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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Christmas Snake

Posted on Saturday 1 January 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

Just a quick post for today. The photo shows an electronic snake toy I bought for our cats. (From ads I saw on Facebook.) It goes back and forth, reacts to objects in front them, pauses every once in a while waiting for a cat to paw at it, then starts up again.

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2021 in Review

Posted on Friday 31 December 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

Here’s something I don’t usually do. But perhaps it’s worth doing, especially for this past year.

What were the significant events of this past year, in my personal life and in the history I’m living through?

I had a heart transplant! I’m still alive! I have a supportive family, and a step-grandson who just turned 1-year-old in October. And I am making visible progress toward a couple three long-term goals, even though I’m not optimistic about ever finishing any of them.

Here am I, the grandson, my partner, and the grandson’s parents (partner’s son and his wife):

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Links & Comments: Narrative Shortcuts, Fantasy Worlds, Arabic Numerals

Posted on Thursday 30 December 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

Sunny but chilly today; we’ve had rain for much of the past two weeks, and now we’re in for a week or so of sun. We did a 34-minute walk, though Robinson Drive and around on  Skyline and back to Crestmont.

We’re being extremely careful about exposure to Covid, of course, given my immune-compromised condition, especially with the apparent easy spread of the new omicron variant. Also, my partner’s relationship’s relationship’s relationship was exposed to someone at work who had tested positive, and so now even my partner is avoiding close contact with his immediate relationship until they can be tested.

I’m happy enough just to stay at home.

I’ve been fascinated to see people struggling to pronounce “omicron”; it’s a Greek letter, long familiar to astronomers, both professional and amateur, and to science fiction fans, since fictional planets tend to be named after their stars, e.g. “Omicron Ceti III” (to cite a planet in an early Trek TOS episode, “This Side of Paradise”). But I learned something in all this: apparently “omicron” really does mean, in the Greek language, small-o, just as “omega” means big-o. Makes sense, but I’d had never noticed that.

Links today are about Don’t Look Up, the economy, fantasy worlds, and Arabic numerals.

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E.O. Wilson, HALF-EARTH (2016)

Posted on Wednesday 29 December 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

E.O. Wilson, Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life, Liveright, 2016, 259p

This is one of Wilson’s last four or five books, the first one following The Meaning of Human Existence in 2014. These books seem slighter that most earlier Wilson books, but this one has an especially striking theme: that to prevent mass extinctions, to preserve the Earth’s biodiversity that humanity’s survival depends on, we must save half the planet’s land-surface from human development. Keep it wild.

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Boosted

Posted on Tuesday 28 December 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

I thought to post a summary of one of those E.O. Wilson books tonight, but it’s past 4:30 and I don’t think I have the time. (I try to wrap up here by 5:30.) So some miscellaneous items today.

First, I finally got my Covid booster today. My cardiologists had actually recommended my *not* getting it when it first became available, since my anti-rejection meds had lowered my white blood cell count. I gathered the idea was there was little point in getting the booster with such a low WBC to work with. But the most recent blood tests showed that level had risen sufficiently to warrant getting the booster. (OTOH, I am not to get a flu shot, or any other routine vaccine, until a year after the transplant — which was 7 months ago now.)

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E.O. Wilson

Posted on Monday 27 December 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

The great evolutionary biologist and author E.O. Wilson died on Sunday. He was 92. He  had been publishing new books right up to the end, with Tales from the Ant World in 2020. Several of his earlier books, from On Human Nature in 1978 to The Meaning of Human Existence in 2014, have over the decades profoundly influenced my thinking.

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