Joel's humanistic blog

Today is the 350th anniversary of the Flushing Remonstrance, an important document in the history of religious tolerance and a part of local Queens history (as the existence of a modern Queens neighborhood of the same name suggests). Here is a New York Times op-ed about the document.

(NOTE: I will be updating this list periodically throughout the day, as I find new posts.) Well, today's the day. On the eleventh anniversary of Carl Sagan's passing, fans from all over the world are posting about Sagan, and this post is the portal to them. I'll keep my remarks to a minimum, since I've said most of what needs to be said already in the announcement post and last year's original meta-post . So without further ado, the list of participating posts (organized alphabetically by URL): Look out, it’s evil!: "Carl Sagan (1934-1996), In Memoriam" Allyn Gibson: "On Carl Sagan" A New Anglican's Journey: "Carl Sagan, 1934-1996" Ann Druyan at The Observatory: "20 December 2007" Astroprof's Page: "Where is today’s Cosmos?" Noch ein Blog Atheism Central: "Second Annual Carl Sagan Blog-a-thon Meta-post" Author of Confusion: "Carl Sagan" Bad Astronomy: "Sagan blogathon" Lunar O...

Today's issue of the Newark Star-Ledger has a news story about various utopian communities that have been in the state of New Jersey, including the anarchist Stelton Ferrer colony, Upton Sinclair's Helicon Hall, and the single-tax colony Free Acres: "Utopia, N.J.: Trying to create a better world in the Garden State" by Vicki Hyman. (Hyman contacted me due to my post on Stelton .) The article is based on a new book of the same name which examines the above and several other utopias, Utopia, New Jersey: Travels in the Nearest Eden by Perdita Buchan, published by Rutgers University Press . The article touches on the range of leftist ideologies behind the colonies, and about what remains of them (Free Acres is the only one that still exists, with "a lush, wooded feel and cooperative air"; remnants of some of the others survive, for example here is some information about the buildings that still remain from Stelton). UPDATE: I found an online article by B...

I'm proud to announce that the science fiction short story "A Martian Odyssey" by Stanley G. Weinbaum (1934, following the version in the 1949 collection A Martian Odyssey and Others ) is now available at Project Gutenberg. It's revered as the first in a number of stories by Weinbaum that appeared in 1934-5 (followed by "Valley of Dreams", "Flight on Titan", "Parasite Planet", "The Lotus Eaters", and "The Mad Moon") that marked a milestone in the realistic depiction of alien creatures. He overcame the problem of making aliens seem like disguised humans, or being monstrous just to be scary; the aliens were meticulously logical (which was often extended to entire ecological systems), yet strange. (On the other hand, I find most of Weinbaum's non-alien stories to be decidedly lesser, and far more gimmicky and cheesy; aliens were as necessary for Weinbaum's fiction to shine as water was for Esther Williams.) G...

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!

Well, it's been a full week since I first announced that I would be repeating the Sagan blog-a-thon this year, and so far the word has been getting out pretty well. Last Wednesday, PZ Myers plugged the blog-a-thon in a Pharyngula post that led to a massive influx of visitors to this blog (according to Site Meter , there were 372 hits that day, compared to around 15 on a usual day). Also, kudos to toomanytribbles for being the first to spread the word, less than an hour after my announcement and before I had emailed anybody about it. On a somewhat related note, I haven't yet mentioned here my first Celebrating Sagan blog post , about a popular web video in which Sagan (and Contact 's Jodie Foster) appears.

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). ...

This has been covered before on this blog , but since Martian Child is finally opening in theaters, I want to point out that Equal Time for Freethought 's interview with author David Gerrold is available, including a discussion of the novel of the same name that formed the basis for the film (as well as Gerrold's real-life childraising experience that formed the source for both).

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...

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!

A favorite long-out-of-print classic of historical scholarship is now online as a free PDF eBook: A New History of Leviathan: Essays on the Rise of the American Corporate State , edited by Ronald Radosh and Murray Rothbard. This is a left libertarian favorite that's little known outside of that circle, but it's easy to see why it's so well remembered. Turning the mainstream view of the political spectrum inside out, the collection features a tag team from the radical Left and Right taking on the historical mythology of the corporate center. As the introduction by the two editors puts it, one editor, Rothbard, "is one of the intellectual leaders of the new 'right-wing libertarian movement' ... a firm believer in laissez-faire capitalism ... a free-market economist, a former contributor to National Review ... [who] favors removing the privileges of the large corporations and returning to laissez-faire"; the other, Radosh, "emerges from the ranks of ...

Today, the newspapers are carrying obits for two different prominent humanists. Here's the New York Times ones for Ellis and Wine . I never met Ellis, although he's appeared occasionally at humanist events in the NYC area; and I met Wine only once, when he gave the keynote at Humanlight 2003. (In fact, I sat next to him in the car when going back to NYC, so it's unnerving that he died in a car accident.)

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).

Over the last few months, I've been making some incremental minor changes and improvements to the blog. I'm not slapping a "2.0" label or anything like that, but I feel it's worth keeping track of; they should add up to a better site experience. This includes, in no particular order: Somewhat belatedly, switching over to the new version of Blogger Cleaning up the HTML coding on pictures (and adding a few new ones) Adding categories (a New Blogger feature) and extending the categories back to older posts Deleting spam comments Deleting some posts I was unsatisfied with A major reorganization and expansion of my sidebar (made much easier by New Blogger), making it a much more complete account of my stuff around the web Finally getting a traffic analyzer, via Site Meter , providing a lot more info about traffic than I had (which was basically none) And also ... I'm going to try to commit to a more regular posting schedule; I make no promises, but will try to ...