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: December 2015
Science Fiction As a Prism in the Dawn
Subtitle?
Posted in Book Notes, Provisional Conclusions
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Review of “The Danish Girl”
from Facebook, today: Today’s movie: “The Danish Girl”, which both Yeong and I liked better than I’d expected given the lukewarm reviews. (Glancing at those negative reviews, their theme seems to be that the movie is too polished, too flat … Continue reading
Posted in Films
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The Yearning for the Golden Past
The Conservative Grand Narrative, according to Jonathan Haidt (mentioned in my discussion of his book The Righteous Mind in this post) is about “the struggle to return to a golden past” — a theme we hear echoed in Republican presidential … Continue reading
Posted in Conservative Resistance, Culture, Narrative, Politics
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Review of “Carol”
From Facebook, 30 Dec 15: Seeing “Carol” at a classic movie theater on Piedmont Avenue– We saw a film today at a classic old movie theater, the kind on a street corner along a street lined with shops and cafes, … Continue reading
Posted in Films
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The Narrative of Narratives
A couple of years ago, when I read David McRaney’s second book, You Are Now Less Dumb, with its long section about human beings’ ‘narrative bias’, in which everything must be understood as some kind of story, this was a … Continue reading
Refining My Thesis
My thesis about science fiction is that (for the most part) it reflects the framework of my Provisional Conclusions: science fiction recognizes humanity’s existence within a vast, ancient universe; it recognizes that human perception of reality is incomplete and sometimes … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
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Sean Carroll’s Reading List
Sean Carroll is one of my favorite physicists who blogs, and whom I’ve linked several times before, most recently about his forthcoming book The Big Picture (due May 2016), and in a blog post a few days ago, he posted … Continue reading
Posted in Book Notes
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Alan Lightman on Cosmology and Human Meaning
Yesterday I mentioned the Harper’s essay by Alan Lightman, What Came Before the Big Bang?, which concerns a couple different theories for that question: one by Sean Carroll and Alan Guth, a so-called “Two-Headed Time” theory, and another by Ukrainian/US … Continue reading
Posted in Cosmology
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Links and Comments: Science and Math and Religion
Radio interview with Lee Goldman, MD, about his new book Too Much of a Good Thing, subtitled “How Four Key Survival Traits Are Now Killing Us”. This is about the familiar idea that our species is optimized for survival in … Continue reading
Links and Comments: Politics and Religion
Three items by Jeffrey Tayler at Salon recently. First, in what I might call the pot-kettle-black category, Religion is the real problem: Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and GOP demonize Muslims, but too afraid to take on the real truth, where … Continue reading