion and enhancement of the humanities of the most creative and best sort.” (...) “I think the quality of scholarship that can be produced, working with vastly expanded cultural corpora, and speaking in contemporary language to expanded audiences, represents one of the great promises of our era. So for me, this is a uniquely exciting moment for the humanities, comparable to the Copernican revolution or the discovery of the New World.” - Amira

"Music is perhaps the art that presents the most philosophical puzzles. Unlike painting, its works often have multiple instances, none of which can be identified with the work itself. Thus, the question of what exactly the work is is initially more puzzling than the same question about works of painting, which appear (at least initially) to be simple physical objects. Unlike much literature, the instances of a work are performances, which offer interpretations of the work, yet the work can also be interpreted independently of any performance, and performances themselves can be interpreted. This talk of ‘interpretation’ points to the fact that we find music an art steeped with meaning, and yet, unlike drama, pure instrumental music has no obvious semantic content. This quickly raises the question of why we should find music so valuable. Central to many philosophers' thinking on these subjects has been music's apparent ability to express emotions while remaining an abstract art in some sense." - Amira

See also: "Music, Philosophy and Modernity" by Andrew Bowie | Cambridge: "Modern philosophers generally assume that music is a problem to which philosophy ought to offer an answer. Andrew Bowie's Music, Philosophy, and Modernity suggests, in contrast, that music might offer ways of responding to some central questions in modern philosophy. Bowie looks at key philosophical approaches to music ranging from Kant, through the German Romantics and Wagner, to Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Adorno. He uses music to re-examine many ideas about language, subjectivity, metaphysics, truth and ethics, and he suggests that music can show how the predominant images of language, communication, and meaning in contemporary philosophy may be lacking in essential ways. His book will be of interest to philosophers, musicologists, and all who are interested in the relation between music and philosophy." (pdf) http://wxy.seu.edu.cn/humanit... - Amira

Music "pushed to the edge of existence": Adorno, Listening, and the Question of Hope by R. Leppert (pdf) https://wiki.umn.edu/pub... // Music and Language: A Fragment by T. W. Adorno (pdf) http://ada.evergreen.edu/~arunc... - Amira

"Sizes are not to scale, but heights above the Earth's surface are accurate on a log scale (that is, each step up is double the height)." - Amira

"To what extent can one read a philosophic text, say Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit or Foucault's History of Sexuality, and interpret/translate the ideas into a painting, sculpture, drawing or other form of visual art? Are there any artists who have taken this as there modus operandi?" // "In critiques, gender theory, Freudian thought, Foucault, etc often come into play (though often at the behest of the reviewer) as a necessary part of the 'reading' of conceptual art. So, in the largest way possible, all conceptual artists (this includes pretty much all contemporary artists) could be said to be commenting on philsophical stati quo that make up our society. As for artists who specifically quote/referece particular authors - they're there. Foucault is arguably one of the most crucial figures in art history/historiography/theory, but it often doesn't come out in the artists statement, due to the expected brevity and self-reliance of thought that is usually expected. Again - it tends to be left unsaid, remaining in the background as the sort of intellectual wallpaper of artistic praxis." - Amira

See also: What are some examples of architectural works that were designed with philosophical ideas in mind? http://www.quora.com/What-ar... - Amira

"Steve McCurry, recognized universally as one of today's finest image-makers, has won many of photography's top awards. Best known for his evocative color photography, McCurry, in the finest documentary tradition, captures the essence of human struggle and joy. Member of Magnum Photos since 1986, McCurry has searched and found the unforgettable; many of his images have become modern icons. Born in Philadelphia, McCurry graduated cum laude from the College of Arts and Architecture at the Pennsylvania State University. After working at a newspaper for two years, he left for India to freelance. It was in India that McCurry learned to watch and wait on life. "If you wait," he realized, "people will forget your camera and the soul will drift up into view."" http://stevemccurry.com/biograp... // Each single set is worth a closer look... - Amira

+ - ҳ̸Ҳ̸ҳ prestige ҳ̸Ҳ̸ҳ

"Hierarchy (...) is a way of limiting complexity in the interest of both stability and evolvability. Simon argued that systems structured in this way possess a basic, competitive simplicity. (...) Take ordinary bone, for example, which is remarkably tough, yet lightweight, with properties that our technology still cannot match. The secret is hierarchy. Within bone, small molecules bind together into proteins, which then link into filaments, which in turn organize into larger structures. When a bone suffers a blow, the hierarchy provides a variety of mechanisms by which it can pass along the excess energy it absorbs, without creating lasting damage. Bone, like most other structures in biology, is not just complex, but complex in a highly organized way." - Amira

"What about structures in economics and finance? The growth of modern finance seems to have violated the principle of hierarchical structures, and with gusto. Two trends in the past 30 years — the merging of banks into huge institutions and the explosion of derivatives that link them around the globe — have made the network much less modular. We have created a vast web of interconnections with extreme complexity but little organization. And this does appear to have made the system less resilient. (...) Unlike organisms, of course, financial systems haven’t undergone evolutionary competition from which only the fit have emerged. We have little reason to expect that what exists would be anything like optimal, or even reasonable. (...) Both high concentration and high interconnectedness contribute to an “everything is linked to everything” outcome that is the very opposite of modularity, and a likely recipe for instability. Financial engineering should learn to avoid this architecture, just as surely as biology has.” - Amira

"A retired lecturer who took a DNA test to find out where his ancestors came from has been found to be directly descended from the first woman on earth, who lived 190,000 years ago. Ian Kinnaird, 72, has a genetic marker inherited from his mother that traces his ancestry to an African lineage that has not been found before in Western Europe. Researchers from Britain’s DNA, who carried out the tests, said the result meant that in genetic terms he was a “thoroughbred”, and could be described as the “grandson of Eve, or the grandfather of everyone in Britain”. They were so surprised by the results that they phoned Mr Kinnaird, a widower who lives in the far north of Scotland, to break the news to him. They told him his mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), passed through the female line, was 30,000 years old and only two genetic mutations removed from the first woman, while most men have a genome with around 200 mutations since the earliest humans. (...)" - Amira

"It is further proof that even white Anglo-Saxon Protestants are descended from a black Eve.” The project has now tested 2,000 people across the United Kingdom and most have markers that trace their ancestry back up to 3,500 years, These defined them as descendants of various groups including the earliest Britons, the Ancient Irish, Vikings, hunter gatherers and cave painters." - Amira

"Back in 1936, renowned sculptor Isamu Noguchi was in Mexico working on a 72-ft-long public mural when he hit a snag: for some reason, he couldn't precisely recall the famous formula, E=mc². Rather than risk a mistake, he decided to seek advice and wired his good friend, Buckminster Fuller — a famed architect and great admirer of Einstein — for clarification. Rather than just respond with the equation, Fuller went the extra mile and soon sent the following to his friend — a magnificent telegram in which he also explained it in 264 words." - Amira

"The Literary Map of Africa is a bio-bibliographical database, designed to be a comprehensive research and information tool on African literature. It does not focus on selected authors or national / regional literatures, nor does it follow the sometimes rigid North & sub-Saharan Africa divide; instead, the database seeks to cover the whole continent. This wider scope makes it possible for writers from different regions and countries, with varied histories and cultures, and who produce works in diverse African and European languages to be represented in one project. One objective this project hopes to fulfill is to include as many emerging writers as possible, especially those based in Africa. Many in this category of creative writers do not have a readership beyond their national boundaries and are therefore hardly represented in many bibliographies and encyclopedias." - Amira

"Researchers have begun to show that it is possible to use brain recordings to reconstruct aspects of an image or movie clip someone is viewing, a sound someone is hearing or even the text someone is reading. A new study by University of Pennsylvania and Thomas Jefferson University scientists brings this work one step closer to actual mind reading by using brain recordings to infer the way people organize associations between words in their memories. (...) About a second before the participants recalled each word, these same “meaning signals” that were identified during the study phase were spontaneously reactivated in the participants’ brains. Because the participants were not seeing, hearing or speaking any words at the times these patterns were reactivated, the researchers could be sure they were observing the neural signatures of the participants’ self-generated, internal thoughts. (...) Since the participants were instructed to say the words in the order they came to mind, the specific sequence of recalls a participant makes provides insights into how the words were organized in that participant’s memory. (...) “Each person’s brain patterns form a sort of ‘neural fingerprint’ that can be used to read out the ways they organize their memories through associations between words,” Manning said." - Amira

"The techniques the researchers developed in this study could also be adapted to analyze many different ways of mentally organizing studied information. “In addition to looking at memories organized by time, as in our previous study, or by meaning, as in our current study, one could use our technique to identify neural signatures of how individuals organize learned information according to appearance, size, texture, sound, taste, location or any other measurable property,” Manning said. (...) Our data show a direct correspondence between patterns of brain activity and the meanings of individual words and show how this neural representation of meaning predicts the way in which one item cues another during spontaneous recall. “Given the critical role of language in human thought and communication, identifying a neural representation that reflects the meanings of words as they are spontaneously recalled brings us one step closer to the elusive goal of mapping thoughts in the human brain.” - Amira