Julia Morgan and Julia’s

Posted on Saturday 8 October 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

Last night we had dinner in a restaurant in the Berkeley City Club, a structure just south of Cal, UC Berkeley, designed by the famous architect Julia Morgan, who was the subject of a KQED profile last week. She designed hundreds of structures built in the Bay Area.

It was a nice dinner, but there was some party going on in one of the other rooms, perhaps a wedding party, and so service was slow. We took some photos. I’ll crosspost this to Facebook.

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Other posts in work. A take on SEA OF TRANQUILITY. And this week’s novella by Ian McDonald.

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Republicans and Socialism

Posted on Friday 7 October 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

So many political links, so little time. I do think I should scale these back, and focus on what I can say that nobody else is saying. On the other hand, there are so many crazies in the land, so many who are clueless about the world and their own craziness, and so many others who are unaware of what’s going on.

I have substantial links to comments by Connie Willis and Andrew Sullivan, but they will have to wait.

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Never Ending

Posted on Thursday 6 October 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

Big Think, Nirit Weiss-Blatt, 4 Oct 2022: Bombastic eulogies: Let’s put an end to cynical “The End of” headlines.

Subtitled: “We can never hope for a future with no problems. The solutions to problems create new problems, which in turn require new solutions, as WIRED founder Kevin Kelly explained recently.”

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Cities and Towns

Posted on Wednesday 5 October 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

Caption to photo: “Cities are bastions of elitism and filth.” Also today: MAGA in 2022; It’s not that Trump is nuts; about Herschel Walker.

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Not Pixel

Posted on Tuesday 4 October 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

Not Pixel:

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Marin Vaxxers

Posted on Monday 3 October 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

NYT, Soumya Karlamangla, posted 2 Oct 2022, in today’s paper: Once Known for Vaccine Skeptics, Marin Now Tells Them ‘You’re Not Welcome’

Subtitled: “The wealthy California county just north of San Francisco has one of the nation’s highest Covid-19 vaccination rates after years of being known for parents who opposed shots for childhood diseases.”

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Greg Egan, “Oceanic”

Posted on Sunday 2 October 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

This week’s Sunday novella is “Oceanic” by Greg Egan. It was first published in the August 1998 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction.

Subsequently it’s been published, aside from in these Dozois anthologies, in the author’s collections Dark Integers and other stories in 2008 and Oceanic in 2009, the former in the US and the latter in the UK, and then in The Best of Greg Egan in 2019 in the US.

Egan is perhaps science fiction’s greatest mystery man. He does not attend conventions, he does not appear in public, he does not release photographs of himself. He lives in Perth, Australia.

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First October: Links and Comments

Posted on Saturday 1 October 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

Old Teeth, Hurricanes, Government support for me not thee, Andy Borowitz, Liz Truss

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Kasner & Newman, MATHEMATICS AND THE IMAGINATION

Posted on Friday 30 September 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

Here is another older book out of my library, one to set alongside George Gamow’s One Two Three… Infinity, which I reviewed back in August. This book is even older. Published in 1940, this is Mathematics and the Imagination, by Edward Kasner and James R. Newman, with a Wikipedia page that oddly summarizes only the first four of its nine chapters. This book, like the Gamow, is still in print, from Dover. (The Amazon “Look Inside” samples includes the complete high-annotated table of contents.)

My edition, in the photo here, is a Simon & Schuster/Fireside trade paperback with a 1967 copyright. I bought it in 1980. After I’d graduated from college but before I began my aerospace job. I read it back then, and have spent a couple three hours paging through it this week in order to summarize here.*

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Parameters of Abortion

Posted on Thursday 29 September 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

Two items about abortion today, one from Richard Dawkins about the illogical premise of the anti-abortionists; another about continued Republican efforts to criminalize abortion to the point of executions of women.

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