The Library Basement

In preparing for childbirth, I've found that our American culture is deficient when it comes to pregnancy and infant care. This was perfectly illustrated when our breastfeeding class leader asked a group of 22 young parents-to-be, "how many have ever observed breast-feeding close-up?"

Nobody had.

That is of course unfortunate, because when it comes to breastfeeding and many other aspects of raising kids, direct observation and experience are the best ways to learn. However, our cultural structures prevent us in many ways from obtaining this experience before we have our own children. In this example, the taboo over breastfeeding (in public, even in front of one's family) keeps us from getting such experience. As another example, very few women know what childbirth is like before they themselves experience it, because childbirth is sequestered in a hospital. So, we learn in community classes and from books.

I've also noticed that we seem to have a baffling ignorance of our own human nature. This is illustrated by the fact that breast milk is regarded as a "miracle drug," when it is of course quite the opposite: a completely natural part of human physiology. I'm not sure why we should be surprised by the fact that it is best for infants, but somehow we are. Perhaps it is our industrial nature. The knowledge of the power of breast milk, or "skin-to-skin" contact, or any of these others strike me like Pollan's "In Defense of Food" - common sense re-branded as insider knowledge and then catapulted to the top of the New York Times Bestseller list.

For whatever reason, our culture has lost a lot of its acquired wisdom on pregnancy, childbirth, and parenting. I'm not sure what causes this, but I am pretty sure that it is not good, and it is a trend which we ought to work at reversing.

Yesterday I noticed a pilots' organization magazine belonging to my brother-in-law, and it lit a fuse in my brain. I should be a member of a "trade" association for my field.

So I signed up for the Society of Biblical Literature. It is obviously a pertinent choice for my studies of the Bible. The main benefit for me is access to their journal JBL. However, it will also be helpful to be a bit more "plugged-in" to the field than I have been. I signed up for the cheaper associate membership, since I don't expect to be submitting papers in the next year. Hopefully it is worth the money.

We had a nice vacation last week, and I'm back at work this week. Counting down the days until presumptive delivery. :-)

I had thought I had settled comfortably into the Debian Linux ecosystem, but I was struck by a strange urge the other day.

So I installed Gentoo.

On my eeePC 900 HD.

I'm not sure what possessed me to install a source-based distro on a netbook with a Celeron M processor. Yeah, I've been compiling a lot.

But I've also been having a lot of fun. Gentoo was my first distro, so it's like coming home.

I first encountered Colson Whitehead's literature at Portland's Wordstock expo. I bought The Intuitionist and thoroughly enjoyed reading it. Since then I've also immensely enjoyed John Henry Days and Apex Hides the Hurt. Whitehead truly is among the best of American novelists writing today.

Therefore, when I heard of a new Whitehead novel, Sag Harbor, I instantly reserved it at the library. However, for some insane reason which defies memory, I did not read it when I was finally able to check it out. Truly a mistake. But tonight I've rectified that mistake. I'm not sure why, but a whim took a hold of me as we were at a routine pickup at our local library. I checked under "W" and against all odds, Whitehead's new novel was there. So now I will partake, and enjoy, and repent.

For the past few months I've been hosting a "sandbox" server for the Open Scriptures API. The purpose is to provide a proof-of-concept for the code, and to ensure that we know how to make the code work in production. It has been an adventure, since the code and its requirements have changed many times.

Tonight I reached an important milestone with the API server: I am now serving the API with a the full Tischendorf Greek New Testament text, using mysql as the database. Previously I had been only hosting the book of Jude, and only using sqlite for the database. So now I have a fully-functioning instance, with a full dataset, in a real production environment.

As an exmaple, you can visit here: http://api.ossandbox.info/texts/passage/Bible.Tischendorf:2Thess.1.1-2Thess.1.3 (that's 2 Thessalonians 1:1-3 in an XML format).

If you are interested in the project and would like to know more, check out our mailing list, and visit us on IRC in #openscriptures on irc.freenode.net.

(For the technically inclined, Open Scriptures is group of Django apps, bundled in Pinax. It is being served by Apache and mod_wsgi. Thanks especially to Patrick Altman and Brian Rosner for helping me get things up and running.)

If I were able to submit a revision of the creed, I would change this:

We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins

Into this:

We acknowledge one baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins

I think that would bring this sentance more into line with the biblical witness. However, the last time something was added to the Nicene creed, there was a schism, so I won't push this too hard.

I just finished Taylor Branch's The Clinton Tapes. President Bill Clinton and Branch collaborated on an oral history project spanning Clinton's two terms in office. Clinton kept the tape recordings, but Branch made notes and tape recorded his own recollections after each session. The result is this book, which provides an interesting insight into the internals of a presidency.

If you are in to presidential history, I highly recommend it.

In advance of the planned first-ever Open Scriptures Meetup (OSMU) in September (to coincide with Djangocon), a few of us will be meeting at OSCON to take in the State of the Onion Address and then get some food. We don't want to pre-empt the primacy of the actual first-ever OSMU, so we're going to call this one the Pre-OSMU OSMU. It's a test run.

In a recent post to the Open Scriptures mailing list, it was suggested that we use md5 (or another cryptographic hash) to generate unique IDs for each token (a "token" is the fundamental unit of text (most often a word) in our API database models). Today we discussed the implementation of this on IRC, and it was fairly stimulating.

First of all, md5 is broken and deprecated, due to possible collisions (two different pieces of data can result in the same hash). Since we will be dealing with millions of tokens, we decided not to test our luck, unlikely though a problem may be. SHA-256 has no known collisions, so we decided it was best to use that algorithm.

SHA-256 is implemented in Python's standard library hashlib, so that is good. For exapmle:

>>> import hashlib
>>> hashlib.sha256("Hello world!").digest()
'\xc0S^K\xe2\xb7\x9f\xfd\x93)\x13\x05Ck\xf8\x891NJ?\xae\xc0^\xcf\xfc\xbb}\xf3\x1a\xd9\xe5\x1a'

Needless to say, such a digest would not be very good for use in a RESTful URI scheme. So, hashlib also offers a hexadecimal option:

>>> hashlib.sha256("Hello world!").hexdigest()
'c0535e4be2b79ffd93291305436bf889314e4a3faec05ecffcbb7df31ad9e51a'

That is still not the best, since that makes for a very long string. So, we have the option of using base64 encoding:

>>> import base64
>>> base64.b64encode(hashlib.sha256("Hello world!").digest())
'wFNeS+K3n/2TKRMFQ2v4iTFOSj+uwF7P/Lt98xrZ5Ro='

That is shorter, but it includes the "/" character, which is a no-no for URI design. Luckily base64 includes a function for this exact purpose: Read more »