Ls&Cs: Some Sciency Pieces

Posted on Wednesday 8 December 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

About the miraculous history of Earth; an interview with E.O. Wilson; about SF authors addressing scientific challenges; and about whether science, and the arts, are stuck.

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Novella et al: THE SKEPTICS’ GUIDE TO THE UNIVERSE

Posted on Wednesday 8 December 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

Novella, Dr. Steven, et al. The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe: How to Know What’s Really Real in a World Increasingly Full of Fake. Grand Central, 2018. ***

I read this shortly after publication, nearly three years ago now, and haven’t gotten around to writing it up here mainly because my notes were so long! But I’ll dump them here anyway, with one pass to clean up and trim, and add a summary on the NF reviews page.

“The skeptical, critical thinking, and scientific principles outlined in this book are like the rungs of a long ladder that humanity has used to climb laboriously out of the swamp of superstition, bias, hubris, and magical belief. We tend to look back now at medieval beliefs and congratulate ourselves for being born in a later age. But not every individual or even every institution has followed our best thinkers out of the muck. We all need to climb the ladder for ourselves.”

(P.S. Novella, a neurologist at Yale, is founder and executive editor of Science-Based Medicine, and frequently writes on its site.)

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Pursuing Books During the Pandemic and Supply-Side Crisis

Posted on Tuesday 7 December 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

Via book reviews and Fb posts, I’m aware of 2 or 3 new nonfiction books published every week that look interesting enough to consider reading. I restrain myself; at most I buy 2 or 3 new nonfiction books a month out of those, the most important or relevant ones, or the ones I think I’ll most likely have time to actually read. And of course still don’t read all those that I buy in a timely fashion.

Once in a while my calculation of which books are actually the most important to buy requires retroactive revision. My first takes are not always correct; so I correct myself.

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Links and Comments: More from April 2021

Posted on Monday 6 December 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

Once more reaching into the well for links saved back in April, just before my world almost ended, and before I was effectively zoned out for two months.

Nonexistent problems; the next phase of human civilization; a new unchurched majority; how atheists don’t get the endurance of religion; how evolution produced everyone, including skeptics.

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Ls&Cs: Writers’ Blogs; The Secret in the Diary

Posted on Sunday 5 December 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

I should have established that the context for yesterday’s piece about Republicans and Democrats was not about partisanship, but as another example of a counter-intuitive notion, how things have changed over the decades and centuries, so that what might seem true now wasn’t necessarily true then. Like the items I’ve run about birthdays, and days of the week. The same it seems to me might be said about the concept of Constitutional originalism, which some scholars insist upon — except for the part about “well-regulated militias.”

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Ls&Cs: Democrats and Republicans and Car Designs

Posted on Saturday 4 December 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

About the changing identities of Democrats and Republicans, over the past century and a half; about the logic of abortion, from a philosopher; about the dismal history of infrastructure (and how this relates to conspiracy theories); and two items about car design. And an endpiece.

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Links & Comments & Thoughts for the Day & Endpiece: 3 Dec 21

Posted on Friday 3 December 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

Thought for the day: All the Christmas carols, all the movies about Santa, and so on, are *fan fiction*.

Another thought for the day: I haven’t seen anyone point out that the reason Covid variants keep appearing, and then spreading so rapidly around the world, is that people these days — compared to a century ago — travel far more widely and quickly across the globe. This is the same reason humans are causing the mass extinctions of Elizabeth Kolbert’s book The Sixth Extinction (review; summary on this page.) What is the solution? People will never stop traveling, any more than all of them will wear masks. These consequences of human activity will settle out, even if over the next centuries rapidly spreading viruses will kill significant portions of the human population. And deplete the wildlife population. And reduce, through climate change, half of the occupied planet unlivable. The warnings have been there for 50 years.

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Ursula K. Le Guin: THE DISPOSSESSED (1974)

Posted on Friday 3 December 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

I (re)read this a year and a half ago, and took notes, now condensed a bit here. And I’ll add it to the Reviews/SF directory page.

Le Guin is best known for THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS in 1969, but this later novel is nearly as well known; both books won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards. Here’s the edition I read this time (and to which the page references refer to).

The Wikipedia entry for the book has the first edition cover; I own a book club edition of that.

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Ls&Cs: Resistance to Learning; and Learning

Posted on Thursday 2 December 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

Articles about William F. Buckley, the Republicans’ war on education, and fire management.

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Ls&Cs: Irony; Banning Books

Posted on Wednesday 1 December 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

The most significant item I have today, which I saw a couple days ago, was via a Facebook post by Moshe Feder, who helpfully copied it in its entirety: an article on New Scientist, by Annalee Newitz, which is not available to non-subscribers.

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