MAIN HOON NA (2004)

Meera Bai;

“One night as I walked in the desert the mountains rode on my shoulders

and the sky became my heart,

and the earth - my own body, I explored.

Every object began to wink at me, and Mira wisely calculated thinking,

My charms must be at their height

now would be a good time to rush into his arms,

maybe He won't drop me so quick.”

Bearth Deplazes - Schweizer-Schmid house, Ardez 2018. Photos © Gion von Albertini.

The jungle house ( Africa) - MESURA

Stories of Your Life and Others - Ted Chiang

A book review by Danny Yee

© 2011 https://dannyreviews.com/

The stories in Stories of Your Life and Others tackle big ideas intelligently, in the grand tradition of science fiction. They postulate some fundamental change in how the world works and explore its implications through the experiences or challenges faced by their protagonists.

"Tower of Babylon" is set in a Mesopotamia where there really is a vault of heaven for a tower to reach. In "Understand" an experimental drug makes the protagonist really, really intelligent, capable of understanding not only the world but his own mind. And "Division by Zero" is about a mathematician who discovers that arithmetic is inconsistent.

In "Story of Your Life" a linguist is drafted to help decipher the language of heptapod aliens. Interspersed with the narrative of her linguistic discoveries are vignettes of her lifetime relationship with her daughter. At first these two strands appear to have no connection at all — and their link turns out to be indirect, involving variational approaches to physics and a different kind of consciousness, challenging our notions of memory and free will.

"Seventy-Two Letters" is set in a 19th century England where industrialisation is kabbalah-inspired, with automata (golems) manufactured by applying names to sculptures. And reproduction works in accordance with preformationist theory, with tiny homunculi recursively nested inside sperm. This is mixed up with some politics, involving eugenics and class tensions, and some action. "The Evolution of Human Science", originally published in Nature, is less a story than an abstract speculation about how human science might react to a "metahuman" population with a superior but incommunicable knowledge system.

In "Hell is the Absence of God" angels regularly visit the earth, dealing out miracles (and incidental damage); statistics are kept on the results, and on the fraction of people who are taken to Heaven or condemned to life in Hell, without God. The lead character is desperate to learn how to love God so he can rejoin his dead wife in Heaven; two other characters face rather different challenges.

Presented in a documentary format, with short perspectives from different people, "Liking What You See" is set in a near future where it's possible to reversibly modify people's brains so that they don't perceive beauty or ugliness in faces. A progressive university is debating whether this, known as calliagnosia, should be a requirement for students.The significant novelties involved in Chiang's stories require some serious suspension of disbelief, but he manages this well. He doesn't dwell on the presuppositions or back-story, attempting to justify the impossible, but rapidly introduces the setting and elaborates on it only as much as is necessary for the plot and the exploration of ideas. (The occasional exceptions are jarring, for example in "Story of Your Life" when some nonsensical argument is presented to explain why the aliens haven't learned anything from human television broadcasts.)

None of the characters have much depth. They are driven by intellect rather than emotion and their personalities presented from the outside, fairly clinically. A focus on their understanding of the world is arguably necessary for the elaboration of the story ideas, however, and there's only so much that can be fitted into a short story. (I am not convinced that Chiang could produce a decent novel using the same approach.)The plots work effectively, both in unfolding the implications of the central ideas and in holding the reader's attention. This is true both in the stories with straightforward chronological narratives and in the more unusually structured ones, with resolutions provided by a mix of goal seeking, problem solution, and structural cadence.Stories of Your Life and Others is the most entertaining and thought-provoking collection of science fiction stories I've read for a long time.

955. Adam Caruso & Peter St John /// Studio House /// Highbury, London, UK /// 1993-94

OfHouses presents Houses of the 90′s, part VII: SuperBritish. (Photos: © Hélène Binet. Source: Gennaro Postiglione, ’100: One Hundred Houses for One Hundred European Architects of the Twentieth Century’, Köln: Taschen, 2004.)

Check it out

While most folks were sitting down for supper, NASA tried to move a space mountain.

Beyond sight for backyard stargazers, a spacecraft the size of a vending machine self-destructed by ramming into a harmless asteroid shortly after 7 p.m. ET Monday, September 26th. The high-speed crash was part of the U.S. space agency's Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART.

The moment of impact marked the first time in history humans have attempted to alter the path of an asteroid, a flying chunk of rubble left over from the formation of the solar system about 4.6 billion years ago. Most of the time, these ancient rocks pose no danger to Earth, including Dimorphos, the one NASA just used for target practice. But at least three have caused mass extinctions, the most infamous of which wiped out the dinosaurs.

Stegosaurus didn't have NASA.

"We are changing the motion of a natural celestial body in space. Humanity has never done that before," said Tom Statler, program scientist. "This was the substance of fiction books and really corny episodes of Star Trek from when I was a kid, and now it's real."

(continue reading)

At the very centre of the image above is something incredible - a single, positively-charged strontium atom, suspended in motion by electric fields.

Not only is this an incredibly rare sight, it’s also difficult to wrap your head around the fact that this tiny point of blue light is a building block of matter.

The image was captured by physicist David Nadlinger from the University of Oxford, and it’s been awarded the overall prize in the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council photo competition.

To give you a little perspective on the size of this set-up, the atom is being held in place by electric fields emanating from those two metal needles on either side of it.

The distance between them is about 2 millimetres (0.08 inch).

The atom is being illuminated by a blue-violet laser. The energy from the laser causes the atom to emit photons which Nadlinger could capture on camera using a long exposure.

The whole thing is housed inside an ultra-high vacuum chamber and dramatically cooled to keep the atom still. Nadlinger took this photo through the window of the vacuum chamber.

To learn more, click here.