John Wilkins
evolvingthoughts
Posts by this author
November 27, 2008
The Greens (who I am considering joining, despite their unreasonable opposition to nuclear power) have said they will oppose the "clean feed" proposal in the Senate, so unless the Coalition decides it is a good idea after all, or put it to a conscience vote (because let's face it, a number of…
November 25, 2008
GetUp! is an excellent organisation that has been attacking the draconian laws of the "war" on terror, antigay laws, and so on. They now have a petition against ISP filtering. Go for it...
Hat tip Samuel Douglas
November 23, 2008
Sgt Pepper... oops, wrong oeuvre...
On the 24th of November 1859, a green bound book was published. It made something of an impact on the way we think...
Hat tip to Professor Olsen @ Large
November 23, 2008
At last the MSM seem to be picking it up. A Perth newsmagazine has reported it unfavourably (although are Xenophon and Fielding really waiting for the results, given they are major motivators of the idea?), and an online opinion site suggests that the ultimate source of this stupidity is Clive…
November 23, 2008
I am a fan of science fiction as far back as I can recall. The flights of imagination about large things, ideas and worlds, was enough to trigger off my own imagination. I read pretty well everything I could for over two decades before it all petered out into second rate thick books of fantasy and…
November 22, 2008
Siris has a nice short post on the use of "truth" in discourse:
This appeal to truth is incantatory: it is not an argument but a rhetorical ploy that usually involves a false dichotomy. By ritually displaying one's 'interest in the truth' in contrast with someone else's interest in something…
November 21, 2008
Phil Plait linked to this guy, Louis CK, on why it's alright for the world to go back into the dark ages, but I rather like this one, in which it becomes clear that philosophers are, after all, just persistent two year olds:
November 20, 2008
Frederick Toben is an awful man, who denies the plain fact that the Nazis killed six million Jews and between nine and eleven million Jews, Slavs, Romany, homosexuals, Soviets (civilians and POWs), Poles, disabled, and so on.
But what he thinks is not a crime, either in Australia, where he lives…
November 20, 2008
I'm introducing a new category - the Trashcan. This is a term used in systematics to identify a group that comprises "everything else" once you have done the identification of the real groups of some taxonomic grouping.
I will be using the Trashcan to group together all and only those links that…
November 20, 2008
... has it still happened? Anyway, the BBC, bless 'em, has had philosopher David Bain pose four philosophical questions to mark the epistemologically problematic day:
1. Should we kill healthy people for their organs?2. Are you the same person who started reading this article?3. Is that really a…
November 20, 2008
The body of the man who started off the modern scientific revolution in the 16th century, Nicholas Copernicus, has been found and his face reconstructed.
November 19, 2008
From here via here via here, 99 things I have or haven't done.
1. Started your own blog2. Slept under the stars3. Played in a band4. Visited Hawaii5. Watched a meteor shower6. Given more than you can afford to charity7. Been to Disneyland/world8. Climbed a mountain9. Held a praying mantis10.…
November 18, 2008
Unless the Australian government adds it to the blacklist.
November 16, 2008
We had a little storm here yesterday. It left my brother's flat wet inside and out, destroying their mattresses, and giving my motorcycle a jet blast clean. It's clean for the first time since I bought it four years ago. I was, not to put too fine a point on it, very scared. Two minutes before I…
November 15, 2008
This one started at Nature Networks, where I am not a blogger, but as Larry and Bora have answered it, among others, I figured I'd have a go too...
1. What is your blog about?Basically the philosophical implications of science, although that extends into the distance a bit when I get angry about…
November 14, 2008
As I have argued before, there is a class of objects in the biological domain that do not derive from the theory of that domain, but which are in fact the special objects of the domain that call for a theoretical explanation. The example I have given is mountain, which is a phenomenal object of…
November 12, 2008
So wrote the renaissance humanist, Erasmus of Rotterdam: Man is to man either a god or a wolf. Here, courtesy of Leiter, is an article in The Telegraph, in which philosopher Mark Rowlands describes his life with a wolf, and how he ended up learning, as he puts it, how to be a human from the wolf…
November 11, 2008
The Greens have sought explanations from Minister Against Broadband Stephen Conroy in the Senate. In particular Green senator Scott Ludlam asked Conroy to take back his claim that what the ALP wants is like what is done in Britain, Sweden, Canada and New Zealand; in these cases the filtering is…
November 11, 2008
Right now on the Australian ABC network they are reshowing a program that was first shown in April this year on Professor Sir Gustav Nossal AO [and a three line slew of fruit salad of awards, qualifications, and honours]. The transcript is here, but it doesn't do justice to the man himself. Gus,…
November 11, 2008
There have been several attempts to produce an ontology of biology and the life sciences in general. One of the more outstanding was Joseph Woodger's 1937 The Axiomatic Method in Biology, which was based on Russell's and Whitehead's Principia and the theory of types. In this, Woodger attempted to…
November 10, 2008
Here, by the incredibly young, handsome and way too successful Carl Zimmer, late of the Seed stable. Carl brings to mind my favourite Truman Capote saying:
It is not enough to succeed. Friends must be seen to have failed.
Anyway, go read the bastard's excellent essay. I will just sit here in…
November 10, 2008
The internet filtering debacle raises some more general issues I have with my nation's governments' tendency to censor ideas it doesn't like. Sure, there's the "Won't somebody think of the children" justification, which is a Good Intention (suitable for paving roads), but surely the best bet is to…
November 9, 2008
Read this article by Mark Newton. This gets murkier and sillier by the day.
Late addition: From the comments at the linked site:
As a young person ( 22 ) who has been brought up on the internet and as a ALP member myself working for a Labor State Govt. I have told my boss the state MP that I will…
November 9, 2008
I was very pleased to receive today my copy of this book:
A Companion to the Philosophy of History and Historiography, edited by A. Tucker. Chichester UK: Wiley-Blackwell.
I got it because on pp 405-415 is my essay "Darwin", which I am rather proud of. I have long thought that Darwin as a…
November 9, 2008
...the albino silverback blinks once or twice, says knowingly "Yes, yes", and sends those who do understand math to these two posts at The n-Category Café: "Entropy, Diversity and Cardinality" post 1, post 2. If I read it aright, it means that diversity is measured as the entropy of some metric…
November 8, 2008
It has become common in recent years for people to use terms of philosophy in distinct contexts, as it has terms of biology. Thus, ontology has gone the way of taxonomy, being dragooned into service of database techniques, to mean something quite the opposite of what it originally meant. I have…