Cambrian fossils at Kangaroo Island 28 Aug 200818 Sep 2017 Kangaroo Island is a largish island off the coast of South Australia, famous for its wildlife and food. It also has some of the best preserved Ediacaran Cambrian fossils, on a par with the famous Burgess Shale. A report on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s TV show Catalyst recently showcased these, and interviewed my friend Chris Nedin as well as his colleagues Jim Gehling and Diego Garcia. Chris is the guy shown on the preview of the video. You can view the report on video, or read the transcript, courtesy of the ABC. Here’s a pic of Nedin showing us where the Ediacaran period starts, when he and I and friends Ian Musgrave and Jim Foley took a trip through the Flinders Ranges a few years back. He’s way too fit, from his years of climbing shale cliffs (like he made us do on that trip). D’oh!: I should have said Cambrian not Ediacaran. I’m sorry, I have a cold. Uncategorized
Uncategorized Judging experiments 30 Dec 200718 Sep 2017 This is a field in which I am largely ignorant, so I will just report it and leave the commenters to interpret. Collider blog has a discussion of an idea reported by Charm &c. in a paper at arXiv by Bruce Knudsen, proposing that experiments should be assessed using Shannon… Read More
Uncategorized Amazing new philosophy resource 30 Jan 2009 David Chalmers and his student David Bourget at the Australian National University have developed a new resource: PhilPapers. This is a hot list to online versions of (so far) over 188,000 items in current philosophy. I checked my own papers and they were all there (something Thompson International seems unable… Read More
Uncategorized I can’t handle the Truth 23 Nov 2008 Siris has a nice short post on the use of “truth” in discourse: This appeal to truth is incantatory: it is not an argument but a rhetorical ploy that usually involves a false dichotomy. By ritually displaying one’s ‘interest in the truth’ in contrast with someone else’s interest in something… Read More
Both Chris Nedin and Chris Glen spotted the deliberate (?) error in my post and pointed out they are Cambrian fossils, not Ediacaran.