Greenflame

Jottings on science, religion, technology, pop culture, photography and faith from the Aotearoa New Zealand

  • Copyright and repositories

    Tim’s post here points out that sharing copyright with journal publishers does come with strings attached – as in you might not be able to submit it to an electronic repository (as hypothesised here a day or so ago).

    See: SansBlogue : When copyright fails…

    Might be interesting to see what the definition of a repository is. Tim and co’s idea seems to be for a place to upload files to. I wonder if instead each person is responsible for hosting the files (via department space or their own domain name) and then the “repository” merely provides an indexes to those files. A biblical studies Napster?

  • Adam Curry Wants to Make You an iPod Radio Star

    Following up from the posting about making theological vignettes on video, there might be an easier way to do it first up – via pod-casting. Have a look at : Wired 13.03: Adam Curry Wants to Make You an iPod Radio Star.

  • Subversive, life-giving fan fiction.

    Read the following essay the other day on the train which seemed to link in with a number of other ongoing threads of discussion out there.

    In his essay ‘Web of Babylon’* on the nature of fan fiction Kurt Lancaster ponders the nature of power relationships within publishing and the generations of new micro communities. [Fan fiction is where writers take aspects of an existing literary world – say a television show like Babylon 5 – and create a new but derivative work that expands upon the canonical literature. So you might take character behaviour demonstrated in the TV show but place it into another unvisited context.] So the original text isn’t simply produced and consumed only as directed. Rather as Lancaster notes it is transformed and transforms the readers.

    ‘Fandom here’, media scholar Henry Jenkins tells us, ‘becomes a participatory culture which transforms the experience of media consumption into the production of new texts, indeed of a new culture and a new community’. Fans may create new cultural texts, but they do not necessarily build a new full-sized community. In anything, what evolves out of their creative productions are micro-communities. (p.309)

    (more…)

  • Philosophy : A Guide to Happiness

    Just had the video of Alain de Botton’s Philosophy : A Guide to Happiness out of the library for the week (I don’t think it ever made it onto NZ TV). It’s a television version of his book The Consolations of Philosophy where he summarizes what six different philosophers said about things like love, self-esteem and anger (one philosopher per topic) and how that might give wisdom for living in the everyday.

    It was the format of the episodes (30 mins each) that attracted my attention (the content did too). Started wondering whether you could do that same thing with theologians – pick 6-8 theological figures and then look at how each one might relate to an aspect of the Christian life. Turn each into a short video for use in class or with discussion groups. Emphasis upon the practice of faith.

    BTW – my favourite part of the video was in the Epicurus on happiness/good living episode where an advertising agency is approached to develop ads that counter consumerism.

  • Don’t hand religion to the right

    Interesting article in the Guardian on religion and politics brought to my attention by Jonny Baker: act justly. Nice to get an alternative point of view from the typical argument I’ve frequently encountered that if your’re Christian in NZ you should vote for a centre-right (neo-con) type party rather than the centre-left (neo-lib) ones. At the end of the day though both are “slaves” to the market. See Guardian Unlimited | Guardian daily comment | Don’t hand religion to the right.

    For a related political posts see: Harbinger’s recent Evangelicalism & politics and Postmodernbible’s Abortion and All. As always read the comments.

  • Open-source programmer alleges Linux misuse

    Open-source programmer alleges Linux misuse | Tech News on ZDNet is an article that notes one man’s crusade for the GPL covering Linux to be upheld by those embedding it in consumer products.

  • Printers again

    Following up from Somethings wrong somewhere and the laser printer/consumable issue the old inkjet printer (~1996) Kim uses ran out of a colour (yellow?). Now new cartridge costs $75 – new printer with cartridge costs $70-80. The cost is replacing the whole cartridge even if most of the other colours are still not depleted – too wasteful in my reckoning.
    So looking for a new printer that has individual replaceable colours, MacOSX/WinXP compatible and won’t break the bank. So far the Epson Stylus C65 comes close but when one colour runs out it won’t print at all until that cartridge is replaced. There are some old Canon S520’s floating around cheap too, as well as the Brother MFC210c multifunction thing that seems to do that same thing with ink. The old printer still works and I have several unopened black ink cartridges so it may end up going to a student for essay printing.

  • Upgrading MT

    Pondering upgrading MT to a later version for a variety of reasons – nested categories being one of them and fixing the CSS Windows IE problems being another. Given AKMA’s problems doing this (see here) I’m thinking a clean install might be the best thing after doing an export and full backup. The CSS might look plain for a while before being “greenified”. If you have comments about the readability of the site (fonts, size etc.) now would be a good time to make them (That means you, Stu).

  • Blogs of our lives

    STUFF : TECHNOLOGY : DIGITAL LIVING – STORY : Blogs of our lives has a survey of new blogging technologies that will increase the amount of personal information that needs to be managed.

    While the multimedia diary will continue to be stored across a number of devices, the real challenge, says the CSIRO’s Science Industry manager, Dr Ross Wilkinson, will be how we organise and access it.

    “In some sense where it is stored and how it is stored is going to be less important than ‘Can we find the stuff?’. It is hard finding things on a messy desk just as it is hard finding things on a messy computer. How do we get support for that?”

    Wilkinson points to the likelihood of an artificially intelligent electronic helper that will learn from our digital habits and favourites, decide what to record in our digital cache and then organise the information into our life story.

    Like the messy desk image. I’m always looking for stuff on mine.

  • Brian McLaren Remembers Stan Grenz

    Some thoughts and reflections by Brian McLaren on Stanley Grenz. See Brian McLaren Remembers Stan Grenz.