Afternoon roundup …

… Courtesy of Dave Lull:





… FYI:  Lessons From Bar Fight Litigation | Ordinary Times.



Regarding bar fights, the best policy is to avoid them.



… Odd fellow: The Madness of John Cowper Powys or Strange Doings at Phudd Bottom.



A slight correction: As the story indicates, Phudd Bottom is in upstate New York. Debbie and I drove by it on our way to New England once, but New York is not part of New England.



… The past transfigured: One Does Not Age: Richard Howard by Craig Morgan Teicher.



… One of a kind: What Do You Get When You Combine These?

Spufford thinks a faith that makes sense, emotionally to the core, is one that deals with reality – pain and suffering and injustice and death as we know it. He wants to defend that his emotions about how God deals with these matters is defensible because it makes sense.

… Why you should hate the creative writing establishment (…as if you needed any more reasons).

… if we gave even a moment of thought to it, we’d realize that the insurance claims adjuster who finally hits it big with their novel where Bigfoot falls in love with Dracula is a much more—one hundred times more—heroic figure than the Stegner Fellow who uses $43,000 a year from Stanford University to pen a sensitive novel about what it was like to be a sensitive kid who grew up in insensitive surroundings. For the latter person, their travails were substantially decreased once they got to college. Whereas the insurance adjuster’s struggles increased day by day—as everything in their life conspired to pull them away from their writing—and it was only through major force of will that they persevered and kept going.

… Who knew? How online gamers are solving science's biggest problems.

On paper, gamers and scientists make a bizarre union. But in reality, their two worlds aren't leagues apart: both involve solving problems within a given set of rules. Genetic analysis, for instance, is about finding sequences and patterns among seemingly random clusters of data. Frame the analysis as a pattern-spotting game that looks like Candy Crush, and, while aligning patterns and scoring points, players can also be hunting for mutations that cause cancer, Alzheimer's disease or diabetes.

… FYI: How the 'Netflix of books' won over the publishing industry (Q&A).

Among the first to offer this type of system for books is Oyster, a New York-based startup founded by Eric Stromberg and two co-founders. For $10 a month, the service offers unlimited access to more than 100,000 titles, books that can be read across a number of devices, and at the reader's pleasure.