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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Recent Posts
- This Much is Reality… and This Much is Fantasy
- The Anticipation of Unintended Consequences
- Dispatches from the Real World
- The Overton Window of Deviance
- Shocked, Just Shocked
- Continuing Our Studies of Human Nature…
- Here’s a New One: Terrain Theory
- A Little Knowledge… Is a Dangerous Thing
- Politics and Psychology
- There Is Always Long Term Progress and Short Term Retreat
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Meta
Category Archives: Science
E.O. Wilson, HALF-EARTH (2016)
E.O. Wilson, Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life, Liveright, 2016, 259p This is one of Wilson’s last four or five books, the first one following The Meaning of Human Existence in 2014. These books seem slighter that most earlier Wilson … Continue reading
Posted in Book Notes, Science
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E.O. Wilson
The great evolutionary biologist and author E.O. Wilson died on Sunday. He was 92. He had been publishing new books right up to the end, with Tales from the Ant World in 2020. Several of his earlier books, from On … Continue reading
Posted in Personal history, Science
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Extinction Debt
Henry Gee is a long-time editor of Nature, one of the two (along with Science) general interest scientific journals. Gee came to notice of the science fiction community in the 2000s (iirc) when he commissioned short science fiction stories from … Continue reading
Carl Sagan, OTHER WORLDS (1975)
Continuing my stroll through my nonfiction library, of books I’ve read that I think are worth remembering. Carl Sagan, Other Worlds (produced by Jerome Agel). Bantam, 1975. This is a thin little book (160pp) with text by Carl Sagan but … Continue reading
Posted in Book Notes, Science
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Ls&Cs: New Conspiracy Theories and Worldviews Available Here!
Are birds real? Are the leftists the ones denying reality? A perfect gift for the conspiracy theorist in your life who has absorbed all the others, from 9/11 to QAnon to 5G to the stolen election and the Covid hoax, … Continue reading
Lc&Cs: Priorities
Being pro-life and anti-vaccine; being pro-defense and anti-deficit; the decline of American conservatism; and endpiece.
Carl Sagan: THE DRAGONS OF EDEN (1977)
Carl Sagan: The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence. Random House, 1977. This was Sagan’s first book since his 1973 hit The Cosmic Connection (revisited here), and is distinctive in two ways. First, it was the … Continue reading
Posted in Book Notes, Science
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Ls&Cs: Some Sciency Pieces
About the miraculous history of Earth; an interview with E.O. Wilson; about SF authors addressing scientific challenges; and about whether science, and the arts, are stuck.
Posted in Science
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Novella et al: THE SKEPTICS’ GUIDE TO THE UNIVERSE
Novella, Dr. Steven, et al. The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe: How to Know What’s Really Real in a World Increasingly Full of Fake. Grand Central, 2018. *** I read this shortly after publication, nearly three years ago now, and … Continue reading
Posted in Book Notes, Science, Thinking
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Ls&Cs: Writers’ Blogs; The Secret in the Diary
I should have established that the context for yesterday’s piece about Republicans and Democrats was not about partisanship, but as another example of a counter-intuitive notion, how things have changed over the decades and centuries, so that what might seem … Continue reading
Posted in Links, Personal history, Science, science fiction
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