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

The Higgs boson holds the promise of beginning to finally elucidate the fundamental origins of mass. "In 2008, scientists fired up the Large Hadron Collider and began searching for the answer to one of the biggest questions in physics: Why do particles have mass? Now, 50 years after Peter Higgs first proposed what became known as the Higgs boson, the various researchers at CERN have the utmost certainty that they have found it." http://worldsciencefestival.com/events... // "The Standard Model describes the fundamental particles from which we, and every visible thing in the universe, are made, and the forces acting between them. All the matter that we can see, however, appears to be no more than about 4% of the total. A more exotic version of the Higgs particle could be a bridge to understanding the 96% of the universe that remains obscure. “We have reached a milestone in our understanding of nature,” said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer. http://phys.org/news... "Scientists believe that in the first billionth of a second after the Big Bang, the universe was a gigantic soup of particles racing around at the speed of light without any mass to speak of. It was through their interaction with the Higgs field that they gained mass and eventually formed the universe." http://www.firstpost.com/world... - Amira

See also ‎Richard Feynman on the Weirdness of Physical Reality http://www.theatlantic.com/technol... #Higgsboson - Amira

"Consider that you can see less than 1% of the electromagnetic spectrum and hear less than 1% of the acoustic spectrum. As you read this, you are traveling at 220 km/sec across the galaxy. 90% of the cells in your body carry their own microbial DNA and are not “you.” The atoms in your body are 99.9999999999999999% empty space and none of them are the ones you were born with, but they all originated in the belly of a star. Human beings have 46 chromosomes, 2 less than the common potato. The existence of the rainbow depends on the conical photoreceptors in your eyes; to animals without cones, the rainbow does not exist. So you don’t just look at a rainbow, you create it. This is pretty amazing, especially considering that all the beautiful colors you see represent less than 1% of the electromagnetic spectrum." - Amira

"Kunio Katou's "La Maison en Petits Cubes" has won the Best Animated Short Film category at the 81st Annual Academy Awards on Sunday night (22.02.2009). This was the first Academy Award nomination and win for Katou. Katou's 12-minute work uses paper drawings and 2D computer graphics to tell the story of a grandfather's memories as he adds more blocks to his house to stem the flooding waters. "La Maison en Petits Cubes" ("Tsumiki no Ie" or House of Blocks) is the second Japanese animated work to win a major Oscar." https://vimeo.com/12422039# Music by Kenji Kondo. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - Amira

"Why do we like music? Our culture immerses us in it for hours each day, and everyone knows how it touches our emotions, but few think of how music touches other kinds of thought. It is astonishing how little curiosity we have about so pervasive an "environmental" influence. What might we discover if we were to study musical thinking? (...) Something has a "meaning" only when it has a few; if we understood something just one way, we would not understand it at all. That is why the seekers of the "real" meanings never find them. This holds true especially for words like 'understand'. That is why sonatas start simply, as do the best of talks and texts. The basics are repeated several times before anything larger or more complex is presented." - Amira

"Argentinean independent publishers Eterna Cadencia released an anthology of new Latin authors using special ink that disappears once it comes in contact with sun and air, completely disappearing within two months time after opening the book. “The Book That Can’t Wait” makes for an interesting approach to motivate book buyers to read books more promptly, giving first-time authors the attention they need to survive. “Books are very patient objects,” reads the words streamed across the video’s screen. “We buy them, and then they wait for us to read them. Days, months, even years. That’s OK for books, but not for new authors. If people don’t read their first books. They’ll never make it to a second.” http://mashable.com/2012... "Who wants a book that will self-destruct in 60 days? Turns out, Argentine readers do. Eterna Cadencia sold out of its entire first disappearing-ink printing in a single day. (...) The thinking goes, if new authors don't get read, they can't continue -- but if they do get read, they can find footing on a career path of writing. "This time we had the guarantee that our new authors were read." http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketc... - Amira

I'd probably buy one of those just for the novelty of it. After that I'd go back to the kind of books that don't leak letters :) - Eivind

besides, if I were an author, I'd not like my book disappeared forever after two months! :-) - Amira

Abstract: "In this paper I discuss the question: what comes first, physics or information? The two have had a long-standing, symbiotic relationship for almost a hundred years out of which we have learnt a great deal. Information theory has enriched our interpretations of quantum physics, and, at the same time, offered us deep insights into general relativity through the study of black hole thermodynamics. Whatever the outcome of this debate, I argue that physicists will be able to benefit from continuing to explore connections between the two." - Amira

See also: Vlatko Vedral: Decoding Reality: the universe as quantum information http://ff.im/F0IwR - Amira

it was a great book - babeuf(donata donata'dan)

"Each philosopher is a node in the network and the lines between them (or edges in the terminology of graph theory) represents lines of influence. The node and text are sized according to the number of connections. The algorithm that visualises the graph also tends to put the better connected nodes in the centre of the diagram so we the most influential philosophers, in large text, clustered in the centre. It all seems about right with the major figures in the western philosophical tradition taking the centre stage. (...) A shortcoming however is that this evaluation only takes into account direct lines of influence. (...) This is a fantastic resource which stores structured information extracted from wikepdia in a database that accessible through the web. Among other things it stores all of the information you see in an infobox on a Wikipedia page." - Amira

it's like their social graph... as if they were all on Twitter concurrently :-) - Adriano

:-) - Amira

It also lists the List of lists of lists. - miroslav

There is a book by Umberto Eco "La Vertigine della Lista" (published in English as "The Infinity of Lists") http://www.ft.com/intl... about how does one face infinity in attempt to grasp the incomprehensible through making lists, catalogs, etc. - Amira

"Ran Ortner has created the illusion of water coming out of the walls. It’s almost impossible to not be fooled by this illusion and, no matter how many times I try to see a 2D surface, I can only ever see the sea. Ortner’s fascination with water began during his romantic childhood in Alaska. As his portfolio describes his unlikely beginnings, “He and his family lived in an isolated log cabin, with no running water, a wood fire for heat and a grass airstrip for a driveway. To escape the brutal winters, Ran and his family would take their single engine Cessna “Ragwing” on 3-4 month adventures from Alaska to South America. On these expeditions, Ran would turn to the open expanse of the sea to escape the confines of his unconventional childhood. When Ran was eighteen, he left home and began surfing the waves off the coasts of California and Mexico. While surfing he was able to consider both the wondrous and perilous conditions of life. Overwhelmed by what he saw and felt, he turned to art as a form of exploration.” Ortner describes his works as a collision of opposing forces. “Every day I enter my studio, prepare my materials and, as James Joyce said, “go for the millionth time to encounter the reality of the experience.”I attempt through painting to sustain my encounter with life’s biting reality.” For more information on Ortner’s works: http://www.ranortner.com/#home... - Amira

"Sistine Chapel is famous for its architecture and its decoration that was frescoed throughout by Renaissance artists including Michelangelo, Sandro Botticelli, Pietro Perugino, Pinturicchio and others. Under the patronage of Pope Julius II, Michelangelo painted 1,100 m2 (12,000 sq ft) of the chapel ceiling between 1508 and 1512. The ceiling, and especially The Last Judgment (1535–1541), is widely believed to be Michelangelo's crowning achievement in painting." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - Amira

Oh, I know. I'm just saying I didn't know the surrounding architectural bits were so ornate. - Spidra Webster

"Neurons come in an astounding assortment of shapes and sizes, forming a thick inter-connected jungle of cells. Now, UCL neuroscientists have found that there is a simple pattern that describes the tree-like shape of all neurons. Neurons look remarkably like trees, and connect to other cells with many branches that effectively act like wires in an electrical circuit, carrying impulses that represent sensation, emotion, thought and action. Over 100 years ago, Santiago Ramon y Cajal, the father of modern neuroscience, sought to systematically describe the shapes of neurons, and was convinced that there must be a unifying principle underlying their diversity. Cajal proposed that neurons spread out their branches so as to use as little wiring as possible to reach other cells in the network. Reducing the amount of wiring between cells provides additional space to pack more neurons into the brain, and therefore increases its processing power." - Amira

"New work by UCL neuroscientists, published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has revisited this century-old hypothesis using modern computational methods. They show that a simple computer program which connects points with as little wiring as possible can produce tree-like shapes which are indistinguishable from real neurons – and also happen to be very beautiful. They also show that the shape of neurons follows a simple mathematical relationship called a power law. Power laws have been shown to be common across the natural world, and often point to simple rules underlying complex structures. Dr Herman Cuntz (UCL Wolfson Institute for Biomedical Research) and colleagues find that the power law holds true for many types of neurons gathered from across the animal kingdom, providing strong evidence for Ramon y Cajal’s general principle." - Amira

"A 2/3 power law: L = (3/4π)1/3 × V1/3n2/3 where n is the number of dendritic sections to make up the tree, L is the total length of these sections, and V is the total volume" http://www.kurzweilai.net/simple-... "A scaling law derived from optimal dendritic wiring" by H. Cuntz, A. Manthy, M. Hausser: http://www.pnas.org/content... - Amira

"Alan Turing created a new world of science and technology, setting the stage for solving one of the most baffling puzzles remaining to science, the mind-body problem, with an even shorter declarative sentence in the middle of his 1936 paper on computable numbers: "It is possible to invent a single machine which can be used to compute any computable sequence." (...) A good way of understanding Turing's revolutionary idea about computation is to put it in juxtaposition with Darwin's about evolution. (...) What Darwin and Turing had both discovered, in their different ways, was the existence of competence without comprehension. (...) Turing, like Darwin, broke down the mystery of intelligence (or Intelligent Design) into what we might call atomic steps of dumb happenstance, which, when accumulated by the millions, added up to a sort of pseudo-intelligence. (...)" - Amira

"We still haven't arrived at "real" understanding in robots, but we are getting closer. That, at least, is the conviction of those of us inspired by Turing's insight. The trickle-down theorists are sure in their bones that no amount of further building will ever get us to the real thing. They think that a Cartesian res cogitans, a thinking thing, cannot be constructed out of Turing's building blocks. And creationists are similarly sure in their bones that no amount of Darwinian shuffling and copying and selecting could ever arrive at (real) living things. They are wrong, but one can appreciate the discomfort that motivates their conviction. Turing's strange inversion of reason, like Darwin's, goes against the grain of millennia of earlier thought. If the history of resistance to Darwinian thinking is a good measure, we can expect that long into the future, long after every triumph of human thought has been matched or surpassed by "mere machines," there will still be thinkers who insist that the human mind works in mysterious ways that no science can comprehend." - Amira

"All observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar” [Benjamin Whorf] (...) The crucial point is that everything that we see in the right half of our vision is processed in the left hemisphere of our brain, and everything we see in the left half is processed by the right hemisphere. And for most of us, the left brain is stronger at processing language. So perhaps the language savvy half of our brain is helping us out. (...) Among those who were the fastest at identifying the odd color, English speakers showed no left brain / right brain distinction, whereas Korean speakers did. It’s plausible that their left brain was attuned to the distinction between yeondu and chorok. (...)" - Amira

"Language is somehow enhancing your left brain’s ability to discern different colors with different names. Cultural forces alter our perception in ever so subtle a way, by gently tugging our visual leanings in different directions. (...) As infant brains are rewiring themselves to absorb our visual language, the seat of categorical processing jumps hemispheres from the right brain to the left. And it stays here throughout adulthood. Their brains are furiously re-categorizing the world, until mysteriously, something finally clicks into place." - Amira

until the imports of crayons in 1917, the word for "blue" and "green" in Japanese was the same. - Adriano

"An installation of beads on a fishing line under a glass ceiling. The installation projects as if the time has stopped and so has the rain drops in the mid air." http://www.crookedbrains.net/2009... - Amira

Awesome - Sir Vali

"In Year 1, India and China were home to one-third and one-quarter of the world's population, respectively. It's hardly surprising, then, that they also commanded one-third and one-quarter of the world's economy, respectively. Before the Industrial Revolution, there wasn't really any such thing as lasting income growth from productivity. In the thousands of years before the Industrial Revolution, civilization was stuck in the Malthusian Trap. If lots of people died, incomes tended to go up, as fewer workers benefited from a stable supply of crops. If lots of people were born, however, incomes would fall, which often led to more deaths. That explains the "trap," and it also explains why populations so closely approximated GDP around the world. The industrial revolution(s) changed all that. Today, the U.S. accounts for 5% of the world population and 21% of its GDP. Asia (minus Japan) accounts for 60% of the world's population and 30% of its GDP. So, one way to read the graph, very broadly speaking, is that everything to the left of 1800 is an approximation of population distribution around the world and everything to the right of 1800 is a demonstration of productivity divergences around the world -- the mastering of means of manufacturing, production and supply chains by steam, electricity, and ultimately software that concentrated, first in the West, and then spread to Japan, Russia, China, India, Brazil, and beyond." - Amira

Ignore Malthus himself, he was clearly wrong, but many good researchers (if you don't want use scientists) were wrong and still made contributions to their fields. Economics is tough, because people are not 100% rational, and you cannot predict changes to taste and preference. But the reason mathusian economics works so well is because it is so simple. Taste and preference does not matter. It simply states populations will grow until a steady state of population will be reached. Just like the natural sciences, there is a carrying compacity for any given species. Malthusian economics incorporates the fact that an economy will grow until it can only support on average two births per woman. When the economy hits that level it at a steady state until something dirupts, like the black plague. Now the issue today even if an economy is labeled Malthusian, it is not as no country is a closed system today. The US has a tendency to help out in other countries, exporting food, money and technologies so the steady state is never maintained. Even North Korea takes in food help on occasion. - Dario Gomez

"In a new study, a computer program shows how listeners drive music to evolve in a certain way. Although the resulting strains are hardly Don Giovanni, the finding shows how users' tastes exert their own kind of natural selection, nudging tunes to evolve out of noise. (...) Bioinformaticist Robert MacCallum of Imperial College London was working with a program called DarwinTunes, which he and his colleagues had developed to study the musical equivalent of evolution in the natural world. The program produces 8-second sequences of randomly generated sounds, or loops, from a database of digital "genes." In a process akin to sexual reproduction, the loops swap bits of code to create offspring. "Genetic" mutations crop up as new material is inserted at random. The "daughter" loops retain some of the pitch, tone quality, and rhythm of their parents, but with their own unique material added. (...)" - Amira

so cool, thanks :-) - Amira

"One reason that Eurasian civilizations dominated the globe is because they came from a continent that was broader in an east–west direction than north–south (...) a modelling study has found evidence to support this 'continental axis theory'. Continents that span narrower bands of latitude have less variation in climate, which means a set of plants and animals that are adapted to more similar conditions. That is an advantage, says Diamond, because it means that agricultural innovations are able to diffuse more easily, with culture and ideas following suit. As a result, Diamond's hypothesis predicts, along lines of latitude there will be more cultural homogeneity than along lines of longitude. (...)" - Amira

"The researchers found that if a country had a greater east–west axis than a north–south one, the less likely it was for its indigenous languages to persist. The relationship isn't straightforward, but the model suggests that Mongolia, which is about twice as wide as it is tall, would have 5% fewer indigenous languages than Angola, which is roughly square. Meanwhile, Peru — about twice as tall as it is wide — would be predicted to have 5% more persistent languages than Angola. (...) Greater cultural diversity is also known to be associated with outcomes such as lower levels of economic growth and higher probabilities of violence. (...) [The study] further supports the idea that human history and cultural evolution are governed by general ecological and biogeographical rules." - Amira

"Humans seem to have an instinct for music. Certain songs have a quality that makes us want to tap our toes and sing along. We can’t quite say what makes good music, but we know it when we hear it. Sheet music, which tells musicians very precisely which notes to play and when, provides little clue to that mystical ingredient, but Dmitri Tymoczko [a composer in residence at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study] has devised a new way to map music that aims to do just that. (...) Using non-Euclidean geometry and a complex figure, borrowed from string theory, called an orbifold (which can have from two to an infinite number of dimensions, depending on the number of notes being played at once), Tymoczko’s system shows how chords that are generally pleasing to the ear appear in locations close to one another, clustered close to the orbifold’s center. Sounds that the ear identifies as dissonant appear as outliers, closer to the edges. The system “allows you to translate these half-formed intuitive understandings into very precise, clear language.” - Amira

"The whole point of making these geometric spaces is that, at the end of the day, it helps you understand music better. Having a powerful set of tools for conceptualizing music allows you to do all sorts of things you hadn't done before." (...) "You could create new kinds of musical instruments or new kinds of toys," (...) "But to me," Tymoczko added, "the most satisfying aspect of this research is that we can now see that there is a logical structure linking many, many different musical concepts. To some extent, we can represent the history of music as a long process of exploring different symmetries and different geometries." Understanding music, the authors write, is a process of discarding information." http://www.princeton.edu/main... - Amira

"Stephen Hawking has said: "We should look for evidence of a collision with another universe in our distant Past." Some experts believe that what we call the universe may only be one of many. Is there any conceivable way that we could ever detect and study other universes if they exist? Is it even falsifiable? This was a key question Hawking was was asked in an interview with the BBC. "Our best bet for a theory of everything is M-theory --an extension of string theory," Hawking continued. "One prediction of M-theory is that there are many different universes, with different values for the physical constants. This might explain why the physical constants we measure seem fine-tuned to the values required for life to exist." It is no surprise that we observe the physical constants to be finely-tuned. If they weren't, we wouldn't be here to observe them. One way of testing the theory that we may be one of many universes would be to look for features in the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB) which would indicate the collision of another universe with ours in the distant past. The circular patterns within the cosmic microwave background shown above suggest that space and time did not come into being at the Big Bang but that our universe in fact continually cycles through a series of "aeons," according to University of Oxford theoretical physicist Roger Penrose, who says that data collected by NASA's WMAP satellite supports his idea of "conformal cyclic cosmology". (...) - Amira

"[Penrose] does not believe that space and time came into existence at the moment of the Big Bang but that the Big Bang was in fact just one in a series of many, with each big bang marking the start of a new "aeon" in the history of the universe." The core concept in Penrose's theory is the idea that in the very distant future the universe will in one sense become very similar to how it was at the Big Bang. Penrose says that "at these points the shape, or geometry, of the universe was and will be very smooth, in contrast to its current very jagged form. This continuity of shape, he maintains, will allow a transition from the end of the current aeon, when the universe will have expanded to become infinitely large, to the start of the next, when it once again becomes infinitesimally small and explodes outwards from the next big bang. Crucially, he says, the entropy at this transition stage will be extremely low, because black holes, which destroy all information that they suck in, evaporate as the universe expands and in so doing remove entropy from the universe." - Amira

"Carlos Montoya (1903–1993) was a prominent Flamenco guitarist and a founder of the modern-day popular Flamenco style of music. His unique style and successful career, despite all odds, have left a great legacy for modern day Flamenco. It is because of his pioneering work in popular Flamenco music that have allowed other great modern groups such as the Gipsy Kings to take hold in all parts of the world." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - Amira

"The fiber art of [Vermont artist] Karen Kamenetzky is a physical manifestation of the deep relationship between color and life. Kamenetzky dyes and paints silks and cottons, then cuts and collages them into brilliant landscapes inspired by biological processes, as captured through electron microscopy." - Amira

"A new study in Cognition, led by Andrew Shtulman at Occidental College, helps explain the stubbornness of our ignorance. As Shtulman notes, people are not blank slates, eager to assimilate the latest experiments into their world view. Rather, we come equipped with all sorts of naïve intuitions about the world, many of which are untrue. For instance, people naturally believe that heat is a kind of substance, and that the sun revolves around the earth. (...) Science education is not simply a matter of learning new theories. Rather, it also requires that students unlearn their instincts, shedding false beliefs the way a snake sheds its old skin. (…) As expected, it took students much longer to assess the veracity of true scientific statements that cut against our instincts. (...) We never fully unlearn our mistaken intuitions about the world. We just learn to ignore them." - Amira

"Shtulman and colleagues summarize their findings: "When students learn scientific theories that conflict with earlier, naïve theories, what happens to the earlier theories? Our findings suggest that naïve theories are suppressed by scientific theories but not supplanted by them." (...) According to Dunbar, the reason the physics majors had to recruit the D.L.P.F.C. is because they were busy suppressing their intuitions, resisting the allure of Aristotle’s error. It would be so much more convenient if the laws of physics lined up with our naïve beliefs—or if evolution was wrong and living things didn’t evolve through random mutation. But reality is not a mirror; science is full of awkward facts. And this is why believing in the right version of things takes work. Of course, that extra mental labor isn’t always pleasant. (There’s a reason they call it “cognitive dissonance.”) It took a few hundred years for the Copernican revolution to go mainstream. At the present rate, the Darwinian revolution, at least in America, will take just as long.” - Amira

See also: Why people believe in strange things http://ff.im/EQlZn and Shtulman's study http://ff.im/Yo2Jo - Amira

"A $940 million Chinese clone of one of Austria's most picturesque villages, the UNESCO World Heritage-listed Hallstatt, recently opened its doors to visitors in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong amidst some controversy. In a nation known for its skill in manufacturing knock-offs ranging iPhones to Hermes Birkins, the replica village is perhaps the most ambitious attempt at Chinese reproduction yet. The "Made in China" version of the lakeside European village known for tourism and salt includes an exact replica of its church clock tower, European style wooden houses and other properties that will be sold to investors. (...) "The moment I stepped into here, I felt I was in Europe," said 22-year-old Zhu Bin, a Huizhou resident. "The security guards wear nice costumes. All the houses are built in European style." (...) Fewer than 50 Chinese tourists visited Hallstatt in 2005, but now thousands fly to the Austrian town every year, according to officials from the Austrian delegation in China. But some Hallstadt residents remained unconvinced. "I don´t think that it is a good idea. Hallstatt is just unique with its culture and traditions. You cannot copy that. I saw a report and the photos, and the copy seems different. In my opinion it is unacceptable," said resident Karin Höll." :-) - Amira

Training for the invasion? - Ken Morley

“We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?” -- Fahrenheit 451 - Amira

"The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine, is an independent literary organization committed to a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture. It exists to discover and celebrate the best poetry and to place it before the largest possible audience." - Amira

“In any case a metaphor does not have to be new: in fact the best ones never can be. They are like the the language of love, as old as the hills and yet fresh with every new lover. The trick of the poet is to make what seemed feeble, old, dead come back to life. True metaphor is a union like love; perhaps, to use another old metaphor: a durable fire / In the mind ever burning; / Never sick, never old, never dead, / From itself never turning." -- This Is Your Brain On Poetry http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrym... - Amira

“…It is the lovers pulling down empty structures. / They wait and touch and watch their dreams / eat the morning.” — Amiri Baraka, American writer of poetry, drama, fiction, essays, and music criticism, in a poem "Like Rousseau" http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrym... - Amira

"Brodsky believed that a translator must replicate the exact meter and rhyme of the original: “verse meters in themselves are kinds of spiritual magnitudes for which nothing can be substituted. They cannot be replaced even by each other, let alone by free verse.” (...) Few translations in any century could be called “successful reinventions”—or what I would call great translations. (...) By translating, we learn how the limits of our minds can be stretched to absorb the foreign, and how thereby we are able to make our language beautiful in a new way. (...) Maybe we are best served when the translator is not a scholar but a plunderer, taking what he or she needs from the original and flinging aside the rest." - Amira

"As Pound puts it in “How to Read,” “English literature lives on translation, it is fed by translation; every new exuberance, every new heave is stimulated by translation, every allegedly great age is an age of translation.” Maybe our affinity for translation has to do with the fact that reading English is already a matter of translating, internally, between its Anglo-Saxon and Latinate elements. To appreciate Shakespeare, in particular, requires this sort of quasi-bilingualism: “No; this my hand will rather / The multitudinous seas incarnadine,/Making the green one red,” says Lady Macbeth, and the contrast between “incarnadine” and “red” brings home the disparity between the rhetoric of blood and its reality. (...)" - Amira

"50% of all the books in translation worldwide are translated from English, but less than 3% are translated into English. And that 3% figure includes all books in translation—in terms of literary fiction and poetry, the number is actually closer to 0.7%." - Amira

"A mosquito's tiny, low-weight body is the key to its ability to survive flying in the rain, according to scientists. A team from the Georgia Institute of Technology filmed the insects as they collided with raindrops. This showed that their bodies put up so little resistance that, rather than the drop of water stopping in a sudden, catastrophic splash, the mosquito simply combined with the drop and the two continued to fall together. (...) As well as helping explain how the insects thrive in damp, humid environments, the research could ultimately help researchers to design tiny, flying robots that are just as impervious to the elements. "I hope this will make people think a little bit differently about rain," (...) "If you're small, it can be very dangerous. But it seems that these mosquitoes are so small that they're safe." (...) After repeated attempts at what he described as the most difficult game of darts ever, he and his colleagues managed to hit flying mosquitoes with drops of water and capture footage of the result." - Amira

"Each droplet was between two and 50 times the weight of a mosquito, so what they saw surprised them. (...) "There is a philosophy that if you don't resist the force of your opponent, you won't feel it," (...) "That's why they don't feel the force; they simply join the drop, become one item and travel together." (...) The trick for a mosquito is that it hardly slows the raindrop down at all, and absorbs very little of its energy. Surviving the collision though, is not the end of the drama for a tiny insect. It has to escape from its watery cocoon before the droplet smashes the insect into the ground at more than 20mph. This is where the insect's body, which is covered in water-repellent hairs, seems to give it another crucial survival technique. Every mosquito studied in this experiment managed to separate itself from the water drop before it hit the ground." - Amira