Editorial

Kevin Langdon

It’s been a long time since my last package of issues, ##143-146, one year ago. I’m glad that Ron Hoeflin has filled in with a couple of issues and sorry that strong demands on my time have made me so unsuited to be the principal editor of a monthly journal. Once we have a constitutional framework to work within (see Noesis #150), I intend to offer myself as a candidate only to be an occasional Editor, preparing special issues from time to time.

The present set of two issues was prepared in Microsoft FrontPage and printed directly from FrontPage and from Internet Explorer. Hard-copy submissions were scanned and OCRed. The only (slight) difficulty in formatting is that individual articles are now numbered, and page numbers are hyphenated. Thus page 3-7 is the seventh page of the third article in a particular issue. The second column in the table of contents of each issue is the number of pages contained in each item.

The ability to work in FrontPage will simplify the preparation of future issues greatly; I’ll publish another issue soon, to report the results of the voting (see #150), and I’m working on a special issue on biblical scholarship, composed primarily of responses received to Miriam Berg’s “The Synoptic Problem” in Noesis #138, September 1998.

The use of FrontPage has allowed me to publish these two issues on my Web site. The URLs are:

149

150

These issue contain interesting articles from a number of different perspectives, by Mega members and others. As there is some speculative material #149, I refer readers also to “Why Science?”, by Don Radler, Editor of UniSci (Daily University Science News) <http://unisci.com/science2.shtml>, a succinct statement of the empirical viewpoint:.

The Mega Society has been slower than its sister societies in shifting its principal venue to the Internet from printed publications, but, of course, this shift is inevitable. In order to make this easier, I ask all authors of material submitted for Noesis to send it electronically as plain ASCII text or HTML, via e-mail or disk, with graphics as GIF or JPG files, if possible (I can scan hard copy, though; today’s OCR technology is a lot easier to use than was the case in the past).

I’ve established an e-mail list open to all members of Mega at egroups.com. If you’re not already on the list, write to me at kevin.langdon@polymath-systems.com and I’ll add your name and e-mail address.