Mark R. Kelly
» Founder in 1997 and site-runner for 20 years of Locus Online (Hugo Award winner in 2002). Founder in 2012 and still site-runner of sfadb.com (Science Fiction Awards Database). Retired in 2012 after 30 years as a software engineer for a certain rocket engine factory.
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Meta
Monthly Archives: November 2013
Families
Today’s New York Times’ Science section is entirely devoted to ‘Families’, with articles about changing trends and also profiles of several nontraditional families, including one about a gay couple — in their 50s and 60s — who have adopted 6 … Continue reading
Posted in Culture, Personal history
Comments Off on Families
Ineffability, God thereof
Another Andrew Sullivan post on The Dish– a few days ago, this, via Aidan Kimel and Herbert McCabe: God must be incomprehensible to us precisely because he is creator of all that is and, as Aquinas puts it, outside the … Continue reading
Posted in Religion
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A Celebration of Human Ingenuity
Andrew Sullivan’s The Dish on The Inevitabilty In Beauty. Theoretical physicist Nima Arkani-Hamed and novelist Ian McEwan recently discussed the relationship between art and science, often agreeing that what might unite them is beauty. I like McEwan’s response: I would … Continue reading
Posted in Philosophy, Science
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The Trolley Problem
NYTBR reviews not one but two books about the ‘trolley problem’, a hypothetical situation in which the decisions people make reveal how intuitive moral decisions are made differently by different people. The question is, suppose you see a runaway trolley … Continue reading
Posted in Philosophy
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David McRaney 2, Gravity, Haiyan, GRR Martin
I’ve been meaning to close out my thoughts on David McRaney’s brilliant second book, YOU ARE NOW LESS DUMB, which I first posted about a month ago. First, let me follow up on his ‘narrative bias’ described in the first … Continue reading
Posted in Book Notes, Lunacy, Philosophy, Religion, science fiction
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Why Science Is Not About Faith
Great post at Slate by Jerry Coyne — the original headline on the homepage has disappeared, so I’m reproducing from memory in this link: Why Scientists Have No Faith in Science The point is science isn’t about faith, not even … Continue reading
Why People Believe in Conspiracies
With the JFK 50th anniversary upon us, there have been numerous stories lately about this. Here’s one in Slate that wonders why so many people are so taken by outlandish conspiracy theories. http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2013/11/conspiracy_theory_psychology_people_who_claim_to_know_the_truth_about_jfk.html How can this be? How can so … Continue reading
Another Fermi Paradox idea
The Fermi Paradox is the observation that, while calculations of the number of likely planets in the galaxy (or universe) that can support life suggests that there might be millions or billions of them — recent news stories, e.g. CNN, … Continue reading
Posted in Cosmology
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