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: Science
Links and Comments: Against Trump; Roe v. Wade and Personal Choices; Scientists and Stories
Sunday’s NYT Opinion section — typically 10 or 12 pages — was devoted entirely to spelling out (yet again!) why Trump is such an awful president: End Our National Crisis, subtitled “The Case Against Donald Trump.” One section of which … Continue reading
Posted in Conservative Resistance, Narrative, Politics, Science
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Notes for the Book: Deutsch on Reality
I’m still, intermittently, reading my way through David Deutsch’s The Fabric of Reality, and today came across these passages, that echo and underscore my thoughts in Notes for the Book: Hierarchy of Knowledge and Human Affairs. I said in that … Continue reading
Links and Comments: A Proposition; Why So Many Still Support Trump
Decades ago, from reading reviews of books and movies I had read and seen, I formulated a proposition that runs something like this: There is no work of art (book, film, painting, song) so universally admired that someone, somewhere, will … Continue reading
Link and Comment: Profile of an Anti-Vaxxer
This one deserves a post of its own. Today in Salon, a profile of a hypothetical anti-vaxxer couple, Jim and Jenny. Inside the mind of an anti-vax parent. Subtitle: A researcher who studies the anti-vaccination movement digs into the psychological … Continue reading
Andrew Shtulman: SCIENCEBLIND: Why Our Intuitive Theories About the World Are So Often Wrong
(Basic Books, 2017) Here’s a book I read earlier this year and am only just now boiling my notes down into a coherent summary. (Well actually I started boiling my notes down but ended up just cleaning up the remainder, … Continue reading
Posted in Book Notes, Psychology, Science
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Notes for the Book: The Future of Enlightenment
More thoughts coming together. A famous quote is this from SF author William Gibson: “The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.” (There are variants of this phrase around the web also.) Then there was a video … Continue reading
APOD: This is Reality: The Origin of the Elements
Click for a text description, with many explanatory links (some technical, some funny).
Links and Comments: About Thinking; About Research; About Orientations
First, from yesterday’s New York Times Science section: How to Think Like an Epidemiologist. Subtitle: “Don’t worry, a little Bayesian analysis won’t hurt you.” As Marc Lipsitch, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Harvard, noted on Twitter, Bayesian reasoning comes awfully … Continue reading
Posted in Psychology, Science
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Quote: Carl Sagan, Cosmos Chapter IV: Heaven and Hell
The end of chapter IV. 40 years ago the scientists were already warning about the perturbation of the planet’s climate. Our lovely blue planet, the Earth, is the only home we know. Venus is too hot. Mars is too cold. … Continue reading
Posted in Science
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Links and Comments: Coronavirus, Conservative Propaganda, Vaccines, Flat-Earthers, the view of the US from around the world
NYT, Paul Krugman: The Cult of Selfishness Is Killing America; subtitle: The right has made irresponsible behavior a key principle. So we’re failing dismally on both the epidemiological and the economic fronts. But why? … So what was going on? … Continue reading
Posted in Conservative Resistance, Politics, Science
Comments Off on Links and Comments: Coronavirus, Conservative Propaganda, Vaccines, Flat-Earthers, the view of the US from around the world
