January 2008

My youngest (5) was given a Cambridge BrainBox - Electronic Kits for Children and Schools on Monday and it rocks. Really simple way to build electronic circuits that make radios, alarms, lights go on and off, and (most importantly) fans fly up and hit the ceiling. He loves it and has spent that last few days assembling all sorts of things (and blowing the fuses in the set a few times). I can’t believe we didn’t get something like this ages ago (though we have Lego, Meccano and other similar things). The press-stud approach works really well for his hands and it’s robust enough to carry around to show people.

I’m sure it has potential for use in a children’s talk at some point.

Frantic here at the moment. Old job stuff to finish, new job stuff to think about, last week of the school holidays, conference abstract due tomorrow, and going to Dunedin early tomorrow for the bioethics conference (so packing now).

However, still time to note that Dark Horse are finally going to release their next Firefly/Serenity comic book mini-series. Excellent, I can’t wait. See Dark Horse Comics > Profile > Serenity: Better Days #1 (of 3).

A list (with pictures) of some of the times Apple didn’t get it right. Of course, the definition of not getting something right is often in the eye of the beholder (or user), and items like the Newton, Apple IIc and Lisa (all of which I’ve used) all contained elements that contributed to better designs in the future (for Apple and its competitors). I think the MacBook Air might be in this category of a niche-product that helps stimulate all sorts of developments down the line, independent of how successful a system it is in its own right.

See Learning From Failure: Apple’s Most Notorious Flops

I can’t remember whether I’ve posted these links before (a quick search of the blog says not), but in a week’s time I’ll just back from Dunedin having attended the New Zealand Bioethics Conference: Wellbeing and Technology so it seemed apt to note them. There’s a session on transhumanism on the last day of the conference so I’ll be interested to see what the perspectives offered there include.

New Scientist magazine had a special focus on ‘death’ back in October (see Special Report on Death - New Scientist) with a bit in it on transhumanist aspirations to overcome death (or at least, short life) - Death special: The plan for eternal life - being-human - 13 October 2007 - New Scientist (including a link to the video YouTube - Quest for immortality featuring various transhumanists and ‘techno-progressives’).

Other related links:

• Living Forever: The Longevity Revolution - from The Nature of Things with David Suzuki : CBC-TV
• Do You Want To Live Forever? - Channel 4 Documentary
• Mark Walker on superlongevity
• Building Gods - Rough cut of documentary available online
• Immortality Institute

Firstly, a short summary piece from PBS Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly on recent developments in biotechnology and whether they change the ethical landscape. See Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly . PERSPECTIVES . Bioethics Update . January 25, 2008 | PBS

And secondly, Rod Benson (who produces the weekly summary RELIGION & ETHICS AUSTRALIA) also has a daily blog going over at Ethics Update: News, opinion and rumour on all manner of ethical, political and religious issues.

Some more links relating to the recent bibliographic software postings - mostly Mac related.

Firstly, TidBITS - Endnote, Bookends, Sente, Zotero, oh my, which looks at possible alternatives to EndNote on the Mac by an ecologist - with follow up comments by others.

Then there’s a review and a follow up at on the SBL web site of Bookends (which, like Sente, integrates well with the Mellel word processor). See Society of Biblical Literature - Bookends Review: Bibliographic Software For Mac and Society of Biblical Literature - Update to Bookends Review.

Also, does anyone know anything about the Windows software Nota Bene?

Had a nice (but all to brief) lunch today with Tim (of SansBlogue fame), though I was thwarted in my efforts to find some soup to eat as I recovered from the gentle(?) ministrations of my dentist. Conversation ranged all over the place, but included whether or not the ASUSTek Eee Ultraportable , with Linux, OpenOffice and Zotero (or WinXP etc.), might make a nice small, robust machine for taking on sabbatical-type journeys.

The article, ‘Sleep Dealer’ Injects Sci-Fi Into Immigration Debate, is yet another example of how science fiction’s speculative nature provides a space for engaging with questions and issues that challenge and stretch us - in this case a (not-so) futuristic exploration of how Western consumerism might be supported by the creation of virtual ’sweat shops’.

Another recent article picking up this function of speculative or science fiction is Clive Thompson on Why Sci-Fi Is the Last Bastion of Philosophical Writing.

Mary over at Tensegrities points to this visually engaging project - Chris Harrison - Visualizing the Bible.

Beyond Paley: Renewing the Vision for Natural Theology is an interdisciplinary event being held at the University Museum, Oxford in June. The line up of speakers looks engaging, but given my chances of actually getting there as very slim (as in non-existent) I’ll wait for the downloads from the web site.

Related links from the Counterbalance site:

• General Term: Natural Theology
• General Term: Paley, Revd William (1743-1805)
• God, Humanity and the Cosmos Topic: Natural Theology vs Theology of Nature

Kevin Kelly, over at Conceptual Trends and Current Topics - Doomsday Art, has an article reflecting on the continuing trend of exploring contemporary concerns through the apocalyptic genre.

The prospect of being the last person(s) on earth is weirdly seductive. It’s not about the end at all. It’s a romantic vision of rebirth, of starting anew, but with more assets and wisdom that the last birth. It’s a romance that will probably continue to generate works of art in all media every year from now on, until …. the end of the world.

Kelly’s musing are prompted by the recent movie, Cloverfield, and these articles, Apocalypse New - TIME and Life After People - TV - Review - New York Times.

I’d also throw in this for good measure: MONDOLITHIC STUDIOS - An Earth Without Us - A Mondolithic Monday Image.

Well, maybe not. But if the Japanese government can move to train experts to help the populace understand their phones, then maybe there’s a secret organization out there that helps people program their VCRs (or similar) as well. See Japanese to train experts to help puzzled mobile users - Stuff.co.nz.

Of course, maybe creating complicated and unusable technology should be a crime instead? Do remote control designers ever actually use their products?

Related link: consumer.org.nz: Home > Appliances > Video cassette recorders > Programming and tuning

Greenflame · Lent contains various posts relating to to the Lenten season, and links to related resources and studies (some of which is downloadable). Here are some more I’ve come across recently to add to the mix:

• Caritas Lenten reflection programme 2008 | Caritas Aotearoa New Zealand - Catholic series
• Assembly of Confessing Congregations – Following Jesus - Discipleship in the Gospel of Mark. Link via Uniting Church (South Australia) - UC E-News - January 16, 2008. Related link Pancake Day - What is UnitingCare Pancake Day?
• UCA VicTas - Lenten Resource 2006 - Description of using “a series of Retablos styled boxes that contain images, objects and stories to allow the community to reflect, and remember Christ life and teachings as we move towards Easter.”
• e~mergent kiwi: Lenten 7-pack a spiritual resource for your Lent
• Church Mission Society (CMS) | Lent resources | Mission Shaped Intro - Free course which could fit with a Lenten series - link via jonnybaker: mission shaped intro. See also
  • Church Mission Society (CMS) | Get involved | For churches | More church resources | Lent Resources
  • Church Mission Society (CMS) | Lent resources | 40
  • jonnybaker: lent

Useful article (with AppleScript snippet) for adding some helpful functionality to Word 2008 for Mac for pasting plain text into a document. Pasting plain text is something I do fairly frequently, so I’ve filed this link away for the possible time I have to use Word 2008. See TidBITS Problem Solving: Word 2008 and the Paste Plain Text Dance.

Interesting article by Real Live Preacher over at Christian Century on the enquiring mind and faith.

Some people see the boundary between mystery and science as a battleground with barbed wire and trenches on either side. But I think that the place where our searching and empirical minds meet the mysteries of the world is the realm of worship and poetry.

Full article at: The Christian Century: Faith matters - Brother Scientist (January 15, 2008) by Gordon Atkinson.

Tim’s recent post SansBlogue: Referencing for the financially challenged generated a few comments, so he’s followed it up with SansBlogue: Zotero is brilliant, and integrates nicely which includes some movies of how Zotero works in practice.

I have Zotero installed on the old iBook and it’s integration with MS Word v.X for Mac is quite painless and seems to work well. Certainly I think it’d be useful for working on shorter documents (essays, articles and chapters) providing you were using a common citation style.

Of interest particularly to biblical scholars is Zotero Forums - Using Zotero with the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) style. SBL with EndNote is supported (see here), though it is only for versions later than EndNote 9, I think.

See also:

• Greenflame · MS Word’s native bibliography/citation handling?
• Greenflame · Thinking about writing tools

A new user-driven blog relating to transhumanist ideas, and in particular, the technological singularity. See On Singularity:

Problogger, Darren Rowse, publishes his list of useful blogging tools for Mac OS X. I use (or have tried many of them) - Ecto (article editor which I have on both Mac and Windows), CyberDuck (FTP client), ImageWell (for quick manipulation and posting of images) and Firefox. I prefer TextWrangler over TextEdit though (I used BBEdit Lite from way back)

The full list is at 14 Essential Mac OS X Applications for Bloggers

There’s no standalone newsreader application in there though because he uses Google Reader to do that. See Greenflame · NetNewsWire (Free now!) for my preference there. I used the Sage plug-in for Firefox for ages, as well as Bloglines, but I really like having one app that does a single job well, but can talk to other apps if need be.

Justice De Thezier, one of the most frequent contributors to the transhumanist blog Cyborg Democracy (which tends towards the ‘left’ of the H+ spectrum), wrote a posting a few weeks back about how he’s decided to abandon the transhumanist label (and also membership in the WTA). It makes for interesting reading (and has some parallels with stories told by those who leave religious communities).

Interestingly, his three points that he sees hindering a broader, more inclusive transhumanism (1. An undercritical support for technology in general and fringe science in particular; 2. A distortive ‘us vs. them’ tribe-like mentality and identity; and 3. A vulnerability to unrealistic utopian and dystopian ‘future hype’) also came out quite clearly in my own research into the ideology. (And those three points also look similar to criticisms of faith communities by some who leave - uncritical approach to doctrine; us vs. them; and escapist eschatologies).

You can read the article at CybDem: De Thezier’s New Year’s Resolution: Quit Transhumanism and the follow up article at CybDem: 2 Weeks Later….

On a related note - here’s a link to an article describing a movie being developed about the technological singularity: Coming Soon to a Theater Near You: The Singularity In a world where it’s hard to be an expert on the science and technology (say behind global warming claims or reproductive technologies) these types of movies seem to be as much about positioning their proponents as people you can trust, as conveying useful information about their ideas. Still, I look forward to watching it critically at some point.

Both MS Word 2007 (Windows) and MS Word 2008 (Mac) claim to have citation and bibliographic features for writers who need that support - though with a limited set of bibliographic styles. Does anyone have any experience working with them or compared them to a third-party add-on like Endnote? If you only used the supplied styles could you do away with EndNote (and the perennial compatibility problems whenever the OS, word processor or EndNote gets updated)?

Links:

• Create a bibliography - Word - Microsoft Office Online (Word 2007).

• Microsoft Word Processing Software for Your Mac | Mactopia (Word:Mac 2008)
• AppleInsider | Road to Mac Office 2008: Word ‘08 vs Pages 3.0 [Page 3] (Some screenshots of the tools)

The “People Power for the Third Millennium: Technology, Democracy and Human Rights” symposia from The Centre for Bioethics & Public Policy in the UK looks interesting, though being held in London means I’m hoping they’ll be something published out of them for a wider audience.

The first symposium, “Robots & Rights: Will artificial intelligence change the meaning of human rights?”, was a couple of days ago, and other upcoming topics include:

• Transhuman minds? Is cognitive enhancement a human right?
• Privacy and Surveillance: Monitoring humans or monitoring human rights?
• Arts and technology: the role of the arts in democratic policy making

2008 has rolled around and brought with it a whole lot of changes for us. Our youngest turned 5 over Christmas and so will be starting school (no more preschoolers!), Kim started a new job locally, and I’ve got a full-time theology teaching position here in Auckland. So all our family schedules and rhythms will be changing and it will take a little while for that to shake down.

From mid-February I’ll be lecturing in practical theology in the School of Theology at the University of Auckland. The interview was the week before Christmas, and I’m only now just getting my head around actually starting the job in a few weeks time. Some of the exact teaching details are still to be worked out, but I have a reasonable idea of what’s coming up. After so long in the journey to this point it all feels a little unreal.

I imagine it’ll be a year of challenges and opportunities, especially as I get to grips with the change in role to full-time lecturer, and the nuances of teaching theology in a university as opposed to the other places I’ve taught it before. Still, it’s a great relief to be starting and to know what we’re doing, and also to be able to stay in Auckland for the foreseeable future and not have to uproot the family. And, given where we live, I can take the train to work each day and avoid the traffic because I’ll be based full-time at the city campus.

I’m already fielding some of the questions and comments that Simon noted over at Simply Simon: Practicing theology. Things like, ‘Practical theology? Theology is practical?’ or ‘Practical theology? Isn’t that an oxymoron?’. I imagine that sort of thing will be fairly regular for a long as I’m teaching and researching in practical theology . I am looking forward to working in an area that lends itself to interdisciplinary work, as well standing at the intersection of scripture and tradition on one side and the issues and concerns of our society and cultures on the other.

So new things, new experiences, and a new life (of sorts) in 2008. After the frustrations of 2007 we’re all looking forward to it.

I’ve been wondering whether South African athlete Oscar Pistorius, who runs with carbon-fibre prosthetic legs, would be competing at the Beijing Olympics ever since I saw a news article about him a year to eighteen months ago. It appears now that he won’t be there, even if he makes the qualifying times.

See: Pistorius’s unfair advantage keeps him out of Olympics | Athletics | Guardian Unlimited Sport

Hat tip to Andii over at Nouslife: Pistorius’s unfair advantage -the cyborg prosthete.

It’s an interesting question - how much enhancement should an athlete be allowed? Obviously, things like spectacles and contact lenses are allowed, as are various operations to fix/improve weak spots in a physique (e.g. replacing broken tendons) or corrective eye surgery. But something like taking performance-enhancing drugs or blood-doping isn’t. It seems like it’s going to get harder to differentiate between therapy/enhancement in sport as time goes on.

NPR ran a programme on Pistorius and enhancement in sport back in May last year. You can listen to it at: NPR : Prosthetics in Sports: Disability or Advantage?

iRobot have produced a new household robot (’ConnectR’) that allows you to partake in family life when you can’t be there in person. The small round robot allows you to see, hear and follow your loved ones around, as well as allowing you yo talk to them, all via wireless connectivity at home and an internet connection wherever you are.

More details on the product at iRobot Corporation: About ConnectR.

Hat tip to TidBITS Tech News: CES 2008 Day 3: Robots and Wrap-up.

Oh, and there’s a video of it in action over at Geekanerd - Video Games, Comic Books, Movies, and All Things Geek!: Digital Life: Two Minutes With the iRobot ConnectR.

Incarnational or excarnational living - the choice is yours. But somehow it doesn’t beat tucking the kids into bed in person, nor sharing the evening meal together.

A couple of links relating to the ubiquitous Microsoft Office.

Firstly, a look at how the new versions of Office for Mac and Windows compare over at How Does MS Office for Mac Compare to Office for Windows?

And secondly, a link through to an article that notes that the recent Service Pack 3 for MS Office (for Windows) will disable Office’s ability to open a number of different legacy file formats. Not good if you have a set of older documents that you open occasionally or are maintaining for archive purposes. You can ‘undo’ the effects of this ‘upgrade’ but it involves Windows Registry hacking (yuck). Or you could install OpenOffice to access some of the older formats. See Microsoft Office Drops Support For Older File Formats | Compiler from Wired.com.

I can see an increasing need to have several different virtual machines on one’s computer that allow the booting into legacy operating systems and running of older versions of software - sort of like RLP here post-switch to Mac OS X.

I enjoy seeing the different ways that libraries use to promote reading - the recent NZ libraries ‘Inspire me!’ campaign using some well-known faces is a good example.

Here’s one from the American Library Association that uses Alex Ross comic book watercolor artwork (and a couple of others) to promote reading. See Comics Should Be Good! » Some Neat Posters

I use NetNewsWire Lite to keep up with my blog feeds, though I’ve never felt the need to upgrade to the full version. Now, however, the full version of NetNewsWire is being released for free as its developer focuses upon growing their online services. So, if you you’re running Mac OS X 10.4 or later you can grab the latest version and take it for a spin.

More information at: RSS Reader for Mac - NetNewsWire

Hat tip to: TidBITS Networking: NewsGator Turns NetNewsWire Loose for Free

(Of course, I’m still stuck in 10.3.9 for the foreseeable future [anyone want to donate me a MacBook?:-)] and will be plodding along with the old Lite version just fine.)

Came across these podcasts from Radio NZ the other day. I haven’t listened to the Split Enz documentary at all, but the kids have been enjoying the Storytime stories. The former might be of interest to those outside of NZ who like the Finn brothers music, but haven’t listened to their early stuff.

Enzology - Radio New Zealand’s story of Split Enz - Enzology

Enzology is Radio New Zealand National’s documentary covering the history of New Zealand’s most iconic band - Split Enz. Five years in the making, this ten-part series covers the history of the band from their beginnings in Auckland as an acoustic ensemble in 1972, to their final concerts as an Australia-based, internationally acclaimed pop band in 1984.

Radio New Zealand National : Programmes A-Z : Storytime Treasure Chest

I watched the new Babylon 5 DVD - Babylon 5 - The Lost Tales - tonight and really enjoyed it. Some other reviews I read said they didn’t enjoy the pace of the two interrelated stories on the disc, but I thought the pace was just right for the content being dealt with. The first story is a mix of theology and ethics, while that later concerns, perhaps, the qualities of mercy and kindness (again within an ethical context), and both connect plot-wise to the other. Nice to be back in the B5 universe, nice to see the updated CGI effects (no Amiga graphics here), and hopefully there’s a follow up in the near future (see Babylon 5: The Lost Tales - Wikipedia)

Of course, I’ll be back in the B5 universe for a while now after my folks gave me Babylon 5: The Complete Collection + The Lost Tales DVD set for my birthday. All the B5 seasons, the movies, the spin-offs - Crusade, Legend of the Rangers pilot, and The Lost Tales. A serious amount of shelf-space can be recovered when I get rid of my B5 VHS tapes, plus I also get to see/hear the commentaries and special features. Bliss, indeed.

One thing though. I’ve also having Star Trek cravings for Borg-related episodes. I shall have to borrow the Star Trek Fan Collective - Borg off someone sometime to fix that. Resistance appears futile.

Another thing - at some point I’d like to acquire the Jeremiah TV series. I really enjoyed Season 2 (esp. Mr Smith), but missed most of the middle of Season 1. Season 1 got released on DVD only in the US (Region 1) and season 2 is only available via digital download (and hence not to anyone outside of the US. iTunes link here - but strangely no Season 1 in iTunes. You have to get that via Amazon’s Unbox video). So I don’t think that will happen anytime soon.

Via Russell Brown’s column in the latest NZ Listener - Wide Area News: Casting the net - a link through to the World Internet Project New Zealand being done by AUT’s Institute of Culture, Discourse & Communication.

The World Internet Project New Zealand (WIP NZ) is an extensive research project which aims to provide important information about the social, cultural, political and economic influence of the internet and related digital technologies.

The findings of the pilot programme and the interim reports can be found here. (Brown’s piece summarizes a some it as well). I’m going to download them and see if anything interesting pops out.

Back in the past couple of days from 10 days away in Rotorua and Kawerau with both of our families. A really good time to catch up with everybody and for the kids to renew friendships with their cousins. Games of cricket, swimming, family walks in various forests, barbeques, catching up with old uni friends, and a trip out to the Ohope Beach Outdoor Book Sale to pick up a few second-hand books all part of the holiday.

Great to be away together, and also nice to be home now.