I often find it helpful to have a Bible Atlas near me when I’m reading through large chunks of the Bible. I have been unable to find a real good online version, but here is a pretty decent offering from the Access Foundation. It is listed on Scribd as licensed under the Creative Commons non-Commercial Attribution license.
There is a new Unicode Polytonic Greek font available for all you font collectors out there. Rod Decker has the details and download instructions. His post is so complete, there is not much need for me to add to it.
The basic idea: this font supports a very wide range of characters—Hebrew glyphs, for example–but is not as professional looking as (my still-standing recommendation) Gentium (or GentiumAlt).
If you are clueless regarding this discussion, but want to better understand fonts and right way to type in Greek, start with this post by yours truly.
Everyone who’s anyone is familiar with Facebook, and most people probably know about other social networks like LinkedIn and Twitter. Well if your in the academy you can add yet another social network to your list: Academia.edu.
Similar to LinkedIn, Academia.edu allows users to establish networks of contacts specializing in their field. You can fill in your credentials, upload papers, add information about the rest of your department (which might be problematic…), and a whole host of other thinks.
The site looks pretty slick, though I noticed a good deal of sluggishness and some less-than-attractive interface problems (text going off-screen, etc). There also seemed to be some privacy bugs to work through. For example, the front page of the site shows you a structural tree of a variety of Universities. It appears that you can add your name anywhere you like, provided you have an email address from that University. That could be problematic as the information included is now not only about you, but also about the University in question. How does the site verify the information entered? Or is that the responsibility of the University? That’s not so much of a problem for LinkedIn–your lies stay on your page–but for something like this fact-checking seems to be more necessary. Since I could not find answers to those questions on the site, I thought it best to refrain from taking part. Perhaps more information will be released soon, or perhaps Nerdlets readers who have taken the plunge can provide some info in the comments.
In short, while this might be promising, but I’m holding off for now.
We’ve commented on this before at Nerdlets, but now there is a definitive reason for doing so. It’s not really a surprise, but Google is about to tie all its seemingly disparate services together. Introducing the Google Operating System. Why a new operating system? Well, we use our computers differently now. We use them to access the web. Your browser, by and large, is your OS (at least according to Google), which is why Google has recently invested so much time into their entry into the browser wars: Google Chrome.
And the Google OS is actually the Google Chrome OS. According to Google, it is little more than a (Linux!) wrapper around Google’s browser. There is therefore no need to download, install, or develop applications. According to the official Google Blog post:
For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.
There are advantages to this approach. Developers can spend their time programming applications that work on any Computer, and because users do not have to install, update, tweak, or otherwise fuss with their applications, developers can pump out updates quickly and efficiently. Furthermore, provided your browser is secure, you need not worry too much about viruses and malware, or at least not yet. And, of course, since all your data is on the web, you can access your files anywhere! Finally, since Google promises that it’s vision will remain Open Source focused, you (presumably) will not need to worry about Google hijacking your data. If Google does something you don’t like, you can just switch.
There are serious disadvantages as well. Your data is on a server somewhere, and not on your computer. There is also a certain amount of loss of control.
Windows, Linux, and OSX take a hybrid approach to the OS and browser relationship, and I prefer that personally. With the mainstream operating systems your data resides primarily on your computer, but is synced to the web at your request. This is what I practice, since I don’t always have an Internet connection.
So what do you fine folks think? Is the future of computing web-based services running in your browser, or is it something more like what we’re doing now? Your comments are welcome!
Update: Some excellent analysis by Louis Gray.
The full set of images and text from Codex Sinaiticus, the oldest complete copy of the entire NT, is now online. Check out their webpage. The interface is pretty slick, allowing you to change lighting options, zoom in and out, and bookmark and print pages. It also includes a transcription and translation. Anyone interested should definitely check this out.
Update: The always intriguing ReadWriteWeb has also posted a story on this, with a little analysis and some extra technical details. Read that here.
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