Links & Quotes: Spy Stories; Secularism

Posted on Tuesday 11 January 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

Janis Ian (the singer, who I follow on Facebook), offered this David Bowie quote the other day:

“As you get older, the questions come down to about two or three. How long? And what do I do with the time I’ve got left?”

A couple links for today.

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Mundane Life: The Western View; Cardiac Therapy

Posted on Monday 10 January 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

An hour ago I began a different post before realizing it wouldn’t work. So here I am with a mundane post. A post about mundane activities over the past few days.

Here’s a photo posted on Facebook five days ago, a view to the west, over the Bay, of the Moon and Venus. Old Moon in the New Moon’s arms.

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Ls&Cs: Stories: Joan Didion; A Killer Review

Posted on Sunday 9 January 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

Here are two disparate items that happen to be thematically related.

First we have an item by the late Joan Didion, who died on December 23rd. I knew I had a couple books by her, but it took me a week or two to find them in the nonfiction overflow in the garage. Actually, I only found one of them: a paperback copy of her famous book of essays, THE WHITE ALBUM. I opened to the first page and this is what I read:

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Michael Shermer: WHY DARWIN MATTERS: The Case Against Intelligent Design (2006)

Posted on Saturday 8 January 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

This is a middle-period Shermer book, from the range that begins with WHY PEOPLE BELIEVE WEIRD THINGS in 1997 (and omitting some earlier and middle-period books on extraneous topics), and the 6th of 12 Shermer books I have on my shelves.

It recycles some material from previous books, especially HOW WE BELIEVE (2000), but has two distinctive themes. First, Shermer sets the book against his own background as a creationist himself, having become a born-again-Christian in high school, and explains how once he got out of that bubble “The scales fell from my eyes! It turned out that the creationist literature I was reading presented a Darwinian cardboard cutout that a child could knock down.” Second, he focuses on the then-current (and still active) dispute between evolution and “intelligent design,” describing the evidence for and against respectively, and why he debates creationists and how such events go.

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Myths About Science

Posted on Friday 7 January 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

Another overcast, damp day, with occasional sprinkles. Today was partner Y’s last day at his current job; he signed his severance package, returned his laptop and badge. He’ll be home everyday now until/unless he gets another job; he does seem to be eager to find some sort of part-time consulting job, and has had some good interviews.

Cardiac therapy again today; two sessions left, next Monday and Wednesday.

Just one link for this afternoon.

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Links and Comments: January 6th

Posted on Thursday 6 January 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

I’ll post just the three or four items that struck me the most today, the anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrectionist attack by Trump supporters on the Capitol of the United States.

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Links and Comments: Gullibility and the Decline of the US

Posted on Wednesday 5 January 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

First a bit of housekeeping. This blog has attracted no comments at all in the past two months! No real ones (which come in once a month or so) and no spam ones (which used to come in a few a day). The volume of spam had been bothersome enough that I set the period for allowing comments to a new post to 3 days. As of now, I’ll expand that window to… well, more than 3 days. And see what happens.

Nothing extraordinary today. I’ve done some maintenance updates on Locus Online, I’ve been reading another book by John Allen Paulos, and I’ve been updating my planner spreadsheet (which I do every couple months anyway) for 2022. Cardiac therapy today, with only two or three sessions left, I believe.

Two or three timely links for today.

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Simon Baron-Cohen: THE PATTERN SEEKERS: How Autism Drives Human Invention (2020)

Posted on Tuesday 4 January 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

This is one of those books I heard about when it was published (via a PW review), but passed on at the time. (As I pass on 80% of books I hear about that I think I might like reading, as previously discussed.) The review was mixed but invoked Yuval Noah Harari in comparison. Still. Then for some reason I heard about it again late last year and ordered it from Amazon during the holidays.

I have a mixed reaction to the book myself. For much of it the author expounds at length on topics that are straightforward, even obvious, as if struggling to pad out to book length a topic that could have been covered in a medium-length essay. And yet he does introduce some provocative topics, both about his ideas about human invention, but also about how autism relates to the unusual skills of inventors, and by extension how certain kinds of human progress have been driven by a small minority of people with obsessive, “pattern seeking” skills that most of society finds peculiar at best, distasteful at worst.

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Links and Comments: January 6th; How Americans Need Each Other; How to ‘Do Your Own Research’; Enduring Conspiracy Theories

Posted on Monday 3 January 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

Let’s do some links and comments today, then tomorrow perhaps I’ll return to posting book summaries.

NYT, The Editorial Board, 1 Jan 2022: Every Day Is Jan. 6 Now

This could be a reference from my 2021 in Review post. Online publications can change headlines depending on context; the headline on NYT’s homepage yesterday was better: “How Many Times Must America Be Proved Wrong About Trump?”

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January 2nd

Posted on Sunday 2 January 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

Another quick post. I spent my hour of posting for today updating the 2021 in Review post I did a couple days ago, adding sections about family and trips, and tweaking the rest.

This is the Pinewood Picnic site, in Joaquin Miller Park, where we met the cousins for a picnic back in November 2020.

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