A little over a year ago, I became a phone-answering technical support helpdesk person at Slingshot. And a little on Friday I became not one of those any more, due to having resigned.

It was a strangely pleasant job, and I learnt many valuable skills such as reciting by heart how to set up a dial-up connection for Windows XP, explaining the functions of the various blinky lights on the fronts of routers, and saying “I can’t really comment on that” in such a way as to clearly convey the intended meaning “I heartily agree with your opinion about Telecom”. I also got to sample many of the Auckland CBD’s fine places of cheap lunch, and had many enjoyable conversations with my colleagues.

But Time’s wing’d chariot hurtles ever onwards through the celestial hippodrome of Fate, and so on Monday I take up a new career in the Computer Science Department of the University of Auckland, as a Guy Who Does A Bunch of Stuff. I shall have many tasks, the most prestigious of which shall be tutoring a Human-Computer Interaction course. I shall also be supervising labs, maintaining computer software, writing web pages for staff members and all the other myriad tasks typically allotted to graduate students.

Not that I actually am a graduate student. Or rather, the nature of my status as a graduate student depends very much on the observer. It is true that I have graduated several times in the past, and can prove it by presentation of various pieces of paper in my possession. It is also true that I feel entitled to eat lunch in the Graduate Lounge, although it must be said that nobody requires me to present my papers or wear a gown when I go in there.
Weighing against my being a graduate student is the fact that I still have another semester of undergraduate courses to take before any of my pieces of paper have “Computer Science” written on them. And since this is the subject I am currently studying, it would be fair to say that I am not yet a graduate student with respect to Computer Science.

After some discussion, however, it has been agreed that when I’ve finished the upcoming semester of undergraduate courses, a confluence of events will occur that will unequivocally confirm my status as a graduate student. Because I have good grades in the courses I’ve already taken, a Master’s degree in Mathematics, a planned research programme planned and a couple of people willing to be my supervisors, nobody can see why I shouldn’t be able to start a PhD in the second semester of 2006. This doesn’t amount to formal approval, but as I understand it that normally doesn’t come until a good year after one starts, so I feel it’s as good as settled. Somewhere around July I’ll be starting my doctorate. Hence the graduate student work.

In the course of his academic career my grandfather earned four degrees, of which he was justifiably proud. One evening about ten years ago, not very long before he died, he set me the challenge of doing the same. I’m not sure exactly how I’m doing on that score. I have two degrees I think really count, another that I consider a technicality brought about by loophole in university regulations that I believe has since been closed, and a teaching diploma. At the end of the semester that starts tomorrow I’ll have gained another diploma and started on a third proper degree. I’m not sure whether that will all add up to meeting the score, but in his capacity as a theologian and mine as a mathematician I’m sure that he’d be proud of the degree to which I have managed to obfuscate the apparently simple concept of “four”.

Massively. Multiplayer. Pong.

What a fine thing it is to have a Lantern Festival, which is what Auckland did last night. I had a splendid time eating deep-fried morsels and watching the dragon dancing and fireworks. My companions in this venture, Stephen and Olly are kempo practitioners so we, along with Stephen’s mum Val and their friend Alistair, spent a good deal of time watching martial arts demonstrations.

I was particularly struck by the Japanese art of Iaido, which was new to me. As far as I was able to discern, it consists essentially of ceremonially sizing up an enemy (in this case a pole made of bamboo), drawing your sword with great deliberation and a beautifully smooth motion, and then putting it away again because you have decided not to use it. It is hard to describe how impressive it is to see person after person approaching the bamboo pole then retreating again, leaving it entirely unmolested.

Towards the end, a couple of the more experienced sensei did have a slice each at the pole, but they did it in such a perfunctory manner that it seemed clear that this was really beside the point. If anything, it was just to show that the swords were really sharp, and to underline that any one of them could have utterly destroyed the bamboo pole at any time had they chosen to do so.

I do like the idea of a martial art form that encompasses a realistic assessment of the minimal level of threat presented to its practitioners by bamboo poles, and teaches them to react with a proportional lack of violence.

I am a Baha’i rather than a Muslim, but my religion shares with Islam a proscription on creating images of our founder. To my understanding, the point of this rule is to guard against idolatry. Worshipping idols is a common dodge human beings take when faced with religion – obsessing about the messenger is a good way to avoid facing up to the message. Making images won’t automatically cause this to happen, but I think it’s a useful measure to discourage this very human tendency.

A crucial point, however, is that you’re not very likely to fall into the trap of idolatry if you make an image of the founder of a religion you don’t personally believe in. Not making images is a rule for believers, and it doesn’t really make any sense to try to apply it to non-believers.

There was recently a bit of discussion surrounding the Wikipedia page about Baha’u'llah, the founder of the Baha’i Faith. It’s a web page likely to be viewed by many Baha’is, and as such we would like it not to have an actual picture of Baha’u'llah. On the other hand, the page is for everybody, and if you’re not a Baha’i you might reasonably expect to see a picture there, as you would on any other page about a historical figure. Baha’u'llah lived more recently than Muhammad, and photographs of him do exist. As you’ll see if you go to the page, a happy compromise has been reached where a picture has been linked to instead of being embedded in the page. You can see it if you follow the link, and Baha’is aren’t forced to look at it. It’s polite to Baha’is , and I appreciate the consideration.

The same consideration wasn’t shown by the Danish newspaper that published cartoons of Muhammad. I don’t know the motives of the people responsible, but it seems possible that it might have been intended deliberately to cause offence. If so, any Muslim would be well within their rights to write a letter to the editor requesting that it not be done again.

Anything more than that will always be counter-productive. A non-Muslim cannot do any harm whatsoever to Islam by publishing a picture of Muhammad, no matter how insulting. In fact, there is nothing a non-Muslim can make that can harm Islam. Islam can only be harmed by Muslims, just as Christianity can only be harmed by Christians, and the Baha’i Faith by Baha’is. No number of bad cartoons drawn by a non-Muslim can ever match the damage caused by a single violent act committed by a Muslim. That’s simply the responsibility you bear when you belong to a religion.