This month I’ll concentrate on fiction of assorted types: I’m working my way through David Corbett’s rich Do They Know I’m Running? About a Mountain by essayist John D’Agata Philip Pullman courts controversy with The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ Another lifeline for writers and other artists, Eric Maisel’s Brainstorm: Harnessing the Power [...]
A while back I grew most fascinated by the emergence of personal genomics, that is, firms offering whole (or nearly whole) gene testing to individuals via the marketplace. Such tests were, and remain, too expensive for the average bod, but the prices have been plummeting. I even tried to offer myself to a US research [...]
John Lanchester’s feisty I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay (see my review) suggests one idea that hadn’t occurred to me: perhaps the roots of the GFC lie in the end of the Cold War. Put simply (and not in the precise terms Lanchester uses), capitalism had needed to show a ‘human [...]
Amazing! The Obama administration has declassified the size, current and historical, of the American nuclear weapons arsenal. Although there are no surprises in the official September 2009 figure of 5,113 warheads, I’m delighted. For the good news, check out this authoritative analysis by Hans Kristensen at the Federation of American Scientists.
The Australian Weekend Review is essential reading every Saturday, well worth the price of the rest of the unread newspaper, but rarely do I find so many glowing recommendations as in the April 10 edition: Graeme Blundell, whose crime fiction recommendations always chime with me, heads his review of Michael Robotham’s latest, Bleed for Me, thus: [...]
Thriller writer Barry Eisler also pens an acute blog, The Heart of the Matter. One post that originated there but also ran as a Huffington Post headliner is titled ‘Paperback earthworks and digital eReader tides’. Eisler’s simplifying post looks at the ‘battle between paper and digital’ epitomized by the Amazon-Macmillan stoush and points out that [...]
I was saddened to hear (via a post by Don Baker at The Atheist Experience) about a tactic of the religious right in America: setting up ambiguously named Crisis Pregnancy Centers to lure vulnerable pregnant women in and persuade them to have an abortion. I don’t believe we have anything like this in Australia.
Daniel MacArthur, as usual on top of things when it comes to anything affecting personal genomics (an interest of mine) reports on a US District Course ruling invalidating a company-held patent on two genes. Daniel’s post leads on to other fuller analyses. Intuitively, it has always seemed to me that the correct moral and societal [...]
Journalist Camilla Long has an op-ed on the Sunday Times expressing fears about personal genomics, though she takes care to frame her arguments around a criticism of Glenn Close’s public disclosure of full genome sequencing (by Illumina, normally costing US$48,000). I greatly enjoyed the blast given by Daniel MacArthur, who runs the excellent Genetic Future [...]
I’ve been tardy in staying on top of the complex (of course it is, otherwise why my nagging ongoing fascination?) field of personal genomic testing. Thank goodness I do regularly check Daniel MacArthur’s pitch-perfect Genetic Future blog. Wednesday’s post alerted me to two fine ‘status report’ reports: one from Mark Henderson of The Times and the [...]