Argument from authority is a terrible thing - but culture is not (always). And it seems to be a cultural practice on the internet to provide some list of achievements or whatnot. Personally, I think clarity and accuracy of arguments are all that are required - but I cannot immediately convince all visitors of this truth immediately. So to that end, until I win them over otherwise - here's the academic bio:
My first degree was a Bachelor of Science from the University of New South Wales where I enrolled in a "Bachelor of Advanced Science: Physics and Astronomy" - an attempt by that university (now a common marketing tactic) to attract students away from other universities that offered merely a "Bachelor of Science". I was motivated since I was around 5 years old to become an astronomer - it was my sole goal throughout my time in school. However I didn't actually understand my own subconscious until later - and my passion for astronomy was actually more a passion for understanding the biggest and deepest questions asked - and in my young mind these were about physically BIG things - like stars and galaxies and ancient things: like the big bang. Those early questions about "What's out there?" and "How does all that work?" when I looked into the night sky and had conversations with my father (most especially) about these things was gradually shaped and transformed into something I thought even more profound as I studied at university: why are those laws explaining how all that works like that? And: could it be otherwise? And, most especially, how do we know all of this?
And so I was led from astronomy (but never entirely, and only gradually) into more fundamental physics - like quantum theory and general relativity - and then into aspects of mathematics and logic and finally into the Philosophy of Science. My 4 year undergraduate degree became 6 and university administrators tolerated my increasing debt to the government and rejection of ever choosing one particular major to put on my testamur. Ultimately that read "Philosophy of Science" though I had taken enough subjects for, essentially, majors in both mathematics and physics as well. I say "essentially" as although I completed the required number of units for the majors, I did not meet the strict rules having skipped some of the compulsory subjects electing to instead to take more interesting optional ones (e.g.: I preferred studying "Logic and Computability" in maths which taught me more about Godel's Incompleteness theorem rather than something from second year to do with calculus. I'd done enough calculus, I thought). Bachelors degrees of this type are far too onerous. The sheer number of subjects is ridiculous. For a science degree it was at least 8 subjects per year, for 3 years and then a big project in the final year. UNSW actually required more than this. I ended up doing quite a bit more than this and so spent more time there than I needed to. But my interests kept changing. But no subject taken was entirely a waste - for example - I took on a psychology subject and it was all I needed to know about psychology to know: there is little they know. It was this first degree that introduced me to the work of Karl Popper and David Deutsch - and I've not stopped studying what they have to say about just about everything ever since. My worldview is essentially shaped by their writings on the nature of knowledge, science, physics, ethics, politics and philosophy broadly. Neither of these geniuses is an easy read. Both are less well known than they should be. And even now, some 20 years after I first discovered them both, I am still easily surprised by what they have to say when I pick up either "The Logic of Scientific Discovery" by Popper or "The Fabric of Reality" by Deutsch.
After this first degree, I took on a Bachelor of Teaching Degree from the University of Western Sydney. The less said about that the better. I studied how to teach Mathematics and Science. At least that's what they told me it was about. I did it only so governments would legally recognise me as capable and qualified to be employed as a teacher in most every country around the world. That degree taught me much about what passes for educational theory and philosophy. Enough to know that the entire field is so far wide of the mark when it comes to understanding how learning actually works as to not be merely barking up the wrong tree - but in an entirely wrong forest of bad and false ideas.
While completing this degree I was regularly attending philosophy seminars back at UNSW (so my mind would not completely stagnate over in an Education Faculty) and became interested in linguistic philosophy (a mistake) and because I had also recently tried my hand at learning Spanish (I am awful at languages) I decided to take on yet a third uni qualification which was a Postgraduate Certificate in "Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages" (TESOL) through Macquarie University. The reason? To learn about grammar. I was part of a generation that never learned the explicit rules of grammar. One does not need to, of course - but I wanted to. And I did. It was actually quite interesting and actually the qualification turned out useful as I did teach English for a while in London to travellers which is a story in itself, not for now.
My fourth university qualification was another Postgraduate Certificate. This time from the Australian Catholic University. Why ACU? Because my employer at the time was happily paying for people to do this degree. Strangely, they did not care I was already fully qualified as a mathematics teacher. I just wanted to learn more mathematics. This time I did take on additional calculus subjects and also some more discrete mathematics. It was fun to learn all those new things. Maths can be fun. Exams never are.
My fifth qualification is Master of Science in Astronomy through Swinburne University. I suppose if I am proud of any qualification, it is this one. As far as Masters Degrees go - the Swinburne Master of Science seems a bit more rigorous than others I have looked into. Some Masters require 8 units of study - or less. This required 12. And some major research projects. It was hard work but the most interesting of all my degrees. 12 subjects ranging from Planetary Science, through to Galaxy formation, computational astrophysics, cosmology, general relativity, astrobiology and all about telescopes and more. I was tolerated by my fellow students when I lectured them about Popper or pulled them up for their justificationist, anti-fallibalist attitudes (another story). My Masters in Astronomy completed - in my mind - my childhood dream of becoming "an astronomer". I have never been employed as one, and now never intend to be. The Bachelors I completed, followed by the Masters was enough to satisfy my curiosity about what the present state of knowledge in that field was, how research was conducted and what "being an astronomer" was rather going to be like had I gone that way. There is much in particular to say about the culture of the world that is "professional astronomy". While much good work is done, so very much is publishing for the sake of not perishing - poor quality observations or simulations (once I completed my own "research" and got the hint with the carrot dangled that there might be a "PhD" in something like what I'd done I realised that couldn't possibly be what I could devote more time to - and I lacked the imagination to think of anything better.) I still like to stare at the sky and have not lost my passion for astronomy, but like many children who first turned to the stars, my mind is taken to places well beyond the limited amount we can see.
Partway through the Masters, I paused and enrolled back at Macquarie in a Diploma of Geoscience in Geophysics. Of the 8 units - I got through 2. I think my highest mark ever was in the first year geology subject. It covered a lot of stuff. I'd never studied geology before but was so interested, I was doing all my homework and more. The background I already had in science made learning some of the material far easier. I thought I was on the way to leaving what I was doing to enter the very lucrative mining industry. Then I sort of had a revelation: what the hell would I want to do that for? Just the money? So I stopped, went back and finished the Masters. For that I won something called "The Australian Sky and Telescope Award" for the best performance, that year in Australia, in an Astronomy Masters degree. For now, 5 and a bit degrees is enough.
I worked the entire time to pay my way through my degrees. I was a security guard at what was then Bankstown Square for 6 years and saw my share of gang violence (this was back in the late 90s), shop stealers and court appearances. I have not since been on a first name basis with members of the police force. The job allowed me to study in between arrests and patrols. It now provides useful source material for funny anecdotes over a beer. Though I look back fondly, the reality was I would travel 60+ minutes to university each day, typically be there from 9 to 4 or 5pm with around a 1 hour break at some point during the day between lectures, tutorials and laboratory work, and on many days immediately travel straight to my workplace as a security guard where I'd stay until 9 or 10pm. On weekends, it was just the security work, of course, but shifts would be 8 to 12 hours and sometimes the nightshift from 6pm to 6am.
When finally I did "retire" from that work, I became a "science communicator" with (what was then) The Outreach Centre for Sciences at The University of New South Wales doing Science Shows for visitors to the university and for things like Science Week at the Australian Museum. My speciality was running our inflatable planetarium (actually quite an impressive device that we could fit 50 people inside of) which we would transport to schools across the state and other places to promote the university and inspire people to take an interest in astronomy. One year I was essentially Dr Karl Kruszelnicki's warm up act for a week in August as I did my show all about whizz bang chemical reactions right before he came on. We'd do the usual Liquid Nitrogen stuff and fill balloons with hydrogen and explode them. All the usual schtick. It was very poorly paid but gave me a taste for performing and enticed me into doing physics teaching.
And so with all of that stuff I now can't stop telling people what I think about every topic. As I can't keep my big mouth shut, this website serves as a conduit for my stream of consciousness. Sometime around typing my 1000th word of a Facebook comment I realized that I probably shouldn't be trying to explain the physics of planetary alignments on social media. I mean - if someone is going to go to zero effort and re-post rubbish without checking (let alone caring) if it's true or false about how the world is coming to an end, then they are even more unlikely to bother reading anything I have to say on the topic.
Hence this website.
But for every Facebook post, Tweet, Tumbler or Instagram about coming apocalypses, the powers of crystals, pseudo-scientific medicine, bad-science nutrition, the dangers of fluoride, the evils of coal, etc, etc - there's a need for some kind of counter from my little corner if only to keep my pontificating within the relatively cordoned off area that is a website. So rather than rant and rave for essay long posts that Facebook might or might not publish to news feeds anyway - this seems to be a more aesthetically pleasing outlet for commentary on the world.
And it's a useful place to keep materials for my lessons together.
All my pictures are either used under Creative Commons licenses or taken by myself (those would be the bad ones).
Criticism is the best thing you can do for an idea. Arrogance isn't a criticism.
My first degree was a Bachelor of Science from the University of New South Wales where I enrolled in a "Bachelor of Advanced Science: Physics and Astronomy" - an attempt by that university (now a common marketing tactic) to attract students away from other universities that offered merely a "Bachelor of Science". I was motivated since I was around 5 years old to become an astronomer - it was my sole goal throughout my time in school. However I didn't actually understand my own subconscious until later - and my passion for astronomy was actually more a passion for understanding the biggest and deepest questions asked - and in my young mind these were about physically BIG things - like stars and galaxies and ancient things: like the big bang. Those early questions about "What's out there?" and "How does all that work?" when I looked into the night sky and had conversations with my father (most especially) about these things was gradually shaped and transformed into something I thought even more profound as I studied at university: why are those laws explaining how all that works like that? And: could it be otherwise? And, most especially, how do we know all of this?
And so I was led from astronomy (but never entirely, and only gradually) into more fundamental physics - like quantum theory and general relativity - and then into aspects of mathematics and logic and finally into the Philosophy of Science. My 4 year undergraduate degree became 6 and university administrators tolerated my increasing debt to the government and rejection of ever choosing one particular major to put on my testamur. Ultimately that read "Philosophy of Science" though I had taken enough subjects for, essentially, majors in both mathematics and physics as well. I say "essentially" as although I completed the required number of units for the majors, I did not meet the strict rules having skipped some of the compulsory subjects electing to instead to take more interesting optional ones (e.g.: I preferred studying "Logic and Computability" in maths which taught me more about Godel's Incompleteness theorem rather than something from second year to do with calculus. I'd done enough calculus, I thought). Bachelors degrees of this type are far too onerous. The sheer number of subjects is ridiculous. For a science degree it was at least 8 subjects per year, for 3 years and then a big project in the final year. UNSW actually required more than this. I ended up doing quite a bit more than this and so spent more time there than I needed to. But my interests kept changing. But no subject taken was entirely a waste - for example - I took on a psychology subject and it was all I needed to know about psychology to know: there is little they know. It was this first degree that introduced me to the work of Karl Popper and David Deutsch - and I've not stopped studying what they have to say about just about everything ever since. My worldview is essentially shaped by their writings on the nature of knowledge, science, physics, ethics, politics and philosophy broadly. Neither of these geniuses is an easy read. Both are less well known than they should be. And even now, some 20 years after I first discovered them both, I am still easily surprised by what they have to say when I pick up either "The Logic of Scientific Discovery" by Popper or "The Fabric of Reality" by Deutsch.
After this first degree, I took on a Bachelor of Teaching Degree from the University of Western Sydney. The less said about that the better. I studied how to teach Mathematics and Science. At least that's what they told me it was about. I did it only so governments would legally recognise me as capable and qualified to be employed as a teacher in most every country around the world. That degree taught me much about what passes for educational theory and philosophy. Enough to know that the entire field is so far wide of the mark when it comes to understanding how learning actually works as to not be merely barking up the wrong tree - but in an entirely wrong forest of bad and false ideas.
While completing this degree I was regularly attending philosophy seminars back at UNSW (so my mind would not completely stagnate over in an Education Faculty) and became interested in linguistic philosophy (a mistake) and because I had also recently tried my hand at learning Spanish (I am awful at languages) I decided to take on yet a third uni qualification which was a Postgraduate Certificate in "Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages" (TESOL) through Macquarie University. The reason? To learn about grammar. I was part of a generation that never learned the explicit rules of grammar. One does not need to, of course - but I wanted to. And I did. It was actually quite interesting and actually the qualification turned out useful as I did teach English for a while in London to travellers which is a story in itself, not for now.
My fourth university qualification was another Postgraduate Certificate. This time from the Australian Catholic University. Why ACU? Because my employer at the time was happily paying for people to do this degree. Strangely, they did not care I was already fully qualified as a mathematics teacher. I just wanted to learn more mathematics. This time I did take on additional calculus subjects and also some more discrete mathematics. It was fun to learn all those new things. Maths can be fun. Exams never are.
My fifth qualification is Master of Science in Astronomy through Swinburne University. I suppose if I am proud of any qualification, it is this one. As far as Masters Degrees go - the Swinburne Master of Science seems a bit more rigorous than others I have looked into. Some Masters require 8 units of study - or less. This required 12. And some major research projects. It was hard work but the most interesting of all my degrees. 12 subjects ranging from Planetary Science, through to Galaxy formation, computational astrophysics, cosmology, general relativity, astrobiology and all about telescopes and more. I was tolerated by my fellow students when I lectured them about Popper or pulled them up for their justificationist, anti-fallibalist attitudes (another story). My Masters in Astronomy completed - in my mind - my childhood dream of becoming "an astronomer". I have never been employed as one, and now never intend to be. The Bachelors I completed, followed by the Masters was enough to satisfy my curiosity about what the present state of knowledge in that field was, how research was conducted and what "being an astronomer" was rather going to be like had I gone that way. There is much in particular to say about the culture of the world that is "professional astronomy". While much good work is done, so very much is publishing for the sake of not perishing - poor quality observations or simulations (once I completed my own "research" and got the hint with the carrot dangled that there might be a "PhD" in something like what I'd done I realised that couldn't possibly be what I could devote more time to - and I lacked the imagination to think of anything better.) I still like to stare at the sky and have not lost my passion for astronomy, but like many children who first turned to the stars, my mind is taken to places well beyond the limited amount we can see.
Partway through the Masters, I paused and enrolled back at Macquarie in a Diploma of Geoscience in Geophysics. Of the 8 units - I got through 2. I think my highest mark ever was in the first year geology subject. It covered a lot of stuff. I'd never studied geology before but was so interested, I was doing all my homework and more. The background I already had in science made learning some of the material far easier. I thought I was on the way to leaving what I was doing to enter the very lucrative mining industry. Then I sort of had a revelation: what the hell would I want to do that for? Just the money? So I stopped, went back and finished the Masters. For that I won something called "The Australian Sky and Telescope Award" for the best performance, that year in Australia, in an Astronomy Masters degree. For now, 5 and a bit degrees is enough.
I worked the entire time to pay my way through my degrees. I was a security guard at what was then Bankstown Square for 6 years and saw my share of gang violence (this was back in the late 90s), shop stealers and court appearances. I have not since been on a first name basis with members of the police force. The job allowed me to study in between arrests and patrols. It now provides useful source material for funny anecdotes over a beer. Though I look back fondly, the reality was I would travel 60+ minutes to university each day, typically be there from 9 to 4 or 5pm with around a 1 hour break at some point during the day between lectures, tutorials and laboratory work, and on many days immediately travel straight to my workplace as a security guard where I'd stay until 9 or 10pm. On weekends, it was just the security work, of course, but shifts would be 8 to 12 hours and sometimes the nightshift from 6pm to 6am.
When finally I did "retire" from that work, I became a "science communicator" with (what was then) The Outreach Centre for Sciences at The University of New South Wales doing Science Shows for visitors to the university and for things like Science Week at the Australian Museum. My speciality was running our inflatable planetarium (actually quite an impressive device that we could fit 50 people inside of) which we would transport to schools across the state and other places to promote the university and inspire people to take an interest in astronomy. One year I was essentially Dr Karl Kruszelnicki's warm up act for a week in August as I did my show all about whizz bang chemical reactions right before he came on. We'd do the usual Liquid Nitrogen stuff and fill balloons with hydrogen and explode them. All the usual schtick. It was very poorly paid but gave me a taste for performing and enticed me into doing physics teaching.
And so with all of that stuff I now can't stop telling people what I think about every topic. As I can't keep my big mouth shut, this website serves as a conduit for my stream of consciousness. Sometime around typing my 1000th word of a Facebook comment I realized that I probably shouldn't be trying to explain the physics of planetary alignments on social media. I mean - if someone is going to go to zero effort and re-post rubbish without checking (let alone caring) if it's true or false about how the world is coming to an end, then they are even more unlikely to bother reading anything I have to say on the topic.
Hence this website.
But for every Facebook post, Tweet, Tumbler or Instagram about coming apocalypses, the powers of crystals, pseudo-scientific medicine, bad-science nutrition, the dangers of fluoride, the evils of coal, etc, etc - there's a need for some kind of counter from my little corner if only to keep my pontificating within the relatively cordoned off area that is a website. So rather than rant and rave for essay long posts that Facebook might or might not publish to news feeds anyway - this seems to be a more aesthetically pleasing outlet for commentary on the world.
And it's a useful place to keep materials for my lessons together.
All my pictures are either used under Creative Commons licenses or taken by myself (those would be the bad ones).
Criticism is the best thing you can do for an idea. Arrogance isn't a criticism.