Month: May 2005

Searching for Sue Blackmore’s piece in the UK Daily Telegraph Saturday Review, I stumbled across this A(australian)BC The Descent of Man programme on “modern” evolution. Sue was a contributing voice apparently, along with Dawkins, Pinker, and more.

Modern mind in a prehistoric brain, would no doubt appeal to Enlightened Caveman.

The more I read the more I see “evolutionary psychology” as the key topic for understanding reality. And the more of that I read the more I realise Bronowski was right to substitute ascent (per ardua ad astra) for descent (from the trees).

I wonder if legalising all drugs would solve more problems than it caused ? BBC NEWS reporting on Afghan president Karzai being pressed on opium & heroin controls.

monthly fee looks a bit steep, but it can only be a matter of time. [via BBC].

Vonage to Vonage will need a critical mass, but unlike Skype the phoning in and out of the network must be implicitly included, if you are using your standard phone ?

Apparently here in Oz, the equivalent is Engin.

… here in Perth … I only mention the weather, ‘cos we’ve had a lot of it recently.

Since last Sunday we’ve had stormy weather (ripping up trees and washing away railway ballast kinda stormy weather) and about one quarter of the local annual rainfall, which means we’ve had about half of it since that 43C day at the end of March.

Yesterday evening we had a most spectacular storm – I first noticed the dark ominous clouds moving in opposite directions about 4pm – circulating around the eye of an impending storm. By sunset, out over the Indian Ocean, it was thoroughly formed with lightning and rain sheeting down 5 or so miles out over the ocean around Rottnest island. Dozens, hundreds (?) of people standing watching along the city-beach and Cottesloe – taking advantage of the photogenic storm-with-waterspout-at-sunset opportunity.

By 6:30 it was clear this was just one of several drifting in from the west and the torrential rain was set in for hours … but today … glorious.

I expect I’ll get to go sit and read on the beach later (Quixote), once the chores are out of the way. (Oops spoke to soon – here comes the rain again – closing in again this evening, from inland this time.)

Sue Blackmore’s latest and briefest “Introduction to Consciousness”, in the “Very Short” series reviewed positively here in the Grauniad. The Full “Introduction” was a great book. [here], [here], [here] and [here]. Not read this abridgement myself, yet. Glad to see the reviewer finds the idea of “I” as a temporary fiction as disconcerting as … well … “I” do.

I’m reminded by Dave Pollard’s latest post that this timeline (and the book it comes from), got a lot of airtime post-9/11, since it seemed to have predicted a 9/11-type intiated catastrophe by 2005, back in 1997.

Useful resource. It links the Geoffrey Moore Crossing The Chasm “early adopters”, etc view of technology uptakes and the Kondratiev 80 year (three human generations, in my view – one to learn, one to exploit, one to forget why and lose the plot) industrial cycles or shifts in prevailing “Techno-Economic Paradigm” (Freeman, Dosi et al.) – with the prevailing political and social situation at the times. Wholly US focussed – but useful none-the-less.

Dave’s been in a bit of a depressing “the end of the world is nigh, and there’s nothing we can do about it” mode recently – a release to make the best of the time left he says – a real driver for many astro-physicists and the like to get us surviving humans off the planet too, apparently. This question of the reality or illusion of human free-will, is thoroughly in focus. Consciousness and free will may be metaphorical, but they’re real enough. Read David Deutsch (you too Sue) for a more optimistic antidote.

I’m getting used to the new look and style – but I’ve had conflicting feedback about the “all lower case” script. Whaddya think ?

One of the reasons I like it, is that it took away any rhetorical intent behind using capitalisation conventions (or not) for theistic terms.

Jorn gets a mention in this review of 10 years of Yahoo, as blogging pioneer and originator of the term “blog”. [Via Anol’s SoulSoup.]