Matthew Henry John Bartlett

GoodBooks NZ – NFP online bookshop, proceeds to Oxfam, free shipping

Robert Pirsig interview [via Deb]

Bruce Wearne on Australian amnesia, churchy politics

Tips on writing to a deadline [via SvN [via RDB]]
Nice new website for Massey students by Richard Bartlett of Bartlett Projects
EVENT: This Friday is Buy Nothing Day

New kind of keyboard in the works
A hymn to Mithras, or not; and invented religions

Jared Diamond on the collapse of various past civilisations by war, ecological ineptitude, rulers’ greed, &c. [13MB MP3, more formats available down the page]
Rank yourself on the global rich list

The kingdom of heaven may be compared to open source software. Consider freeing yourself from Microsoft’s shackles:

More on Malachi Ritscher [via Lynton]

EVENT: Fernanda y Rafael de Cuba are giving a salsa performance 10pm Saturday at the St James Jimmy Bar

EVENT: Public lecture by Chris Marshall, 7pm Thursday 30 November at St John’s. Blurb: “One of the most troubling features of the Bible is the extent to which it implicates God in horrific violence. Christians have long found it difficult to reconcile this with the example of Jesus. This lecture looks to the apostle Paul for help in thinking through this important problem.”

good optical illusion [via digg]

Robert Fisk on justice, hypocrisy and Saddam [via Bel]

EVENT: Goodbye Bex party at Kate’s flat 24 Nov

Stephen Lansing lecture on complex adaptive systems, water politics/religion among 1000-year-stable rice farmers in Bali, pests mediating human cooperation, the Green revolution and the Asia Bank, dying coral, El Niño and Borneo hardwood (non) reproduction, the long hard work of learning to live well in one place. [14MB mp3, more formats available down the page]

Hubble took a million-second exposure of a small bit of the night sky (one tenth of the moon’s diameter) that appears uttlerly black/empty to earth-based telescopes, and found about 10,000 flash new galaxies. [via Digg]

GIVEAWAY: mhjb.co.nz/blog offers the first interested commentor a SPECIAL PRIZE, to wit, Kim Stanley Robinson’s 1994 novel Antarctica. Some say it’s epic, but it’s not really, it’s just big, almost 700 pages. Big and good. Like lots of his books it makes me want to work hard and collaborate and start/join a co-op and be a scientist or bureaucrat and do (more/better) drugs. There’s this underground party at the south pole which is by itself worth the price of the book ($12 at Arty Bees). The prize has a catch though: you have to agree to give away the book (with or without the tootling of trumpets) when you finish it.

Tom Wright on the War on Terror
Gallery of images rendered on freeward Blender 3D modeller

One Malachi Ritscher burnt himself to death Friday before last in Chigaco in protest at the US’s actions in Iraq. Here’s his mission statement and bio. Mainstream media over there reporting his death don’t mention the war.

Clay Shirky on category decay in classification systems, or why knowledge is nothing without a community, or why the church and the bible are necessary to each other [17MB mp3, more formats available down the page]
An intro to an intro to RS Thomas

General Stay Human discussion here

Joel says:
The name has to be more accessible for people. A name like Stay Human might be fine with those of us who have some understanding of the angchap/social justice/counter-cultural/Judeo-Christian world view etc etc, but I feel a name like that isolates us too much from the outset. The name is crucial because it’s our brand, it is the first point of contact that someone makes with the station and it is a reference point which takes on meaning once that person starts to discover what the station is all about. Stay Human is a fantastic name for a radio show, maybe one dealing with counter-cultural ideas and issues, yet as a name, a brand, it doesn’t work.

My own concerns about that particular name are these. Firstly I feel it is trying to say too much. I understand that in terms of the humanizing goal of the station the name fit’s perfectly, however I would rather let the programming do the talking than have a grand name which can also peg us into a hole. The name has to be much more subtle.

One name which Geoff and I came up with a while back was ‘The Funnel’. could also work as Funnel FM. One reason for this is that it works well visually as it is also the shape of a loud-hailer or speaker. And it carries connotations of channeling stuff into a specific point… a concentration of information, ideas etc. What do you guys think??

Chaplain Tim McKenzie says “David Newton is adamant that the name must reflect the values contained on the chaplaincy website, and therefore have a slightly subversive tang. At the moment, he thinks “Stay Human FM” is the best name by a country 1500m, and will take a lot of convincing otherwise. But he is open to other names, provided that they reflect the values of the chaplaincy etc.”

• Body Politic
• Commonweal
• Grace

William H Willimon has a blog

EVENT: White Lines East are playing this Thursday at Bodega at 9pm

In Firefox 2, Ctrl+Shift+T opens the tab you accidentally just closed

My favourite author, Kim Stanley Robinson, answering the question “what comes next?” in a recent panel of science fiction authors who went to UCSD [Gvideo]:

I don’t think you can predict the future at all except in the most trivial sense, even tomorrow, but i do … it’s a question of what the carrying capacity of the earth is, and we’re in the midst of a kind of global environmental crisis. We think science, or at least it’s commonly held, that science or technology will work our way through this or get us out of it, but we can’t make topsoil. (more…)