00 Zero or Shaken not Stirred

First, the mind maps will be archived on Tuesday, as agreed.

Secondly, I have looked into Acts of God (a little more), in relation to insurance and legal systems. An Act of God can be defined as a natural catastrophe, an unusual event not caused by human intervention which could not have been prevented by reasonable care or foresight, for example a hurricane, flood, earthquake, violent volcanic eruption, even locust plagues. You can get insurance against Acts of God, such as flood insurance etc. There is even Acts of God holiday insurance.

It can refer to property and personal damage and contracts dealing with the delivery of goods or services, the idea being to protect parties from litigation over delays or failures due to circumstances beyond their control. Origins of the phrase can be traced back to religious texts and the term was subsequently appropriated by insurance companies in the early 19th century. Some insurance policies still use the phrase Act/s of God today, though it is being replaced increasingly by secular terminology or put into quotation marks. In the film, The Man Who Sued God, (Australia: 2001), the protagonist is faced by an insurance company’s non-payment due to an ‘Act of God’… So, he sues God in the form of his earthly representatives.

There is also Catastrophe Modelling (Cat Modelling) - whereby computers are used to make calculations to estimate losses that could be sustained due to a catastrophic event (in insurance) and Catastrophe Theory (Mathematics).

To take up on the idea that “perhaps modernity is catastrophic (with radical newness) because it is the age in which technology has developed such that it can destroy the earth (nuclear weaponry, global warming etc)”. The Catastrophe, Revolution and the Narrative of History post foregrounds technology as being inherently bad, given the examples. The effects of modernity are surely not all detrimental? For example, there has been a control or eradication of epidemics and disease, and improvements in communication, such as this blog etc. Modernity covers a wide spectrum.