DUBLINERS ARE used to complaining. But they may be surprised to hear that, 400 years ago, they were complaining about roughly the same things: foul weather, property problems and allegations of political corruption.

Archival material from 1608 also reveals Dublin's civic authorities had to carry out repairs to the main bridge over the Liffey - in a spooky parallel to similar repairs which began this week on O'Connell Bridge.

Dublin historian Dr Maighréad Ní Mhurchadha, who has researched the era in question for a new book, says construction difficulties and the weather were the main issues facing Dubliners in 1608, a year in which the Irish currency was worth three-quarters of the pound sterling.

While Dubliners of 1608 didn't have to battle heavy rain and flooding, they were faced with severe frosts and cold winters. In fact, the Liffey was so frozen on several occasions that people and animals were able to walk across it, she says.

The winter of 1607-1608 had been particularly cold, with Dublin City Assembly voting in April "to repair the defects of the piles of the Bridge, happened unto them by means of the late frost".

The planning tribunals would not be established for another 390 years. But, as Dr Ní Mhurchadha points out, there had been plenty of allegations of political skulduggery.

She cites one particular occasion, in which it was complained at a meeting of the Dublin Civic Assembly that many charters, books and rolls belonging to the city had come into the hands of certain citizens by some sinister means. These were being retained "to the great hurt" of the city. There was a suggestion the guilty parties were members of the assembly, she says.

Mainstream it’s not — and that’s just how the organizers like it. A Razor, a Shiny Knife began as a regular post-boccie Sunday dinner with friends and grew as those friends told other friends. The meals became more ambitious and eventually, anyone who turned up was asked for money to cover the groceries. It became what is called an underground restaurant, but it, and others like it, often have less in common with restaurants than with other alternative culture, like indie rock.

The passionate enthusiasts who have opened dozens of unlicensed restaurants in apartments and other private spaces in recent years do not generally aspire to become traditional restaurateurs, with overhead and investors and the health department — a k a The Man — telling them what to do. They are not in it for the money or for Buddha Bar-size crowds; instead, they say, they are in it for the community and the creative freedom. It’s hard to imagine even the most adventurous legitimate restaurant encouraging customers to hack the hindquarters off a boar’s carcass. And underground restaurants have found their niche. Stringing together the farm-to-table movement and a bloggy kind of interactivity, they have gained a following among food lovers, mostly in their 20s and 30s, who have an opinion on local versus organic, prefer intimate and casual to grand and ceremonial, and are open to meeting people and building connections in new ways.

If you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project—every page, every edit, every line of code, in every language Wikipedia exists in—that represents something like the cumulation of 98 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 98 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 98 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of the cognitive surplus that's finally being dragged into what Tim O'Reilly calls an architecture of participation.

Now, the interesting thing about a surplus like that is that society doesn't know what to do with it at first... Because if people knew what to do with a surplus with reference to the existing social institutions, it wouldn't be a surplus, would it? It's precisely when no one has any idea how to deploy something that people have to start experimenting with it, in order for the surplus to get integrated, and the course of that integration can transform society.

Genetically speaking, Finns and Italians are the most atypical Europeans. There is a large degree of overlap between other European ethnicities, but not up to the point where they would be indistinguishable from each other. Which means that forensic scientists now can use DNA to predict the region of origin of otherwise unknown persons (provided they are of European heritage).

The genetic map of Europe was compiled by comparing DNA samples from 23 populations in Europe (pictured on the right-hand side map). Those populations were then placed on the ‘genetic’ map according to their similarity, with the vertical axis denoting differences from south to north, and the horizontal one from west to east. The larger the area assigned to a population, the larger the genetic variation within that population.When compared to the actual map, the populations kinda sorta maintain their relative position to each other.

“71% of adults used to play on the streets when they were young. 21% of children do so now. Are we designing children and play out of the public realm?

This project is a study into different ways of bringing play back into public space. It focuses on ways of incorporating incidental play in the public realm by not so much as having separate play equipment that dictates the users but by using existing furniture and architectural elements that indicate playful behaviour for all.

It asks us to question the current framework for public space and whether it is sufficient while also giving permission for young people to play in public.

INTERVIEWER
Are there any shows that you particularly love?

ECO
The police series. Starsky and Hutch, for instance.

INTERVIEWER
That show doesn’t exist anymore. It’s from the seventies.

ECO
I know, but I was told that the complete series was just released on DVD, so I am thinking of acquiring it. Other than that I like CSI, Miami Vice, ER, and most of all, Columbo.

INTERVIEWER
Have you read The Da Vinci Code?

ECO
Yes, I am guilty of that too.

INTERVIEWER
That novel seems like a bizarre little offshoot of Foucault’s Pendulum.

ECO
The author, Dan Brown, is a character from Foucault’s Pendulum! I invented him. He shares my characters’ fascinations—the world conspiracy of Rosicrucians, Masons, and Jesuits. The role of the Knights Templar. The hermetic secret. The principle that everything is connected. I suspect Dan Brown might not even exist.

In the Olympics, few nations are bigger underachievers than India. Despite a fast-growing economy and a population of 1 billion, at the last Olympics in Athens, the country managed just one medal, a silver in double trap shooting. The president of the Indian Olympic Association, Suresh Kalmadi, shocked no one this week when he warned the country not to expect "too many medals in Beijing". In comparison India's neighbour across the Himalayas, China, won 63 medals, including 32 golds, and the Beijing games are likely to see the People's Republic overtake the US to become the world's greatest sporting nation.

Many theories have been proposed to account for India's failure. Some experts say India has not much in the way of sports culture and few heroes; others blame a "corrupt sporting bureaucracy". Things have got so bad that in the past, Indian sports ministers have suggested a moratorium on international competition to train athletes who will not be a national embarrassment.

In a recent paper, Anirudh Krishna and Eric Haglund, two academics at Duke University in the United States, said that the problem for India is not the size of the economy or the large population but the number of people who can "effectively participate in sports". Although India's economy is growing, the country is mired in poverty. Nearly 8 million children suffer from malnutrition and more than 250 million live below the poverty line.

"Ill health and poor nutrition can hamper early childhood development. In addition, lack of information and lack of access can effectively exclude larges swaths of a country's population. The resulting small percentage of effective participants helps explain more fully why despite such a large population and a large potential talent pool, a country ends up winning very few Olympic medals," the paper's authors wrote in the Bombay-published journal Economic and Political Weekly... Controversially, the paper contends that social mobility is the key to countries' success at the Olympics. Populations that are better informed and better connected to opportunities, in societies where information and access are widespread "tend to win a higher share of Olympic medals", they said.