Joel's humanistic blog

I don't dance like Cyd Charisse. But women identify with me. And while men desire Cyd Charisse, they'd take me home to meet Mom. — June Allyson As the Legs fansite reminds us, today is the birthday of Cyd Charisse, who danced in some of the greatest classic musicals like Singin' in the Rain , The Band Wagon , and Silk Stockings . Last month, the site had a form to send birthday messages, which would then be printed out and mailed to Cyd herself; the site now has the update: "Thank you to all those who sent birthday wishes to Cyd throughout the month of February! The letter has been sent. If I get a reply, I will post it here."

Today is the first anniversary of the passing of the historian of anarchism Paul Avrich. He wrote numerous books about the history of anarchism in Russia and the United States, and combined careful scholarship with a personal emphasis on the people involved. I met Avrich twice: at Bluestockings in summer 2003, and at the 2004 Modern School Reunion. In the former, he did a presentation about anarchist women, to match the bookstore's feminist theme -- but to make it more specific, he narrowed it down to those he had personally known , which turned out to be quite a lot! Also, I had on me a handwritten list of books about alternative education that were mentioned in Ron Miller's Free Schools, Free People , when I realized that Avrich's modern school book was included on the list! Both organizations paid tribute to Avrich in 2006 (the former memorial including Stanley Aronowitz as speaker).

Today's New York Times Science section has a front-page article on Carl Sagan and the Varieties of Scientific Experience book. It alludes to the recent tenth anniversary of Sagan's passing and covers a wide ground of Saganania (much of which will probably be familiar to Sagan fans); Ann Druyan is quoted.

When and to what degree should we citizens be allowed to protect ourselves against the crooked and incompetent, to decide what we will buy or use, or who we will work with, and when should we be protected whether we ask to be or not, and if so how, and by whom? Beyond that, is our present system of giving licenses through S-chools a good way, or the best way, or the only way of doing this? I think it is none of these. Too often the protectors don't protect, but turn themselves into a new conspiracy to exploit and defraud the public. We could probably protect ourselves quite well against many (but not all) dangers, if we were not early in life made into expert-worshippers, and if we could easily find out the truth about the dangers. Thus, the conservative economist Milton Friedman has said that even medical doctors should not be licensed. If someone thinks he can heal others, let him say so, and get what clients he can. But require him to make open to everyone both his method...

This weekend, the New York Times book review had a couple of letters in response to a previous review of John Scalzi's novels which commented on one of science fiction's most perennially controversial novels, Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein. One of them is by John J. Pierce, who points out the long history of contention over the book and how Heinlein liked Joe Haldeman's The Forever War despite the latter being a direct critique of his book. It's an example of how irreverent and open debate is encouraged in the genre; as Gregory Benford put it, while in "serious fiction ... proceeds from canonical classics that supposedly stand outside of time, deserving awe, great and intact by themselves", science fiction books constitute "immense discussions, with ideas developed, traded varied; players ring changes on each other — a steppin'-out jazz band, not a solo concert in a plush auditorium." Pierce is recognized among science fiction fandom...

Today is the tenth anniversary of Carl Sagan's passing, and as I promised in my original announcement , here is my promised meta-post for the Carl Sagan Memorial Blog-a-Thon with a gigantic list of participating blog posts. I've been overwhelmed by the sheer volume of responses, so it's still incomplete. While I will be updating this list repeatedly, if I've missed your post, you can email or post a comment. Also, note that it's fine to post after the 20th. Sagan's wife and collaborator Ann Druyan has started off her new blog today with the post Ten Times Around The Sun Without Carl , while his son Nick Sagan has posted his memories of his dad and his official blog-a-thon welcome following his posts here , here , here , and here . And Louis Friedman, who along with Sagan was one of the founders of the Planetary Society, has posted his memories of Sagan at the Planetary Society Blog . The new website Celebrating Sagan has gathered a staggering amount of ...

Recently, I found out that some choice Stephen Jay Gould essays from The New York Review of Books are free online at the magazine's website (hat tip to 2xSlick on the agony booth forum ). One is the first Gould essay I ever read, "Dinomania" (1993, also in the then-new collection Dinosaur in a Haystack ), where he deals with the Jurassic Park phenomenon, and in particular takes the movie version to task dumbing down some of the themes of the book. Another is "The Streak of Streaks" (1988, also in the collection Bully for Brontosaurus ) about Joe DiMaggio's hitting record, with Gould's memorable account of his personal encounter with his sports hero when his father caught a ball from DiMaggio. So, to complement the many bloggers who are posting anecdotes and memories of Sagan for the Sagan blog-a-thon , I'll describe my own memories of meeting with Sagan's friend and fellow science writer Gould, who also died far too young (Sagan would be ...

I realized I should complement this list with one of notable current Sagan stuff that isn't online. The big news is the new book The Varieties of Scientific Experience , based on rediscovered transcripts of Sagan's 1985 Gifford Lectures edited by Ann Druyan. Look for Sagan stuff in the latest issues of The Planetary Report and Skeptical Inquirer . On the 20th, there will be a memorial dinner in Dallas, Texas.

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 .

Next month, December 20, 2006 will mark the tenth anniversary Carl Sagan's passing. In his honor, I am organizing a special memorial "blog-a-thon" among Sagan's fans throughout the blogosphere. If you're a Sagan fan with a blog, you can participate by posting something related to him on or near that date. Read or reread a Sagan book and review it; discuss cool things that you've done that's been influenced by him; pontificate on one of the many topics he treated (SETI, astronomy, critical thinking, the history of science, human intelligence....), or post about something completely surprising. Contact me by email or by leaving a comment, and then when the date approaches, I will create a meta-post that links to all the stuff people are doing, providing a network of the participating bloggers. A list of Sagan stuff online that may be a source of ideas. Carl's son Nick Sagan on the blog-a-thon . Publicity for the blog-a-thon includes Cornell Univer...

Two weeks ago, one of the great classic writers of science fiction passed away: Jack Williamson. His famously long career spanned from the Gernsbackian beginnings of the modern genre in 1928 to a final novel, The Stonehenge Gate , published in 2005, and was already a nonagenarian when I started reading him in the late 1990s. I've enjoyed a great deal of his science fiction, which is always marked by a sense of adventure and imagination. The early The Green Girl sends its heroes beneath the sea in a Verne-inspired "omnimobile". The Legion of Space and its sequel The Cometeers were some of the most entertaining of the early "space operas". The dystopian "With Folded Hands" and the subsequent The Humanoids contain a famous treatment of robots which was influential on both the field and actual AI researchers like Marvin Minsky. Hal Clement thought that The Legion of Time was "the best time travel story ever written"; not only was its tre...

Today is the 97th anniversary of the death of Francisco Ferrer, an anarchist and freethought educational pioneer whose persecution by both church and state and execution on trumped-up charges led to outrage and an international movement to emulate his ideas. Ferrer and other European educators wanted a "modern" approach to education based on freedom and reason, in place of the traditional one based on coercion, rote and indoctrination. Emma Goldman, who visited Sebastien Faure's French modern school La Ruche, conveys the atmosphere of the school in her description from her autobiography : He [Faure] had taken twenty-four orphan children and those of parents too poor to pay and was housing, feeding, and clothing them at his own expense. He had created an atmosphere at La Ruche that released the life of the child from discipline and coercion of any sort. He had discarded the old methods of education and in their place he established understanding for the needs of the child...

My second transcript for Equal Time for Freethought is now online: from last year's Hanukkah season, Barry Seidman 's holiday interview with Douglas Rushkoff . The interview started off with a subversive look at the historical origins of Hanukkah, based on Rushkoff's treatment of the subject in his book Nothing Sacred: The Truth about Judaism . The role of circumcision led to a discussion of the modern Jewish take on the practice. The holiday also led to the issues of assimilation in general, and of Passover as another holiday which Rushkoff had an alternative take on. The touchy topic of what a humanistic secular Jew should think about the Israel situation was dealt with. Even technical difficulties were an opportunity for discussion: when noise interfered with the reception as he was discussing Passover being a de-idolization of the Egyptian gods, he said "I hear strange and exciting sounds" and "It's those gods coming back at me now". After...

Last month, dorkbot-nyc got off on a roll with its first meeting after the summer hiatus. Bret Doar showed his hybrid roboticized musical instruments including the Huffyphonic Gyrobanshee 1000 , a combination of a bicycle wheel and a guitar. Jon Lippincott demonstrated Vis Virtual Universe , which displays and navigates through a surreal 3D animated solar system, which he wrote from the ground up in C++ (which fit in with my blenderheaded fascination with all things related to 3D computer graphics). David Kareve explained his exhibit which uses freaked-out crash test dummies to explore the culture of fear reinforced by the terror alert system; I was tickled to see that his presentation of the various spoofs of the terror alert system included the Sesame Street one that I've had on my blog sidebar almost since the beginning of the blog (which I got from freeman, libertarian critter ): The next day's installment of the popular video blog Rocketboom did a segment covering t...

My transcript of Barry Seidman's Equal Time for Freethought interview with Harold Barclay, author of People Without Government: An Anthropology of Anarchy , is now online .

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...

If you talk about the scientists who have said, "Well, we're very aggressive and we can't escape it because that's our nature", they have almost always been only looking at the male side of the human equation. — Judith Hand In late July and throughout the month of August, Equal Time for Freethought ran an extensive and detailed four-part analysis of the origins of violence and the prospects for peace, as informed by the issues of gender, human nature, and hierarchy. On July 30, August 6 and August 13, an epic three-part, 90-minute show aired with host Barry Seidman interviewing Judith Hand and Douglas Fry , respective authors of the intriguing books Women, Power, and the Biology of Peace and The Human Potential for Peace: An Anthropological Challenge to Assumptions about War and Violence . Both of these authors brought to light much interesting information about the interconnection between patriarchy and violence, and pointed to, well "the human potential...

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).

A passage which deserves to be better known, from Oscar Wilde's famous essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism : Shallow speakers and shallow thinkers in pulpits and on platforms often talk about the world's worship of pleasure, and whine against it. But it is rarely in the world's history that its ideal has been one of joy and beauty. The worship of pain has far more often dominated the world. Mediaevalism, with its saints and martyrs, its love of self-torture, its wild passion for wounding itself, its gashing with knives, and its whipping with rods – Mediaevalism is real Christianity, and the mediaeval Christ is the real Christ. When the Renaissance dawned upon the world, and brought with it the new ideals of the beauty of life and the joy of living, men could not understand Christ. Even Art shows us that. The painters of the Renaissance drew Christ as a little boy playing with another boy in a palace or a garden, or lying back in His mother's arms, smiling at her, ...

Following Paul Avrich in February, another major figure in the anarchist movement, Murray Bookchin, passed away last month. Reason 's Jesse Walker has posted an RIP, which also discusses the interactions between Bookchin and libertarianism. Like many individuals on the left and right (Ronald Radosh comes to mind), Bookchin was willing for a period to ally with libertarians, which he later downplayed when he became more dismissive of libertarianism. To illustrate this, Walker has an amusing side-by-side analysis of Bookchin with libertarianism's Murray Rothbard, with whom he at one point collaborated on something called the Left-Right Anarchist Supper Club, but he later dismissed him as an advocate of "naked greed" with "repulsive" ideas. I wasn't particularly familiar with Bookchin's stuff or his "social ecology" philosophy of eco-anarchism, but I've read a few bits. His famous New Left rant "Listen, Marxist!" was a cri...