Here, by the incredibly young, handsome and way too successful Carl Zimmer, late of the Seed stable. Carl brings to mind my favourite Truman Capote saying:
It is not enough to succeed. Friends must be seen to have failed.
Anyway, go read the bastard's excellent essay. I will just sit here in my pool of failure.
More like this
Last week I linked to Carl Zimmer's take down of Casey Luskin.
Imagine a book I would write. On viruses (what else?).
Now, instead of it sounding like it was written by a chimpanzee who learned English from watching 'Waynes World' and 'Waynes World 2' on a loop + 4chan, imagine it was written by an articulate, science-literate human.
Everyone has a bad Monday every now and then, right? Here's one for you: at 7a.m. spilled an entire cappuccino on my laptop and at 7p.m. I hit some black ice on the highway and rolled (and totaled) my truck. That is what I call a rough Monday...but what a banner, no?
I knew I'd love Carl's Microcosm for the delicious irony of using a mere "germ" to illustrate
It's a decent review of the past 50 years of genetics for the lay person. I think that's why Zimmer is so successful; he conveys mind numbing quantities of science into something readable for the average individual with little background in science. In any event, I know most of that, and I'm a bit upset that he didn't go more in depth with how untranslated regions within an a sequence function (like operators), but it was still a decent place to send people for a very general overview.
For a layman like me, it's a great piece of work.
One of the difficulties a non-specialist faces in keeping up with the field is that it changes so quickly, and new discoveries keep happening. That's why I started reading Scienceblogs.
Zimmer is indeed absurdly talented. But reading him was what led me to other fascinating blogs like this one. (Fishing for compliments, John?)