A film to watch out for

... and here's why:

"We are being sold a false bill of goods, that the more connected we become the more equal we will be," Rivera said during an interview from Sundance's headquarters in Park City. "Statistically speaking, that's not what's happening. The more connected we become, the more we are divided."

Sleep Dealer is remarkably topical for a film set in the future (albeit one described by Rivera as taking place "five minutes from now"). Central themes include outsourcing, corporate ownership of water, remote warfare, confessional internet diaries and military contractors who are accountable to no one. It's the rare political film without any reference to contemporary politics; like Blade Runner and other big-brained sci-fi flicks, it's about ideas, not selling merchandise.

Full article at Wired News. Film's site here.
I'm a great believer that the importance of sci-fi is the space it gives us to explore potentially big issues arising from new technology and cultural change. This film looks to have the potential to do that real well.

Leaked document on ID cards

THIS is, as it is claimed, the scan of an internal document of the Identity and Passport Service. It’s about the plans for the UK’s identity card scheme…

Don't believe 'em when they say intermittancy is a problem

Scientists of the University of Kassel in Germany prove that the entire country can be powered by renewables only. They connected biogas, wind and solar power in a distributed way and show it can deliver both baseloads and peakloads.

There's a video too ".

Those horizontal wind turbines just got more feasible

What I liked about this article is that it explains in simple terms what the engineering difficulties have been for this family of wind turbines.
Here' the bit that draws me in:

It may resemble a giant rotary washing line, but it might just help Britain meet its hugely ambitious new wind energy targets. At least that's the claim of the company developing a novel "vertical axis" wind turbine dubbed the Aerogenerator.

The 144-metre high V-shaped structure would be mounted offshore and capable of generating up to 9 megawatts of electricity, roughly three times as much power as a conventional turbine of equivalent size. Switching to such a design could ensure that thousands fewer turbines would be needed in order to meet the government's new wind power target, says Theo Bird, founder of Windpower, the Blyth-based firm behind the new turbine.

As unique as it may sound, the Aerogenerator is in fact just the latest addition to a family of wind turbines that generate power through a rotating vertical shaft as opposed to the horizontal shafts of the more familiar windmill design.

Justifiable cynicism

Is it just me or does the idea of men from the world’s largest and most powerful corporations and banks discussing climate change make it seem like they are figuring out how to make more money from environmental degradation (probably figuring out what will be beach-front property in fifty years from now, or how to get more tax dollars to pay for cleaning up their blunders)?

Hmmmm. And why do I think that there may be more truth in that than I'm comfortable with?

Mid-life blues is a cross-cultural phenomenon

There is no explanation given, various possible hypotheses are proposed, though suprisingly not the most obvious one that it is a response to the onset of clearer signs of aging, though there is mention of the adjustment to fuller understanding of ones limitations and 'infeasibilities'.

"It looks from the data like something happens deep inside humans. For the average person in the modern world, the dip in mental health and happiness comes on slowly, not suddenly in a single year. Only in their 50s do most people emerge from the low period. But encouragingly, by the time you are 70, if you are still physically fit then on average you are as happy and mentally healthy as a 20 year old. Perhaps realizing that such feelings are completely normal in midlife might even help individuals survive this phase better."

Explaining the cocktail effect's neurology

You know how you can manage to home in on a particular conversation in a room of conversations? (All other things being equal). Well, it looks like they have cracked the neural dimension of that.

This is the approach the Zador lab has taken to explain “selective attention,” or what Dr. Zador calls “the cocktail party problem.” Half of the neurons measured in the reported experiments showed no reaction at all to incoming stimuli. The researchers hypothesize that each neuron in the auditory cortex may have an “optimal stimulus” to which it is particularly sensitized.
“Your entire sensory apparatus is there to make successful representations of the outside world,” said Dr. Zador, who is director of the CSHL Swartz Center for Computational Neuroscience. “Sparse representations may make sensory stimuli easier to recognize and remember.” Recognizing the brain’s ability to distinguish “optimal stimuli” could help scientists find ways to improve how sounds are learned.

It just show that perception is more an active process than naive 'representation' models (such as that undergirding the kind of knee-jerk positivism that Dawkins seems to slip into a lot). It further indicates that an active part in interpretative processing is played by human subjects. Perhaps no surprise to hermeneuts but more solid brain data to back it up helps us to think about the correlations. Such as some further evidence that flows with a constructivist approach to learning and relating theologically to the naming the animals motif.
How Does The Brain Attend To One Voice In A Noisy Room? New Findings On Selectively Interpreting Sound

Beliefs affect integrity

... specifically beliefs about free will and determinism.

Surprisingly, the link between fatalistic beliefs and unethical behavior has never been examined scientifically -- until now.

And the study is very interesting, provided the methodology stands scrutiny. In fact, the results were not counter-intuitive, either.

those with weaker convictions about their power to control their own destiny were more apt to cheat when given the opportunity as compared to those whose beliefs about controlling their own lives were left untouched.

Now all we have to do is relate this to Calvinism, Augustianism, Pelagianism and Arminianism. Though we should note that all of those systems of thought at their best nuance the basic view that they take about free-will to encompass elements of 'the other' view and not to undermine motivation to do well. The debate is not settled by this, of course but the dangers of fatalism do become clearer. It occurs to me also that this may have bearing on things like beliefs in destiny or electedness also.

Language Acquisition: Toddlers As Data Miners

In one of my teaching practices last academic year I was asked by my mentor why I was including material in my lesson plans that went beyond what the kids needed (an interesting comment in itself for what it might be seen to imply about our education sysytem -rightly or wrongly in this case, I'm not sure). My reply was that we learn better often by being able to put things into a broader context or to link things up with other facts or perspectives that interest us more.
Well, I think I see here a glimmer of something that that may somewhat corroborate that:

In the adult version of the study, which used the same eye-tracking technology used in the Cognition study, adults were taught 18 words in just six minutes. Instead of viewing two images at a time, they simultaneously were shown anywhere from three to four, while hearing the same number of words. The adults, like the children, learned significantly more than would be expected by chance.

Doubly interesting and perhaps germane to my Homo Loquens writing project, is the fact that this is related to language learning. My emerging thesis is that language and learning are important partners and may involve common or similar systems in the brain and mind. I think the theological reflection on that will involve noting the image of God is arguably about, inter alia, dominion which seems to be exercised through understanding (I think that Brueggemann takes that line) which is itself reflective of God's own work of speaking things into existence and ordering them 'verbally' (noting for careful use the anthropomorphism here).
New Thoughts On Language Acquisition: Toddlers As Data Miners

Bigger threat than ID cards?

This begins to sound scary and I think I might be thinking of investing in a company that would produce an RFID personal shield.

With tags in so many objects, relaying information to databases that can be linked to credit and bank cards, almost no aspect of life may soon be safe from the prying eyes of corporations and governments, says Mark Rasch, former head of the computer-crime unit of the U.S. Justice Department.

By placing sniffers in strategic areas, companies can invisibly "rifle through people's pockets, purses, suitcases, briefcases, luggage - and possibly their kitchens and bedrooms - anytime of the day or night," says Rasch, now managing director of technology at FTI Consulting Inc., a Baltimore-based company.

In an RFID world, "You've got the possibility of unauthorized people learning stuff about who you are, what you've bought, how and where you've bought it ... It's like saying, 'Well, who wants to look through my medicine cabinet?'"

Bioethonol without the major downsides

Coskata's ethanol produces 84 percent less greenhouse gas than fossil fuel even after accounting for the energy needed to produce and transport the feedstock. It also generates 7.7 times more energy than is required to produce it. Corn ethanol typically generates 1.3 times more energy than is used producing it.

Making ethanol is one thing, but there's almost no infrastructure in place for distributing it. But the company's method solves that problem because ethanol could be made locally from whatever feedstock is available

There's still a way to go in terms of scaling it up and distribution, but in principle this looks like a quick way to help in the short to medium term and maybe help with landfill issues too.

Maybe I'm missing something, but it's an optimistic development on first sight.

hiatus

Regular readers may have suspected something was up when my time without a new posting exceeded 5 days. You'd be right. On Friday a tragedy hit our family in the form of a car, an allegedly drunk driver and one of my children who could have died and now has a permanent disability to contend with. We're dealing with the aftermath and I'm just catching up with letting people know whom I've misssed.

'Truthiness' -it ain't buffy

The title gives a good bit away: Unanimous Union: The Mind And Body Together Lean Toward 'Truthiness': Tests on answering ambiguous questions have shown, among other things, an interesting human bias:
“These dynamic data showed that participant arm movements had lower velocity and curved more toward the alternative response box during ‘no’ responses than during ‘yes’ responses—suggesting that we experience a general bias toward assuming statements are true,"
Must think about that more in relation to "Did God really say...?"

And then there is the wholistic thing: body and mind seem closely linked in this.

Ships pulled by kites

Here's a surprising item on the BBC NEWS

A German cargo ship has set sail powered, in part, by a kite in an effort to cut fuel costs and carbon emissions.

and you can see the future on video. It really is happening: a return to maritime wind power, but in a strangely different form. You almost wonder why our ancestors didn't think of doing it this way.

The question of being Trinity

Came across a really interesting quote here: Faith and Theology: Robert Jenson and the question of being:
“So what is it to be? … To be God is to anticipate a future self by an inexhaustible interpretive relation to an other that God himself is; to be a creature is to anticipate a future self, by a finite interpretive relation to an other that the creature is not…. Being is interpretive relatedness across time; that is, to be is to rise from the dead. Such is the description of reality that coheres with trinitarian doctrine of God."
I think that a couple of years or so back this was a book that was mentioned in an email group I was on debating outreach to Muslims, in particular explaining the Trinity; one poster was much caught up with the metaphor of identity (though that didn't necessarily preserve them from wandering from the path of trinitarian rectitude!). Hmmm maybe I should get hold of this book.
(From Robert W. Jenson, The Triune Identity: God according to the Gospel (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982), p. 182.)

ICT's enhancing conversation rather than destroying relationships

I keep having conversations verging on moral panics that social networking, web2.0, mobile phones etc etc are eroding our ability to converse and build relationships. I keep saying that in all probability they are merely reconfiguring how we use our communicative bandwidth. Of course, the main caveat in that is that technologies always have effects on our sensorium and so our thinking (cf McLuhan, Understanding Media). So this article, How Email Brings You Closer to the Guy in the Next Cubicle: helps us to note that indicators of face-to-face time and work are not falling off, if anything they are rising in usage. What's going on? "Technology makes it more fun and more profitable to live and work close to the people who matter most to your life and work. Harvard economist Ed Glaeser, an expert on city economies, argues that communications technology and face-to-face interactions are complements like salt and pepper, rather than substitutes like butter and margarine. Paradoxically, your cell phone, email, and Facebook networks are making it more attractive to meet people in the flesh."
Quite so. There's more to being embodied, clearly, than the neo-gnostic ideas of many pundits.

Aha! Experiment in price; first result

By the time you read this it may already have changed. So I'll clip the state of affairs as of now. You may recall I happened to notice that a book I was reading was selling second hand for over £1,0000. My hunch was that there was some kind of bot working out the price. To test the hypothesis I listed my copy for sale at less than half the asking price. Well today at this page Amazon.co.uk: Used and New: The Future of Money: Creating New Wealth, Work and a Wiser World the price has come down to :
"

£360.52
* LOW PRICE

"
So I'm going to halve the price again and see the further response...

Britain's children eat, sleep and breathe TV

Beware the moral panic lurking behind these reports. Of course the Guardian isn't the Daily Mail, so no comments implying that the country is going to the dogs led by its citizens-in-waiting. So, in the article Life through a lens we are told: "Boys asked by the company to choose between programmes on different channels frequently refused, saying they would 'watch both'. 'They flick from one to another and cannot conceive that they should have to make a decision. They are puzzled that you should put them in a situation of having to make one or anther choice.'"
Now, this is not really new. Kids of my generation were characterised as doing our homework in front of the tele: we multitask (yes the men as well as the women!) in information.

The issues that tend to cause concern, though, are that kids seem to be reading less. Now be careful here: let's recall that reading was dissed at first because it would (and this prophecy proved true) stop people remembering things. We are in danger of fetishising books rather than recognising that it is the goods they are tools to deliver that are important. Some of those goods can be delivered by televisual and ICT media. AH! But! they're watching trashy soaps. Indeed, many are: but recall that mass literacy was similarly abused for similar ends and lo! Popular culture generated the bodice-ripper, the weekly popular magazines (as discussed in a number of historical studies of popular culture: I would point to the relevant sections of Callum Brown's The Death of Christian Britain for a view of popular reading in the Victorian period and into the early years of the 20th century) Tit-bits and the Sun. There is no technology or bunch of artefacts that will make 'us' more civilized. Technological developments merely make some uses less likely and others more likely, but all of them will have their characteristic virtues and vices. The moral panic response merely fails to compare like with like, mainly because it is running off nostalgia and self-righteous misanthropy. The trick is to recognise that there will be benefits and deficits and to try to identify both and respond accordingly. Hand-wringing is ultimately self-pitying laziness -probably.

ID cards not welcome in Wales

You might expect me to read this as good news as far as it goes:ID cards not welcome in Wales: and indeed I do. A recent vote in the Welsh Assembly had a landslide not to make ID cards in effect compulsory in Wales, should they become required elsewhere to access public services. "The vote guarantees that any move to introduce ID cards by Labour in Westminster will have no impact on access to health and education services in Wales. Mike German, leader of the Welsh Liberal Democrats, said: 'This is a powerful message to Westminster: Wales is not interested in ID cards."
Of course the doubly interesting thing is that Labour AM's didn't defend the ID card policy of 'their' Westminster government. Add this to Gordie's reluctance to commit himself to endorsing compulsory ID cards, and one may be sensing a shift in the wind? I do hope so.

Crazy hopefulness

The article title says it well: Crazy idea, but it might just work : "In Stockholm, they are going to capture the body heat generated by all the passengers at the central train station to heat water, which will be piped to the next-door office and used to heat the building."
And that's not all:

Chocolate factories produce a lot of waste, equivalent to 5-10% of their total output, which usually goes into animal feed or straight to landfill. But now Ecotec, a UK bio-diesel firm, has worked out how to turn it into fuel....
"Where does the flushed material go? What would happen if everyone in the world crapped in their drinking water supplies? Why doesn't any other land mammal defecate deliberately in water? Why do we?" ... By 2010, China aims to have 50m households operating biogas systems, which harvest excreta and turn it into biogas and fertiliser. In Uganda, farmers are being taught how to make biogas using human excreta along with other organic waste, and in Sweden they already make an extra strong version, which includes biogas from rotting animal carcasses, and they even run trains on the stuff. There is no place for squeamishness in the brave new world....
...a method of using whey, a waste product from cheese, as a floor covering. The whey protein is apparently a perfect binding agent, which means that it can replace the highly toxic solvents usually used in wood floor coverings. ...
... a road that has an asphalt layer (which is very effective at conducting heat) on top of a system of water-bearing pipes. The water absorbs heat generated by vehicles on the road surface and from the sun. It is then piped away and stored thermally until needed. It is then piped to buildings, where it is used to heat the air. There is already one system in operation that powers four office blocks in Scharwoude in the Netherlands,

Lots of small decentralised solutions could be the saving of us.

Why losing bank details is a big deal

Regular readers will know my views on matters relating to this, so I'm simply going to offer a short section of quote from this report, Clarkson stung after bank prank without comment. "Clarkson published details of his Barclays account in the Sun newspaper, including his account number and sort code. He even told people how to find out his address.
'All you'll be able to do with them is put money into my account. Not take it out. Honestly, I've never known such a palaver about nothing,' he told readers.
But he was proved wrong, as the 47-year-old wrote in his Sunday Times column."

32: the number of the problem of life on earth

An interesting article by Jared Diamond in this month's Edge 233: he writes about the number 32 which happens among other things to define the rough consumption rate of the 1 billion of us in the rich chunk of the world compared to the rest. He goes on to spell out the consequences fairly starkly.
"If India as well as China were to catch up [with first world rates], world consumption rates would triple. If the whole developing world were suddenly to catch up, world rates would increase elevenfold. It would be as if the world population ballooned to 72 billion people (retaining present consumption rates). Some optimists claim that we could support a world with nine billion people. But I haven't met anyone crazy enough to claim that we could support 72 billion. Yet we often promise developing countries that if they will only adopt good policies — for example, institute honest government and a free-market economy — they, too, will be able to enjoy a first-world lifestyle. This promise is impossible, a cruel hoax: we are having difficulty supporting a first-world lifestyle even now for only one billion people."

Speech and the demonic

Now I'm still thinking about the substantive content on this post Demythologizing demons: however, this bit did get my attention as something to look at in due course with regard to the Homo Loquens Coram Deo project.
"Matt. 9:32-33 (cf. Luke 11:14):
While they were going out, a man who was demon-possessed and could not talk was brought to Jesus. And when the demon was driven out, the man who had been mute spoke.
The demon prevents this man from speaking—i.e., from communicating with others. Being incapable of dialogue is a distortion of human relationality, and hence a mark of creation’s bondage to sin. Jesus interrupts this bondage by bringing liberation to this man. The act of exorcism is thus the act of restoring this man to a world of right relations."
I'd broadly agree with this and I suspect that I want to link it to the stuff about the image of the communicative God I blogged about recently. But there is something too about language and full humanity; however, we need to be wary on that front to protect the rights and dignities of those with communicative difficulties. There are also connections here, I think, to corporate humanity ...
Just thinking out loud briefly so I can come back to this.

Trees Giving Up CO2 Battle, Soil is the answer

I've been hearing about this quite a bit lately since the first bit of research a couple of years ago, I think, showed that maybe trees had only so much carbon capacity and that rising temperatures might be reducing it. The article, Trees Giving Up CO2 Battle, But Sustainable Farming Offers Hope (at Celsias) precises a recent report: "The ability of forests to soak up man-made carbon dioxide is weakening, according to an analysis of two decades of data from more than 30 sites in the frozen north." and goes on to interpret a bit: "The finding published today is crucial, because it means that more of the CO2 we release will end up affecting the climate in the atmosphere rather than being safely locked away in trees or soil."
But there may be help at hand for this downheartening news.
"The world’s soils are the earth’s second largest carbon sink (next to the oceans). As we’ve shared before, proper soil management is a powerful and highly effective method of removing carbon from the atmosphere, as well as reducing fossil fuel use, reducing toxic chemical use and runoff, improving plant (and thus human) health, and more (actually, a lot more if we also simultaneously incentivise the relocalisation of our markets)."
Yes folks, back to terra preta and organic farming: one of the deleterious effects of oil has been fertilisers. Short-term great, but long term results in thinning and denaturing the soils which can then only be kept somewhat productive by more oil-derived products. We've been eating oil and it's going to have to stop. So actively trying to build up our soils is an important way forward and doubly so since the trees are less capable than we thought.

Aggression As Rewarding As Sex, Food And Drugs

When I read the headline Aggression As Rewarding As Sex, Food And Drugs: I thought 'yeah; I recognise that there is a kind of buzz to it and it would explain the recreational fighting that I see and hear about in cities'. So while we humans are more peaceable than chimps (who couldn't manage to live in cities of several millions without a bloodbath), we do have to find ways to undermine this pleasure in aggression. Here's a summary of the research.
"“We learned from these experiments that an individual will intentionally seek out an aggressive encounter solely because they experience a rewarding sensation from it,” Kennedy said. “This shows for the first time that aggression, on its own, is motivating, and that the well-known positive reinforcer dopamine plays a critical role.”"
Some bullying is like courtship; it's the foreplay of a violent encounter; that's the payoff, the reward. That's what we have to work at delegitimising.

Pistorius's unfair advantage -the cyborg prosthete

As I saw this on BBC News24 earlier I felt that an landmark had been reached, here's the Guardian's report of itPistorius's unfair advantage keeps him out of Olympics in which we are told that "The findings of a two-day independent investigation into whether Pistorius's prosthetic running limbs constituted an unfair advantage over other athletes were announced this morning.
An IAAF statement said that the South African's 'cheetah' running blades were technical aids and as such were in clear contravention of IAAF rules. This means effectively that he is banned from competing against able-bodied athletes."
There you have it: a prosthetic that enhances a human over their able-bodied counterparts. This is the road to the cyborg. Wait till it can be done by tinkering with your genetics ....

The Collapse of Civilization: "It Wouldn’t Be An Adventure"

It's disturbing to think that some people might think that the collapse of civilisation could be an adventure, clearly they haven't heard of the Dark Ages or watched Mad Max -well maybe they have done the latter but not realised that most of us would be the ones dying. So this article It Wouldn’t Be An Adventure is right to draw our attention to the words of Kim Stanley Robinson

"'It’s a failure of imagination to think that climate change is going to be an escape from jail – and it’s a failure in a couple of ways.
For one thing, modern civilization, with six billion people on the planet, lives on the tip of a gigantic complex of prosthetic devices – and all those devices have to work. The crash scenario that people think of, in this case, as an escape to freedom would actually be so damaging that it wouldn’t be fun. It wouldn’t be an adventure. It would merely be a struggle for food and security, and a permanent high risk of being robbed, beaten, or killed; your ability to feel confident about your own – and your family’s and your children’s – safety would be gone. People who fail to realize that… I’d say their imaginations haven’t fully gotten into this scenario.'

But right also to remind us:

The other half of this coin, of course, is that many of the things we need to do to avoid meltdown will also help us lead happier, more secure lives, both on local and national levels.

The interesting thought experiment suggested is the possibility that at the end of the 70's we might have chosen other roads politically and they might have put us in a better place now. One stab at that thought-experiment in counterfactual history is here mostly done in the comments section.

The one that got away from Hal Lindsey

Here it is: proof that God is British ( NB ;-) ) and this article shows it. Commons call to disestablish church is number 666 -Times Online: "A motion calling for the disestablishment of the Church of England has been listed in the House of Commons as 666 ... It appeared appeared on the House of Commons order paper numbered 666 ... What is even stranger is that this motion was tabled last night when MPs were debating blasphemy."
The parliamentary proceedings of the UK parliament are clearly at the heart of God's purposes, else why the warning?

'We are not willing' over Turkish priest

The title of this article does not quite tell all the story, but enough of it to get attention.Bishop locked out of churches over Turkish priest . Perhaps some of the most pertinent background is this "A heady mix of nationalism, anti-western sentiment and Islamic extremism has resulted in Turkey's tiny Christian community being increasingly targeted." You may even recall some of the reports but the most noticeable was the killing of a group of protestant pastors pretty much in cold blood after their study group had been infiltrated by extremists. But apparently, there has been "a spate of verbal assaults on priests, and the vandalism of churches." and "In this climate, hatred for converts to Christianity is especially shrill"
This has created a climate in which congregations are in mortal fear and so the ordination of a native Turk who is a convert to Christianity from Islam has increased the anxiety of those living there to the point where they have denied their buildings to the bishop for the ordination. The bishop is being criticised for not understanding what is at stake. It's interesting that we don't hear the bishop's point of view (his office refused to comment); presumably the point is that if the guy has a vocation and it is recognised by the church we should ordain, all the more if he is an 'insider' to the culture. However, the question is how far that can be set against the potential suffering of persecution. It is hard to tell a bunch of Christians that they ought to suffer for their faith, and the ordination would now have that force in these circumstances. I wonder whether there could be the option to ordain him to a part of London or Germany to work among Turkish expats pending a longer term review of bringing him back to Turkey. I wonder whether we will ever find out what happens?

Church Times - Blasphemy report might be repealed

When I noticed this article, Church Times - Blasphemy report might be repealed, my initial reaction was of hopeful anticipation that the blasphemy law could be repealed. My reasons are pretty much those articulated by the co-director of Ekklesia, Simon Barrow, wh said: “Privileging one religion above other views is indefensible in a democracy, and for Christians there is the added irony that Christ was himself arraigned on a charge of blasphemy. Using the law to attack opinions about belief is to misuse it, and suggesting that God needs protection against free speech makes no theological sense at all.”
I also think that it is important for the churches to support this and be seen to support it: we live in a world where similar laws are used elsewhere to persecute Christians (and others) and they are so liable to misuse to help settle personal grudges or to gain financial or social advantage as the mere suggestion can bring lynch mobs or prompt irregular application of justice procedures. So it would be a hugely good signal to repeal our own and robustly to defend doing so. Bring it on. Amen!

Labour goes nuclear

At first when I read this Labour goes nuclear but row erupts over who will foot bill I thought, that perhaps the government had been cunningly green: 'yes you can have nuclear power but you will pay all the costs' "Private companies who wanted to build new stations would have to pay for the entire cost while 'meeting the full costs of decommissioning and their full share of waste management costs', argued Hutton who said atomic power was needed to reduce carbon and the growing reliance on energy imports." It would have been vaguely good news, because as I've written before, it looks unlikely that unsubsidised nuclear power could actually survive in a power market.
HOWEVER
all is not really so good:

he government is effectively making electricity generated by coal or gas more expensive by promising "greater certainty for investors" through unilateral action to underpin the price of carbon. Coal and gas power stations emit relatively large quantities of CO2 for which they will need costly permits while atomic power is virtually carbon free.

· The public purse could ultimately be used for all decommissioning of new plants and waste disposal. The current bill for dismantling existing plants is estimated at over £70bn with an additional £20bn for the disposal of waste.

· Ministers are also looking at putting a ceiling on the price private firms will have to pay for dismantling reactors at the end of their life, reducing companies' risks and making it cheaper for them to borrow.

Grrrr!

Naps Help Your Memory, New Study Suggests

A report of some research on the effects of napping on learning shows that 90 minute siestas may be a good thing at consolidating 'how to' learning. This article gives the outline details: Naps Help Your Memory, New Study Suggests: "if you need to memorize something quickly or if your schedule is filled with different activities which require learning 'how' to do things, it is worth finding the time for an afternoon nap."
I'm just wondering whether I should throw that into the review of how we organise the college day ... !?

Rethinking Christmas NOW!

From Make Wealth History comes this suggestion that I have often thought, and sometimes actioned or commended to others: Rethinking Christmas: "if you long for a simpler, more human Christmas, now is the time to start planning it. You’ve got a blank slate for 2008, and if you wait until the pressure hits in October or November, it’s too late. If you want to talk to your family about it, and have a bit of a discussion, now might be a good time to make some suggestions. You can talk again in the summer and decide for sure whether you want to go for it, but get the ball rolling early."

I'm thinking of setting it for myself as a Lent project; perhaps even blog about it ...

Insects inherit the earth ...

In an intriguing report about a soon-to-be-published hypothesis, Forget the meteorites - it was insects that did for the dinosaurs there seems to be credible evidence that longer term ecological factors could have had a lot to do with the demise of dinosaurs.
"Our research with amber shows that there were evolving, disease-carrying vectors in the Cretaceous [period], and that at least some of the pathogens they carried infected reptiles. This clearly fills in some gaps regarding dinosaur extinctions.'
In the gut of one biting insect preserved in amber - fossilised tree sap - from that era, the team has found the pathogen that causes the parasitic disease leishmaniasis, and in another they found a type of malaria parasite that infects birds and lizards. By inspecting fossilised dinosaur faeces, the team also found parasitic microbes that are carried by insects.
Apart from spreading disease, the insects were busy pollinating flowering plants.
These gradually took over from seed ferns, cycads and gingkoes. If herbivorous dinosaurs could not adapt to this new diet they would have gone hungry."
And from there, the effects would work up the food chain.

Outsourcing: just colonial chickens coming home to roos

This article, They've sold off their souls is a quick intro to the way that the big global funds players are fastening down the profit motive hard into the companies they buy into and buy up. The result being that considerations that humanised capitalism in the recent past, about how the company's ethos was, keeping stakeholders sweet, motivating workers through vision and so forth, are being shed along with expensive first world workforces.

One of the comments (the 6th) is very much to the point, imho: "To talk about out-sourcing is missing the point. The issue should not be about trying to privilege ourselves by refusing to give jobs to overseas workers: the issue should be why we allow ourselves to retain a system that produces such startling inequality of wealth. The system has always been hugely unequal, but in the past we, the workers of the West, were bought off on the proceeds of screwing over the Third World: but now, as profits get inevitably tighter and tighter, our chickens have come home to roost."

Of course, the irony would be that this process could kill the goose that lays the golden egg: while most disposable income is in the west that's where the markets are -but only as long as people are employed and paid relatively well. Outsource too quickly and recession hits. It is probably true that there needs to be a global redistribution of income; this may be one way it could happen. The issue is how it can be managed so that chronic decline doesn't cause even moGuardian Unlimited | Comment is free | re suffering and so that many can be lifted out of poverty largely by their own efforts?

I need to reflect on this more, but I'm not sure, in the grander scale of things, outsourcing is necessarily a bad thing.

The Future of Money: inflation

Some of you may have noticed this book appear in the margin in my current reading 'bit'. (And it may be gone by the time you read it, of course) The Future of Money: Creating New Wealth, Work and a Wiser World. Did you also notice the price? £1,142.55!!!!! I bought it a couple of years back from Amazon (yes; I found the delivery slip inside the front cover when I final got round to reading it) for much less (double figures under £20). But it appears that this is the only copy being offered for sale: so does that account for the price. I'm considering the experiment of offering it for sale to see whether that changes the price -it's such a random figure, as well as being high; is there some kind of market-analysis bot operating to work out what the market might bear? I suspect it needs a service if there is.
It's ironic, given the title, dontcha think? Especially as one of the things that the book does is explain why inflation to some degree is built into the way we do currency at present.

PS I decided I would experiment and offered the book for £500 (I'd get just over £400 of it if it sold at that price -unlikely!), so that may appear in the price now and you'd have to click on to Amazon to see the £1k+ price and whether it changes.

A theology of linguistic diversity?

I've had this posting Language Log: More on the theology of linguistic diversity on my desktop for a few days now, waiting for time to look at it again. It's a comment on the theological musings in a book by Mark Baker on comparative syntax. Mark writes: "many cultures and historical periods have believed that language is not just a biological phenomenon or a social institution; rather it also has an important spiritual component. ...

In the Judeo-Christian scriptures language is, then, a property of humankind by virtue of the fact that God creates humans 'in his own image' (Gen. 1:27). All other animals are called forth out of the ground, implying that htye have a physical nature and are subject to the same physical principles as inanimate matter 9Gen. 1:24). The creation of humanity, however, has a second step: 'The Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being' (Gen. 2:7). In other words, humanity is given a spiritual nature that is specifically said to be parallel in many respects to God's. Among other things, this means that since God is a linguistic being, so are humans."

Regular readers will know of my interest in developing a proper theology of language (mostly posted under the 'homo loquens' tag on this blog), and I guess I had been hoping that this would contain some help in that, but I'm not sure it really does. However, in identifying why it doesn't I think it helps me move forward. The quoted section raises some ostensibly good points but inadequately for my purposes. Broadly speaking I'm happy with saying that language has a spiritual component (for many reasons that have to be explored further) and the interpretation about a degree of specialness in relation to God compared with other created beings, though I would want to be careful about how I characterised that and where I went with it (for example, the naming of the animals seems to imply a drawing of the creatures into the orbit of spiritual significance with human beings exercising a priestly role).

Where I have trouble with it is saying that God is a linguistic being. While the text of Gen 1-3 does present God speechfully, it is only in relation to creation that it is so. And when we reflect on the nature of language, we perhaps get an inkling of why: language necessarily involves partialness as we select topics and ignore -or leave assumed- other things. Language is, of necessity, tied up with the work of dividing up and demarcating creation. So to say that God is a linguistic being is problematic. Doubly so when we further reflect that God has no vocal tract (except in incarnation). And yet clearly God condescends to communicate in some way corresponding to verbally with Adam. So perhaps it is not that God is linguistic so much as God is communicative and language is a chief means to communicate in a context involving finitude both of environment and of agents? Being communicative is an aspect of loving: it is going out to the other, touching the other, overcoming the separation.

Anyway, that was not the only issue raised in this book, apparently, with a theological dimension. Linguistic diversity is tied down to the tower of Babel. And indeed that is well and good because it is clearly a primary text for reflecting on linguistic diversity theologically. However, we should also recall that it is not the only point to note from Genesis, or even the first point.Remember the Tower of Babel story is chapter 11 of Genesis, well, in 10:5 we read:

From these the coastland peoples spread. These are the descendants of Japheth in their lands, with their own language, by their families, in their nations.

(emph, mine, obviously). It gives, rather, a diffusion idea of language difference growing as people spread. See also v.20 and 31. It is then a bit of a shock to read Gen 11:1

Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. 2 And as they migrated from the east, they came upon a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there.

Now there may be ways to harmonise these statements, though it is hard to imagine how some obstacles would not remain about how these descendants are dispersed and speaking differently and all of a sudden are in one place speaking in common*. I suppose that those who originally told these stories and collected them together, would have been aware also of the differences (there's nothing like memorising stories to help you to be really familiar with them), so I don't think that harmonising them was a high priority because they weren't listening and telling them with our modern concerns about history; they didn't, I suspect, really tell them as history but as stories that helped them know their place in the world and in God's purposes. The Tower story doesn't 'work' without a common language at the start, so it has to be told that way and it would be understood that we were engaged in another story at this juncture. The point, theologically, I think, is that human accumulation of power is potentially a bad thing and that linguistic diversity has a place in checking the pretension of Empire (and read that against the kind of background of interpretation of Colossians, for example, to be found in Walsh and Keersmaat's 'Colossians Re;mixed') I think that the tower of Babel thing is actually about a preference for subsidiarity/decentralisation rather than about language as such. The language angle, taken in with chapter ten, would be, I suggest, that for all the difficulties that different languages can bring, there is another side which is about holding back the oppression and pride of Empire. This latter point seems to be Mark Baker's too. However, I'm not sure I'd go along with the rather pessimistic spin he puts to it:

Genesis presents the creation of linguistic diversity as an act of judgement and limitation, meant to afflict humanity and prevent it from reaching certain goals, rather than as an act of blessing.

The way it is presented in chapter 10 seems rather more positive, or at least less negative. It almost reads as a celebration of the identity of the different peoples; and as such an anticipation of both the different tongues praising God (seen positively) in Revelation and, arguably, of the different treasures of the nations brought into the New Jerusalem which I think would include poetry and literature, for example. The Babel story is often paired in Christian reflection with the Pentecost gift of tongues. Strangely, though the Pentecost story is seen as a kind of reversal of Babel, we don't see a miraculous gift of all speaking the same language but God's glory being proclaimed in all different languages, suggesting that it is appropriate and desirable for all languages to become vehicles of doxology. This perspective might fit better with Mark Liberman's questionning of Mark Baker's remarks about evolutionary fitness, too.

*We should note too in 10:11 that only some of Noah's descendants are placed in Shinar, so all in all seeing chapters 10 and 11 as non-sequential (saying that chapter 10 is an overview, pointing up where the peoples ended up after the Babel scattering) probably doesn't help harmonise the stories. I think we really shouldn't try: that isn't the purpose of having these stories here.

PS Cath at ninetysixandten has a nice post on this selfsame assertion -I note we both blogroll Language Log...

A Worship/ministry 'ouch!'

Thanks Jon. A picture really does paint a thousand words...

333 � The Ongoing Adventures of ASBO Jesus

further hidden energy footprint of nuke power

Interesting and helpful material in this Celsias article. Nuclear Reactors for the UK - is this a Good Idea? � Celsias:

"is not so widely recognised is that the final disposal of waste will require a lot of energy. This begins to become clear when you think about what has to be done to keep high-level wastes safe for the thousands for years in which they must lie undisturbed. Containers have to be built from steel, lead and electrolytic copper; vast repositories have to be dug and lined with clay; much of the work needs to be done by robots; retired fuel-rods have to be kept cool and safe for a century or so before the final disposal programme begins. Then there is the energy-cost of dismantling and burying the old reactors, doing the best that can done to rehabilitate the disused uranium mines to some semblance of sustainability and safety, and dealing with the stocks of leaking depleted uranium hexafluoride gas. (It is “depleted” in the sense that it has been used as a source of the uranium-235 needed by reactors, but some uranium-235 and all the uranium-238 remains)."

I wonder whether that has been added to the carbon footprint of 'clean' nuclear energy?
In fact we're told how energetically expensive it is: "To deal with the total legacy of waste left by a nuclear reactor through its whole life-cycle requires energy equivalent to about 25 percent of the gross energy supplied by the reactor to the grid."
And remember, we have to add to that the footprint of building the thing in the first place.

The article is mostly, in fact, about the likely shortfall in uranium. So it looks like, if we do go down the nuclear road bigtime (God forbid), we will have to generate the energy for disposal from other means: ironically, this could have to be renewables.

Technology to watch: Use Sunlight to Make Fuel From CO2

You know, I was wondering the other day if there could be a way to do what photosynthesis does, industrially, and make CO2 into carbohydrates. Well, blow me, if there's been some research going on to do this and proof of concept has been achieved,now they're building a prototype.

The prototype will be about the size and shape of a beer keg. It will contain 14 cobalt ferrite rings, each about one foot in diameter and turning at one revolution per minute. An 88-square meter solar furnace will blast sunlight into the unit, heating the rings to about 2,600 degrees Fahrenheit. At that temperature, cobalt ferrite releases oxygen. When the rings cool to about 2,000 degrees, they're exposed to CO2.
Since the cobalt ferrite is now missing oxygen, it snatches some from the CO2, leaving behind just carbon monoxide -- a building block for making hydrocarbons -- that can then be used to make methanol or gasoline. And with the cobalt ferrite restored to its original state, the device is ready for another cycle.
Fuels like methanol and gasoline are combinations of hydrogen and carbon that are relatively easy to synthesize, Stechel said. Methanol is the easiest, and that's where they will start, but gasoline could also be made.

It'll take 15 years or so to get it commercial, though. But it does offer the prospect of power stations burning oil or coal and recovering some of the CO2 to reburn as hydrocarbons...
Scientists Use Sunlight to Make Fuel From CO2:

Forgive: improve Well-Being -and Atonement?

A brief reminder of the tangible health benefits of forgiving. And, happily, a good brief definition of forgiving which covers some of the pitfalls commonly made by people thinking about forgiving. "Forgiveness doesn’t mean forgetting, condoning or excusing whatever happened. It’s acknowledging hurt and then letting it go, along with the burden of anger and resentment."
There's also a nice four-step guide to forgiving that we could do well to make use of.

four steps that are included in most approaches to learning forgiveness.
* Acknowledge the pain and anger felt as a result of someone else’s actions. For forgiveness to occur, the situation needs to be looked at honestly.
* Recognize that healing requires change.
* Find a new way to think about the person who caused the pain. What was happening in that person’s life when the hurt occurred? Sometimes, the motivation or causes for the incident have little to do with those most affected. For some people, this step includes saying, “I forgive you.”
* Begin to experience the emotional relief that comes with forgiveness. It may include increased compassion for others who have experienced similar hurt.

Now, to confess my further interest; what happens if we consider that these processes also may apply to God in some way? What if these are what is taking place on the cross. Is this a forgiveness model of the atonement emerging?
I think so, and I've been mulling it over, hoping to find some time to write more ...
Learning To Forgive May Improve Well-Being:

being real about market distortion: big pharma

One of the big arguments about the possibility of patenting genes is to do with incentives to develop technologies. Well, no doubt there is some of that. But we should be wary as the perhaps unsurprising results of a study into relative investments in research and marketing by big pharma companies shows that probably about twice as much goes on the latter as the former. "the study’s findings supports the position that the U.S. pharmaceutical industry is marketing-driven and challenges the perception of a research-driven, life-saving, pharmaceutical industry, while arguing in favour of a change in the industry’s priorities in the direction of less promotion,"
Now I know it's complicated, and I'm not calling for easy answers, but I am saying that we should be real about the possible distortions.
Big Pharma Spends More On Advertising Than Research And Development, Study Finds:

'New Renaissance'?

I found myself thinking that this was self-serving hype at first. But then I wondered: "'the society we now live in is arguably the most exciting it has ever been', and the arts 'have never been so needed to understand the deep complexities of Britain today'"
It's that thing about needing arts to understand deep social complexities. And then I thought: what about the church and the Christian message?

I don't know whether we really are or could be on the verge of a new renaissance. At the moment I find it hard to believe, but I may be reacting out of sensibilities formed by an old pardigm that is precisely what would be challenged, overturned and used as the compost for something new. However, if it is true, or could be true, I sense that it is right in being built on a sense that art currently really is about articulating at visceral levels, non-verbal levels, changes in consciousness that are taking place. And if that is so, we need to take note as Christians. Our habitual ways of communicating and even offering space for reflection on big questions are simply not really learning the languages of the arts. We need to be able to build an imaginal apologetics and to be able to speak the language of the arts. This is how the plausibility structures of our times are built and reinforced and we are not engaging; we don't even understand that it is happening.

Of course we need to be careful we look widely if we do decide to take this seriously: both popular and 'high' art need to be in the frame. We have not to be transfixed by the high art side to miss the popular. Arguably the latter is more important, but there are important connections between them and so we do need to look at it.

And on that note, I'm also stirring into the pot of this musing my observation of how many lifestyle shops seem to be selling blank canvasses and art materials...

Britain on verge of 'new Renaissance', minister claims | Art & Architecture | Guardian Unlimited Arts:

New word: solastalgia

It seems that some parts of Australia are suffering quite a rapid climate change, which means that it has been possible to study how people have reacted when their place starts to change around them. With sadness and depression, is apparently the answer.
The researcher, Glenn Albrecht "has given this syndrome an evocative name: solastalgia. It's a mashup of the roots solacium (comfort) and algia (pain), which together aptly conjure the word nostalgia. In essence, it's pining for a lost environment. 'Solastalgia,' as he wrote in a scientific paper describing his theory, 'is a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at home.''"

Expect to see more of it. I note too that it appears to be a mashup of languages too: Latin and Greek respectively, if I'm not mistaken.
Clive Thompson on How the Next Victim of Climate Change Will Be Our Minds:

Morgenthaler on Worship

Right in the middle third of this interview are some really interesting comments about music and worship bands that we really need to pay attention to. Of course, I'm bound to say that because I've been saying similar things ... !
ALLELON - Articles: Viewing Article

Futarchy: Vote Values, But Bet Beliefs

Here's an intriguing suggestion to use the power of the Wisdom of crowds.
"In futarchy, democracy would continue to say what we want, but betting markets would now say how to get it. That is, elected representatives would formally define and manage an after-the-fact measurement of national welfare, while market speculators would say which policies they expect to raise national welfare. The basic rule of government would be:
When a betting market clearly estimates that a proposed policy would increase expected national welfare, that proposal becomes law.
Futarchy is intended to be ideologically neutral; it could result in anything from an extreme socialism to an extreme minarchy, depending on what voters say they want, and on what speculators think would get it for them.
Futarchy seems promising if we accept the following three assumptions:
* Democracies fail largely by not aggregating available information.
* It is not that hard to tell rich happy nations from poor miserable ones.
* Betting markets are our best known institution for aggregating information."
Still thinking about this, but interested in any leads or further thoughts.
Futarchy: Vote Values, But Bet Beliefs:

Microsoft Office Drops Support For Older File Formats

Well, that's the point of proprietary formats isn't it? It's about leverage towards built-in obsolescence. It's the economics of drug addiction: hook 'em then screw 'em. Open standards is the way to go. So I'd echo this plea. "... there’s an alternative which is somewhat easier (and free): just grab a copy of OpenOffice which can handle the older file formats. Once you’ve got them open, now might be a good time to convert them to ODF documents lest Office 2017 decide to again disable support for older file formats."
Microsoft Office Drops Support For Older File Formats | Compiler from Wired.com: