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
Category Archives: Culture
Links, Quotes, Comments: 20 June
A post today by Amanda Marcotte, on both Salon and Alternet– Salon: Reason vs. the right: Have conservatives abandoned science and rationality? Alternet: Have Conservatives Abandoned Rationality, Skepticism and Truth? The possibility that rationality itself has become a partisan issue … Continue reading
Ann Druyan on Cosmos
Salon: Interview by film critic Andrew O’Hehir of Comos writer and executive producer Ann Druyan. Neil deGrasse Tyson was the visible host, but he didn’t write the show; Druyan, the widow of Carl Sagan, did. You’ve been pretty outspoken over … Continue reading
Links and Quotes, mid-June
Preoccupied with writing up book notes this past week (and other things), I have a bunch of linked articles to note without making any of them separate posts. From last Monday, two interesting op-eds in the New York Times. Charles … Continue reading
Posted in Cosmology, Culture, Quote at Length, Religion, Science
Comments Off on Links and Quotes, mid-June
Notes on Peter Boghossian
Peter Boghossian’s book has an aggressive title, A Manual for Creating Atheists, though it is in no way as ‘angry’ as Greta Christina’s book, discussed last time. Boghossian is a faculty member in Portland State University’s philosophy department, and his … Continue reading
Posted in Atheism, Book Notes, Culture, Religion
Comments Off on Notes on Peter Boghossian
Unafraid of the Dark: Highlights from the last episode of Cosmos
Passages from the last episode of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s “Cosmos”. Early in the episode, he describes a thought experiment: Pick a star, any one of the hundreds of billions of stars in our Milky Way galaxy, which is just one … Continue reading
Salon on Cosmos, Neil deGrasse Tyson, science, and conservative denialism
Several posts at Salon lately about “Cosmos”, Neil deGrasse Tyson, science, and conservative denialism. 5 Most Important Lessons from “Cosmos” Which are: It’s OK to not know all the answers Climate change is happening, and it’s made-made. Evolution: How did … Continue reading
No One Can Be An Expert on Everything
This post by Andrew Sullivan, about GOP denialism of climate change, raises fundamental epistemological questions about how we know *anything*. I’m not a scientist either. I have no expertise in measuring carbon levels back thousands of years; I have no … Continue reading
Sean Carroll: The Meaning of Life
I was checking out Sean Carroll’s blog today, and saw this post with a YouTube excerpt of comments he made during a debate with Michael Shermer, Dinesh D’Souza, and Ian Hutchinson. Can’t resist quoting extensively, since he summarizes much of … Continue reading
Posted in Culture, Psychology, Quote at Length, Religion, Science
Comments Off on Sean Carroll: The Meaning of Life
Believers, the Bible, the Internet, and Humanity’s Future
The writer is a blogger who deconverted from Christianity and is frustrated by discussions he has on the internet: Why don’t theists admit they’re wrong? He’s reacting as I did earlier to the New Yorker article about how no evidence … Continue reading
Assorted Links and Quotes: Selective Thinking, Southern Atheists, Creationist Logic, Fox News, Neuroscience
Assorted links from the past couple days: Neil deGrasse Tyson vs. the right: “Cosmos,” Christians, and the battle for American science, by Sean McElwee. About the selective thinking of the religious right in denying those Enlightenment values that threaten their … Continue reading
