Independence and other things

Tropes and Other Things

Our day-today experience of the world regularly brings us into contact with middle-sized objects such as apples, dogs, and other human beings. These objects possess observable properties, properties that are available or accessible to the unaided senses, such as redness and roundness, as well as properties that are not so available, such as chemical ones. Both of these kinds of properties serve...

The Universe Among Other Things

Peter Simons has argued that the expression ‘the universe’ is not a genuine singular term: it can name neither a single, completely encompassing individual, nor a collection of individuals. (It is, rather, a semantically plural term standing equally for every existing object.) I offer reasons for resisting Simons’s arguments on both scores.

About faults, errors and other dangerous things

In this paper the traditional paradigm for learning and training of operators in complex systems is discussed and criticised. There is a strong influence (the doctrine of 'mental logic') coming from research carried out in artificial intelligence (AI). The most well known arguments against the AI-approach are presented and discussed in relation to expertise, intuition and implicit knowledge. Th...

Testing Naval Artillery and Other Things

On jumping genes and other things

EMBO Reports (ER): Many thanks for agreeing to talk with EMBO Reports about the fascinating topic of transposable element activity in the human genome. First of all, how did you become interested in this phenomenon? Fred Gage (FG): I first became aware of transposable elements approximately 14 years ago, when I was studying a gene that modifies fibroblast growth factor (FGF) transcription. This...