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Your strike responsibility can be to feel self righteous: if you could be striking, you would be. If there is a picket line, you can carry a sign and shout slogans. Or sing The Internationale.

If you desecrate a cracker, someone will surely start that Wiki page for you. It could be me, but then I'd have to learn how to do footnotes.

My singing could set back academic rights a whole century.

I never figured out Wikipedia's footnotes either.

Your talk gets off to a promising start, but for technical reasons I'm struggling to listen to it. I only get audio, no video, and also not appearing is any sort of pause button that I could use to let the buffering get ahead a bit.

I could download the whole thing, but that is one enormous file.

Was that a stunt double or do you write much older than you appear in person (on video)?

Oh, you can stay...

Three cheers for the Irish Times! (They for many years carried Brian O'Nolan/Flann O'Brien/Myles na gCopaleen's column "Cruiskin Lawn," judged by James Thurber "the funniest newspaper humor column in the world": O'Nolan tried to emulate Shaw by writing his novel "The Hard Life" in such a way as to tempt the authorities to seize it under the Irish censorship laws of the time, but someone tipped the police off and they let it go.

Blasphemy laws are a [redacted] idea!

---

As for the strike... whenever the local at the University of Melbourne calls a strike, the admin sends around an e-mail asking those academic staff who are going to go on strike to please inform them, so they know whose pay to dock.

I thought the strike was Tuesday past? And it Didnt happen.. Come to manning, have a few beers and let people pick your brain

I would like to say something clever and original but as usual Douglas Adams got there first:

[...]

Majikthise: "We, are Philosophers."

Vroomfondel : "Though we may not be."

Majikthise: "Yes we are."

Vroomfondel: "We are quite definitely here as representatives of the Amalgamated Union of Philosophers, Sages, Luminaries and Other Thinking Persons, and we want this machine off, and we want it off now!"

[...]

Vroomfondel: "We'll go on strike!"

Majikthise: "That's right! You'll have a national Philosopher's strike on your hands!"

Deep Thought: "Who will that inconvenience?"

You should engage in anti-thinking, not non-thinking. For eight hours you should peddle creationist clap trap, such as that found at Answers in Genesis or Ray Comfort's Blog. You should also periodically yell "Banana" or "Intelligent Design is science" at the top of your lungs.

My brain wouldn't recover from that. Maybe when I was in my twenties, but that would be the death of whatever rational thinking I still have. Instead I'll think about things I'm not paid to think about, like international politics or art.

Two observations about Ireland's reviving their blasphemy laws. First, don't they know that blasphemy is a victimless crime? And second, from reading your story, I learned the Irish word for "idiot",which certainly applies to the politicians who are reviving said blasphemy laws!

So many bad puns, so little time

evolvingthoughts — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 08:34:38 +0000

So many bad puns, so little time

Wilkins is fragile and destablised

Intellectual tourist attacks local inhabitants

All happy bacteria are alike (or is that like each other?)

Australian current affairs gets vaccination right! [That's not a pun, it's an act of God] The original video is here.

Evolution does spreadsheets in origin of genetic code

Siris and Sandwalk go head to head on the Courtier's Reply. Neither of them are dressed.

Creationists misunderstand Deep Time. I'm shocked. I mean, it's only ten years since they were taken to task for it. Perhaps if they had millions of years to think it over...

evolvingthoughts Tue, 04/28/2009 - 04:34

Tags

religion

science communication

"Wilkins is fragile and destablised"

Having a bad day, John?

"Wilkins is fragile and destablised"

Having a bad day, John?

"Wilkins is fragile and destabilised".

Not only that, he's calving!

I fear I am a coward, I couldn't bear to watch the vaccine vid. Reading the ignorant comments from the anti-vax trolls on Plait's blog was torture enough.

Bits

evolvingthoughts — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 20:54:08 +0000

Bits

Pope rewrites medical science to suit Catholic dogma. Film at 11.

Australian government censorship website hacked. I'm not laughing, really.

evolvingthoughts Fri, 03/27/2009 - 16:54

Tags

"killed with a large melons" Haha, they asked for that one..

Some linkage

evolvingthoughts — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 23:24:09 +0000

Some linkage

Some links and issues I have come across lately.

Those who read this and my other blog know that I am deeply opposed to internet censorship. Recently, Wikileaks put up a leaked list supposed to be the list being used in Australian trials of what will be a mandatory blacklist of URLs. First the minister said it wasn't the list, then he said it had some similarities, and now he says it's substantially the right list but there have been edits, but that's not my point. Now, in Germany, a Wikileaks host has been raided at the behest of a German minister. It's even possible that the Australian minister for Controlling Adults, Stephen Conroy, instigated this. All my fears are coming to pass. I live now in Orwell's vision.

Nick Davies at The Guardian reports that a survey of news stories by some researchers in Cardiff found that fact checking in newspaper items occurred in, wait for it, only 20%of stories at best (they found evidence of fact checking in 12%, and another 8% were possibly checked). This means that 80% of what you read in the papers is made up by reporters in some manner or another. I wonder why the media are dying?

Doctoral student Tim Dean, at UNSW (the sister university to mine) has a blog entry up at Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies blog. I disagree with him on some aspects, but it's an interesting read.

evolvingthoughts Wed, 03/25/2009 - 19:24

Tags

Now take your figures for journalist veracity, and consider the sort of people and policies journalists tend to favor.

To put it another way, when a reporter supports a proposal 80% of the time it's a good idea to oppose it. :)

For a long time, I was involved in sending press releases about science and technology for the institute I worked for. In one case out of three years, they got it right, mostly. How? They printed the press release verbatim, with a top and tail paragraph, under the journalist's byline. I didn't mind, but the new pars were wrong..

The media started to take themselves too seriously after the rise of gonzo journalism. It wasn't great before that, but it went rapidly downhill afterwards. The medium is not the message.

A melange

evolvingthoughts — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 10:54:58 +0000

A melange

Chris Nedin at Ediacaran has a nice discussion of the metaphor of the adaptive landscape, "Climbing Pit Improbable". It should be noted that the genetic notion of adaptive peaks is exactly the same thing as the AI notion of gradient descent learning., which inverts the "landscape" the way Chris describes.

The philosopher responsible for initiating the "deep ecology" movement, Arne Naess, has died at the age of 96. Maybe there is something to this exercise thing.

John Whitfield, at Blogging the Origin, is, well, blogging his way through the Origin. Chapter 1 is here. Comments by various folk make it more interesting (OK, I'm commenting there, alright?)

Thomas Levenson at The Inverse Square Blog (what a name! I wish I'd thought of that one!) has a birthday greeting for Wallace. I'm a little late on that one, but I was travelling.

Chief atheist puppygrinder, Brent Rasmussen, takes spiritualists to task for redefining "God" to mean anything at all. I disagree with him - when science and religion conflict, then religion had better redefine God to mean something that is still possible. I think it's a (limited) virtue of religion that it can adapt.

On another religious criticism, Ebach and Williams attack taxonomists who don't get that paraphyly is artificial and anti-evolutionary.

And finally on religion, here's an article about Dulles (the cardinal, not the politician) arguing that we need religion to explain teleology in biology. Did nobody noticve that this has been eliminated already?

evolvingthoughts Wed, 01/14/2009 - 05:54

Tags

religion

"...religion to explain teleology..." !!

Hmmm. Maybe we should restitute the Phlogiston theory of heat, (and the Frigoric theory of cold), the Theory of Spontaneous Generation, and (of course) the flat earth.

I'm sure that there are plenty of other bad concepts out there to mock.

arguing that we need religion to explain teleology in biology.

Or vice versa. See Conway Morris, passim.

I had trouble getting Brent's site to load. I wonder if you have sent him too much traffic.

>>Maybe there is something to this exercise thing.

I wouldnt't got that far. If you go hiking in Australia I think your life expectacy is lowered.

I read somewhere that life expetancy goes up 3 years for every 10 iq points above the norm. So given my data for nowegian male life expectancy from a report by the UN) only goes back to born in 1950 (69.3) he must have had an IQ around 200...
Now if only i could find his IQ, if it were ever measured...

Yay gross misuse of statistics!

In the matter of Dulles, how can anyone who attributes "aspirations" to plants be taken seriously at all? The reasoning becomes even more muddled from there, if that's possible. The article did provide me with one surprise, though: the stupid, pejorative term "Darwinism" has been around longer than I thought!

Cardinal Dulles is just being a good Aristotelian Thomist as the Catholic Church demands. What do you expect? After all they pay for his upkeep and all those fancy dress costumes that he gets to wear.

Paraphyletic taxa are quite valuable. They are an irrefutable argument for more funding for taxonomists.

the stupid, pejorative term "Darwinism" has been around longer than I thought!

From the beginning, actually, being coined by Huxley in 1860. Of course, originally, it wasn't quite so pejorative.

Bits and pieces

evolvingthoughts — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 16:48:42 +0000

Bits and pieces

I'm away from what serves as my computer these days for a while - off to Sydney to find a place to live. Also, the Seed Masters (whom I for one welcome) are upgrading Moveable Type from 3 to 4, so we can't blog for a few days anyway. But I would like to announce that my paper with Gareth J. Nelson on a possible precursor to punctuated equilibrium and the biological species concept, Pierre Trémaux, has been published in the journal History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences. The full details are:

Wilkins, John S., and Gareth J. Nelson. 2008. Trémaux on species: A theory of allopatric speciation (and punctuated equilibrium) before Wagner. Hist. Phil. Life Sci. 30: 179-206.

A manuscript version is available from the PhilSci Archive.

evolvingthoughts Wed, 01/07/2009 - 11:48

Tags

evolution

History

Happy househunting and may the punctuation of your equilibrium be brief.

A poem: Aubade by Philip Larkin

evolvingthoughts — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 18:57:24 +0000

A poem: Aubade by Philip Larkin

This was brought to my attention by a reader on the alt.fan.pratchett group in response to an evangeliser there. Below the fold, it really asserts how I think of death (and identifies me thus as an Epicurean).

Aubade

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
- The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused - nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear - no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anasthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small, unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape,
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

Philip Larkin

evolvingthoughts Sun, 01/04/2009 - 13:57

Tags

Truisms

That just about says it all - which I suppose makes me an Epicurean too. Faced with that bleak, unblinking void - it doesn't even qualify as fate - it's not hard to see why people cling to faith. For the rest of us, it's a bit like that scene towards the end of the movie Deep Impact where Vanessa Redgrave and Maximilian Schell stand helplessly and hopelessly on the beach waiting to be obliterated by the onrushing tidal wave.

Just a few cheery thoughts to begin 2009.

I thought it was Tea Leoni, not Vanessa Redgrave.

My mistake. You're quite right, it was Tea Leoni. She has the reconciliation with her father after her mother - played by Vanessa Redgrave - dies and just before they're wiped out along with the rest of the eastern seaboard of the US. I still say it's a memorable image - and a good metaphor.

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Dylan Thomas

Oh, is it poetry time?

De Vermis
John M. Ford

The worm drives helically through the wood
And does not know the dust left in the bore
Once made the table integral and good;
And suddenly the crystal hits the floor.
Electrons find their paths in subtle ways,
A massless eddy in a trail of smoke;
The names of lovers, light of other days -
Perhaps you will not miss them. That's the joke.
The universe winds down. That's how it's made.
But memory is everything to lose;
Although some of the colors have to fade,
Do not believe you'll get the chance to choose.
Regret, by definition, comes too late;
Say what you mean. Bear witness. Iterate.

and Ecclesiastes 9:9-10:

9. Live joyfully with the wife whom thou lovest all the days of the life of thy vanity, which he hath given thee under the sun, all the days of thy vanity: for that is thy portion in this life, and in thy labour which thou takest under the sun.

10. Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.

Well if you're going to include The Preacher:

Chapter 3
18 I also thought, "As for men, God tests them so that they may see that they are like the animals. 19 Man's fate is like that of the animals; the same fate awaits them both: As one dies, so dies the other. All have the same breath; man has no advantage over the animal. Everything is meaningless. 20 All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return. 21 Who knows if the spirit of man rises upward and if the spirit of the animal goes down into the earth?"

22 So I saw that there is nothing better for a man than to enjoy his work, because that is his lot. For who can bring him to see what will happen after him?

Chapter 4
1 Again I looked and saw all the oppression that was taking place under the sun:
I saw the tears of the oppressed
and they have no comforter;
power was on the side of their oppressors
and they have no comforter.

2 And I declared that the dead,
who had already died,
are happier than the living,
who are still alive.

3 But better than both
is he who has not yet been,
who has not seen the evil
that is done under the sun.

Very poignant. I really don't get atheists who defiantly say to evangelists that they don't fear death -- I think anyone who says that is either psychologically unusual, or in denial. The impending oblivion of yourself and everyone you care about is something to which one can become resigned, but never fully reconciled. As my father said, a couple of years before his passing, and as he felt his health and mind declining, even when you know there isn't much left, you sure cling to what little is still there.

For myself, the response to the evangelists is: Yes, it's rather sad; but wishing it were otherwise won't change anything, and I prefer to live in reality than in fantasy, however comforting.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,

how true!
religion with gods and demigods and heavens and hells was one glorious subterfuge for ordinary persons like me who so much needed it to die peacefully. no wonder the people who gave us this grand design were called prophets and enlightened ones. it seems we have lost religion, that last resort for thinking mortals, for ever.

Some are prepared for death and welcome it. People commit suicide every day. And there are much worse things than death. Darwin suffering in his last hours repeatedly said, "If I could but die." The lucky ones are perhaps caught unprepared: "because I could not stop for death, he kindly stopped for me" (Frost).

If you're a scientist, you can view it as the ultimate scientific experiment. Unless MWI quantum immortality is somehow real. That would be hell indeed.

Oops... sorry, that Dickinson, not Frost. My Poetry teacher would kill me.

"Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others."

Courage will not save you from death, but the courage of the dying means not to scare others of your dying.

My father died eight years ago. He died of small-celled lung cancer. A devastating disease usually linked to smoking. Ironically, he used to be a very heavy smoker, but quit smoking 32 years before his death so his children would not pick up the habit. And his courage during the last three months was precisely that: he tried not to scare us while he was dying.

Terry and John

evolvingthoughts — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 00:23:20 +0000

Terry and John

Congratulations to Sir Terence Pratchett, or SurPterry as we shall undoubtedly come to call him (although I'm tempted to doubt it as he is the last bloke I think would ever be lost for words). But overlooked in the reports is this guy, who gets an OBE:

He's John Martyn, BTW.

evolvingthoughts Wed, 12/31/2008 - 19:23

Tags

humor

Sermon

John Wilkins

Born January 1, 1614

Happy Birthday?

I spent about twenty years working in the music business in various different capacities, during that time I worked on, was involved in, promoted and attended a vast number of live concerts. In my memories I have a comparatively short list of those concerts that were truly transcendental and extraordinary, one of those was John Martin live at Cardiff Students Union in 1975: Awesome simply Awesome!

Miscellany

evolvingthoughts — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 21:22:41 +0000

Miscellany

Damn it's hot. Around here, snow is at a premium, which means our solstitial celebrations are less active than those oop north. Anyway, I got interviewed last night on national radio, the ABC's National Evening show, talking about the early ideas of philosophy to presenter Rhys Muldoon. Nice fellow. It was more like a chat than an interview (which means I did most of the talking, as my chats tend to). It seems I am the sole contactable philosopher in Australia.

So anyway, to entertain you there are some pre-solstitial items just announced. First off, I'm going to put all the internet filtering and other Australian political bastardry on my other blog The drought resistant philosopher, so go there in a while to find out what's new and awful. Now, to the good stuff...

The origin of silk spinning in spiders has been pushed back another 80 million years, to before the origin of flying prey. What they used the silk for is unclear, and may have had something to do with sex (doesn't everything?). To my chagrin, the term "missing link" has been used again. PNAS paper here ...

A few PLoS papers: one on harmonising contributions made by authors to correct for sampling bias in h-indices. Another on the supposed 63My periodicity in extinctions, which they reckon is 62My. And a third that argues that humans didn't kill of Neandertals, they sent them extinct by competitive exclusion (i.e., by taking up all the resources). Good to know we merely starved them to death. not killed them outright.

There's a lot being made of a study that shows that first cousin marriages do not make much difference in viability of progeny. See Laden's blog , or Pleiotropy. Since the degrees of consanguinuity thing was established by canon law not any kind of science, it is clearly a religious prohibition and should be overturned as secular law. Hooray for the Darwins...

Have a fun solstice. Remember, the season is the reason for Jesus. And all solstitial heroes...

evolvingthoughts Tue, 12/23/2008 - 16:22

Tags

Don't suppose there's a transcript or podcast for that radio chat? (I've just had a look, unsuccessfully, on the hypothesis that it was on RN, as none of the other ABC stations sound likely).

John, thanks.

Oh, and you need a capital letter after a full stop. Or you can make the full stop a comma. I know it's hard... ;)

Good to know we merely starved them to death. not killed them outright.

Being accessible is good. I can see the Discovery Channel special now; The Ten Deadliest Ideations in Philosophy: John Wilkins, Paradigm Hunter.

The Beast is back! Lets hear it for the good old G4!

It's actually the G4 I destroyed the screen of (hint: always do up the gear sack on the motorbike so that when you go over a speed hump at your usual 60km/h the laptop bag stays in the bag...). The keyboard is dead so I'm using it as a desktop until the new beast arrives.

And the only good paradigm is a dead paradigm. But there's no transcript. He did say he'd like to speak to me again, though, silly lad.

Trashcan: hobs and goblins

evolvingthoughts — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 19:39:39 +0000

Trashcan: hobs and goblins

I've been travelling a little to organise my move to Sydney. Love the building, the department, the people and the project. Not sure about Sydney... so anyway, nothing of substance from me for a while.

Here's a lovely little essay about Newton pissing off most of the European intellectual giants of his time, by one of our commentators, Thony Christie, at Etherwave Propaganda. He truly was the most egotistical and curmudgeonly bastard of his time, matched only by his actual achievements.

The latest Linnaeus' Legacy is up at Agricultural Biodiversity. They had the good taste to use one of mine.

Bob Grumbine, a net friend for many years, is trying a science blog aimed at secondary school students. Keep an eye on it. His daughter has one that covers, among other things, women in science.

John Hawks discusses what you get if you buy a species name: fame or a defeasible hypothesis?

evolvingthoughts Wed, 12/10/2008 - 14:39

Tags

Biodiversity

General Science

humor