consequently.org/snippets/

March 7, 2005

consequently.org/snippets is no more. It is replaced by my del.icio.us links, available at http://del.icio.us/greg_restall/. Point your feed-reader at the feed: http://del.icio.us/rss/greg_restall. Thanks! This feed is going away very soon.

November 6, 2004

Johnny Warren (Australian soccer hero) has died after a battle with cancer. Zachary has been liking wearing his ‘soccer hero’ shirt of late, and he wants his Daddy to wear one too. I’ll try to get something in Johnny Warren’s honour.

October 25, 2004

Native Seeds.

October 15, 2004

The Great Bear: I have a print of this in my office.

September 26, 2004

Tim Bayne gets sucked in to weblogging.

September 11, 2004

“I’m George W. Bush and I approve this message” (The Bush Campaign’s TV Commercial, if he was running against Jesus. From the theologically and politically literate MAD Magazine, of all places!)

A heartbreaking phonecall: Mamdouh Habib calling his family from Guantanamo Bay, for the first time since his detention without charge in October 2001.

Clare Parish exhibiting at West Space, August 27 to September 11.

Look, look! A job in a philosophy department advertised with a specialisation in logic. This is a rare thing, so if you’re into this kind of thing, you might be interested.

July 29, 2004

“There’s nothing this Puddin’ enjoys more than offering slices of himself to strangers.”

July 28, 2004

John Passmore died on Sunday.

July 24, 2004

PENG: Processable English.

To read: You are where?. Rory Ewins on academic weblogging.

July 23, 2004

Try musicplasma: visually see how musicians are related by means of co-purchasing data at Amazon.com.

July 20, 2004

Awesome Quicktime VR panorama from the Apollo 11 lunar landing 35 years ago.

July 19, 2004

M@ is back. (The Department wasn’t the same without him.)

June 21, 2004

Next week my spouse leaves Zack and me for what she tells me is an academic conference which just happens to be on a rather attractive island in Brittany. Going to South Molle Island just doesn’t cut it.

June 18, 2004

On “Christian Entertainment”.

Post the Beatitudes — Kurt Vonnegut.

June 17, 2004

RdR is blogging too…

June 16, 2004

The SMH’s Radar is now a weblog.

June 15, 2004

Coach philosophical after defeat. “Both me and Gordie liked the way Haugy elaborates and then undermines a battery of common presuppositions about the foundational notions of intentionality and representation.” (Via Neil.)

June 11, 2004

The Annotation of the Celera Human Genome Assembly: Chromosome X. (A 540KB PDF file.)

June 10, 2004

The Peter Garrett press conference. To be honest, I’m not sure what I make of this.

June 9, 2004

Proofreaders’ Marks.

June 8, 2004

I hope the fact that Tony Marmo now has his own website doesn’t mean that he’ll stop posting here.

AirPort Express from Apple. This looks like just the ticket for when we go travelling on study leave. (The fact that we could use it at home to send music to our stereo is a nice bonus.)

June 2, 2004

On the Defence Department’s attention to detail.

AKMA on Openness, Publication, and Scholarship.

May 27, 2004

Sorry.

The First Noble Truth of Charlie Brown: on Peanuts, Christianity and Buddhism.

Richard Zach (at Calgary) is blogging.

May 26, 2004

Kliper.

May 25, 2004

And in my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink: from Body and Soul.

Events in Analytic Philosophy.

May 24, 2004

Very odd lines in the Google Gmail Terms of Service.

May 19, 2004

The Rational Street Performer Protocol.

M@ tries to fly home.

May 12, 2004

Turning the Pages: from the British Library. These are just gorgeous digitisations of some illuminated manuscripts from their collection.

Pooling printers in Mac OS X. I had no idea you could do this.

David Fremlin’s Measure Theory volumes are available online.

May 11, 2004

The Federal Budget 2004-2005 is targeted at people like me.

May 10, 2004

CASE is the Centre for Apologetic Scholarship and Education housed at New College at the University of New South Wales. (Earlier this year I participated there in a workshop on “Future Apologetics,” where I presented a little paper on the role of logic in apologetics and reasoning about religion.)

Notes on how to catch plagiarizers, and, how to prevent plagiarism.

May 8, 2004

Envelope and Letter Folding.

May 7, 2004

Watch/listen while it’s still there: Hey Hey 16k.

A LaTeX package for Fitch-style proofs.

AAL 2005 in Perth, September 24 to 25. Be there!

May 6, 2004

The Plush Fish Experience.

May 5, 2004

OntologyWorks: making the KK thesis work for you.

The Philosophical Gourmand Report gets marked for effort, but there’s no way that the ANU should be ranked equal to Melbourne on any combination of food, nightlife or cultural capital. (I’d say our relative ranking on philosophy is a moot point as well.)

I’d watch Channel 5a (or at least record it), at the very least on 1pm on Saturdays.

May 4, 2004

James MacLaurin on philosophy’s place in NZ, responding to philosophy’s fine result as the highest ranked discipline in a review of research in New Zealand Universities. (And Philosophy at Otago went particularly well. Well done!)

Ken MacLeod: The Midnight Fathers.

When do you think that people act intentionally? Try these experiments on for size.

April 28, 2004

The sorry state of higher education funding. The picture is indeed dire, and the facts portrayed here are sad. (One statement there requires correction: Kwong Lee Dow is ours and not theirs.)

April 24, 2004

From The Amateur Gourmet: Decadent and Wildly Expensive Chocolate Ice Cream.

April 21, 2004

The Age, Online redesigns.

Z, C and I are fans of the Koala Brothers.

April 20, 2004

Massive Change Radio.

Paint your floors.

April 19, 2004

AntiRSI: Software to remind you to take a break from your computer every now and then. For Mac OS X.

April 18, 2004

Erathostenes: a spam filter predicated on keeping all the good stuff (Ham) in one mailbox, and all the bad stuff (Spam) in another. It ‘learns’ the difference better as you get more and more.

April 17, 2004

An unorthodox view of an Orthodox Easter service.

April 16, 2004

Redesigning the Presidential Daily Briefing.

April 15, 2004

Some answers to some questions about Google’s GMail.

April 14, 2004

Cornelia Parker’s Cold Dark Matter: an exploded view. Christine loved this when she visited the Tate when she was in London a couple of weeks ago.

Doing my bit to keep that fad going for a few days.

How to chop a doughnut into 13 piaces with three cuts.

April 12, 2004

XeTeX: Mac OS X and Unicode font support for TeX.

April 9, 2004

Ecce Homo

New Scientist reports results from a Finnish study that mothers-to-be who eat chocolate daily had happier babies than those who didn’t.

Thinner and Autoplate: more listening.

The Grothendieck Circle online.

Manuel Bremer’s Lectures on Paraconsistent Logic.

April 8, 2004

I could waste a lot of time here: www.archive.org/audio. There’s a lot there.

April 6, 2004

Flash flash at levitated.net.

Ken Macleod likes the idea that some of his compatriots believe Harold Wilson flanked by Xena and Conan led an army of cyborgs to victory over the apes in the Battle of Woking during the Martian invasion.

April 3, 2004

Poisson d’Avril’s Theorem. I was rather slow in finding this. Consider it posted here a couple of days previously.

April 1, 2004

I think I need one of these signs (via Peter).

March 29, 2004

[Warning: another mathematical post.] Do you like higher order categorical structures? If so, this Tom Leinster lecture is good fun.

March 28, 2004

Why Churches Should Have Websites. Mine doesn’t.

The Passivator: find your passive voice (and stamp it out).

March 26, 2004

Free Culture: Lawrence Lessig’s book (freely downloadable, by the way) subtitled “How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity.” I think ‘Free’ in the title is a verb.

FreeFullText.com: a list of scholarly periodicals with free issues online. The AJL isn’t there yet, but should be soon.

Managing academic e-journals: an article from the Communications of the ACM.

March 25, 2004

Noam Chomsky’s Weblog.

What is Motivic Measure?: By Thomas Hales. I don’t understand it all, but it does seem like a productive application of ideas from logic to problems in measure theory. As an extra bonus: it involves cutting things up with scissors.

March 24, 2004

Effective Scientific Electronic Publishing: handy tips for those of us who make research available online.

March 23, 2004

Paul Ford’s Ftrain.com redesigns. The new design utilises more horizontal space than your usual website.

Philosophical break-up lines: Just doing my best to push Brian’s page up the Google Rankings.

March 22, 2004

The phony election campaign is heating up. Opposition Leader Mark Latham is cranking up the rhetoric on the Government’s appalling treatment of AFP commissioner Mick Keelty after he dared to say that Australia might be more of a terrorist target since our involvement in the invasion of Iraq. This might work: Howard’s weak points are his “honesty” and “openness.”

Via M@, I find that Peter Martin (erstwhile Tokyo correspondent for the ABC, and now economic commentator in the Australian media) has a weblog, commenting on pertient social issues in a way that manages to take economic considerations seriously without being captive to what has become known in this land as "economic rationalism." It's good stuff. 11 Myths about open access journals answered by the people at BioMed Central. (The first link is to a short PDF file.) Philip Pullman on how we teach our kids to hate reading and writing. A choice quote: "A child very seldom wants to talk about something that's made a deep impression: it's too personal, too sacred. But they soon learn what's expected, and they keep a set of stock answers that they have found will satisfy the teacher."

March 21, 2004

Meat-eating vegetarians? I think I've heard of that somewhere before.

March 20, 2004

Australasian Association for Logic Conference, 2005 [Perth, September 24 to 25]. I'll probably not be there, as I'm planning to be away on study leave in the second half of 2005. Do you have the latest version of Mac OS X? Then you can use Python to manipulate images in nifty ways. John Gruber's explanation of why we need Markdown if we write for the web.

March 19, 2004

Read Toby Ord's pictures and commentary from Oxford. He's in his element. Deductive Closure and the Sorites: by Matt Weiner. Give him feedback before he presents it at the APA. Work is progressing toward a standard for PDF files suitable for archiving. Via Brian, a chart indicating the relative profitability of different coffee producing countries. The news isn't good, especially when you know a little about how the new "efficient" coffee is produced.

March 18, 2004

The Why of Y: explaining the fixed point combinator [64K PDF file].

March 17, 2004

"And so it was that with ingenuity and supplemental information from letters to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, 17-year-old David gathered and refined -- mostly from household products -- enough radioactive material to make a crude breeder reactor in his backyard." The Wuthering Heights Roleplay is one way to while away an afternoon with friends. I note that to be Baptist/Methodist is one the problems one can have, along with being a socialist, being honest, or deaf or playing the bagpipes. sovmusic.ru: music from the old Soviet Union.

March 16, 2004

To keep in mind when marking my students' first assignment: Gollum grading papers. Igino Marini's Fell Types. Font faces from the 17th Century, digitally reproduced for use in the 21st.

March 15, 2004

"Crows: We Want To Be Your Only Bird™".

March 14, 2004

Handy card-sized portraits of people from early church history at the Disseminary. The History of Robots in the Victorian Era.

March 13, 2004

Climate change: An Australian Guide to the Science and Potential Impacts

March 12, 2004

Stanley Fish on "Hard Choices". The Evasion/English Dictionary. M@ and Eliza continue the Australian colonisation of St. Andrews.

March 11, 2004

Cameras are getting very small these days. Meg Lees (Senator in the Federal Parliament, formerly with the Australian Democrats) has a weblog.

March 10, 2004

The Evolution of Type. Ern Malley's Namesake: by David Lewis. The On-Line Picasso Project.

March 9, 2004

Don Knuth on the outrageous subscription fees of many academic journals, and what to do about it. [The link is a 208KB PDF file.] Chris Brink: philosopher, logician, mathematician, vice-chancellor. Robert Corr on Racialised culture. Animals on the Underground. Christine heads off to London (and Oxford and Glasgow) in a few weeks. Maybe she'll see some of these creatures. Edward Tufte on Sparklines: "intense, simple, word-sized graphics." The Brunswick Music Festival is on again. On Friday night we're going to hear Bruce Cockburn.

March 8, 2004

Mathematical Illustrations: a manual of geometry using PostScript for illustrating mathematics.

This is one of the strangest Amazon.com booklists I have managed to stumble across.

New Nietzschean Diet Lets You Eat Whatever You Fear Most.

consequently.org/writing is the new home of my academic scribbling.

April 14, 2003

The 39 Steps: a primer on story writing.

April 11, 2003

Theodore Rout has a website.

The case of Theodore J. Rout.

April 6, 2003

Quaker Business Meetings: how Friends make decisions.

April 4, 2003

Oh to live in San Serriffe.

April 2, 2003

The news in type.

The Experience Machine: Michael Barrish, with Oatmeal. Talking about Nozick. And dancing in his bathrobe.

April 1, 2003

Hydra: Seven heads are better than one.

This is the second insanely interesting application I’ve seen lately. Hydra is a text editor which lets lots of people edit the one file, all at once. I’ve not used it in this mode yet, but if you use Mac OS X, and especially if you’re a co-author of mine, then please download Hydra, and let me know, and we’ll give it a whirl.

March 29, 2003

Soybo. This is the strangest and most interesting software package I have seen in the last few years. It is impossible to summarise easily. Check it yourself if you have a computer with a permanent internet connection, and a desire to get at your stuff when you’re not at your desk.

March 26, 2003

Make your own Metafilter.

March 24, 2003

Some interesting material on U.S. Foreign Policy and terrorism. Collected by Tomas Kapitan, a philosopher at Northern Illinois University. His own papers are also worth a browse.

“Armies are in motion, but are the philosophers and religious leaders, the liberal thinkers, likewise in motion?” From a New York Times Magazine article about Sayyid Qutb, an Islamic thinker and revolutionary. (Read right to the end for the quote and the context.)

March 22, 2003

This is not a happy headline. I’m as glad as other people that the service personnel of the Australian Defence Forces are unharmed. But marking the first Australian bomb of the war with its own headline makes me more than a little queasy.

March 20, 2003

Where is Raed?

March 19, 2003

Donald Knuth on email: “E-mail is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration.”

Online or Invisible? Steve Lawrence on why you should publish your work on the internet.

Melbourne Zoo’s Trail of the Elephants: Zachary and I visited this morning, and it is idyllic. We will be visiting the elephants regularly.

March 18, 2003

Wittgenstein on Rule-Following cited in a defence of Jose Padilla’s right to leagal representation.

Hans Blix, quoting Martin Luther: “even if the world perishes tomorrow, I’m going to plant my apple tree today.”

March 9, 2003

That last snippets entry was added by Zachary, who was fiddling with my computer when I wasn’t looking. Is this a record for the youngest weblogger? He hasn’t reached two yet.

4200 Research Essays about the Net.weblocQWERTGYRHGTJTTRF ;

March 8, 2003

The Budapest Open Access Initiative: more momentum behind free online access to scholarly information.

March 7, 2003

QED, from Robin Hartshorne.

March 5, 2003

Elaine Storkey on TV and the “Enthronement”

Tom Lehrer on George W. Bush: I’m not tempted to write a song about George W.Bush. I couldn't figure out what sort of song I would write. That’s the problem: I don’t want to satirise George Bush and his puppeteers, I want to vaporise them.

March 3, 2003

A Kripkean argument for Goatism.

Fly Guy. Just try it.

March 2, 2003

The “enthronement sermon” of Rowan Williams, the new Archbishop of Canterbury.

February 27, 2003

Darren Lehmann’s last over in the game against Namibia: a four, a four, a four, a six, a four, and a six.

N. T. Wright to be new Bishop of Durham. (That mightn’t mean much to you, but I think Tom Wright’s books on the historical Jesus are very good. I wonder whether Bishoping will give him more or less time to write.)

I am getting lots of hits from Cornell today.

scottraymond.net is back for 2003.

4200 Research Essays about the Net.

February 26, 2003

The Australian Cricket Board’s Anti Doping Committee Decision on Shane Warne.

February 25, 2003

My Real Estate Agent has An Email Address.

A few banner-waving Christians demonstrated...

The Association for Informal Logic and Critical Thinking.

February 24, 2003

Schrödinger’s Iraq.

February 23, 2003

Balloon v1.0, or how one man built and launched (and recovered) his own high altitute “weather balloon.”

February 22, 2003

Shane Warne banned from cricket for 12 months.

Nauru loses contact with the outside world.

February 20, 2003

Who lives and plays in the Big Blue House?

One of Life’s Secrets: how to dissipate blame.

The Netherlands part-timers decided that a mix of white-water rafting and game-viewing would be the best preparation before their World Cup Group A match against Australia on Thursday.

The L-Curve: ways to picture really big numbers. For example, really big amounts of money and unequal distributions of it.

Beatus de Saint Sever, illuminated art from the eleventh century.

Pinwheel Aperiodic Tiling, as seen at Federation Square.

Arches of the Bridge Break Ranks, by Paul Klee.

Qubits are on solid ground?

CoffeeGeek.