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
Search Results for: how the mind works
Lewis Thomas, Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony
This was the third collection, published in 1983, of Lewis Thomas’s elegant, mostly short, essays, following The Lives of a Cell (which I blogged about last week) and The Medusa and the Snail. I read (or reread, I’m not sure) … Continue reading
Posted in Book Notes, Culture, Music, Science
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Alan Lightman, The Accidental Universe
Alan Lightman’s THE ACCIDENTAL UNIVERSE (2014) is a short book of seven essays, most previously published, on various ways the universe is not obviously what it appears to be, or is at odds with what humans might prefer. (Lightman is … Continue reading
Posted in Book Notes, Cosmology, Philosophy, Science
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Narrativium and Lies-to-children
I was looking at the third volume in this series, published in the US last week (the publisher, Penguin Random House/Anchor, has kindly been sending me copies), and realized the book wasn’t at all what I’d thought at first glance … Continue reading
Posted in Book Notes, Children, Evolution, Narrative
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Links and Comments: Flip-Flopping Politicians; Jerry Coyne’s new book; Six Basic Storylines; Trigger Events
Slate: Our Best Presidents Are Flip-Floppers Politicians are attacked for changing their positions due to political expediency — as Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, a one-time biology major, has done about the teaching of creationism in schools, to appeal to his … Continue reading
Posted in Book Notes, Narrative, Religion, Science
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A Month’s Worth of Links and Comments
New York Times, March 20: In the Age of Information, Specializing to Survive The Internet makes it easy to learn almost anything. And yet And yet, even as the highbrow holy grail — the acquisition of complete knowledge — seems … Continue reading
Interesting items from Sunday’s New York Times
Frank Bruni: The G.O.P.’s Gay Pretzels Bruni imagines a letter from the RNC to the Republican presidential candidates on their handling of the question, would you attend a gay wedding? From Bobby Jindal We do not recommend the tint picked … Continue reading
Naïve Physics
Here’s a fascinating article from The Conversation: Infections of the mind: why anti-vaxxers just ‘know’ they’re right (via). My interest in this piece isn’t about anti-vaxxers per se, it’s about the more general issue of how people form beliefs, what … Continue reading
Posted in Physics, Psychology
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Links and Comments: The Universe; Narratives and Conservatives; PW reviews; the Right-Wing Myth
Catching up from the past week. First, refining the Provisional Conclusions, I’ve switched the order of the first two, and of the last two. This shifts the entire list to a more positive, rather than negative, spin, I think. \\ … Continue reading
Provisional Conclusions
In January 2015, partially inspired by the various alternative Ten Commandments I’d been collecting (e.g. A Secular Ten Non-Commandments), and partly by the idea of knitting together my numerous blog posts, I sat down to compile this set of “provisional … Continue reading
Links and Comments: Memory is Fallible; Fundamentalists Are Alike All Over
A couple informed articles appeared today about the Brian Williams kerfuffle, how the NBC News anchor was discovered to have inflated his account, increasingly over the years, of being on a helicopter in the Iraq War in 2003, and speculation … Continue reading
Posted in Psychology, Religion
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