Here’s the team. Jerry Collins is still in doubt so he’s bracketed with Kristian Ormsby at No. 6. Nonu keeps his place on the wing.
Destiny awaits.
Greenflame
Jottings on science, religion, technology, pop culture, photography and faith from the Aotearoa New Zealand
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Some good thoughts by Maggi in her ongoing “Words and the Word” series on the formation of the canon. words and the word vii: “Inspiration” and the formation of the canon.
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Tim’s Online Bible Dictionary Project has had me thinking about things back from my computer science background. Several of the people I used to work with are involved with the New Zealand Digital Library project.
The New Zealand Digital Library project is a research programme at The University of Waikato whose aim is to develop the underlying technology for digital libraries and make it available publicly so that others can use it to create their own collections.
Tim’s project sounds to me like a digital library – a collection of various resources (text only?) with a layer of meta-data (key words, hyperlinks, related articles) on top creating a variety of ways of accessing that information.
Recently I’ve started thinking more (and writing a bit) about technology and social justice – both in general and with respect to posthuman technologies. So I was interested to see that Prof. Ian Witten (a supervisor of mine back in the mid-90s) of the NZDL had written a paper on digital libraries and society from a humanitarian perspective. You can find the PDF here: Digital Libraries and Society.
Ian was recently awarded The Namur Award for “an outstanding contribution with international impact to the awareness of social implications of information technology.” Excellent.
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Today National Radio’s Digital Life has an interview with Lawrence Lessig, chairperson of Creative Commons. Plus some stuff on blogging, Wikipedia and a church that uses technology to block cell phone calls during the service.
Tune in at 1pm today (Saturday) or 8:06 pm Wednesdays. On Thursday they make the programme available online at the same web site.
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Saw this a few weeks back after following a link off Neil Gaiman’s blog. It’s a music video made with a relatively cheap digital still camera that takes short video clips. Seeing as how I’ve just acquired a camera that will do the same sort of thing I was reminded of it. (Though my artistic talents don’t stretch this far.)
Anyway, here it is: The Sad Song by Fredo Viola. (It’s pretty big so you’ll probably need broadband to listen to all of it). -
Following up on the post from the other week (Greenflame: Emergent systems & the church) here’s a primer on emergence written by Philip Clayton – Science & Theology News – Features: Emergence. In it he looks at some of the different views on emergence, science and religion.
(And for those of you who were looking for an online version of the David Wollert’s paper “Complexity Theory as Model and Metaphor for the Church” there doesn’t appear to be one yet. However Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith (ASA) do publish stuff online but several months (years?) after the paper copy comes out. Maybe contact them direct and see when it’ll be online.)
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Stargate SG-1 Marathon Weekend. ‘Nuff said.
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Meanwhile, over at MIT…
Robotic Life – sociable robots
The Sociable Robots project aims to build capable and appealing robots that can physically interact, communicate with, and learn from people in familiar human-oriented terms.
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Doing a bit of transhumanist web surfing today while pondering writing a paper on the transhuman agenda and Christian social justice and came across the article below over at Betterhumans.com.
In Betterhumans > Ending Aging to Help the Poor author Simon Smith argues,
Rather than hinder the fight against poverty, funding life extension research is one of the best things we can do to improve everyone’s quality of life.
There’s many things in his piece that I find unsettling including his argument that a fraction of the defense budgets of the Western world could be diverted to anti-aging research. The implication in the article seems to be that the research would then be used for the good of all. I’m sorry but I can’t see that happening. It’s like arguing that phamaceutical research benefits all evenly – rather than only those who can afford it. Pharmaceuticals become an economic “weapon” – just ask those countries who need them, can only afford generic drugs and then get slammed with economic implications.
There’s also the implication that unless we get the anti-aging treatment the elderly are inherently worth less than the younger – that they have nothing positive to contribute any more.
Anyway, have a read and a think about it. I think I might use it in class next week when we look at the doctrine of humanity.
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Jonathan’s post zone de confluence has some interesting refections on a French art exposition on technology’s effects on our perceptions on time and space.
He also had a link to this movie (WeAccept_H.mov) produced by one of the artists – D-Fuse – as a response to the commercialisation of the Internet.