Posted 3/6/2004 02:10:37 PM

Halley points to dervala's poetic musings on life to this moment:

(It is very hard to write about this without sounding painfully earnest and possibly sick-making.)

I had the time to grieve a husband who is still dear to me, and to count the million billion mistakes I made.

I learned how to be by myself, and see for myself.

I learned how to sit still. I am bad at it.

I made friends from different lives. There are so many fine people out there.

I discovered how little I need to live happily. Fancy dinners and toys are no longer on the list. Nor is running water, if the lake is clean.

I learned how to pretend to be brave, which is nearly as good as courage.

I saw different ways of bringing up children, and I hope to make bolder mothering mistakes than indoor, anxious cossetting.

I visited old and new friends on two continents, and atoned for years of putting office work before them.

I fell in love.

I made up with Ireland. Now I have a place to miss, and go back to.

I had the time to read hard books.

I started to pay attention to politics and freedom.

I lost my puppyish infatuation with America. (But I still heart New York.)

I learned to be an ounce less than completely selfish. (Occasionally. When it suits me.)

I got to know my parents as an adult. I finally grasped that their lives as teachers are more valuable than any CEO’s.

I made memories of Lake Superior that that will feed me when I’m old.

I felt, first-hand, compassion, grief, love, outrage, anger, and gratitude.

I got the chance to write.

I faced some fears.

I found I had an untold number of assumptions and prejudices. Many more lurk, still invisible to me.

I learned how to trust people to be kind. They mostly are.

I learned that atoms trump bits. Nothing beats face-to-face contact, which is why babies don’t IM.

I accepted that I’ll never be wealthy. It still scares me, especially in America.

I earned some crows’ feet, and the conviction not to Botox them.

Somewhere along the way I woke up as a grown woman.

I want to find a way be a net contributor.

And oh, I will miss my freedom dreadfully. I will miss the space to read and write and think and talk. But we’re over Newfoundland, and a new life waits.

Posted 3/5/2004 01:19:16 PM

SenseCam is a badge-sized wearable camera that captures up to 2000 VGA images per day. In addition, sensor data such as movement, light level and temperature is recorded. This is similar to an aircraft "Black Box" accident recorder but miniaturised for the human body. It could help with memory recall, e.g. where did I leave my spectacles or keys? who did I meet last week? by doing a "rewind" of the days events. If a person has an accident, the events and images leading up to this will be recorded, and these could be useful to health workers. It could also be used for automatic blog generation.

Sensors trigger a new recording. For example, each time the person walks into a new room, this is detected and the image is captured with an ultra wide angle lens. Other triggers include, time, a person nearby, change in light level, or sudden movement. A hand gesture can also manually capture an image or a change in acceleration. An accelerometer is used for image stabilisation to reduce blurred images caused by motion. The SenseCam can also capture handwritten notes and pictures. The current prototype interfaces with Windows XP to show images and sensor data. Future version will capture audio and heart rate.

-MS Research

Combine SenseCam with MyLifeBits and we will all be creating Terrabytes of data each year. Personal archive searching could become a central part of our story telling and personal memory.

Posted 3/5/2004 12:38:04 PM

Good questions from a civic perspective; questions without self-evident answers among religious people. What other questions might be posed?

Gibson's 'Passion' underscores how theologies differ

...In America today discussions regarding the place of religion in the public square most often concentrate on the separation of church and state. But it would also be worthwhile to ask other questions, questions such as how strongly we want to proclaim certain aspects of our theologies.

Would it be wise for Jews to publicly announce with fervor and conviction their belief that Jesus is not the messiah and that they still remain God's chosen people?

Should Christians loudly declare to their non-Christian friends that their souls are in peril if they do not accept Jesus and that they may very well burn in hell?

Should Muslims write articles for the Advance saying that their religious goal is an all-Muslim America?

...In my Temple's religious school we teach our children of the great and lofty teachings of their Pharisaic heritage. We teach about Yosei ben Yochanan who said: "Let your house be open wide, and let the poor be members of your household." (Pirke Avot 1.5)

And we teach about Hillel who said: "Be of the disciples of Aaron, loving peace and pursuing it and loving your fellow creatures" (Pirke Avot 1.12) And we teach about Rabbi Eliezer who said: "Let your neighbor's honor be as dear to you as your own." (Pirke Avot 2.15)

I wanted more than anything to find in Mel Gibson's picture the figure of Jesus as teacher -- not victim. I wanted to hear his lessons of love and peace. It was Mr. Gibson's choice to focus almost entirely on cruelty and violence. That was his right. But Jews and Christians would have drawn closer together and our world would have been made more peaceful had he chosen otherwise.

___________________

Jesus as teacher is very much under emphasized in the Christian experience today and over much of Western Church history. Jesus as victim--whether of God or Satan or the Jews or the Romans--in the theologies of the various Churches and time periods has dominated since the decimation of Jerusalem and the ascendancy of Rome.

Nevertheless, it is true that Jesus was both teacher and victim, among many other things, and one cannot be traded for the other. It is our theological decisions that cast him in a passion play nearly exclusively. It will be our theological considerations that reconsider this state of things.

Posted 3/5/2004 11:09:38 AM

Weaponizing the Wild Kingdom

...In an August 2003 article, Los Angeles Times reporter Charles Pillar noted that DARPA has put forth some of the "most boneheaded ideas ever to spring from the government" -- including a "mechanical elephant" that never made it into the jungles of Vietnam and telepathy research that never quite afforded the U.S. the ability to engage in psychic spying.

As former DARPA Director Charles Herzfeld noted in 1975, "When we fail, we fail big." Little has changed. According to DARPA's current chief, some 85%-90% of its projects fail to meet their full objectives. Still, Piller points out, DARPA "has been behind some of the world's most revolutionary inventions" – "the Internet, the global positioning system, stealth technology and the computer mouse."

DARPA's spectacular failure rate and noteworthy successes stem from its high risk ventures. For years DARPA has funded extremely unconventional, sometimes beyond-the-pale, avant-garde research in all realms of science and technology. It is, perhaps, the most creative place in our vast government for a scientist who wants to stretch his or her mind in adventurous directions and be well paid to do so. If you have a wild idea, DARPA's the place to try it out. Said Harvard University pathologist Donald Ingber in a 2001 Los Angeles Times article, "DARPA [has] funded things that a lot of people thought were ridiculous, and some that people thought were impossible. They make things happen."

There's only one caveat -- in one way or another most every project, however mind-stretching, invariably must end, directly or indirectly, in the incapacitation or death of future American enemies.

The projects are often some of the most lethal ever conceived. Over the years, DARPA research has led to a plethora of products designed to maim and kill, among them the: M-16 rifle, Hellfire-missile-equipped Predator drones, stealth fighters and bombers, surface-to-surface artillery rocket systems, Tomahawk cruise missiles, B-52 bomber upgrades, Titan missiles, Javelin portable "fire and forget" guided missiles and cannon-launched Copperhead guided projectiles, to name but a few.

A question seldom asked is why pie-in-the-sky creativity exists unfettered and fostered only in the context of lethal technologies? As the U.S. continues its mad dash into a post-Cold War, one-nation arms race, fears of a missile gap or the menace of a technologically advanced foreign foe drop away as explanations; nor can it just be a generalized fear of falling behind the rest of the world. Look at the state of education in America -- in 2002 the U.S. ranked 18th in UNICEF's list of teenagers in 24 industrialized countries falling below international academic benchmarks. Despite the poor showing, no one is rushing to set up an Advanced Education Research Agency.

According to the CIA's annually-published World Factbook, "the US is the largest single emitter of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels," yet the Environmental Protection Agency's "National Center for Environmental Innovation" is a far cry from a DARPA-like entity. It doled out a mere $737,500 in seven state-innovation grants in 2003. DARPA, by comparison, spent about $3 billion on some 200 projects that ranged from space weapons to unmanned aerial vehicles. But just because the government isn't pouring money into the projects of scientists eager to attack environmental problems doesn't mean environmental research is of no interest to it. Quite the opposite. DARPA has taken up the torch and is funding a rigorous research program aimed at finding novel ways to weaponize the natural world.

As evidenced by their Vietnam-era mechanical elephant project and a recent grant to researchers developing a robotic canine called "Big Dog" for the Army, DARPA might be said to have something of an animal fetish, reflected perhaps in various projects whose very names evoke the ethos of the wild kingdom....

-TomDispatch

Posted 3/4/2004 06:43:22 AM

in the words of Bart:

where's my spy camera?
where's my spy camera?
where's my spy camera?

make your cell phone a spy phone.

Posted 3/3/2004 09:52:32 PM

flying cars will not be invented in Detroit or Tokyo. the future of space and terrestrial travel is going to be fueled by inventions coming from India.

if true this story is big. really big.

Table-top fusion: NRI makes Sun in jar
via seizureofpower

WASHINGTON: An Indian-born scientist and his team may have won a place in the sun by achieving nuclear fusion in a table-top experiment, leading to expectations that the world is on the cusp of a bounteous energy source.

The scientific world is describing Dr Rusi Taleyarkhan’s breakthrough, now revalidated after some initial skepticism, as "making the sun in a jar."

...In a phenomenon known as sonoluminiscence, a burst of ultrasound causes a bubble in a liquid to collapse and emit a flash of light. It is thought that the gases trapped in the collapsing bubbles could be heated to temperatures hot enough for fusion to occur.

Taleyarekhan and his team are reported to have achieved this to a degree that has gained credibility and impressed peers.

Posted 3/3/2004 08:51:56 PM

The Nietzschean diet, which commands its adherents to eat superhuman amounts of whatever they most fear, is developing a strong following in America.

Fat Is Dead, proclaims the ambitious title of the dense, aphoristic nutrition plan, which was written by Friedrich Nietzsche in the late 1880s and unearthed three years ago. After reaching bestseller lists in Europe, the book was translated into English by R.J. Hollingdale and published by Avon last month.

if this doesn't do it for you perhaps this will.

Posted 3/3/2004 11:12:31 AM

helpful.

interesting.

Hey! I can see my house from here.

Posted 3/3/2004 09:57:38 AM

{notes from email in lieu of blog posts}

P,

I just lost my reply to you.

A damn Socket device driver that I installed last night on this machine caused a blue screen of death just as I was signing off and about to hit send. What timing.

Anyway. I will reply, again, in a heavily truncated, disgruntled manner, inline below.

>Subject: foundationalism
>Date: Sun, 29 Feb 2004 23:48:43 -0600

>
>What do you guys make of these post-foundational epistemologies/
>hermeneutics?

All epistemologies/hermeneutics are descriptive. Descriptive of that for which their advocates seek. Descriptive of that from which their advocates speak. How we know what we know and how we go about interpreting what it is we know rests in the loosely coupled agreements that are the shared networks of plausibility between people-in-communities. These intricate processes go on with or without our explicit intent and have part in what it is to be of our species.

It is only when we bring a more exacting precision to our choice of language and its structure that we make explicit these cerebral mannerisms of our species under the particular labels above within a department of the academy labeled, "Philosophy."


> It sounds as if in an effort to avoid the perils and
>pitfalls of foundationalism, the theologians du jour are looking for
>a coherentist position. (ala using "tradition/ scripture" as a
>two-fold tragectory for hermenuetics like grenz and franke do) Am I
>correct in my evaluation? Won't coherentism just put theologians
>into an inherently "circular" quandry?
>How is a coherence or "weblike" justificatory system any less
>problematic than good ole foundationalism?
>

(This is where I lost the most and am without the motivation/time to respond again, atm.)

>Or is Rorty right and philosophy with a capital P is dead. AND, If
>philosophy with a capital P is dead can the same be said for
>theology with a capital T?
>

Philosophy as a human project (which is a specific designation to keep us from presuming that it finds its origin only in our particular traditions tracing back to the pre-Socratics in the West) is not dead. There are particular modes of philosophic discourse that have become less useful on our various trajectories as a unified, diverse species of this planet and so have been put to less direct use in how we speak about ourselves, our relationships, our heritage and our futures.

Philosophy is a practice of communicative inquiry: for the most part it has been and is an aural and visual pursuit of learning to listen, to act and to speak in particular manners that challenge the moment in which the event is meaningfully engaged.

Is there such a thing as Philosophy? Theology? There is no way to answer. The whole that such a question expects to interrogate is absent. We have our moment and the moments inscribed in the memories of our texts and art, our institutions and technology from which to begin speaking of the things designated in the capitalization of these words.

d

Posted 3/3/2004 09:30:29 AM

{more archives for dan}

in further discussion regarding this:

Ok, I wrote a response to JJ after his first post yesterday, but the response seemed to go on and on without end so I did not post it. Today I reconsidered and thought I might as well through it out there--despite being far too long for a blog post comment--as I, unfortuneately, do not have the time to edit and develop it in any other form. Cheers!

________________________


I think you've nailed it, John. Fear of the heresy hunter is the narcotic stealing the productive years of many a new theologian/pastor/normal shmo.

There are different readiness factors across the scene of contemporary Christianity. McLaren and others have wisely recognized this and contented themselves with, from all accounts, quite a successful practice of pushing their constituents through publishing and conferencing in ways that, while seemingly radical to those being challenged, are perceived as a paltry restatement of what has been said by many outside of the Christian noosphere for sometime (Levinas, Quine, Rorty, Derrida, Foucault, and in the case of McLaren's second in his "A New Kind of Christian" trilogy, Jared Diamond) pandering to Christian subcultures all along the spectrum from totally incapable of comprehending the intellectual heritage of their moment to those who read bits but see it as little more than fodder in their reinstantiation of a hyper-Reformed, Schaefferian presuppositional apologetic-fueled, rationalist faith or as overcome by various returns to a buffet-style classical foundationalism from whichever period one's historical predilections privilege a la the ancient-future evangelicals (Webber, et al), the Cambridge school (Radical Orthodoxy) or the contemporary make-overs of any of the thousands of Nicene splinters shaved off of the Catholic and Orthodox traditions.

To a younger generation no longer casting about in the plausibility structures of their parent's variously compromised revolutions (as much as I hate using generational language it seems to come so easily at this moment) these postures of slow-go theological rethinking seem more in line with the vocational security of those vesting in the old systems than about the natural processes of transformation that, often do take large quantities of time but, usually build to a place of bursting out onto the scene in such a way as to surprise those advocating what seemed to be the more prudent stance of carefully preserving their place in the political and economic org charts that feed off of the old ideology machines of tight identity positions, gated communities, and “spiritual disciplines” that revolve around organizational goals of attendance, fund-raising and other lock-ins that ensure a level of institutional viability that can only be secured by the trickle-down spiritual economy etched into the very architectures of these systems.

The Amway-Christianity of 40 Days of Purpose, Alpha, Christian Radio, TV and Publishing has nothing to say outside of the echo chambers of the various major and minor brands of Christianity, Inc. and those few in the wider culture who still share a modicum of the cultural idioms bandied about in the marketing efforts of such brands within their target markets. The cone of the unknown, with regard to the post-structural critique that is at this moment driving much of the call to rethink the sign, “gospel,” is so broad for those inside of these institutions that when they first hear about these things and then hear an Emerging Church leader say that we won’t have substantively reconsidered our theology for a generation or more it seems to make perfect sense.

Just moving the quarter-inch from the various for-profit domestications of the gospel as offered by the competing brands in the Christian market segment to considering this New Kind of Christian thinking was vertigo inducing in its playful reordering of the way one speaks of things Christian. If it is that hard to move a quarter of an inch in the informal devotional life of an individual how much more so to begin rethinking the very manner in which gospel is spoken of and academically considered within a formally theological framework. Or at least so says the somewhat rogue, New Christian Leader, still within the Amway-Christian economy as they speak to their downline at a rally that still revolves around showing the plan, sponsoring new people, listening to tapes and doing enough each month to secure their BV bonus level.

The system itself is suspect! ...It is not in the interest of an Emerging Church leader’s professional viability to substantially reconsider the vocabulary, spacing and diction of salvation. It is not in the interest of preserving a direct deposit paycheck into an upper middle class bank account to do substantively reconsidered theological work that finds itself unable to simply invent new taglines for a brand too long monopolizing the memory of a poor, earnest prophet from the backwaters of an occupied Israel.

How difficult is it to begin doing theology that takes having no privileged starting place seriously? How difficult is it to begin preaching within a tradition now in touch with an intricately woven global patchwork of traditions that are each internally plausible and, potentially, as consistent and inconsistent as their internal definitions of coherence and acceptable orthopraxy allow for? How difficult is it, really, to begin to give contingency and genealogy—those symptoms of a certain founding undecidability that is the space of our unfolding as a cosmos—the presuppositional place that would be necessary for the new theological thinking to begin?

Not all that hard, really. One simply has to—and it is already happening. If you do not read blogs or message board threads you are likely missing out on the new thinking that is already taking place. There is no need to wait. It is here.

Posted by: Dan Hughes at February 26, 2004 06:58 PM

Posted 3/2/2004 08:49:59 AM

Marty Beckerman | Meaningless sex! Rampant drug use! Teen debauchery!

Last week, MTV Books/Pocket Books released 'Generation S.L.U.T.,' the second book by 21-year-old writer Marty Beckerman.

...Beckerman has written a fictionalized story about self-loathing, bed-hopping, gang-raping high school students in Anchorage, Alaska, which occasionally morphs into a comic strip.

... It's enough to make parents either reconsider the educational potential of nunneries, or scratch their heads and wonder if we haven't heard this kind of alarmism before -- in less graphic terms, perhaps. Salon talked to Beckerman from his dorm room in Washington, and asked him to clarify a few things.

... And what is your next project, exactly?

"It's called 'Jew-boy Goes to Hell: Young America in World War III,' in which I visit Baghdad and Tehran and Kabul and Jerusalem and the West Bank. The publisher hasn't signed on the dotted line yet. It's a really expensive project. But it's about how the war on terror will affect Generation Y, because we care more about bongs and PlayStation than the future of planet earth."

Posted 3/1/2004 10:03:39 PM

a day in the life of a CodeCon attendee:

...But what's really exciting is that the guys from the Shmoo hacker group have set up shop in the VIP area and are selling random numbers for a dollar. I'm talking high-quality random numbers – these suckers are really random.

Posted 3/1/2004 09:49:17 PM

Google gurus join Forbes billionaire club

...with Google becoming the Internet search engine of choice among the tech savvy, company founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page also saw their fortunes reach $1 billion apiece.

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates was the world's richest man for the 10th year running, with a personal fortune of over $46 billion, but investor Warren Buffett was catching up.

The world's mega-rich grew even richer over the past year as their stock portfolios swelled, catapulting the total number of billionaires to a record 587.

"After two years of significantly falling fortunes, we really saw an uptick for just about everyone on the list," Forbes Associate Editor Luisa Kroll told a news conference.

The total net worth of the world's billionaires added up to a staggering $1.9 trillion dollars, equal to almost one fifth of the giant U.S. economy.

...Older, married men dominated the list, which includes 53 women and 24 single people. The average billionaire's age is 64, and 27 are under 40.

New York was the home base of choice for the super-rich, with 31 of them living there. Moscow came in second with 23, followed by Hong Kong with 16 and Paris with 10.

The list saw the addition of 64 billionaires this year and even included a wanted man, a suspected arms trader and three jailbirds.

"Not everyone on this list is a paragon of virtue," said Steve Forbes, CEO of publishing company Forbes.

Posted 3/1/2004 09:43:43 PM

Gates goes to college

Posted 3/1/2004 12:18:40 PM

the oscars flash on the screen to my right, billy crystal's jokes so empty, it seems.

you know, i remember exactly what i was doing right now a year ago, at this hour when the tilted planet was aligned just so....

don't you remember the urgency, the unsettled expectation, the concern and worry that infused last year's awards? what happened to all of that? how numb have we become as the year(s) tick(ed) by? news of death "over there"... (is) taken in with a pained cringe, and then a hardening almost stiffness. of course. this is the way the world is.

Posted 2/29/2004 01:14:36 PM

TheStar.com - U.N. staff see boy shot in back

...In a conflict marked by a surfeit of civilian casualties on both sides, Palestinian claims seldom result in convictions against IDF soldiers because of conflicting eyewitness accounts.

The Bashir shooting is rare because it happened in plain view of three U.N. personnel who were visiting the family home.

Rarer still, the victim's father, Khalil Bashir, said last night he doesn't want punishment for the shooter.

Instead, he's asking that Yousef's plight become "a turning point for an historic reconciliation with Israel.

"We make a mistake if we let our wounded memory guide our future. Punishment doesn't pay. What pays is a change of mentality," an emotional Bashir told the Star.

"It is time for tolerance and forgiveness. I want the Israelis to know that we, both sides, have no other option. Let us devote ourselves to melting the ice and find a solution to give our children a chance to live."

..."In thanks to God, I am more determined than ever to find a way to peace. I ask our friends all over the world, help me exploit this chance to change the mentality. I can forgive. Let us all forgive."