Roger Boylan in More Intelligent Life:

Posthumous success is better than no success at all, but it’s still rotten luck when the applause erupts only after the curtain has fallen for good. Flann O’Brien was an Irish author who would have turned 100 this October 5th. Bad luck dogged him all his life, and he died unappreciated in 1966. He was so self-effacing and elusive that Brendan Behan, an Irish poet and novelist, said of his contemporary: “You had to look twice to see if he was there at all.” But in death O’Brien enjoys a cult following that expresses its devotion in Flann O’Brien pubs, literary conferences, T-shirts and the appearance of one of his books in an episode of the TV series “Lost”.

“Flann O’Brien” was the invention of Brian O’Nolan, who used the nom de plume as a way to hide his writing from his employers at the Irish Civil Service. (For this reason he also used the name Myles na Gopaleen, or Myles of the Ponies, to write columns in the Irish Times—a reference to a character in a 19th-century Irish play by Dion Boucicault.) O’Nolan was confined to speaking and writing in Irish (Gaelic) at home as it was the only tongue countenanced by his nationalist father. But he escaped into English as a child, via the works of Kipling and Conan Doyle, and ultimately preferred the language for his own books. After university, where he performed adequately, he entered the civil service and enjoyed a certain degree of independence until his father died. This promoted him to paterfamilias and sole supporter for his ten siblings, his mother and his wife, Evelyn. Writing was his only escape, which he indulged in the interstices of the job.

Ya Cao, Ronald A. DePinho, Matthias Ernst and Karen Vousden in Nature:

In your opinion, what have been the most important findings in cancer research in the past 10 years?

Ya Cao. Cancer has been identified as a chronic disease1. In an attempt to battle this disease the World Health Organization have developed three principles on cancer prevention: they have estimated that current prevention strategies could prevent up to one-third of new cancers; they have suggested that improved early screening could result in the detection of one-third of cancers at an early stage; and they have proposed that a comprehensive treatment strategy could improve survival and quality of life for another one-third of patients with advanced cancer. These strategies offer the most cost-effective, long-term control of cancer.

Cancer is a vastly complex disease exhibiting a plethora of changes in multiple genes. More and more attention is now being focused on the relationship between infection and cancer. For example, about 200,000 women die every year from cervical carcinoma, which is closely associated with human papillomavirus (HPV) infection. Importantly, a vaccine against HPV was the first cancer vaccine to be developed and should substantially reduce the incidence of cervical cancer. Besides HPV, Helicobacter pylori infection is linked with gastrohelcosis, which is the precancerous stage of gastric cancer. Clearly, the relationship between H. pylori and gastric cancer is an important basis for developing an efficient therapeutic strategy for controlling H. pylori infection and, ultimately, gastric cancer.

In the post-Human Genome Project (HGP) era, researchers and scientists are again recognizing the importance of the molecular mechanisms of carcinogenesis from the genome-wide level.

Gidi Weitz in Ha'aretz:

More recently, television series have become perhaps the most significant of all forms of creativity. Do you think there is a qualitative difference between them and novels? Did you see “The Sopranos” or “The Wire”?

“Everybody loves 'The Wire' and I think it's okay, but in the end it's just a police series. I love 'The Sopranos.' 'Deadwood,' which didn't last long, was a series I liked a lot; it had more filthy language than I've ever heard on television anywhere in my life, but it was brilliantly written. I like some of what is on now, like 'Breaking Bad' and 'Dexter.'

“I mean, there is always a lot of junk; most novels published are bad novels, most plays put on are bad plays, most movies that come out are bad movies and that is also true of TV. Nineteen times out of 20 you fall asleep. There was a series called 'Game of Thrones' which was very popular here in the United States, a post-Tolkien kind of thing. It was garbage, yet very addictive garbage – because there's lots of violence, all the women take their clothes off all the time, and it's kind of fun. In the end, it's well-produced trash, but there's room for that, too.

“I watched all that because if I am going to work in this field, I need to know what it is going on. I have been making myself have whole-series marathons to get the point of how it goes. I will soon start writing my little series.”

Evgeny Morozov in The New Republic:

In 1975, Malcolm Bradbury published The History Man, a piercing satire of the narcissistic pseudo-intellectualism of modern academia. The novel recounts a year in the life of the young radical sociologist Howard Kirk—“a theoretician of sociability”—who is working on a book called The Defeat of Privacy. Building on “a little Marx, a little Freud, and a little social history,” Kirk posits that “there are no more private selves, no more private corners in society, no more private properties, no more private acts.” (And, according to Kirk’s sardonic wife, “no more private parts.” She finds her husband’s books “very empty” but “always on the right side.”)

One cannot fault Kirk for thinking too small. He is trying to prove that “sociological and psychological understanding is now giving us a total view of man, and democratic society is giving us total access to everything. There’s nothing that’s not confrontable. There are no concealments any longer, no mysterious dark places of the soul. We’re all right there in front of the entire audience of the universe, in a state of exposure. We’re all nude and available.”

Occasionally Kirk practices what he preaches—his sociology class is invited to see his wife give birth—but he hates it when his own privacy is violated. When a student (who is also his lover) reads his book manuscript, he protests that it is private. He is furious when another student, in a desperate attempt to document the professor’s promiscuity, starts chasing him with a camera.

Public Parts—the second book by Jeff Jarvis, the Internet’s loudest guru—reads like a glib, half-baked sequel to The Defeat of Privacy, produced by an older and more conservative Howard Kirk, who has swapped his tweed jacket for a tuxedo and his smoking pipe for an iPhone. Jarvis’s intellectual heroes are different from Kirk’s, and the latter’s hippie lingo is replaced by business-friendly clichés, but the message is the same.

More here. [Thanks to Kris Kotarski.]

William D. Nordhaus in the New York Review of Books:

Is energy our friend or our enemy? In their personal lives, most people regard energy as an essential friend. It powers our computers, warms our homes in the winter, fuels our cars and planes, and provides a necessary input to produce virtually everything we use. Modern life would be inconceivable without the friendly side of energy.

But in recent decades, energy has also become an enemy. Presidents have lamented our “addiction to oil,” we have gone to war to protect oil fields from hostile powers, and air pollution from fossil fuels kills tens of thousands of people every year. Perhaps most worrisome, the accumulation of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide threatens to change the earth’s climate in ways that are unpredictable and potentially dangerous.

The two faces of energy are the primary reason why energy policy is so controversial and tangled. We need national policies that address the enemies of pollution and global warming. But because energy is such a large part of consumer budgets and so central to our advanced economies, people are reluctant to allow energy prices to reflect the true social costs of energy consumption. We see this tradeoff play out in energy and environmental policy year in and year out.

More here.

Greg Wilson and Jorge Aranda in American Scientist:

Software engineering has long considered itself one of the hard sciences. After all, what could be “harder” than ones and zeroes? In reality, though, the rigorous examination of cause and effect that characterizes science has been much less common in this field than in supposedly soft disciplines like marketing, which long ago traded in the gut-based gambles of “Mad Men” for quantitative, analytic approaches.

A growing number of researchers believe software engineering is now at a turning point comparable to the dawn of evidence-based medicine, when the health-care community began examining its practices and sorting out which interventions actually worked and which were just-so stories. This burgeoning field is known as empirical software engineering and as interest in it has exploded over the past decade, it has begun to borrow and adapt research techniques from fields as diverse as anthropology, psychology, industrial engineering and data mining.

The stakes couldn’t be higher. The software industry employs tens of millions of people worldwide; even small increases in their productivity could be worth billions of dollars a year. And with software landing our planes, diagnosing our illnesses and keeping track of the wealth of nations, discovering how to make programs more reliable is hardly an academic question.

More here.

Douglas Quenqua in the New York Times:

As corn mazes go, the one on Bob Connor’s farm in Danvers, Mass., isn’t particularly challenging.

“It’s one of our average-to-smaller mazes,” said Brett Herbst, who counts that maze among the 2,000 he has designed in the past 16 years. A typical visitor should expect to complete it in about 20 minutes, he said.

Still, a local family had to be retrieved by the police on Monday when they were unable to find the exit to Mr. Connor’s maze before the sun set. The parents, toting an infant and a small child, panicked and called 911, setting off a chain of events that soon turned them into a target for late-night jabs from television hosts like Jay Leno and Chelsea Handler. (The punch line, Mr. Connor said, was that the family was about 25 feet from the exit when they called for help.)

Modern corn mazes are complex systems designed with the aid of sophisticated computer programs. But they are meant to be challenging, not life-threatening, according to maze builders, and getting out should never require a police escort.

More here. [Thanks to Ezra Palmer.]

Nathan Schneider in The Nation:

It all started with an e-mail. On July 13 Adbusters magazine sent out a call to its 90,000-strong list proclaiming a Twitter hashtag (#OccupyWallStreet) and a date, September 17. It quickly spread among the mostly young, tech-savvy radical set, along with an especially alluring poster the magazine put together of a ballerina atop the Charging Bull statue, the financial district’s totem to testosterone.

The idea became a meme, and the angel of history (or at least of the Internet) was somehow ready. Halfway into a revolutionary year—after the Arab Spring and Europe’s tumultuous summer—cyberactivists in the United States were primed for a piece of the action. The Adbusters editors weren’t the only ones organizing; similar occupations were already in the works, including a very well-laid plan to occupy Freedom Plaza in Washington, starting October 6.

Websites cropped up to gather news and announcements. US Day of Rage, the Twitter- and web-driven project of a determined IT strategist, endorsed the action, promoted it and started preparing with online nonviolence trainings and tactical plans. Then, in late August, the hacktivists of Anonymous signed on, posting menacing videos and flooding social media networks.

But a meme alone does not an occupation make. An occupation needs people on the ground. By early August, a band of activists in New York began meeting in public parks to plan.

More here.

Justin E. H. Smith in his own blog:

There must be a word, and probably one beloved of Bolsheviks, for what is occurring right now: there is a sort of apodicticity, an undeniability to it all, one that makes someone like me a bit ashamed to have not seen it earlier. Just two or three years ago my mind still drifted off to more beautiful distractions every time someone started to get indignant about bailing out bankers, or drawing that tiresome, overwrought contrast between 'Wall Street' and 'Main Street'. I've always, to be honest, had a difficult relationship to political engagement. A vivid memory still lingers of a lie-in, circa 1988, somewhere in the suburbs of Sacramento, around the pumps at a Shell station. “Free South Africa, Boycott Shell!”, we were meant to chant, as the zit-faced teenaged pump attendant looked on confusedly, no doubt thinking to himself: What's South Africa? The historical moment was just wrong, or I didn't have the wherewithal to stick it out through the lean years of activism, through the early post-Cold War period of optimistic triumphalism and end-of-history, end-of-ideology ideology. I just didn't have the right temperament for it. It's my shortcoming, not history's. I admit it.

But the thing about this moment that I am trying to get at is that one doesn't need the right temperament in order to be carried along with the mass upheaval. To say, I'm sorry, this just isn't really my thing, is really nothing other than to say, I am an asshole, a wretch. And furthermore, fuck you. To say that this is just not one's thing would be morally the same as that puerile gesture of the Chicago stock traders who announced with a sign in the window of their skyscraper, We Are the 1%.

More here.

An interesting piece by Matt Pearce in New Inquiry:

Gary Robinson was not an important man. He was an ex-con and a drunk. But veteran Miami Herald crime reporter Edna Buchanon started her story about his demise with four words that would eventually become four of the most famous words ever written about anybody in any American newspaper: “Gary Robinson died hungry.”

And that’s how a nobody died famous.

Most of us are nobodies, and we have a few writers who make nobodies famous. We keep most of them in newsrooms. So it’s not that what Teju Cole is doing — making Lagos’ nobodies famous — is, technically speaking, all that unique. What’s new is that he’s doing it on Twitter.

@tejucole, Aug. 29: Scoop, scoop, scoop, spark. Four of those who were collecting petrol from a damaged tanker in Benue died right there.

@tejucole, Aug. 25: Children are a gift from God. In the returns department: a baby girl, left by the side of Effiom Ekpo Street in Calabar.

@tejucole, Aug. 23: O believers! Know that during the Hajj, a Jeddah hotel housing 34 Nigerian pilgrims went up in flames, and none were harmed.

@tejucole, Aug. 22: Even if one does not believe in ghosts, 2,700 of them continue to draw salaries from the Imo State payroll.

@tejucole, Aug. 19: The Nigerian police motto is “the police is your friend,” but Taiwo, 25, beaten in Alapere for not paying a bribe, has his doubts.

@tejucole, Aug. 14: An Air Force officer in Bayelsa who mistook himself for a cop mistook the baker Paul Wisdom for a thief and shot him in the head.

Cole, a novelist and sometime journalist, lives in Brooklyn but grew up in Lagos, the burgeoning Nigerian metropolis that will soon overtake New York City and Los Angeles in population if it hasn’t already. (Cole’s first novel, the recently published Open City, won love from New Yorker curmudgeon James Wood — no small feat.) While working on a book about Lagos, Cole discovered the oft-bizarre tragedies sketched out daily in its newspapers and set about refining them into a purer concentration of fate’s ironies.

Joshua Cohen reviews Meir Doron and Joseph Gelman’s Confidental: The Life of Secret Agent Turned Hollywood Tycoon Arnon Milchan, in n+1:

The Department of Homeland Security’s Analytic Red Cell Unit employs thriller novelists to envision terrorism scenarios: Brad Meltzer and Brad Thor and writers not named Brad receive assignments like, “Think of a way to blow up the Super Bowl.” When I first heard about this unit a few years ago, I started going to parties, drinking too much, and telling everyone I’d been recruited to Red Cell 2: We were a group of literary novelists, tasked with envisioning the terror scenarios the thriller novelists were envisioning before they envisioned them. This was in the event that any of the thrillerists went rogue. (Soon I was hinting at the existence of a Red Cell 3, assembled to predict our predictions of predictions. It was staffed entirely by poets in Brooklyn.)

It’s depressing that the days of litterateurs working as intelligence officers—the days of Greene and Buchan, Fleming and le Carré—are largely over. Why would Ahmadinejad want to klatsch with Philip Roth? What would Kim Jong-il have to say to Jonathan Franzen? If there’s any arts bureau today with the cachet to access world leaders, it’s Hollywood: America’s greatest asset—in every respect—is Brangelina.

If you’re a reviewer, once in a while you’re sent a book in the mail so chintzily produced by a publishing house too busy to edit that you wonder how it is that its sensationalist claims aren’t better known. This was certainly the case with the full-color illustrated, under-proofed Confidential: The Life of Secret Agent Turned Hollywood Tycoon Arnon Milchan.

Jennifer Szalai in Lapham's Quarterly:

It would be fair to guess that Charles Prince’s echo of John Martin, a banker who was nearly ruined by the South Sea Bubble, reflects a sincerity that was blissfully ignorant rather than an irony that wasn’t. One might even be willing to bet on it—if, that is, certain information about Prince’s knowledge and state of mind were actually forthcoming. A wager entails uncertainty, but without the prospect of a future event coming to pass, uncertainty is worth little besides the mystery it affords.

To cast lots for Christ’s robe, as Pontius Pilate’s soldiers did, was to play a game of chance. Gambling is one of those activities, along with religious worship and prostitution, that was popular already by the time any recording of history began. Our modern financial system owes much to this desire to make a fortune off of Fortune, though a society that organizes itself around financial risk-taking, whose national assets oscillate in an invisible cloud of ones and zeros, requires a very particular understanding of what the future can hold. Finance makes a commodity out of expectation, something to be bought (preferably low) and sold (preferably high). In the case of the worried farmer or the worried breadwinner, the future can also be viewed with suspicion, but finance enables the anxious to trade one possibility for another: both the speculator and the hedger are seeking the best future that money can buy.

Having spent much of my 20s being a C programmer, I was one of many to whom Dennis Ritchie was a demigod. I still have my prized (and much thumbed through) copy of the classic The C Programming Language by Kernighan and Ritchie somewhere in a box of old books. It was the C programmer's absolutely indispensible bible. Ritchie had an elegant mind and he used it to design the most elegant language and operating system. His death is very sad.

Steve Lohr in the New York Times:

Dennis M. Ritchie, who helped shape the modern digital era by creating software tools that power things as diverse as search engines like Google and smartphones, was found dead on Wednesday at his home in Berkeley Heights, N.J. He was 70.

Mr. Ritchie, who lived alone, was in frail health in recent years after treatment for prostate cancer and heart disease, said his brother Bill.

In the late 1960s and early ’70s, working at Bell Labs, Mr. Ritchie made a pair of lasting contributions to computer science. He was the principal designer of the C programming language and co-developer of the Unix operating system, working closely with Ken Thompson, his longtime Bell Labs collaborator.

The C programming language, a shorthand of words, numbers and punctuation, is still widely used today, and successors like C++ and Java build on the ideas, rules and grammar that Mr. Ritchie designed.

More here.

“And the day shall come when only wealth shall be considered holy
and its power sanctified by even its victims.”
…………………………. –from The Book of Misapprehensions

The Lord is my Shepherd

the lord is my shepherd
I shall not want any other leader besides him
(even from his own party)
I shall have no other political party besides his
I shall not suffer any domination by the British or
the Americans
and my country shall never be a colony again

the lord is my shepherd
even if I walk in the valley of freedom
I am forced to attend his rallies
I shall not say what I want
because the police and the military will descend
on me

even if I walk in the shadow of poverty
I shall continually shout his name and sing his
praises
“long live my leader”

the lord is my shepherd
I shall not associate with members of the opposition
I shall not walk with demonstrators
for should I be found out
I shall be beaten or tortured

I shall have no other TV stations besides his
I shall see what he wants me to see
I shall hear what he wants me to hear
I shall read what he wants me to read

the lord is indeed my shepherd
I shall not starve
for I shall certainly be given food handouts
to vote for him
and other people’s land for free
squatting

but now the lord is not my shepherd
I have suffered many setbacks
my business operations have been closed my bank accounts frozen
my house has been demolished
my land has been confiscated
and unto me a new law hath been given:
“thou shalt praise the lordship in all his follies”.

by Cosmas Mairosi
publisher PIW, © 2007