Joel's humanistic blog

A quick note: my blog has recently been added to the Planet Humanism blog aggregator.

Exactly what it says ... stuff that's happened since last time . The audio of the three ETFF Druyan interviews (of which transcripts were already up before) has gone live on Celebrating Sagan. Here's the widget: By the way, to get to a MP3 of a segment, right-click on it and select "Download this song." toomanytribbles has a really nice post about my last round of updates. On the ETFF interview transcripts: "all three pieces are stunning." Patrick Fish, the Sagan Gathering guy, has posted a video for me on YouTube: Ithaca Times for Joel Schlosberg, Extra Sagan, No Cheese :

Today's the right time to drop in a note about my plans to do a follow-up to this previous post about Douglas Rushkoff . I've wanted to post thoughts about Get Back in the Box and Nothing Sacred , and Rushkoff has dropped hints about his truly intriguing upcoming project, which will be about corporatism. But instead of a real post for now, I'll throw out a link to a video of a Rushkoff event about "Testament, Get Back in the Box and Corporatism", which took place at the Astor Place Barnes & Noble on February 28th of this year; I really should have blogged about this a long time ago since I was there, and can be seen in the audience:

Three new eBooks that I worked on have been added to Project Gutenberg : "A World is Born" by Leigh Brackett , from Comet magazine, July 1941. This short story is one of her "sword-and-planet" stories that took place in the rest of the Solar System; of course almost nothing was known about what the planets were like, so this provided the opportunity for writers to imagine what might be there. Brackett's versions drew upon existing genre tropes, but had a special quality of their own; the environments were vivid enough to almost be characters of their own. In this case, the setting is Mercury; Edmond Hamilton aptly described her version of it: The Brackett Mercury, lacking the glamor of Venus and the haunting sadness of ancient Mars—there is no history here, and no beauty—has a certain harsh authority even so. Nature is the chief villain, and a convincingly nasty one.... Leigh's concept of a world where tremendous mountains went up literally beyond the s...

I'm pleased to announce that I'm now an official contributor to the Celebrating Sagan website and blog. This is a site that appeared at around the same time as my blog-a-thon last year, and which had a similar mission of remembering Carl and his legacy. In particular, it was specifically designed to accept reader contributions, in particular from readers without blogs, so it turned out to be a good complement to the blog-a-thon. (And so, I'm able to post contributions that are emailed to me -- although you can also send them to the core team .) We'll see where this goes ... but one thing that's in store is audio I sent them of three half-hour interviews of Ann Druyan from Equal Time for Freethought , to go with their "Sounds of Sagan" collection. For now, transcripts of the interviews are available on ETFF's website: ETFF episode 50, July 13, 2003 : This show was about general science issues, and includes a large number of listener call-in quest...