Poet Paul Kelly: It Is Easy To Be Matish: Cockatoo Island

Almanac: Hugh Kingsmill on individualism and the soul

“What is divine in man is elusive and impalpable, and he is easily tempted to embody it in a concrete form—a church, a country, a social system, a leader—so that he may realize it with ... read more

Writing like blogging opened up the world ... Paul Kelly review: Poet prince reigns in the rain

Watch Sharon Jones & Dap-Kings' Intimate 'Call on God' Video - Rolling Stone

Paul Kelly Sydney Opera House Forecourt Mick Radojkovic theMusic.com.au | Australia's Premier Music News & Reviews Website

Paul Kelly: Life Is Fine review – some of his best songs in years

Paul Kelly's new album Life Is Fine attempts to recapture the feel and .... Their contributions, singing songs written from a female point of view, ...

Why Spoken English Is So Different From Written English…

"Modern languages with a long literary tradition show a stark split between their written and spoken styles across many contexts. In current English, writing uses more varied vocabulary than conversational speech, and it uses rarer and longer words much more often. Certain structures (such as passive sentences, prepositional phrases, and relative clauses) appear more often in written than spoken language. Writers generally elaborate their ideas more explicitly through syntax whereas speakers leave more material implicit. And written language stacks clauses inside each other to a greater depth than spoken language. This is one of the most striking differences between speech and text; sentences like the opening line of the Declaration of Independence simply do not occur in conversation." … [Read More]

Some 165,000 years ago, people on the South African coast started to eat molluscs and to use the shells as adornments. That’s when humans became human... That’s when humans became human

Wealth inequality has been increasing for millennia The Economist. Applies the Gini coefficient to neolithic societies.

Why did we start farming? LRB. James C. Scott’s Against the Grain.

From inboxing to thought showers: how business bullshit took overGuardian (Plutonium Ken). Wait, let me consult a thought leader….

David Kahn, The Code-Breakers, The Story of Secret Writing.  I read this one quite young, and learned that problems are to be solved!  I also developed some sense of what a history could look like and what a history should report.  I recall my uncle thinking it deeply strange that a boy my age should be reading a book of such length.

Every day, throughout the EU and beyond, thousands of dogs are working to help keep us safe, many times even risking their lives. These specially-trained and dedicated ‘K9’ officers are searching for explosives or drugs, finding evidence at crime scenes, tracking missing people and criminals and protecting their handlers.

To honour their loyalty and their work, Europol dedicates for the first time ever its yearly calendar to these invaluable four-legged members of police forces.

Europol’s “Dogs as Heroes” 2018 calendar features professional images of police dogs in their working environment in Europe and beyond. All of the calendar’s images were submitted to Europol as part of the Agency’s annual photo Bessie competition open to law enforcement photographers.

Europol’s “Dogs as Heroes” 2018 calendar will be available for purchase for one symbolic euro* at the EU Bookshop.

The incredible moment male dolphins attempt to woo females with sea sponge 'gifts' in a romantic courtship ritual

‎

Many a man has tried to woo a woman with gifts, and it seems that this practice even occurs in dolphins. Scientists have observed male humpback dolphins presenting females with large marine sponges in an effort to mate.

Philip Roth and the meaning of America. “Not only can you go home again, Roth insists. You can only go home again.” Newark was his  sensory key  

Huge warehouses, surrounded by an array of spectacular industrial cranes, provide the main venues for the art work at this year's biennale – which is a mixed bag, not helped by the airport-style barriers (everywhere) with A4-paper signs telling you where you shouldn’t stand, walk or touch. (About as annoying as the biennale’s website, where brightly coloured words plummet intermittently down your screen.)   

On holiday in Australia recently, one of the most bizarre places I came across was Cockatoo Island. It’s a UNESCO world heritage site in the middle of Sydney Harbour and, until Sunday, the host of Sydney’s twentieth art biennale. Before all this, though, it has had an extraordinary past.

Named after its sulphur-crested inhabitants, Cockatoo Island has, since 1839, been a prison for particularly bad convicts; an Industrial School for Girls, which took over the same prison buildings (you can still see crumbling-brick cells, ceramic sinks, faded tiles and childlike scribbles on the walls – imagine what it must have been like for those school children); and a ship-building yard, at its peak during the Second World War. The island then lay dormant for a decade in the 1990s, underwent restoration from 2001, and was opened to the public in 2007. There are camping areas now, too. (I’m not quite sold on that idea.)

William Forsythe’s installation “Nowhere and Everywhere at the Same Time, no. 2”, though, is a highlight. He’s filled a cavernous room with hundreds of synchronized, swinging plumb bobs on strings, which you’re invited to navigate through (no barriers here). Forsythe, a choreographer known for the experimental dance concepts – often using video projections, music, architecture and spoken word – that he developed with the Frankfurt Ballet and the Forsythe Company, calls this piece a “choreographic object”. (The original “Nowhere and Everywhere at the Same Time”, 2005, featured a solo dancer who moved in a field of pendulums suspended from the ceiling of an abandoned building on the High Line in New York.) Here, you instinctively weave your body in and out of the plumb bobs in time to their hypnotic sway (several got tangled when I wasn’t quick enough; along came an attendant to immediately clean up in my wake).

 

 "Nowhere and Everywhere at the Same Time, no. 2", 2013, by William Forsythe. Photograph: Bob Barrett 

Over in the old prison and school area, there’s a sinister site-specific work by the Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota. In “Conscious Sleep” (displayed in the former sleeping quarters), white steel bed frames are held up vertically by densely woven black thread; a powerful glimpse into the dark, nightmarish and claustrophobic minds of the inmates (and schoolgirls), perhaps. Back out into the bright daylight of the prison yard, the electricity cables stretching between the disused buildings look as though they’ve been just as artfully placed. 

 "Conscious Sleep", 2009/2016, by Chiharu Shiota. Photograph: Ben Symons

Another wonderful surprise is Miguel Ángel Rojas’s tessellated floor in the former Mess Hall. Only when up close (there’s a barrier to stop you treading on it) do you realize that the tiles are an illusion, instead made up of finely powdered charcoal, sand and lime. A rock sits in the centre. It’s a delicate challenge to Australia’s history of colonization (this kind of floor pattern is found in nineteenth-century Victorian architecture) and evokes the powerful connection to land felt by Aborigines. 

Approaching the Guards House – the highest point on the Island – a thud-thud, thud-thud shakes the ground, like an eerie heartbeat that grows from a murmur to a bass-heavy boom. This is Cevdet Erek’s “Room of Rhythms” (see top image), a series of large speakers scattered in and around the now-roofless building, apparently to do with – the blurb tells us – the campaigns dating back to the 1850s to reduce the working week from forty-four hours to forty; each pulsation mirrors the workers’ unremitting protests that finally succeeded in 1947. But for me, even without this information, the atmosphere is affecting straight away. A reminder of all those beating hearts, mostly held captive, many of whom probably died on Cockatoo Island over the course of nearly two hundred years. Unlike them, I escaped on a city ferry a few hours later. 

Books of the Year 2017 | The TLS contributors decide

Private equity firms overburdened businesses with debt, and now workers are paying the price. Will policymakers do anything about it? By David Dayen. November 14, 2017.

“The Macy’s near my house is closing early next year. The mall where it’s located has seen less and less foot traffic over the years, and losing its anchor store could set off a chain reaction. Cities across the country are facing this uncertainty, with over 6,700 scheduled store closings; it’s become known as the retail apocalypse This story is at odds with the broader narrative about business in America: The economy is growing, unemployment is low, and consumer confidence is at a decade-long high. This would typically signal a retail boom, yet the pain rivals the height of the Great Recession. RadioShack, The Limited, Payless, and Toys“R”Us are among 19 retail bankruptcies this year. Some point to Amazon and other online retailers for wrestling away market share, but e-commerce sales in the second quarter of 2017 only hit 8.9 percent of total sales. There’s still plenty of opportunity for retail outlets with physical space. The real reason so many companies are sick, as Bloomberg explained in arecent feature, has to do with debt. Private equity firms purchased numerous chain retailers over the past decade, loading them up with unsustainable debt payments as part of a disastrous business strategy. Billions of dollars of this debt comes due in the next few years. “If today is considered a retail apocalypse,” Bloomberg reported, “then what’s coming next could truly be scary.” Eight million American retail workers could see their careers evaporate, not due to technological disruption but a predatory financial scheme. The masters of the universe who devised it, meanwhile, will likely walk away enriched, and policymakers must reckon with how they enabled the carnage…”

Science imitates nature to improve solar cells

The wings of the butterfly Pachliopta aristolochiae, or Indian Common Rose, absorb just about all of the light that falls on them. (Wikimedia Commons)

By Bob McDonald

The black wings of a butterfly have provided a simple way to improve the light gathering abilities of solar cells. It is the latest example of how science turns to nature to find elegant solutions to technical problems.

Solar cells are a wonderfully clean way to turn sunlight directly into electricity with no moving parts and no pollution. But since their current invention more than 60 years ago, they have suffered from inefficiency. Early versions only converted about 1 to 2 per cent of the sunlight falling upon them. That has been improved to roughly 20 per cent today, but that still means 80 per cent of the sunlight is not being used.

Part of the problem is that solar cells tend to have smooth surfaces, which act as partial mirrors, reflecting sunlight back into the sky rather than absorbing it. It was in an attempt to make the surface of solar cells less reflective, and therefore absorb more light, where the scientists turned to the butterfly.

Solar cells are a wonderfully clean way to turn sunlight directly into electricity, but they've suffered from inefficiency. (J. Pat Carter/Associated Press)

The wings of the butterfly Pachliopta aristolochiae, or Indian Common Rose, are a very dark black. This means they absorb just about all of the light that falls on them. (Total reflection of light produces white.) Scientists from Karisruhe Institute of Technology report in the journal Science that under a powerful microscope, they saw tiny holes in the butterfly wings known as nano structures. These little structures, invisible to the naked eye, come in different sizes and shapes, something like the surface of a sponge.

Light-absorbing wings

The holes allow light to penetrate deeper into the wing, increasing the surface area so more light is absorbed without making the wings larger. And the different sizes of holes enable the butterflies to absorb all the colours of light that fall on them, resulting in their deep black colour.

For the butterfly, their light-absorbing wings are used for temperature control. For the scientists, they wanted to apply the same technique to solar cells, so more light could be turned into electricity.

Swiss engineer George de Mestral is the inventor of Velcro, inspired by the many burrs fastened to his pants and his dog's fur after a hike. (Nano Vivid)

After examining these natural structures under an electron microscope, the scientists reproduced a similar pattern onto the surface of a thin film solar cell. It is made of a modern flexible material that is usually used in smaller applications. When they shone light straight down on the surface, absorption increased by 97 per cent. That number shot up to 207 per cent when the light beamed down at an angle, which is important for solar panels, which are not always facing directly at the sun.

It seems that the little holes act as caves, letting the light penetrate deeper into the surface and be absorbed along the cave walls.

This could become a tremendous step forward to improving the efficiency of this type of solar panel and making them more competitive in the alternative energy market.

Seeds inspire Velco invention

This is not the first time nature has inspired science, often leading to useful inventions. In the 1940s, Swiss inventor George de Mestral was walking his dog and noticed seeds that had attached themselves very strongly to the dog's fur and his pant legs.  When he examined the seeds closely, he saw a miniature hook system that grabbed onto loops in fabric and fur. The result was one of our most useful sticky materials: Velcro.

Materials scientists are very interested in gecko feet not just because they stick to almost any surface, but they also instantly let go on demand. (L. Lee Grismer/WWF)

NASA also looked to nature when it developed robots that resemble insectswith legs instead of wheels to explore other planets. That's because walking is better for covering uneven terrain.

And then there is the gecko, a small lizard with the amazing ability to climb walls, cling to the ceiling and even stick to smooth surfaces such as a mirror. The secret, discovered under a microscope, is a large number of tiny hairs that increase the footpads contact area with the surface. They use what are known as van der Waals forces, which are very weak and only act at microscopic distances, but add up when surface contact is very large. 

Materials scientists are very interested in gecko feet not just because they stick to almost any surface, but they also instantly let go on demand, leaving no residue, allowing the gecko to run. A tape with that ability would be very valuable, and gloves made of gecko-like material would allow people to climb walls.

It makes sense that nature can show us better ways to do things. After all, it has had millions of years to experiment and evolve the best solutions to problems such as sticking to a surface, absorbing light, flying, swimming, seeing in the dark and countless other adaptations that have allowed animals and plants to survive in different environments.