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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Memes and Dreams, Obsessions and Abuse

Posted on Wednesday 28 September 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

Do people really not want to work? Why do people have anxiety dreams about school long after graduating? Plus items and politics and religion.

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Commitment to America and Zombie Economics

Posted on Tuesday 27 September 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

Washington Post, Eugene Robinson, 26 Sep 2022: The only agenda that unifies the Republican Party is revenge

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Which Books to Read, Dumb Politicians, Politics as a Joke

Posted on Monday 26 September 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

How do I choose which books to buy, or read? A case example. Also: about dumb politicians, and about politics as a joke.

A few times here I’ve discussed my methods and thought processes to identify which books to read, or in particular which new books to buy with an eye toward reading. Here’s another chapter. Never minding the thousands of books that I own, and the several dozen from recent years that I definitely intend to read but have not yet, there are more new books that come out each year than I have time to read. Well, maybe I could read all of them if I started from scratch and *only* read new books.

There are different thought processes for different kinds of books. For novels, for example, reading one does not preclude reading any other, any more than seeing one movie rules out another, hours in the day aside. In contrast, nonfiction books might seems redundant after a point, for those on similar topics. Everyone has their favorite topics, subjects of interest, but do you need to read every basic book about cosmology or evolution that comes along? Only those by experts in the field? Only those that claim some new perspective or detail some recent discovery?

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