24/11/2013: WLASze: Weekend Links on Arts, Sciences & zero economics

This is WLASze: Weekend Links on Arts, Sciences & zero economics. Enjoy!


Shopping malls rarely inspire - both in terms of exterior architecture and interior design… their utilitarian purpose combines with aesthetic of the masses to produce bland, dentally-inspired greyness… unless, of course, it is a shopping mall in Sweden, where extreme capitalism collides often spectacularly with extreme socialism to produce unexpected visuals. Behold this Van-Damme-Volvo-ad (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7FIvfx5J10) equivalent in the shopping mall architecture:
http://it.phaidon.com/agenda/architecture/articles/2013/november/14/malmos-melted-shopping-mall/
After all, energising those satiated consumers to spend their money on things other than social justice requires visual experiences that are truly spectacular...

Three sets of links relating to space next.

First, NASA's latest Cassini images of the Titan - with high resolution section showing Northern Lakes (Salt Flats): http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/photos/imagedetails/index.cfm?imageId=4900
H/T: @raluca3000 @NASAWebbTelescp (click on image to enlarge)

Second, a beautiful set of visuals to put the relative dimension of the Earth and our solar system compared to some stars out there:
http://www.mbandf.com/parallel-world/our-sun-is-extremely-large-our-sun-is-fairly-small

The page above comes courtesy of a fantastic Mechanical.Art.Devices (M.A.D.) Gallery http://www.mbandf.com/mad-gallery/explore/ A fascinating glimpse into the world of unique engineering and design… (not strictly space image, but so elegant, it might just be stellar)...

Three: one hell of a cool story, via arstechnica, from the Antarctica, where earlier this year, scientists discovered Ernie and Bert, "two neutrinos with energies over 100 times higher than the protons that circulate in the LHC. Now, the same team has combed through its data to find an additional 26 high-energy events, and they've done a careful analysis to show that these are almost certainly originating from somewhere outside our Solar System."
http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/11/south-pole-detector-spots-28-out-of-this-world-neutrinos/

And in a related story, http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/04/coolest-jobs-in-tech-literally-running-a-south-pole-data-center/ arstechnica covers the jobs at the South Pole data centre where they have to "heat the air used to cool… data centre".

Brilliantly written and fascinating!


Science Gallery at TCD is featuring this week in dezeen with a story about the latest show "Grow Your Own - Life After Nature" that runs through 19 January 2014 and is worth visiting…
http://www.dezeen.com/2013/11/20/olafur-eliasson-tears-used-to-make-human-cheese/ See @ScienceGallery

A brave show, pushing the bounds of what we consider aesthetically acceptable and blending these bounds with what we consider both art and science. And the science bit is not about the actual physical stuff, like growing cheese culture based on human body excretions-produced bacteria. Instead, it is a science of our self-awareness, the compartmentalising nature of our understanding of the acceptable. In many ways, this is about ethics reaching beyond their own domain into aesthetics. As we commonly have a problem with seeing the animal that provides us with a steak in their living condition, we have a problem seeing (let alone tasting) a slice of cheese that was grown from the bacteria harvested from our bodies.

"Selfmade is a series of ‘microbial sketches’, portraits reflecting an individual’s microbial landscape in a unique cheese. Each cheese is crafted from starter cultures sampled from the skin of a different person. Isolated microbial strains were identified and characterised using microbiological techniques and 16S ribosomal RNA sequencing. Like the human body, each cheese has a unique set of microbes that metabolically shape a unique odour."

We then frame the whole experiment into what is ethically or aesthetically acceptable to us: "Cheese odours were sampled and characterised using headspace gas chromatography-mass spectrometry analysis, a technique used to identify and/or quantify volatile organic compounds present in a sample."

I will leave you at this and suggest you explore the said boundaries on your own…



Interesting show in London's St Petersburg gallery: Vladimir Baranov-Rossine: From Cubism to Surrealism:
http://www.saintpetersburggallery.com/exhibitions.html

Apparently, the first exhibition in 30 years retrospecting his works in Europe.

While on Russian art, an amazing collection of rare Allies posters highlighting the role of the Soviet army during the World War 2: http://rbth.co.uk/multimedia/pictures/2013/11/14/wwii_lend-lease_posters_campaigning_for_soviet_troops_31715.html

And travelling further in time, an unseen until recently collection of early photographs of life in Russia from the beginning of the 20th century
http://www.businessinsider.com/prokudin-gorskii-photos-of-russian-empire-2013-9#a-water-carrier-poses-for-prokudin-gorski-in-the-street-25
Here's a sample - both in colour and original print:

Readers of WLASze would know that I am not a big fan of Zaha Hadid, having written before my opinion about her over-exposed, over-worked studio. However, where credit is due, it should be given. Fantastic aesthetic and total absence of respect for balance can be a cool combination. This building confirms:

http://www.designboom.com/architecture/innovation-tower-by-zaha-hadid-at-hong-kong-polyu-11-20-2013/


And for the last bit - an absolutely fantastic Gel talk by Vi Hart on mathematical applications to music composition:
http://vimeo.com/29893058?utm_content=bufferb7b81&utm_source=buffer&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Buffer

Enjoy!

20/10/2013: Oscillator: Long and Short-run Cycles

Some months ago I gave a presentation at the Science Gallery on the topic of cyclicality in social and economic data. I focused on more philosophical issues and longer cycles. Someone just sent me the link to the video... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChiVez1IlMc

FISCAL CYCLE: FROM NANOSECOND TRADING TO GENERATIONAL OSCILLATIONS

22/9/2013: WLASze Part 2: Weekend Links on Arts, Sciences and Zero Economics

This the second part of WLASze: Weekend Links on Arts, Sciences and zero economics (part 1 is linked here). Enjoy!


Financial crises tend to have profound and long-run impacts on the societies they visit. This much should be pretty clear to the readers of this blog (from economics side of my musings). However, no man is an island and, thus, no art is an island either… What about financial crises impact on arts? Did gloom-n-doom of the Great Depression result in the darkening abstraction in arts, ultimately leading to the emergence of urbanist photography and design, as well as early abstract expressionism? Motherwell's Spanish Republic studies (http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=79007) as culmination of darkness and pain?

Or Kline's torn dynamism?

Although all of these post-date the war, they are hardly infused by the giddy optimism of the 1950s and experimentation of the 1960s, instead carrying the pre-Vietnam fear and memory of the past, foreboding the replay of the previously experienced or at least a threat instead of foretelling a new era…Or more immediate deepening of German expressionism? The sombre consolidation of Bauhaus outside Weimar?

Enough of the argument here… Instead, back to the current events. Here's an interesting post based on Franco “Bifo” Berardi talk at Pratt Institute on his book The Uprising: Poetry and Finance, "which considers poetry as a salve in the wake of the international financial crisis. Or, as reviewer David Cunningham puts it now in considering the book for the UK’s Radical Philosophy journal, the book “posits a parallel between ‘the deterritorialization effect’ which has, on the one hand, ‘separated words from their semiotic referents’ and, on the other, separated ‘money from economic goods.’” Read and judge for yourself:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2012/11/audio-now-online-from-franco-berardi-talk-on-the-uprising-on-poetry-and-finance/?woo


On a brighter side of things, crises teach us (or attempt to teach us) to distill things more to the basics, to the necessary, striking out the superfluous. This can be a torturous process, but it can also be a path to beauty. Modern Japanese architecture, having faced the demons of severe constraints, often shows the emergence of angels of beauty out of the challenge of pushing organic spaces into contained sites. Two brilliant examples:

http://www.dezeen.com/2013/09/16/house-in-fujizakura-by-case-design-studio/
Cool, tranquil, beautiful and, yet, too individualistic for being inhabitable - a shell for a hermit crab of sorts…

And via deezen.com another example - this one a perfect balance of view, space, light and yet jigsawed into a challenging site…

http://www.dezeen.com/2013/09/11/alley-house-by-apollo-architects-associates/

There is a fundamental difference between 'compressed' European architecture and Japanese architecture. This difference arises from two distinct drivers for challenges of space. In European context, some (not all) of the spacial challenge rests on the basis of desire to appear to be 'environmentally conscious' - in other words, we often tend to build rural houses on micro scale to pretend that this 'helps the environment'. This gives our small rural houses architecture a forced, fake dimension. In the case of Japan, physical space constraints generate organic, unforced, organic effort to design spaces on intimate scale. End result, even urban architecture in Japan is often truly a balance of space, design, liveability, tradition and subtle, even modest distinction.


The testaments to the 'fake' constraints in the Western World are abandoned spaces - which in my view (aside from presenting a challenge as to why we need severe spatial constraints of design in the firs place) carry almost intrinsic artistic beauty in and by themselves. I wrote about this before in previous WLASze posts… so here are few more links documenting abandonment:
http://www.boredpanda.com/abandoned-places/

H/T for the above to @nicolematthews1

and more: http://blogof.francescomugnai.com/2013/01/30-of-the-most-beautiful-abandoned-places-and-modern-ruins-ive-ever-seen/


Abandonment is no threat, however to the greats of European art. Grand Palais in Paris is hosting the first in 40 years retrospective of George Braque. To me, Braque is ahead of the other great, associated closely with him - Picasso, especially in the context of defining fauvism and cubism.
http://www.france24.com/en/20130920-rare-braque-exhibition-opens-grand-palais-paris-picasso

Picasso and Braque... and Mark Tansey's take on their dual significance:

And from cubism (a quasi-scientific approach to space, light and positioning in painting) to physical positioning in a stream of light. Here's a massively important paper:
"By Bernoulli’s law, an increase in the relative speed of a fluid around a body is accompanies by a decrease in the pressure. Therefore, a rotating body in a fluid stream experiences a force perpendicular to the motion of the fluid because of the unequal relative speed of the fluid across its surface. It is well known that light has a constant speed irrespective of the relative motion. Does a rotating body immersed in a stream of photons experience a Bernoulli-like force? We show that, indeed, a rotating dielectric cylinder experiences such a lateral force from an electromagnetic wave." In other words, light has the same properties as air and water in their ability to create, for example, support drag that holds airplanes in the air...

Here's a popular link: http://www.technologyreview.com/view/519471/optical-bernoulli-forces-could-steer-objects-bathed-in-light-say-theorists/

From the authors: "The forces obtained here are only a fraction of the incident radiation pressure and seem to require infeasible rotation rates, but we expect that they can be resonantly enhanced by techniques similar to those that have been used by other authors to enhance scattered power for a given particle diameter. Mie resonances are already visible in Fig. 4, but much stronger resonant phenomena can be designed… Material dispersion will contribute an additional source of lateral force… Such enhancement mechanism, …may permit the future experimental observation and exploitation of optical “Bernoulli” forces.

We are far away from 'flying on light' but we know that theoretically it is feasible… And more… can light create 'vacuum' as a flow of water does?.. Injection pump for light anyone?..


And to conclude, a splash of hydraulic / fluid dynamics art from the Science Gallery (Trinity College), this time in Canada: http://www.therecord.com/whatson-story/4117146-big-splash/ Surface Tension, watery exhibition from @ScienceGallery opened in @THEMUSEUM in Kitchener, Ontario. Congrats to all involved! Great to see SG spreading its wings around the globe. Note, I covered SG latest exploits in Dublin here: http://trueeconomics.blogspot.ie/2013/08/382013-wlasze-part-1-weekend-links-on.html.

3/8/2013: WLASze Part 1: Weekend Links on Arts, Sciences and zero economics

This is the first part of my regular WLASze: Weekly Links on Arts, Sciences and zero economics posts for this weekend. Enjoy...


When science meets art, and it happens often, the awe is magnified… Behold the colour-coded eucalyptus:

Two links with more images and stories: http://blog.cuipo.org/natures-painted-tree-the-rainbow-eucalyptus/ and http://all-that-is-interesting.com/the-worlds-most-amazing-trees .


And more on trees, the forests - to be more precise - this time around with more science:
http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/07/forests-not-as-thirsty-because-of-increasing-carbon-dioxide/
To run through the usual 'complexity' quote: "Early predictions by climate scientists were that increasing temperatures would devastate forests because elevated temperatures increase the rate of evaporation and transpiration at leaf surfaces, potentially causing trees to suffer from “water-stress.” Instead, this paper suggests that increased efficiency of water-use by forests might mean that water does not become a limiting factor in productivity as temperatures rise. This new finding seems like unadulterated good news, therefore, until you factor in the effect that water usage by forests has on components of the ecosystem."


Now to art or rather design and the Cool Stuff: it was only a matter of time before it came from one of those 3D printers:

http://www.dezeen.com/2013/08/02/stedelijk-museum-acquires-first-3d-printed-chair-solid-c2/
"Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam has acquired Solid C2 by Patrick Jouin, the first item of furniture to be 3D-printed in one piece" Stunning design. Jouin's site will be here: http://www.patrickjouin.com/ once it is constructed (presumably he is not using a 3D printer for that task).


Last week I wrote about the Science Gallery and their one-off event which did include 3D printers - a tent full of them really. The printers are gone, but the main event - ILLUSION - is still going on and is 177.1% worth a visit. original post is here:
http://trueeconomics.blogspot.ie/2013/07/2772013-wlasze-part-2-weekend-links-on.html
Link to the event is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_5rsqsx4lY
And a couple of images from the event:

@ScienceGallery


Irish Architecture Foundation is hosting an Open House in Dublin on October 4-6th:
http://www.architecturefoundation.ie/activities/open-house-dublin-2013-100-great-buildings-from-the-obvious-to-the-overlooked/
It's free, and it covers 100 buildings. There will be a "special “Architrek” event in Dún Laoghaire" too.

And more from the IAF: http://www.architecturefoundation.ie/news-item/riai-2013-irish-architecture-awards/
The Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland announced 13 awards across categories including the Public Choice Award.
http://www.riai.ie/index.php/news/article/riai_2013_irish_architecture_awards_minister_quinn_praises_collective_achie

Irony has it, Minister Quinn was presenting and speaking - just before he made his subsequent statements about the low prioritisation of History in Irish educational curriculum: link here http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/quinn-takes-aim-at-historians-over-junior-cert-criticism-29466898.html

Brodsky wrote: "That's why Urania's older than sister Clio!" but that wasn't quite on the mind of our Minister… obviously… for I doubt he has much of an idea of the muses hierarchies, for, of course, Clio's equivalent existed in Pausanias' accounts of the original muses, while Urania was a later addition to muses… But then again, Minister Quinn would probably also deem Urania's domain of astronomy not worthy of studies, since it does;t quite lend itself easily to code writing or adwords sales or other noble activities that Ireland Inc promotes.

Still back to the topic: great awards, and congratulations to the hosts @RIAIPresident


Now for some 'Wow, that's just gross' relief: Foreign Policy has joined on the Summer fun and shed its usually academic veneer for a set of 'This Week' photos… Number 7 is priceless…
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/08/02/the_world_in_photos_this_week#7
There is something basic that is missing in this… people stuffed like capers in a tiny can of an artificially-made beach… You'd think that's mad. But a better image is here:
http://www.theworldofchinese.com/2013/07/dead-sea-of-china-gets-sardine-packed/

It is a beach under a roof with fake 'rocks' and 'waves'… and… oh… I guess that just might beat all the daft ideas one ever could have had about filling the Grand Canyon with something...

But not in China, where the ridiculous never becomes sublime even when it is based on it…
http://www.businessinsider.com/tianducheng-a-paris-replica-in-china-2013-8
This stuff really does blow your mind: A Ghost Town that is Paris...


Of course, there is always room on the WLASze page for some Russian-focused links. Aside from the usual medley of world/cosmos domination, Russians also like to stake some claims on world history. And this time around MrsG, MiniG and MicroG - with their Native American bloods - better be prepared. Per report in Pravda.ru (yeah, I know…) Native American Indians are originally from Russia...
http://english.pravda.ru/science/mysteries/19-07-2013/125188-american_indians-0/
May be Sarah Palin was right when she said she often saw Russians on Alaska's beaches…


Bering Straight - the former bridge that allowed early human migration to the Americas, is nowadays an ice-flanked inhospitable space. Not quite as cold as the ice space of Enceladus. And not as cool as Enceladus...
http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/07/enceladus-icy-jets-pulse-to-the-rhythm-of-its-orbit/

More WLASze to come in Part 2, so stay tuned.

27/7/2013: WLASze Part 2: Weekend Links on Arts, Sciences and zero economics

This is the second post of my WLASze: Weekend Links on Arts, Sciences and zero economics.

The first post is linked here and is referenced below. Enjoy!


I covered superb Irish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2013 in my previous post. Now on to one of the best artists exhibiting this year in Venice: Catalan artist Antoni Tàpies, who, sadly passed away just last year, are in the Palazzo Fortuny. Tàpies's canvases of earth, dust, structurally rich and textured paint, and deep in colour and subdued light convey forms in their own space, free of time, interference of artist's positioning, referencing, blinding internal and external fields of view.

You can explore his work - outside Biennale - here. Tate has some excellent Tapies in collection here.
Here's one from Tate selection:

Don't forget and don't miss: ILLUSION show opened today in Trinity's Science Gallery:

I am just back from there… and kids and MrsG loved the show and the MakersFair in front of the Physics building...

By far the most impressive piece for Luca was:

Yet there are other fantastic works and projects there.


Amazing work of Portuguese artist, Henrique Oliveira in Paris. Dynamic, fluid, yet forceful. Integrated into space yet perfectly disruptive to that space…
Here is the artist website (warning - slow loading). Very good overview across three media - a rare combination for any artist.

Amazingly, http://www.theartnewspaper.ru/ let their domain lapse! Seriously poor judgement by the AN.


Cool stuff on 'superfluids': Behavior of Turbulent Flow of Superfluids Is Opposite That of Ordinary Fluids

Via http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/07/130725152143.htm example: liquid helium. "When cooled to extremely low temperatures, helium exhibits behavior that is otherwise impossible in ordinary fluids. For instance, the superfluid can squeeze through pores as small as a molecule, and climb up and over the walls of a glass. It can even remain in motion years after a centrifuge containing it has stopped spinning. Now physicists at MIT have come up with a method to mathematically describe the behavior of superfluids -- in particular, the turbulent flows within superfluids."

More scientifically, from the authors' mouth: "Superfluid turbulence is a fascinating phenomenon for which a satisfactory theoretical framework is lacking. Holographic duality provides a systematic approach to studying such quantum turbulence by mapping the dynamics of a strongly interacting quantum liquid into the dynamics of classical gravity. We use this gravitational description to numerically construct turbulent flows in a holographic superfluid in two spatial dimensions. We find that the superfluid kinetic energy spectrum obeys the Kolmogorov Formula scaling law, with energy injected at long wavelengths undergoing a direct cascade to short wavelengths where dissipation by vortex annihilation and vortex drag becomes efficient. This dissipation has a simple gravitational interpretation as energy flux across a black hole event horizon." [Few of you who took my derivatives theory few years back would recall, undoubtedly, Kolmogorov scaling in non-normality space...]

And in uber-geeeky terms via MIT: "Holographic description of a superfluid with vortices. The vertical axis is the radial direction z of AdS4. The planes at z=0 and z=1 are the boundary of AdS4 and the black hole horizon respectively.  The green surface is a surface of constant bulk charge density, with the region between the two slices defining a ``slab'' of condensate where most bulk charges reside.  The slab screens excitations from falling into the horizon. This can be seen from the vector field in the plot which indicates the direction and magnitude of the local energy flux;  note that this flux vanishes quickly below the slab. The vortices, with energy flux circulating around them, punch holes through this screening slab, providing avenues for excitations to fall into the black hole.  The surface z = 0 also shows the condensate on the boundary (with blue color representing zero condensate), superposed with flow lines of the superfluid velocity. The flux tubes show a surface of constant  |\Phi|^2/z^4, which coincides with the boundary condensate at z=0. The z = 1 surface also shows the flux of energy through the horizon.  Note that the energy flux is only significant (red and green) in the wake of the moving vortices."

Yeah, I know… WHAAAAT...WHAS...DAT?! Still, cool...


While on the impossible science set, reading through some links, I stumbled upon the ages-old Godel's Ontological proof of the existence of God. Here's the brilliant exposition. And more links on this fascinating effort:

• Prof. Dr. Elke Brendel gives exhaustive background and compendium of actual proof here
• Good backgrounder here
• And more philosophical outline here.

This is why I absolutely love Godel's work. He was, beyond any doubt, one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century. Godel's greatest contribution was in the form of two Incompleteness Theorems. Am paraphrasing these here:

• Theorem 1: In any logical system it is possible to construct statements that are simultaneously neither true nor false.
• Theorem 2: By Theorem 1, no consistent system can be used to prove its own consistency. 

Theorem 1 is equivalent to the Liar’s Paradox: "Everything I say is a lie" or "This sentence is false". See: http://www.iep.utm.edu/par-liar/. Theorem 2 is equivalent to saying that "No proof can be proof of itself".  Godel's Theorem 2 is, in my view, a more defined logical version of Karl Popper's idea that any theoretical (mathematical) system based on axiomatic (or hypothesis-anchored) structure is falsifiable, but unprovable. Godel actually pre-dates Popper's thesis. Incidentally, this is why, in my view, axiomatic (theoretical) structures of inquiry are more powerful (have greater degrees of freedom) than 'natural' sciences. And hence, arts are more powerful than physical (experimental) sciences.

Time to stop…


And time to see the awesome power of nature. Courtesy of My Modern Met blogs:
http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blogs/veselin-malinov-porto-portugal-hurricane-storm

The extreme and the extremely beautiful power of nature merged with the power of art. Veselin Malinov's work is fantastic. See it here. His other works are also superb, even if less dynamic. By the way - both, the exceptionally movement-saturated photographs of the storm and 'static' images of architectural spaces reveal Malinov's real strength: intuitive composition.

 Compare this with the banality of architectural photography of Peter Marlow, I covered in the first post (linked above).

Enjoy!

15/6/2013: Weekend reading links: Part 2

The second part of my Weekend Reading links on Art and Science and No-Economics (see the first part here: http://trueeconomics.blogspot.ie/2013/06/1462013-weekend-reading-links-part-1.html)

Let's start with this:

http://vida.fundaciontelefonica.com/project/may-the-horse-live-in-me/
It's not a horse meets artist or vice versa, but an artist 'becomes' a horse. Literally, physiologically. Amazing stuff, although MrsG thought it is taking performance art a bit too far.


Next up - amazing show of new work by one of my favourite artists of all times: Gerhard Richter
http://www.mariangoodman.com/exhibitions/2012-09-12_gerhard-richter/%20and%20related
Couple of images:

The migration of Richter's work toward more linear, form-focused, less figurative work over recent years has been in tune with what is happening around the world of abstract art today. I love it, but the 'old' Richter (second image above from 2005: http://www.mariangoodman.com/exhibitions/2009-11-07_gerhard-richter/) is much more dynamic and still more appealing to my aged self. From that vantage point, an even more brilliant show of works by the artist is here: http://www.ludorff.com/en/exhibition/gerhard_richter_abstrakte_bilder/works . Art Basel 2013 has more vintage Richters too.


http://www.mariangoodman.com/artists/ has some very interesting artists I knew far less about. Great example is Julie Mehretu: http://www.mariangoodman.com/exhibitions/2013-05-11_julie-mehretu/#/images/7/

Reminds me of one of my old favourites: a merger of abstraction by Cy Thombly (http://www.cytwombly.info/) and mathematical / architectural precision of Alberto Giacometti: http://www.fondation-giacometti.fr/en/art/16/discover-giacometti/ scroll down to Encounters, Portraits and Fifty Years of Prints sections for the likes of

Wyeth cross over too… for some reason… maybe geometry or Giacometti-esque reference to line?

Lastly for the arts: cool images from the Arctic spying outpost: http://www.wired.com/rawfile/2013/06/charles-stankievech-northernmost-settlement/

On science: a quick link to the Science Gallery - brilliant place, brilliant coffee, brilliant crowd: http://sciencegallery.com/

On a personal note: I came across this wonderful set of radio spots recorded for Mount Juliet. Followers of mine would know I was recently privileged to cast a fly (more like nymphs and wet flies) at the estate and can attest to the superb quality of water there. The spots are lovely and worth listening to: http://www.mountjuliet.ie/radio-adverts/

My favourite is The Ghillie one. I did not use ghillie's services on my day on the Nore, preferring the 'risk' of reading the river on my own, but I had wonderful help and conversation with the staff member who helped me with the waders and dry room and fishing room. Superb. And superb doesn't even begin to describe the late-very-late breakfast I got on my return from 5am-noon fishing.

Loved it. And here's one of my friends from the Nore who is still happily swimming in his pool…

Update: I rarely update the Weekend Reading Links posts after they are out, but here are more interesting links, this time on science.


A convoluted title of this paper: "Action video game playing is associated with improved visual sensitivity, but not alterations in visual sensory memory" should not be a deterrent from reading its very interesting findings. Basically, games players (for electronic games that is) tend to be able to see more in the faster-paced and more complex scenes than non-gamers. However, what they see they don't remember all too well after the fact. I am not even sure they comprehend what they see any deeper either, but that a different topic all together. http://link.springer.com/article/10.3758%2Fs13414-013-0472-7


Further evidence that Anglo Irish Bank was lending well beyond the constraints of our planet was found by Nasa: http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/06/nasa-finds-unprecedented-black-hole-cluster-near-andromedas-central-bulge/ In brief, the Andromeda's core is about as concentrated with black holes as Dublin docklands: http://www.independent.ie/business/irish/nama-behind-70pc-of-the-vacant-docklands-sites-29346104.html