Selfish Gene Mobi Download Book
Terpsícore Deckelman
He claimed not to be interested in such things. But he was a smoothy, all right. How else, in the midst of the Thatcher massacre of British science, did his lab keep expanding? And yet, he kept up the pretense.
Surely. As E. coli took refuge in our innards. Doubtless long ago the ancestors of E. coli killed a great many of our ancestors before eventually becoming the beneficial symbionts they are now, helping us digest our food.
So our lab got this big grant to study vectors. Which is how Les found you, ALAS. He drew this big chart covering all the possible ways an infection might leap from person to person, and set us about checking all of them, one by one.
Hell, nobody ever caught anything from giving blood . . . nothing except maybe a little dizziness and perhaps a zit or spot from all the biscuits and sweet tea they feed you afterwards. And as for contracting HIV from receiving blood, well, the new antibodies tests soon had that problem under control. Still, the stupid rumors spread.
Sanctimonious twit. Of course he was a donor. Les went on and on about civic duty and such until the waitress arrived with our pizza and two fresh bitters. That shut him up for a moment. But when she left, he leaned forward, eyes shining.
I stared, and upon seeing that look in his eyes, I knew that Les was more than an altruist. He had caught that specially insidious of all human ailments, the Messiah Complex. Les wanted to save the world.
He went on. And on. I listened with half an ear, but already I had come to that fateful realization. A seven year wait for a goddamn co-authorship would make this discovery next to useless to my career, to my ambitions.
We paid our bill and walked toward Charing Cross Station, where we could catch the tube to Paddington, and from there to Oxford. Along the way we ducked out of a sudden downpour at a streetside ice cream vendor. While we waited, I bought us both cones. I remember quite clearly that he had strawberry. I had a raspberry ice.
While Les absent-mindedly talked on about his research plans, a small pink smudge colored the corner of his mouth. I pretended to listen, but already my mind had turned to other things, nascent plans and earnest scenarios for committing murder.
I made my arrangements slowly, knowing Les was in no hurry. Together we gathered data. We isolated, and even crystallized the virus, got X-Ray diffractions, did epidemiological studies, all in strictest secrecy.
Clever, eh? But it does point out just how hard it is, in nature, to pin down a Primal Cause . . . some centre to the puzzle, against which everything else can be calibrated. I mean, which does come first, the chicken or the egg?
Symbiosis? The picture he created in my mind was one of minuscule puppeteers, all yanking and jerking at us with their protein strings, making us marionettes dance to their own tunes, to their own nasty, selfish little agendas.
But deep down, we users count on the sappy, inexplicable generosity, the mysterious, puzzling altruism of those others, the kind, inexplicably decent folk . . . those we superficially sneer at in contempt, but secretly hold in awe.
As I came to hate Leslie Adgeson. I made my plans, schemed my brilliant campaign against both of you. In those last days of innocence I felt oh, so savagely determined. So deliciously decisive and in control of my own destiny.
Catastrophic Auto-immune PUlmonary Collapse . . . acronym for the horror that made AIDS look like a minor irritant. And in the beginning it appeared unstoppable. Its vectors were completely unknown and the causative agent defied isolation for so long.
This time it was no easily identifiable group that came down with the new plague, though it concentrated upon the industrialized world. Schoolchildren in some areas seemed particularly vulnerable. In other places it was secretaries and postal workers.
For a while there, funerals and other public gatherings were discouraged. But an exception was made for Les. The procession behind his cortege was a mile long. I was asked to deliver the eulogy. And when they pleaded with me to take over at the lab, I agreed.
Oh, you made us behave better, all right. At least a quarter of the human race must contain your DNA, by now, ALAS. And in their newfound, inexplicable, rationalized altruism, they set the tone followed by all the others.
David Brin is a scientist, technology speaker, and author. His 1989 ecological thriller, Earth, foreshadowed global warming, cyberwarfare and the world wide web. A 1998 movie by Kevin Costner was based on The Postman. His novels, including New York Times Bestsellers, have been translated into more than twenty languages, and won Hugo and Nebula awards. His new novel from Tor Books is Existence.
I've been reading lots more non-fiction books than normal. And I'm getting increasingly annoyed about footnotes1. Footnotes are a weird skeuomorph hangover from the days of printed text. I don't think they are really suited to eBooks - but they seem to have come along for the ride into the future.
Let's take an example. I'm currently reading "Race After Technology" by Ruha Benjamin". It's an excellent book. But I am unsure how I am supposed to read it5. (This criticism applies to most books I've read, but this is what I'm currently reading.)
Before I tap the link - I've no idea what's behind it. And, that's assuming that I know that reference numbers are tappable, and that the tap-target is large enough that I don't accidentally interact with the book in some other way.
Here's another, from the same page:
Here the author provides a citation and some explanatory text. How does an author decide what goes in the body and what goes in the notes? How does the user know whether the footnote is a citation or is explanatory?
But I want to talk about the cognitive issues at play. When footnotes can contain anything from a citation to essential background information, the user is forced to break from the flow6 of reading - often in the middle of a sentence. This is a problem in both paper books and electronic books.
There are many websites about Shakespeare. As is discussed in Eric M. Johnson's Opening Shakespeare from the Margins (2017), 187-205 Springer International Publishing The Shakespeare User the use of open source software has seen...
CSS could be used to show / hide various parts of the citation until interacted with. A reader familiar with hypertext should know that visiting a link will take them to an external site. No need for footnotes at all!
In a world where information isn't free (Scientific Journals, I'm looking at you...) sometimes it is impossible to link to the source, or the link might go away, or it isn't online at all. In that case, a citation with a brief summary of the information being cited is appropriate
There's all sorts of complexity around things like LaTeX, which produce (print-focused) PDFs. They should theoretically translate very easily into EPUB or HTML for reading on screen, but in practice in-text citations and structured bibliographic references are some of the main exceptions where the transition never quite works.
My habit has been to check the first couple in a new book and see whether they are footnotes (of the explanatory aside type) or endnotes/citations. The former I will generally click on, the latter I might skim through at the end if I'm looking for additional material to read.
As you rightly point out, the real irritant is editors who merge the two types meaning that you have to click on everything just in case it's a useful aside or explanation of a term. Simon Schama's books suffer from this, 80% are simple citations but others contain useful additional context.
On Kindle (and I presume in ePub) you can use different marking schemes for footnotes and citations (e.g. * for a footnote, 1 for a reference) but it's hit and miss whether publishers/editors make use of these.
By far the largest[1] user of footnotes (both for citations, and supplemental information or commentary, online, is Wikipedia. You might like to look at how footnotes are done there[2], using popups and bi-directional links. Examples are available[3][4].
If you can't have that, linking to the footnotes and back to the main text also works well. Another quite popular option is to have a tooltip with either a summary or the main contents of the footnote: this can be good for quick links or due diligence reporting, but for long pieces of text I find it harder to read, and dealing with sub-footnotes without accidentally closing the whole thing can be tricky.
I continue to get a lot of reads on Medium for a brief (but well-researched) tantrum I threw 5 years ago about a design change they made to their marginal notes, which are a much better solution to the same problem. Imho. Not sure how well that could work in an ebook, mind, but then I'm kinda ok with how ebooks handle them atm.
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