Each Christmas I try to reread Dickens' A Christmas Carol, to let flow the spirit of the season. Harder and harder each year, as I get busier and busier. I really need a dollop of idleness to let joy sink in.
Anyway, in my view Dickens is the greatest writer of the English speaking world, and I just finished one of his more powerful passages, from Stave Three (the Ghost of Christmas Present):

'Spirit,' said Scrooge, with an interest he had never felt before, 'tell me if Tiny Tim will live.'
'I see a vacant seat,' replied the Ghost,' in the poor chimney-corner, and a crutch without an owner, carefully preserved. If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, the child will die.'
'No, no,' said Scrooge. 'Oh, no, kind Spirit! say he will be spared.'
'If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, none other of my race,' returned the Ghost, 'will find him here. What then. If he be like to die, he had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.'
Scrooge hung his head to hear his own words quoted by the Spirit, and was overcome with penitence and grief.
'Man,' said the Ghost, 'if man you be in heart, not adamant, forbear that wicked cant until you have discovered What the surplus is, and Where it is. Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die? It may be, that in the sight of Heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man's child. Oh God! to hear the Insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust.'
Scrooge bent before the Ghost's rebuke, and trembling cast his eyes upon the ground.

Link: The Science Creative Quarterly: THIS IS THE TRUTH.

1. Cigarettes are bad for you.
2. Men and Women are equal.
3. Global Warming is real, and (by the way) it’s all our fault.*
4. It’s not all relative.
5. Gin is better than Whiskey. Whiskey is better than Gin.
6. Intelligent Design is wrong.
7. Over consumption is a serious problem.
8. The Millennium Development Goals are worthy*.
9. Wilco is good, sometimes exceptional, but often inconsequential.
10. Shit happens (ditto for sex and death).
11. Creationism is silly. (also, see 6)
12. SUV’s are just stupid.
13. The truth is worth more than an iPod*.
14. On the whole, disorder increases.
15. Science, for better or for worse, is all around.

So, I’m wondering, if your surname is Void, how do you write a cheque?

‘It is not humanity on my part. I am perfectly willing that other people should kill things for my comfort and advantage.  The mechanism of life is so wonderful that I shrink from stopping its action.  To tread on a black-beetle would be to me like crushing a watch of complex and exquisite workmanship.’
– W.S. Gilbert

Nabakov, linked in  Andrew Sullivan.  I find the commonsense notion that what will happen to our consciousness when we die, will be pretty much like what was happening before we were conceived, to be at once compelling, comforting, and frightening:

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our
existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of
darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views
the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at
some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). I know, however, of a
young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking
for the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks
before his birth. He saw a world that was practically unchanged — the
same house, the same people — and then realized that he did not exist
there at all and that nobody mourned his absence. He caught a glimpse
of his mother waving from an upstairs window, and that unfamiliar
gesture disturbed him, as if it were some mysterious farewell. But what
particularly frightened him was the sight of a brand-new baby carriage
standing there on the porch, with the smug, encroaching air of a
coffin; even that was empty, as if, in the reverse course of events,
his very bones had disintegrated.

Some insight from the discoverer of the double helix.  He’s right, in my view, about the transformative effects of the falling costs of sequencing.
"Esquire: What I’ve learned"

Never fight bigger boys or dogs.

The cost of DNA sequencing is going to change the world much
faster than I would have thought. We can resequence someone now for
$150,000. Can you reach the $1,000 genome? I’m skeptical of that. But
just $15,000 would change the world. You’d do a thousand Greeks and a
thousand Swedes and find out what’s different about them. Anytime a
child has problems at school or something where you worry something is
wrong, you’ll do a DNA diagnosis.

I’ve given my DNA to two of these companies. I’ve told them they
can publish everything except the structure of the gene that will tell
me if I’m predisposed to Alzheimer’s. I don’t want to know.

New ideas require new facts.

You explain things by way of ideas. Why do we have a government
that is run by rich trash? Because they’ve used their money to buy the
presidency. Bush is a tool for the people who don’t want an inheritance
tax. And Frist isn’t an innocent bystander, with his own family
fortune–hundreds of millions. The piece of shit, I hate him.

For all my life, America was the place to be. And we somehow
continue to be the place where there are real opportunities to change
the world for the better.

I’m basically a libertarian. I don’t want to restrict anyone
from doing anything unless it’s going to harm me. I don’t want to pass
a law stopping someone from smoking. It’s just too dangerous. You lose
the concept of a free society. Since we are genetically so diverse and
our brains are so different, we’re going to have different aspirations.
The things that will satisfy me won’t satisfy you. On the other hand,
if global warming is in any way preventable and it’s likely to come,
not doing something would be irresponsible to the future of our society.

Continue reading →

I have been speaking to several friends and colleagues lately about career choices, mine and theirs, weighing options and fretting about stability vs. risk, when and how to make a leap, and so on.  When considering a major decision, I often think back to this article by the late Nico Colchester that I first read in the Economist a few years ago.  "Comfortable sogginess" is something we all fall into from time to time, or all the time, but it risks regret over the life not lived.

Crunchiness brings wealth. Wealth leads to sogginess. Sogginess
brings poverty. Poverty creates crunchiness. From this immutable cycle
we know that to hang on to wealth, you must keep things crunchy.

Crunchy
systems are those in which small changes have big effects leaving those
affected by them in no doubt whether they are up or down, rich or
broke, winning or losing, dead or alive. The going was crunchy for
Captain Scott as he plodded southwards across the sastrugi. He was
either on top of the snow-crust and smiling, or floundering thigh-deep.
The farther south he marched the crunchier his predicament became.

Sogginess
is comfortable uncertainty. The modern Scott is unsure how deeply he is
in it. He can radio for an airlift, or drop in on an American
early-warning station for a hot toddy. The richer a society becomes,
the soggier its systems get. Light-switches no longer turn on or off:
they dim.