More Year-End Summaries

Posted on Friday 30 December 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

Three about science and tech, three about politics. Continue reading →

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Another Science in 2022 list; A Reading about the Medea Hypothesis

Posted on Thursday 29 December 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

Smithsonian Magazine, Carlyn Kranking and Joe Spring, 28 Dec 2022: The Ten Most Significant Science Stories of 2022, subtitled “From Omicron’s spread to a revelation made using ancient DNA, these were the biggest moments of the past year”

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Science, Anti-Science, and Fantasy

Posted on Wednesday 28 December 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

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Self-Replacement?

Posted on Tuesday 27 December 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

Today looking at an article about how conservatives worry about the “great replacement” (of US Christian whites by non-white, non-Christian immigrants) and how, ironically, conservative policies invite their being replaced, through simple natural selection. With comments at the end about the big picture: about natural selection, climate change, and immigration.

Salon, Mike Lofgren, 24 Dec 2022: There really is a “great replacement” — but it’s not what Tucker Carlson says it is, subtitled “Is voting for Republicans literally killing white people in rural America? Because the correlation is striking” Continue reading →

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Mysteries, Stories, and Science

Posted on Monday 26 December 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

I like mysteries, once in a while, but I don’t trust them. They are too often contrived, “too clever by half” as the saying goes. Their narratives double back and re-interpret, like lawyers who revisit a set of testimony and add what was elided, in order to “explain” things to favor their clients.

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Christmas Stories

Posted on Sunday 25 December 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

Over Friday and Saturday evenings we watched Miracle on 34th Street for the first time in a couple decades. (I’m not sure if Y had ever seen it.) After such time goes by, you see things in a film or book that you didn’t earlier. Continue reading →

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Mysterious Chords

Posted on Saturday 24 December 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

NY Times ran this piece a few days ago.

NYT, Hugh Morris, ‘Everyone Wants to Hear’ This One Chord in a Christmas Carol, subtitled “A moment in ‘O Come, All Ye Faithful’ is so popular, it’s printed on T-shirts. But it’s also symbolic, and important to music history.”

The article refers to a particular moment in a particular setting of that famous Christmas carol.

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Assorted Links from Recent Weeks

Posted on Friday 23 December 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

About George Santos’s fictional resume, Tucker Carlson’s year of being wrong, Avatar 2’s “ecological Indian” cliche, the hypocrisy of right-wing “free thinkers,” Thomas Frank on the lack of imagination of Democrats, DeSantis and vaccines, book banning, and two religious graphics.

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30%-Earth, Perhaps, With a Catch

Posted on Thursday 22 December 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

New York Times, Catrin Einhorn, 19 Dec 2022: Nearly Every Country Signs On to a Sweeping Deal to Protect Nature, subtitled “Roughly 190 nations, aiming to halt a dangerous decline in biodiversity, agreed to preserve 30 percent of the planet’s land and seas. The United States is not officially a participant.”

Vox, Benji Jones, 19 Dec 2022: The world has a new plan to save nature. Here’s how it works — and how it could fail., subtitled “At the UN Biodiversity Conference in Montreal, world leaders agreed to a historic plan to halt biodiversity loss.”

This is actually quite remarkable. It evokes E.O. Wilson’s “Half-Earth.” But there’s a catch. Continue reading →

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Liberal and Conservative Humor

Posted on Wednesday 21 December 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

With an endpiece about stars.

Here’s an intriguing article, fairly long, that examines how the humor of liberals and conservatives differ. Since its core conclusions are consistent with so many other observations about the differences between liberals and conservatives — admittedly two crude endpoints, or constellations of traits, in a multidimensional spectrum — they sound plausible. I think the article is on to something.

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