design
ddobbs | January 9, 2009The bloggers at the design firm Pentagram know how to write a lede:
During the financially dismal 2008 holiday shopping season, one product held up nicely: bras.
Some great design worth exploring there, from the outfit that did the signage for the front of the Times building and the Atlantic redesign.
evolvingthoughts | January 4, 2009Well, he admits that it was a theist diatribe from the beginning, and not the even handed interaction between science and faith doco he told Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers among others. Always nice to find out that those who assert that only with faith in God can we have morals behave as if morals were an optional extra. Not surprising, but there it is. You can lie for your religion, to nonbelievers who do happen to behave morally and ethically.
cevans | December 15, 2008
Let's try a thought experiment.
This one comes via Buckminster Fuller: imagine you have a length of nylon rope, which you splice into a length of cotton rope, then into another length of hemp rope. If you tie an overhand knot in the rope, and push it down, through all three kinds of ropes, the knot remains a knot. The material is irrelevant, because the knot is just a pattern that has a specific set of guidelines for itself. Fuller wrote that "a pattern has an integrity independent of the medium by virtue of which you have received the information that it exists." That is to say, if you…
evolvingthoughts | December 11, 2008... shh, not so loud or everyone will want one.
Here's a piece by Darksyde at Daily Kos in which he reports the outgoing EPA chair (who has overseen all manner of bad science and decisions, although that may not be his own fault) as saying
"It's not a clean-cut division [between evolution and creation]. If you have studied at all creationism vs. evolution, there's theistic or God-controlled evolution and there's variations on all those themes."
It seems to me that theistic evolution is not exactly about God controlling evolution, although there may be plenty of biblical warrant for God…
evolvingthoughts | November 28, 2008
I haven't done much philosophical blogging lately. There are Reasons. I'm preparing to move to Sydney over the next few months (and there may be a period in which I have no laptop too), and trying to catch up on a bunch of projects I have in play and which deserve my attention. Also, there's a stack yay high of books to review. To impress you all and disgust my editors, they include the following:
Books
Sober, Elliott. 2008. Evidence and evolution: the logic behind the science. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press.
This continues Sober's general project of giving a…
evolvingthoughts | 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 arrived at my brother's place, I was on the road on my bike. Then this happened. Hailstones the size of a small orange, winds up to 130km/h (and I am sure that was what I saw when I took this pic), tree branches down and water just pouring into the flat.
Anyway, that to one side, here are some…
evolvingthoughts | November 5, 2008
Hmmm... cool name for a song. Anyway, here are a few things that caught my eye while I was trying to ignore some politics.
The Internet filtering debacle has reached the pages of Nature. With luck this will blow up in Conroy's face. It really does look like this was pandering to the religious right here in Australia.
Siris has one of his usual erudite and evocative pieces, this time on herbs (i.e., drugs) making people beasts in classical sources. I wonder if the notion that drugs take us upward rather than downward was an invention of the moderns?
David White argues that intelligent…
evolvingthoughts | November 1, 2008
I used to think that Jews in general were able to avoid the confusion of biblical literalism with their rich tradition of allegorical and other forms of interpretation and commentary, but it seems that there are some - haredim - who follow the example of the Lubavitcher Rebbe and dismiss evolution as far-fetched and anti-biblical. The link is to an anonymous essay by a rabbi at the Jerusalem Post. In it he argues that the tradition of Orthodox Judaism permits a looseness of interpretation that means that science can rule out bad interpretations, which is very unlike the Christian literalist…
evolvingthoughts | October 5, 2008
But, allowing that we were to take the operations of one part of nature upon another, for the foundation of our judgement concerning the origin of the whole, (which never can be admitted,) yet why select so minute, so weak, so bounded a principle, as the reason and design of animals is found to be upon this planet? What peculiar privilege has this little agitation of the brain which we call thought, that we must thus make it the model of the whole universe? Our partiality in our own favour does indeed present it on all occasions; but sound philosophy ought carefully to guard against so…
evolvingthoughts | September 19, 2008
Actually I'm not. The Sea of Faith In Australia crowd are very nice and easy to get on with folk, and many of them are your garden variety humanists, atheists and skeptics. Lawrence Krauss is a very nice guy with a good patter in anti-ID; nothing I haven't heard before but, and this surprised and educated me, something that few of the audience seemed all that familiar with.
One thing that has been very useful to me is to get a cross bearing on what interested and intelligent folk know and do not know. That will help me be a little more clear in the future. My talk is tonight, so we'll see…
evolvingthoughts | September 12, 2008
Here is a roundup of links and stuff that I don't have time to blog on right now.
A. C. Grayling replies in a piece of beautiful snark to Steve Fuller's response to his review of Dissent over Descent. Thony is not permitted to point out any further historical inaccuracies...
Leiter reports that a philosopher who blogs, from Yeshiva, James Otteson, may have been removed because he said things on the blog that are sexist, or at least interpreted to be, according to Inside Higher Education.
Will Thomas at Ether Wave Propaganda has the first of a series on the historian Simon Schaeffer, on…
evolvingthoughts | September 8, 2008
I am presently reading Fuller's Dissent over Descent, but here's A. C. Grayling's review in advance of mine. The money quote:
The demerits of ID theory itself – so woeful as to be funny: in this world of ours, with so much failed experiment of life, so much repetition and haphazard variety of endeavour to meet the challenge of passing on genes, to claim the existence and activity of a supernatural designer would be a sort of blasphemy on the latter, if it existed – are well enough known not to require the wasted effort of iteration; nor does the overwhelming security of evolutionary theory…
evolvingthoughts | September 5, 2008
One of the enduring objections to evolution of the Darwinian variety is that it is based on chance, and so for theists who believe God is interventionist, it suggests that God is subjected to chance, and hence not onmi-something (present, potent or scient). Darwin and his friend Asa Gray debated this issue in correspondence, and it ended up as the final pages of his 1868 Variation (below the fold). Effectively, Darwin argued that we cannot "reasonably maintain" that God intended for chance events that are useful to humans or to the species concerned. It is this that I want to discuss,…
evolvingthoughts | August 24, 2008
In addition to Fuller's Science versus Religion, I also received my copy of Phil Dowe's Galileo, Darwin and Hawking last week, and today arrives Roy Davies' The Darwin Conspiracy (thanks, Roy; I will be as even handed as I can be), and Frank Schaeffer's Crazy for God. So I am going to be busy over the next few weeks. I'll post a bloggy review here for those that I also have to review for a journal (I have a backlog on this - Bowler's Monkey Trials and Gorilla Sermons is also due).
I'm about one third through Schaeffer's book already - it's a good read. His father and mother come across as…
evolvingthoughts | August 22, 2008
A little while back I linked to Sahotra Sarkar's review of Steve Fuller's Science versus Religion. Now Fuller has put up a defence at the Intelligent Design website, Uncommon Descent, under the gerrymandered image of a bacterial flagellum (if you want to know what a real flagellum would look like at that scale, see this).
While I haven't yet read the book (I'll be reviewing it for Metascience), a couple of points that Fuller's post make clear:
1. He has a really casual dismissal of factual accuracy so long as the "spirit" is right
2. This explains why he's allied himself with ID.…
evolvingthoughts | August 11, 2008
Steven ("Steve") Fuller is a well known sociologist of science (he began as a philosopher of science but is presently employed by the University of Warwick as a sociologist). He is widely credited for the subject and journal of Social Epistemology. He is also the guy who wrote several hundred pages of "expert" opinion for the creationists in the Dover Trial for money. Never one to waste work, he has revised it as a book. Save yourself the $20 and read Sahotra Sarkar's review in the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. I particularly like the final sentences:
These excursions into fancy allow…
evolvingthoughts | June 16, 2008
From the Enough Rope series by the inestimable Andrew Denton, interviewing Sir David Attenborough, in the course of which, this segment on creationism, below the fold. Humane thoughts of a great humanist.
ANDREW DENTON: Let's talk about the imagination of human beings. You're strongly on the record as being opposed to the concept of creationism. Why do you feel so strongly about it?
I feel so strongly about it because I think that it is in a quite simple historical factual way wrong. Um the arguments I would ah put forward ah now that we are um more knowledgeable about the world as a…
evolvingthoughts | June 10, 2008
This guy is brilliant, both as a guitarist and a lyricist.
Oh, his name's Chris Smither, if you want to Google him.
evolvingthoughts | June 2, 2008
Creationism is being pushed legislatively in Texas again. But this line is priceless, from State Board of Education vice chairman, David Bradley (yes, you guessed, a Republican):
Bradley said he doesn't foresee any successful effort to remove the “strengths and weaknesses” requirement from the science standards.
“There are issues in the evolutionary process that have been proven wrong,” he said. “Evolution is not fact. Evolution is a theory and, as such, cannot be proven. Students need to be able to jump to their own conclusions.”
After all, if the grownups can jump to their own…
cevans | May 29, 2008Although I've read a great deal about the fantastically oblique heraldry and insignia of the purported "black world" of the U.S. military -- namely in the (recommended) work of Trevor Paglen -- I've never come across it in the flesh, er, vinyl decal. Imagine my joyful surprise at discovering a treasure trove of mission stickers, identifiers, and decals at the small-aircraft annex of the Portland International Airport this week. Apparently pilots of all stripes pass through and leave their mark. Decode at will, and read more here.