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
Monthly Archives: November 2017
Lunacies: On Finland and Flat-Earthers
Vice, from December 2016: This Dude Accidentally Convinced the Internet That Finland Doesn’t Exist. The article touches on how some people will believe anything, and the notion of Poe’s Law There is an internet adage named after a commenter by … Continue reading
Posted in Lunacy, Psychology
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Perspectives: Dozois and Bryson
Recently on Facebook, Gardner Dozois quotes from At Home, by Bill Bryson (author of A Short History of Nearly Everything), on the closing years of the 19th century: “From the perspective of domesticity, there has never been a more interesting … Continue reading
Posted in Human Progress, Technology
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Links and Comments: Evolution of Evolution Denial, and American Gullibility
A ‘Retro Report’ article in the NY Times, Questioning Evolution: The Push to Change Science Class, summarizes the by-now familiar litany of how objections to Darwin’s theory of the evolution — along with the many lines of supporting evidence and … Continue reading
Posted in Conservative Resistance, Evolution
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Link and Comments: Fractured Reality
The cultural theme of this second decade of the 21st century seems to be the fracturing of consensus cultural norms, even of consensus reality, especially in the US. I’ve observed this in tandem with reading about advances in psychology, over … Continue reading
Posted in Culture, Psychology, Religion
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What We Learned from This Morning’s Newspaper
Robert H. Frank, Molly Worthen, Anthony Doerr, and Nicholas Kristof on cutting taxes for the rich, rejecting Roy Moore-style evangelicalism, how even the conscientious among us react to warnings of climate change, and how Blue States do better at practicing … Continue reading
Posted in MInd, Politics, Psychology, Religion, Science
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Passages from Pinker
As a palette cleanser from my last post, here are some thoughts from my ongoing reading of Steven Pinker’s THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE, a history of the world with focus on violence, that summarizes that history through phases: … Continue reading
Posted in Humanism, Social Progress, Steven Pinker
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Links and Comments: Roy Moore and Religious Hypocrisy
The Roy Moore scandal fascinates me for several reasons. First, because Roy Moore has been a villain, a sort of comic-book villain, for years and years, among progressives who observe his brand of religious zealotry as a sign of the … Continue reading
Links and Comments: The Profound and the Pernicious
From NPR, The Answer To Life, The Universe — And Everything? It’s 63. The headline is a riff on the famous episode in Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Wikipedia) in which a vast computer called Deep Thought … Continue reading
Links and Comments: Conservative Susceptibility to Lies; Contempt for Science; Existential Threats
» Slate: Why Are Conservatives More Susceptible to Believing Lies?. Subtitle: “An interplay between how all humans think and how conservatives tend to act might actually explain a lot about our current moment.” Longish article about how conservatives are more … Continue reading
Posted in Conservative Resistance, Culture, Species Reset
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A Very Short Book by A.C. Grayling
A.C. Grayling, AGAINST ALL GODS (2007), subtitled “Six Polemics on Religion and an Essay on Kindness” I saw this referenced from Tim Crane’s book that I mentioned a couple posts ago, and ordered it without realizing that it’s very short, … Continue reading