Category Archives: MInd

Steven Pinker, HOW THE MIND WORKS, post 3

Posted on Sunday 25 February 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

Chapter 7, “Family Values,” about the psychology of social relations, is the longest chapter in the book, and second-to-last. The author begins by recalling that period in the 1960s when activists and folk singers called for peace and understanding, a … Continue reading →

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Steven Pinker, HOW THE MIND WORKS, post 2

Posted on Saturday 24 February 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

The last few chapters are especially rich and fascinating. Here’s Chapter 6, about human emotions. Ch6, Hotheads

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Steven Pinker, HOW THE MIND WORKS, post 1

Posted on Friday 23 February 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

I mentioned this book a few days ago and quoted from it. Now I’ve finished it and will summarize and highlight. As I said earlier, I’ve had this book since it was published in 1997 (I have a first edition, … Continue reading →

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Aesthetics: Color Theory: 60:30:10

Posted on Monday 13 June 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

Here’s another item I saw just recently, which shares with the previous post how a design principle can be crystalized in numbers. Via Boing Boing, Devin Nealy, 31 May 2022: The 60-30-10 percent rule of color

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Daniel Keyes: FLOWERS FOR ALGERNON (1966)

Posted on Friday 11 March 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

Here’s the next part of the batch of brief reviews of SF novels that I began last week. I’m now thinking, though, that with more substantial books like this one I’ll just cover one book per post — back to … Continue reading →

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Links and Comments: Nature and Human Brains; Science Fiction and Mental Resiliency

Posted on Friday 19 June 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

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 →

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Links and Comments: Conspiracies! Conspiracies!

Posted on Wednesday 20 May 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

Over the past several weeks there’s been an outbreak of stories and articles in the various legitimate media (New York Times, NPR, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, et al) about conspiracy theories related to the coronavirus pandemic. So many articles! … Continue reading →

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What We Learned from This Morning’s Newspaper

Posted on Sunday 19 November 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

Robert H. Frank, Molly Worthen, Anthony Doerr, and Nicholas Kristof on cutting taxes for the rich, rejecting Roy Moore-style evangelicalism, how even the conscientious among us react to warnings of climate change, and how Blue States do better at practicing … Continue reading →

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Links and Comments: Philip Pullman meets Matthew Hutson

Posted on Wednesday 25 October 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

There was a big profile of Philip Pullman in the New York Times Magazine a couple weeks ago– Philip Pullman Returns to His Fantasy World — on the occasion of the first book in his new trilogy that parallels his … Continue reading →

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Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow: Intro and Chapter 1

Posted on Wednesday 13 September 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

This is perhaps the most influential book of the past couple decades on the whole subject of human mental biases, how the ways in which we think entail errors of perception, and employ heuristics that are often but not always … Continue reading →

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