Priority By Budget
In early March, President Trump released his budget proposal for the 2020 fiscal year, a proposal that would set federal research spending at $151 billion, or roughly 3% of total federal spending,...
View ArticleSo You Want to Be A College Professor?
Once upon a time, being a college professor was thought to be an existence of intellectual pursuits and the imparting of knowledge to students who truly wanted to learn. Like all fairy tales, or...
View ArticleNot Listening, Not Being Taught… or Not Caring?
The 1960s, and especially 1968, were a tumultuous time in U.S. culture and history. In the middle of the Vietnam War, there were continual protests and flag burning and draft card burnings across the...
View ArticleIf This Keeps Up…
Trump will win re-election. What do I mean by “this”? It’s not any one thing, but a combination of factors. First, Trump is solidifying his base into an immovable monolith. Admittedly, that “monolith”...
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I’ve finally finished the last editorial revisions on another Recluce novel — Fairhaven Rising — and my editor will be putting it into the production process shortly. Since I’m not much for spoilers,...
View ArticleGuarantee?
As I mentioned in an earlier post, the local university is transitioning to a trimester system so that students can theoretically obtain their bachelor’s degree in three years. This is a bit of a...
View ArticleKnowing… and Knowing
There are many ways to classify knowledge, but, in the end, what each of us knows is based on one of two methods… and sometimes a combination of both. The first way of knowing is through observation,...
View ArticleThe Muzzling of Science
The latest edition of Scientific American printed a table from the Silencing Science Tracker, created and maintained by the Columbia University Law School, which listed almost 200 actions by the...
View ArticleMonopoly, Monopsony, and Shortsightedness
Some readers may recall that in 2012, the U.S. Department of Justice sued the major U.S. publishers because, as a group, they refused to discount ebooks to Amazon, and that practice was considered a...
View ArticleEthics, Greed, and Corruption
There is often a significant difference between an ethical action and a legal action. Under current U.S. law, it’s obviously not illegal to raise the price of a drug that a child needs to stay alive...
View ArticleTrump… and Ducks and Smoke
There’s an old saying along the lines of “if it quacks like a duck, waddles like a duck, and swims like a duck, it’s probably a duck.” There’s also the one about “where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”...
View ArticleFictional Heroes and Heroines
The other day, I came across a reader comment that suggested that I’d bowed to the “PC censors” and made the protagonist of a recent book into a “beta male,” because he actually listened to women,...
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For quite a number of reasons, I haven’t been doing as much pleasure reading in the last few months, but I finally got around to Valiant Dust, by Richard Baker, the first book in a trilogy, and I found...
View ArticleThe Non-Intuitive Nature of the “Intuitive”
I’m not a computer designer, coder, or programmer, but I have been using computer applications for more than thirty-five years, and I continue to be amazed at how many applications whose use is said to...
View ArticleThe Mage-Fire War
Tor.com has just published the first three chapters of The Mage-Fire War, the third book about Beltur, Jessyla, Lhadoraak, Tulya… and Taelya. Here’s the...
View ArticlePeople Met Almost in Passing
Barbara Howes and Anne McCaffrey had very little in common, except both were writers, one a quiet but excellent poet and the other a commanding, dominating force in the development and history of...
View ArticlePeople and Belief
Contrary to popular opinion, we do not live in a totally free society. Behavior in our society is in fact restricted by laws, laws theoretically made up by the people for the people, laws designed by...
View ArticleGutless Wonders
This past weekend I listened to two career politicians waffle and essentially refuse to answer questions about Trump and his administration. Both were Republicans, and it was clear that they didn’t...
View ArticleIdealism/Principles as Policy
Every thinking person should have ideals, but ideals need to be tempered with practicality. There’s a saying that’s been attributed variously to George Bernard Shaw, Benjamin Disraeli, Otto von...
View Article“Impractical?”
Once, many long years ago, I was the legislative assistant for a U.S. Congressman. Like many young and idealistic professionals, I wanted to make the United States a better place [and I still do]. I...
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