Having taught critical reasoning and studied the usual logic for philosophy undergrads, I felt that I had a pretty good understanding of logic and reasoning, at least without getting into modal logics and other such aberrations. Not for the first or last time I mistook confidence for competence. Neil Thomason,…

In between my absent career path, I just wrote this in reply to a student who wanted advice on their assignments, as they got around 70% for the subject I just taught them. Many of my students were science or STEM students, and essays are hard for them. This is…

Then something happened. A position came up for a lecturer at Bond University. Paul suggested I apply, as lectureships in Australia in philosophy are like honest politicians, only a few exist. I did, and to my surprise I got the job. Of course, this meant I had to surrender my…

So, at this point I am now 50 or so, doing my postdoc at UQ with Paul Griffiths, and living with my family just pre-separation (the divorce came a few years later). Two things happened. The first is that I started to gain confidence, Now, this may shock those who…

My time at Queensland initially was among the best of my life, although I did miss my kids a lot. I moved up for a year before the family arrived (pre-divorce), and lived in a really nice part of Brisbane (it would be churlish to say, the only really nice…

Another result of my meanderings on the interwebs was my blogging career, the tail end of which you are now reading. P. Z. Myers, whose name I routinely misspelled for about ten years until I ran out of alternatives, was active in the talk.origins group. He was early into science…

Sometime around 1994, I was finishing my computing diploma and got access to a unix terminal. Typing various commands assigned to us, I mistyped something and instead typed rn and what came up was the mother of all chat boards, which I later found out was called USENET, but which…