Henry Blodget in Business Insider:

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Peter Pesic in American Scientist:

Lisa Randall’s new book, Knocking on Heaven’s Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World, takes us 10 years past her initial conjectures and in some ways may be even more ambitious. As the subtitle indicates, she wishes to take up larger questions about the nature of scientific thinking, including its relation to religion and its reliance on probability. At the same time, she wishes to bring her audience up to date regarding the status of her theory within the larger ambit of particle physics and cosmology as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) begins its work, a monumental collaboration involving the whole world. (Americans are the largest single nationality involved in its operation, although the United States is not an official member state of CERN, its operating consortium.)

The resulting book is valuable and engaging; like its predecessor, it is a tour de force of popularization. The good part about its wider ambition emerges in Randall’s clarification of the exact purport and scope of scientific work. But as she interweaves this with descriptions of theories and experiments, past and present, the reader may feel some tension between her somewhat divergent goals, which work together but also divide the reader’s attention and hence lead to organizational challenges.

Randall acknowledges in the preface that Knocking on Heaven’s Door is “in some respects . . . two books in one,” a statement that portends problems for the unity and cohesive force of the whole.

More here.

Hannah Gersen in The Millions:

After a couple days of hemming and hawing, I decided to join the protesters of Occupy Wall Street. I was hesitant to go because until very recently, I worked as an administrative assistant at a prominent Wall Street law firm. I didn’t know how, in good conscience, I could rail against The Man when my primary responsibility had once been to keep track of incoming phone calls from Goldman Sachs. But then I heard one of the protest’s organizers on the radio saying that the Occupy movement wasn’t against capitalism, corporations, or even big banking. He was for income equality. And democracy. The reporter pressed him to be more specific, but he refused.

“Why do they have to be more specific?” I yelled at the radio. “Isn’t it obvious why they’re upset?”

I was getting annoyed at the way Occupy Wall Street was being covered — as if it was insane to gather in a public space and protest. As if it had never happened in America before. Wasn’t the whole point of passive resistance to just be there? To not make any demands? As I tried to come up with a good parallel, I found myself thinking of Bartleby, the Scrivener, Herman Melville’s short story about an office worker, Bartleby, who decides out of nowhere that he doesn’t feel like working anymore, but continues to show up at the office every day. Bartleby’s idleness baffles and then infuriates his boss, who begs Bartleby to give some reason for his behavior. But Bartleby refuses to disclose his interests, and over the course of the story, his needs become so few that he dies of starvation. It’s a bleak, mysterious story, and as I returned to my copy to reread it, I was stilled to rediscover its subtitle: “A Story of Wall Street.”

More here.

Marie Myung-Ok Lee in The Guardian:

I've come to the Congress on Aesthetic Vaginal Surgery because I want to learn more about one of the fastest growing cosmetic procedures in the US. This newish industry consists of doctors and their clients (clients, not patients, because these surgeries are cash-only elective procedures) who believe the female nether area can be improved upon or remediated. Procedures offered include labiaplasty (trimming or completely removing labia), vaginal rejuvenation (tightening), hymenoplasty (“revirgination”) and clitoral “unhooding” – among others.

On my way to check out the exhibits, I pass a 4ft welcome poster of a woman's bare back and well rounded buttocks. At a cosmetic gynaecology conference at a luxury hotel in Las Vegas only six weeks earlier (yes, these surgeries are so popular there are two competing conferences), even the ads for post-surgical “compression garments” were made to look a little S&M sexy, while the mostly male doctors walked around with name badges festooned with identifying ribbons (“Presenter”! “Faculty”! “Attendee”!), looking like generals returning from battle with a chest full of medals.

As I browse, a surgical equipment salesman mistakes me for a doctor and eagerly tries to sell me his new radiostatic scalpel (“Less thermal collateral damage!”), demonstrating its precision by cutting slices out of a piece of raw steak.

Designer vagina surgery is big business: according to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, in 2009 female consumers spent an estimated $6.8m (£4.4m) on these procedures (the figure counts only plastic surgeons, not gynaecologists).

More here.

From Gawker:

Steve Jobs had a mild form of cancer that is not usually fatal, but seems to have ushered along his own death by delaying conventional treatment in favor of alternative remedies, a Harvard Medical School researcher and faculty member says. Jobs's intractability, so often his greatest asset, may have been his undoing.

“Let me cut to the chase: Mr. Jobs allegedly chose to undergo all sorts of alternative treatment options before opting for conventional medicine,” Ramzi Amri wrote in an extraordinarily detailed post to Quora, an online Q&A forum popular among Silicon Valley executives. “Given the circumstances, it seems sound to assume that Mr. Jobs' choice for alternative medicine has eventually led to an unnecessarily early death.”

Amri went on to say that, even after entering conventional medical care, the Apple CEO seemed to eschew the most practical forms of treatment. Addressing the period when Jobs began to visibly shed weight, Amri wrote, “it seems that even during this recurrent phase, Mr. Jobs opted to dedicate his time to Apple as the disease progressed, instead of opting for chemotherapy or any other conventional treatment.”

More here.

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.