Here, it shows that Wilde had been influenced by books ever since he was born.

Wilde, born in 1854 and raised in a well-to-do, book-filled house in Dublin’s Merrion Square by a literary mother who called herself Speranza and performed public recitations of poetry, devoured the printed word from an early age. At his Enniskillen boarding school, Portora, he ran up a staggering book-bill of £11 5s 9d. The autograph and date (2 September 1865) on his copy of Voltaire’s L’Histoire de Charles XII make it the one book known to have been in his possession at the age of eleven, and mark his excellence in French. At Portora he also mastered the King James Bible, won a prize for Scripture and became a fine classical scholar, preferring Greek to Latin.

The most unconventional aspect of Wilde’s adolescent taste, in Wright’s view, was his love of French fiction. His passion was Balzac. He later said he wept ‘tears of blood’ when he read of the death in prison of the poet Lucien de Rubempré: ‘I was never so affected by any book.’

After Trinity College, Dublin he went on to Magdalen College, Oxford. There, in 1874, Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance struck him with the force of a revelation and he claimed never to travel without this book ‘which has had such a strange influence over my life’.

Even he was imprisoned because of his homosexuality, he still need books for the hope to live his life.

When disaster struck in 1895 and he was tried and found guilty of ‘gross indecency’, it struck his books too. Auctioneers descended on the house in Tite Street, Chelsea that Wilde shared with his wife Constance and their two sons. His cherished book collection was sold at auction to pay his creditors. According to Wright, who has consulted the ‘Tite Street Catalogue’, Lot 114 included ‘about’ 100 unidentified French novels.

Among the humiliations Wilde suffered after being sent to prison were not only compulsory silence – prisoners were forbidden to speak to one another – but deprivation of books. All he had in his cell at Pentonville, apart from his bed (a plank laid across two trestles), were a Bible, a prayer book and a hymnal. When at last his sympathetic MP won him permission to have more books, Wilde nominated Pater’s The Renaissance along with the works of Flaubert and some by Cardinal Newman. These were allowed, but only at the rate of one a week. Moved to Reading Gaol, he found himself under a more sympathetic prison governor. His book request lists after July 1896 show him developing an interest in more recently published titles, including novels by George Meredith and Thomas Hardy. Wilde later said that he also read Dante every day in prison and that Dante had saved his reason.

When he was discharged in May 1897, he was not allowed to take his accumulated books with him and faced what he called the horror of ‘going out into the world without a single book’. But friends rallied round. Entering the hotel room in Dieppe where he was to begin his exile, he found it full of books furnished by his friends and he broke down and wept. He soon received a copy of Poems by his old lover, Alfred Douglas, and their relationship resumed. Wilde, after being received into the Roman Catholic church, died in a Paris hotel on 30 November 1900.

It is quite tragic to see the immensed love of Wilde for his books. It is said then, books is what that make Oscar Wilde, the great Victorian playwright.

 

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”

Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. “I can’t read War and Peace  anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”

Anecdotes alone don’t prove much. And we still await the long-term neurological and psychological experiments that will provide a definitive picture of how Internet use affects cognition. But a recently published study of online research habits , conducted by scholars from University College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think. As part of the five-year research program, the scholars examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the British Library and one by a U.K. educational consortium, that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information. They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to another site. Sometimes they’d save a long article, but there’s no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it. The authors of the study report:

 

 It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.

 

Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self. “We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We arehow we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.

Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It’s not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains. Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.

 

His article makes sense that many people felt the same as he is. After that,  James Bowmen from The New Atlantis wrote an article as a response for Carr, Is Stupid Making Us Google? which gives an explanation and alternatives for this problem among digital people.

In brief, I believe this is one of the challenge for the digital natives as a process to evolve into a more completed form method of online reading and thinking. Maybe one day, we will develop a new way of thinking that makes us much more superior than generation before, which they used traditional sense when reading.

A survey at five universities around the world has found considerable buy-in of eBooks for research and study purposes, giving strong credence to the notion there is a large, undertapped market for the medium.

Between 52 percent and 84 percent of respondents were aware of the availability of eBooks through their libraries, and between 58 percent and 80 percent had used eBooks at least once, according to a new study conducted by Springer Science+Business Media.

Interestingly, the study also found that people who were inclined to rely on digital ink for work didn’t much like it for play. At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, for example, 78 percent said they use eBooks for research, compared to only 10 percent for leisure. (see chart above)

The survey also found that most people find eBooks through Google and library search engines, rather than vendor site (just like everyone does for … everything).

As more eBook readers emerge, and evolve to tackle the new media market, one question that keeps popping up is: Who benefits the most from the relatively new format? 

Rumors have been floating around about a new Amazon Kindle being targeted towards college students, who face high textbook prices and have been turning to piracy and investigating other options like open source books to save money. 

Amazon hasn’t confirmed any such effort yet, but it looks like some sort of deal with university libraries would make a lot of sense, where students can borrow texts for free as needed.

Schools who participated in the study include: Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica (CWI), Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science, in Amsterdam; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; University of Muenster in Germany; University of Turku in Finland; and JRD Tata Memorial Library Bangalore in India.

Read more from NY Times.

But inside are not old-fashioned vacuum tubes but the stuff of 21st-century high-tech dreams dedicated to the marriage of art and science as it has never been done before, its creators say — 220,000 square feet of theaters, studios and work spaces hooked to supercomputers.

Within its walls, the designers say, scientists can immerse themselves in data and fly through a breaking wave or inspect the kinks in a DNA molecule, artists can participate in virtual concerts with colleagues in different parts of the world or send spectators on trips through imaginary landscapes, and architects can ponder their creations from the inside before a single brick or two-by-four has been put in place.

Read more 

This surely is a great news for both scientists and artists. Hope Empac’s effort will not let waste. Although they are not working together instead of just putting them under one roof, still this is what scientists and artists wanted because both were considered mutually exclusive. But then, a scientist can become an artist while an artist can become a scientist, like Leonardo DaVinci. When science and arts fused, it is a masterpiece for our mind.

I won the White House for Barack Obama last week. And for John McCain, too!

I was playing The Political Machine 2008, this year’s big sim-election title, and had a blast slinging mud and pandering. Playing as Obama, I stormed around the coasts, promising clean coal and running ads blasting McCain for supporting the war, and soon I was kicking back in the Oval Office. Playing as McCain, I played precisely the opposite cards in the red heartland, and won that race as well.

And as I turned off the computer, I thought — wow, you could regard The Political Machine as the supreme indictment of American Democracy. Because for all its cartoony graphics, the electioneering feels quite realistic. Almost too realistic. And you wind up worrying: Is real-life politics just a game, too?

As we move ever closer to Nov. 4, pundits constantly complain that the presidential campaign has become a farce of scorekeeping — with the candidates, media and consultants treating it merely as a horse race. Why aren’t we talking about issues? they moan. Isn’t democracy supposed to be about more than just pandering to the crowd?

In one sense, the pundits are completely right. There’s something enormously depressing about watching the electioneering devolve into such nanoscale pettiness as the “lipstick on a pig” argument, or the choruses of “drill, baby, drill.” We’re facing down some of the hugest social crises in a generation — climate change, a worldwide economic meltdown — yet we’re faced with campaigns dominated by who’s racking up more daily points: Who attacked? Who deflected? Modern political campaigns even borrow directly from the linguistics of game-playing: The candidates are engaged in a “horse race.”

But let me suggest another way to look at it. Maybe American democracy really is a game — and maybe that’s the best thing about it.

What, after all, is a game? A game is a set of rules that gives players a set of goals but also constrains their behavior in striving for those goals; it architects their behavior in an interesting and hopefully enjoyable way. A really well-designed game is “balanced” and self-correcting. In a game of pool, for example, if you take an early lead by sinking a ton of balls, you quickly discover that — whoops — the game gets harder because your opponents’ balls block all your shots. In MMOs like World of Warcraft, different classes of players do different things; as a result, no one class can run roughshod over all others.

In comparison, what’s a democracy? Much like a game, it’s just a bunch of rules — written down on a piece of paper (er, a “constitution”) — that constrain everyone’s behavior in an attempt to architect a productive, happy and peaceful polity. And, again like a game, if it’s well-designed, it’s self-correcting.

One reason to admire the U.S. democratic system is its neat balance of power. On paper, anyway, the branches of government — executive, legislative and judicial — are co-equal, so each can prevent the others from causing too much mischief. When it comes to elections, some sparsely populated states were weighted higher — given extra senators and congressmen or Electoral College votes so that, again in theory, they wouldn’t be run roughshod over. American democracy is strikingly gamelike in its design.

Yet the thing is, the game is clearly in need of a redesign. When you play Political Machine, you quickly realize — much as real-world candidates do — that you’re mostly worried about the small handful of vote-rich “swing” states, like Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio. I won even though I almost completely ignored population-rich New York, California and Texas.

This is, of course, because of the superweird Electoral College system. It’s a design choice that made a lot of sense 200 years ago, but makes increasingly less sense as time goes on and America becomes more of an urban, coastal country. The software of American democracy was designed to run on hardware — a particular population distribution — that no longer exists.

If American democracy actually were a game, like Halo, players would call it unbalanced — and cry out for a solution. Or to put it another way: The software of U.S. democracy needs a patch. It needs some tweaks that force politicians to consider the whole map.

Plenty of electoral thinkers have suggested reweighting the Electoral College, or maybe even scrapping it. Assuming this were politically possible, it would require some sober meditation on design. For example, to ensure that low-population states don’t get completely overlooked politically in the new regime, you might want to include new safeguards for them — such as a couple extra senators or representatives.

Even so, you’d want to be very, very careful as you proceeded. As any videogame designer knows, changing even one tiny part of a system — making the rifles more lethal in Call of Duty, or gravity slightly more powerful in a racing game — can send the entire thing spiraling into chaos. The same goes with democracy, in spades.

But the point is, thinking about American democracy as a game is not necessarily a bad thing. Quite the contrary: It might be the best way to fix it.

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Here’s a sad monument to the sleaziness of this presidential campaign: Almost one-third of voters “know” that Barack Obama is a Muslim or believe that he could be.

In short, the political campaign to transform Mr. Obama into a Muslim is succeeding. The real loser as that happens isn’t just Mr. Obama, but our entire political process.

A Pew Research Center survey released a few days ago found that only half of Americans correctly know that Mr. Obama is a Christian. Meanwhile, 13 percent of registered voters say that he is a Muslim, compared with 12 percent in June and 10 percent in March.

More ominously, a rising share — now 16 percent — say they aren’t sure about his religion because they’ve heard “different things” about it.

When I’ve traveled around the country, particularly to my childhood home in rural Oregon, I’ve been struck by the number of people who ask something like: That Obama — is he really a Christian? Isn’t he a Muslim or something? Didn’t he take his oath of office on the Koran?

In conservative Christian circles and on Christian radio stations, there are even widespread theories that Mr. Obama just may be the Antichrist. Seriously.

John Green, of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, says that about 10 percent of Americans believe we may be in the Book of Revelation’s “end times” and are on the lookout for the Antichrist. A constant barrage of e-mail and broadcasts suggest that Mr. Obama just may be it.

More.

Comment:

If this circumstances are true, Mr. McCain has almost reached at its peak of success in his campaign against Mr. Obama. The religion matter is quite serious among the Americans, and could be used politically against Mr. Obama.

First, if you have not visit this site, try it. It will suggest something that are very interesting to get the sensational feeling before seeing the collider started. Actually, it is intended before the launching of LHC last week but then, now we have to wait again, so it doesn’t matter then to try it for a second time because it is not that obsolete, it just a week late though.

Second, you could try yourself to debate with the-end-of-the-world-people. I don’t know if it worth it or not but I can guarantee you that it will not last just for two month. Maybe not even after the Higgs Boson is found.

ScienceDaily (Sep. 21, 2008) — Theoretical models of stellar formation propose the existence of very massive stars that can attain up to 150 times the mass of our Sun. 

Until very recently, however, no scientist had discovered a star of more than 83 solar masses. Now an international team of astrophysicists, led by Université de Montréal researchers from the Centre de recherche en astrophysique du Québec (CRAQ), has found and “weighed” the most massive star to date.

Olivier Schnurr, Jules Casoli and André-Nicolas Chené, all graduates of the Université de Montréal, and professors Anthony F. J. Moffat and Nicole St-Louis, successfully “weighed” a star of a binary system with a mass 116 times greater than that of the Sun, waltzing with a companion of 89 solar masses, doubly beating the previous record and breaking the symbolic barrier of 100 solar masses for the first time.

Located in the massive star cluster NGC 3603, the supermassive star system, known under the name of A1, has a rotation period of 3.77 days. The masses were calculated by a combination of observations made with the SINFONI instrument, an integral field spectrograph operating on the Very Large Telescope on the site of the European Organisation for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere (ESO) in Chile, and infrared images coming from the Hubble Space Telescope.

The stars forming the A1 system are so massive and bright that the light they transmit shows characteristics that only “Wolf-Rayet” stars possess. A Wolf-Rayet star is a hot, massive and evolved star exhibiting a very high loss of mass due to a strong stellar wind (similar to the solar wind). Within the context of this work, a binary system transmitting X-rays at a power almost never seen in our Galaxy was also discovered near NGC 3603-A1.

Note: NGC 3603 (entry number 3603 of the New General Catalogue) is a giant HII region in the Constellation Carina, in the Carina arm of our spiral Galaxy, the Milky Way, about 20,000 light years from the Sun. It was discovered by John Frederick William Herschel in 1834. NGC 3603 has an open cluster at its centre that contains approximately 2,000 bright and massive stars.

Here is the review from The Wired.

So, another disappointment after a disappointment is really a frustrating experience for fans. Hope George Lucas can bring another miracle for fans just like he did for the Star Wars live-action movies.