Views from Crestmont Drive

Readings: Margaret Atwood and Jared Diamond

Posted on Monday 13 February 2023 by Mark R. Kelly

Margaret Atwood on the people banning her book The Handmaid’s Tale; Jared Diamond on the earthquake in Turkey and Syria, and long-term disaster planning.

Margaret Atwood, The Atlantic, 12 Feb 2023: Go Ahead and Ban My Book, subtitled “To those who seek to stop young people from reading The Handmaid’s Tale: Good luck with that. It’ll only make them want to read it more.”

A familiar lesson, which conservatives cannot seem to learn. Ban something, and you create a desire for it. (Similar to the Streisand effect.) Atwood begins:

Continue reading →

Posted in Conservative Resistance, longtermism, Quote at Length | Comments Off

Religious Presumptions, Divine Plans, Hollywood’s Worst

Posted on Saturday 11 February 2023 by Mark R. Kelly

Catching up on links not yet used from the past week or so. Jerry Coyne responds to Timothy Keller’s presumptions about the metaphysical truth of Christianity and the need for a revived Church; The obvious evidence for lack of a “divine plan”; An example of Hollywood’s worst; and items about the balloon and Ozone Man.

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Posted in Movies, Religion | Comments Off

Approximations and Denials of Reality

Posted on Friday 10 February 2023 by Mark R. Kelly

Ted Chiang on ChatGPT; Paul Krugman on the GOP’s Orwellian take on the world; and epistemology.

Ted Chiang, The New Yorker, 9 Feb 2023: ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web, subtitled “OpenAI’s chatbot offers paraphrases, whereas Google offers quotes. Which do we prefer?”
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Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

Evolution Understood and Not Understood

Posted on Thursday 9 February 2023 by Mark R. Kelly

I mentioned those John Brockman anthologies of science essays back on Feb 4th. They’re associated with the website Edge.org, one of those fascinating websites I’ve noticed over the years but have not followed regularly (others are Big Think, Quanta, Aero, Quillette…) but in this case perhaps should…. Well, except that it doesn’t seem to post much new material lately. Continue reading →

Posted in Evolution, Science | Comments Off

SOTU Address and Other Current Events

Posted on Wednesday 8 February 2023 by Mark R. Kelly

Some things never change…

NY Times, Round Table, 8 Feb 2023: Times Columnists Respond to the State Of the Union

I’ll just list the contributors and their headlines.

Frank Bruni: Biden showed himself to be a happy warrior.
Nicholas Kristof: A populist Biden gave perhaps the best speech of his presidency.
Bret Stephens: Joe Biden shows his two faces.
Michelle Cottle: Biden makes clear he’s still up for the fight.
David French: “We will stand with you as long as it takes.”
Michelle Goldberg: Biden was at his best.

The Republican party is full of so many class acts. Continue reading →

Posted in Politics, Psychology, Religion | Comments Off

Dacher Keltner, AWE: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life

Posted on Tuesday 7 February 2023 by Mark R. Kelly

This is a book about the subjective experience of awe, and how being aware of everyday examples of awe can make your life more meaningful and fulfilling; yet how (in my take) it’s about the emotion, triggered by both the subjective and the objective, and not about science fiction’s “sense of wonder,” something of which the author seems unaware.

(Penguin Press, January 2023, xxvi+309pp, including 59pp of acknowledgements, notes, and index.)

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Posted in Book Notes, Psychology, Science, science fiction | Comments Off

More About the 747

Posted on Monday 6 February 2023 by Mark R. Kelly

For decades the Boeing 747 was the largest passenger airliner in the world, and it debuted (in 1968) just a few years before I had occasion to take a plane flight anywhere, or pay attention to different kinds of planes. (Actually, perhaps 10 years; I didn’t fly on a passenger jet until May 1979, when I flew from LA to visit my family in Tullahoma TN.) So when it debuted I took it for granted as being the current pinnacle of a certain kind of technology, just as the landing on the Moon in 1969 was the pinnacle of that era’s space technology, the latest in a long line of ever-impressive pinnacles of technology that kept appearing, two thirds of the way through the 20th century.

What I didn’t understand at the time Continue reading →

Posted in Personal history, Technology | Comments Off

What We Learned from This Morning’s Newspaper

Posted on Sunday 5 February 2023 by Mark R. Kelly

Items today concern the US military budget, the Chinese balloon, flooding in Houston, Richard Powers on a real battle for trees, and the passing of the 747. All items from today’s paper (the New York Times).