I am indebted to Doug Bandler, who recently mentioned the wonderful and stimulating book, Aping Mankind, by Raymond Tallis.

I suppose this has become a bit of a theme for me lately.

Lawrence Krauss, another of the "new atheists" I wrote about the other day, experienced an example of the sort of sexual apartheid that deluded Westerners are prepared to go along with so as not to offend those of certain views:

One of the "new Atheists", Victor Stenger, who is a retired research physicist and now full-time writer, is someone whom I follow quite a bit and I have read several of his books.

Note: putting in links to all these guys is time-consuming but you can Google all of the stuff here fairly easily.

"In his Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant argued that experience was not the only source of knowledge, that in addition our minds have certain built-in a priori concepts. One of his major examples was our intuition that space is described by Euclidean geometry. Of course, we now know that other geometries exist and that Einstein used non-Euclidean geometry to describe space in his general theory of relativity. So much for what Kant called the synthetic a priori."

As the article says, this is a man whose jazz achievements transcended his own field and became one of the most famous of them all. A consummate musician who worked almost to the very end.

Nicholas Dykes, a fan of Rand (not an uncritical one, though) wrote a great essay for the UK Libertarian Alliance several years ago about the late Sir Karl Popper.

In a joust with Richard Goode , I wrote a longish comment that I thought I would repeat here.

I received this message via a good pal of mine, Alex Singleton. I am spreading this around for those who are interested:

Although there is a bit of silly snark at the end via J Tucille, here is a pretty fair and good item on the "Ayn Rand phenomenon" at the British Broadcasting Corporation's website.

US legal scholar, activist and Rand fan Tim Sandefur has an excellent essay on why he thinks Objectivists, given Rand's views on art and aesthetics, should pay more attention to the art of poetry.

I occasionally look at some of the atheist/skeptic sites out there, as they can contain some good material (such as debunking of nonsense such as Creationism).

During one of the recent jousts on this site, the issue of Ayn Rand's views about Native American peoples came up as a point against her.

I am probably behind a good deal of SOLO regulars here, but I have finally got around to watching the film Agora, starring Rachel Weisz.

Here is a link to the latest on the Egyptian elections: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05...

I came across this item (via Ray Kurzweil's futurism site) about a large construction that is floating off the west coast of the US that will be a form of "seastead" for computer and other entrepreneu

I was going to write this in response to Stephan Kinsella regarding his statement that Rand got it wrong on anarchy (as he says she also got IP wrong).

Oh boy, that IP posting of mine has really got the barn burning. So we might as well continue.

As I expected, the issue of intellectual property rights gets objectivists, and others in the the broad free market/classical liberal school really fired up.

I am reading "Watermelons", a book by James Delingpole about the Green movement and the scandal of the AGW alarmists who, at institutions such as the University of East Anglia in the UK, have allegedl

One of the arguments that they sometimes bring up is that the universe is structured in such a way that if a single relationship were slightly different, life could not exist.

In an interesting swerve on the idea of an individual attracting resentment for his/her achievements and manner of their achievements, we have the phenomenon of a whole team of individuals - in this c

Well, rather than look to the religious world for reasons for optimism, let us consider the ingenuity, courage and tenacity of our fellow bipeds as a cause for celebration:

I came across this cool (literally) idea over at the technology, futurist and current affairs site Wired. It is a welcome reminder of how amazingly fecund our business world is.

Legal activist, scholar and Rand fan Timothy Sandefur has an interesting response here (http://sandefur.typepad.com/fr...) to an article by

I think Howard Roark would have approved: Check out this website:

http://the-shard.com/

Boy, I love the internet. In thinking about a recent posting I put up here debunking some false charges against Rand about her views on human nature and so on, I found this comment.

On BBC Television this morning, I noticed, as I was getting ready to go to work, there was a short item on about the problem with many young teenagers - some very young indeed - getting caught up in the world of violent gangs.

Updated to add some new content, links: