This is a personal area for holiday snaps, etc. For academic stuff go to my Homepage
About me
I was born in Cwmbran, Wales, and have family in the UK and Australia. I was educated at Cambridge and the Australian National University. I work as a researcher in the philosophy and history of science, particularly life sciences. I'm married to my long-term research collaborator Karola Stotz. My (our) non-work interests are beaches, bush and birds.
Skype address paulandracal
Holiday snaps....
North Carolina Mountains April 2006
Weekend in paradise March 2006
Yuragir National Park Jan 2006
Cooloola Nat. Park, New Year 2005
Cividale del Friuli, September 2005
July 05 - Bald Rock NP & Warrambungles NP
Statistics
'Those Platonists are a curse,' he said,
'God's fire upon the wane,
A diagram hung there instead,
More women born than men.'
W.B Yeats
The knowledge that
is suited to our situation and powers, the whole compass of moral, natural and
mathematical science, was neglected by the new Platonists; whilst they
exhausted their strength in the verbal disputes of metaphysics...and studied to
reconcile Aristotle with Plato, on subjects of which both these philosophers
were as ignorant as the rest of mankind.
Gibbon, Decline and Fall,
XIII.
"When scientists abolish the gods...they create instead...instinct.
Deification is replaced by reification, which is only a little less dangerous and far less picturesque"
David Lack, The Life of the Robin, 1943
"As I now draw towards a conclusion of both my experiments and observations on the singing of birds; it may possibly be asked, what use
results either from the trouble or expense which they have cost me, both of which I admit to have been considerable.
I will readily own, that no very important advantages can be derived from them...at best they should rather be considered as what Lord Bacon terms
experiments of light, rather than of fruit."
Barrington, Daines. 1773. Experiments and Observations on the Singing of Birds. Phil. Trans. R. Soc., 63: 249-291.
"No one who met him could easily doubt that Wittgenstein was a tragic figure of some magnitude...
[he] failed to realise that what he had to convey was essentially a poetic awareness of the otherness of reality;
he was led, presumably by historical accidents of which I am ignorant, to enshrine his message in a logico-philosophical jargon...
[which] resulted in him being taken for a philosopher - an identification by which he was at first flattered, later filled by apprehension
and a sense of guilt...'
Conrad H. Waddington, The Ethical Animal, 1960