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Our most likely future is somewhere between Brave New World and 1984.  It is clean and bright, rather than the post-industrial recycling center of cyberpunk, because an unofficial and unelected power center simply surpassed and usurped the inefficient nation states.  They know what is best.  Memory implants and omnipresent cybernetic personalities ... (See the whole review)

Zoltan Istvan’s new novel The Transhumanist Wager has been compared to Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. (See, for instance, Giulio Prisco’s review.) But to what extent are the books alike, and in what respects? To be sure, the story and the writing style are gripping, the characters are vivid, and the universe created by Istvan gave me an experience high... (See the whole review)

I have not read it yet and may post a review or comments after reading it.

Game theory explorations with 15 "primitive" societies reveals what makes us WEIRD people special. What is it to be "Western Educated Industrialized Rational Democratic"?   The Foundations of Human Sociality: Economic Experiments and Ethnographic Evidence from Fifteen Small-Scale Societies edited by Joseph Henrich, Robert Boyd, et al... (See the whole review)

My recap from reading up to page 68: Some good work and some good thought in here, but ... Tuschman shows himself to be part of that new brand of social scientists who are too fascinated with evolutionary and biological psychology to realize that they are in the grips of it (while they presume to be commenting objecti... (See the whole review)

Bernstein places the origin of capitalism in the mathematics of chance.  For Ayn Rand, capitalism began with the recognition of individual rights in the Enlightenment.  That identification of those rights rested on a largely implicit realization of the individual as such, which began in the Renaissance.  We ascribe the idea of the Re... (See the whole review)

Coming next month: ... (See the whole review)

Death is Wrong is my new children’s book on indefinite life extension, illustrated by my wife Wendy Stolyarov. It combines child-friendly philosophical arguments for radically lengthening human lifespans with scientific facts about long-lived creatures, recent breakthroughs in extending animal lifespans, and the SENS research program for reve... (See the whole review)

Plans to start new communities, and even entire new nations, are iconic to the libertarians who were impassioned by Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged.  Rand's "Utopia of Greed", hidden in the Colorado Rockies, only echoed a long tradition in American history, beginning with America itself.  The City on a Hill, the City of God, drew the leaders of a million... (See the whole review)

It is a book about political philosophy published in 2012. I put a review of it on Amazon. It is among the 4-star ones with a date of June 3, 2015. (See the whole review)

A defense of Ayn Rand's ethics. My review is here. (See the whole review)

Toward the end of her deployment, she discovered Atlas Shrugged, and it resonated with her. Focused and detailed, she often ran into brazen incompetence. ... (See the whole review)

Edited by Ellen F. Paul, Fred Miller Jr., Jeffrey Paul. One can read most of the Introduction, which gives an overview, using Amazon's "Look Inside" feature. So I made my review a short one. (See the whole review)

Here is my review of Paul Johnson's Creators ... (See the whole review)

I haven't read this, but the review makes it look interesting. I'm probably not the only one who thought that atheism emerged at the time of the Enlightenment. ... (See the whole review)

My review of this book is here. If you find it helpful, please click 'yes'. (See the whole review)

For decades, Dr. Randell Mills has flummoxed both supporters and detractors with his dogged determination not only to prove the existence of a new state of hydrogen, the hydrino, but also to harness its power for the betterment of the human condition. I have followed the hydrino story since initially encountering it in a Mensa Bulletin letter in th... (See the whole review)

This is a thoughtful, thought-provoking set of aphorisms and reflections.  As much as I enjoyed it – and believe that I benefited from reading it three times – I have to ask if the author would have written it had Hillary Clinton been elected president. ... (See the whole review)

“Again, I am not arguing that reason alone will get us there; we need legislation and laws to enforce civil rights, and a strong police and military to back up the state’s claim to hold a monopoly on the legitimate use of force to back up those laws. But those forces are themselves premised on being grounded in reason, and the legislati... (See the whole review)

Intended for children, The Story of Science: Aristotle Leads the Way by Joy Hakim as many small problems throughout but remains valuable for its sense of life. The author encourages understanding, exploration, discovery, and the integration of knowledge. You can find it remaindered online at prices low enough to gift an entire class of 5th graders,... (See the whole review)

How the Martians Discovered Algebra: Explorations in Induction and the Philosophy of Mathematics by Roger E. Bissell delivers an algorithm for generating Pythagorean Triples. Central to the thesis of the work, Bissell explains how he discovered this by means of induction, not deduction. From there, Bissell takes the reader into number theory in ord... (See the whole review)

Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter by Scott Adams (Penguin, 2017) is a tribute to Donald Trump. It is also a tribute to Scott Adams. The author of Dilbert has been popular online for decades; and he had tens of thousands of readers when, back on August 13, 2015, he began predicting Donald Trump’s victory. Througho... (See the whole review)

If one person can change the world, four might do 16 times as much.The Philosophical Breakfast Club: Four Remarkable Friends Who Transformed Science and Changed the World by Laura J. Snyder (Broadway, 2011) is the story of Charles Babbage, William Herschel, William Whewell, and Richard Jones. They met at Cambridge about 1810. By 1860, through their... (See the whole review)

Confiscation: Gold as Contraband 1933-1974 by Kenneth R. Ferguson was a pleasure to read. Ferguson writes well. I met Ken Ferguson in person at a coin show here in Austin. He speaks as intelligently as he writes. Our time together was enlightening. ... (See the whole review)

I Am I - Sudden Flashes of Self-Awareness in Childhood ... (See the whole review)