Very unwell. And apparently getting more so. I’m starting to work my way through all the usual stages to make sure of where the problem is — replacing the monitor driver, installing new display drivers for the card (it’s a Radeon 9800), running diagnostics — but at the moment, here’s what I’ve got.

…Not much to say but frak. And this is the worst possible timing for this, as the household budget is not going to allow me to do anything about this for days and days yet.

…If I have any fans at Radeon who feel inclined to send me some old 9800 that’s lying around (it would be something of a legacy card these days), this would be the moment.

…Gaaaaaaaaah.

Just reading this article gives me entirely too many ideas for SF stories having to do with scary possible gene therapies… 

A study of Swedish twin brothers found that differences in a gene modulating the hormone vasopressin were strongly tied to how well each man fared in marriage.

"Our main finding was an association between a variant of the vasopressin receptor 1a gene and how strong bonds men reported they had to their partners," said lead researcher Hasse Walum, of the department of medical epidemiology and biostatistics at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. "Men carrying this variant scored on average lower on a scale measuring the strength of the bond compared to men not carrying this variant."

Women married to men carrying the "poorer bonding" form of the gene also reported "lower scores on levels of marital quality than women married to men not carrying this variant," Walum noted.

…Vasopressin activates the brain's reward system, and "you could say that mating-induced vasopressin release motivates male voles to interact with females they have mated with," Walum said. "This is not a sexual motivation, but rather a sort of prolonged social motivation." In other words, the more vasopressin in the brain, the more male voles want to stick around and mingle with the female after copulation is through. This effect "is more pronounced in the monogamous voles," Walum noted.

NB: this study was done on voles. If you’re human, your mileage might vary.

And this final note:

…it's too early for men to blame their inability to commit on a single gene, although Lucas guesses it's an excuse that's "certainly going to be used."

My nominee for this year’s Too Long: Don’t Read award…

This autumn, according to the newspaper Libération, 676 new books will be published [in France], 466 of them written in French, the rest long-awaited translations. According to François Reynaert in Le Nouvel Observateur, "The name alone is leaden - in the expression 'rentrée littéraire,' one hears especially 'rentrée.' It smells of the back of the classroom and the old eraser."

One novel, "Zone," by Mathias Enard, consists of one sentence running over 500 pages.

Pass.