Monthly Archives: October 2021

Personal History: View from the East Coast of England

This is one of my two favorite photos that I’ve taken in my entire life. This is a photographed snapshot. It’s a view from the east coast of England, when I visited the place my parents lived in the 1950s … Continue reading

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Heinlein’s STARMAN JONES (1953)

Starman Jones is the 7th of 14 novels that Heinlein published from 1947 to 1963, at annual intervals except for a four-year gap between the last two, that were called “juveniles” at the time — that is, designed for younger … Continue reading

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Ls&Cs: Visiting Flooded Cities Simply Explained

Water through the body; human inability to account for long-term threats; how sometimes the answers to conspiracy theories are simple.

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Ls&Cs: Two from Free Inquiry

From the October/November 2021 issue, articles about Christian Morality and about how understanding COVID does not depend on a Kuhnian paradigm shift.

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Personal History: World Fantasy Con Badges

One more set of badges with commentary for today, then I’ll move on to other things, and catch up on links and comments. Today: badges from World Fantasy Conventions.

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Personal History: Worldcon Badges

Another afternoon of sorting and photographing photos and artifacts. For today, here’s a group shot of badges I’ve collected from the World Science Fiction Conventions (Worldcons for short) over the years.

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Personal History: Work Badges and Travel

I’m going through — one more time! — artifacts of my family’s life, and my own life, that have been gathering dust in a couple closets, determined once and for all to take photographs and write up descriptions of them, … Continue reading

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Ls&Cs: You Suggest Having Ice Cream, They Hate Ice Cream

The principles of an angry 3-year-old; the anti-business party; Supreme Court justices’ motivations.

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Ls&Cs: Look at the (Economics) Evidence

More evidence that economics (and psychology) are becoming sciences, not just ideologies. This year’s Nobel Prizes in economics are interesting, Paul Krugman explains, because their recipients applied real-world evidence which turn out to undermine ideological economic theories that that have … Continue reading

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Robert Sheckley, MINDSWAP (1966)

Robert Sheckley was a science fiction writer who debuted in the early 1950s, right about the time Philip K. Dick that did. They were both prolific short story writers through the ’50s, each publishing several stories a year, in the … Continue reading

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