John Wilkins
evolvingthoughts
Posts by this author
October 25, 2007
David Chalmers and David Bourget of the Australian National University have a great new resource up of online papers on mind:
We (David Chalmers and David Bourget) are pleased to announce the launch of MindPapers, a new website with a bibliography covering around 18,000 published papers and…
October 23, 2007
According to a book mentioned by Greg Dahlman at blog.bioethics.net. He notes that this makes Stephen Colbert Plato. I think it makes Hilary Clinton Aristotle, and Richard Dawkins Epicurus, although the sequence is a bit messed up.
October 23, 2007
Much to do about the sexual inclinations of a fictional character in the most successful (and I still think, despite the lack of editorial control, one of the classic) children's stories. PZ Mungle has this to say:
I really, honestly, truly do not give a good goddamn if Dumbledore is gay. He's a…
October 23, 2007
The estimable Drs David Williams and Malte Ebach have started a blog on Systematics and Biogeography, which supports a recent book they haven't sent me a free copy of yet. Expect much puncturing of pretensions and orthodoxies.
October 23, 2007
An article at Wired by Clive Thompson notes that the antievolutionists use rhetorical ploys, playing on the ambiguity of language to imply that "theory" just means "wild-arsed guess" (or words to that effect). He proposes that we should stop calling evolution a theory, and start calling it a "law…
October 22, 2007
I am attempting to classify the various explanations of the existence of religion, so chime in the comments.
They are:
1. The intentionality explanation
Human beings are agents and highly adapted to social life. As a result, our cognition tends to take what Dennett calls the "intentional…
October 21, 2007
Today was the final lecture in my Introduction to Cognitive Science course. Thank the fates it is over.
I started this having no real idea of the topic, never having taught what Americans are pleased to call "freshmen" and we call "first-years", and with the first two lectures occurring in my…
October 21, 2007
This is a meme started by PZ Mackers. I will exact retribution upon him later. In the meantime, I have been tagged
There are a set of questions below that are all of the form, "The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is...". Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them in a…
October 15, 2007
I gave a lecture yesterday on animal minds, and in the course of it tried to show some YouTube videos in Keynote by linking to the pages (tool using crows, by the way, and the excerpt from Life of Birds by Attenborough on Japanese crows using stop lights to get nuts they dropped under car tyres,…
October 15, 2007
They are now toadies of the Exclusive Brethren, who fund campaign advertisements for the Liberal Party.
Add to this Cardinal George Pell's support, Catholic minister Tony Abbott's attempts to control who can use RU486 on an individual basis (i.e., never), Peter Costello's links with Hillsong,…
October 13, 2007
So, the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions has admitted that Haneef, the Indian muslim doctor who was deported for being of "bad character" because he was related to someone who had peripheral involvement in the London and Glasgow bombings, was wrongly charged on the basis of bad…
October 12, 2007
The International Herald Tribune worries that Gore's receiving the Peace Prize is going to denigrate the award because it "strays from traditional Nobel definitions of peace work". Huh. As Tom Lehrer said, when Henry Kissinger can win the Peace Prize, the time for political satire is long past. If…
October 12, 2007
From an AP Bio student on his vocab quiz (they have to learn word roots, like -itis, -logy, etc. and be able to use the parts in real words w/ definitions):
"Mammograb: Examination of the breasts."
Via Beautiful Biology, hat tip to John Pieret.
October 12, 2007
My mate Ian Musgrave, Astroblogger and expert in several fields of science, and his lovely family, are up visiting rellies in Queensland from the arid wasteland that is Adelaide. We all went on a bushwalk and while we were eating apples at the top of the cliff, we saw a couple of dolphins (…
October 9, 2007
It seems that almost nobody can mention Jews without making an inadvertent or deliberate ass of themselves. Most recently, Richard Dawkins put his foot in it in this Guardian article. He said:
When you think about how fantastically successful the Jewish lobby has been, though, in fact, they are…
October 6, 2007
Does anyone who reads this blog have access to JFP from the American Philosophical Association? None of the locals or my usual contacts do, and by the time I can get a subscription going, I'm likely to have missed the deadlines this year. Drop me a note if you do. Thanks
October 6, 2007
I found this interesting and still surprisingly modern essay by David Starr Jordan in 1897, at William Tozier's blog, where he had scanned it from a journal called The Arena. They had some good public discussion journals at the time.
So I took his scan and OCR'd and corrected it, and put it here…
October 5, 2007
On Monday night last, Jason Grossman, a philosopher form the Australian National University rang me with an idea. He was coming to my university to give a talk entitled "How to Feyerabend", arguing that Feyerabend was a dadaist rather than an anarchist. I'd tell you more about his talk, but I can'…
October 3, 2007
LOLCats are one of those things you either hate or hate really really a lot. But the idea of translating the entire Bible into LOLCatese? Priceless.
Someone has way too much spare time (and will we see battles fought over the Auterised Bibel translation versus the VulgarCat version? I hope so),…
October 3, 2007
The estimable and overproductive Neil Levy* at CAPPE at my alma mater, has sent me Terry Pratchett's and Stephen Brigg's book/diary Lu-Tse's Yearbook of Enlightenment 2008, with a note "To help you chart your course into unemployment". For which I give much thanks, as it also contains many…
October 2, 2007
I do these things to (a) impress you all (if I can), (b) get a crossbearing on whether I'm actually part of this culture I find myself inside of, and (c) see if there are any other books I ought to have read. Like my source, Live Granades, I bold those I've read and italicise those I've partially…
September 30, 2007
Thinking some more about PZ's latest comedic act, I think I see what the problem is.
People do not change their beliefs just because someone offends them. They change their beliefs because opponents offend them. If someone is a Muslim, they won't become an Islamist because another Muslim teaches…
September 30, 2007
The arch-Enemy of all humanity, PZ Mocals, has posted what he no doubt thinks is a funny skit. I told him good, I did. There's no way we can tolerate this attack of godlessness.
September 28, 2007
Stay tuned after the break as we will be showing the following specials, rated R for Reason. Suitable for 15 years and over...
I worked for ten years at The Walter and Eliza Institute of Medical Research (WEHI for short). This was the institution at which Macfarlane Burnet was director. I will…
September 27, 2007
I keep forgetting to check the "unpublished" list. If you put a link in, or use certain terms, the spam filters will hold it for approval. I am forgetful, and haven't checked for a while, so apologies to those whoe comments were held for over a day.
September 27, 2007
There's been a lot of media spin and unthinking objections to the visit of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the US. He was called the "modern Hitler", for example. This strikes me as both unthinking and dangerous. Ahmadinejad is his own kind of threat and problem, and comparisons to past dangerous…
September 25, 2007
Over the past three years or so I have been trying to get an academic career going, at the tender age of (then) 49 (now 51). I have applied for a number of positions while working as a postdoc at the University of Queensland, and tried now twice to get an ARC Discovery Grant up on biodiversity…
September 24, 2007
This is a nice post by Christopher Taylor at Catalogue of Organisms, a kiwi studying spider systematics (and what's not to love about that; cephalopods be buggered!) on the species of moas that used to live in New Zealand. I didn't realise they'd be forest dwellers. It's a worthwhile blog to get…
September 23, 2007
... an email archiver that sorts through the several tens of thousands of emails I have received in the past fifteen years and makes it all a nice searchable archive. If it would automatically archive from the current folders, that would be nice. On the Mac OS X.
Any ideas