Month: February 2010

• Sumedecina — a story told mostly by the graphic display of quantitative information — strikes me as an admirable idea unsatisfactorily executed. The graphics don’t carry enough of the narrative burden, so they become illustrations; b ut the illustrations don’t amplify much over what the captions say. I was rooting for this to be brilliant in both conception and realization, but the realization falls down a bit. (Hat tip, Eric Rice.)

 

• Thomas Benton strikes again with “The Big Lie.” I fully support the premise that the system that produces increasing numbers of doctoral graduates for diminishing numbers of full-time academic teaching/research positions has gotten out of hand (and it has spawned increasing numbers of journals and monographs to support the publication-needs of the growing population of scholars). I fully support the premise that (potential) doctoral students should be aware of the very serious economic problem this constitutes. At the same time, I’ve never been associated with a school where the (post-)grad program relied on its students as warm bodies to staff unpopular courses, so although I believe it happens, I don’t regard that as a sufficient explanation of the source of the problem. Moreover, here in the UK, the economics are very different, both for better and for worse. On one hand, postgrads from the EU don’t have the same crippling debt burden that their US colleagues usually have to shoulder; on the other haqnd, the economics of institutional funding mean that it’s in our interests (for survival, not just for prosperity) to draw students from outside the EU, who then pay a much higher rate — regardless of the prospects of their future employment. While I would think it admirable if schools cut down the flow of degree candidates to match more closely the vocational prospects for research scholars, that premise involves so many complications that I can’t imagine it ever taking shape voluntarily. The situation is all the more vexing as the economics of culture reward vulpine market manipulators (and governments have now funded that endeavor to the tune of many billions of dollars) but pinch pennies with regard to funding the robust educational culture that advances a whole people. Ugly, ugly situation; nothing even remotely like an easy answer.

 

• Derek and I are having fun parsing the cognitive topology of sainthood in the Carolingian period. What? You mean, not everyone finds that fascinating?

 

• Tatyana from Sharmanka spotted by blog post (with impressive rapidity!) and left a nice comment (with links to relevant Flickr collections). It reminds me of the good ol’ days when bloggers used to read one another’s posts and answer in comments or on their own blogs, when the power law distribution was less harsh and less dominated by mass-media-style sites.

 

• Did I mention that I’m very eager to see what’s inside Glitch?

 

• My friends from Seabury will be pleased to see this sign from the Glasgow Theology Dept.’s recreption area:
   
   
   

 

• The excellent webcomic Anders Loves Maria ended the other day, and I’m still feeling the reverberations of its very powerful conclusion. I can’t think of a comic that felt as much like a (non-graphic) novel to me for its sense of narrative and character. That’s why I linked to the very first episode: it makes no more sense to read Anders Loves Maria from some point in the middle than it makes to pick up, say, Great Expectations partway through. If you have patience with explicit sexual content, and a heart to look into the lives of some complicated, flawed characters, set aside some time and read it through.
   
• Probably more to come as I discover tabs that I meant to blog about but haven’t yet.

 

Eccentric gamers around the world are a-quiver with anticipation of Stewart Butterfield’s new MMO game, Glitch. There]s a teaser video on the site, and two articles in c|net today. The Game Neverending seems not (appearances to the contrary notwithstanding) to have ended after all!
 
Drinks at 6:00 in Peter Verona’s house in Lunkhed Commons. . . or whatever its equivalent in Glitch turns out to be.

Yesterday , after church, I went on an adventure with my colleague/neighbours the Blantons and the Sherwood/Davises (we’re threatening to take over Partick Hill in the name of biblical studies). We ended up having a quite delectable Indian lunch, but the real excitement came before that. (Well, the giant curled crispy pancakes were pretty amazing, I have to admit, but the gallery was even better.)
 
The primary destination was the Sharmanka Kinetic Theatre, a brilliant art installation woefully under-served by their website. (Underserved by Google, too, which still thinks the gallery is located at 64 Osborne St., where I walked back and forth several times trying to find anything that resembled a gallery — I finally noticed a single sheet of A4 paper taped to a door among various other posters and leaflets, saying that they had moved to 103 Trongate. Look at the “Street View” on Google Maps, turn to see the red doors with white trim, and then imagine what they’d look like if no one had been keeping them up for months.) If you go through Sharmanka’s site and look at the photos you will get only a foggy sense of the intricate constructions made with the sort of underground Russian satiric bite that you might suppose to have died out years ago. Several YouTube videos show the sculptures in motion; again, there’s no substitute for seeing them in situ. Read the bio page for a fuller sense of the backstory of these wonderful works.
 
The kinetic art was terrific; the children were spellbound (Adam Davis had been there before, but he couldn’t have been more enthusiastic at this repeat visit); the wit and imagination scintillate; the craftsmanship astonishes. I can’t wait to take Margaret and Pippa (successively, not simultaneously), and if any of you want to go with me, I’ll be glad to go with you, too.

Does anyone have advice on cloud storage services (for Mac-based users)?

In fact, by focusing on liability and not teaching our kids how to take risks, we are making their world more dangerous. When we were children, we had to learn to evaluate risks and handle them on our own.

Exactly. That’s Chris Daly, quoting from his own 1995 Atlantic article, being quoted on Doc Searls’s blog. And Aunt Harriet and Uncle Bob live on Spy Pond, so give them a wave for me, Doc.

Remember when coffee-shops were the utterly coolest thing in missional evangelism? This link from Jordon provoked me to think, “What about if ultra-innovative missonal evangelists, instead of starting (or inhabiting) coffee shops, started congregations in laundries?” Large numbers of people have to go; it gives you an hour or so in which to have deep thoughts and spiritual conversation; you could bring along quarters and laundry detergent to share/exchange. I think it has real cool-Jesus cachet; but I’ll bet someone else has already thought of it.

This morning I woke up early to meet David Jasper at the Queen’s Street train station and catch the train to Edinburgh for the winter meeting of the Doctrine Committee of the Scottish Episcopal Church. You may guess how I feel about committee meetings in general, and ecclesiastical committee meetings in particular — but in this case, you’d be wrong (unless you guessed “excitedly looking forward to,” in which case you are so wrong about my general frame of mind as to raise questions about whether you navigated to the blog you thought you were looking for).
 
The meeting was really cool, inasmuch as the Scottish Episcopal Church calls upon us as theologians-by-vocation to deliberate on the life of the church and prepare carefully-reasoned theologically grounded responses to church life (and the issues that confront the church). We don’t determine anything in particular, but the SEC seems to take our input very seriously. It’s a consultative and educational body, and that’s the way (un huh, un huh) I like it.
 
My cousin Adele asked on Facebook if there was a quiz; thankfully, there was not, because I am not fully au courant with the specifics of Scottish Episcopal history and ecumenical relations. There is, however, a lot of homework of the sort I relish. I’m assigned to collaborate with the newly-elected bishop of Glasgow and Galloway on a paper about the doctrine of marriage (with some attention to the state of Scotland’s civil law), designed to guide and inform discussions with ecumenical partners. And I will participate in the annual group composition of a Grosvenor Essay, the topic of which will be Incarnation (my remit involves writing about the biblical articulation of the virgin birth). The meeting involved thoughtful, respectful, professional (if I may say so) group efforts in response to queries directed to us from various other committees and boards; they actually encounter theological problems, and refer them to us to gnaw at. It’s the kind of activity that makes me feel as though I’m in the right place, doing what I’m meant to be doing.
 
Now, I didn’t really get all the way into the heart of Edinburgh. Forbes House — the SEC HQ — is in Haymarket, the rail stop before Edinburgh. But it was my first trip on ScotRail, and now I have a better idea of how that system works. This makes it slightly more likely that I’ll navigate my way to St Andrews successfully next week, when I head over there to give a talk a week from Thursday afternoon.

Steve suggests a collaboration between these birds and these musicians; I’m thinking about Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s brids and Dinosaur Feathers.