Following on from the previous posting here’s an ongoing development in Europe. See European agency rules against stem cell patents | Health | Reuters.

Related links: Are we too risk averse? and Social issues and GM crops – LearningSpace – OpenLearn – The Open University.  

From around the place at the moment

ERMA (Environmental Risk Management Authority) are wanting submissions by Dec 8 on the revised methodology related to the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act. See ERMA: Submissions on proposed GMO regulations if you’re interested in making a submission.

Strict rules hedge 10-year GE onion trial – 28 Nov 2008 – NZ Herald: New Zealand and International environment and global warming news

Potato pioneer stuck in field trials – 29 Nov 2008 – NZ Herald: Science News from New Zealand and around the World

Scientists say it’s time to let GM genie out of the bottle – 29 Nov 2008 – NZ Herald: Science News from New Zealand and around the World

Just nice to go to the playground, walk around the lake and feed the ducks.

Some interesting questions being raised by the Privacy Commission over the storage and lifetime of NZ baby’s DNA in blood samples taken at birth.

From Warning on abuse of baby DNA data – Stuff.co.nz

I’m pretty picky about my computer keyboards (and have been since using ‘dumb’ terminals way, way back). So I’m always interested in links to new ones.

• :: KEYBOARD FOR BLONDES::
• Das Keyboard: The mechanical keyboard that clicks

So far my preferred keyboard for both Mac and PC has been the Microsoft Internet Pro keyboard (with the built in USB hub). However, it got stepped on the other month (don’t ask) and will need replacing at some point soon. They don’t make it any more so it’s time to look around.

HT OMG! It’s a keyboard for blondes | Crave – CNET

The article The Alban Institute – The New Connectivity: How Internet Innovations Are Changing the Way We Do Church by Andrea Useem makes some interesting points about digital technologies and religious community. Resonates with me this weekend as I’m speaking tomorrow evening at church on technology as the environment we inhabit, and also because I attended a Web 3D and Virtual Worlds symposium at work yesterday.

Also PBS carried a feature on online religion today too. See Episode no. 1212. Online Religion | PBS Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly

Both the Alban Institute and the PBS pieces engage with Heidi Campbell’s work.

(Hat Tip: Tensegrities » Blog Archive » Web 2.0 and congregations)

Interesting news article looking at Matrine Rothlatt’s perspective on digital immortality. See Virtual immortality — baltimoresun.com

Terasemfaith.org, the Internet home base for Terasem Movement Transreligion Inc., describes Rothblatt’s religion as one that believes “God emerges as technology becomes increasingly omnipresent, omniscient, omnificient and omnipotent,” and that “technology will soon enable joyful immortality.”

Related links – the film transbemanmovie: About TransBeMan which Rothlatt is involved in and Greenflame · Search results for immortality.

The Center for Spiritual Development in Childhood and Adolescence release a report on an international survey of young people and spirituality. Looks interesting and covers a number of different places in the world.

Related link: What Do You Believe? – teenage spirituality, cultural diversity and religious pluralism in America

I’m sure I’ve seen something related to Australia recently too. Will have a look for it.

James points to a number of links over at Exploring Our Matrix: Religiously-Inflected Science Fiction. Of note are:

• This World and the Next: Classic books on science fiction and spirituality. (Sojourners Magazine/November 2008) by Elizabeth Palmberg.
• Spiritually-Inflected Science Fiction by Elizabeth Palmberg

To which we can also add The Sci Fi Catholic: Sci-fi Essay at First Things pointing to FIRST THINGS: On the Square » Blog Archive » Reel Aliens.

Related links: Greenflame · Science Fiction

So I’ve been trying our different options for virtual machines on the MacBook Pro with varying degrees of success. So far I’ve played around with the Parallels 3 demo, the VMWare Fusion demo, Crossover and VirtualBox.

Given I don’t have a spare Windows XP or Vista licence lying around at the moment (something I’ll fix in the next few days) I’ve been playing around with Windows 98 and Ubuntu distributions to see how easy it is install and run the different virtual machines.

Firstly, Crossover which effectively attempts to run Windows applications (using a WINE base) without you having to install a Window OS in a virtual machine. A nice idea but it didn’t really do the job with the apps I tried. Plus I want to record what the Windows setup looks like with something like Camtasia and having the familiar Windows Desktop helps there.

Secondly, Parallels. Easy install and worked well mostly. With Windows 98 it wouldn’t find the CD drive properly (disk image or real CD) which meant it couldn’t install the extras nor additional drivers it needed to run smoothly (like for sound and networking). Ubuntu installed too, but again the extras wouldn’t install either, though it ran just fine without them for testing purposes. Perhaps XP and Vista would work better, but it’s had a couple of strikes against it. YMMV.

Thirdly, VMWare Fusion. Again easy to install and the install of the OSs seemed to work well. It did a better job on Win98 (which is useful because I need to test course CD-ROMs etc. on old browsers and OSs. A lot of our students seem to have second-hand/hand-me-down hardware) but I couldn’t for the life of me get the soundcard to work. The appropriate drivers just gave a blue screen of death on install, though the CDROM worked. Latest Ubuntu (8.10) installed like a charm, with the extras. So, if this one plays well with XP/Vista it could be the one to pick.

Lastly, VirtualBox. Installed Win98 fine but only in basic mode – no sound etc and lo-res graphics. Ubuntu fared better and installed smoothly. If all I wanted to do was run the latter for testing then maybe that would be the way to go.

Next step is to set up a Bootcamp partition with Vista and then see how the virtual machines like Fusion play with that. In a less than perfect world I’d go with that by default, but I’d like to be testing and documenting the Windows and Linux experiences for students at the same time as the Mac experience. So far Fusion looks like it might do the job best, but we’ll wait and see.