Greenflame

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

  • Constantine and comics revisited

    Tim and I were talking yesterday about my comments to his post SansBlogue : Hell wants him. Heaven won’t take him. Earth needs him and I’ve decided to turn them into a post over here in response to that. Bear in mind my comments are more about the genre of comic books than the movie (which I have yet to go and see). Tim wrote,

    It’s no wonder that the distributors thought a couple of free tickets should be thrown to the School of Theology… I was the theologian”, and my (still just) teenage son was the representative of the likely target audience. Well, the plot and script was based on the DC/Vertigo comic book Hellblazer so I assume teenage boys are the target

    (Immediate response – how come Tim got the tickets!? More considered response follows.)
    (more…)

  • Mind Control – Brain/Computer Interfaces

    Article about Matt Nagle (25) who is a patient in a trial that seeks to prove brain-computer interfaces can return function to people paralyzed by injury or disease. Basically the device in the brain identifies the brain activity associated with moving limbs and responds electronically effecting a response in the world. See Wired 13.03: Mind Control.

  • Reclaiming Mary

    A friend of mine wrote this a while back but it’s just gone online : Reality – Issue 66 – Reclaiming Mary by Rosemary Dewerse.

    Today Mary is still accorded a very high place by Roman Catholics, while amongst Protestants — who have inherited the aversion of their forefathers — she is a victim of conscientious neglect.
    But is this neglect fair to the Mary of Scripture? Could it be possible that the Protestant tradition has, in fact, starved itself of a potentially significant contributor to our understanding of faith, discipleship, and (to borrow a phrase from Radford Ruether) the “feminine face of the church”?

  • Suspension of Disbelief

    Suspension of Disbelief : A Fact-Check for the Four-Color World is a group blog reality-checking comic stories. “Incredible stories in a realistic world” might be their slogan.

    Thus, in the spirit of educating the public and the publishers, we here have created this group blog. We’ll complain when creators get the facts wrong, and congratulate when they get them right (and we expect there will be no shortage of the former). Some may call it nitpicking; we prefer to think of it as accuracy. It’s one thing to read about Gorilla Grodd kidnapping the President of the United States, but that same talking gorilla story suffers if the story has him abducting a supposed U.S. Prime Minister. Comics regularly expect us to believe the impossible. Making the real-world backdrop that they’re set against truly realistic makes those impossibilities easier to handle.

    Maybe there’s a similar opportunity for a group blog for fact-checking sermons – I hate it when preachers assert things about the real world in order to create a world for their sermon point. There are incredible stories to be told but it’s better if they’re not set in fairyland.

  • Tim on Constantine

    Tim’s had some thoughts on the movie “Constantine” over at SansBlogue. Added my 2 cents in the comments there.

  • CSS Sleuthing

    Still looking at why the CSS breaks in Windows IE. It’s bizarre, but because I’m going to revise the overall layout of the site anyway I’m not going to beat my head against the wall over it. Now I’ve got the “printer-friendly” template working I’ll be moving to a new layout (maybe three columns) and I’ll make sure the CSS doesn’t break in the new one. Built my first home page way back in ’94 and always thought that the tools would improve debugging pages – but at the end of the day printing out the source for a page and actually looking at the code seems to catch the errors that automated tools ignore.

  • Usability and the Harris Teeter’s self-checkout carousel

    Usability and the Harris Teeter’s self-checkout carousel . Felt like this at the library the other day when the self-service scanner fails on every third book. From Heal Your Church Web Site : Teaching, rebuking, correcting & training in righteous web design.

  • Seriously impressed

    Contemplating changes to blog style to fix the Windows IE image/css problem. In looking around I came across css Zen Garden. Just spent some idle minutes clicking on the styles here. I’m seriously impressed.

  • On the need for boundaries in order to be hospitable

    Some helpful comments on Brian Walsh’s With and Without Boundaries: Christian Homemaking Amidst Postmodern Homelessness over at andygoodlife : Exclusion and embrace Pt 2. It follows on from Exclusion or Embrace where some thoughts are posed on the most excellent Paul Fromont’s posting Baptism@the borders and other thoughts on church membership.

  • Internet Explorer Weirdness with Images

    Okay. Now in the last couple of posts I’ve uploaded and embedded JPEG images in the blog postings. On my iBook in Firefox and Safari they show up. On the Windows XP Acer they show up in Firefox. But in Internet Explorer on the Acer there are just blank spaces where the images are meant to be. They still link if they have hyperlinks attached to them but no picture. If I just view the image URL on its own it shows up. So what’s happening that’s breaking IE? (insert deluge of IE bugs here). Alignment? Image format? Stylesheet problem?

    Really annoying, because I don’t often check with WinXP – I just assume JPEGs get displayed.

    Any clues?

    Update: The images display fine on the individual archive pages – just not on the main page.
    Update 2: And if I remove the “align” parameter from the “img” tag then they display – which is odd because IE knows what the alignment is and makes the space for the image in the right place. In the meantime I’ve just turned off the alignment – yuk! It looks like it might be a CSS clash/problem.
    Update 3: Switching back to the default MT stylesheet caused the problem to go away. Looks like the interaction of container, content and blog styles. Time to update the templates and stylesheet, I think.