- I decided to freshen up the look of my eeePC 900HD (running Ubuntu Netbook Remix):
- I really like Linux Mint. You should check it out, and possibly install it on your computer.
- Star Trek: The Next Generation was the best television series of all time.
- The Chinese word for “crisis” is composed of elements that signify “cliche” and “etymological fallacy.”
- Eric Gagne is suiting up as a Dodger for spring training. Good luck to him, I’d love to see him back on the team.
- I decided to finally and permanently retire my Apple Dual 1.0 GHz G4 Powermac (mirrored drive door). It served faithfully running Gentoo Linux for a long time, but it was time to move on.
Odds and ends
March 7th, 2010
Overseas assassinations: Americans now welcome
March 3rd, 2010Apparently the US “intelligence” community will kill American citizens overseas in some circumstances:
Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair acknowledged Wednesday that government agencies may kill U.S. citizens abroad who are involved in terrorist activities if they are “taking action that threatens Americans.”
Blair told members of the House intelligence committee that he was speaking publicly about the issue to reassure Americans that intelligence agencies and the Department of Defense “follow a set of defined policy and legal procedures that are very carefully observed” in the use of lethal force against U.S. citizens.
Wow.
What I learned in my own class
February 26th, 2010A few weeks ago I wrapped up the adult education class I had been leading at my church. It was a whirlwind tour of “how we got the Bible,” including overviews of each testament, and the issues of canon, transmission, and translation. Overall it was a very fun and rewarding experience for me. This was my first opportunity to lead a class like this, and I’d like to do it again.
As a matter of course, I learned a thing or two as well, so here are some of my reflections on the experience:
I like to talk too much. I believe the class participants were genuinely interested in what I had to say (even though the late hour led to some droopy eyelids). Still, I basically filled almost every minute of the class with me talking. I was able to answer a fair number of questions during each class, so that was good. My weekly plan was to leave some time for generally discussion at the end of each class, but unfortunately that never happened. I need to learn to trim up my material to make room for discussion.
“I don’t know” is a good thing. I was impressed by the breadth and quality of the questions the participants asked. In some cases, I was simply not qualified to answer, since the topic was outside of my grasp. But in this context (church adult education) I am not really a pedagogue, so not having the answer is not bad. Also, in some cases my ignorance fostered discussion within the group, because someone else did have knowledge of a particular topic. A great example of this came when biblical archaeology and geography came up, and some people in our class had actually visited Ephesus.
I’m not solely responsible for content. In a number of instances, my fellow participants were able to supply books, articles, charts, maps, and even comics to enlighten our class. I enjoyed this very much.
If I have another opportunity to lead such a class, I’ll definitely utilize what I’ve learned so far to make for a better experience for everyone.
The benefits of free data
February 24th, 2010Efraim Feinstein’s post “An Economic Argument for Free Primary Data” is definitely worth the read. He argues that freely licensed data best serves a community’s needs because it reduces duplication of effort and therefore conserves resources. It is certainly true that many works have been digitized into proprietary formats many different times. This is similar to my argument about the practical problem of Christianity and Copyright: that copy restrictions make data less useful in the digital age.
A discussion of this post on the Open Scriptures mailing list generated an interesting exchange questioning the applicability of “do not muzzle the ox” to copyright royalties. I’ve written on that issue in brief before, but I may flesh out my views on that in a longer post soon.
Derived classes: not so fast
February 23rd, 2010For the Open Scriptures API I was trying to find an elegant way to store parsing information in a language-agnostic way in a Django model. To achieve that end, I chose to use derived classes. My thought was that we could use a generic class (TokenParsing) as an abstraction layer through which the language-specific parsing models could be connected to our metadata class (TokenMeta). Those parsings could then be retrieved using this bit of magic:
TokenParsing.objects.get(tokenmeta = self)
I thought that this would return a list of all the objects subclassed TokenParsing which linked to the metadata object. However, when subclassed objects are created in Python and stored in Django, it actually creates two instances, one of the base class, and one of the derived class. So this function returns only the base class objects, which have no useful information in them. In other words, the derived, language-specific parsing class (e.g. TokenParsing_grc) can have a link to the TokenMeta object, but there is no way to traverse that link backwards from the TokenMeta object. Without that, the API would not be able to query metadata properly.
I poked around at other possible methods for achieving this (e.g. abstract base classes), but none of them would achieve my goal. So I have decided to revert to the original method.
But as it turns out, that is not a bad thing. In my quest to find a way to express parsings in a language-agnostic way, I overlooked one glaring problem: a language-agnostic solution would be useless. This came home when I was searching for a solution to this problem:
Why would this be useful? If you don’t know what class you want, you also won’t know which methods to call or which attributes can be inspected.
Of course! In order to make use of the real parsings (their methods, attributes, etc.), the API code would have to know the specifics of the models. “Language-agnostic” models would be useless. Since the API already has to be customized to some extent for each language, there is not point in having a generic TokenParsing class to clutter things up.
Fool me once.
Morphological v. Semantic Parsing and Databases
February 22nd, 2010I proposed an initial Django model for storing Greek parsing data in the Open Scriptures mailing list and it has generated a good amount of discussion. The central question is whether we should follow traditional yet problematic morphological parsing paradigm, or whether we should seek to implement a semantic paradigm. Mike Aubrey has written some good posts on the problems with the traditional paradigm (e.g. Robertson on the middle and passive voice).
Luckily with Django we can have an arbitrary number of parsing models for any given word. So from a technical standpoint, it is not a question of which model, so long as that model can be sensibly reduced to database fields.
From a grammatical point of view, I have mixed feelings. I think that there are some real problems with the traditional system, especially in terms of its terminology and treatment of “tense” and voice. I think there is some value in purely morphological descriptions (especially insofar as they provide an objective description of the word), but that should not be the end-all of understanding a word. And I tend to agree that the introduction of a new technology paradigm (i.e. the Open Scriptures API) may be a good time to introduce new parsing paradigms.
Still, most people who have learned Greek are rooted in the traditional paradigm, so Open Scriptures should contain parsing information they can understand. Also, there are many existing datasets using the traditional paradigm which we would like to import and utilize. So I think it best for Open Scriptures to be able to store the morphological parsings (though not to the exclusion of other paradigms). It was suggested that we might be able to provide an automated mapping between different paradigms. Assuming there is a consistent correlation between the two schemes, that should not be overly difficult. If not, someone will need to generate a new database of parsings, and that will be no small task.
Update: It turns out that Django dervied classes are not the answer to this problem. I’ll elaborate later.
More good stuff on the internet
February 21st, 2010You should check these out:
- The Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts (pretty pictures of old documents, plus much more)
- Quisition (free online flashcard system)
- Eternal Kingdom Focus (some excellent Greek and Hebrew helps)
Go forth, and make use of the better parts of the internet!
Scripture and APIs
February 18th, 2010I’ve been having some correspondance on the Open Scriptures mailing list. Weston has been working on implementing database models for an API using Django. One of the most challenging aspects has been finding out how to provide structural information to the text: verses, chapters, title headings, etc. There’s also been a desire to not rely on any particular structural marker in the database. So the base unit for storing the text is what is called a Token in the project. It is comprised by one of the three atomic structures of a text – word; punctuation; whitespace. Of course, there may be cases where even the basic Token can be split, but you’ve got to start somewhere.
To provide structure, Weston has proposed a Token linkage system, where you can record a certain structure (e.g. “Verse 12″) and using the features of a relational database, connect it to the tokens which should be included in that structure. There is even a feature for non-linear token linkages, if anyone finds a use for that.
I am optimistic about the potential of this particular project. Once the API is nailed down, there will be a lot of great opportunities for “client” apps, using whatever framework they wish. Until then, the API has to be finalized and garnished with built-in methods, and the models have to be tested with real data (which requires that the data be ported to the models in the first place). At any rate, it’s a good time to be interested in the scriptures and open source software. My experience with databases is not the strongest, but I am pleased that the project is using a Python framework, since it is my best language. But it’s also fun to bring my education to bear on technical problems – sort of a perfect storm of personal interest for me.
Note: This post has been adapted and cross-posted on the Open Scriptures blog.
Chatter on women in ministry
February 15th, 2010C. Michael Patton writes to explain “Why Women Cannot Be Head Pastors“. The crux of his argument is that women lack the combative nature to sufficiently oppose false doctrine, which is an important function of church leadership. I’ve never heard this particular argument before. John of Ancient Hebrew Poetry expresses his disagreement. Food for thought.
Hexapla
February 15th, 2010Today I discovered a very interesting project: The Hexapla Institute.
The purpose of the Hexapla Institute is to publish a new critical edition of the fragments of Origen’s Hexapla, an endeavor which might be described as, “A Field for the 21st Century” to be available in a print edition and as an online database.
In other words, it’s about the coolest project I’ve ever heard of. Sadly the website seems a bit out of date, so I’m not sure how/if the project is progressing at this point.
Grammar and the machine (links)
February 1st, 2010From around the internet:
- Morphology catalog of NT Greek
- If you can read German and are interested in the grammar of Greek papyri fragments, read Grammatik der griechischen Papyri aus der Ptolemäerzeit
- Greg Boyd published an essay on the scriptural underpinnings for his Christian anarchy
- Jacques Ellul on technology (video with subtitles)
The last two are thanks to Jesus Radicals. There is of course some irony in blogging about an online video containing a critique of technology.
On the canon
January 28th, 2010In the adult education class I have been teaching we took a look at the canon last night. I feared that compared with previous topics I would be short on material, but I actually ended up going a bit long (and cutting off questions/discussion). I’ll have to get better at making time. Still, we had some good discussions about the scriptures, the Apocrypha, and some of the gospels which are covered from time to time in the media. The class was particularly amused and flabbergasted by the last sentence in the Gospel of Thomas.
He who has a precision scope, let him see
January 19th, 2010A prominent supplier of rifle sights to the US Military inscribes its products with scripture references (e.g. 2COR4:6 and JN8:12). These sights are affixed to weapons which are used in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
2009 Page Count
January 17th, 2010I log all of my book reading in a composition book. 2009 was my first complete year of this practice. I read 9,044 pages in 25 books. This excludes any books I abandoned (that number was unusually high in 2009) and any online reading (which I hazard to guess accounts for more than half of my total reading). I hope to improve upon that total for 2010. There is no shortage of stuff for me to read.
