"Kim Stanley Robinson - Forty Signs of Rain" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

stuck; but maybe she was only studying her way, or waiting for a moment of reduced flow, because all of
a sudden she attacked the water with a fierce flurry of paddle strokes, and seemingly willed her craft up
the next pouring ramp. Five or seven desperate seconds later she leveled out again, on a tiny little bench
of a refuge that did not have a pushback eddy, judging by the intensity of her maintenance paddling there.
After only a few seconds she had to try a ramp to her right or get pushed back off her perch, and so she
took off and fought upstream, fists moving fast as a boxerтАЩs, the kayak at an impossible angle, looking
like a miracleтАФuntil all of a sudden it was swept back down, and she had to make a quick turn and then
take a wild ride, bouncing down the falls by a different and steeper route than the one she had ascended,
losing in a few swift seconds the height that she had taken a minute or twoтАЩs hard labor to gain.

тАЬWow,тАЭ Frank said, smitten.

She was already almost down to the hissing tapestry of flat river right below him, and he felt an urge to
wave to her, or stand and applaud. He restrained himself, not wanting to impose upon another athlete
obviously deep in her own space. But he did whip out his cell phone and try out a GPS-oriented
directory search, figuring that if she had a cell phone with a transponder in the kayak, it had to be very
close to his own phoneтАЩs position. He checked his position, entered thirty meters north of that; got
nothing. Same with the position twenty meters farther east.

тАЬAh well,тАЭ he said, and stood to go. It was sunset now, and the smooth stretches of the river had turned
a pale orange. Time to go home and try to fall asleep.

тАЬIn search of kayaker gal, seen going upstream at Great Falls. Great ride, I love you, please respond.тАЭ

He would not send that in to the free papers, but only spoke it as a kind of prayer to the sunset. Down
below the kayaker was turning to start upstream again.



IT COULD be said that science is boring, or even that science wants to be boring, in that it wants to be
beyond all dispute. It wants to understand the phenomena of the world in ways that everyone can agree
on and share; it wants to make assertions from a position that is not any particular subjectтАЩs position,
assertions that if tested for accuracy by any sentient being would cause that being to agree with the
assertion. Complete agreement; the world put under a descriptionтАФstated that way, it begins to sound
interesting.

And indeed it is. Nothing human is boring. Nevertheless, the minute details of the everyday grind
involved in any particular bit of scientific practice can be tedious even to the practitioners. A lot of it, as
with most work in this world, involves wasted time, false leads, dead ends, faulty equipment, dubious
techniques, bad data, and a huge amount of detail work. Only when it is written up in a paper does it tell
a tale of things going right, step-by-step, in meticulous and replicable detail, like a proof in Euclid. That
stage is a highly artificial result of a long process of grinding.

In the case of Leo and his lab, and the matter of the new targeted nonviral delivery system from
Maryland, several hundred hours of human labor and many more of computer time were devoted to an
attempted repetition of an experiment described in the crucial paper, тАЬIn Vivo Insertion of cDNA 1568rr
into CBA/H, BALB/c, and C57BL/6 Mice.тАЭ

At the end of this process, Leo had confirmed the theory he had formulated the very moment he had
read the paper describing the experiment.