Greenflame

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

  • AK05 – Auckland Festival

    Just received my copy of the event guide to AK05 – Auckland Festival ’05 and it looks like there’s something for everyone.

    Of interest to me in particular are events at the Corban Estate Arts Centre which is about 5-10 minutes walk from home. So I’ll be trying to get to Gleem – Multimedia Light Sculpture Festival. From the blurb,

    Gleem is a free twilight festival of light-based art and intrigue set in the historic Corban Estate Arts Centre park. New media meets nature – be mesmerized by multimedia, interactive sculptures, live music, dance and theatre.

    (More details also available here www.gleem.org)

  • Cellphones get broken by tight jeans

    Cellphones get broken by tight jeans according to a recent survey by manufacturer Siemens. Just one of the more common ways of destroying your mobile.

    Reminds me of common notebook computer accidents – like leaving a pen or pencil on the keyboard and closing the screen. Or the incident a friend (who serviced notebook computers) told me about the guy who’d taken everything out of the boot of the car to repack it, forgot to put the notebook bag back in the car at the end, and reversed over it. Data recovered but case, keyboard and screen were history.

  • Pondering Possibilities In Podvertising

    Article on how advertising might slip into podcasting (click on link to get Wikipedia explanation of that).

    In Pondering Possibilities in Podvertising a variety of schemes are proposed (inserted audio ad, sponsorship, RSS ads etc.) as a response to those who like time-shifted audio (and video) content delivered to their MP3 player or similar.

  • Paperless office?

    Over the last few days I’ve been trying to impose a level of order upon the chaos produced by writing and teaching. That, plus having to clean out my Carey office, meant the office at home has been covered in paper for days. Draft chapters, notes taken, half developed lectures, that same lecture/draft/article printed several times as it evolved, newspapers and magazines and several “million” memos, flyers and printed out web pages. So much for technology’s development of the Paperless office

    Lecture notes are now filed, drafts in the filing cabinet, magazines are under control (only a year’s or two’s worth of Listeners to file away now), and an orderly pile of papers and articles to enter into EndNote (I keep a separate EndNote database of what’s in my filing cabinet) and then file.

    But if I don’t do it today or tomorrow the piles will develop a life of their own and take over the floor & desk again.

    Part of the problem is that I don’t like reading large amounts of text on a screen – reading a printed copy on the couch or in bed and being able to scrawl all over it. I like not being tied to my iBook for reading.

    For the reading I do have to do on it maybe Tofu, a Mac OSX app to help reading large amounts of text on the screen, will aid me?

  • God In The Machine: What Robots Teach Us About Humanity And God

    Ordered God In The Machine: What Robots Teach Us About Humanity And God today. Always good to find a book directly related to your thesis topic.

    Hollywood to the halls of NASA, robots loom large in the popular imagination. But what feelings do these lifelike machines really provoke in us? In God in the Machine, Dr. Anne Foerst draws on her expertise as both a theologian and computer scientist to address the profound questions that robots such as Cog and Kismet raise for us all: What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to have a soul? And what do robots teach us about our relationship with God?

    I’ve read Anne Foerst’s material over the past few years and it’s been helpful in seeing how someone set out to establish a dialogue between theology and artificial intelligence, and weaves in her interpretation of what the image of God is and how that relates to AI.

    There’s a very brief article here (KurzweilAI.net – Robot : Child of God) written by her with general responses posted below it for those of you who are interested.

  • Creative commons, music and Wired Magazine

    November Wired Magazine’s lead story was about music, sampling, remixing, copyright and creative commons. Came with a CD of music (and MP3s on the web site) from well known artists released under a creative commons licence. Some musings on the creative process as being in part derivative or creating using others work as inspiration. Also the tension between art as culture and art as commerce.

    See: Wired 12.11: Sample the Future.

  • Monday blues (the good ones)

    So the wintery weather appears to have moved on for the moment – blue skies and wamer temperatures at the moment, though it was cold and wet this morning.

    Too hard in high winds, rain and hail to attempt to outside decorations, but inside the Christmas tree is up, Advent calendar is progressing and the Nativity scene is stuck to the lounge front window facing the road.

    PhD meeting went well – always a good idea to combine it with lunch – and now I’m ready to work on my paper for the Virtual Theology colloquium in February. Something on technology and religion interacting through the use of metaphor perhaps. Or perhaps not.

  • Breathing space

    Journal article submitted, marking finished, supervision meeting on Monday to wrap things up for the year, and no outstanding deadlines. A time to catch my breath.

    Tomorrow will be a day of stuff – post office, overdue library books to return, Christmas decorations to do with the children (Kim’s bought 32m of fairy lights, plus I’ll attempt to get the coloured lanterns into the tree out front and stick the nativity scene onto the lounge window), food shopping, end of year PhD BBQ hosted by the School of Theology, and the All Black game in the middle of the night. But it’s all low impact.

  • Writing, writing, writing…

    Article due tomorrow. All the ideas are in my head and most of them are on paper. 400 words of the 5000-odd left to put on the page and then some more proof reading. In the words of the Holsoms(?) bread ad it’s time to “let it go.”

    Today’s Calvin and Hobbes seemed somewhat apt – though I’m definitely not in the genius category this week/month/year. (Calvin and Hobbes — 1999/12/02/)

  • Technology and Human Becoming

    From Technology and Human Becoming by Philip Hefner.

    If the techno-human, the cyborg, is created in the image of God, what does that tell us about God?

    Hefner uses the term ‘created, co-creators’ to describe human beings. Created in the sense the we are finite (stands against hubris) but capable of being part of God’s wider creative enterprise, and agents in that enterprise. It’s an optimistic engagement with technology at a time when emergent technologies seem to meet with innate conservatism.

    Random neurons firing at the moment as I’ve been reading a lot of bioethical and theological reflections on technology (e.g. cloning). How should the tension between – don’t do evil – and – actively choose to do good – be worked out technologically?