June 2008

For an interesting range of articles, video clips and other things relating to the speculative concept of the technological singularity see IEEE Spectrum: Special Report: The Singularity.

Related links:

• Greenflame · Three Major Singularity Schools
• Greenflame · Pondering the Singularity (Again)
• Greenflame · Transhumanism

When the combination of WYSIWYG graphical user interfaces, scalable fonts, laser printers and desktop publishing software started to make its presence felt at the end of the 1980s it was a time of serious typeface abuse in newsletters, invitations and home-made greetings cards. It seems everyone wanted to go and put as many jarring and clashing typefaces on a page as they could. Some of my friends even when to far as to use things like Fontographer to create their own typeface variants, but then they tended to be over-zealous about things like that (and actually read up on things like kerning etc.) (Of course, all that came in useful when we had a couple of assignments in computer graphics class writing Postscript by hand to generate graphic objects and in order to understand how a Postscript laser printer or Sun’s NeWS GUI worked.)

(Equivalent things to this typeface abuse still happens today in Powerpoint presentations you encounter every now and then, along with the evil that is the blink tag in web pages.)

Anyway, the other day I saw this news article, F is for do-it-yourself fonts - Stuff.co.nz, which pointed over to FontStruct | Build, Share, Download Fonts. This is a web site that allows you to design your own typefaces and share them with the world. Suddenly it’s 1986 all over again.

Related link: At some point I want to see the film, Helvetica, as I’m always intrigued by the effort and history that lurks in the stories about things like typefaces.

Picked up the following book from a sale pile today at a book clearance store. Hoping to find some time to flick through it at some point - perhaps on the train traveling to and from the SBL international conference in a week’s time. Must have a hunt through the conference programme book and see if there’s anything in there relating to popular culture.

“Living with Star Trek: American Culture and the Star Trek Universe” (Lincoln Geraghty)

The fusion of technology from Weta Digital’s work on animation technologies using human subjects finds an application in helping doctors understand children’s motion with a view to corrective surgery and other therapy. See Wellywood technology helps children to walk - NZ Herald: Technology News

An interesting article over at Confessions of an Aca/Fan: Designing Accessible Games. You see articles about making things like web sites usable or accessible, but not so much about making computer/video games accessible for people.

Something I didn’t know when making MP3 disks in iTunes - Macworld | Playlist | Creating navigable MP3 discs.

A couple more robot links to go with a robot girlfriend link from a day or two back.

The first, Robotic Navi-Bear as Annoying as It Is Cute | Autopia from Wired.com, is the fusion of a talking teddy bear with a navigation system for drivers.

The second, Tartalo the robot is knocking on your door, is about a robot being built in Spain the can navigate around the wider community by recognising people’s homes.

ALA | Select Bibliography of Children’s Books about the Disability Experience is a list from the American Library Association that “contains some outstanding books that portray emotional, mental, or physical disability experiences, most published between 2000 and 2006.”

Just filing the link here because it might be useful at some point for the “Spirituality and Well-being” course I’m co-teaching next semester.

Hat tip to: Select Bibliography of Children’s Books about the Disability Experience « Nano, Bio, Info, Cogno, Synthetic bio, NBICS

Another step in the direction of virtual companions? See Japan makes robot girlfriend for lonely men

Related links: Greenflame · Computer companions: Are they possible?

Great little article by Sam J. Miller over at mental_floss Blog » Battlestar Galactica vs. Star Trek looking at the difference in anthropologies underlying Star Trek (pretty positive) and the new Battlestar Galactica (pretty negative). Worth a quick read.

Miller argues that Galactica doesn’t hide the warts or flaws in human nature and relationships, or paint a rosy picture of some kind of trajectory towards perfection achievable through the myth of progress. He says of that,

Galactica is sci-fi without that BS. Sci-fi with all the anger and stupidity and sadness that real people experience. Sci-fi without the conviction that we will conquer our own ugliness. Sci-fi for the age of peak oil and 9/11 and natural disasters compounded by climate change to the point where they can completely destroy major cities. Galactica’s message is that unless we come to terms with our own history, we are doomed. Mankind created the Cylons to fight our wars and to do our grunt work for us. Eventually they rose up and wiped out 99.999% of us. This basic lesson is one we still haven’t learned: that exploitation leads to exploitation, that if you oppress someone you sow the seeds of your own oppression. “You can’t play God and then wash your hands of the things you’ve created,” says the Galactica’s commander, William Adama. “Sooner or later, the day comes when you can’t hide from the things that you’ve done anymore.”

It’s similar to the flaws in humanity that Joss Whedon brought out in Firefly or J. Michael Straczynski kept in Babylon 5.

Hat tip to Exploring Our Matrix: Around the Blogosphere (The End of the Banana Argument)

Related link: Greenflame · Science fiction as safe(?) space to explore unpleasant questions

Ages ago (way back in 1990-91, I think) one of my flatmates had the game OIDS on his computer. It ran just fine on a Mac Plus and on the new Mac LC’s that had just come out. Good memories of the flat all taking turns to see who could get the highest score.

Any now I find that there’s a version for Mac OS X available from Xavagus Prime Software. I downloaded it and all the game playing memories came back. Unfortunately, the old game playing reflexes haven’t come back with the memories - can’t seem to fly anywhere near as well as I once did.

Related link: Oids - MobyGames

Just finished watching Justice League: The New Frontier DVD borrowed from the local library, which is the animated movie of Darwyn Cooke’s “The New Frontier” detailing the formation of the Silver Age Justice League. I enjoyed it, and especially so because it dealt primarily with the characters of Green Lantern (Hal Jordan), Flash (Barry Allen) and Martian Manhunter (J’onn J’onzz) rather than the normal Trinity of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman.

The artwork style is very much 1960s, and for the comics enthusiast there are all sorts of cameo appearances and background details to note. And while it’s animated superheroes the plot and content (for example, the shades of grey in politics) are definitely geared for an audience above children’s level (The rating on the the DVD here is “M”). As the Line of Fire review noted below states: “This is a fine film, definitely geared towards adults, a little too violent for the kids, but for anyone who ever loved superheroes, you will find an appreciation of this film.” However, for audiences outside of the US there will be a few moments where the elements of the story may not resonate as strongly as they might for those brought up in the US context.

Related links:

Justice League: The New Frontier - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Justice League: The New Frontier DVD Review - Line of Fire Reviews - Comics Bulletin

Absolute DC: The New Frontier HC Review - Line of Fire Reviews - Comics Bulletin

Interesting series of quotes about what it means to be human from various scientists over at What Does It Mean to Be Human? | Wired Science from Wired.com.

Often our attempts to define this tend to be linked to particular understandings of the essential core that defines human beings, sometimes called the locus humanus. Typically, this is denoted by a set of attributes that human beings alone possess, such as the religious concept of an immortal soul, but is often a collection of psychological attributes such as reason, language, consciousness and self consciousness. And indeed, in the quotes in the link above some of these crop up.

Hat tip to Nouslife: What Does It Mean to Be Human?

Metanexus’ eMagazine/eJournal - Global Spiral - has a special issue this month on transhumanism edited by Hava Tirosh-Samuelson from Arizona State University.

See Global Spiral, June 2008 (Volume 9, Issue 3) - Special Issue on Transhumanism

Articles include:

• Engaging Transhumanism: The Meaning of Being Human :: Hava Tirosh-Samuelson :: Global Spiral
• Of Which Human Are We Post? :: Don Ihde :: Global Spiral
• Wrestling with Transhumanism :: Katherine Hayles :: Global Spiral
• Cybernetics Is An Antihumanism: Advanced Technologies and the Rebellion Against the Human Condition :: Jean-Pierre Dupuy :: Global Spiral
• Brains, Selves and Spirituality in the History of Cybernetics :: Andrew Pickering :: Global Spiral
• Transhumanism and the Posthuman Future: Will Technological Progress Get Us There? :: Ted Peters :: Global Spiral

I will have to make time to read them all in the next couple of weeks - perhaps one or two per day on the train?

The iBook power adaptor died. After years of faithful service the cable that wrapped around the yo-yo adaptor broke, and I’ve spent a reasonable bit of time trying to find an old style iBook adaptor to plug in. However, I found one this morning and we’re up and charging. Luckily, backups had been made so no worries there mostly. I can’t belief how expensive both Apple and third-party adaptors are, though.

The G3 lives on - and is still fine for word processing, music and podcasts, email, blogging, DVDs, presentations and basic web browsing. Not so good for video play back (Flash or MP4) though - and web pages with lots of Flash items etc. tend to drag.

The screen may die in a little bit though, so it may become limited to a desk with a monitor and keyboard for chidren’s homework in the near future

Damaris have produced some multimedia and study resources for schools and churches in conjunction with the new Prince Caspian movie. See Damaris Media: Prince Caspian.

Free CD-ROM of resources if you’re in the UK.

Stu, over at Definitive : a way of moving beyond the infinite wanted people to post their (random) thoughts on the future of (the) church.

So, I’ll post on and off over the next few weeks.

My first random thought about the topic is that we often forget that the Church (or church) is the Spirit’s. And that, while human endeavour and action shapes both its good and bad, ultimately the Church is the community formed, shaped and sustained by the Spirit of God. Sometimes, in our efforts to shape the church, predict the church’s future, and point out it’s good points and bad points we often forget that, as do lapses into Christomonism and such like.

The liturgical imperative, “Hear what the Spirit is saying to the Church,” should be more proactively engaged with, rather than just passive background noise.