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"Hawkins, John"
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Volcano disasters
Discusses volcanoes and why they erupt, and also gives a brief history of some famous, and devastating, volcanic eruptions.
Book
The Garden and the Necropolis: Ethics as Pilgrimage from the Buddha to the Posthuman
Humans inherit an ethical condition shaped by suffering: biological, historical, and relational. Buddhism begins by diagnosing this suffering as inherent to embodied life, while Western theology situates suffering and morality as consequences of the Fall. Levinas reframes suffering not as a problem to be extinguished but as the very site of ethical awakening: the Other’s vulnerability commands an infinite responsibility. Maria Dimitrova’s comparative work on Levinas and Buddhist thought reveals how compassion and responsibility illuminate one another and how both exceed purely ontological frameworks. This paper weaves these traditions into a single genealogy of ethics—from Edenic innocence to the historical moral burden of exile, from biological interdependence to the modern “Necropolis,” and finally toward a speculative future in which technology may allow a reconfiguration of suffering itself. The result is a proposal that ethics is neither eternal nor arbitrary but a pilgrimage arising from suffering and oriented toward a horizon of grace made possible not by divine restoration but by human and post-human agency.
Journal Article
Shipwreck disasters
Reviews the most disastrous shipwrecks, from the Mary Rose in 1545 to the Princess of the Stars in 2008, and explores the causes and circumstances of these calamities at sea.
Book
“Words, Words, Words”: Hamlet, Polonius, and the Death of Philosophy in the State
This essay argues that Hamlet should be read not merely as a domestic or dynastic tragedy, but as a political–philosophical ALLEGORY in which language itself becomes a site of crisis. Beginning with Hamlet’s contemptuous reply to Polonius—”Words, words, words” (2.2.191)—the play dramatizes the death of philosophy in the state, where speech is emptied of wisdom and reduced to surveillance, platitude, or performance. Had events unfolded differently, Prince Hamlet might have become a philosopher-king in the Platonic sense, ruling through reflection and justice. Instead, succession ambiguity, Claudius’s manipulative election, and the corruption of logos foreclose that possibility. The Mousetrap, often interpreted as a test of guilt, can also be read as a thought experiment about succession itself: a theatrical attempt to expose the fragility of legitimacy in an elective monarchy. Hamlet’s wager that words and representation can secure truth collapses, leaving only suspicion and violence. Polonius parodies philosophy’s degeneration into bureaucratic rhetoric, while Horatio inherits the burden of words as memory—tasked with telling a story that remains undecidable. Drawing on Plato, Foucault, Kewes, and recent scholarship, the essay contends that Shakespeare stages the foreclosure of philosophical sovereignty: a tragedy for Denmark and, symbolically, for the world.
Journal Article
Bigfoot and other monsters
Describes the history of Bigfoot and other wildmen encounters, examines each story and determines its truthfulness, and includes information on other mythical creatures, such as the Loch Ness Monster.
Book
Efficiency and complexity in grammars
This book addresses a question fundamental to any discussion of grammatical theory and grammatical variation: to what extent can principles of grammar be explained through language use? The book argues that there is a profound correspondence between performance data and the fixed conventions of grammars. Preferences and patterns found in the one, the book shows, are reflected in constraints and variation patterns in the other. The theoretical consequences of the proposed ‘performance-grammar correspondence hypothesis’ are far-reaching — for current grammatical formalisms, for the innateness hypothesis, and for psycholinguistic models of performance and learning. Drawing on empirical generalizations and insights from language typology, generative grammar, psycholinguistics, and historical linguistics, this book demonstrates that the assumption that grammars are immune to performance is false. It presents detailed empirical case studies and arguments for an alternative theory in which performance has shaped the conventions of grammars and thus the variation patterns found in the world’s languages. The innateness of language, the book argues, resides primarily in the mechanisms human beings have for processing and learning it.
eBook
The world's strangest unexplained mysteries
Examines the world's most famous unexplained mysteries, including the Nazca Lines, Stonehenge, and Anastasia Romanov.
Book
Getting Data Science Done
Getting Data Science Done outlines the essential stages in running successful data science projects–providing comprehensive guidelines to help you identify potential issues and then a range of strategies for mitigating them.
Data science is a field that synthesizes statistics, computer science and business analytics to deliver results that can impact almost any type of process or organization. Data science is also an evolving technical discipline, whose practice is full of pitfalls and potential problems for managers, stakeholders and practitioners. Many organizations struggle to consistently deliver results with data science due to a wide range of issues, including knowledge barriers, problem framing, organizational change and integration with IT and engineering.
Getting Data Science Done outlines the essential stages in running successful data science projects. The book provides comprehensive guidelines to help you identify potential issues and then a range of strategies for mitigating them. The book is organized as a sequential process allowing the reader to work their way through a project from an initial idea all the way to a deployed and integrated product.
eBook
Aliens and UFOs
Examines the alien and UFO phenomenon, citing such famous instances as Roswell, Betty and Barney Hill, and Exeter.
Book
HEDGES error-correcting code for DNA storage corrects indels and allows sequence constraints
Synthetic DNA is rapidly emerging as a durable, high-density information storage platform. A major challenge for DNA-based information encoding strategies is the high rate of errors that arise during DNA synthesis and sequencing. Here, we describe the HEDGES (Hash Encoded, Decoded by Greedy Exhaustive Search) error-correcting code that repairs all three basic types of DNA errors: insertions, deletions, and substitutions. HEDGES also converts unresolved or compound errors into substitutions, restoring synchronization for correction via a standard Reed–Solomon outer code that is interleaved across strands. Moreover, HEDGES can incorporate a broad class of user-defined sequence constraints, such as avoiding excess repeats, or too high or too low windowed guanine–cytosine (GC) content. We test our code both via in silico simulations and with synthesized DNA. From its measured performance, we develop a statistical model applicable to much larger datasets. Predicted performance indicates the possibility of error-free recovery of petabyte- and exabyte-scale data from DNA degraded with as much as 10% errors. As the cost of DNA synthesis and sequencing continues to drop, we anticipate that HEDGES will find applications in large-scale error-free information encoding.
Journal Article