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: Culture
Links and Comments: Luck; Facebook and social bubbles; being openly secular
One author with a new book currently making the circuit of talk shows and newspaper op-ed pages is Robert H. Frank, whose book is Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy, and who turned up on KQED’s … Continue reading
Posted in Conservative Resistance, Culture, Religion
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Links and Comments: Innovation, Optimism, Conspiracy Theories, and Liberals
Four items from the New York Times, Sunday before last. Neil Irwin: What Was the Greatest Era for Innovation? A Brief Guided Tour. What strikes me about this is not so much which era was greatest, as how much things … Continue reading
Posted in Culture, Human Progress, Politics
Comments Off on Links and Comments: Innovation, Optimism, Conspiracy Theories, and Liberals
Links and Comments: Truth and Slavery
This article in The New Yorker, After the Fact by Jill Lepore, considers the current US presidential race in light of a new book by Michael Patrick Lynch, The Internet of Us, subtitled “Knowing More and Understanding Less in the … Continue reading
Links and Comments: Irrational Voters; Republicans and Gays; Religious Liberty v Progress
Robert Sapolsky in last week’s Los Angeles Times: We’re rarely rational when we vote because we’re rarely rational, period. How various discoveries about mental biases and motivated thinking play out in elections. Probably the most striking thing about any of … Continue reading
Posted in Conservative Resistance, Culture, Human Progress, MInd, Religion
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Links and Comments: Terrorists and Threats
Cartoon by Mark Fiore: Thank You. Love, ISIS. Why? A piece by Nicholas Kristof in today’s NY Times explains. It’s called Overreacting to Terrorism? online and “Terrorists, Tubs and Snakes” in the print paper. The basic problem is this: The … Continue reading
Links and Comments: Trump; Democrats v Republicans; American exceptionalism; government regulations
As Donald Trump seems to be on the path to claiming the Republican nomination for president, Republicans who are appalled by him are increasingly expressing misgivings. Salon has this fascinating article about how some Republican pundits admit that the crude … Continue reading
Posted in Conservative Resistance, Culture, Politics, Religion, Social Progress
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Item’s from Sunday’s New York Times: Pace of Change; Criticism; Religion in Politics; Creative Children
Most interesting, a review, by Paul Krugman, of a book by Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, whose thesis is that the extraordinary growth and change brought about by technology over the past century has pretty … Continue reading
Posted in Book Notes, Culture, Human Progress, Religion
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Links and Comments: Fear, Terrorism, Fear, and Religion
The New Yorker, January 2, 2016: Thinking Rationally About Terror, by Lawrence M. Krauss How people overestimate the risk of low-probability (but highly-publicized) dangers, like terrorism, and seldom worry about more mundane dangers, like gun violence and auto crashes. As … Continue reading
Link and Comment: Terrorism and Republican Fear-Mongering
Jerry Coyne points to an essay by Lawrence Krauss, in The New Yorker: Thinking Rationally About Terror. Krauss’ essay addresses the fairly obvious fact that incidents of ‘terrorism’, despite the publicity they get and panic they trigger, are very rare … Continue reading
Review of David Silverman
The book is FIGHTING GOD: An Atheist Manifesto for a Religious World, just published in December 2015, and I’m not linking it with a cover image as I often do with books I review, since I can’t especially approve of … Continue reading
Posted in Atheism, Book Notes, Culture, Politics, Religion, Social Progress
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