Author: AKMA

Tonight I made a soup for dinner. Since I’m not pure of heart, I used a dry soup mix from the cupboard; Pip and I evaluated the choices, and agreed that this one looked promising. I am very sad to say that we erred. The soup was thin and cardboard-y, and Pippa and I decided after a half bowl each that we would not require one another to finish — and Pip made a delicious tofu dip to tide us over.

This sort of post — personal, unabashedly mingled with more serious reflections — has occasioned a number of posts on the bibliobloggers’ blogs (it’s slightly amusing to be the subject of a series of blog posts explaining why people don’t read my blog). At the same time, I don’t begrudge my colleagues their diffidence. Online media offer every reader the opportunity to read what suits him or her, and every blogger the opportunity to link to what suits him or her. . . .

Dave has been calling attention to drawbacks in the openness of the Wikipedia — first in conjunction with the Adam “The PodFather” Curry vs. Kevin “The Humble But Firm Pioneer” Marks fiasco, then in conjunction with the more weighty problem of horribly slanderous allegations against John Siegenthaler.

Two consequences of these demonstrations: First, I think Rex Hammock is quite right that we should “use Wikipedia as a gateway to facts, not a source for them.” If one knows nothing about a topic, the Wikipedia can be a great place to start — but one absolutely ought not stop there. A lot of people with strong opinions have a great motivation to insinuate biased or erroneous positions into this ostensibly NPOV (“neutral point-of-view”) reference source, whereas people who know a lot about such things tend to have other things to do. I observed something of this when working on linking Wikipedia entries to a Disseminary project. Good place to start, but by all means, check it (I’m looking at you, GOE-takers).

Second, there should be a space for professional societies to maintain moderated local-pedias on their areas of demonstrable expertise. That would be a tremendous step forward, wouldn’t infringe on Wikipedia’s turf, and would provide much more reliable information. Someone set up the Disseminary with the bandwidth and some small stipends, and we’ll show you how to do it.

People frequently ask me how I find time to blog. I will have completed this post inside two minutes — but last night Pippa and I spent four hours playing World of Warcraft, and really only just got our toes wet. So, my question is, how do people find time to play WoW?

Oh, and Mac users: How do you negotiate the chat interface? I find myself typing the slash-letter command, then deleting the slash, and the whole thing gets confusing.

Chris pointed me to this amusing report on Slate’s slam on the Left Behind theo-cultural miasma.

Dorothea live-blogs this take on open-access academic periodical publishing, which I heartily endorse.

Jeneane and Halley both point to Susan Mernit’s lament that the SF Weekly could devote a long, insightful article to Craig Newmark of Craig’s List, which quotes various industry-leader types while avoiding citing any women. Hello?

World of Warcraft is marvelously engineered, but is no game for a pacifist (not that anyone’s surprised by that, but I’m confirming what one would expect). As one of my capacities therein is “healing,” I’m looking forward to finding a vocation as an in-game EMT.

Writers who use Unicode Greek now no longer need rely on Gentium (marvelous though it is) or whatever was loaded with their system software; the Greek Font Society has released a Greek Didot in regular, bold, italic, and bold italic. I haven’t kicked the tires myself, yet, but their PDF samples look very impressive (via Hypotyposeis, the long way around).

I stopped by the Apple Store this evening to pick up my first-string computer; can you tell from the way I blog? The retired TiBook performed well coming back after a year of inactivity, but the zippier, more powerful iBook (with all my files, applications, and system upgrades from the last year) is my Main Unit.

As to the much-anticipated outcome of the title sweepstakes — I didn’t hear anything today. We’ll have to wait, probably till Monday.

Neither Margaret nor I can log in to AIM this morning (I tried both iChat and AIM proper), but I don’t see anything about a problem in the online news sources. Is anyone else having problems?

[Later:: Back online after a couple of hours.

My editor Neil writes to say,

I’m posing the “finalists” — not including “faithful subversion” — to the marketing-and-covers group. We’re under pressure to get this to the sales people yesterday so I’m asking for your indulgence — I’ll check e-mail later to see what the group finds the most marketable and will have to finalize tomorrow a.m.

Here’s what I’m sending:

(1) Practicing Interpretation / Reasoning Biblically in the Postmodern World

(2) Signs of Scripture / Practicing Biblical Interpretation in a Postmodern Age

(3) Biblical Sense / and Postmodern Sensibility

(4) Faithful Interpretation / Making Postmodern and Biblical Sense

While I was moderating comments on the “Name That Book” thread, I spotted some lunch-meat comments into which the bot had inserted a [rel] attribute that reads “itsok.” Recognizing that rel attributes aren’t necessarily legislated from on high, is there any organized backing for such an attribute? It seems on the face of it that the spammers are making a pitiable effort to communicate to a mark-up parser that their brand of comment is OK — but unless someone else (legit) is using that attribute to appease vigilant parsers, the gesture smacks of a desperate faith that the artificially-intelligent parsing engine can read English and will say to itself, “Hmmm, well, it’s not a ‘nofollow’ or a vote tag, and it says it’s OK, so I’ll just let it through.”

This afternoon, I had an email message and a phone call from my editor at Fortress. The requirements of production and marketing oblige me to propose my alternate title within twenty-four hours (actually, by now it’s down to around twenty-one).

Fortress put the project together under the name Faithful Subversion: Reading the Bible in a Postmodern World, which makes me uneasy; the “faithful” part stands to bother readers who might be attracted to “subversive” readings of the Bible, and vice versa. On the whole, I’d rather not invoke either of those words in the title.

The top half of the cover features a close-up of the central valley of an open book, over a flipped and reversed-out negative copy of the same image (on the lower half). Laura points out that this design “is looking for a two-word phrase that contains a paradox or other kind of surprising juxtaposition,” and I think she’s quite right. I tried Walk This Way on my editor, and he felt (and I agree) that it just doesn’t look quite right.

So the minutes are ticking away. Readers who know the kinds of thing I’m probably writing about, please rack your brains to help me out on this. I’m inclined to ask that the subtitle be changed to “Reasoning Biblically in a Postmodern World,” but apart from a title, the subtitle doesn’t matter much. A combination of “Interpreting” or “Meaning” or “Signifying” with something else would be especially welcome. I’ve had a project in mind for a long time which I’d expected to call “Representing the Truth”; maybe that title would work here. If I used my envisagted-future title for this book, it would make the second time I’ve had to draw on a title from a prospective work to identify an actual work; the publishers of my first book chose Making Sense of New Testament Theology as the title, when I had been hoping to save that for a later, different book.

If you can offer any help at this stage, please speak up (even if I don’t take your suggestion, it may jar loose the title I’m looking for from the logjam in my brain).

In the past few days, a number of Firewire devices around the Adam family compound have refused to mount (on two different CPUs). Different cables, different peripherals, different computers, no discernible static discharges, but inconsistent mounting behavior.

Since I can’t figure out what’s going on, it’s driving me batty.

No, I’m not still brooding about sending my wife and son away again (or, more to the point, I am still brooding about sending Margaret away, but I wasn’t thinking about it until you reminded me just now, thank you very much).

Instead, I’m wincing about having to leave my iBook in the tender care of the local Apple Store. I could have kept running it from the power adapter indefinitely, but I knew I’d have to bring it in sometime. Since this is the Holiday Overconsumption Season, the interval between now and mid-January (perhaps even longer, if Steve makes an exciting announcement such as “Intel iBooks available!”) will see a steady pack of would-be buyers and desperate service-seekers jamming Apple retail outlets; I figured that today was my best bet to get careful, patient attention from an Apple employee.

They confirmed what you and I already suspected: that either the DC connector or the power controller has gone bad. If it’s only the DC connector, we’re out of there relatively inexpensively. If it’s the power controller, well, it could be worse: It could be the power controller and the screen, one hinge, and the optical drive.

In the meantime, my ol’ trusty TiBook has stepped off the bench and is filling in for its younger, more robust compatriot. It doesn’t recognize my hard drive at work, though it does recognize my home back-up drive. Its own optical drive seems moody or dysfunctional. It has a slower processor and half as much RAM, and I haven’t upgraded its OS or added the Pages application in which I did most of my word processing for the past year. And I’m not even going to try to install World of Warcraft on this unit; sorry, Joi, but I’ll join in as soon as I can.

But I’ll tell you — those three extra inches of screen size sure look great. The Microsofties who showed that the biggest productivity boost you can give your system is more screen area were definitely onto something. I’m looking at 15″ PowerBooks with lust in my heart.

I hesitate to intrude — but a vexatious conflict has opened up in an area of Blogaria that’s dear to my interests, and it’s worth deliberating about, in several different dimensions.

The conflict concerns Flickr, “almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world.” It turns out that at some point, Flickr has begun segregating certain images that do not appear to be photographic, on the basis that their brand identity involves their “photo sharing” function. Drawings, paintings, computer-generated fractal patterns, and doodles do not count as “photos,” on this account, so the 700 Hoboes Project (for one prominent instance) ought not appear in publicly-accessible areas of Flickr. When Flickr has private-ized drawings, their artists and sympathizers have made a ruckus.

To grant Flickr all the sound points possible, it’s clear that they present the site as a photo sharing application, and they do differentiate photos from drawings or other graphic designs. It would be unreasonable to use Flickr as insulation from the bandwidth costs that elaborate graphics can run up. They have made that explicit, although not necessarily obvious. And it’s their (Yahoo’s) site and service, so if they want to enforce their terms of service over against the practice of their clients, then it’s their prerogative.

On the hand, this situations entails certain peculiarities that actually correspond to problems with the RIAA/mp3 controversies. In both cases, commercial agencies try to constrain their clients’ online behavior based on aspects of physical-world media. As a point of fact, there’s no intrinsic difference between jpg files generated by digital cameras and those generated by scanners (EXIL data notwithstanding) — and it’s easy enough to take a digital photo of a drawing, and to scan a photographic print. Which is the true Flickr-OK “photograph”?

Moreover (as constant readers of Jeff Ward or even my talk about visual hermeneutics from two years ago will immediately recall) all these distinctions along the spectrum that runs between “photograph” and “printed text” run the risk of invidious arbitrariness. Is a photograph of printed text more Flickr-OK than a scan of printed text? On what basis? Is a photograph of a drawing more Flickr-OK than a scan of the same drawing? Will it make a difference if a photo has been altered to look more painterly (as with a filter in Photoshop or Painter)? What is it about the bits that have been gathered together to represent visual information in a “photograph” that differentiates them from bits gathered for visual information in a “scanned drawing” or even a digital sketch?

Furthermore, although Flickr has maintained its concentration upon photo sharing, the viral aspects of Flickr have all along been the way they engineered in collaboration and social interaction. Flickr is, after all, the mainstream genius offspring of the eccentric genius of the late lamented Game Neverending (Wikipedia). In both, the most obvious features (photo sharing, multi-player gaming) thrive because they’re wrapped around robust, innovative social software. Under the circumstances, the features that have made Flickr unique and popular have nothing to do with the mechanical means by which bits were defined as representations of an image, and everything to do with the interactions between participants (which again have nothing to do with whether the images involve “photographs” or “drawings” or whatever).

Flickr made itself precious to its clients by devising a way for them to do something they loved. At this point, restricting the bits they can share to “photographic” bits risks cutting down the tree’s trunk in order to sustain its leaves.

All in all, a difficult case, and an odd circumstance in which to read about the Flickr-ization of Yahoo, when one might suspect that current events foreshadow the corporatization of Flickr, instead.

[Later: I should emphasize that, contrary to what some bloggers have written, Flickr neither bans nor removes non-photo images. In the interest of helping users get the search results they want, Flickr excludes non-photo images from searches, and I gather that Flickr is working on ways to enable users to select “photos” or “non-photo illustrations” as a search criterion. At the rate at which Flickr grows, though, engineering a more discriminating search mechanism will take a lot of work. I’m heartened to hear that Flickrites are not out to get illustrators — but I’m not convinced that this is the most productive way to work toward their desired end. On the other hand, I didn’t just build an image-sharing empire and sell it to Flickr for quillions of sheets of purple paper.]