Real and Imaginary Worlds

Posted on Friday 21 October 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

Another round of links to articles and essays about current events.

Link about this photo, from Raw Story, further down the page. My prediction: the Angel of Death will *not* strike all these people down by the end of the year.

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Denying the Denialists? and Bros

Posted on Thursday 20 October 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

Just time for one Reading today, then some comments about seeing a movie in a movie theater for the first time in nearly 3 years.

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Readings: On Freedom of Religion, and Unholy Alliances

Posted on Wednesday 19 October 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

I posted this link a couple days ago but without comments. It’s worth revisiting (it was in today’s print paper, so I reread it) to dig out key points.

New York Times, Steven Paulikas (an Episcopal priest), 15 Oct 2022: Same-Sex Marriage Is a Religious Freedom (title on homepage: “Why Should Your Religion Be Favored Over Mine?”)

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It’s Been Happening Here All Along

Posted on Tuesday 18 October 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

NYT, Jamelle Bouie, 18 Oct 2022: The U.S. Thinks ‘It Can’t Happen Here.’ It Already Has.

The quoted phrase is, of course, the title of a famous 1935 novel by Sinclair Lewis, on the idea that the fascism of Hitler’s Germany could never happen in the US.

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Voter Suppression, Supply-Side Economics, Empathy; and Links

Posted on Monday 17 October 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

Heather Cox Richardson, Facebook, October 16, 2022 (Sunday)

Richardson, a political historian, posts several times a week with longish (2 to 3 screens) summaries of recent events, grounded in historical perspective. This one is about the connection between voter suppression by Republicans and resistance to Reagan’s “supply-side economics” (so-called “trickle-down economics”) in the 1980s. I’d never made the connection, but she makes it sound inevitably reasonable.

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Ian R. MacLeod, “New Light on the Drake Equation”

Posted on Sunday 16 October 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

This week’s Sunday novella is “New Light on the Drake Equation” by Ian R. MacLeod. It was first published on the (long-gone) website Sci Fiction on May 2, 2001. (The site, edited by Ellen Datlow, won a Hugo Award in 2005 and was disbanded by its owner, the SciFi.com website, a few months later.)

Subsequently the story has been published, aside from in these Dozois anthologies, in Breathmoss and Other Exhalations in 2004, and in a “Best of” ebook-only collection from Open Road in 2013.

The story is as much meditation as a story. Continue reading →

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The Latest on Quantum Mechanics and Gravity?

Posted on Saturday 15 October 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

Frederik Pohl, the SF writer and editor who wrote Gateway and many other novels, once wrote a book called Chasing Science: Science as a Spectator Sport, which was about him not being a scientist, but interesting in following new scientific developments.

This is roughly where I am. I have a degree in math, took some science courses in college, but most of my understanding of science has come through reading books, beginning with Isaac Asimov’s collections of F&SF essays (beginning with Only a Trillion) and onward through books by Carl Sagan and Richard Dawkins and Edward O. Wilson.

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Neil deGrasse Tyson; Gregory Berns; the Myth of a Lost Golden Age

Posted on Friday 14 October 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

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Yom Kippur, Belief in Belief, Doctrine of Discovery, the SBC

Posted on Thursday 13 October 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

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Jim Al-Khalili, The Joy of Science

Posted on Wednesday 12 October 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

Here’s a short little book that is basic but substantive. Familiar yet essential. Frankly, if I had seen it in a bookstore, I would have glanced through it and likely set it back down. Seeing it online made it difficult to tell how small a book it is. Still, it’s good to once in a while review the very basics, and this book does so nicely.

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