Blog

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...

Because we currently live in a throw-away economy, with devastating impacts on our psychology, social relationships, health, and environment, evolving away from this paradigm is paramount for our survival. The invention of cheap plastics in the 1950s seemed like a...

In wake of the recent racially-motivated and anti-woman murder and maimings in Charlottesville, I've written a Medium article "Charlottesville is just around the corner" about the projected invasion of San Francisco and Berkeley this weekend by neo-Nazis and their...

To cut through the very successful and rhetorically effective branding by fascists, I've developed a handy guide (to be expanded): (Alt-Fact) vs. (Brutal Reality) "Alt-Right" = NeoNazi "Snowflake" = Not interested in dehumanizing people; not completely numbed yet...

Dear Europe, It's been a lovely trip. We hiked in the Austrian Alps, swam in the Baltic sea, and enjoyed the joyful chaos of Fête de la Musique in Berlin. Despite these beguiling adventures, I remain puzzled. You seem to have given a full monopoly of clear outdoor air...

I'm happy to announce that the Biosemiotic Ethics special issue in the Zeitschrift für Semiotik I co-edited with Morten Tønnessen and Jonathan Beever has come out. It's got the great semiotician John Deeley's last article in it he wrote before passing, and we...

Here's a guest blog post I did on the US Action on Smoking and Health website for Earth Day, titled "For an Earth Free of Tobacco Waste." This work came out of the World Health Organization (WHO) chapter I wrote in the forthcoming The Environmental Impacts of Tobacco...