herbswanson.com

The 12 November 2003 issue of the Christian Science Monitor contains a story on the controversies surrounding Australia's new national museum in Canberra. The article, written by Janaki Kremmer, is entitled, "Is a museum obligated to tell the whole truth?" Some politially powerful Aussies feel that the museum gives too much attention to the aboriginal people and fails, thereby, to reflect the "inclusive" historical experience of Australia. The museum's exhibits, furthermore, are criticized by some because they focus on every day life and mix and match such things as clothing and the artifacts of daily living, sometimes without respect to periods or ethnicity. The article reports that some white Australians feel that their history and identity has not received sufficient attention compared to all of the space devoted to the aborigines. The article describes the difference of opinion as a political one, between conservatives and liberals, with the liberals defending the originality and ethnic balance of the museum. The liberals contend that Australian museums and histories marginalize the nation's indigenous peoples and that the Canberra museum is the first to give them the space they deserve. The museum itself has been very popular, drawing far more visitors than initially expected.

This article and the experience of the museum in Canberra raises the obviously prickly question of the ownership of the past. The fact is that Australia has a multiplicity of pasts and just as many ways of understanding the past. Which of these pasts takes precedence is indeed a political question. It is especially worth noting that the conservatives are using the rhetoric of inclusivenss to make their case, which rhetoric is usually the preserve of the liberals. If the article itself is fair, then what seems to be happening is that the conservatives are using that rhetoric of inclusiveness to actually preserve the un-inclusive, pro-white immigrant tradition of the other Australian historical museums. What, I wonder, is wrong with having at least one museum that devotes its primary attention to the aborigines?

The 14 February 2004 website of I. T. Vibe carried an article written by Craig Beaumont entitled "NASA test Interplanetary Internet." The article, citing a NASA press release, reported that NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) established direct contact between one of NASA's Martian exploration rovers and an ESA sattelite circling Mars, which ultimately involved the transfer of data back to Earth. This is the first time that a network has been established between two human extraterrestial communication systems. The article goes on to speculate that in the future a larger network could be established between Earth and human teams or settlements on the Moon and Mars. Presumably, such a network would include orbiting communities such as the International Space Station as well. The article concludes with the intriguing comment that, "So in years to come, you [may] find yourself chatting to someone online who might not be halfway round the world, but literally on another planet."

This is one of those news tidbits that reminds us of the future that is coming, if we can keep this old planet going. The Web, in short, may someday contain websites that originate from space or another planet. Scifi writers, I might add, have long since

Internet and the Web are, effectively, only a little more than a decade old. Important as they are, they pose new challenges and problems as well, among them the problem of preserving data that are lost when websites shut down or are revised. Rick Weiss wrote an article entitled "On the Web, Research Work Proves Ephemeral" that was published in the 24 November 2003 issue of the Washington Post, which reports that while scholarly publications are increasingly citing online sources those sources themselves are constantly disappearing. By the time a book or an academic article is published, many of the websites it cites are gone. Refering to a study conducted by Robert Dellavalle and others into this problem, the article states, "Dellavalle's concerns reflect those of a growing number of scientists and scholars who are nervous about their increasing reliance on a medium that is proving far more ephemeral than archival."

The seriousness of the problem is demonstrated by the fact that increasingly there are no hardcopies for many documents found on the Web. They exist only electronically, and when they are cleaned off a site, that site moves, or it is shut down such documents are lost. (A cynic might observe, of course, that the loss of a lot of what is found on the Web is really no loss at all!) The article notes that there are now projects to archive old web pages and cites one by Kahle's Internet Archive (www.archive.org). Such projects cannot keep up, as the article points out, with the mass of data that seems to be passing regularly out of electronic existence; but they do represent a first effort to save the e-past.

As an experiment, I went to the internet archive site linked above and typed in "herbswanson.com." Low & behold, there were the two earliest versions of this website! I wonder how they did that?

The 23 December 2003 issue of the Christian Science Monitor contains a book review, written by Ron Charles, of the book American Jesus: How the Son of God became a National Icon (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), written by Stephen Prothero. The book is a history of the ways in which various American groups and cultures have contextualized Jesus. From Presidents such as Thomas Jefferson in the early nineteenth century to groups as disparate as black Americans and Mormons, Americans have constantly redefined Jesus in their own terms. Prothero claims that in spite of the secularization of American society, Jesus is more "popular" than ever. (A claim that the huge popular interest in U.S. in the movie, "The Passion of Christ," seems to bear out). For those who are interested in the history of the contextualization of the Christian message, this sounds like an important book—one that may end up in the book review section of HeRB one day. Given the importance of the American religious consciousness on the founding and historical development of Protestantism in Thailand, this could well also be an important book for the study of Thai church history.

Last February 29th, Tambol (Sub-District) Sngabaan, of which Ban Dok Daeng is a part, held elections for the Tambol Council. On March 12th, the village