Michael Flynn's Blog, page 101

Green Religion

We Will Come Rejoicing, Leaving the Sheaves in the Field Where They Damn Well Belong.

Joseph Bottum at First Things www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2009/07/25/green-religion/ , has this to say about a column in the Times of London—a column by Antonia Senior that identifies the religious character of environmentalism.

True enough, but Senior’s analysis is a little odd, and it is proof, in its way, of how little religious thinking is actually present in England. To get to the religious chara

Quote of the Day

On the Naturalism of Our Cogitation

Everything my cognitive abilities show me about my cognitive abilities reveals to my cognitive abilities that everything my cognitive abilities disclose are fully in accord with what I grasp of the world by way of my cognitive abilities. 
-- The Cogitator

Presidential Approval Ratings

This Is Pretty Kool

You can go to the second tab and two comparisons mano a mano.  Try superimposing GWBush and BHObama and HSTruman.  There are in many cases, some interesting parallels in the trajecotries of popularity.

www.usatoday.com/news/washington/presidential-approval-tracker.htm

www.usatoday.com/news/washington/presidential-approval-tracker.htm

The Cosmic DustBuster

Jupiter Sucks Up Another Cosmic Dust Bunny



and makes Our World just a Little Bit Safer. 

This image shows a large impact on Jupiter's south polar region captured on July 20, 2009, by NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility in Mauna Kea, Hawaii. Image credit: NASA/JPL/Infrared Telescope Facility

Public Service Announcements

Let's be Careful Out There

m_francis @ 2009-07-19T20:13:00

In the Lion's Mouth

Well, it is officially started.  Up Jim River is "in the can" at Tor, and I sold an excerpt from it -- "On Rickety Thistlewaite" -- to Analog, sent a 10K novelette ("Iron Shirts") to Interzone, whose fate is yet unknown, and finished a short story, "Cargo", with which to try once more Stan Schmidt's inexhaustible patience.  And the October Analog has arrived on my doorstep with the novella Where the Winds Are All Asleep, an Irish pub story. 

So it seemed like a good time to st

Man in Space!

The Way the Future Was

Czar Light, Czar Bright

Of the Making of Many Czars There is No End

The on-going effort to replace constitutional government with a coterie of "czars" inserted between the President and the Cabinet and the Congress, we have a fascinating "Science Czar".  He once authored a book (Ecoscience [sic:]) with doomsters Paul Ehrlich and his wife.  (The doom back then was to be population growth, not global warming.)  Popgrowth was so urgent that Holden recommended involuntary sterilization, taking babies from their mothers witho

Quote of the Day

On Teaching Foreign Languages

The study of any foreign language is an egregiously unhumanistic enterprise in which even good students can actually make an indubitable error! That's humiliating and undemocratic.  The students who make many errors will suffer regular and irretrievable diminutions of self-esteem, and those who make only a few will stand in danger of becoming elitists. Those are risks that we cannot and will not take,

Blinded Us With Science

How Science Was Welcomed by the Publick

James Hannam, an historian of early modern science book reviews an account here:
bedejournal.blogspot.com/2009/07/merrie-unscientific-england.html