Lunuganga

Geoffrey Bawa was a renowned architect in Sri Lanka whose style spread beyond the island’s borders and influenced others in Asia. He would design homes that blended in with the lush tropical foliage. Perhaps his signature achievement was the home that he himself occupied at a place called Lunuganga (that translates as ‘salt river’) on the banks of a river near the southwestern coast of the island. He furnished it with works of art that reflected his eclectic tastes. You can see many photographs here and here. After his death in 2003, the house has been run by a trust set up by his friends. The gardens are open to the public and the buildings are part of a hotel.
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On being a victim of hacking

I retired from Case Western Reserve University a little over two years ago. About a year after I left I got a phone call at home from the head of the computer’s security division, whom I know pretty well, to tell me that they were investigating the activities of a former student at the university who had infiltrated the computers of quite a few people. The investigators had determined that my work computer was one of those hacked.
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Can men and women just be friends?

Can men and women just be close friends or is it inevitable that it will eventually end up in a sexual relationship or the two becoming estranged? This was, of course, the question that was central to the 1989 hit comedy film When Harry Met Sally and as I recall the answer given in the film was the former. But Johanna Leggatt argues that not only is a close non-sexual relationship possible, she feels that a desirable quality that she looks for in a man is that he have female friends.
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Storing books in libraries

I love libraries. And I love librarians. They are the most knowledgeable and helpful of people as a class. They seem to get a real kick out of finding stuff for you.

Libraries have the problem of what to do about the increasing numbers of books and journals that they own. This problem is particularly acute for university libraries that do not, as a rule, throw old books and journals away or sell them because they are resources for research that a faculty member or student may need at some point, however rarely. In my own research, I have been very grateful to my university library because it has rare books on obscure topics published over a century ago that I suspect that are almost never checked out. And yet, there they are, just waiting for me.
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Appropriate and inappropriate workplace behavior

The recent spate of revelations about inappropriate behavior in the workplace has largely dealt with pretty serious offenses where the wrongdoing was obvious. But what about gray areas where people may not be sure if something is appropriate or not? To explore this NPR, in conjunction with the polling outfit Ipsos, conducted a survey to see what people thought was appropriate and what was not and reporter Danielle Kurtzleben discussed the results on last Saturday’s episode of All Things Considered.
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Public toilet etiquette

On my long flight back from California, I whiled away some of the time by watching some episodes of the comedy show Curb Your Enthusiasm that stars Larry David who plays himself as a somewhat cantankerous and annoying busybody who talks all the time, and deals with his life and interactions with other comedy writers and actors in Los Angeles who makes cameo appearances. I had never seen a full episode of the show before but had seen clips and was of course aware of David himself, especially given his many appearances on Saturday Night Live during the 2016 election campaign where his strong physical and vocal resemblance to Bernie Sanders, including his gruff manner, was exploited to the hilt.
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Baby Winter Olympics

I mentioned before that the only Winter Olympic sport I would care to watch is curling but since I do not have cable TV, I could not see any because the network broadcasts only show it at weird hours. But I got lucky on my long flight last week because the airline had various TV channels and while surfing through, I managed to catch the US vs. Switzerland women’s curling contest. It was fascinating. The level of strategy involved and the precision with which the teams can aim the ‘rock’ towards the ‘house’ (I am slowly learning the jargon) is amazing.
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Is there art in artificial intelligence?

I mentioned the fascinating Science Café talk on Deep Learning. At the very end, there was a thought provoking question raised by an artist in the audience who asked whether such machines could create works of art. The speaker pondered the question and answered that in his opinion, the answer is no. His reasoning was that in a work of art, the artist is trying to convey something based on their life experiences and emotions and a computer, however sophisticated and capable of learning, would not be able to draw upon such resources.
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