Ls&Cs: Some Things Never Change; Some That Do Go Unremembered

Posted on Wednesday 17 November 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

How racism persists while changing its expression; how cherry-picking the Bible has been done for centuries; and how the seven-day week has only recently become the worldwide standard.

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Notes for a Series of Essays About Science Fiction

Posted on Tuesday 16 November 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

The essays I plan to write will be about science fiction — the nature of science fiction with discussion of many individual science fiction works — and the things science fiction is about. Which is most things.

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Ls&Cs: Human Are Animals; The Yuck Factor

Posted on Monday 15 November 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

I’ve kept up with posting current links to articles and essays in recent weeks (since I’ve been posting once a day, for two months now) so well that this evening I am mining links I captured back in March and April that I didn’t post at the time. Here are two, about Western philosophy, and human psychology.

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L&Qs&Cs: Innumeracy and Covid

Posted on Sunday 14 November 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

Humans are intuitively not good at proportions and other statistical concepts, but those concepts can be taught. They are not, and politicians and partisan news sources use public misunderstanding of these concepts to their advantage.

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Ls&Qs&Cs: Recent Headlines; The Collapse of America?

Posted on Saturday 13 November 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

Clearing out saved links from the past few weeks, posted here mostly just as links with only a few quotes and comments, and ending with a provocative site linked to the Medium blog collective.

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Links & Comments: More on Foundation and Dune

Posted on Friday 12 November 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

I still have not seen the Dune movie, nor any Foundation episode past the 2nd. Still, articles and reviews about them illustrate some basic principles about science fiction, and about dramatic adaptations of science fiction, and I’ll post a few more here, with comments and quotes.

Most significantly is this long essay in The New Yorker about Foundation, which — stop right there — is mind-boggling to anyone who’s followed the genre over the past several decades, seeing how the critical attitude toward science fiction, once dismissed as childish and sub-literary, has changed. So here we are. Isaac Asimov discussed seriously in The New Yorker!

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Ls&Cs: Interviews and Excerpts: Pinker, Harari, Graeber & Wengrow

Posted on Thursday 11 November 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

Michael Shermer interviews Steven Pinker about Rationality; NYT interviews Yuval Noah Harari about the simple story that can save the planet; and an excerpt from Graeber & Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything.

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Ls&Cs: Infrastructure; Insurrection; Safety; Radicals; Birthdays

Posted on Wednesday 10 November 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

When voting for infrastructure means betraying your country; how dying from Covid is sacrifice in the war against Joe Biden; when safety measures give false confidence; how QAnon and Pakistani radicals are similar; when birthdays were not a thing.

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Ls&Cs: Religion vs Science; Freedom; Feudalism

Posted on Tuesday 9 November 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

Plain speaking about the obvious conflict between science and religion; about the idea of freedom without responsibility; about the odd attraction of feudalism in fantasy and science fiction.

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Ls&Cs: Hillary; Money; Rural America; the Economy; Populism

Posted on Monday 8 November 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

Today I had a dentist appointment; I compiled Weekly Bestsellers for Locus Online; I updated sfadb.com with the World Fantasy Award winners. After lunch: my thrice-weekly cardiac therapy. Then: read another chapter of Pinker; and now compiling links collected this past weekend, as a new rainstorm settles in over the Bay Area, in the early dark.

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