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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Category Archives: Uncategorized
A Table of Moral Polarities, Initial Take
I’ve been making notes over the past month for a table of moral polarities, in order to align and summarize some of the concepts and the many news examples I’ve compiled lately. Recall how I’ve mentioned that certain attitudes, especially … Continue reading
Posted in Culture, History, Meaning, Morality, Philosophy, Science, science fiction, Uncategorized
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Today’s Authoritarianism Watch
Items today: Heather Cox Richardson on the transformation of the Republican Party since Reagan, from a party of small government to one bent on enforcing Christian nationalism; How Republicans now argue that juries don’t count (when they lose); FDR’s four … Continue reading
Posted in Conservative Resistance, Morality, Politics, Uncategorized
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Approximations and Denials of Reality
Ted Chiang on ChatGPT; Paul Krugman on the GOP’s Orwellian take on the world; and epistemology. Ted Chiang, The New Yorker, 9 Feb 2023: ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web, subtitled “OpenAI’s chatbot offers paraphrases, whereas Google offers … Continue reading
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Steveioe
Here’s an online comedian, Steven Ho, who goes by Steveioe, who was once an ER nurse (at UCLA), who began doing Tik Tok videos of himself acting out situations in the ER (in which he would play all of several … Continue reading
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Pending
No post tonight; unanticipated domestic turbulence. Will fill in retroactively, if I can. Update 20Nov21: No, let it stand.
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John Allen Paulos, A MATHEMATICIAN READS THE NEWSPAPER (1995)
John Allen Paulos, A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper. Basic Books, 1995. Author’s Conclusion: Always be smart. Seldom be certain. Journalists should ask, in addition to Who, Where, What, etc., How Many? And How Likely? And no matter how detailed the … Continue reading
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Lines from Angels in America: The World Only Spins Forward
Just a few about what the angels are, what they want, and in what sense the play is about angels and their relationship with America. Part One: Millennium Approaches Joe, a Mormon lawyer living in New York, has this take … Continue reading
Posted in Book Notes, Uncategorized
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Equus, part 2
Scene 25. The psychiatrist, concerning the worship of a 17-year-old stable boy raised in isolation by his religious mother: I only know it’s the core of his life. What else has he got? Think about him. He can hardly read. … Continue reading
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Recent Links Saved from Facebook
Steven Pinker’s favorite books http://www.vulture.com/2018/03/steven-pinkers-10-favorite-books.html include title by Gamow, Dawkins, Deutsch, and his wife Sean Carroll’s correctives to Jordan Peterson’s fandom Cleaning your room is good; using pseudo-intellectual babble about archetypes to identify culture with masculinity is… Posted by Sean … Continue reading
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The Instinct Can Be Fought: TOS #24: “A Taste of Armageddon”
The Enterprise attempts to initiate diplomatic relations with a planet conducting a computer war with its neighbor planet, a war in which theoretical causalities voluntarily go to die in disintegration chambers. This is one of Trek’s best ethical conundrums, a … Continue reading
Posted in Star Trek, Uncategorized
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