variegated expatiations

The election appears to be over. Well, the voting part of it. But now we’re faced with a hung parliament and the horse trading with the independents and Greens as one or the other major party seeks to form a government. It suggests to me that the label assigned by the Sydney Morning Herald (and others) of “Decision 2010″ ought to be replaced by “Indecision 2010.”

It also reminded me just how difficult voting is — there are so many candidates I’d really like to be able to place last on the ballot papers!

I spotted this sign on a local field:

I’m somewhat surprised not to see it knee-deep in litter, given that no fines apply!

It appears that Ellen Van Wolde’s article about the meaning of ברא in Genesis 1 has appeared in JSOT (link to the reference is here). There has already been some discussion over her claim on other blogs, so I’m hoping to get a copy of her article soon (if anyone feels motivated to send me a copy please let me know!).

The abstract at the above link provides the summary (here reproduced in unicode rather than using the BFI method adopted at Sage):
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First, a warning: this is primarily an opportunity to vent my frustrations.

I visited Australia’s largest theological library this week, hoping to look up some material and photocopy a few pages. Theological resources down-under are not as extensive as they are in other parts of the world, but this particular library has most of what I need and, indeed, most of what I was after this time.

However, after collecting material to photocopy, my problems began. I had a library photocopier card issued previously by the library which should have contained some credit, but in the period since my previous visit they had “upgraded” the photocopiers so that they link into a computer system which maintains user accounts to which a user can apply credit for photocopying.

This means it is no longer possible to walk in off the street and copy something. Instead, you first register as a visitor on the system (a one-off process since the registration details are retained for future use). This process, however, appears to involve a number of servers passing information back and forth and the applications are, I was told, processed at set times. Exacerbating the problem appears to be the fact that the entire network is dreadfully slow taking minutes to open some web pages. Once the application is made, the user waits for it to wend its way through the network to the computer it needs to get to. Even when there, it isn’t yet ready to have credit for copying applied — that’s an additional wait. Once credit is purchased, there’s another delay while the computers process that.

Before this process finished my schedule demanded that I could wait no longer. My solution was to photograph the pages I needed using my mobile phone (this actually worked quite well and certainly was less troublesome in the long run).

Nonetheless, the experience left me a little annoyed. What happens if one of the servers goes down? Does nobody get to photocopy anything? Seems like the technology is making life more and more difficult. Next time I’ll just take a camera and avoid the copiers altogether. And if I need to access online databases, I’ll walk down the Fisher Library at Sydney Uni…

Not normal fare around here (if there’s such a thing), but I thought this was quite amusing: