An Invitation to Biblical Poetry

An Invitation to Biblical Poetry is an accessibly written introduction to biblical poetry that emphasizes the aesthetic dimensions of poems and their openness to varieties of context. It demonstrates the irreducible complexity of poetry as a verbal art and considers the intellectual work poems accomplish as they offer aesthetic experiences to people who read or hear them. Chapters walk the reader through some of the diverse ways biblical poems are organized through techniques of voicing, lineation, and form, and describe how the poems’ figures are both culturally and historically bound and dependent on later reception. The discussions consider examples from different texts of the Bible, including poems inset in prose narratives, prophecies, psalms, and wisdom literature. Each chapter ends with a reading of a psalm that offers an acute example of the dimension under discussion. Students and general readers are invited to richer and deeper readings of ancient poems and the subjects, problems, and convictions that occupy their imagination.

Biological Algorithms for Digital Manufacture

<p>Computational simulations are generally built upon a form or design that is near or mostly complete. Agent-based simulations are ones where the rules and behaviours are designed, creating an unpredictable output. In this research, these rules are derived from the complex systems in nature, utilising cross-disciplinary principles between architecture and biology. The abstraction of data and rules from biological structures are used to inform computational rule-sets for modelling 3D printed structures. The simulations in this paper explore the concept of emergence: where systems have an irreducible complexity and adaptability - a series of smaller parts combined acting as a whole. The concept of agent-based simulations as a form of emergence is a tool used greatly within many areas of research as a speculative method to build form and space. Computation rule-sets define a design intent for each simulation, demonstrating the ability to use agent-based systems and a spatial design driver. Informing the agents with design intent, allows them to adapt to their environment and to the ability and limitations of a freeform 3D printer. The focus in this project is the design of emergent principles in nature and how they can be applied to optimize structures for use with digital fabrication methods, thus producing a new approach to designing fabricated forms. Using a design by research approach, this research demonstrates the potential of free-form 3D printing as a technique for an integrated fabrication system. It outlines computational design techniques including the simulation of emergent phenomena to define a digital workflow that supports the integration of both emergent structures and free-form printing.</p>

Biological Algorithms for Digital Manufacture

<p>Computational simulations are generally built upon a form or design that is near or mostly complete. Agent-based simulations are ones where the rules and behaviours are designed, creating an unpredictable output. In this research, these rules are derived from the complex systems in nature, utilising cross-disciplinary principles between architecture and biology. The abstraction of data and rules from biological structures are used to inform computational rule-sets for modelling 3D printed structures. The simulations in this paper explore the concept of emergence: where systems have an irreducible complexity and adaptability - a series of smaller parts combined acting as a whole. The concept of agent-based simulations as a form of emergence is a tool used greatly within many areas of research as a speculative method to build form and space. Computation rule-sets define a design intent for each simulation, demonstrating the ability to use agent-based systems and a spatial design driver. Informing the agents with design intent, allows them to adapt to their environment and to the ability and limitations of a freeform 3D printer. The focus in this project is the design of emergent principles in nature and how they can be applied to optimize structures for use with digital fabrication methods, thus producing a new approach to designing fabricated forms. Using a design by research approach, this research demonstrates the potential of free-form 3D printing as a technique for an integrated fabrication system. It outlines computational design techniques including the simulation of emergent phenomena to define a digital workflow that supports the integration of both emergent structures and free-form printing.</p>

The symbiotic relationship between blind shrimp and the goby fish, with a commentary on irreducible complexity

Advocates of the concept of irreducible complexity in the natural world have propositionally identified the symbiotic relationship between the blind shrimp and the goby fish as incapable of having naturally evolved. An irreducibly complex system is most commonly identified as “A system…(that) includes a set of well-matched, mutually interacting, nonarbitrarily (sic.) individuated parts such that each part in the set is indispensable to maintaining the system’s basic, and therefore original, function.”, although it may be noted that various definitions and articulations of the concept itself are present in contemporary literature. The concept may be summarized as the idea that certain biological and natural systems and organisms are so intricately complex, that there is no conceivable method by which those systems or organisms could have arisen by “chance” through naturalistic or darwinian evolution. While evolutionists may claim that such systems did indeed evolve naturally, the argument goes, this does not explain how it happened. This type of partnership (as is observed in the symbiotic relationship between the goby fish and the blind shrimp), it is said, had to have been programmed into them by their Creator from the very beginning of their existence. This paper examines such a claim in light of what is known about symbiotic relationships among organisms as they are observed in nature.

Ironic Empires

This chapter considers the irreducible complexity of Du Fu’s relationship to the Tang empire in his late poetry from Kuizhou. During this period, his poems repeatedly portray miniature versions of the empire in the ostensibly private, domestic affairs that occupied his attention in a region where he had no property and few friends. Readers have been divided as to the significance of these poems: for some, that he should have continued even in his exile to see the empire everywhere he turned has evidenced his continuing commitment to the Tang; to others, the patent absurdity of some of these miniature empires has suggested a mockery of imperial pretensions. This chapter argues that both of these antithetical interpretations are correct. As soon as Du Fu seeks to assert his continued connection with the values of the empire, he recognizes the absurdity of his overreach; and as soon as he recognizes the absurdity of his overreach, he acknowledges the darker ways in which he remains dependent, even in Kuizhou, upon imperial hierarchies of questionable justice.

Membaca Narasi Penciptaan Mazmur 19:1-6 Melalui Perspektif Kosmologi Intelligent Design: Irreducible Complexity

This article examines: is science and theology so wide apart from each other; is the suffering of bible scholars who have a "second class" status in academic conversation impossible to end? The advancement of science which should illuminate the theological-biblical notions which are textually unexplainable in scientific detail has in fact created such a sharp split point. The idea of Intelligent design: irreducible complexity promoted by Michael J. Behe provides a kind of “theistic interstice" that can be used as a lens to see the existence of an intelligent designer of the universe narrated in Psalms 19: 1-6. The existed complexity, cannot be reduced because the condition itself is threatening the universal system. This article concludes with the identification: if the assumptions of an intelligent designer who refers to God is considered too premature; the framework of an intelligent designer then provides an imaginative space to grapple with the possibility of His involvement in the universe. Abstrak Artikel ini mempertanyakan ulang: Apakah ilmu pengetahuan dan teologi alkitabiah sudah sedemikian jauh terpisah satu sama lain? Apakah penderitaan para sarjana kitab suci yang diklaim berstasus “kelas dua” dalam percakapan akademik mustahil diakhiri? Kemajuan ilmu pengetahuan yang semestinya menerangi terminologi teologis-alkitabiah, yang barangkali memang secara tekstual tidak dijelaskan secara detail-ilmiah khususnya isu kosmologi dan kosmogoni, nyatanya justru telah menciptakan titik pisah yang begitu tajam. Gagasan kosmologi Intelligent design: irreducible complexity yang diusung oleh Michael J. Behe memberi semacam “celah teistik” yang dapat dipergunakan sebagai lensa untuk melihat kemungkinan keberadaan Sang Perancang Cerdas semesta raya dalam narasi Mazmur 19:1-6. Kerumitan yang ada, tidak dapat dikurangi, tidak boleh tidak ada. Mengingat situasi tersebut justru berpeluang mengancam sistem semesta. Artikel ini diakhiri dengan identifikasi, bahwa jika dugaan perancang cerdas yang merujuk kepada keberadaan Tuhan dinilai terlalu prematur, maka pemikiran intelligent designer menyediakan ruang imajinatif-intelektual untuk menggumuli kemungkinan keberadaan dan keterlibatan-Nya atas semesta.

Semiotics

Semiotics refers to an intellectual tradition that deals with processes of making and interpreting meaning in all kinds of text, in all modes. However, semiotics was never integrated into mainstream disciplinary structures. Because of this marginal status semiotic tendencies flourished outside and between the major disciplines. As a discipline semiotics seems small, vulnerable and out-of-date. But as a broad intellectual tradition semiotics can be seen as a meta-theory which encompasses literary theory. This second perspective makes semiotics more useful for literary readers, and hence is emphasized in this chapter. Semiotics’ value is enhanced when it is seen as a complex, heterogeneous field with fuzzy boundaries and productive entanglements with literary objects and theories. “Semiotics” comes from Greek semeion (sign, omen, or trace), something that points towards important, often hidden meanings. Signs in this sense go beyond words and verbal media. This scope gives “semiotics” a radically disruptive quality. Western culture in the modern era has been based on the primacy of words as carriers of all meaning and thought. Semiotics is the site of a radical challenge to this dominance. Semiotics sees signs and meanings everywhere, in every mode, not just in words. The changing media of literature in the present and past raise many semiotic issues for literary theory. Poetry always carried meanings through sound as well as words. Drama needs to be performed. Film and multimedia carry the role of print fiction in new contexts. In the multimedia 21st century, literature has gone beyond writing, and its theories need a semiotic dimension. Semiotics has a divided history, with two founding fathers. Peirce emphasized complexity and flow, and Saussure emphasized structure. Before 1960 structuralism dominated, but by the end of the 20th century post-structuralism prevailed. Semiotics went underground, but left traces everywhere of the intellectual revolution it participated in. It helped to trigger the turn to meaning across the social sciences and celebrated the irreducible complexity and diversity of forms and meanings in literature and life in the modern world.

A Double-Barreled Novel

This chapter explores Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, the most celebrated novel of the late nineteenth century, as the most completely realized example of the perspectival realism of the Reconstruction generation. Addressing Twain’s relationship with Howells and considering the way Twain’s absorption of the categories of the “sentimental fool” and the practices of mugwump aestheticism fed into his approach as a novelist, this chapter reads Huckleberry Finn as an allegory of the irreducible complexity of emancipation. This reading overturns traditional readings of the novel that celebrate Huck’s raft as a space of utopian freedom. It also offers an alternative to the dilemmas encountered by readers who have confronted the novel’s minstrelized depiction of the escaped slave Jim. What Twain called his “double-barreled” novel must be read for the way the possibilities of emancipation are hidden in plain sight, obscured by symbols of freedom such as the raft. Written in an age of renewed federalism even as it looks back at the antebellum world, Huckleberry Finn invites the reader to consider the possibility that the multiplicity of jurisdictions and overlapping, nonunified character of the U.S. legal system might represent a route toward emancipation in a world in which, absent a uniform law, no community could represent true justice.