Mark R. Kelly
» Founder in 1997 and site-runner for 20 years of Locus Online (Hugo Award winner in 2002). Founder in 2012 and still site-runner of sfadb.com (Science Fiction Awards Database). Retired in 2012 after 30 years as a software engineer for a certain rocket engine factory.
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Meta
Category Archives: Cosmology
World Views and Cosmic Views
Two items today by Adam Lee. OnlySky, Adam Lee, 17 Jul 2022: How to tell if you’re in a bubble OnlySky, Adam Lee, 19 July 2022: My humanism comes from the stars
Michio Kaku: THE GOD EQUATION, 2
I’ve spent my blogging time this afternoon refining yesterday’s post about Michio Kaku’s book THE GOD EQUATION. I’m not sure reducing 20 bullets about each chapter to 10 bullets will make much difference, in terms of my goal to pass … Continue reading
Posted in Book Notes, Cosmology, Physics
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Michio Kaku: THE GOD EQUATION (Doubleday, 2021)
Here’s a book I thought suspect on two or three counts, but which turned out to be quite worthwhile. It’s a succinct, crisp history of physics, from the Greeks to the present, and ending with, though not dwelling too much … Continue reading
Posted in Book Notes, Cosmology, Physics
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LQCs: Bad Map Projections; Worldle; Banned Books
I’ve commented a few times about map projections, and how projections of the entire globe are invariably misleading in one way or another, because there’s no accurate way to map a spherical surface onto a flat map. Inevitably there are … Continue reading
Posted in Conservative Resistance, Cosmology, Films, Movies
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Notes for the Book: Timelines
I love timelines, especially those scaled depictions of the progress of time from left (the past) to right (the present and the future). Back in the 8th grade, I think it was, I constructed such a timeline on a scroll … Continue reading
Links and Comments: Nature and Human Brains; Science Fiction and Mental Resiliency
Scientific American, Caleb A. Scharf: A Failure of Imagination, subtitled, “Nature does not have to play fair with our puny human brains.” A favorite theme of mine: how there’s more to the universe than humans are aware of; how there … Continue reading
Posted in Cosmology, MInd, Narrative, science fiction
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Gould: UNIVERSE IN CREATION
Roy R. Gould’s UNIVERSE IN CREATION: A New Understanding of The Big Bang and the Emergence of Life (Harvard, 2018) overlaps on a couple topics with the Adam Frank book reviewed previously. But. Gould would like to claim that the … Continue reading
Posted in Book Notes, Cosmology
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Frank: LIGHT OF THE STARS
Adam Frank’s LIGHT OF THE STARS: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth (Norton, 2018) asks, what can thinking about the prospect of alien civilizations tell us about our own fate? Currently our species’ story (by those of us … Continue reading
Posted in Astronomy, Book Notes, Cosmology, Species Reset
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Link and Comment: Adam Frank on the Earth’s Biosphere
Today’s NYT has an op-ed by Adam Frank, Earth Will Survive. We May Not., which keys off the theme of his new book, LIGHT OF THE STARS: ALIEN WORLDS AND THE FATE OF THE EARTH, just released this past Tuesday. … Continue reading
Posted in Cosmology, Evolution, Species Reset
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Neil deGrasse Tyson, ASTROPHYSICS FOR PEOPLE IN A HURRY
This slender volume of magazine essays came out nearly a year ago, and I read it then, and thought it pleasant but nowhere near foundational. But since it still shows up on bestseller lists, nearly a year later, and has … Continue reading
Posted in Astronomy, Book Notes, Cosmology
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