The Complex Christ

Three-view Tele | Now That's Community

No doubt about it, Sharp are clever people. They've developed an LCD screen that shows 3 different images, depending on your viewpoint.

As Far East Gizmos put it, "these displays have allowed Sharp to once again create new demand and contribute to the creation of new lifestyles."

Call me a grouch, but is part of that great new lifestyle everyone in the family being able to watch the same screen, but something different? Ahh... those great family evenings! McDonalds for one, KFC for another and curry for the kids. And let's all sit down together and watch something different! Now that's community ;-)

[But wouldn't we just LOVE one for alt.worship. Trinity meditation here we come...]

Technorati Tags: Technology

Double Bind | Should Environmentalists Buy up Gas-Guzzlers?

Our car, a truly horrible beast, has been making strange noises from the engine for about a year. In January our mechanic deemed it a fatal problem: it wasn't worth the cost of fixing, and it might run for 2/20/200/2000 miles.

It did about the 2000. Which got us over the Severn Bridge into Wales late on Friday night before we ground to a halt. It was clearly terminal.
So we get put on the back of a lorry and taken back home, a nice weekend away abandoned.

The question is, what to do now. Someone has given us a car they had just replaced. But the fuel economy is not good. So do we refuse it? Do we let them sell it and buy something more economic ourselves or do without a car at all? We actually drive much less than most - neither of us commute to work, and we deliberately use the trains whenever we can. So refusing this thing and buying something more efficient might end up with us using an efficient car a little, and someone else taking the gas-guzzler and using it much more than we would.

Much of the carbon foot-print of vehicles is obviously their production - the energy to actually manufacture it. So by not buying a new car you are avoiding that energy use.

I think the best thing we could do is take the car and never use it. Reduce our car travel to zero. That's never quite going to happen, but we'll do our best. We could convert to LPG, but there's an issue with capital there. Capital we need to save to replace the boiler in the house with a high-efficiency condensing system. All donations accepted ;-)

Any better ideas?

Technorati Tags: Environment, Technology

Emerging Church Critique | David Byrne & Jesus Camp

Great to see a fabulous line up for critiquing the Emerging movement.

Eight.
White.
Men.

"I hope that the movement or conversation in its present form will increasingly divide between those who deeply and intelligently desire to be faithful to Scripture while learning to communicate the gospel to a younger generation, and those who, whether mischievously or ignorantly, happily domesticate and distort the Scripture because of their analysis of contemporary culture."

Thanks Don Carson, always nice to know you actually want more division.

[Un]Connectedly, thanks to Paul for this link to David Byrne on Jesus Camp.
His blog looks well worth an RSS.

Technorati Tags: David Byrne, David Byrne, Jesus Camp, puppy, Sexism

Would The Real Islam Please... Sit Down?

"You say I'm violent once more, and I swear I'll smack your head in"

The furore over the Pope's ill-chosen comments created an interesting debate on the radio this morning. It seems that his apology has not been enough for many Muslims, who have reacted to his perceived accusation of Islam being a violent religion with... acts of violence. A nun has been murdered, churches in the Middle East firebombed, and one Imam has called for a 'day of anger'.

The response to this apparent contradiction was tackled by a representative from the Muslim Council of Britain who called on us to once and for all 'separate the idea of Islam from being Muslim.'

I fear this is an impossible task. He - quite rightly, and eloquently - denounced the violence done in Islam's name, and expounded a view of it as a religion of peace. But he seems to be a minority voice; his call to effectively deny Islamic status to those who promote violence would mean huge numbers of Islamists in the East and West being told they are not following Islam properly, something I think they would ferociously resist.

This confusion between the small voices of scholars who expound Islam as a peaceful religion, and the huge dynamite voices of those who explode that view is creating a massive problem - both within the world as a whole, and within Islam itself. (It is not dissimilar, of course, to the tension felt within Christianity - with the aggressive Zionist, fundamentalists on one side, and the way-of-peace movement on the other.)

My prayer is that the real Islam would... not stand up, not wave banners and shout for blood, but sit down and talk with us, and show us this religion of peace. Not to shut them up, but to teach us about the way of peace too. None of us follow our religion purely; we all need to try to lead by example better. And more than ever that leadership needs to be round the table.

Technorati Tags: Islam, Peace, Pope, Religion

The FlowMarket™

Thanks to Saga for this [link]

All products available from The Flowmarket™

Technorati Tags: Art, Consumption, Design, Flow Market

Shortcuts | Dirt | Journeys

I watched a student at school take a shortcut today. And then watched as they were followed by countless others, taking a few quick steps on a worn brambly path, while a few others took the concrete slab route round and about.

I'm guessing that eventually the school will give in to the inevitable, and formalize this route with proper paving. But for now it remains a dirty path.

The evolution of such short cuts tells us something about cities, about dirt, about our innate journeying. While the planners can spend millions trying to formalize the routes they want us to take, if they don't suit us, we will find shortcuts. Cut throughs, through hedges, or over small walls. Rather than being planned, these paths emerge, and tend to show us the way people really want to go. But, being informal, and unpaved, they tend to be dirty. Brambles might scratch, or mud get on the shoes. But we'd rather that than have to follow the official line. Sometimes the destination is the thing, and the journey adapts.

Perhaps this emerging movement is one example of an ecclesiastic shortcut. The official line, the routes we were meant to take, were dreary, and took us around the houses. So a new path emerged. Muddy. Messy. Unkempt. Useful.

I guess someone will come along and pave it one day. And we'll keep our shoes clean then. Our feet won't have to touch the earth.

Technorati Tags: Emergence, Environment, London, Religion, Urban Planning

Backside Cache | Dirt and Computing

Great article in Wired at: http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,71763-0.html?tw=rss.index

At first sight, a computer is a system that seems "clean." Early mainframes were housed in dust-free rooms bathed in unvarying white light. Nobody ever got physically dirty handling a laptop. The computer-using proverb "garbage in, garbage out" is just a metaphor; nothing physical goes into a computer, and nothing physical comes out of it.

Then again, why would a "clean" system require so many filters? Spam filters, search filters, surf filters? Why would stuff we encounter on a computer screen be capable of making us feel dirty, or "infecting" our clean machines with a virus?

Just as every animal has a mouth and an ass, with processing stuff in between, a computer operating system has inputs, processing and outputs. We input content through a keyboard, a modem, a drawing tablet, USB or Firewire ports. Useful stuff is output via screen, printer, speakers or over the internet. The useless stuff -- dirty old computer waste -- leaves the system via a little desktop metaphor called the Recycle or Trash bin.

It might be refreshing if, one day, the people who made your computer's OS would call a spade a spade. In a section of his conference talk titled "The Geometry of Filth," Adam Jasper Smith gets to the uncomfortable yet unavoidable nub of the matter. "Dirt radiates out from us," he says. "The primal form of this dirt -- the perfect dirt -- is shit."
 

Let There Be (Solid State) Light

Let There Be (Solid State) Light

"I hope the award of this prize will help people to understand that this invention makes it possible to improve quality of life for many millions of people. This is not just a source of light that makes enormous energy savings possible, it is also an innovation that can be used in the sterilisation of drinking water and for storing data in much more efficient ways.

"It is estimated that it is possible to alleviate the need for 133 nuclear power stations in the US by the year 2025 if white solid-state lighting is implemented."

Technorati Tags: Environment, Technology

Chill Out | Air [Con]

The stats are simply astounding.

The US has approximately 5% of the world's population. And uses 25% of the world's electricity. And fully one third of that goes on air conditioning.

That's 8% of the world's electricity on keeping you guys cool.

7 billion gallons of petrol a year are used in US car air-con systems - equivalent to the total oil consumption of Indonesia, population 240 million.

What's more, the Chinese haven't even got started. Every ten days another coal-fired power plant opens somewhere in China big enough to serve all the households in Dallas. The Chinese already use more coal than the US, the EU and Japan combined. And they are getting the air-con bug: the market has grown by 70% each year.

The cultural effects have already taken their toll. Air con has made the Central/Southern American siesta redundant. The rise of the internet means warehouses of servers that need to be kept at low ambient temperatures - this alone was cited as a major reason for the rolling blackouts in California this summer. And the major problem is that air con is a con: it creates a positive feedback loop whereby the heat ejected raises the temperature for everyone else, and so more and more people end up getting them, which raises the temperature even more.

So what do we do? Turn it down. Chill out. Slow down. Take a bath. Have a siesta. Before we all fry.

//Check out the full article in Prospect [here]//

Technorati Tags: Environment, air conditioning

Morning Rush | Art Therapy | Dirt Boundaries

On a school trip to the (excellent, and oft neglected) Museum of London a couple of months back I was struck in the foyer by an exhibition which included this work 'Morning Rush'. Having a while to look through their shop after the tour - a compulsory part of any trip with kids, I can tell you - I noticed (hot tip for interesting gifts) that the museum allows you to browse and order prints from their huge archive of London photography/print.

Not being able to find this particular work, I emailed the museum about the possibility of buying it and was put in touch with one of their external programmes staff. She told me it had been produced by one of the prisoners involved in their art programmes. I won't mention his name here, but it became clear through the negotiations about buying the piece that he was inside for some pretty terrible crimes. And that he was being moved to a high security, long term gaol with no art facilities what-so-ever. It ended up that we made a cheque out to the Governor of this place, and the purchase may go some way to resourcing the beginnings of an art department.

I don't want this to sound like some do-gooder story. And you may hate the piece anyway. But it is background to some difficult questions I was left with to do with beauty. Can hands that have done such violence create rich beauty? If we can agree they can in a physical, material sense, then we have to allow them to have 'beautiful minds' tucked away somewhere. Minds that were troubled into evil acts. Minds that can be renewed. Minds like ours.

So this piece now stands at the bottom of our stairs by the front door. And reminds me each time I step out of the house to try not to stand in judgement on this beautiful/ugly city that is just over the doorstep. But to try to encourage the beauty in each thing. Somehow.

It's not easy.

Technorati Tags: Art, London