My collection of 50’s sci-fi books that have at least a tangential connection to the post-apocalyptic subgenre. Unfortunately, I don’t have have a vintage edition for many of these.
Scientific Award FAIL
Larry Moran reports that John Mattick, author of the infamous dog-ass plot, has won some genomics-related award that I have never heard of.
Moran has the sorry details:
I’m pretty sure that there’s no more than a handful of biochemists/molecular biologists who believe Mattick. They know that lots of noncoding DNA has a function—a fact that’s been in the textbooks for almost fifty years—but they do not believe that most of our genome encodes functional regulatory RNAs. It’s simply untrue that Mattick has proved his hypothesis over the past 18 years. Just the opposite has happened.
He quotes the press release:
The Award Reviewing Committee commented that Professor Mattick’s “work on long non-coding RNA has dramatically changed our concept of 95% of our genome”
Uh, no. Not true. Continue reading “Scientific Award FAIL”
The Cat Empire’s Falling with a little thanks to the Bronx High School for Science
Australian band The Cat Empire are best known as the epitome of the party band. Their music is an often irresistible mix of latin, jazz, ska, piano rock and whatever else happens along the way. Falling, from their 2010 album Cinema, is a great specimen in this regard. Somehow a brass band, guitars, a scratch DJ, several layers of keyboards and a singer stay infectiously together. It works in large part because of their great keyboardist Oliver McGill. His merengue inspired rhythm piano is the spinal column of the song. He holds everything together and everything radiates out from there. Yet in a band with a full horn section, why does he play an electric keyboard? There aren’t any elaborate effects and the band clearly isn’t just looking for an easy piano replacement (seeing as they’re already lugging turntables). The keyboard synthesizer just provides exactly the right sound at the right time. Sometimes it’s a Hammond organ, sometimes it’s bar piano. Even better, sometimes, it’s both (well, with the second keyboard anyway). Continue reading “The Cat Empire’s Falling with a little thanks to the Bronx High School for Science”
Apocalypse 1952: Bernard Wolfe’s Limbo
Rage against the machine
It’s the post-apocalyptic 1990’s, thanks to a late 70’s nuclear third world war brought on by the giant computers that had been delegated by humans to handle geopolitics. (They sound a little like the micro-trading computers that now handle the much of high finance.) It turns out that the computers weren’t any better at keeping the peace than humans were.
Neurosurgeon and former Mormon Dr. Martine has spent the last 18 post-war years hiding out on an uncharted island somewhere in the Indian Ocean, integrated with the natives, but events draw him back home to what’s left of the United States. What he finds, built upon the slag heaps of both the former United States and Soviet Union, is a cyborg civilization filled with men who’ve renounced war, cut off their limbs, and replaced them with nuclear-powered prostheses. To his shock, Martine find out that he unwittingly had something to do with this bizarre state of affairs.
Bernard Wolfe’s 1952 Limbo is a disturbing but weirdly compelling proto-cyberpunk behemoth that combines an edgy, in-your-face language that compares with the best of Alfred Bester, with long, Heinlein-style philosophical digressions that are about as subtle as a kick to the head, to create one long, entertaining rant against… well, something, but I couldn’t quite figure out what. Continue reading “Apocalypse 1952: Bernard Wolfe’s Limbo“
Being a Scientist: Computational Biologist
When your field publishes papers with sections entitled “Simulated Data”, something like this is bound to happen. I’m pretty sure we had to rescue this one from the break room trash. Being sensitive or living up to the computer nerd limited sense of humor stereotype?
You can get your own “Being a Scientist” template here and create your own, you crafty bastards you.
The Finch and Pea 