Richard Dawkins, FLIGHTS OF FANCY: Defying Gravity by Design & Evolution

This book was released in the UK in November 2021 — here’s its Amazon UK page — and was announced for US release in May 2022. I ordered the latter when it came out; here is its Amazon.com page. Turns out they are not separate editions, but the same identical edition, from the Apollo imprint of Head of Zeus, with a single ISBN, and only the UK price in pounds on the back. Why the delay in US availability? Don’t know.

The books is pleasant but unusual in Dawkins’ oeuvre. Continue reading

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Good News of 2022; What Success at College Means

NY Times, Nicholas Kristof, 31 Dec 2022: Cheer Up! The World Is Better Off Than You Think. Continue reading

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Books Read in 2022

Some of my Facebook friends are doing it, so I’ll do it too, though here, not there. Well OK, maybe there too.

The list is below. The photo shows all of them in order of finish, except that the 2022 SF novels, along with the last four nonfiction books, are stacked flat at the far end. The shelf was full. Continue reading

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The Weekend, and Heather Cox Richardson on 2022

I’ve missed posting the past two days for various reasons. Continue reading

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More Year-End Summaries

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

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

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Self-Replacement?

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

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

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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