Category: Uncategorized

Seems the people at Steorn just did a public demo of their anomalous energy machine. Link via Nova Spivak. But they had a technical hitch. Hmmm, oh well.

Nice link here from Ben Goldacre’s “Bad Science”.

Still unread on my list I must confess, but came across his official website promoting his latest work “Spook Country” via Rivets.

The (retiring age) chairman of a previous employer made an impression by naming Gibson’s “Neuromancer” as a must read for anyone participating in the information age. Still catching up.

I remember a couple of months ago being impressed by the pictures of Ian Paisley joking with Martin McGinnis after the agreement to re-open the Irish Assembly, and a few days later joking with Bertie Ahern as he handed over a gift of a musket captured from the “losing side” at the Battle of the Boyne. The sceptic in me thought “he’ll never keep it up”, though I think I missed blogging any comment at the time.

How times have really changed. At Blair’s farewell prime minister’s question time, as Blair’s appointment as Mid-East Peace Envoy was confirmed, the old bugger said “I hope that what happened in Northern Ireland will be repeated and at the end of the day he will be able to look back and say it was well worthwhile.”

They’re real enough. Thanks to Apothecary’s Drawer for the link. Great galleries of Ray’s own photos on his site too – I think I’ve mentioned that before.

Alan Rayner’s “Inclusionality” restated as “Natural Inclusion”.

This piece illustrating an integrative and redistributive selection notion of evolution of extended self, as opposed to an eliminative selection of discrete selves, using a mycelium fungus example migrating its center of operations to food … and beyond.

This piece elliciting a succinct communication of Alan’s inclusional objectives.

And this piece illustrating the integrative rather than divisive dualist take on boundaries of identity – “We are bewitched by bipolar craziness, and if we really want to restore the dance we need some sellotape” – some integrating glue.

All pieces captured by Jack Whitehead and linked by William Pryor on his very new “Unhooked Thinking” blog following this year’s “Unhooked thinking” conference. William Pryor has his own only slightly less recent personal blog too.

The debate trundles on.

Struan Hellier’s father Graham Hellier is a Presbyterian minister and has written this “Christian Response” to Dawkins. I responded with these comments. My position is already pretty clear – Dawkins is as extreme as any religious extremist and unfortunately he cannot separate his (correct) arguments about the memetic success of religious (faith and authority-based) beliefs and reasoning, from his incorrect assertion that “scientific” reasoning can be totally objective and faith-free, or that if it is, it cannot be practically applicable to the whole of life.

Related is this news story about growing concern about the distinction between spiritual “contemplative” activities and religious “faithful” activities, and the worry about the inroads of the latter into US political life. Dawkins unfortunately seems devoid of contemplative spiritual values, so would not see the distinction and be locked in ancient faith vs reason battles – tilting at windmills.

Stunning detail in these Nasa images of Mars from 2004; via Rivets.

Dunno why, but I liked this. Fully Ramblomatic, via Rivets.

Well backdate actually. I’ve just reloaded all the older (scanned) photos linked from the general gallery page above, to some old pages of mainly music subjects, that I had hosted at an expired ISP, now moved over to Dreamhost with the rest of the blog pages.

Anyway all live again, and updated outgoing dead links within these and inbound links from various other psybertron pages.

I updated links with David Lavery’s work recently, but I also just noticed a recent post of his summarizing his various web projects.

As well as the “Descartes – Evil Genius” pages, take a look at the commonplace book “The Imaginative Thinker” which as well as being an extensive collection of quotes, actually includes an enormous bibliography of all the sources.

(Was reminded of this whilst following up my own bibliography project, currently looking at “Library Thing“, something which I’ve seen people as diverse as Geo Hancock and Chris Locke using. Still find Chris infuriating in that whilst his interest is in de-bunking pseudo-scientific new-age++ stuff, I never see anything to replace the inevitable babies he keeps throwing out with the no-brainer bathwater – but I’m repeating myself.)