So last weekend’s long hard work resulted in the architect coming up with a plan.

Its pretty close to what we’re after. Currently its too big, and the front part might stick out a bit much, but we’ll be jiggling things around for a while.

Pics in here.

If the process for making changes to a document has been “don’t touch it, give the changes to me”, and that document is the most important thing that we’re going to write this year, and you want to change the document, should you:
a) Give the change to me and let me do it, as I’ve been doing for the last two months, or
b) Change things yourself, breaking the document and crashing the computer of anyone who tries to look at the document?

Someone did (b). The document is 135 pages long, due to the government on Friday.

I was planning on having the next two days off, to revise for the exam on monday. I could make that plan, because I knew that the document was fine, formatting bang on, just a few text changes to make before the end of today, then print on friday and deliver.

Instead, I’ve managed to recover the text of the document, and am now going to sit here, style up 135 pages, put back in the figures, graphs, footnotes, cross-references, typeset the swine, and then, then do the text changes.

And then I’m going to kill Someone.

I think that any jury would agree, this is entirely justifiable.

So we’re spending this weekend on a design your own eco-home course. And happily, there’s less hippies on the course than one might expect. But oh my word, there’s still some right ones. I’d like to be charitable and say that they’re just at one end of the logical/intuitive spectrum, but sadly no, they’re just airheads.

Anyway, aside from that, there’s some interesting people there and the architect running it is very good, so I think we’ll get something positive from it over all.

And you’re all invited to our house-warming. It’ll be in about two years time, so don’t put the beers on ice just yet.

So the happy, clappy, stampy people are using the lecture room upstairs. I think they are about to come through the floor with their fervour. And their drummer is boring. Yes, its a church with a drum-kit, and there’s not a breakbeat in sight. No jumped-up, stuttering jittery rhythms for us, just 4/4 on the nail.

Then again, I’m at work at 6-30 on a Sunday, so what should I expect. Still the National Science Foundation indicators are a goldmine, so I’m gonna put those monster headphones on, turn it up to painful and keep digging.

In my office, I’ve just found a book entitled “The Religion of Geology”. Second edition, published in 1859.

It includes the following chapter headings
“The Noachian deluge compared with the geological deluges”
“The World’s supposed eternity”
“Geological proofs of the divine benevolence”
“Scientific truth, rightly applied, is religious truth”

A sample:

“But a still larger number of authors, although men of talents, and familiar, it may be, with the Bible and theology, had no accurate knowledge of geology. The results have been, first, that, by resourting to denunciation and charges of infidelity, to answer arguments from geology which they did not understand, they have excited unreasonable prejudices and alarm among common Christians respecting that science and its cultivators; secondly, they have awakend disgust, and even contempt, among scientific en, especially those of sceptical tendencies, who have inferred that a couse which resourts to such defense must be very weak.”

So firstly, grammar like this is impossible to skim-read, all those sub-clauses, or whatever they are called.

Secondly, I think the author is in favour of theologians learning and being guided by natural science. But its kind of hard to tell.

Thirdly, geology is no longer viewed as a temptation of Satan.

Fourthly, it has a touching dedication to his wife, in contrast to many of the harsh words said in his world about “female deception and inconstancy”.

Fifthly, the vast deposits of coal in the north-eastern USA are an example of divine geological benevolence, put there for the benefit of Europeans.

Sixthly, this is like watching ice bergs crashing into each other. Two belief systems, negotiating their boundaries, when one belief system is rapidly accelerating. This debate continues today, as does the acceleration.

Seventhly, in the book was a 1947 New Zealand Railways suburban time-table for the Hutt Valley line, being used, I assume, as a bookmark. We have more trains on Sundays now, a point which may be obliquely relevant to the above discussion.

I so rarely get to use that phrase. But here, its appropriate. So, the situation is, two friends of A got married in Rarotonga last Easter. A toddles off over there, takes some pics of the wedding, families and sprogs. Puts pics on web. And then we get this comment. Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!

because acoustic covers of industrial tunes are an unquestionable good thing, especially when the song being covered is po-faced, facististic, from Belgium, and I happen to have it on vinyl (proving how old I am), here’s a cover of Front 242’s
Headhunter on an acoustic guitar.

This video of a jet running into a concrete wall. Where did it go?

Obviously, it was stolen by aliens.