November 2005

For some bizarre reason I go away for the weekend and return to find that the only web site in the world that I cannot access through ADSL at home is http://www.greenflame.org. Yet I can when I dial-up with the same ISP. Very, very annoying. But why? And why now after almost 3 years of using ADSL to access the site?

It’s not the iBook because the WinXP Acer and Kim’s Win2K HP laptop also have the problem, and I’ve tried various browsers too. It’s not the server because it’s visible on dial-up and I can FTP in to the site and ping it. Just web connections.

Can’t see any restrictions in the ADSL router. Why on the 24th Nov did it work and then on the 29th die a death? Web server logs don’t show my IP traffic even getting there.

Argh!

Update: Well, it’s definitely just me. Others can post comments (thanks, Paul) and a variety of other people using different ISPs have viewed the site just fine. And it’s only port 80 by the looks of it. I can view pages if I use ports 8080 or 443 (SSL). Bizarre.

Nice summary of a talk given on the influence of Google (and like) upon the identification of critical and helpful knowledge, particularly within the academic world, over at planet telex » Blog Archive » The University of Google - Speed Searching and the Killing of Knowledge. A problem that I come across regularly when marking essays. Seems that the essay question is typed into Google and the first few web sites retrieved crop up in several essays. Darren cites a list of criteria that the speaker, Tara Brabazon, gives to students to constructively educate them in using sources like Google. These include:

• Who authored the document?
• What expertise does the author have?
• What evidence is provided?
• What genre is the document, is it a journal piece, academic paper, polemic or a blog post?
• Is the site funded by an institution?

I talk about the use of internet/electronic resources to students whenever I teach but on the whole it doesn’t seem to have that much affect upon a significant minority. Even citing Internet resources is poorly done. Now however, I think I’ll develop a more constructive strategy.

See also: Greenflame: Google Sociology.

I’ve been a big fan of Doctor Who ever since I learnt to hide behind the couch and I really enjoyed the recently rebooted series. So when I saw that Damaris have just published Back In Time: A Thinking Fan’s Guide to Doctor Who I was intrigued. The sample text they have online looks like it has possibilities so I’ll add it to the following list of books to acquire at some time:

• What would Buffy do? The Slayer’s Guide to Spiritual Life by Jana Riess (Jossey-Bass, 2004).
• Finding Serenity: Anti-heroes, Lost Shepherds and Space Hookers in Joss Whedon’s Firefly by Jane Espenson (BenBella Books | Smart Pop Books, 2005).
• Interacting with Babylon 5: Fan Performances in a Media Universe by Kurt Lancaster (Uni. Texas Press, 2001).

Any suggestions to add for Star Trek, Stargate and others gratefully received. (See also: Greenflame: Battlestar memories and Greenflame: On the bookshelf)

The Slouch!Buster looks interesting. I wonder if anyone imports them here?

The Nadachair and Slouchbuster are based on the ropes that Tibetan monks use to sit upright for hours on end when meditating. The monks use these ropes between their knees and back to help them stay upright. The Slouchbuster is a small, much more elegant version than ropes. The Nadachair is a larger version.

Tim finally publishes his thoughts on the interaction of RSS and commenting on blogs. Namely that the more RSS and its analogues (e.g. Atom) are used to “consume” blogs the less one is inclined to comment directly on the blog being read. A quick skim and if it’s interesing a link from your own blog to it. Thus Tim asserts a “death of comments” theology, so to speak. See SansBlogue : Web 2.0 and the Evils of RSS. (I’m sure I’ve talked to him about this before but it’s nice to see him put it down in some concrete form.)

One of the things that initially attracted me to blogging, both as an author and reader, was the interaction based around comments and trackbacks. Now spam dealt to the trackbacks on this blog but the comments are still there because I think it’s important for the opportunity to add another voice to be there. But with the advent of RSS aggregation I think that’s a thing of the past - so many blogs, so little time. Software such as Carnglas Software’s iFeedPod only increased the point of aggregation being getting the information/data down to me not creating a two-way or multi-way network.

Personally, I think things like RSS are brilliant at getting subscriptions to content like news and podcasts, but I’m still not convinced that it’s the best way to read blogs. There’s something about going to the front page of a blog and seeing what else has changed (comments, polls etc) apart from just the next post.

Anyway, over to Tim’s blog to post a comment…

Was writing up a section on immersion as one of the distinctive approaches to VR (one of the seven that Michael Heim identifies) and came across these articles. Love the VirtuaSphere (but not sure if I could carry off the Lycra body suit). The VR small and taste articles are also interesting but I think I’d need to see and try out the taste one. Anyway, here are the links:

• gizmag Article: The VirtuSphere: full body immersion Virtual reality at last.
• gizmag Article: First human robotic arm implant.
• New Scientist Breaking News - Smell cannon targets virtual reality users.
• New Scientist Breaking News - Virtual reality conquers sense of taste

Saw this a while back in my copy of Robo Sapiens but there some interesting comments here on robot-assisted surgery. See : American Heart Association: Robotic surgery-stenting combo opens coronary arteries, speeds recovery.

Robo Sapiens robot surgery photo by Peter Menzel here.

Kevin Kelly compiled a list of his 100 must see documentaries and documentary series which includes “Hell House“. The latter being a documentary about a church that creates a “virtual Hell” to scare people into the Kingdom.

Full list at Kevin Kelly — Cool Tools — True Films.

Emergent Authorship: Player as Co-Creator by Celia Pearce on interactive computer games - especially massive multiplayer online games and “God-games”.

From a cultural perspective, the ramifications of these new forms of entertainment is nothing short of revolutionary. Through these experiences, the consumer is thus transformed into consumer/producer and consumption itself becomes an act of production. Where previously there was a clear boundary between producer and consumer of content, this boundary continues to become more blurry. The role of the “author” in this context is, rather than creating content, to create context. This then invites the audience create or co-create the content, in essence, to entertain each other with their unique way of “playing the story.” Karl Marx said “seize the means of production.” What is interesting here is that not that users are seizing the means of production, but that in a sense, capitalism has found a sort of compromise in the production/consumption hybrid.

Published in a more polished form in: Celia Pearce, “Emergent authorship: the next interactive revolution”, Computers & Graphics, Volume 26, Issue 1, February 2002, Pages 21-29.

Related to that last post some more commentary on religion and gaming - hopefully the author will draw out his assertion of “a strong relationship between consumption and faith.” See both Water Cooler Games - iBelieve - social commentary goes meta and the related Serious Games for Religion and Religious Institutions.

Persuasive Games produce a variety of games with the objective of stimulating thinking and experience of real world issues with a view to persuasion, instruction, and activism (or at least, social awareness). Saw a link to their latest game ‘Airport Insecurity’ today when following up some virtual reality links.

Ian Bogost, Partner, and Game Designer at Persuasive Games, commented “Airport Insecurity simulates standing in line, and calls attention to our oblivious acceptance of security practices. The point of the game is to draw attention to the relationship between our perception of security, the reality of its effectiveness, and what rights we’re willing to give up on faith. The government has classified negative GAO reports on the TSA, and we culled as much data as we could from news archives to recreate a representation of how airport security currently works in America. We hope the game will challenge citizens to ask harder questions about the relationship between policy and civil rights.”

More also at Water Cooler Games, a site that looks at “the uses of videogames in advertising, politics, education, and other everyday activities, outside the sphere of entertainment.”

Online Journal of Public Theology (Mostly an American perspective)
WHY STUDY RELIGION from the AAR.

I borrowed An Ordinary Joker: the Life & Songs of Peter Cape from the library on Saturday. It’s a collection of biographical pieces, his poetry and a CD of him performing some of his songs. Cape wrote a variety of pieces in the gap between the the Second World War and the rise of global communications when New Zealand was beginning to struggle with its own self-identity in the world. Some of these have entered into Kiwi culture including “Taumarunui (on the Main Trunk Line)” and “She’ll be right”. Cape was a writer, poet, actor, musician, priest, journalist and producer among other things and the book talks about those sides to his life.

The NZ FOLK SONG site has this to say (as well as links to lyrics and scores)

(JA) Peter Cape is best known for his songs ‘Taumaranui On The Main Trunk Line’ and ‘She’ll Be Right Mate.’ He was the voice of those rural New Zealand men who had been transplanted to the big city suburbs. He expressed their yearning for that lost way of life with its physical and emotional simplicity, where men may have been socially inept, but were proud of being physically self reliant.

Personally his poem “Trinity” and the New Zealand Christmas poem/song “Nativity” are my favourites.

The Guardian publish their list of the top 20 books for geeks. Just in time for finding that literary Christmas present for the geek in your life. Check of course that they don’t already own them. I’ve read most of the list (maybe 15 or 16) but not some of them for a while. See : Top 20 geek novels — the results! from Guardian Unlimited: Technology.

Via: Neil Gaiman’s blog where he’s having some trouble trying to phone home with his iPod.

IST Results - Robo-rodent gets ‘touchy-feely’ with artificial whiskers.

Robots that ‘feel’ objects and their texture could soon become a reality thanks to the innovative and interdisciplinary research of the AMouse, or artificial mouse, project.

See also IST Results - Embodying artificial intelligence for some general discussion on A.I.

The other day I was re-watching “Kid’s Story” off The Animatrix DVD. Of all the various Matrices (plural?) that’s the one story that gets me every time - in just over 9 minutes it seems to capture many themes that might make it a useful analogy in a religious context. Does the kid have a “conversion” moment or is it a journey? What role does faith serve in appropriating grace? The sense of hope that it leaves rather than (for me) the sense of despair and futility at the end of the third movie. As well as the “putting to death” of the old self for the new.

If you haven’t seen it hire the DVD and watch just that one story. The animation style is great too.

Maybe Stu could do something with it?

Wired News: Real Story of the Rogue Rootkit has a follow-up to the Sony BMG copy-protection debacle, including the really good question of why the anti-virus and security software we all “have” to use on Windows didn’t pick it up. And also that the DRM software may have used other software outside of the scope of that software’s licensing.

I wonder if the Sony offer to replace affected CDs will happen here in NZ? Must check my CD collection.

I like the Apple web browser Safari but I often had problems with it under Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar) and 10.3 (Panther) around its inability to send a “deep refresh”. In Firefox I’d click Ctrl-Refresh to get the most recent page (and in IE I could do similar) but the web toolkit that Safari (and NetNewsWire) use doesn’t allow that. It’s been a real source of frustration because my ISP has an upstream cache and Safari will only get pages from there until they expire. Which meant things like editing blog entries, refreshing web site changes and getting the latest RSS feeds wasn’t reliable. (I’d post stuff on here and it would appear in the news aggregator half a day later.)

However, last night I installed Privoxy which is a caching layer that you can set up between web applications and the net. Configure it to always ask for the most recent page, point the default OS X proxy settings at it and Safari/NewNewsWire works just fine! Excellent.

BTW - Privoxy isn’t the easiest to configure if you’re not comfortable with modifying configuration files and setting up proxy settings.

So now I can get my RSS/Atom feeds reliably outside of the Sage plug-in in Firefox. I’ll keep using Firefox as my browser because it can by-pass Privoxy but now my “Apple” apps will work just fine.

Maybe this is all fixed in Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) with Safari 2.0 but I’m not there yet.

Also, if you’re getting fed up with Flash slowing up web sites (can we all say “TVNZ“?) try out the Firefox plug-in FlashBlock. It marks the Flash on the page but doesn’t load them until you click on them or set up that site to always load Flash animations/apps.

Just received a copy for Living on the Boundaries - Evangelical Women, Feminism and the Theological Academy by Nicola Hoggard Creegan and Christine Pohl and published by IVP. Nicola is one of my PhD supervisors and I’m looking forward to reading the book over the next few weeks or so. Nicola’s off to AAR so I should be able to make a good start before she gets back. From the blurb,

What happens when evangelicalism meets feminism?

In their own biblical and theological training, Nicola Creegan and Christine Pohl have each lived at the intersection of these two movements They now both teach in Christian institutions of higher education where others follow along a similar pathway. They have a story to tell about their experience along with those of ninety other women they surveyed who have lived on the boundary between evangelicalism and feminism. They explore what it was like for evangelical women who pursued doctorates in biblical and theological studies. What were their experiences as they taught and wrote, were mentored and became mentors? What are the theological issues they faced, and how did they respond? How have they negotiated professional, family and church commitments? This well-informed, multidimensional and sensitive narrative of women’s experience will be illuminating for anyone involved in the academic theological world.

You can download a sample chapter from the link above.

The book will go next to Elouise Renich Fraser’s “Confessions of a Beginning Theologian” on the bookshelf. (See Greenflame: Beginning theologian)

I’ve got several ideas running around in my head for academic articles relating to religion and comic books. But I’ve never really figured out where I could send them, nor read other examples of how people engage with comics at an academic level. Until now.

ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies

The objective of ImageTexT is to advance the academic study of comic books, comic strips, and animated cartoons. Under the guidance of an editorial board of scholars from a variety of disciplines, ImageTexT publishes solicited and peer-reviewed papers that investigate the material, historical, theoretical, and cultural implications of visual textuality. ImageTexT welcomes essays emphasizing (but not limited to) the aesthetics, cognition, production, reception, distribution and dissemination of comics and other media as they relate to comics, along with translations of previously existing research on comics as dimensions of visual culture. Exploring all periods and all countries, and deploying a wide range of disciplinary approaches, ImageTexT is designed to foster innovative discussions of the political and social implications of comics, to generate original formal aesthetic analyses of comics, and to broaden theoretical discussions of genre, period, narrative, and complex image/text relationships in comics and related media. ImageTexT will include reviews of current scholarship in the field, announcements regarding relevant conferences and upcoming publications, and links to other theoretical projects of interest to readers. ImageTexT will also provide currently unavailable English-language translations of seminal essays of comics theory. ImageTexT is listed in the MLA Bibliography, beginning summer 2005.

“Up, up and away!” so to speak.

Looks like Sony will (temporarily, at least) stop producing the spyware DRM on CDs. See Wired News: Sony to Suspend Antipiracy CDs. User Friendly had a related cartoon also this week. (To understand the cartoon see here if you’re not up with geek jargon)

See also: Greenflame: DRM Hell.

Update: Looks like the User Friendly cartoon might be part of a series (see here for the next one)

Science and Theology News have put together a variety of mini-sites on various topics on the past few months. The latest one is a collection of pieces on intelligent design from a variety of perspectives.

See: Science & Theology News - Intelligent Design.

Now, I’d so want to be there. It’s nice to live in NZ but it sucks when trying to get to things like this.

Now, a consortium of scientists in Scotland has put together a collection of films related to the ethics of cloning to engage the general public in these contentious and frequently misunderstood issues.From Nov. 11 through Nov. 13, Edinburgh will host the European Biomedical Ethics Film Festival, centering on both therapeutic cloning, or stem cell research, and reproductive cloning.

Via Science & Theology News - Clones on Film.

Came across this today : f a i t h * i n * f i c t i o n. Looks like it has some interesting content, including comic related stuff.

The Seattle Times: How to outsmart automated phone systems and The Seattle Times: Business & technology: Dial-a-human shortcuts have advice for those who wish to subvert automated call centres. It’s US focused but I guess you could apply the same principles to generate a list relevant to you own location.

If you click the link it will generate an essay for you with the appropriate style and vocabulary. See The Postmodernism Generator: Communications From Elsewhere.

That’s pretty impressive. I wonder what other “dialects” you could get it to speak?

Visited Hamilton yesterday to catch up with various people at the University of Waikato. The weather was perfect with warm sun and crisp blue skies which made driving there and back a pleasure. The campus there is refreshing too, with trees, lawns and water, as opposed to the more urban campus of Auckland which is mostly concrete.

I was primarily there to visit the technical advisor for my thesis in the Computer Science department which went really well. Also managed to see people in Film and Media Studies who are looking at online religion/religion online and an old friend in Physics/Engineering now researching in the area of autonomous robotics.

Then to cap off I had a most enjoyable dinner with Paul (of Prodigal Kiwi fame) at a café in town.

A day well spent. If there was work going in Hamilton, moving back there wouldn’t be a hard decision.

Not so much an article about science-religion animosity but one about how copyright holders use intellectual property rights to influence policy direction in the wider world. So copyright here isn’t about making sure the people get acknowledged and paid fairly for their work but rather about issues of power and control. Interesting.

See: Wired News: Evolutionists Are Wrong!.

Anthony Smith starts what looks like an interesting series of posts over at Musings of a Postmodern Negro: Modernity and Race.

At the end of what feels like a long and stressful day this made me smile.

Everything Sounds Like Coldplay Now.

Just chipping away at the thesis. Chip, chip, chip… Resistance is futile - the mountain will be reduced to dust (hopefully before I am).

I’ve started following these recent stories about Digital Rights Management approaches to music. I don’t buy a lot of CDs - rather buy books instead - but I always check the back for DRM because it can screw up listening to the CD on the iBook. Now I’ll really check closely in case I end up installing a software on the PC that opens the door to remote access by others by simply trying to play the CD.

DRM this, Sony! - CNET.com.

Mark’s Sysinternals Blog: Sony, Rootkits and Digital Rights Management Gone Too Far (Technical discussion of what Sony’s approach does on your Windows PC)

The Big Picture: DRM Crippled CD: A bizarre tale in 4 parts - Opinion on DRM being used not to prevent music piracy but rather to prevent it playing on a competitors product (e.g. iPod).

PhD seminar day at the School of Theology today. A dozen or so of us did quick presentations on our thesis work, plus a few other talks (including one on sitting your viva). Compressed three years work into 10 minutes + questions. If only writing it up went that quickly.

There are songs that define the moment you’re in. You hear it on the radio and it takes you back to a certain time and place. For better or worse (probably worse) the current song that defines this moment (the end of 2005) is the Ookla the Mok song “Super Powers“.

You can download the MP3 from their web site here.

Listen to the song and test out your comic book “geek factor” by picking all the different superheroes referred to.

BTW, I came across the song because it was played during the trailer of the short film “Bite me, Fanboy“. I’d buy the DVD but it might be too autobiographical.

Good thoughts on the place of the Lectionary in worship here at Conrad Gempf : The Lectionary. One of the points from my sermon last weekend was about integrating and juxtaposing bits of the Bible we don’t often read (e.g. lament) with bits we often do (e.g. praise & thanksgiving). A lectionary approach allows that, though as with any human-made scheme it can become both oppressive and liberating. I guess that’s where an openess to the work of the Spirit in such a scheme comes into play.

In our current church a lectionary approach isn’t used and sometimes I really miss the Collect and readings from various parts of the Bible in the service.