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: December 2020
Links and Comments: Gift-Giving; Australia is Fake; Facebook as Doomsday Machine
NYT: You’re Choosing a Gift. Here’s What Not to Do., subtitled “Many of our natural impulses turn out to be wrong. Psychological research can help us choose wisely.” Another essay about how intuition and “common sense” can seem appropriate for … Continue reading
Posted in Lunacy, Psychology
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Links and Comments: The American Divide
Washington Post, Max Boot (a conservative who’s left the Republican party): No vaccine can end America’s pandemic of ignorance and irrationality But the biggest divide in modern America, I would argue, is between those who are rational and those who … Continue reading
Links and Comments: Religion and Abortion
I’m fascinated by how the supposed verities of religion turn out to shift and sway with the times, especially with politics. The religious cherry-pick from scripture whatever they currently want to support, since it’s so easy to find in scripture … Continue reading
Link and Comments: Dawkins, via Coyne, on Science and Truth
Today Jerry Coyne’s site (even though it’s a blog, with chronological posts every day, sometimes several a day, he’s obstinate about not calling it a blog, but a site) links an article by Richard Dawkins at the UK magazine The … Continue reading
Posted in Philosophy, Science
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Links and Comments: Trying to Be Smarter; Faith vs Fact
NYT: How Do We Get to Herd Immunity for Fake News?, subtitled, “We need to match our focus on the supply of misinformation with a focus on the demand for it.” Yet the chorus of angst over misinformation has focused … Continue reading
Links, Comments, and Memoirs: Republicans from Reagan Forward
Paul Krugman’s NYT column today is When Did Republicans Start Hating Facts?, subtitled “A straight line runs from Reagan to the Trump dead-enders.” I’ll quote from this and comment, and then discuss my own attendance at a Reagan rally way … Continue reading
Carl Sagan: Cosmos (1980)
Cosmos may fairly be called one of the foundational books of my life (even moreso than Sagan’s earlier The Cosmic Connection, revisited here in 2015) even though I hadn’t read the entire book until this year. The book was a … Continue reading
Posted in Book Notes, Science
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Links and Comments: How People Think; the Election and the Pandemic
It’s been a few days since last bunch of links and comments, and I’ve collected several since then that perhaps can be fit together into some kind of overe-arching theme. It’s about how different people think differently. I should say … Continue reading
Posted in Conservative Resistance, Politics, Psychology
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Links and Comments: Pandemic Responses and Routines
The Atlantic, 24 Nov: Your Individually Rational Choice Is Collectively Disastrous, subtitled “Stopping the virus from spreading requires us to override our basic intuitions.” This isn’t about haywire individual thinking (cognitive biases, the appeal of simplistic stories to explain the … Continue reading
Posted in Culture, Psychology
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Links and Comments: Politics and Conspiracy Theories; Epistemology
Another batch of links and comments, again on topics of politics and conspiracy theories, not because I’m trying to dissuade anyone in particular of any such beliefs (let alone supernatural ones), but because all these examples (more and more of … Continue reading
Posted in Lunacy, Politics, Psychology
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