August 2005

For those of you running Movable Type 3.2 here’s an online web-based tool to generate a new stylesheet for your blog. Ingenious. See - Movalog : Movable Type Style Generator.

Via Elise at Learning Movable Type: Movable Type Style Generator.

It’s a lovely day outside - a blue sky, crisp air and warm sun. I’m at my desk in the postgrad area in the Carey library but that’s not so bad because I have a view out of the window. Plus the All Blacks’ last minute victory over South Africa on Saturday and the English making Australia follow-on in the cricket have all helped buoy my mood. (We won’t talk about Wellington’s performance against Otago last Friday in the NPC though - it’s beginning to muck up my Virtual NPC lead.)

Two weeks ago it was a different matter - not only watching the All Blacks go down on Sunday morning to South Africa but then went to church for a sermon on the wrath of God. Took me about a week to recover from the combination of the two.

Anyway, I’m off to read a really interesting looking article in the latest

Theology and Science journal.

Barns, Ian. “Debating the Theological Implications of New Technologies.” Theology and Science 3, no. 2 (2005): 179-196.

Church agencies to join major climate change coalition - news from ekklesia

Heard something like this today from a friend of mine who thought I’d be interested in looking at a bright Mars in the sky tonight. But there’s no evening Mars in the sky at the moment - just Venus and Jupiter over in the north-west. The Stardome here at Auckland has this article about some Mars misinformation circulating on the net. See: Stardome Space News Page : Mars Hoax making the rounds on the internet.

However, it did give me an good reason to take my daughter outside to look at the sky tonight. She seemed quite taken with the idea of constellations and planets in the night sky. Maybe she’ll be the one to make the most use of my telescope.

Via Strangely Dim: And Now, a Word from Our Klingon Friends we get to mu”a’vo’ mu’ - A Klingon Word from the Word

Thinking about the Scriptures, through the lens of the Klingon Language Version of the World English Bible.

Just the thing for Friday afternoon as I prepare for tonight’s Enterprise episode. I wonder if they’ll come to Tim’s biblioblogger meeting at SBL?

Live long and prosper!

Driving into Auckland City and back today gave me the chance to listen the following podcast of Radio OpenSource’s God 2.0 (June 1, 2005) released as a podcast here - Open Source » Blog Archive » Re-broadcast: God 2.0.

The internet is aflame. Orthodox Jews and fundamentalist Christians, wiccans and pagans, everyone is talking about God. So how has our notion of God changed since people started searching for Him online? And how has the Internet changed since He moved there?

It has Jeff Sharlet (Killing the Buddha), Gordon Atkinson (Real Live Preacher), and Sarah Dylan Breuer (SarahLaughed.net) in conversation with the presenter. Lots of interesting ideas.

Thanks to Ernesto Burden | God Pod for the link.

I’ll be tinkering with stylesheets and the blog layout over the next week or so - primarily to reorganize a few things, but also to fix some problems with Internet Explorer. If you arrive and things look different/broken don’t panic - try again later. I’ll try and make changes in increments (and offline) but sometimes it’s better to simply return to a clean slate and start again.

I wonder if we’ll get them here? Wired News: Star Trek Phone Set to Thrill.

Yesterday I did my two (mini-)lectures for the bioethics block course at Carey.

The first lecture “Theology and Science : where are we today?” looked at the current state of science and religion/theology interaction. Alerted by Jason I tracked down Time Magazine for 15 August with its cover story “Evolution Wars” (& related story “Face-Off: Darwinians vs. Anti-Darwinians”). Jason has some good questions and observations on his posting along with quite a few comments.

Anyway, the reason I tracked the article down was to use it to emphasize to the class how science-religion interaction is typically portrayed, and to point out that it’s often narrowly defined as an evolution vs. special creation debate. To do so misses out on the dialogue going on in areas such as cosmology, genetics, neuroscience, ethics and the environment. Plus historically its hard to make a case that science and religion have always been, and will always continue to be, mortal enemies. Reality is, as usual, far more complicated than that. For example, have a listen to John Stenhouse’s lecture on science and religion “Galileo’s Dilemma: Science and Religion” given as part of the NZ Royal Society’s EINSTEIN 2005 LECTURE SERIES. (Windows Media audio link here)

Jason’s pondering about whether geography has an effect upon the nature of science-religion discussion is interesting too and similar thoughts were expressed in this editorial - Denis Alexander, “Geography and the Science-Faith Debate”, Science and Christian Belief, Vol. 15, No. 1, April 2003. (PDF Link)

The other lecture, “Transhumanism : Humans as (co-)creators”, filled in the slot from 4:30-5:00pm to end the day. A quick, basic survey looking at various strands of post- or transhuman thought, leading into some questions about how to engage with the ideas behind aspects of technology and technoculture. Both this and previous lecture seemed to go okay - though as with all block courses the information stream has to be compressed somewhat given the limited timeframe and there’s way less room for discussion.

Good to see a full lecture theatre for the course and students prepared to engage with the material - though I imagine it was stretching for many of them.

Wow - this could make a lot of difference in developing robots (not just humanoid ones) that respond/react to the environment in ways that mimic humans. The sociable robotics crowd who see intelligence emerging out of human-like interaction with the world will be happy, I imagine. See: Humanlike robot skin developed | Betterhumans > News

A flexible artificial skin has been developed that could give robots the ability to sense touch and temperature.
…
“It will be possible in the near future to make an electronic skin that has functions that human skin lacks,” they write.

I guess you could make clothing out of it too. Imaging gardening gloves that told you the temperature of the soil while you worked it - or something linked back into a human-worn haptic interface.

IBM helps Firefox reach disabled | Tech News on ZDNet

IBM will donate 50,000 lines of code to the Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox Web browser to make it friendly for people with visual and motor disabilities, Big Blue said Monday.

Sounds like a useful addition to Firefox. Now if I could only get it to reduce the sensitivity to popping up the context menu when I press the left-mouse button too long on my iBook.

Currently reading Ronald Cole-Turner’s survey paper “Design and Destiny: Philosophical and Religious Perspectives on Human Germline Modification” prepared for “Science and Religion: Global Perspectives”, June 4-8, 2005, in Philadelphia and available here. It’s got some stuff in it on “preimplantation genetic diagnosis”, which starts with IVF but incorporates genetic testing of the embyro(s) prior to implantation, and a variety of responses (both secular and religious) to human germline modification.

Related to this is the article Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly . COVER STORY . Impossible Choices . April 15, 2005 | PBS which looks at the nightmare of bioethical dilemmas faced by two everyday couples.

Saw that Oxford University has just set up the Oxford Future of Humanity Institute headed by transhumanist Nick Bostrom.

The Future of Humanity Institute was founded on 1 June 2005. FHI is part of the new James Martin School for the 21st Century at Oxford University. Dr. Nick Bostrom has been appointed as its director. Recruitment will take place over the coming months, with a view to starting activity in the fall of 2005. (This website is under construction.)The Institute aims to become humanity’s best effort at understanding and evaluating its own long-term prospects. FHI will study how anticipated technological developments may change human beings and transform the human condition.

A couple of interesting links off Wired News.

Firstly Wired News: Google’s Book Scanning Hits Snag comments on the problems Google is having convincing the existing publishing community its digital library attempt is a good thing. Really, what did they expect would happen?

And secondly Wired News: Mac Hacks Allow OS X on PCs talks about the version of Mac OSX that runs on the new Intel Mac is able to be hacked to run on non-Apple Intel hardware. Can’t see it happening soon but if Apple released a version of Tiger for generic Intel systems I’d buy and install it on our Acer P4 system in a flash.

Received several copies of the book “Portraits : Youth” today in the post. It’s a really excellent little book that is both a photo collage of young people in New Zealand together with a part of their own stories (including insights into their various ethnic communities).

It’s available from the Office of Ethnic Affairs for free!

I just emailed them (ethnic.affairs@dia.govt.nz) and they sent me three copies straight away. (There was an interview earlier this week with the director of the Office of Ethnic Affairs on the radio this week which described the project and included one of the young people in it.) Good resource for all sorts of people - might be the sort of thing that inspires other groups to put something similar together about the people in their school, local community or church.

News article (press release) about the book here: http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PA0507/S00287.htm

(The boy on the left is of Russian descent, the two on the right are Assyrian and Somali respectively.)

Slow day today after I had a few old fillings drilled out and redone today. Tried to treat it as a practical exercise for the thesis. After all, in one of his articles about technology David Lyon asked the question, “Where is the boundary of the body—at the skin, or elsewhere?”

At the enamel possibly? Anyway, my teeth have been colonised by new technology and I took the rest of the day slowly. I guess fillings make me a cyborg in some of the definitions of the term.

FedEx’s lawyers get all tetchy over a guy who made his own furniture out of their (used) shipping materials and then posted the pictures of it on the net. Sounds like a creative form of recycling to me. More at :Wired News: Furniture Causes FedEx Fits.

Another recent article on introducing technologies, formerly associated with therapeutic, to assist the unimpaired in new ways. Another example of intentional cyborgism. See Wired News: Hearing Aids for the Unimpaired.

HearWear -­ The Future of Hearing, a new exhibition at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, shows off trendy deaf-tech prototypes like gadgets that can filter out annoying noises and memory glasses that replay the last few seconds of conversation — handy for wearers who might have missed someone’s name.

One of the significant issues facing people trying to make sense of data is getting the data in a format that can be analysed - particularly if you’re trying to use data from disparate sources. This following article notes an open source attempt to overcome this problem. See Wired News: Analyze This: Combining Data

In hopes of broadening the potential of this kind of software, several companies plan to announce an agreement Monday on a technological standard that will let multiple computing engines for sorting unstructured data work together.

The programming codes that govern the framework, spearheaded by International Business Machines in conjunction with academic researchers and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, will be open source and freely available.

Back when I was doing data mining related work this was a huge issue, so I’ll be interested in seeing what they come up with.

STUFF : TECHNOLOGY - STORY : Apple buys NZ domain as download wars begin - Apple acquires www.itunes.co.nz

Guess we’ll have to wait and see though.

Heard the interview this afternoon on National Radio with Chris Grantham about his newly released Bits of the Kiwi Bible. Basically it’s chunks (pericopae?) of the Bible (primarily Mark’s Gospel) retold in Kiwi vernacular. I’ve heard Chris preach using it and it held up well in that context. I’ll probably grab a copy in the near future. It’s published by Penguin (see here) and there’s bits of the book available for viewing at www.kiwibible.co.nz.

Grabbed these two books off the shelf in the public library because the covers and titles looked interesting. They’re definitely “coffee table” books - glossy, well laid out, striking design. Contentwise they’re light and fluffy (and being books about the web a little dated). What is really, really good about them is the showcase of web sites that each has in the back. Great books for looking at 30-50 web sites to see what things you like or don’t like, different colour schemes and navigation layouts.

Worthwhile getting out from the library and skimming. Probably not worthwhile buying them. There’s also a web site related to the series over at - www.designdirectories.com.

• “www.imaging” by Robin Nichols and Philip Andrews.
• “www.Colour” by Roger Pring.

From Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly a story about the implications of the excess embryos produced in by technological processes such as IVF. There’s both a link to the video clip of the story as well as the transcript of the clip. See Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly . COVER STORY . Excess Embryos . July 4, 2003 | PBS.

A relevant article for me as I continue to read material related to transhumanism, as well as preparing for two half-hour slots I’m doing for Carey’s bioethics block course in a week or two - One on the interaction of science and religion, and the other on transhumanism.

On Thursday I posed a question in my seminar about whether the agrarian imagery we’re familiar with from the biblical material translates into theological resources and theological imagination for engaging with techno-culture. Then today over at Science & Theology News : Pastors in the pasture grow organic congregations there’s an interview with Jeffrey Hawkins of HOPE CSA who uses a real agrarian approach for pastoring pastors in their vocation in the contemporary world.

This way of farming offers a model for how churches should approach growth, Hawkins said. In 2003, he began bringing pastors to work on his farm through his ministry, HOPE CSA, which stands for Hands-On Pastoral Education using Clergy-Sustaining Agriculture. Pastors from several denominations and churches around the state visit once every month to work on the farm and participate in discussions with Hawkins and fellow pastors.Hawkins makes many parallels between factory farms and mega churches, and between sustainable farming — which doesn’t deplete natural resources or pollute the environment — and healthy churches.

“I don’t want to demonize church growth and factory farms,” Hawkins said. “I want to help us be honest about the consequences of choosing those models.”

Sounds like interesting project - I wonder if there are any others like it around?

Did my PhD seminar presentation “Being human by becoming gods? Transhumanism and the imago Dei” today so that’s another thing crossed off the “To Do” list. The seminar went okay, I think, and I got some good feedback and suggestions from people after it. The incomparable Philip Halstead preceded me with his excellent seminar “Forgiveness from the heart: A theological and psychometric study of adult children and their parents”, and he took the photo below. Philip is a man who knows the importance of good coffee and regularly delivers piping hot java to my cubicle in the Carey postgrad area.

I’ve uploaded the references part of the brief handout I gave out at the seminar. (SeminarRefs.pdf) Luckily I remembered to bring some speakers. The lecture room was wired for the DVD, VHS and PC-video but didn’t have an audio connection for the laptop.

Working on the departmental PhD seminar I’m doing later this week - reworked title is “Being human by becoming gods? Transhumanism and imago Dei.” It’s been a slow road getting the talk done. When I did something similar just after I started this process/journey it was more about sketching the landscape - now it’s about not getting lost in the details that have been painted over time. Plus I’m tired from working on this project for so long. So many other interesting things just wanting to be looked at in my peripheral vision.

Oh, and another year rolled round on the PhD last week with the good, old annual report meeting. All things going well (and it looks like they are) I won’t be doing another one of those again. Nice to look back at the road travelled in the past year though.

I’m preparing a handout for the seminar with a list of books and resources on it. Might post part or all of it depending on how it goes (and what it looks like).