Interesting article on fair vs. free trade in this week’s NZ Listener – A Fair Go by David W Young,

Fair trade campaigners remain bothered by the effects of free trade. But their focus has changed. They are now concerned with the lack of free trade caused by rich countries’ protectionism. The old opponents have a common adversary.

There’s also a really alarming article about how commercial whaling might be back in force if the things go in favour of the whaling nations at Ulsan – which looks probable. (That article isn’t online but if it does become available I’ll link back to it later.)

Acer PC “repaired”, software and data reloaded, and yet still not there. PC turns itself off after several hours. Not suspend, not hibernation, not graceful shutdown, just off. New CPU fan and heat sink to arrive today or on Monday. Hopefully the problem, which I originally thought was a fan but it seems we also had disk problems, will then be alleviated. When it’s running it goes like the wind now – disk access is much faster – but turning itself off at random isn’t part of the plan. No problems getting everything back on it – nice to see the backups + software reinstall was fairly trivial.

This was coupled with intermittent iBook problems (it’s not all the heaven portrayed here). After backing everything up on the iBook twice – research and email is critical – ran into problems with the disk. I’ll probably just reinstall a clean Jaguar to stabilize things.

On the off chance I dropped by Noel Leeming as I know they have Mac software in my local store. They can sell me the in-stock Mac OS X 10.3 for $329 or order me Tiger (10.4) for $269. Go figure that out – I’d have bought discounted and now obsolete Panther in a flash to move on from Jaguar (10.2) but doesn’t look like the price is flexible. I’d jump straight to Tiger but I’m concerned some of my other software critical to finishing the thesis would need upgrading turning a “simple” OS upgrade to access features of my existing software into a major upgrade of significant financial cost.

How much simpler it was in the days of my Powerbook 150 (Apple code name “Jedi”) – “the little laptop that could”. Just kept keeping on, keeping on.

Journal article requires citation format that isn’t one of the myriad available for EndNote. So rather than do it all by hand – and possibly botch something up – I’m going to attempt to create my first EndNote output style. Figure the time invested will be repaid if I ever have to write another article for this style.

From Jesus Creed: Why is sin urbanized?

Because, when we define “justice” in general terms and “social justice” in sociological terms, we bifurcate the two and see the biggest problems in the urban context. This is a mistake.

Here’s why: the word “justice” is no different than “social justice” in biblical categories — just run your eyes quickly through Exodus or Deuteronomy or the prophets (and don’t just go to Micah’s famous text). There you learn that “justice” refers to “what is right” (say, tsedeqah or mishpat) and what is right is determined by “what God says” (Torah) and behind what God says is “who God is” (the perichoretic splendor of love and holiness and beauty). So, in biblical categories “justice” is indistinguishable from “social” justice because it is the Nature of God that determines — we are talking ontology here — what is right because God is What is Right.

Acer tech arrived this afternoon to replace the hard disk in the family PC. Metallic grinding noises from the computer followed by it turning itself off prompted the call to the service tech hotline. By some miracle we’d just backed everything up a few days before so I’m now in the process of restoring everything over the next few days. Still can’t believe MS took the backup program out of Windows XP Home leaving me to do it manually.

When the PC’s up and going I’ll backup the iBook to it before its OS upgrade. It’s doing strange things too and a clean install onto its disk will help it make it to the end of the thesis (hopefully).

If you haven’t backed up your PC for a while might be time do it again.

Metanexus Institute – Visual Explorations : Earth’s City Lights.

This image of Earth’s city lights was created with data from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) Operational Linescan System (OLS). Originally designed to view clouds by moonlight, the OLS is also used to map the locations of permanent lights on the Earth’s surface.

Where To Find Great Free Photographs And Visuals For Your Own Online Articles is a blog entry about sources of low cost images for reuse in your own projects.

Via Jonny Baker.

Science & Theology News : NASA developing human-like robots.

The goal of the Ames Research Center is to create a robot that acts, responds and interacts naturally with humans. In order for this to occur, robots must possess traits such as self-awareness and human-awareness.

A week of lots of little things.
Monday – normal day of looking after the four kids while Kim’s at work.
Tuesday – lecturing to BCNZ students on the implications of their understanding of being human upon the wider world. (note to self: get real penguin for next time I do this)
Wednesday a PhD supervision meeting (note to self: put page numbers on drafts)
Thursday – looking after sick 2 year old son. Said 2 year old son pours bottle of baby oil over relatively new sofa. Went to Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy to recover (note to self: do not complete dialogue out loud in cinema).
Friday – coffee with Mark, personal submission on xenotransplantation to Bioethics Council, watching Hurricanes play Crusaders in Super 12 semi-final.

Wired News: The Beeb Shall Inherit the Earth – On, among other things, the BBC’s new backend for accessing their content – BBC Backstage.

Wired News: Eggheads Invent Tele-Petting – Wow, haptic interfaces that solve the HCI problem (that’s Human-Chicken Interface).