Category Archives: Uncategorized

Index to Reviews

I’ve built a page here for reviews, books and films, that I’ve posted here since mid-2013, when the “Views from..” blog was established, succeeding the earlier Locus Online editorial blog. The link is in the header above. I’ll go through … Continue reading

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Blog ToC Updated

I spent a couple three hours this afternoon — as a storm moved in over the Bay Area — compiling my own Table of Contents to this blog, and updating that page. I thought I had not posted so much … Continue reading

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2016 European Tour, Days 4-5: On the Boat; Cádiz; Málaga

Wednesday, 5 October: Last morning in Lisbon, we found a sidewalk cafe for croissants and coffee. I did a bit of computer work, then we checked out of the hotel and taxied to the cruise ship. We’re on an Oceania … Continue reading

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Links and Comments: Cognitive Biases, Trump, and Reality

A recurrent theme: human mental habits do not perceive reality accurately. Here on Huffington Post is a huge circular graph, a Cognitive Bias Codex, grouped into four quadrants and 20 ‘buckets’. Here’s a link to an enlarged version of the … Continue reading

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Obduction, 2

Rather more quickly than I expected, I am back to report completing Obduction, the new computer game from the makers of the Myst franchise, about which I previously blogged, for reasons that slightly soured me on the entire game. I … Continue reading

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Links and Comments: World maps; religions as movies; movie physics; flat-earthers; Trump and his followers; webs v walls; wrong about the future; negativity bias

Catching up. Washington Post: Six maps that will make you rethink the world. I’ve always been fascinated by these sort of ‘alternate history’ maps. Khanna is the author of the new book “Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization,” in … Continue reading

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Equus, part 1

From Peter Shaffer’s play Equus, written in 1973 and later adapted into a film directed by Sidney Lumet, starring Richard Burton and Peter Firth. Burton played a psychiatrist investigating a young man played by Firth, who had inexplicably attacked and … Continue reading

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Links and Comments: the mystery of monogamy; why people cannot live with doubt

Los Angeles Times op-ed by [evolutionary psychologist] David P. Barash: Our biology wants us untethered. So why does society place so much emphasis on monogamy? Monogamy is a mystery. A Martian zoologist, visiting Earth and noting our basic biology — … Continue reading

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My memories of David G. Hartwell

(Expanded a bit from Facebook post, 20jan16) I met David G. Hartwell​ in the mid 1990s and had lunch with him on the Queen Mary, one Nebula Awards weekend (it was 1997), where I described my idea of compiling a … Continue reading

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Film review: THE REVENANT

From Facebook, 10jan16: Today we went to see THE REVENANT, the film with Leonardo DiCaprio as an 1820s fur trader in the American northwest, mauled by a bear and left for dead by his compatriots, who manages to survive and … Continue reading

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