Lectures done! 22 Oct 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 absence as I was at a conference in the UK. So it has been a bit like surfing a wave of magma. Anyway, I dropped my hindbrain (17″ MacPowerBook G4) on Friday and shattered the LCD. This has made it hard to (i) prepare the lecture, (ii) give the lecture, and (iii) post blog entries. Now that I have time, and it is being repaired, I am to fix this. Administrative
Administrative Lego me too! 12 Aug 200718 Sep 2017 I had to. They made me do it. Yes, I’m smoking again, but I’ll give up soon, I promise. The grumpy expression is because I’m teaching… Read More
Administrative Update on a pilgrim’s progress 21 Jan 201122 Jun 2018 Okay, well it’s more like the John Wayne sense of “pilgrim” than John Bunyan, but here I am, having gotten out of Dodge Brisbane just as the latest natural disaster hit. “Here” being the Blue Mountains outside of Sydney. Once my goods and chattels were “uplifted”, to use the quaint… Read More
Administrative Travel Diary 3 6 Oct 2009 Here I am in Erlangen, after two whirlwind days with Thony Christie, seeing Albert Speer’s version of the Coliseum, lots of Nurnberg and Erlangen sites, and some originals of Conrad Gesner’s never-completed Historia Plantarum. That man was a damned good artist. I owe Thony some serious thanks. But I signed… Read More
I used to think it was a terrible thing that life was so unfair. Then I thought, ‘what if life *were* fair, and all of the terrible things that happen to us came because we really deserved them?’ Now I take great comfort in the general unfairness and hostility of the universe. Marcus Cole Babylon 5: A Late Delivery from Avalon (#3.13) (1996)
You don’t know the convenience of a laptop until you are without it, for whatever reason. Craig Venter has done some terrific work on DNA, and artificial life is getting closer. How will Philosophy handle that side of science?