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Religion

You are currently browsing the archive for the Religion category.

Vale Scott Young

01 April 2008 in Internet, Religion by Stilgherrian | No comments

Photograph of Scott Young

I’ve just had the most amazing conversation about the man in the photograph. C Scott Young was, according to Mark Pesce, “the very, very first VRML designer. What he did — with no tools and for (literally) no money — changed the world.” And Mark should know, because he invented VRML.

Alas, Scott died a few days ago after a long, long battle with diabetes-related illnesses. He doesn’t have his own Wikipedia entry yet, but you can get hints of his life in Mark’s personal blog post and the memorial site.

Tonight’s conversation was remarkable because it led me to re-read a somewhat influential Wired article from 1995, Technopagans: May the astral plane be reborn in cyberspace. When that article hit the streets I’d just moved to Sydney in the first dot.com boom. Mark Pesce was a minor superstar in the Internet firmament for inventing leading-edge virtual reality technology — he was, almost literally, creating the world of William Gibson’s Neuromancer.

That article combined what I knew of Mark’s technical work with religious and spiritual ideas which were at least somewhat related to my own. I remember thinking, “I’d very much like to meet this man one day.” That’s why I was so well pleased when I finally did meet him last December.

Mark, I am truly sad that you’ve lost a good friend — especially since there was so much complex news for you this week. As you say, “Remembering is the only gift we living can give those gone before us.”

I always used to enjoy the wholesome food from the Common Ground Café at Sydney’s Royal Easter Show, the Newtown Festival and other events. There’s now a bad taste in my mouth now that I’ve discovered they’re owned by an isolationist cult with abusive child-discipline practices. A former members says workers aren’t paid and there’s no workers compensation or insurance.

24 March 2008 by Stilgherrian | 8 comments

Since it’s Easter Sunday, I’ll point you to a previous post showing what happens to unpopular bunnies. Enjoy!

23 March 2008 by Stilgherrian | No comments

Overheard in a pub recently, someone asking their friend, “Are you an atheist?” The reply was, “What does that mean? You’re so intelligent!”

22 March 2008 by Stilgherrian | No comments

One of the Pope’s groupies came up with a new version of the 7 deadly sins. I haven’t bothered chasing this story ‘cos it seems like such a wank, but there’s some interesting commentary from friend and colleague Zern Liew and Murdochland blogger Tim Dunlop [waves].

13 March 2008 by Stilgherrian | No comments

Australia 2020 News, 13 March 2008

13 March 2008 in Politics, Religion by Stilgherrian | 1 comment

I wonder if Australia’s Jewish communities will be suitably placated by having their own kosher pre-summit summit on 14 April, since the main Australia 2020 Summit on 19-20 April clashed with Passover?

Meanwhile, the process of selecting the 1000 “best and brightest” (minus the politically-handy pre-selections) started yesterday. There’s “more than 10,000 applications” to deal with — though previously the figure was 7000+ so who knows who to believe.

[Summit vice-chairman] Professor [Glyn] Davis met Mr Rudd on Tuesday to review progress for the huge gathering. A team, including Victorian public servants and some of Professor Davis’ staff, is working on the agenda, while a Queensland bureaucrat is helping with background material for the summiteers.

Mind you:

The committee also has lists of possible summiteers sent in by the public and CVs that are not accompanied by formal applications.

I’d have thought that being unable to follow the published nomination process would automatically exclude you from being Australia’s “best and brightest”.

It’s sounding like we’ll know the list of 1000 early next week.

Jason Calacanis and the Evil Cult of the Internet Start-up

10 March 2008 in Business, Ecology, Internet, Religion by Stilgherrian | 21 comments

[Note: This article is a follow-up to How do you treat your staff? Like 37signals, or like this prick?, written after that piece received a lot of attention. But my views are more complex than simple Good vs Evil, as a look through all Calacanis-related posts will show.]

I’m still chuckling at the seriousness with which some people treat getting onto Techmeme. It’s true, I keep stopping typing to giggle. It’s embarrassing.

I’d never visited Techmeme until this weekend. Even then it was only because someone told me I’d blipped up there. It’s just another feed of what someone thinks is “important” in infotech, yeah? Who cares. It’s not as if it’s Reuters or BBC News.

It’s just more geeks telling geeks what geeks think other geeks should think about stuff that geeks think about.

Photograph of Jason Calacanis

But Jason Calacanis cares.

Jason Calacanis must care very deeply because he “joked” about it on this website, and over at TechCrunch he “joked” about getting pageviews. His fan club speculates that Duncan Riley and me and others are only attacking him to generate our own web traffic. Well, I can’t speak for Duncan, but no, I couldn’t care less about website traffic — especially the low-grade drive-by flamers that usually wash up here after being mentioned on high-traffic fan sites. That’s not why I’m here.

I’m attacking Calacanis because I reckon the business style he describes, the one championed by his defenders, is rotten to the very core.

But first, let’s talk about religion…

Read the rest of this entry »

Three quickies for you: The 40 Most Inappropriate Children’s Book Covers (I like Sharing is for Losers: an Ayn Rand Primer and Pop! Goes The Hamster And Other Fun Microwave Games). A nice rant about Sydney’s Fireworks Display Exhaustion Syndrome. And the story of the Bluetooth Burqa (hat-tip to 3 Quarks Daily).

06 March 2008 by Stilgherrian | No comments

“Heath Ledger is notable for being two things at the moment. They are: 1. Not gay. 2. Dead,” notes Eric TF Bat. “This hasn’t stopped our good friends at the Westboro Baptist ‘Church’ announcing plans to picket his memorial because he played a gay cowboy in some movie a while back.” Eric’s rant says what needs to be said.

25 January 2008 by Stilgherrian | 1 comment

Is it really so wrong to mix business and politics (and religion)?

23 January 2008 in Business, Politics, Religion, Transparency by Stilgherrian | 6 comments

So last week Apple announced new products. Yawn. The Cult of Apple worshipped their God, and millions of words were written praising His Wisdom. However the most interesting comment I’ve read so far was about the political content of Steve Jobs’ presentation.

Alastair Rankine writes that the Macworld Keynote has moved from slick-but-reality-distorted marketing into the realms of straight-out entertainment, and then criticises Randy Newman’s performance. Not because it was crap (which, being Randy Newman, is inevitable), but because it was political.

Criticism of the Bush administration is something I obviously have a lot of time for. But is it suitable for a consumer product launch? …

Mix politics with business and you take a risk with a relatively small upside but a big downside. If your politics match mine, we are no more likely to do business together than before we knew each other’s positions. But if our politics disagree, this difference becomes a barrier that we each have to overcome in order to do business together.

I’m not arguing for censorship or anything. I’m just saying that the separation of politics and business is crucial for the success of both.

I disagree.

Business is about making money, yes, but sometimes I think it’s wrong to “leave politics at the door”. In fact, is it even possible?

Read the rest of this entry »

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