Oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee was treating one of his patients, a woman with advanced abdominal cancer who had relapsed multiple times, when she asked him what seemed like a simple question. "She said, 'I'm willing to go on, but before I go on, I need to know what it is I'm battling,' " Mukherjee tells NPR's Terry Gross.

But, as Mukherjee explains, describing his patient's illness wasn't so simple. Defining cancer, he says, is something doctors and scientists have been struggling to do since the disease's first documented appearance thousands of years ago.

"Cancer is not just a dividing cell," he says. "It's a complex disease: It invades, it metastasizes, it evades the immune system. So there are many, many other stages of [defining] cancer which are still in their infancy."

via An Oncologist Writes 'A Biography Of Cancer' : NPR.

"If there's a seminal discovery in oncology in the last 20 years, it's that idea that cancer genes are often mutated versions of normal genes," he says. "And the arrival of that moment really sent a chill down the spine of cancer biologists. Because here we were hoping that cancer would turn out to be some kind of exogenous event — a virus or something that could then be removed from our environment and our bodies and we could be rid of it — but [it turns out] that cancer genes are sitting inside of each and every one of our chromosomes, waiting to be corrupted or activated."

People having been miscopying text for thousands of years. And understanding the errors in these manuscripts is actually quite similar to understanding genetics. This sounds a bit odd. What do handwritten manuscripts, from the medieval period or earlier, have to do with genetics? On the surface, nothing: one is a hard experimental science and the other is a distinguished part of the humanities. However, while those who study each of these fields have very little to do with each other, it turns out that there is a great deal of symmetry. And it mainly comes down to mutation. Scholars who study paleography - the field of research that examines ancient writing - are all-too-well-aware of the mistakes that scribes make when copying a text. These types of errors, which can be used to understand the provenance of a history of a document, are actually nearly identical to the types of errors caused by polymerase enzymes, the proteins responsible for copying DNA strands. It's clear what a mutation is in genetics: a strand of DNA gets hit by a cosmic ray, or copied incorrectly, and some error gets introduced into the sequence. For example, an 'A' gets turned into a 'G', although they can be much larger in effect. These errors can range from causing no problem whatsoever (don't worry - the majority are like this), to causing large-scale issues due to the change in a single letter of DNA, such as in the case of sickle-cell anemia.

Well, there are also systematic errors in copying a text. Whether it's skipping a word or duplicating it, there is order to the ways in which a scribe's mind wanders during his transcription. Many of the errors can be grouped into categories of error, just like the different types of genetic mutations. And not only are there regularities to how both DNA and ancient manuscripts are copied, but it gets even better: despite the differences in terms, these types of errors are often identical.

via The Atlantic.

But how do our browsers and the web actually work? How has the World Wide Web evolved into what we know and love today? And what do we need to know to navigate the web safely and efficiently? 0 Things I Learned About Browsers and the Web” is a short guide for anyone who’s curious about the basics of browsers and the web. Here’s what you’ll find here:

irst we’ll look at the Internet, the very backbone that allows the web to exist. We’ll also take a look at how the web is used today, through cloud computing and web apps.

hen, we’ll introduce the building blocks of web pages like HTML and JavaScript, and review how their invention and evolution have changed the websites you visit every day. We’ll also take a look at the modern browser and how it helps users browse the web more safely and securely.

inally, we’ll look ahead to the exciting innovations in browsers and web technologies that we believe will give us all even faster and more immersive online experiences in the future.

via 20 Things I Learned About Browsers and the Web.

Rowan Williams believes an illuminating new survey of Christianity will have few, if any, rivals.  From his' review of "A History of Christianity" by Diarmaid MacCulloch:

This book is a landmark in its field, astonishing in its range, compulsively readable, full of insight even for the most jaded professional and of illumination for the interested general reader. It will have few, if any, rivals in the English language. The story is told with unobtrusive stylishness as well as clarity. And at a time when Christianity's profile in our culture is neither as positive nor as extensive as it has been, this book is crucial testimony to the resilience of the Christian community in a remarkable diversity of social settings. The first three thousand years do not seem likely to be also the last.

via The Guardian.

'You have to choose your future regrets' In June Christopher Hitchens, the hard-drinking polemicist and atheist, met his toughest opponent yet when he was diagnosed with cancer. The question on many lips was: would his illness alter his beliefs – on Iraq, on Islam, on God? At home in Washington, with a large glass of Johnnie Walker to hand, he responds with characteristic combativeness

via The Observer.

Despite the steady paycheck, it wasn’t easy being a sideman for pianist-composer Thelonious Monk during his legendary late ’50s residency at Greenwich Village’s Five Spot, the “house that Monk built.” Johnny Griffin, who held down the tenor saxophone in 1958, recalled:

[Monk] wouldn’t pull his music out, and the joint would be loaded, every night. He had it in his briefcase, but he said it would be better if I heard it. So he would play the melody and I’m supposed to retain the melody after he played the first chorus, and I was supposed to play the second chorus coming in with the melody! So you can imagine what happened. I’d mess up, and he’d say ‘No, no, no, let’s do it again.’

The perversity in evidence here—why bring a briefcase full of music and then never open it? Why compose songs of such complexity, sweat every harmonic and rhythmic detail, and then refuse to allow your sidemen to study them?—was pure Monk. In his music and his personal life, he pushed situations to their limits.

Sometimes the aesthetic gamble paid great dividends, as at the Five Spot, where the audience of painters, Beats, and other postwar bohemians welcomed the intimate seat at Monk’s open rehearsal. The very messiness of Monk’s method was proof to them of his adventurousness and even his virtue. When Monk’s band transformed from a disjointed ensemble into a swinging unit, alive to the offbeat accents and melodic surprises that were Monkian signatures, audiences witnessed something that was, to their worldly sensibility, better than a miracle—better because it was not just astonishing but believable too. The evidence was before their ears.

And then there was the downside of the Monkian gamble, often felt keenly by those closest to him. John Coltrane, Monk’s most famous collaborator during his Five Spot residency, recalled that playing with Monk was “like falling down an elevator shaft.” One misstep, one lost measure, and you were flailing with no help on the way. And when Monk wasn’t letting his sidemen flounder, he was leading them with an insistence that sometimes felt too fierce. “[Monk’s] comping was so strong [when he was] playing his own music,” Griffin noted, “that it’s almost like you’re in a padded cell.”

via Boston Review — Scott Saul: Off Minor.