Liberal Religion and Neo-Astrology, Champagne Breakfasts, Clusters and CMSs

[tcpip]

Gave an address at the Melbourne Unitarian Church on Sunday on Reverend Stephen Fritchman, a radical liberal in the U.S. who caused a great deal of trouble for the political establishment during the 1940s, 50s and 60s. On a vaguely related topic I found myself debating on convert_me last week with astrologers, of all people. Intrigued to discover that some of that ilk now claim (or rather, admit as the statistics and science is beyond reasonable doubt) that it has no predictive value whatsoever, but rather can only be used as a metaphorical and instrospective approach. So, after all those centuries it is finally acknowledged to be fiction.

Last Saturday the deco-apartment of Das Hoehnhauss/Casa di Lafayette held a champagne breakfast with various teas, Timorese coffee, lots of pancakes, almond shortbread, silverware and fine china. In attendence were caseopaya's new workmate and partner along with imajica_lj. We're hoping to turn this into a semi-regular event as it's a delightful way to waste away a Saturday morning and most of an afternoon and catch up with a small group of people as well. We're gradually building a list of people to come along, but if anyone is particularly keen to attend in the next couple, please drop a line below.

Work-related matters have been quite busy of late and we've been somewhat short-staffed. Upgrading the dual-core Opteron systems to quad-cores on Tango is a necessity if we wish to reach at least somewhere close to the c7 Teraflop peak but (as one would expect) it hasn't entirely been smooth sailing. On a completely different tangent, I've been investigating the relative competitive benefits of Drupal vs Plone CMSs for ARCS. Having some experience with both does lead me towards the former for the sake of simplicity, but I'm interested to hear contrary views.

Comments

[telarus.livejournal.com]

Mmmm. Nicely lulztastic astrology thread. Well done.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the kind words. Have any favourite moments you care to share?

[telarus.livejournal.com]

What I liked seeing the most was the peeling away of the esoteric onion skins to reveal the jewel at the center. Many practitioners of this and other arts don't seem to realize the base mechanisms that allow the desired effects to happen, and it was refreshing to see the conversation actually go in that direction (ala Pooperman and your comments setting up a tension which Nefri then had to work out internally).

Namaste

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Actually.... yes. I was very pleased with how the discussion went as well. After all, it started out with a "astrology has no predictive value vs that's not 'real' astrology" and reached a point of agreement.

Even as a "full and frank discussion", it stands in stark opposition to a lot of other online discussions, doesn't it?

[telarus.livejournal.com]

Agreed. Usually the participants get bored with the topic and the discussion ends, or they get bored trying to pick the discussion out of the surrounding drama. It helped that all of the participants were well 'spoken' and pushed towards a resolution.