Isaac Beekman, whom Jacob identifies as “the first mechanical philosopher of the Scientific Revolution”, was confident that “God had so constructed the whole of nature that our understanding … may thoroughly penetrate all the things on earth” (Jacob 1988, p. 52). Similar theses are propounded with the same confidence today, notably by people who describe [...]
Maartje M. L. de Win, Gerry Jager, Jan Booij, Liesbeth Reneman, Thelma Schilt, Cristina Lavini, Sílvia D. Olabarriaga, Gerard J. den Heeten and Wim van den Brink, “Sustained effects of ecstasy on the human brain: a prospective neuroimaging study in novel users”, in Brain, Vol. 131, No. 11, November 2008, pp. 2936–2945.
Although we do not [...]
Aaron Sell and Leda Cosmides and John Tooby and Daniel Sznycer and Christopher von Rueden and Michael Gurven, “Human adaptations for the visual assessment of strength and fighting ability from the body and face”, in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, forthcoming.
Abstract
Selection in species with aggressive social interactions favours the evolution of cognitive [...]
Recent blog posts by Michael Schaffer and Hendrik Herzberg nicely characterise the feeling of futility provoked by trying to track and understand all of the variables involved in the ongoing US election. It is very difficult to get a sense both of political events, and of the media and popular reactions to those events. [...]
Nathan W. Bailey, “Love will tear you apart: different components of female choice exert contrasting selection pressures on male field crickets”, in Behavioral Ecology, Vol. 19, No. 5, September-October 2008, pp. 960–966. [URI]
Lay Summary
Theory predicts that exaggerated male ornaments can evolve through the action of female choice for those ornaments. Female choice consists of the [...]
In the latest issue of the British Academy Review, there is an excerpt from Robin Dunbar’s 2007 Joint British Academy/British Psychological Society Lecture, appearing under the title “Why Humans aren’t just Great Apes” [PDF]. The article begins with Dunbar recapitulating his famous argument for his eponymous number, complete with the following, lovely, table.
The number ~150 [...]
Liane Schmidt, Baudouin Forgeot d’Arc, Gilles Lafargue, Damien Galanaud, Virginie Czernecki, David Grabli, Michael Schüpbach, Andreas Hartmann, Richard Lévy, Bruno Dubois and Mathias Pessiglione. 2008. “Disconnecting force from money: effects of basal ganglia damage on incentive motivation”, in Brain, Vol. 131, No. 5, May 2008, pp. 1303-1310. [DOI]
Abstract. Bilateral basal ganglia lesions have been reported [...]
An electrical engineer is not a voltmeter’s way of making another voltmeter.
Sterelny, Kim. 1994. “Science and Selection”, in Biology and Philosophy, Vol. 9, No. 1, January 1994, pp. 45–62.
We learn about the perks that accompany a Nobel Prize, including a living alarm clock in the form of a white-robed soprano sporting a tiara of lit candles.
Jerry A. Coyne, “The Complex James Watson”, in The Times Literary Supplement, 12 December 2007.
I am aware this will have little interest for most readers, but it looks like JSTOR is finally going to be enabling DOI for journals that wish to have their content identifiable in this way. This is very good news. JSTOR is easily the best online database for academic journals. It is [...]
On some accounts, the creative activity of God is mobilized by an entirely inexhaustible and uninhibited love. This love, which is understood as being totally without limit and condition, moves God to desire a plenum of existence in which everything that can conceivably be an object of love is included. God wants to love as [...]
The scapegoat by means of which the accumulated ills of a whole year are publicly expelled is sometimes an animal. For example, among the Garos of Assam, “besides the sacrifices for individual cases of illness, there are certain ceremonies which are observed once a year by a whole community or village, and are intended to [...]
I remain profoundly puzzled by what I have said, despite the fact that I think I am correct.
Stuart Kauffman, Investigations, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000, p. xii.
The Large Hadron Collider
Some Search Phrases That Have Landed People Here
observing people at bus stops
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problems with garbage
how do you get underwater lights to automatically dim
speculation in philosophy
poems about sex and skateboarding
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“weakness in the legs” and “balance” and “slurred speech”
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Concetto Gianino, “Experimental analysis of the Italian coffee pot “moka””, in American Journal of Physics, Volume 75, Issue 1, January 2007, pp. 43-47.
Abstract
I describe an experiment involving the moka Italian coffee pot. The pot is an ingenious device for making coffee that uses the liquid-vapor equation of state of the water and Darcy’s law of [...]
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I have upgraded et cetera to WordPress 2.0, so if you notice any glitches over the next while please let me know.
Word Browsing
While on technical matters, I can’t recommend highly enough the Word Browser Plugin for Safari. People shouldn’t be encouraged to post Word files to the internet of course, but those files such as [...]
Physics in Oxford will forever in my mind be associated with the motto, ‘We delight in physics’, emblazoned on the foot of departmental notepaper issued from the pen and the wit of Oxford University’s famed nuclear physics Professor Denys Haigh Wilkinson, now retired. Never mind that this Shakespearean quote from Macbeth II.iii was a pragmatically [...]
Wolfram himself is a lapsed elementary particle physicist, and I suppose he can’t resist trying to apply his experience with digital computer programs to the laws of nature. This has led him to the view (also considered in a 1981 article by Richard Feynman) that nature is discrete rather than continuous. He suggests that space [...]
To the et cetera massive.
As you will have noticed, we have moved, to grander locales, where the grass is greener and the vistas vertiginous. If you are a regular (who am I kidding, I may as well address you all by name), please update your bookmarks to reflect the domain that N and I have [...]
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