December 2006

Back home after Christmas break away down in Kawerau with Kim’s family. Here’s a shot of the Tarawera River that flows though the town (though this shot was taken walking up to the Tarawera Falls - see Greenflame: Water, rock and forest).

It looks like it’ll be hot for Christmas Day, the kids are off for summer holidays, and things are closing down for an extended summer break. Must be Christmas in the Antipodes. Time to sing a few songs about Christmas in the summer, where there is no snow in sight and the Pohutukawas are blooming.

Of course, the classic running around my head for the past few days is John Clark’s One On a Tractor.

Others that capture the spirit of the season are Peter Cape’s New Zealand Christmas or Backblocks Nativity (originally titled Epiphany), and Shirley Murray’s An Upside Down Christmas. (More in the archives that those link to.)

And, if you can get your hands on a copy of Spirit in a Strange Land: A Selection of New Zealand Spiritual Verse, there are some good Advent poems in there too.

Have a good Christmas and New Year.

And now, off for some Christmas backyard cricket and barbecues…

A while back I was skimming a couple of religion and media books (See Greenflame: Religion and computer-mediated communications), but I never got further than that with them. One of those books was Heidi Campbell’s “Exploring Religious Community Online: We are One in the Network” and now Paul has written a brief review of the book from his more informed position. See fishers, surfers and casters » Heidi Campbell’s Exploring Religious Community Online.

Now, let’s hope he will write one for Religion and Cyberspace, a collection of essays edited by Morten Hojsgaard and Margit Warburg.

The photo above is of the floor of the office at home. You can see the carpet!

This has not been the case for the past few months when the carpet has been obscured by layer upon layer of papers, print outs, books, bags, folders and anything else that got sucked into the maelstrom. Indeed, it looked like it was gaining enough mass to implode and form its own mini black hole. Now however, the floor is clear, books returned to supervisors (who may have forgotten I even had them), paper filed or recycled, and I can walk directly to my desk. I might even vacuum at some point.

Listened to James Hughes’ recent Changersurfer Radio podcast yesterday where he interviews Lee Silver (author of “Remaking Eden: How Genetic Engineering and Cloning will Transform the American Family“, and more lately “Challenging Nature: The clash of science and spirituality at the new frontiers of life“.) It’s an interesting interview because both Hughes and Silver sketch out what each thinks of religious (and quasi-religious) objections to transhumanism. Overall, their articulation of religious positions is limited, and doesn’t take into account the breadth of religious engagement with convergent technologies, but it serves as a useful insight into how some techno-optimists perceive the religious world.

I have a nagging doubt about their optimism about the human spirit too. The argue that many problems in the world could be solved if technological development was allowed to be unhindered - elimination of hunger, suffering and illness etc. However, we currently have technologies that could make a dent in those issues and it is more a matter of human will and of the human “heart” as to whether they will be. Certainly, the human propensities for self-interest, greed and control of resources never seem to feature in these discussions. Anyway, the full interview is available at: ChangeSurfer Radio: Challenging Nature.

Also, seen on the local library bookshelf (and now on loan here) is Simon Young’s recent book “Designer Evolution: A Transhumanist Manifesto“. Too late to put Young’s book in the bibliography but I’ll have skim through it sometime.

Steve tagged me, so here are five things you may not know about me:

1. I can’t stand brussel sprouts, and am intolerant towards cauliflower and broccoli. Perhaps I have a green-hating gene?
2. As a computer science postgraduate I was given a “Mostly likely to become Elite” award by the faculty.
3. I originally went to university to study chemisty and astronomy, and before getting sidetracked into computer science passed undergraduate astrophysics and astronomy papers.
4. The first comic book I ever remember reading was the Legion of Super-Heroes story in Superboy #201 where ERG-1 recovers his corporeal form and defeats the robot that has immobilized the legion. Alas, all retconned out of existence now.
5. I like to diagram things to understand them better, and often reduce pages and pages of terse text (particularly theological writing) to visual representations.

I don’t forward chain letters (that’s a sixth thing), but if you feel inspired consider yourself tagged.

Kim and I spent a pleasant evening at the book launch of Cathy Ross’ book Women with a Mission - Rediscovering Missionary Wives in Early New Zealand published by Penguin. Some nice speeches and an opportunity to see Cathy and Steve again briefly. Nice also to see a PhD thesis transition into an accessible book. If you’re interested in NZ or missions history it may well be up your alley.

One of the local PC magazines came with the full version (both Vol. 1 & 2) of Atari Arcade Anniversary Edition for free, which I duly installed on the PC today. My children, upon discovering it, are rapt with the likes of Centipede, Asteroids and Missile Command. However, the game of the collection for them is Pong. Go figure. I guess, game play will always trump eye candy.

A good example of some of the current research that is leading towards “augmented intelligence”. Ultimately, the robotic system will pick up the human user’s intentions and then use its own artificial intelligence to achieve that goal. I like the non-invasive approach which differs from other approaches such as BrainGate. More at ScienceDaily: Researchers Demonstrate Direct Brain Control Of Humanoid Robot.

Substitution of cybernetic “immorality” for cybernetic “immortality” in a couple of places. Guess my conservative evangelical heritage is showing through

A most excellent week this week. Performances by the children at school assembly, taking my youngest on foot through the church’s drive-thru nativity so he could pat the animals (including the llama dressed a a camel) and see the rest of the family dressed up, got the sign-off from my supervisor on the final draft of the thesis so I can now submit when I’ve printed and soft-bound it, shared a long birthday party with the youngest yesterday with lots of friends (his, mine and ours) dropping by through the day, and many other things.

The stuff of Darwin Awards. See Good book drives doctor to distraction.

Dropped by my comic shop today to collect a couple of Christmas presents I’d ordered through them (games, in this case). Reminded me about the way they organize their customer files. If you have subscriptions for comics etc. with them you have your own folder in the filing cabinet behind the counter. The folders are organized by first name, and then surname. So, within a short time they remember your first name when you come into the shop, adding an extra dimension of hospitality to their service.

It’s only a small thing, but it makes you feel that you personally, and your custom, are welcome.

It’s like the church we joined when we moved towns once. I visited one church (among several), filled out the ‘visitors card’, and had a very brief chat with someone who approached me. Then, later on that week the church found someone in the congregation who worked in a related field to phone up to see how we were settling in and to see if we needed help with anything. The fact that they a) bothered to get back in touch, b) had remembered who I was from the brief conversation, and c) found someone to contact me with whom I had a vocational connection, made me feel like they had something good to share.

Getting the final bibliography into shape. EndNote’s behaving oddly though - could be a race against time…

Update - The old G3 iBook hard disk is also making a strange clicking noise from time to time… Backups in progress.

Stayed up last night working on the thesis bibliography, which gave me an “excuse” to watch Jonny Reid win twice at the Gudang Garam A1GP Sentul. The first time in the sprint race, and the second in the feature event. The latter had all the things that make motorsport exciting - aggressive driving, variable weather conditions, leads eaten away by the safety car, pit stop dramas, the lead changing several times and the odd collision. Great stuff, and now the New Zealanders have put their first wins away it’ll be interesting to see if they can maintain the pressure. Might be worthwhile going down to Taupo in the new year to see them.

More at:
A1GP World Cup of Motorsport: NEW ZEALAND’S DOUBLE WIN AT SENTUL.
A1Team.NZL

Wired News: Firefly Reborn as Online Universe.

I’ve tended to avoid MMORPGs, but this one might be irresistible.

A large cardboard box can be many things. A boat, a rocket ship, a toy box, a stable for ponies or a zoo for animals, but combining boxes robustly for kids’ games never seems to work well. Saw this today and wondered whether there’s something similar in NZ. Must check the next time I’m at the hardware shop.

Cool Tool: Mr. McGroovy’s Box Rivets

Recent BBC World “Click” programme had a slot on strange USB devices for your PC. See BBC NEWS | Programmes | Click | USB talk. Just right for Darren over at planet telex » One of my new toys….

A conscience vote in the Australian House of Representatives passed legislation opening the door to human embryonic research (particularly therapeutic cloning) in Australia. See Embryo cloning gets the go-ahead - National - smh.com.au.

It’ll be interesting to see how that shapes discussion in NZ over the same issue.

A recent essay by theoretical biologist and complex systems researcher, Stuart Kauffman, on the need for a secular spirituality that goes beyond reductionism. See Edge: BEYOND REDUCTIONISM: REINVENTING THE SACRED By Stuart A. Kauffman.

Some interesting points for engagement based on the quick skim I did of it.

Later on this week I’ll hopefully have time to pop into town and pick up the next issue of Ion from the comic shop. And it’s nice to find someone else who has been pondering some of the the plot lines relating to what exactly morality is the Green Lantern Corps, particularly in terms of who defines what “good” and “evil” are in the GL oath. The old O’Neil/Adams issue #76 (April 1970) with it’s oft-cited three panels here started one discussion of what exactly “good” and “evil” were in GL. I’m hoping for another.

Or at least suffer a painful disembowelment. When all the thesis chapters were laid out yesterday, and my supervisor and I went through them slowly, we decided (reluctantly) that chapter two (the most painful of the chapters in terms of writing stress) needs 10 or so pages or so removed. So this afternoon’s job is to eviscerate ~4000 words on the history of AI (which is very interesting, but not essential to the thrust of the chapter in light of later chapters) and replace it with 400-500 well chosen words. (These are different from the other well chosen words I thought when the need for the surgery became clear.)

(This is, indeed, the Don Brash school of thesis editing - “gone by lunchtime”)

Ah, chapter two. The bane of my existence for the past year. All the other chapters combined have not delivered the grief that this one did. A classmate of mine back at uni in Christchurch once cleverly adapted Keats’ “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” to “Le Professeur Sans Merci”. I’m contemplating “Le Chapter San Merci” as a sequel.

On a brighter side, the rest of the thesis looks good, with only a few minor changes to make (I’ve heard that before though). Not only that, but the thesis structure and content now has a nice literary structure, with the chapters forming nice structure of inclusio(s) (and possibly even a chiastic structure, if you look at it in the right light).

As I’ve edited my thesis, and used a variety of Mac OS X the bizarreness of the Home / End keys in OS X has driven me mad. In some apps they go to the top and bottom of the document, in others to the beginning and end of paragraphs, and in other apps (e.g. Ecto) they didn’t work at all!

Today I tracked this down, made the changes, re-logged in and, wow, they work how I want (beginning and end of line respectively). That man deserves a DB.

See Mac OS X and Home / End keys.

This article talks about how intelligent software agents might transfer between various “bodies” in order to achieve certain tasks. So you own “personal assistant” software might follow you around the house, making itself available as it incarnates itself in different technological artifacts. Spooky, possums.

See Wired News: The Seoul of a New Machine.

Resonates with the idea of a “familiar” or personal spirit that accompanies you through the day, assisting you when needed. Though, I guess, “guardian angel” might also be another analogous term.

For an old retro gamer like me this is amazing (but not the price, unfortunately). The only drawback is that it doesn’t have an Konami games, such as the incomparable Gyruss, a game that has consumed more of my money than any other.

See Dream Arcades.