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)