Category Archives: Science

Ls&Cs: New Conspiracy Theories and Worldviews Available Here!

Posted on Friday 10 December 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

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 →

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Lc&Cs: Priorities

Posted on Thursday 9 December 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

Being pro-life and anti-vaccine; being pro-defense and anti-deficit; the decline of American conservatism; and endpiece.

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Carl Sagan: THE DRAGONS OF EDEN (1977)

Posted on Thursday 9 December 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

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 →

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Ls&Cs: Some Sciency Pieces

Posted on Wednesday 8 December 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

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.

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Novella et al: THE SKEPTICS’ GUIDE TO THE UNIVERSE

Posted on Wednesday 8 December 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

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 →

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Ls&Cs: Writers’ Blogs; The Secret in the Diary

Posted on Sunday 5 December 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

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 →

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L&Cs: Wars on Education

Posted on Tuesday 23 November 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

Controversies like the current one over the teaching of “critical race theory” have, of course, happened before.

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Ls&Cs: Interviews and Excerpts: Pinker, Harari, Graeber & Wengrow

Posted on Thursday 11 November 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

Michael Shermer interviews Steven Pinker about Rationality; NYT interviews Yuval Noah Harari about the simple story that can save the planet; and an excerpt from Graeber & Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything.

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Ls&Cs: Religion vs Science; Freedom; Feudalism

Posted on Tuesday 9 November 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

Plain speaking about the obvious conflict between science and religion; about the idea of freedom without responsibility; about the odd attraction of feudalism in fantasy and science fiction.

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Ls&Cs: Science, Detection, and Narrative

Posted on Tuesday 2 November 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

Aspirin: Why do scientists keep changing their minds? How science is like detective work. How conspiracy theorists exploit the provisional nature of science. Can history be overturned, or just refined? And KSR, aliens, the new telescope, and existential crises.

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