A biosphere for Brisbane 26 Aug 200818 Sep 2017 A few doors down from my office there’s a guy with a ready laugh and a shared love of Macintoshes named Dom Hyde, a philosopher who works on the logic of vagueness among other things. He’s also very active in environmental matters, particularly those associated with the D’Aguilar Range, which is a beautiful tall timber forested region just to the northeast of Brisbane, where I live. It also includes the water catchment for Brisbane. So you might think that when Dom and his friends proposed that this range should be a UNESCO Biosphere, government would fall over itself in protecting this crucial area. Well, you would if you didn’t know Queensland politics and the influence of developers here. However, agreement from the councils and State government has been reached, and the proposal is now underway. Congrats to Dom. He’s a powerhouse in the face of apathy. Ecology and Biodiversity Politics
Ecology and Biodiversity A melange 14 Jan 2009 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…. Read More
Australian stuff The discrimination of the age 23 Jan 201418 Sep 2017 There are many kinds of undue and harmful discrimination in modern society, all of which collectively tend to privilege a few. Women are treated with less respect and given fewer opportunities than men; heterosexuality is privileged over “deviant” forms of sexual identity and the alphabet community (currently LGBT and variants)… Read More
Administrative More Arizona fauna! 11 Mar 200818 Sep 2017 John Lynch took me to the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum yesterday, and made me walk. Naturally I forgot my camera, so I can’t show you the really cool hummingbirds, or the cougar/puma (it has a split personality) or the bighorn sheep, let alone the amazing diversity of plant life (until I… Read More
Three cheers for Dom! We were undergrads together, and even then he was building his couches from leftover beer crates and spare bicycle parts. Sort of took the “well, one thing can just become another thing easy enough” to heart, and in retrospect it all led to activism and vagueness.
Three cheers for Dom! We were undergrads together, and even then he was building his couches from leftover beer crates and spare bicycle parts. Sort of took the “well, one thing can just become another thing easy enough” to heart, and in retrospect it all led to activism and vagueness.