Some mechanism at the back of his mind seemed ceaselessly to be shifting around factors from the surrounding world, hunting for patterns in them, and when such a pattern arose a silent bell would ring inside his skull.

Hogan uses this ability in his job as a "synthethist," working for the government, someone who excels at connecting the dots, "making cross references from one enclosed corner of research to another."

Five mornings a week doing nothing but read, under no compulsion to produce any kind of results -- merely requested to mention by mail any association or connection he had spotted which he had reason to believe migt prove helpful to somebody: advise an astronomer that a market research organization had a new statistical sampling technique, for instance, or suggest that an entomologist be informed about a new air-pollution problem.

Without intending to indulge in the least bit of blog triumphalism, this sounds to me very much like what blogging at its best can be: connecting the dots, making associations public that weren't otherwise apparent, finding links between things when they exist and debunking them when they don't -- and if individual bloggers (most of us, anyway, with a few exceptions) are not talented, gifted or lucky enough to be able to do this by themselves, the total system of bloggers, working more or less without coordination (at least on the liberal side of the blogosphere), can sometimes do it, as individual bloggers take seperate steps in interesting directions, and the next person builds upon that work to take things yet another step.

(Of course in Brunner's novel, Hogan's deal with the government, to be well-paid for being curious and doing research, is a Faustian bargain, as it turns out they eventually have a more active intelligence-gathering and black ops role in mind for him, but, specifics of Brunner's plot aside, wouldn't it have been nice to have more Donald Hogans working for our intelligence agencies back before 9/11, connecting all those dots that remained known but unconnected?)