by cameron | Feb 20, 2007 | science vs religion
I’m sitting here waiting for filmmaker Brian Flemming, creator of “The God Who Wasn’t There” to turn up for our interview. I don’t think he got my email confirming the date/time. Ah well. Meanwhile I’m reading Brian’s blog and there are some great links to information I was going to talk to him about. I might as well share some of it with you now.
Join “The Blasphemy Challenge“!
The Rational Response Squad is giving away 1001 DVDs of The God Who Wasn’t There, the hit documentary that the Los Angeles Times calls “provocative — to put it mildly.” There’s only one catch: We want your soul. It’s simple. You record a short message damning yourself to Hell, you upload it to YouTube, and then the Rational Response Squad will send you a free The God Who Wasn’t There DVD. It’s that easy.
Go to WellingtonGrey.net to find out how George W. Bush’s decision tree works.
He’s also explains the difference between the scientific decision tree and the faith decision tree. Very enlightening.
The Center for Inquiry Transnational, in conjunction with its Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion (CSER) announces the creation of the Jesus Project. The Jesus Project will enlist the talents of scholars from many disciplines to try to determine the likelihood of Jesus of Nazareth having ever existed.
Spearheading this important undertaking is the Chairman of CSER, R. Joseph Hoffmann. The goal of the project, according to Hoffmann, is not to “prove” the non-existence of Jesus, but to take the theory as a “testable hypothesis” and use the best methods of critical inquiry to reach a probable conclusion.
by cameron | Feb 20, 2007 | Uncategorized
When I read Miriam’s post about shaving her head for leukemia, it dawned on me – Britney hasn’t gone mad – she’s just a sweet, down-home country girl with a heart of gold who wants to raise money for those poor people suffering from leukemia. And if Miriam can raise a couple of hundred bucks by shaving her head, imagine how much Britney will raise?
Of course, the infamous no-panties exercise a couple of months ago now makes complete sense. It was just a trial run. She probably raised $500k for the cause by shaving her taco and, in order to prove that she had actually done it, she kindly asked some photographers to be at hand when she got out of Paris’ wheels to record the event. With the huge success of that venture, she’s now decided to go the whole hog and shave her noggin.
And the press is beating it up, making out that the poor girl is half a loaf short of a picnic. It’s just not fair. She’s just doing her bit. I wish more stars would shave their heads. And their tacos for that matter.
Three cheers for Britney!
by cameron | Feb 20, 2007 | media 2.0
People love bandwagons. One of the popular memes at the moment, re-invigorated by some bloke called Rich Skrenta, the CEO of Topix.net, is about “The Failure of We (the) Media”. Anil Dash jumped on it. Even Ben Barren jumped on it.
Are these people living on the same planet I am? The one with 60 million blogs, squillions of YouTube videos and tens of thousands of podcasts? And it’s still the dawn of time as far as new media is concerned. Talking about the failure of “We Media” in 2007 is like the mental midgets who were talking about the failure of the internet to live up to the hype in 2001.
Thank Darwin Chris Anderson gets it.
Every day I get most of my news from blogs. I don’t visit “news sites” or use a “news aggregator”. I use a generic feedreader (Bloglines) and a totally idiosyncratic RSS subscription list that includes everything from personal posts from friends to parts (but not all) of the WSJ. When it comes to the web, I have no interest in someone else trying to guess what I want to read or “help” me by defining what’s news and what isn’t. My news is not your news; indeed, you probably wouldn’t call most of it news at all. I will probably never visit any of the sites Skrenta mentions, and never did visit the ones that are now defunct. In short, We Media is alive and well. It’s just the would-be We Media institutions that are not. A phenomenon is not necessarily a business. That doesn’t make it any less of a phenomenon.
Paul Montgomery – I see he lists TinFinger as one of the “We Media” businesses that failed? Does he know something I don’t?
by cameron | Feb 19, 2007 | Podcast, TPN
I got an email a couple of days ago from Fabian Frei, a student at The University of St Gallen in Switzerland, who is writing his master’s thesis on innovation in the podcasting scene and wanted to chat to me about TPN, so of course I recorded tonight’s interview.
If you enjoyed this podcast, make sure you don’t miss future episodes by subscribing to our feed and leave us a voice comment!
The G’Day World Theme Song is “Save Me†by The Napoleon Blown Aparts.
by cameron | Feb 19, 2007 | Uncategorized
The VERY fine folks at Apple (you know who you are) provided TPN with a WONDERFUL 2nd birthday present today by making us a “Featured Provider” on the iTunes UK homepage! As regular readers will know, we’ve been “Featured Providers” on the Aussie iTunes homepage for a while but I’d love to see us hold the same position in our other key markets (esp the UK and USA), so this is an awesome happening!
by cameron | Feb 19, 2007 | Christianity, Podcast, science, science vs religion
An interesting post on Andrew Sullivan’s blog recently from one of his readers who says:
I am an atheist (who was once a Christian) and wanted to comment on your latest missive to Sam Harris. I would describe my own embrace of science and secular humanism as being motivated by a form of faith that is deeper than Christian faith. I believe that if Jesus lived today, he would be a secular humanist and would reject Christianity, just as he “rejected” Judaism and inspired Christianity. Christianity was once the vehicle for the boldest and most honest thinking about reality, the brotherhood of man, and the human condition. I think in light of the advances in science and our exposure to other religious traditions, it is time again to humanize further our understanding of “God” (or the source of all truth, goodness, and beauty) and come to a more universal understanding of religion.
I’m not sure I agree with the author’s claim that Christianity was ever “the vehicle for the boldest and most honest thinking about reality” – bolder than vedanta? However, he makes a good point that, from what we know about the man called Jesus (which as we saw from my podcast with John Dickson, is very little), he doesn’t seem to have been overly concerned about tradition or authority.
Would he have been like Father Bob Maguire, who I had another of my regular skirmishes with last week?
by cameron | Feb 19, 2007 | Podcast, TPN
Remember when radio made you laugh?
I’m re-booting the Laugh Out Loud podcast to shamelessly exploit the rising amount of podsafe comedy appearing out there. Get yourself a few laughs for free!
[audio:http://lol.thepodcastnetwork.com/audio/tpn_lol_20070219_003.mp3]
DOWNLOAD AND SAVE
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by cameron | Feb 17, 2007 | Uncategorized
Van Halen 1977
Van Halen 2007
by cameron | Feb 16, 2007 | media 2.0, Melbourne
I remember going to see a Ben Folds gig in Melbourne a couple of years ago (we go pretty much every time he visits, it’s always an awesome gig) and when he performed his cover version of Dr Dre’s “Bitches Ain’t Shit” I nearly wet myself laughing. What a stroke of genius.
Over on Coverville, Brian recently linked to the below video which is an acapella band from U of C Berkley doing a cover of Ben’s cover. Brilliant. But the best part of the story is that Ben Folds is asking people to “Sing It Bitch” – he wants people to make their own videos of the song, post them up to YouTube, and he is then posting the best ones up onto BenFolds.com.
What a great way to get your audience involved, create a community and generate some buzz at zero cost.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjNNxnKVEpQ]
by cameron | Feb 16, 2007 | Uncategorized
This is the scariest legal precedent I’ve heard for a while.
Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel has been sentenced to five years jail in Germany for contributing to a website.
Zündel emigrated to Canada from West Germany in 1958, when he was 19. He lived there for many decades, writing pamphlets and, more recently, websites, denying the existence of the Holocaust.
Now, denying the Holocaust is a crime in Germany – but not in Canada.
In 2003, Zündel was arrested in the United States for overstaying a visa waiver and deported back to Canada. The Canadian government, however, invoking laws passed post 9/11, said he was “a threat to Canada’s national security” and threw him in jail. Canadian Federal Court Justice Pierre Blais said “Mr. Zündel’s activities are not only a threat to Canada’s national security, but also a threat to the international community of nations.” We’re invading sovereign nations, starting bloody civil wars in the process, but this guy is “a threat to the international community of nations” for writing a website? Does anything seem wrong to you?
He was then deported back to Germany where he was wanted for the crime of “inciting racial hatred”. He was placed on a trial and yesterday sentenced to five years jail.
The world has gone mad.
