Steve Sailer has an interesting post on the limits of reason, or why some intelligent people can embrace both Darwin AND religion, contra the brilliant but smug Richard Dawkins.
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Writing Life 2: “Long Tails”
Scott Esposito at Conversational Reading has an examination of the publishing world’s current obsession with what we might call Big Safe Books, and why it is not the best or only business model. “I suppose that all this reflects the dominant business-model in commercial publishing right now: Put all your eggs in one basket. Publishers …
Writing Life #1
It has been a rough week– we lost Libby’s father Ken (see “Ken Adam” below) and a good friend, Bill Smiley, this week, so blogging has taken a back seat. But we are home now and things are returning to as close to normal as they ever get here at Casa Querencia. In that spirit: …
Ken Adam R.I.P.– and a few thoughts on Yosemite
Ken Adam, my father- in- law, died yesterday at 87, at home, surrounded by his loving family. He had a long and adventurous life. Among his achievements were many pioneering climbs in Yosemite. To quote from Steve Roper’s A Climber’s Guide to Yosemite: ” Although as long ago as 1886 Hutchings, in reporting the relatively …
Oh all right…
… something cool. This is a photo of two aboriginal hunters with matchlock rifles and a Laika dog in the Tunguskaya region of Siberia in 1926, part of a great archive compilied by Russian census takers in 1926 (you can “back” into the larger archive). As my friend Vladimir Beregovoy, who sent this to me, …
“Spleen” by Beaudelaire
I’m like the King of some damp, rainy clime,Grown impotent and old before my time,Who scorns the bows and scrapings of his teachersAnd bores himself with hounds and all such creatures.Naught can amuse him, falcon, steed or chase:No, not the mortal plight of his whole raceDying before his balcony. The tune,Sung to this tyrant by …
Human Nature
I promise to snap out of this mood sooner than later, but I believe in celebrating the bracing effects of gloom as well as the good things. In that spirit, a quote from Rose Nunez at No Credentials: “What history really teaches is that people are indeed nasty; that Hobbes was righter than Rousseau, and …
China in Zimbabwe
An article in the NYT on the new bonds being forged with China by Zimbabwe’s megalomaniacal dictator Robert Mugabe contains many things to give us pause. Remember those farms confiscated from white farmers that were supposed to go to the “people”? Well, “…China won a contract last year to farm 386 square miles of land …
Durians
From the Oxford Companion to Food, a bit of doggerel from Horticulture. It helps to know that Alfred Russell Wallace was extremely fond of the stinking fruit. The durian–neither Wallace or Darwin agreed on it. Darwin said ‘may your worst enemies be forced to feed on it’. Wallace cried ‘it’s delicious’. Darwin replied ‘I’m suspicious, …
Atlantis??
Frankly, if this were any lesser journal than Nature I’d be VERY skeptical. But…. “In a recent paper in Geology, Marc-Andre Gutscher of the European Institute for Marine Studies in Plouzané gives details of one candidate for the lost city: the submerged island of Spartel, west of the Straits of Gibraltar. “The top of this …