Blog

John Rawls's (1971) notion of national self-sufficiency in terms of resources is about as far from our current globalized world as we can get, in terms of theory aimed at non-ideal applications. Globalization is a fact of life. And yet, with each displacement in our...

Notes from a debrief of Philip Morris’s 1998 Litter Focus Group read: “Non-smokers tend to give smokers a lot of slack about throwing down a butt,” claiming that “throwing it on the ground eliminates fire risk,” and that litter is a “natural result of outdoor smoking...

In Erasmus University Rotterdam's weekly online magazine Erasmus Magazine, a condensed version of my speech I gave Monday March 4th, 2019 for the Opening Ceremony of the Erasmus Sustainability Days is now published. It's also available in Dutch [in Nederlands].

My article, "I Am a Fake Loop: the Effects of Advertising-Based Artificial Selection," just appeared in the journal Biosemiotics. You can read it here for free. In this piece, I explore Niko Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz's ethological understandings of the human animal,...

A couple weeks ago, UCSF launched our newest collection of industry documents. The UCSF Industry Documents archive is a repository of almost one hundred million pages of previously secret industry documents now searchable for the public due to discovery and legal...

The great American newspapers have shot themselves in the foot. In the race against online media and decentralized user-based content, when they haven’t been bought up by conglomerates with the intention to destroy them or use them as organs of ideology, newspapers...

The 2018 Biosemiotics Gathering at UC Berkeley organized by myself and Terry Deacon takes place June 17-20 at the International House. Please see www.biosemiotics.life for more information. The Biosemiotics schedule can be found here.

My new lexicon entry in the Encyclopedia of Food and Agricultural Ethics on "Fungi Ethics" is online. It can be accessed here. Fungi ethics, which is closely allied to plant ethics, describes how fungi--both for better and worse--are forever imbricated in our food...

I am inspired by recycled electronics. IT Asset Partners (ITAP) recently posted a video about it's ragtag recycled electronic car surpassing in range the major three manufacturers' (Tesla, Chevy Volt, and Nissan Leaf) top vehicles. ITAP director Eric Lundgren stresses...

In the Bay Area, and probably all around California, I have been seen at bus stops and on buses a very disturbing ad. What is disturbing about this advertisement, is that whoever made it failed to understand adolescent psychology. The ad says: Underage drinking and...

Out of the almost 500 shellmounds that existed in the greater bay area, over the last few centuries, these have been systematically destroyed. The Berkeley Shellmound is the earliest of those shellmounds established in the greater Bay Area region by the people...

One of the great things about empire is it doesn't attempt to hide its monstrosity. The latest "Military Parade" stunt, normally reserved in Western cultural imaginations for Stalinist USSR, Maoist China, and North Korea, has now come home to roost. The spiritual...

I just came upon a great little app/website Are Men Talking Too Much? that is a simple and humorous counter that allows tracking the gender of the person speaking in a meeting. I like this because I am prone to talk too much, and over the years, through great effort,...

The Washington Post's alarming story about teenagers intentionally imbibing Tide detergent "pods" (or "pacs") due to dares by other teenagers, is not a story about teenagers being dumb, but really one about faulty design. The increasing one-use bite-sized...

I am very pleased to announce that the Eighteenth Annual Biosemiotics Gathering will take place at the University of California Berkeley's elegant International House grand auditorium June 17-20, 2018.  On behalf of the Organizing Committee, Terry Deacon and myself...