Category Archives: Science

Andrew Shtulman: SCIENCEBLIND: Why Our Intuitive Theories About the World Are So Often Wrong

Posted on Sunday 13 September 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

(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 →

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Notes for the Book: The Future of Enlightenment

Posted on Monday 24 August 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

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 →

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APOD: This is Reality: The Origin of the Elements

Posted on Sunday 9 August 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

Click for a text description, with many explanatory links (some technical, some funny).

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Links and Comments: About Thinking; About Research; About Orientations

Posted on Wednesday 5 August 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

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 →

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Quote: Carl Sagan, Cosmos Chapter IV: Heaven and Hell

Posted on Friday 31 July 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

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 →

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Links and Comments: Coronavirus, Conservative Propaganda, Vaccines, Flat-Earthers, the view of the US from around the world

Posted on Thursday 30 July 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

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 →

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Link and Quotes: Frank Bruni on the pandemic and freedom

Posted on Wednesday 22 July 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

I saw this via Facebook, and I can’t just now find a cleaner URL: NYT: Frank Bruni, So This Is Your Idea of Freedom? He’s says more eloquently what I was trying to say a couple days ago. What does … Continue reading →

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Andrew Sullivan: Inspiration for this Blog; essay on Pandemics

Posted on Tuesday 21 July 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

[draft] Trying to look away from all the stories about crazy protesters who object to wearing masks and who think the pandemic is all a conspiracy theory they can blame on people they don’t like… To look at long thought-pieces … Continue reading →

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About the Pandemic and Individual Liberty

Posted on Monday 20 July 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

There’s a point to be made about the zealots insisting on individual liberty, when they go ballistic about refusing to wear masks (example links below). Do they bristle at the intrusion on individual liberty that there are laws that prevent … Continue reading →

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Links and Comments: Search Engines; Responses to Disease

Posted on Sunday 19 July 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

I found the piece mentioned two days ago about London reforms after the Black Plague. Actually it was New York reforms after the 1860s. It’s an opinion piece in the NYT that was online four days ago, and that appeared … Continue reading →

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