This summer I discovered a new (to me) literary genre: post-war British Sci-Fi. The decades after WWII were (not surprisingly) rather rough on the Brits, and the zeitgeist found an interesting outlet in science fiction. What makes these books so awesome?
Primarily it's the tone of stoic despair, a la Orwell. These books are less about the implications of technology, and more about capturing the mood of the times. There's one science/technology schtick to get things rolling, and from there on out it's all about how dysfunctional society can get. Imagine a sci-fi Flannery O'Connor or Cormac McCarthy with a dose of classic British reserve.
I've read two books so far and I'm looking for recommendations for more, so don't hold back in the comments.
I've
been mean to computational/network/systems biologists recently (
twice). Real soon here I'm going to get into some positive aspects of these fields, but before that, I have to slam systems biology one more time.
Guess which blurb was written within the last 5 years, and which one was written more than 30 years ago:
#1:
Before blogs, writers could delusionally
imagine great things about who was reading them:If you look at the traffic statistics for any newsish website you’ll see that people are reading when they’re supposed to be at work. Which means they’re multitasking. Which means they want short items.
This reminds me that something I’ve come to understand in my years in the business is that probably the greatest privilege that writers for traditional magazines have is that nobody has any idea who’s reading them...
Tyler Cowen says the prevalence of individuals falling within autism spectrum make American academe competitive:
A lot of people at colleges are aware of dealing with autism (and Asperger's syndrome; I will refer generally to the autism spectrum) in their "special needs" programs. The more complex reality is that there is a lot more autism in higher education than most of us realize. It's not just "special needs" students but also our valedictorians, our faculty members, and yes —sometimes- our administrators.
Craig Venter says that in a few months, his team will have created the
first genuine artificial life form. As you may recall, Venter's team did the first whole genome transplant a few years back, which involved taking the genome of one species of bacteria and putting it into the genome-free cell of another closely related species. The new hybrid species was able to reboot with the new genome. According to The Times:
Artificial life will be created within four months, a controversial scientist has predicted. Craig Venter, who led a private project to sequence the human genome, told The Times that his team had cleared a critical hurdle to creating man-made organisms in a laboratory.
The perception of truth is almost as simple a feeling as the perception of beauty; and the genius of Newton, of Shakespeare, of Michael Angelo, and of Handel, are not very remote in character from each other. Imagination, as well as the reason, is necessary to perfection in the philosophic mind. A rapidity of combination, a power of perceiving analogies, and of comparing them by facts, is the creative source of discovery. Discrimination and delicacy of sensation, so important in physical research, are other words for taste; and love of nature is the same passion, as the love of the magnificent, the sublime, and the beautiful.
- Humphrey Davy, 1807, quoted in The Age of Wonder, by Richard Holmes
Melville on Science vs. Creation Myth
Non-coding DNA Function... Surprising?
Yep, This Should Get You Fired
No, There Are No Alien Bar Codes In Our Genomes
