Sunspots 22

Things I have recently spotted that may be of interest to someone else:

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Interview with author of Lost Women of the Bible, which is, as I understand it (I haven't read it) about how God's plan for persons with two X chromosomes is more important than some people seem to think it is.

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Katherine has moved to France, and it's not the same (not all bad, though!)

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Nessa, the Smite Faerie, posts lots of brief, but insightful book reviews, often on fantastic fiction. She (?) must read fast.

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Article in The Journal of Religion and Popular Culture, on using the Web to teach a comparative religions class, which gets into some deep territory. Sample:
[¶ 18] There is much debate about what it means to “enter cyberspace.” Do we enter a space of “no relation” to embodiment in ways that leave the body behind completely? Or does digital technology simply make evident what psychoanalysis has argued all along: that the body is constituted not purely organically but also psychically (through imaginary, or arbitrary, relations)? My contention in this essay is that both these interpretations, in their rush to “tidy up” the messiness of the emerging scenes of digital communication, miss something crucial: the complex sorts of subject constitution that can arise when language is practiced through, and as, multiple media.

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For you Firefox users, a weather forecast extension.

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IceRocket, a blog search tool that does more than, say, Google. Among other features, posts in the return list are sorted by post date, and the number of links from other blogs is shown. In the page of returns, There are Focus, Exclude and Subscribe links for each return. I think the first one narrows the responses to one blog. The second, I think, gives returns not including the blog in question. The third lets you subscribe to the blog returned. It's not perfect. For one thing, it didn't return this blog in the one search I did, even though an attempt to register my blog with IceRocket got the response that it was already registered. For another, while testing it, the server timed out once. Shows promise, but may need some work.

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Scholar's Blog, by Michele, describes itself as a "Blog for an English independent scholar of fantasy fiction." The posts fit that description, except that they are readable by non-scholars.

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It's been a while since I looked up a book on Amazon. There have been some helpful changes. At least for some books, there are now listings of Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs), that is, phrases found in this book that are found significantly more often than in "normal" books. This gives clues to what the book is actually about, and, since the SIPs are also hyperlinks to other books with the same SIPs, helps you to find similar ones. Capitalized Phrases works similarly. The site also gives the number of books that the book in question cites, which is an indicator of how scholarly it is, and a list of these books. Don't forget the "Look Inside the Book" feature, too (not available for all works) which has been around for a while.

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My apologies to Bloglines. They are now searching within the text of my blog, (In my next-to-last post, I said that they weren't) and, presumably, those of many others that they hadn't been for some months. Thanks!

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American Eagle (I have no financial interest in this clothing chain, so far as I know, and have never bought anything from them) had some fake books in its store displays for the back-to-school season. One of these was entitled Classics of Twenty-first Century Literature. Thanks for a good laugh!

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"Harry Potter and the Half-Stumped Critics" claims that, although postmodernists and conservative Christians (some, not all, of each, I suppose) have embraced the Harry Potter books, they don't exactly support either type of view.

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Wired says that a good new browser is coming soon.

I am aware, at least somewhat, of Hurricane Katrina's aftermath (of many kinds), that the U. S. Senate Judiciary Committee is examining Judge Roberts, and that there are various other important events, some of which we probably haven't heard of, transpiring now. Other sources are covering these matters. I guess I won't.

As of posting time, I have no information on this week's Christian Carnival.