Chemero from Cincinnati to Vanderbilt Tony Chemero (philosophy of mind and cognitive science), University Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Cincinnati, has accepted a senior offer from the Department of Philosophy a…

I have news.

leiterreports.com/2026/04/13/c...

Vote for the best of the internet I just voted in The Webby People's Voice Awards and checked my voter registration.

Our series, “How We Came To Know Earth,” is a guide to the modern understanding of fundamental climate science. Vote for it in this year's Webby Awards:

An Arctic Road Trip Brings Vital Underground Networks into View | Quanta Magazine A vast meshwork of soil-bound fungi governs life aboveground. In Alaska, and at field sites around the world, researchers are racing to understand exactly how, with critical stores of carbon at stake.

Journey with writer @maxlevy.bsky.social and a team of researchers through the Arctic tundra as they sample some of Earth’s rarest and most restricted fungal species — underground wisps that govern life aboveground. www.quantamagazine.org/an-arctic-ro...

For better or worse, McLuhan gave it a try. I find the biological analogies useful, like Maynard Smith and Szathmáry's book. They talk about “the way in which information is transmitted between generations” as being key to major transitions in evolution. Woese also good on this.

Elizabeth Eisenstein is good on effects of printing press, Ithiel de Sola Pool on the telephone, Jack Goody and David Olson on literacy. All qualitative, though.

Yes, I get that. I suspect we have differing views on what mathematics is. I'm inclined toward a Turing-computational approach, which is not everyone's cup of tea. Nonetheless this is a useful pursuit. Schmandt-Besserat has some good thoughts on the bifurcation of early writing into text and math.

Seems to me that the adjectival property of "threeness" is part of natural language. In mathematics, "3" is a symbol that is related to other symbols by rules. Are there Venn diagrams of natural language and math in which their overlap contains "3" and other evolved, intuitive math concepts?

Not sure how linguists would deal with it as it has no natural semantics, just "deliberate semantics" as Vygotsky would say. There are certainly linguists who eschew semantics, but I imagine they would find mathematics boring as all of the rules are given in advance.

Resolutions passed by county commission on 2/24. You can download 'em.

Block 2701, lots 2, 6, 32.02, 85-90

This is "Aldo Leopold's Big Woods" behind the campus. It will be preserved open space adjacent to the township's Loveless Preserve. It includes an option on an easement to facilitate the Johnson Trolley Trail including the proposed bike/ped bridge across 295.

Reading Group - Gibson (1979) The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception Rob, Marianne, and I had so much fun with the Turvey (2019) reading group that we decided to keep going, and we decided to return to the so...

Buckle up!

psychsciencenotes.blogspot.com/2026/02/read...

Home of the ever so appealing Cartlidge Meats....

"Therefore there must be two states of this copolymer; perhaps a straight chain which serves as a memory, and a folded conformation which can selectively interact with the environment.” 2/2

Interesting to note that Howard Pattee anticipated the ribozyme from first principles in 1966: "“The memory and transcription functions must occur at different times; that is, the sequence of copolymers cannot act as a degenerate memory and a non-degenerate selective structure at the same time." 1/2

A small polymerase ribozyme that can synthesize itself and its complementary strand The emergence of a chemical system capable of self-replication and evolution is a critical event in the origin of life. RNA polymerase ribozymes can replicate RNA, but their large size and structural ...

A small polymerase ribozyme that can synthesize itself and its complementary strand | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... - this looks super cool, but does it really relate to the origin of life?

Imagine! I mean, imagine how hard it is for a quadratic equation to understand itself! Imagine how hard it is for that statement to have any meaning whatsoever!

I like thinking of the gene regulatory network as an organ - a little chemical brain. And it seems reasonable to think of the adaptive responsiveness of the cell as reflecting a kind of cognition.

Updated Chapter 1 of my lectures notes for the Evolutionary Systems course.
casci.binghamton.edu/academics/i-...

And it will mark the 100th birthday of Howard Pattee!

How Dad’s Fitness May Be Packaged and Passed Down in Sperm RNA | Quanta Magazine Research into how a father’s choices — such as diet, exercise, stress, nicotine use — may transfer traits to his children has become impossible to ignore.

What child is this? Look to the father.

Closing the loop: how semantic closure enables open-ended evolution? Abstract. This study explores the evolutionary emergence of semantic closure—the self-referential mechanism through which symbols actively construct and in

New paper led by @amahury.bsky.social published in JRS Interface:
"Closing the loop: how semantic closure enables open-ended evolution?"
royalsocietypublishing.org/rsif/article...

Urban lichens as an emerging model for urban evolution Click on the article title to read more.

bsapubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

The Year in Biology | Quanta Magazine Take a jaunt through a jungle of strange neurons underlying your sense of touch, hundreds of millions of years of animal evolution and the dense neural networks of brains and AIs.

www.quantamagazine.org/the-year-in-...

Behavior and Culture in One Dimension (Resources for Ecological Psychology Series) Amazon.com: Behavior and Culture in One Dimension (Resources for Ecological Psychology Series): 9780367703295: Waters, Dennis: Books

The gift that keeps on giving....
www.amazon.com/Behavior-Dim...

By "memory" you mean long-term perception?

Humans, of course, are the ultimate allosteric devices, almost infinitely reconfigurable.

It appears that Rider used the prospective WCC sale funds as collateral for loans that funded operating deficits. The money they got from the sale repaid those loans. So there's nothing left.

I doubt von Neumann would agree that DNA sequences are computer code. As he wrote in TSRA, "by axiomatizing automata in this manner, one has thrown half of the problem out of the window, and it may be the more important half." It's the stuff that can't be formalized that's interesting.

I continue to think the the more interesting question is "how does language acquire children?"