Saṃsāra

The Value of Shade

There are an abundance of precedents for how the ambient temperature of a place can be improved, most of them realised with some careful contextual planning (laying out routes according to local breezes, planting shade trees, modifying building sizes and/or orientations, and so forth), but also some semi-passive applications such as having a channel with running water along the curb of a pedestrian path.  The US seems to lean toward photovoltaics for shade, minimising the value of æsthetics.  Perhaps in some areas trees require too much water or regular care?

• In Andalusia, Spain, the main shopping pedestrian road, Calle Marqués de la Larios in Málaga’s Old Town, is covered with large shading canvas canopies to lower the ambient temperature below.  (There is another such street in Madrid).  Málaga’s history stretches back to Roman and pre-Roman times.  It is also famous as the home of Picasso.
• Tree-shaded steps leading up to the Acropolis, an ancient citadel located on a high rocky outcrop above the city of Athens and containing the remains of several ancient buildings of great architectural and historic significance, the most famous being the Parthenon.  The word acropolis comes from two Greek words meaning “edge” and “city”.
• Tree-shaded path leading up to the Alhambra, which Moorish poets describe as “a pearl set in emeralds” in allusion to the colour of its buildings and the woods that surround them.  Today, the dense nightingale-filled woods are English elms brought by the Duke of Wellington in 1812.

• New Mexico is the sunniest state in the US.  Rio Grande jewelry suppliers has set up a solar grid that doubles as a car park shade (getting into your car after several hours in the New Mexico summer sun can actually be painful).  The grid generates more then 1 megawatt when at full capacity (from close to 5 acres of solar panels) and the company (of course) uses it to help run their facility.
• The Morris County Improvement Authority has embarked on a 3.2 MW renewable energy programme pilot that encompasses 19 public school and county government buildings.  Under the programme, known as the Morris Model, 14,000 solar panels are being installed at participating school and county government buildings.  When completed, the total project will result in an energy savings of more than $3.8 million for participants.  This is the Mennen Sports Arena parking lot (near where I lived in New Jersey).
• Dell commissioned a new solar-shaded parking structure of “solar trees” for their Texas headquarters.  The installation has 516 individual solar panels producing more than 130 KW of solar power.  On top of offering shade to 50 parking spaces and avoiding 145,000 pounds of greenhouse gas emissions per year, the new installation is also connected to two stations where electric vehicles can plug in for a quick charge.  [Why do only 50 cars get covered?  Are they for executives?  Or are they to encourage employees to get to work early so they can grab one of the limited spots?  If this is such a great idea, why doesn’t everyone get a covered parking spot?]

• A tree shaded parking area at the Alhambra.  The Spanish know how to do “cool” right.
• S Street in California’s capital.  Tree planting is effective in moderating elevated temperatures of surface parking lots as well as in providing associated benefits such as stormwater runoff mitigation.  The Sacramento Parking Lot Ordinance, passed in 1983, has a 50% shading requirement for off-street surface parking lots within 15 years of their development.  Sacramento’s shading requirement mandates tree planting — not only is “tree planting one of the most cost-effective means of mitigating urban heat islands and associated expenditures for air conditioning”, tree planting is “considered essential to moderating the heat gained by asphalt parking lots”.  [Note how many SUVs are in this lot.  I’ve read that even the best engineered car is no match for a car just 1/3 larger.  It’s perhaps understandable how people might justify their decision to buy an SUV — though it means more fuel used and more heat generated.]
• It’s the middle of summer and the temperature is 103°F.  Given a choice between a parking spot in the blazing sun and one in the shade, which one would most people choose?  A shaded parking lot is good for business: studies show shaded lots lead to higher profits for local businesses and contribute to overall customer satisfaction.  With parking lots occupying about 10% of land in many cities, consider the following benefits of shade: it reduces pavement temperature by 36°F; it decreases parking lot runoff containing metals, oil and grease: it lowers the temperature inside vehicles by 47°F; it reduces fuel tank temperatures by 7°F.

A lot of people in the comments for the solar-panel-covered parking spots said they thought EVERY parking lot should look like that.  But my vote goes to the tree-covered ones — trees add moisture to the air and bring in birds and butterflies.  I hope the MIT scientists who have mimicked photosynthesis will focus on using photosynthetic energy to power electric vehicles — then maybe we’ll see more greenery.

The Endeavour’s Final Flight

On 21 September 2012, NASA’s space shuttle Endeavour landed in Los Angeles, California, after completing its final flight, a cross-country farewell journey with flyovers and stops in Texas, Arizona, and several locations in California.  Endeavour completed its last space voyage in June 2011, and has since been undergoing a decommissioning process in Florida, preparing to be delivered to the California Science Center.  Now that the shuttle is in Los Angeles, it’ll undergo a few weeks of preparation before being carefully towed through city streets to its new home.  Shuttle Enterprise is at the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum in New York.  Shuttle Discovery is at the National Air and Space Museum Steven F Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia.  And shuttle Atlantis is at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida.  [Everyone else felt left out.]

• The space shuttle Endeavour, atop NASA’s Shuttle Carrier Aircraft (SCA), flies over the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
• Atop the SCA, it flies over Houston, Texas.
• It soars over the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco during the final portion of its tour of California.  (This is an example of great framing.  And great PR.)

• Escorted by two F18 jets, the shuttle flies by the Hollywood sign en route to Los Angeles International Airport.
• Endeavour conducts a flyover before making its final touchdown at Los Angeles International Airport.  (The air is almost thick enough for swimming.)
• And now, it’s mated to the Over Land Transporter (OLT), after being removed from the SCA, in readiness for its final trip to the science centre.

• NZ foreign trusts pay no tax on overseas income and don’t have to tell anyone what they own, how much money they make, or who benefits from payouts.  Before aspiring Kiwi tax dodgers start dialing their accountants: foreign trusts can’t be used by anyone living in NZ.  But non-Kiwis with a lot of money they want to hide from certain tax authorities may find NZ foreign trusts just the ticket.  NZ tax consultants actively market them to wealthy global elites as evidenced by the following phrases: “NZ is not seen as a ‘tax haven’ country so the use of a NZ [foreign] trust is generally not perceived as a means to avoid tax.”  “It should be noted that NZ has no central trust registry, thus offering a considerable degree of privacy/secrecy and flexibility.”  “Many governments require declaration of all income earned by their taxpayers and/or assets held by them.  By using a NZ foreign trust, you can avoid disclosing assets without having to lie.”  [No sources were given for these sites.]  Trust beneficiaries don’t legally have ownership of trust assets — one can shift assets to a trust, then legitimately claim not to own them while continuing to get benefit.  [I would suppose it depends on what sorts of questions get asked.]  NZ foreign trusts gained usefulness from 1988 tax changes made to stop Kiwis escaping taxes by putting their assets into an overseas trust — the trusts began being taxed according to the domicile of the settlor rather than the trustee.  At first, foreigners settling a NZ trust could do so in perfect secrecy because a trust is technically just a private arrangement — not only was there no register of trusts, there was no requirement to tell the government about it as long as it had no NZ income.  An overseas taxman was therefore unable to probe — the IRD didn’t have any information and had no power to get it.  The Australian Taxation Office came to suspect that lots of Aussies were using NZ trusts to avoid tax, so new disclosure rules were enacted in 2006.  Since then, trusts have to tell the IRD the trust name, trustee, and whether the settlor is Australian.  Trustees keep financial details on income and distributions and names of settlor and beneficiaries ready to give the IRD on demand.  IRD routinely passes Australians’ details to their tax office but the rest stay relatively undisturbed — IRD won’t ask for details unless an overseas taxman requests it by the trust’s name (so then he must already know it exists).  [And there’s just NO WAY around this?]  The IRD says there are approximately 8,000 foreign trusts registered since 2006; how much they hold in assets is unknown but it’s thought that some individual trusts hold billions of dollars.  Foreign trusts pay about $20 million in fees annually to NZ administrators.  One consultant says he estimates that “US$21 trillion of unreported private financial wealth is owned via tax havens”.  Combine foreign trusts with a shell corporate trustee and your get a virtually impenetrable web protecting the wealth of the super-rich from onerous taxes.
• Tax Exemptions and Free Speech: We can agree that a right to free speech is part of the status quo of a liberal democratic state.  It follows that any tax exemption that restricts or compromises one’s right to free speech would be unlikely to pass muster.  The case Speiser versus Randall 357 US 513 (1958) involves a provision of the Californian Constitution that provided property tax exemptions to WWII veterans, if they signed an oath not to advocate the overthrow of the US or California governments.  This provision was ruled unconstitutional because it essentially amounted to a fine on a certain class of people for exercising their right to free speech.  The argument for this conclusion is as follows:

  1.  A right to free speech is part of the baseline (or status quo) in a liberal democratic state.
  2.  Selective changes to tax policy from the status quo must be assessed in terms of just compensation and equal relative gain.
  3.  Changes to tax policy that impact upon the right to free speech must be assessed in terms of just compensation and equal relative gain.
  4.  A tax exemption conditional upon professing certain political opinions necessarily redistributes wealth from those of one set of views to those of another.
  5.  This essentially fines certain people for exercising their right to free speech.
  6.  There is no corresponding compensation or share of gains for the people who lose out.
  7.  Therefore, this tax exemption is illegitimate.

• [More:] Tax Exemptions and Religious Liberty: The free speech example was a warm-up.  It highlights the basic structure of the analysis undertaken whenever there’s a selective tax exemption.  It can be applied it to cases involving tax exemptions for religious organisations.  First, a general argument.

  8.  A right to religious liberty (RL) is part of the baseline (or status quo) in a liberal democratic system.
  2.  Selective changes to tax policy from the status quo must be assessed in terms of just compensation and equal relative gain (from previous argument).
  9.  Changes to tax policy impacting on religious beliefs and practices must be assessed in terms of just compensation and equal relative gain.
10.  The right to RL includes the right to practice different religions or no religion at all.
11.  A tax exemption for particular types of religious organisation, in a religiously pluralist society, has serious redistributive consequences — it takes money from non-believers, or it privileges one religion over another.
12.  So you cannot have a discriminatory tax exemption for religious organisations, that is, one that privileges one type of religion or fails to include non-believers.
A tax exemption for educational religious organisations, when there’s already a publicly-funded secular system of education, might be deemed legitimate because it merely equalises the religious and secular systems of education — unless, say, for religious reasons, the religious organisation doesn’t permit interracial dating among students.

Rent-A-Womb

At A clinic in Hyderabad, southern India, a surrogate mother is carrying Octavia and Dominic Orchard’s second child.  The British couple know only the sparest of details about the woman who is pregnant with their baby.  They know she’s 31 and has children of her own, her name, and that for reasons not explained — perhaps she has been widowed or deserted — she has no husband.  For the duration of her pregnancy she’ll live with other surrogates, away from her home and family [her children will miss her], in a primitive dormitory within the clinic.  It goes without saying that she’s desperately poor.  Other than that, their surrogate’s life is a mystery to Octavia and Dominic.  They chose not to become acquainted with the woman carrying the baby created from Octavia’s egg and Dominic’s sperm.  “Our baby has no biological connection to the surrogate,” says Octavia.  “Her womb is just the receptacle in which it is being carried.  Perhaps it sounds cold and rather clinical, but this is a business transaction — there’s no altruism involved on the surrogate’s part: she’s being paid to have our baby.  It’s a contractual arrangement.  We don’t want to get emotionally involved with our surrogate’s story.  I’m not interested in her background.  I don’t want to be part of her life.  She speaks a different language.  She lives in a world culturally, economically and socially so remote from ours that the distance between us is unbridgeable.”

India’s burgeoning surrogacy industry — there are about 1,000 clinics providing surrogates for “fertility tourists” — has been compared to a baby factory in which children are made-to-order for affluent couples (who often use donated eggs and sperm to create their baby and an Indian donor to carry it, choosing everything from their baby’s eye colour to its height.  Some of these couples are homosexuals who try to make the more of their opportunity for parenthood.)  Estimates suggest 1,000 such births for British couples occur in India each year.  When their baby is born in November, Octavia and Dominic will fly to Hyderabad.  “We’ll not be at the birth — it’s a private thing as far as I’m concerned,” she says.  “I’m assuming that once the baby has popped out and been bathed, he or she will be handed to us.  The surrogate will see the baby, but she won’t breastfeed it or cuddle it.”

This puts gender equality on a whole new level.  Presumably the baby’s gut bacteria will come from the birth mother rather than his/her genetic mother.  This could have a huge influence on his/her overall health, susceptibility to diabetes, and slimness.  Presumably the genetic mother will need to feed the baby sterile formula, so it will then be only the birth mother’s microbiota community which will have a chance to take hold.  Did the birth mother need to take antibiotics at some point?  This could also be an important data point for the new parents to know.  Or this: "In one experiment, Swiss scientists created a lineage of mice with a genetically reinforced anti-inflammatory signal.  Then the scientists inflamed the pregnant mice.  The babies emerged fine — no behavioural problems.  The take-away: Control inflammation during pregnancy, and it won’t interfere with fœtal brain development."  Or this: A population-wide study from Denmark spanning two decades of births indicates that infection during pregnancy increases the risk of autism in the child.  Hospitalisation for a viral infection, like the flu, during the first trimester of pregnancy triples the odds.  Bacterial infection, including of the urinary tract, during the second trimester increases chances by 40% as does low-grade infection.  Other links are asthma, rheumatoid arthritis, metabolic syndrome, obesity, celiac disease, and [other] autoimmune disorders in the mother.  Mothers of autistic children often have unique antibodies that bind to fœtal brain proteins.  I personally think Octavia is missing important knowledge by not wanting to know anything at all about her child’s birth mother.  Luckily for them, people living in environments that resemble our evolutionary past, full of microbes and parasites, don’t suffer from inflammatory diseases as frequently as middle-class Westerners do.  Indian birth mothers may naturally boost their offsprings’ immune systems.

• The ejaculation that led to your conception contained 100s of millions of unique sperm — you’re the one in half a billion that made it to fertilisation.  Your parents met and conceived YOU, instead of finding other mates or none at all.  And this applies to your parents, your grandparents, your great-grandparents, and on and on – each the winning sperm of hundreds of millions of particular ejaculations, particular unions, all of which could easily NOT have happened.  So should you feel lucky to be alive?  Let’s see… “Utility” is an economic concept similar to happiness but broader, the ultimate emotional evaluation of whether things are good or bad.  It doesn’t rest on a purely hedonistic model of life but may be got from a variety of transactions and experiences.  Broadly speaking, utility is a function of “income” (in this sense income need not be monetary as it may include items not available directly on any market, such as affection from others and self-respect).  In studying how utility responds to changes in income, economists focus on middle-class individuals who own houses, earn money from investments, and buy insurance.  It seems a person receives lots of utility from his first dollar — even the first $1,000 or $10,000 – but not nearly as much from the 40-thousandth and even less from the millionth.  (Modern American utility functions of income apparently top out around $75,000 annually.)  What this means is dollar for dollar, gains are less valuable to average suburbanites than losses are painful.  They’d rather pay $1,000 a year in car insurance (say) than take a 1-in-10 chance at a $10,000 accidental loss during that year.  This is called risk aversion.
• Many people (the miserable and poor) behave in ways inconsistent with risk aversion; they focus on now and the immediate future at the expense of the far future — they’re “extreme future discounters”.  These people don’t “properly” consider the future because their lives are so painful, they’re effectively suicidal.  Poor people look around and rationally weigh costs and benefits of different actions, but choose to gamble on long shots precisely because their current situations aren’t worth sustaining.  They’d just as soon die as remain stuck where they are and so gamble what little they have in hopes of reaching a more meaningful place.  Don’t just think gangs and lotteries and crime and crack — think people pursuing acting or singing careers, going to law or business schools, marrying in haste, or even having children.  Such people bet everything, including the future, on winning a particular gamble.  The utility function pictured at left has a lot of space beneath it and is above the x axis even at the origin, reflecting a judgement that even at zero income, a person gets great value from being alive.  But at right is a utility function for a person who only begins to get positive utility at income I_D.  For all incomes below I_D, the person experiences negative utility — that is, he suffers.  Some people derive little measurable utility increase even from incomes far greater than zero.  If utility over all future time intervals, appropriately discounted, is less than zero, suicide becomes an option.  Or big bets.  Or drugs to help pass the time in case better days arrive.  Suicidal people are insensitive to the potential for great losses, and are only motivated by the possibility of a BIG win.  (In 2009, more than 37,000 Americans took their own lives and that figure is believed to be “terribly under-counted”.)
• The most important policy implication of the “mathematics of misery” –— that many people appear to attach zero value to their lives — is that procreation becomes suspect.  If people don’t highly value their lives, then they haven’t benefitted by being brought into existence.  A life that produces zero utility in the immediate present and zero or negative utility for the foreseeable future is hardly the kind of precious gift that justifies procreation.  Yet it’s likely that a substantial portion of the population of the world lives just this kind of life.  Someone whose utility function is negative for all time intervals would’ve been better off remaining unborn.  A second policy implication is a need for greater compassion in providing “palliative care” to people whose only incentive to remain alive is uncertainty.  More than anything, a human utility function is a function of social belonging — that’s the ultimate point not only of income, but of intelligence, beauty, and other material and non-material goods: these may be traded for social belonging.  (Providing others with what they want is the opposite of being a burden and helps one to belong.)  Within a group or class, we like to go up, but we HATE going down.  Each person sees a huge drop-off in utility when considering the loss of his present group belonging.  This has little to do with absolute material welfare — losing one’s social group and status can be worse than death.  A person born into a wealthy social group that has few opportunities for belonging may be in a worse position than a person born into poverty but with many opportunities for belonging.  Wealthy effectively-suicidal people start out with more initial income — they have more to gamble with — but they have a higher mark to reach for success.  It isn’t clear which effect predominates.  Compassion where possible is helpful.

• The New York Stock Exchange produces up to 2,000 gigabytes of data per day that must be stored for years.  It is estimated that more than 1.8 trillion gigabytes of digital information were created globally last year.  To support all that digital activity, there are now more than 3,000,000 data centres of widely varying sizes worldwide.  Nationwide in the US, data centres used about 76 billion kilowatt-hours in 2010, or roughly 2% of all electricity used that year.  The Indexed Web contains at least 9.34 billion pages.
• Could the internet “wake up”?  And if so, what sorts of thoughts would it have?  The complexity of the web may have already surpassed that of the human brain.  Take the number of computers on the planet — several billion — and multiply by the number of transistors in each machine — hundreds of millions — and you get about a billion billion, written more elegantly as 10¹⁸.  That’s a thousand times larger than the number of synapses in the human brain (about 10¹⁵).  Of course, our brains happen to be soft, wet, and made of living tissue, while the internet is made up of metal chips and wires — but that’s no obstacle to consciousness so long as the level of complexity is great enough.  (Most researchers working on artificial intelligence would agree that the “substrate” shouldn’t matter.  That is, it should make no difference what the system is made of.  Most philosophers, though not all, would agree.)  Certainly, by any measure, the internet is a very, very complex system.  But could it be conscious?  In principle, yes.  Each computer feels nothing, of course, but the totality of the internet may be more than the sum of its parts — true for the brain, too.  One nerve cell [presumably] feels nothing — but put it together with 100 billion other nerve cells, and suddenly it can feel pain and pleasure and experience the colour blue.  Should the internet achieve consciousness, it will, at least at first, be “utterly naïve to the world”.  On the other hand, the internet has only existed for a couple of decades.  Who knows where it’ll be in the coming years?  Should there be a large power failure somewhere in the world, a conscious internet could experience the equivalent of pain.  And who’d be callous enough to turn off the internet when, consciousness achieved, it begs for continued life?  (Who would be the true “machine” then?)  And would a non-living consciousness put paid to the quaint notion of free will once and for all?  Or would the internet after that point be said to be alive (and free-willed) as well as conscious?  A free-willed machine brings with it a raft of potential problems.  Perhaps then turning off your computer could warrant a fine or an imprisonment?
• tl;dr — unpack this and you’ll find an accusation: “too long; didn’t read.”  It isn’t slang of the moment; over the past few years, its use has proliferated — its enduring popularity a testament to the fact that it calls out what might be the fundamental problem of the internet age: tl;dr is a battle cry of the internet generation.  It elegantly and concisely summarises the internet’s information problem.  In the days before virtually unlimited space, the very fact of publication was enough to let you know that something was worth your time — some publisher had pre-screened it; some editor had slaved over it; some magazine had devoted ad revenue to paying someone to write it.  The internet changed rules.  Now there are fantastic gems no one gets paid to write.  Conversely, just because someone got paid to write something is no longer a guarantee that you should spend your time reading it.  Attention means time, and if we have a limitless space into which we can dump limitless information, the most precious resource becomes time to sort the wheat from the chaff.  How can I know what’s worth my attention?

A pole of inaccessibility marks a location that is the most challenging to reach owing to its remoteness from geographical features that could provide access.  Often it refers to the most distant point from the coastline.  The term describes a geographic construct, not an actual physical phenomenon.  Subject to varying definitions, it is of interest mostly to explorers.

• The northern pole of inaccessibility, sometimes known as the Arctic pole of inaccessibility, or just Arctic pole, is located on the Arctic Ocean pack ice at a distance farthest from any land mass.  It is 661 kilometres (411 statute miles) from the North Pole, 1,453 kilometres (903 miles) north of Barrow, Alaska and equidistant from the 3 closest landmasses, Ellesmere Island, Franz-Josef Land, and the New Siberian Islands.
• The southern pole of inaccessibility is the point on the Antarctic continent most distant from the Southern Ocean.  Landmass only?  Or iceshelf?  Hence, there are two.
• The oceanic pole of inaccessibility is the place in the ocean that’s farthest from land.  It lies in the South Pacific Ocean, 2,688 kilometres (1,670 miles) from the nearest lands: Ducie Island (part of the Pitcairn Islands) in the north, Motu Nui (part of the Easter Islands) in the northeast, and Maher Island (near the larger Siple Island, off the coast of Marie Byrd Land, Antarctica) in the south.  Chatham Island lies farther west, and Southern Chile in the east.  This location is also referred to as Point Nemo, a reference to Jules Verne’s Captain.  Go to Google Maps on satelite view , paste these coordinates into the search box : 48°52.6′S 123°23.6′W and, on satellite view, go about 1/3 of the magnification up from the negative end of the scale, and there it is.
• In Eurasia, the Continental Pole of Inaccessibility (46°17′N 86°40′E) is the place on land that is farthest from the ocean; it lies in northwestern China, near the Kazakhstan border.
• In North America, the continental pole of inaccessibility is in southwest South Dakota about 11 miles southeast of the town of Kyle, located 1,650 kilometres (1,030 miles) from the nearest coastline at 43.36°N 101.97°W.
• In South America, the continental pole of inaccessibility is in Brazil at 14.05°S 56.85°W, near Arenápolis.
• In Australia, the continental pole of inaccessibility is located either at 23.17°S 132.27°E or at 23°2′S 132°10′E, 920 kilometres (570 miles) from the nearest coastline. The nearest town is Papunya, Northern Territory, about 30 kilometres to the southwest.
• In Africa, the pole of inaccessibility is at 5.65°N 26.17°E, which is 1,814 kilometres (1,127 miles) from the coast, close to the tripoint of Central African Republic, South Sudan and Democratic Republic of the Congo, also close to the town of Obo.

The closest trenches for this exercise were 6,400 metres from the blast.  Military troops participating in Camp Desert Rock Exercises witnessed the power and fury of an atomic blast.  The underlying message given is that if citizens remain calm and “face it,” they can survive the bomb.  many nuclear tests were conducted at the Nevada Test Site (NTS) to gain data that would help in Civil Defense preparedness.  As part of Operation Cue, the video depicts many unidentified atmospheric tests fired to learn potential effects of detonations on citizens and cities and to test the effectiveness of Civil Defense organisations.  At the NTS, entire cities or “doomtowns,” including houses containing furniture, appliances, food, and mannequins representing people, were built.  Utility stations and automobiles were also located in the town.  The houses were constructed with various exteriors.  Inside each house was an array of instruments to gather the pertinent data on blast, heat and radiation effects.  The majority of the houses were destroyed by the blasts.  Industrial-type buildings and transportation structures, such as railways, bridges and freeways were also subjected to nuclear blasts.

Found.  (Click the photo for clarity.)  The lesula is a new species of owl-faced monkey fairly recently discovered in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
My intent isn’t at all to demean Prince Charles — it’s that I noticed that he shares with the lesula a trait of close-set eyes.  (The lesula looks surtrisingly human.  So does Prince Charles.)

• Only one other photo of poet Emily Dickinson is known to exist, one when she was a teenager.  (In this photo, she is 30.)
• In the year 1842, five years into the proper Victorian Era, Lisztomania swept the land.  Liszt was 31 years old the year he landed in Berlin.  He’d established a new mode of performance — the solo piano recital — and new kinds of non-narrative music that people compared to musical poetry.  He also developed a violent playing style that broke strings and sometimes brought down entire pianos.  The Berliners were enchanted.  At his concerts, they worked themselves up to screaming, fainting ecstasies.  Women followed Liszt down the street and picked up his old cigarette stubs, made bracelets from his broken piano strings — and tried to rush him en masse, and pull out or cut locks of his hair.  The craze spread outward from there to Britons and Italians as Liszt moved around.
• This person is credited with the following quote: “Those who cast the votes decide nothing.  Those who count the votes decide everything.”  Click the photo for a larger image taken about 40 years later (when he’s more recognisable).

María Eva Duarte de Perón (1919–1952) was the 2nd wife of President Juan Perón and served as First Lady of Argentina from 1946 until she died.  She’s usually referred to as Eva, but sometimes the diminutive Evita.  Her parents, Juan Duarte and Juana Ibarguren were descended from Basque immigrants; Juan was a wealthy rancher from a nearby town, where he already had a wife and family.  When Eva was a year old, her father returned to his legal family, leaving her mother and 5 children in poverty.  All Duarte left was a document declaring the children were his — this allowed them to use his surname, Duarte.  Eva was the youngest child.  At 15, she headed for Buenos Aires with the goal of becoming an actor — at which she was successful enough to to move into her own apartment in the exclusive neighbourhood of Recoleta.  At 25, she met Perón during a charity event for earthquake victims.  They married the next year.  In 1946, he was elected president of Argentina.  Over the next 6 years, she ran the Ministries of Labor and Health, founded and ran the charitable Eva Perón Foundation, championed women’s suffrage in Argentina, and founded and ran the nation’s first large-scale female political party, the Female Peronist Party (all that was just in her spare time).  In 1951, she announced her candidacy for vice president — but opposition from the nation’s military and bourgeoisie plus her declining health, mandated she withdraw.  The next year, at 33, she died of cervical cancer weighing only 36 kilograms (about 79 pounds).  She was accorded a state funeral that nearly 3,000,000 attended.  In 1971, her body was exhumed and flown to Spain, where Juan Perón maintained the corpse in his home.  He and his 3rd wife, Isabel, kept the corpse in their dining room on a platform near the table.  In 1973, Perón came out of exile and returned to Argentina, where he became president for the 3rd time.  He died in office in 1974 and his wife Isabel, who had been elected vice-president, succeeded him, becoming the first female president in the Western Hemisphere.  Isabel had Evita’s body returned to Argentina and buried in the Duarte family tomb in La Recoleta Cemetery (near Eva’s first apartment).  Eva became the subject of the musical Evita in 1976 and in 2011 a Yale neurosurgeon studying her skull x-rays and photographs said she was possibly given a prefrontal lobotomy in the last months of her life in order “to relieve the pain, agitation and anxiety she suffered in the final months of her illness”.

• A team of scientists has deciphered the 3-dimensional structure of the human genome, paving the way for new insights into genomic function and expanding our understanding of how cellular DNA folds.  A thorny question is how each of our cells stows 3 billion base pairs of DNA while maintaining access to functionally crucial segments.  “We’ve long known that on a small scale, DNA is a double helix,” said co-first author Erez Lieberman-Aiden, a graduate student and researcher at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.  “But if the double helix didn’t fold, the genome in each cell would be two metres long.  Scientists have not really understood how the double helix can fold to fit into the nucleus of a human cell, which is only about a hundredth of a millimetre in diameter.  This new approach enables us to probe exactly that question.”  Researchers report two striking findings: First, the human genome is organised into two separate compartments, keeping active genes separate and accessible while sequestering currently-unused DNA in a denser storage compartment.  Chromosomes snake in and out of the two compartments repeatedly as their DNA alternates between active (gene-rich) and inactive (gene-poor) stretches.  Cells cleverly separate the most active genes into their own special neighbourhood to make it easier for proteins and other regulators to reach them.  Second, at a finer scale, the genome adopts an unusual organisation known in mathematics as a fractal.  The specific architecture, called a “fractal globule,” enables the cell to pack DNA incredibly tightly — information density in the nucleus is trillions of times higher than on a computer chip — while avoiding the knots and tangles that might interfere with the cell’s ability to read its own genome.  Moreover, the DNA can easily unfold and refold during gene activation, gene repression and cell replication.  Nature has devised a stunningly elegant solution to storing information — a super-dense, knot-free structure.  Scientists used formaldehyde to link together DNA strands near each other in the cell’s nucleus, then determined the identity of neighbouring segments by performing massively parallel DNA sequencing, thus creating a spatial map showing how close different parts are to one another.
• Microscopy has come a long way from the first glass-and-light optical equipment.  These days, scientists can focus on individual molecules using advanced methods like atomic force microscopy (AFM), where a miniscule probe feels out the details of a surface.  In this AFM image of a nanographene molecule, the resolution is so high that for the first time, the individual bonds between atoms can be seen, shown here as green lines.  IBM researchers used the same imaging technique to measure the length and relative strength of individual bonds in the spherical carbon molecules called buckyballs.  Their method improves understanding of the building blocks of all matter.  This nanographene molecule exhibits carbon-carbon bonds of different lengths and bond order.  Their AFM uses a carbon-monoxide-functionalised tip.
• To measure anything’s position precisely is to lock in on one static frame of motion, like a photograph does.  Conversely, to observe movement, you can’t isolate a frame, because motion is the summation of many frames — you meed a filmclip.  Sharpness in one parameter requires a certain blurring of the other parameter.  Imagine watching a film of an archery tournament: archer shoots; arrow flies; camera follows arrow’s trajectory, but stops on a single frame in mid-flight, stilling it.  The pause enables you to know the position of the arrow with great accuracy, but you’ve lost all information about its momentum.  In that single frame, the arrow is going nowhere; path and velocity aren’t shown.  Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle says measuring the location of a subatomic particle inherently blurs its momentum and vice versa.  And this makes sense from our biocentric perspective — everything we perceive is reconstructed inside our heads in an organised whirl of information.  Time in this sense can be defined as the summation of spatial states occurring in the mind.  If one mental image is different from the last, we can say that change has occurred over “time” — but that doesn’t mean there’s some actual matrix in which those changes occur — it’s just our way of making sense of our perceived reality.  We watch loved ones age and die and say some external entity called time is responsible.  And there’s a peculiar intangibility to space, as well.  We can’t pick it up and take it to a lab.  Like time, space is neither physical nor fundamentally real — rather, it’s a mode of interpretation and understanding, part of mental software that moulds sensations into multidimensional objects.  “(In fact, are space and time even physical enough that ‘objects’ would continue to exist were all life removed from the scene?)  Most of us think of space as like a vast container with no walls — but it isn’t really.

1. Distances between objects mutate depending on conditions like gravity and velocity — there’s no absolute distance between anything and anything else.
2. Empty space, as described by quantum mechanics, isn’t empty but is, rather, full of potential particles and fields.
3. Quantum theory casts doubt on the notion that all objects are truly separate, since entangled particles act in unison even if separated by the width of a galaxy.  Two entangled photons zoom along optical fibres until they’re 7 miles apart; one hits a 2-way mirror and either bounces off or goes through.  Whatever action it takes, its entangled twin always performs a complementary action.  If there’s communication between the two, it happens at 10,000 times the speed of light — in other words, quantum news must be instantaneous, with no external constraints.

These concepts may be difficult to fully grasp.

• A few NASA images were selected from more than 120 contained in the online “Earth as Art” collection acquired by the Landsat programme over the last 40 years.  This image was so named due to its similarity to Van Gogh’s painting “Starry Night”.  It was acquired 13 July 2005.
• On 1 February 2003, white pinpricks of cloud cast ebony shadows on the Rub’ al Khali (Empty Quarter) near the border between Saudi Arabia and Yemen.  The lines of wind-sculpted sand are characteristic of immense sand deserts (sand seas) and the Rub’ al Khali is the largest of this type in the world.
• 4 August 2002 – Like distant galaxies amid clouds of interstellar dust, chunks of sea ice drift through graceful swirls of grease ice in the frigid waters of Foxe Basin near Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic.

• In both hemispheres, polar mesospheric clouds are at the peak visibility during respective late spring and early summer seasons, typically appearing as delicate, shining threads against the darkness of space — hence another name, noctilucent (night-shining) clouds.  On 13 June 2012, these were visible to aircraft flying over Canada.  Polar mesospheric clouds form between 47-53 miles (76-85 kilometres) above Earth’s surface when sufficient water vapour at these high altitudes exists to form ice crystals.  These clouds stay illuminated by the sun when it’s just below the visible horizon, giving them so-called night-shining properties.
• High-pressure systems often bring fair weather and relatively clear skies.  On 5 June 2012, NASA’s Aqua satellite acquired this view of a cloud formation hole off the coast of Tasmania.  The weather system over the Great Australian Bight cut the oval-shaped hole from a blanket of marine stratocumulus clouds.  Its diameter stretches 1,000 kilometres (620 miles) across.  Globally, average sea-level pressure is about 1,013 millibars; at the centre of this high, pressures topped 1,040 millibars.  Sea-level pressure maps on that day show the shape of this cloud hole matches the shape of the high-pressure area.
• These are the city lights of Dubai, United Arab Emirates, as viewed from the International Space Station.  Dubai is the largest metropolitan area within the Dubai emirate, a favorite subject of astronaut photography largely due to unique artificial archipelagos in the Persian Gulf directly offshore (the full design only visible from airplane or orbiting spacecraft).  Aerial nighttime Dubai presents a vivid display of an urban development pattern.  Highways and major streets are sharply defined by yellow-orange lights, while the commercial and residential areas resolve into speckles of individual white, blue and yellow-orange lights.  Large, brilliantly-lit areas are hotels and malls (the brightest of them the Burj Khalifa Tower, which is 2,717 feet or 828 metres tall).

Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York, which monitors global surface temperatures on an ongoing basis, has created a video to show how Earth continues to experience warmer temperatures than several decades ago.  “We know the planet is absorbing more energy than it is emitting,” GISS Director James Hansen said at the video’s launch.  “So we are continuing to see a trend toward higher temperatures.  Even with the cooling effects of a strong La Niña influence and low solar activity for the past several years, 2011 was one of the 10 warmest years on record.”  In the video, reds indicate temperatures higher than the average during a baseline period of 1951-1980, while blues indicate lower temperatures than the baseline average.  The two photos above show the temperature at the begainning in 1888 and at the end in 2011.  At least one of the commenters feels that the video begins too close to the end of the “little ice age” about 1850 to actually give a true picture.

• This shot was taken in the photographer’s native town, Zhytomyr, in the Ukraine.
• This is the Mardi Khola valley in Tibet, 2011, at the Annapurna Conservation Project area, 15,000 feet above sea level.
• Located in the Mahalangur section of the Himalayas, the international border between China and Nepal runs across the precise summit point of Everest.  Taken at sunset from a height of 5,170 metres (near Gorak Shep).

• Foothills of the Himalayas, Nagarkot village, the village at the top of the world where inhabitants look down at the clouds.  A hardy population of 3,500 people carve out an existence on the slopes of steep mountains, farming for centuries with traditional terraces to stop crops sliding away.
• On the highest peak of the Ganesh Himal, a subrange of the Himalayan range, the Sing La Bhanjyang Pass is a great trail for trekkers of all experience levels.
• Nepal is a country that for thousands of years has been shrouded in a veil of myths, mysteries and mysticism.

• This is the central square of Brussels, its most important tourist destination and most memorable landmark.  The Grand Place was named by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site in 1998 and it was voted the most beautiful square in Europe in 2010.
• Robson Square (provencial government centre and courthouse) in British Columbia was designed by Arthur Erickson in 1980.  This is the exterior stair and ramp.  Erickson died in 2009.
• Think of the city as a living organism.  A slow moving blob is constantly expanding outwards, consuming more and more land and resources.  As the city spreads, it spawns suburbs, subdivisions and auto-dependent residents.  This is urban sprawl, and German photographer Christoph Gielen has captured it in a series of aerial photographs of housing subdivisions across the United States.  This is a housing subdivision in a water-starved state.

• Ofunato Civic Centre and Library by Chiaki Arai Urban and Architecture Design is located in Sakari-cho, Ofunato city in northeastern Japan.  (The coastline around Ofunato is famous for dramatic scenery.)  This cultural building complex (completed in 2008) consists of a main hall with 1,100 seats, a library, multi-purpose spaces, an atelier, a tea room, and a studio.
• Covered in recycled jute sacks that travelled through Europe, this low-slung swirl simultaneously provides the togetherness of a sofa and the solitude of a chair.  The Axel 3-seater chair was available only in the US at Anthrolologie for $2,698 + $300 delivery — but now it isn’t.  Perhaps they sold them [it?] all?  It reminds me of antique furniture designed for a courting couple and a chaperone — perhaps it would do well (in moulded plastic, perhaps) in a coffee shop, each with a small table attached on the right.  Then, one could chat with one’s neighbours and form varyingly-sized groups — or remain politely aloof.
• Wooden Spiral Staircase inside Peleş Castle, a Neo-Renaissance castle in the Carpathian Mountains, on an existing medieval route linking Transylvania and Wallachia, built between 1873 and 1914.  The total cost of work on the castle is estimated to be 16,000,000 Romanian lei in gold (approximately US$120 million today).  By form and function, Peleş is a palace, but is consistently called a castle.  It has a 3,200-square-metre (34,000 square feet) floor plan with over 170 rooms.

• How do spouses originally meet? In the past, couples met through friends (~40% in 1990).  Today, less than 30% meet through friends, but it’s still the most likely way to meet a future partner.  Online works for about 22%.  About 11% meet spouses in college.  Family once was the most common method, but today it is less than 10%.  Primary and secondary schools have undergone a huge shift from 21% in the 1940s to about 5% today.
• Who has the highest quality relationships?  That would be couples who meet in church or in primary or secondary school, followed by those who meet online.  Those who meet through family are less likely to rate the quality of their relationship as high.
• Who is more or less likely to break up?  Couples who meet in church or primary or secondary school are less likely to break up.  Couples who meet online are also less likely to break up.  Couples who meet through friends are more likely to break up.
• Who most benefits from online dating?  Gays, lesbians, and older heterosexuals.  This is because they’re less likely to live in environments that contain other eligible singles in their demographic.  It’s an especially good way to meet a future spouse if you’re in a niche demographic.  (Or really weird.)

It doesn’t matter whether you decide to marry or stay single; either way you’ll be sorry. — Socrates