Joel's humanistic blog

From the Georgist Progress Report website, here is an excerpt from Martin Luther King Jr.'s final book, Where Do We Go From Here? Chaos or Community , in which King supports a guaranteed income rather than conventional welfare programs as the most direct means of dealing with poverty; he includes a quote from Henry George's Progress and Poverty : The fact is that the work which improves the condition of mankind, the work which extends knowledge and increases power and enriches literature, and elevates thought, is not done to secure a living. It is not the work of slaves, driven to their task either by the lash of a master or by animal necessities. It is the work of men who perform it for their own sake, and not that they may get more to eat or drink, or wear, or display. In a state of society where want is abolished, work of this sort could be enormously increased. Aside from the question of work motivation, the point is that levels on inequality or equality income levels tra...

We have science-fiction writers such as Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke providing cogent and brilliant summaries in nonfictional form of many aspects of science and society. — Carl Sagan, "Science Fiction — A Personal View", in Broca's Brain The revered science fiction writer (and science popularizer/futurist, and inventor, and humanist) Arthur C. Clarke — author of 2001 ( book and movie ), Childhood's End , Rendezvous with Rama , "The Sentinel", "The Nine Billion Names of God", "The Star" and many others — will be turning 90 this month. To mark the occasion, Thilina Heenatigala , a friend of Clarke's and the General Secretary of the Clarke-cofounded Sri Lanka Astronomical Association has started a blog to celebrate Clarke's 90th birthday . He is sending an open invitation to all Clarke fans to post birthday wishes as blog comments for. December 16th is the special date! Heenatigala is also a big Sagan fan: he organized ...

The science fiction short story "The Mississippi Saucer" by Frank Belknap Long (from Weird Tales , 1951) is now available at Project Gutenberg. As the title implies, an early take on the flying-saucer idea, it is brief enough (ten pages) that I'll avoid spoiling it by saying more about it ... so, read and enjoy!

It's that time of the year again. In just over a month, on December 20, 2007, we will reach the eleventh anniversary of Carl Sagan's passing — and the first anniversary of the wildly successful first-ever Carl Sagan Memorial Blog-a-Thon . Far exceeding my wildest expectations, this became a truly worldwide celebration, featuring more than 250 posts in 11 languages! Sagan fans are truly cohering into an online force to reckon with. For the second blog-a-thon, I'm keeping the format pretty much the same as last time: First, I start with a post (this one) to announce the blog-a-thon now. Then, I leave it open to participating bloggers to post something Sagan-related on their blogs sometime near December 20th (a bit late is OK); interested people without blogs or otherwise unable to post on a personal blog are encouraged to submit something to the Celebrating Sagan website (I am able to post material directly to the site, or one could contact the site's webmasters). ...

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

Nope, don't confuse it with this old post about his MySpace page. My friend Daniel DeCastro put up, earlier this summer, an honest-to-no-God, really real webpage to show off his composing talent: DeCastro Music In particular, it has a wide selection of music (far more than the old MySpace page), as well as his thesis . Happy listening!

The second of two quick notes on my recent stuff elsewhere on the web: At Steve Baldwin's Ghost Sites blog, he's posted an analysis I sent in about a time capsule from the 1990s Internet: the official book promotion site for Jackie Chan's 1998 autobiography I Am Jackie Chan: My Life in Action , which has been preserved intact virtually unchanged from the date of release.

The first of two quick notes on my recent stuff elsewhere on the web: Here's Thorstein Veblen's description of the Icelandic Commonwealth , from his book An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation as existing in a quasi-anarchist form, where the government lacked most of the usual functions, such as defense, and coercive power. I sent this passage (which I discovered while proofreading the book in Distributed Proofreaders ) in to Roderick T. Long , who had written about Iceland in a similar vein here and here ; he hadn't seen it, and neither had David Friedman (the other libertarian most well-known for seeing Iceland as a model of anarchy).

When Stephen Fischler and Joel Sucher's pair of 1980s documentaries Anarchism in America and Free Voice of Labor: The Jewish Anarchists were released onto DVD last year, the home video availability, much like Bird and Shaffer's The Wobblies doc , led to a resurgence of interest in both movies. Some time afterwards, I noticed that while the former had an entry on the comprehensive Internet Movie Database , the latter did not. So about a week ago, I finally decided to try to make my way through the IMDB update process and submit it for inclusion in the database ... and it's paid off: Free Voice of Labor has a brand-new page on the IMDB ! (And yes, I should eventually post some thoughts on the actual content of both of Fischler and Sucher's movies ... there was a flurry of posts shortly after the DVD's release, and I felt like I was coming late to the party at the time. But yeah, they're recommended, and I wanted to get out this announcement now rather t...

I can't believe this. Last night, I stumbled upon the archive of the webzine Sci Fiction on the Sci Fi channel website for the first time — and saw that it was going to be taken down by the 15th! (The magazine ran from 2000 to 2005, but even when it stopped publishing, the archives were left up ... until now.) It's really too bad, as it has an impressive lineup of both new fiction, and classic reprints. The latter, with its truly old-school lineup of authors — Robert Bloch, Zenna Henderson, Theodore Sturgeon, William Tenn, Manly Wade Wellman — brings back a lot of memories of hunting this stuff down in musty paperbacks, including one tale (Fredric Brown's "Mouse") where I was left hanging because the ending page was actually ripped out of the book! How did this never get on my radar? Note to self: how did I never, say, Google "Allamagoosa" ? The news has been picked up by bOING bOING after I submitted the link, where Cory is understandably upset ...

As inspiration for your blog-a-thon post , here's a collection of cool stuff related to Carl Sagan that's available online. A 1994 CSICOP keynote by Sagan on Point of Inquiry, together with a new interview with Ann Druyan. A transcript of the keynote's Q&A session was rediscovered and published in Skeptical Inquirer magazine in 2005. Ann Druyan also discusses Carl in an interview by Skeptic magazine's Michael Shermer. A NASA video of a 1972 panel on extraterrestrial life, also featuring Ashley Montagu. Carl Sagan on Charlie Rose in 1995 and 1996 . Carl Sagan on MySpace . The website and blog of Carl's son, science fiction writer Nick Sagan. The website of Don Davis , space artist who illustrated such Sagan works as Cosmos and The Dragons of Eden ; including his memories of Sagan .

Back in the days of VHS, one of the common items were cheap compilations of cartoons that had fallen into the public domain, and which could therefore be distributed by third party companies. (I still have a Daffy Duck videotape from 1989). Nowadays, thanks to the wonders of the Internet, it's possible to see the same cartoons online for free. Archive.org is the dean of public domain video sites, but ReFrederator is a new site that, incredibly enough, posts a new cartoon each weekday! The cartoons include everything from old-fashioned Popeye action and Warner Bros. mischief (with looney standbys like A Corny Concerto , Pigs in a Polka , and Wackiki Wabbit ) to the exploits of far more obscure characters like Flip the Frog, Molly Moo-Cow, and Willie Whopper (Ub Iwerks's studio is the most consistently entertaining of the lesser-known studios sampled). Stylistic experimentation abounds in cartoons like The Dover Boys, Chuck Jones's pioneering 1942 foray into stylized a...

Since its debut in the early days of the Web in 1997, Lawrence Knapp's Page of Fu Manchu has been the definitive Internet resource about Sax Rohmer's classic villain, charting Fu's influence, incarnations, and imitators. The site has just posted some screen captures I made of Fu Manchu's "cameo" in the Warner Bros. cartoon Have You Got Any Castles (1938) (thanks to ReFrederator for posting a nice print of the public domain cartoon online), as well as expanding its description of the appearance. Way back in 2001, I also contributed to the site's list of "clones" of Fu Manchu, the Fu-in-all-but-name in question being Iskandar from Jack Williamson's science fiction fantasy The Wizard of Life (1934).

Steve Baldwin's Ghost Sites project tracks the underbelly of the Internet, documenting dot-com busts, defunct websites, and "Forgotten Web Celebrities" , and collecting such ephemera as ancient banner ads . Many posts highlight outdated websites that give ample evidence of not being updated in an inordinately long time, whether they're sites whose "Last Updated" date is more than a decade ago , which explain that they are meant to be viewed with Netscape 2.0 (or even older versions of the then-predominant browser), or which are just plain old . In this vein, the site recently posted my "foresnic notes" about a Looney Tunes website, the Non-Stick Looney Page , which has been inactive for so long that the latest addition is a group of desktop themes for Windows 95/98, and still has web buttons from 1996.

Danny Mydlack's excellent documentary Voices from the New American Schoolhouse about Fairhaven School (which I was fortunate enough to see at its premiere at AERO 's conference last year) got a boost of publicity last week when award-winning science fiction writer and all-round cool guy Cory Doctorow featured it on his popular blog Boing Boing . Given that Boing Boing is #1 on Technorati's listing of the Net's most-linked-to blogs , this certainly showed it off to a lot of people who don't follow alternative education. Right from the title of the post, "Documentary on radical free school - inspiring", it's clear that Doctorow is going to emphasize rather than downplay the departure from the status quo of schooling, even using the term "free school" (which some avoid who consider it passe in an aging-hippie way). Moreover, he refers to his own history of attending a free school that was started during the heyday of the movement in the ...

My friend Daniel DeCastro, talented composer and fellow atheist, finally has a web presence. He has two MySpace pages: his personal page and, most importantly, his music page with samples of his music! I've been hoping that he'd do this for a long time; and the samples include a movement from of his amazing Symphony #1 in progress. He's also writing a string quartet and a set of preludes (one in each key, like those of Bach, Chopin, or Rachmaninov), so when I'm talking to him about his composition I almost feel like I don't know what century I'm in—but his music also draws from the distinctly 21st century inspiration of video games and anime. For another local composer's webpage, see that of Columbia University's Christopher Bailey , who among other things is the composer of dorkbot and artbots theme songs and has music online at his compositions and MP3s pages.