Time to update the desktop wallpaper in anticipation of the season. And I know it was just a pre-season game but beating the Brumbies by 40-6 on Saturday felt good. Wallpaper availble here Hurricanes – Hurricanes Wallpaper.

David Zimmerman on why sports reporting is like witnessing. See Strangely Dim: Good News, Sports Fans.

This morning I am awakened by children. Lots of children. Loud children. For a moment I think that the Pied Piper of Hamlym may have arrived. Then I remember the it’s my four plus three others who are staying. My brain struggles to come up with a collective noun to describe them. Possibilities include a squabble of children, a cacophany of children, and a riot of children. My brain final settles on the obvious – an apocalypse of children – before returning to the familiar world of strange dreams about my thesis.

Every now and then I need some graph or grid paper. But I’m never organized enough to go an buy a pad of it. So this looks like just the trick. Cool Tool: Free Online Graph Paper / Grid Paper PDFs.

Having returned from holiday with more books (see Greenflame: Back from holiday (with books)) we all went out a few days back to one of the local secondhand bookshops with a box of books to exchange. A successful trip with all 6 of us finding something amongst the volumes. To my delight I picked up a copy of Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days by a favourite author of mine, Alastair Reynolds.

Reynold’s ‘Revelation Space’ explores, among other things, how human society might shape itself with different responses to technology interfacing with the human body. As such it is a good example of transhumanism in fiction. Wikipedia has an article on transhumanist fiction as a genre, including links through to some works that are available for download.

Last night I was listening to the podcast Changesurfer Radio: The Future of Virtual Reality and there was this really clever clip at the end of a transhumanist parody from the production The Filkado.

Anyway, it’s a Gilbert and Sullivan knockoff available for download at I am the very model of a Singularitarian – Charlie Kam’s H+ filk. Just writing up some notes on the “Singularity” so it made me smile. The link to the web page has the lyrics too, which is good because the jargon and buzzwords come thick and fast.

“What is the singularity?” I hear you ask. See Transhumanist FAQ : 2.7 What is the singularity? and Technological singularity – Wikipedia.

The podcast wasn’t bad either with some interesting ideas about virtual reality.

A few years back (2001?) I played around with LifeFX (Windows/IE only) which at that point had a funky email program (FaceMail?) you could download and then its avatar software would recite your emails to you with speech synthesis, a “life-like” avatar and recognition of emoticons. So I was interested when I saw this today: Wired News: Avatars Among Us.

I remember discussing with some friends that the way that sociable computers might come about would not be through embodied robotics but through an AI system hooked up to an avatar (maybe trained through embodied robotics though). If you spend you day interacting with a life-like avatar then over time you may come to consider it more than a program on your computer (or PDA or media player).

LifeFX was developed in part using technology researched in part here at the University of Auckland for medical simulations. There’s an article here about it: Wired 8.12: Must Read – Interface2face.

Oh, and there are some video clips of it here: LifeFX Demos.

Just finished re-reading this paper as I tidy some things up.

Rosenfeld, Azriel. “Religion and the Robot: Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Religious Anthropologies.” Tradition: A Journal of Orthodox Thought 8 (1966): 15-26.

It’s forty years old, written when AI hype was greater than today, but it still raises some good questions. For example, “What is a ‘human being’ for the purposes of religion?”

• How does the replacement of human body parts with prostheses (or the loss of body parts) affect religion’s perception of a person? Is all you need an intact brain?
• Would human clones be recognised?
• How would xenotransplantation and transgenic manipulation pose problems?
• If intelligence might be seen as defining ‘human beings’ then if other creatures can demonstrate intelligence then might not they also be considered persons?

Rosenfeld approaches the topic looking for halakhic precedents, including reflection on material written about golems, which makes interesting reading.

Article here from The Korea Times about government efforts to implement various robotic solutions for policing, security and military purposes in the near future. See The Korea Times : Police, Army Robots to Debut in 10 Years.

Brings back memories of Knight Rider, Short Circuit (No. 5 is alive!), K-9 and Robocop (of course).

I’m off to pester the interloan people at the uni library. The uni has a subscription to the journal but only electronically and there’s a 12 month embargo on electronic copy. (So much for the digital technology making it easier for people). Anyway here’s the link to the contents page: Blackwell Synergy: Dialog, Vol 44, Issue 4: Table of Contents and here’s the abstract from one of the articles. Can’t wait to get hold of it.

Imaging God: Cyborgs, Brain-Machine Interfaces, and a More Human Future
By Gregory R. PetersonAbstract: Recent developments in the neurosciences have made possible the advent of brain-machine interfaces, potentially altering our understanding of our relationship with technology and even the very meaning of what it is to be human. This article briefly examines some of the recent developments in neuroengineering and considers the ethical implications. Working from Jesus’ miracles as well as from a dynamic understanding of the image of God, I argue that the categories of healing and transformation should be employed in thinking through the implications of brain-machine interfaces specifically and neuroengineering generally. Although the vocabulary of the cyborg may represent the newfound freedom that this technology can bring, the category of the face may serve as a reminder of the boundedness of human nature.

Link to abstract page here.