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.