Ethics in Sydney? Really?

Sydney is the place to be at the moment, if you're interested in ethics. (Now there's something I never thought I'd be writing.)

I'm currently sitting in on a conference on Moral Cognition and Meta-Ethics, which has the aim of bringing together "the various meta-ethical accounts of moral judgement" and understandings of "moral cognition drawn from the sciences". Not everyone's cup of tea, to be sure, but such interdisciplinary discussion is very necessary ... and based on the first half-day, I'll be back for the remainder of the conference.

I then get Monday to catch my breath --- which is as well, since I have other commitments --- and then from Tuesday 4th, the great Oliver O'Donovan will give this year's New College Lectures, Morally awake? Admiration and resolution in the light of Christian faith. I guess I'll see some of this blog's regular readers there.

I'm still alive ...

... although you wouldn't know it from reading this blog lately. I've variously been on working holiday in the US, recovering from jetlag, and then nursing a virus (which I guess I picked up by not being careful enough while recovering from jetlag).

There are lots of things to post: with luck I'll find time in the next week or so.

I hope everyone else who took August hols had a good time ...

All together now!

ZSHEEEEEEEEEEEEERRRRWWWWWW

Dum de dum, dum de dum, dum de dum, DUM DE DUM,
Dum de dum, dum de dum, dum de dum, DUM DE DUM,
Dum de dum, dum de dum, dum de dum, DUM DE DUM,
Dum de dum, dum de dum, dum de dum ...

Wooo hooooooooooo, woooooooo hooooooooo,
Wooo hooo, woo woo hoo hoo he hoooooo,
He hooooo
(dum de dum, dum de dum, dum de dum, dum de dum, dum de dum)

NAAAAAAAAAAH naah naah naaaaah na na naaaah,
NAAAAAAAH na na naaaah,
NAAAAAAAH na na naaaah,
Na na naaah
(dum de dum, dum de dum, dum de dum, dum de dum, dum de dum, dum de dum)

Wooooh hooooh, wooooh hooooh, woooh hoooh, wooooh hooooh, wooooh ...

shwhrhzshrshwhrhzshrshwhrhzshrshwhrhzshrshwhrhzshrshwhrhzshr ...

Some friends recently loaned me the DVDs of the first and second series, to catch up on the episodes I've missed. As you can see, I've been enjoying the experience. But nothing has quite matched seeing the credit sequence roll for the first time, at the start of The Unquiet Dead (on an airplane, in fact), and the surprise: "Hey! It's Doctor Who!"

(I wish I could take credit for the idea of this post, but I saw it on a T-shirt once ... or at least, down as far as the "Wooo hooooo" part. And with the TARDIS bouncing along at the bottom, as on a follow-the-bouncing-ball sequence. It was a thing of joy.)

Angels in America

I finally saw the HBO adaption of Angels in America recently: better late than never. I can see what all the fuss is about, but I must admit that the first chapter did nothing so much as place me in an ill humour. If you're thinking of seeing it, and are neither gay nor Jewish, you may run in to the same problem, but it is worth persevering past the opening instalment. And it helps to know that the original play was subtitled A Gay Fantasia on National Themes.

There are some truly glorious things about this miniseries:

Al Pacino is extraordinary as Roy Cohn --- lively and terrible and unrepentant --- and the illusionless compassion that the play expresses at the death of this monstrous man is quite moving. Much more so than the usual American TV pieties, because more realistic: and I use the term advisedly, not excluding Meryl Streep's appearance as the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg.

Joe and Harper Pitt's misery is taken seriously, and not patronised. Nor is Joe's Mormon matron of a mother.

And Jeffrey Wright as Belize. If you are going to have a designated truth-telling character, and he's going to be a camp black guy, you might as well do it in style.

But I remain unpersuaded about the angels. Like the confectionary old rabbi whose paean to the immigrant struggle opens the play, the angels are a theatrical conceit and they just don't translate convincingly to film. Not to put too fine a point on it: Emma Thompson does a better job of looking numinous when she doesn't have a silly great pair of wings stuck to her back. And as to the discussion in Heaven, and the angel's messages generally ... OK, OK: on one interpretation, these are the hallucination of a fevered AIDS sufferer, so I should probably cut the scenes some slack.

[For those with a New York Times subscription: Alessandra Stanley's reveiw of the HBO miniseries (2003/11/30) and Frank Rich's review of the theatre production, in both parts (1992/11/10) are both worth reading.]

Gotcha!

In a surprisingly non-partisan op-ed piece in Tuesday's Herald, Gerard Henderson attacks the current journalistic sport of trying to catch politicians in an "embarrassing" failure of memory, in this manner: "Can you name all of the Senate candidates of your party from [some_random_State]? Your time starts now ...".

There has been a certain amount of this lately, and it serves no respectable purpose. It should just stop.

A proxy war

Like a fool, I interjected in a discussion on military chaplaincy on the Faith and Theology blog last Thursday.

I meant to raise my eyebrow at one correspondent's wholesale argument against chaplaincy --- illegitimate as a Christian ministry even if war itself were justifiable, we were told --- which seemed to cry out for contradiction. I told myself that I was thus engaging in a brief police action, in a good cause.

But now I find myself in the middle of a war-by-proxy, with Pacifism and Just War theory sponsoring the two sides. And I have no exit strategy.

There must be a moral in here somewhere.

She is a very bad girl

Apparently Helena Bonham-Carter is playing Bellatrix Lestrange in the new Harry Potter film.

[significant pause]

Pardon me while I try to concentrate on whatever else it was I was doing ...

Dawn will have to wait until September ...

... as stated in this press release. The other information in the previous post on this subject still holds good.

As I understand, there's no fallback period for launch after September-October: by the time Dawn would arrive in the asteroid belt following a late launch, Vesta and Ceres would be too far apart for the spacecraft to visit both of them. [I don't have an authoritative reference for that statement, but I may add one if I get time to look around online in the next week or so.] One hopes that they've cleared their slate in September, and that the weather holds.

ATLAS under construction

There are time-lapse movies of the ATLAS detector under construction on YouTube here, in one minute and two minute versions. They give a better idea of the sheer scale and complexity of the thing, than mere description does.

ATLAS, and the Large Hadron Collider project more generally, was discussed in an earlier post

Dawn is about to depart

The Dawn spacecraft will be launched on a mission to the asteroid belt in a few days. Check it out at the Dawn website.

Dawn will be the first spacecraft to orbit two separate bodies after leaving the earth. This is a rather difficult thing to do, and the craft can manage it using ion engines: their thrust is low but they are extremely efficient in their use of propellant (more technically: the specific impulse is very high). You leave them switched on more-or-less permanently, and after a few months you are either going like the clappers, or have climbed further out of the gravity well of the sun (or some other body) ... or both.

The targets of the Dawn mission are the two most massive asteroids, Vesta in 2011 and Ceres (now officially classified as a dwarf planet after the recent shakeup in naming) in 2015. These two are about as different as asteroids get, in their characteristics, and so if one is to choose only two targets, this pair is a good pick.

Good luck to the Dawn team ...

Rings Around Saturn

NASA's Cassini probe has been at Saturn for three years now, and the team have celebrated by putting together a slide show. Some of the captions are insufficiently detailed, but there's no quarrelling with the pictures.

(I could hope that this post will attract as many hits as the recent one whose topics included "HBO", "Mormons", and "sex" ... but it probably won't. A shame, that.)

Image credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Let's be honest

I just added "Christianity" to the official subtitle of this blog, as one of its prevailing concerns. Because, let's be honest: who was I kidding by omitting it?

The tendentious nature of much discussion on theo-blogs still dismays me: it sometimes dismays me when I'm engaged in such discussions. I would hope that my own contributions are reasonable, but this is for others to judge ... and it will not do to affect a distance from these discussions which is not supported by the data.

For the record, I have been known to contribute to the following theo-blogs, in roughly this order:

The Blogging Parson (Michael Jensen)

nothing new under the sun (Byron Smith)

hebel (Matt Moffitt)

Faith and Theology (Ben Myers)

My problem is usually with (some of) their interlocutors, rather than these gentlemen themselves.