Moving digs

I’m trying to move the blog to another host, one which allows me to add plugins. This should not affect subscriptions or URLs, but for the moment I am freezing the blog so I don’t lose comments. I’ll post another announcement when all is done.

Travel funds

I have, as readers know, no actual position right now. This also means that I lack all travel funds, but there are several events in America in June, ISHPSSB and the 2011 Evolution Meetings in Oklahoma, that I would love to attend and present at. Anyone got any ideas about travel funding? Can someone bring me to their department? Here’s hoping…

I get email

Only one of the very many things I share with PZ Myers (apart from the success, the job, the handsomeness, the youth, and the Trophy Wife™) is that occasionally I get emails from crackpots. When you get an email whose Subject line is

Fw: Tidal Wave Hit Japan and Alaska as prophesy! — As Science has Proven the Bible, So have “i” proven in the name of the Lord, the Immutable Destiny of those Prophesy in the Bible, {{Proof below}} Which “i” am commanded to gather and instruct, The 144,000 and More “i” pray which now Inherit the promisedland / Paradise called EARTH Rev:7:3-4, Rev:14:1-3, Matthew 25:34, Matthew 5:5, Rev:21:3 — Why Does God have to do as He does??? – Crying out too Church Missions and Scientific Researchers around earth, BRING HOME YOUR MISSIONS – The gathering signs listed on the Prophecy and the Signs page on the Lords website have fallen Like rain over the last year and a half, “i” now very soon must make another List of Signs — death and aging now soon end as Prophesy/Promised by the Great Physician who came and Destroyed death in battle / Victory Isaiah 25:8, He Jesus Christ the Lord God of the Heaven and Earth The Scientific soul of the God our Father who Scientifically Created the Universe, and Miraculously Brought it Forth.

then you know you are dealing with a disordered mind…

Multiple Inappropriate Capitals, inability to use apostrophes, no apparent knowledge of sentences or sentence structure, verbs or subject-object. All that is missing is five consecutive exclamation marks (properly called “shrieks” or “bangs” in typesetting).

Admin: May be off line for a week

So I am trying to transfer my blog and domain name to a new host, and am about to be without internet for a week, as I move into a new flat. These two facts may interfere with a good outcome. If things go well, you won’t notice. But things never go well, especially since there is no easy guide to this process online anywhere I can find, so I am in the dark.

I have paid a couple of hundred dollars to achieve this, leaving me about $80 in the hole after previous donations are used up (thanks especially to Andrea!). If anyone can spare a buck or two that would help me. I paid for four years’ hosting, so costs will drop a fair bit once done.

If things go spare, then you won’t even be able to play Mornington Crescent. I suggest you write the moves on a piece of paper and type them in when I come back online.

Too big for my boots

I can no longer use the online WordPress export function to back my blog up – I have to ask WordPress to do it. This is because the size of the blog and comments and graphics, etc. has exceeded their latency time and so it times out. Oh dear… it looks like I am going to have to move to a hosted install. This may cost me money. Being as I am presently unemployed, I may ask you guys to contribute when I know the costs.

However, that won’t change the URL or feed I hope.

My talk online

The Australian Broadcasting Commission, or ABC, radio show on science, Ockham’s Razor (named after some philosophy guy), has finally played my talk on species concept history and the death of essentialist stories. You can go listen to it here.

The recording process was fraught. I have reduced lung capacity due to decades of smoking (I stopped a while back, but lungs don’t regenerate), and so I kept swallowing the ends of the sentences, so the sound editor is to be congratulated for making it sound natural, as each sentence took several takes.

Update on a pilgrim’s progress

Okay, well it’s more like the John Wayne sense of “pilgrim” than John Bunyan, but here I am, having gotten out of Dodge Brisbane just as the latest natural disaster hit. “Here” being the Blue Mountains outside of Sydney. Once my goods and chattels were “uplifted”, to use the quaint movers’ terms, I set out for Sin City.

A Bunyan Pilgrim. Babe is nowhere to be seen.

A Blue Mountain. Yes, it really does look like this.

Despite some flood diversions and detours, I got here pretty much as I planned, and am staying at my friends’ Malte and Melinda’s place until I find somewhere I can afford in this city to store myself and said goods and chattels. And of course the very next day I had a dose of gastro – probably either from the norovirus infection doing the rounds in Brissie or the Subway I had in some country town. But I got over that (or rather I got that out), and the next day Kipling Will, a noted entomologist and systematist, came to stay for a day or so.

We went beetling, which is not at all like buggering. Kip found some Caribidae, and was happy. I have photos of him bending over, as he rustled through the undergrowth and detritus. A man should not be that happy, bending over. In public, anyway. He’s seen more of Australia this trip than I have in my life, which is pretty impressive. For those that do not know, Texas fits happily into NSW about three times. And he drove up and down Queensland, which is bigger, NSW, South Australia and substantial and rural parts of Western Australia too.

Kip Will, beetling, not buggering.

And we talked, of course. Lots. About species concepts, classification and stuff whereof I know not wot (i.e., most stuff; it’s frightening to be the only philosopher in a room of scientists). There was beer. Or so I’m told – it’s all a bit hazy.

I got the proof of a paper I am going to display in front of actual scientists in Zootaxa, which I corrected (some of which were of course my errors, not theirs). This is equally frightening. It’s a good thing mere facts do not affect a philosophical argument. Scientists will understand, I am sure.

Right now more beetling not buggering is going on outside in the dark, but being as I am a sessile organism I decided to catch up on a little bloggery (not buggery) and reassure you all I have not succumbed to the fleshpots of NSW (what, exactly, are fleshpots, by the way? My febrile imagination is not to be trusted on this matter*).

I apologise for channelling Henry Gee, but he’s like a mind virus, you know. A very large and infectious mind virus.

* Late note: OED says it’s a pot one boils flesh in. You dirty-minded buggers!

Update on a pilgrim's progress

Okay, well it’s more like the John Wayne sense of “pilgrim” than John Bunyan, but here I am, having gotten out of Dodge Brisbane just as the latest natural disaster hit. “Here” being the Blue Mountains outside of Sydney. Once my goods and chattels were “uplifted”, to use the quaint movers’ terms, I set out for Sin City.

A Bunyan Pilgrim. Babe is nowhere to be seen.

A Blue Mountain. Yes, it really does look like this.

Despite some flood diversions and detours, I got here pretty much as I planned, and am staying at my friends’ Malte and Melinda’s place until I find somewhere I can afford in this city to store myself and said goods and chattels. And of course the very next day I had a dose of gastro – probably either from the norovirus infection doing the rounds in Brissie or the Subway I had in some country town. But I got over that (or rather I got that out), and the next day Kipling Will, a noted entomologist and systematist, came to stay for a day or so.

We went beetling, which is not at all like buggering. Kip found some Caribidae, and was happy. I have photos of him bending over, as he rustled through the undergrowth and detritus. A man should not be that happy, bending over. In public, anyway. He’s seen more of Australia this trip than I have in my life, which is pretty impressive. For those that do not know, Texas fits happily into NSW about three times. And he drove up and down Queensland, which is bigger, NSW, South Australia and substantial and rural parts of Western Australia too.

Kip Will, beetling, not buggering.

And we talked, of course. Lots. About species concepts, classification and stuff whereof I know not wot (i.e., most stuff; it’s frightening to be the only philosopher in a room of scientists). There was beer. Or so I’m told – it’s all a bit hazy.

I got the proof of a paper I am going to display in front of actual scientists in Zootaxa, which I corrected (some of which were of course my errors, not theirs). This is equally frightening. It’s a good thing mere facts do not affect a philosophical argument. Scientists will understand, I am sure.

Right now more beetling not buggering is going on outside in the dark, but being as I am a sessile organism I decided to catch up on a little bloggery (not buggery) and reassure you all I have not succumbed to the fleshpots of NSW (what, exactly, are fleshpots, by the way? My febrile imagination is not to be trusted on this matter*).

I apologise for channelling Henry Gee, but he’s like a mind virus, you know. A very large and infectious mind virus.

* Late note: OED says it’s a pot one boils flesh in. You dirty-minded buggers!

While I move, a delay in posts

I am about to move to Sydney, although the Brisbane flooding has caused me no end of problems. This will mean I cannot post for a while; perhaps two weeks, although I doubt it. I should be able to comment a bit.

Please bear with me and don’t start reading that PZ guy instead. He has enough readers.

A paperback of Species: A History

My not-inconsiderable ego has expanded several sizes upon the news from University of California Press that my book Species: A History of the Idea (see at right or on the My Books page) is to become a paperback. I hope to make a couple of corrections, and maybe add a section on Blumenbach (which you, my dear readers, have already seen, here, here and here). I expect tens of thousands of sales now…