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Exegetical Insight, Lost Edition

 Culture  19 Responses »
May 142009
 

lost

Though perhaps not as significant as yesterday’s exegetical insight, I put myself to the task of translating Jacob’s tapestry from last night’s lost (that pause button is wonderful, isn’t it!).

So here goes. First I transcribed it into miniscules:

θεοι τοσα δοιεν οσα φρεσι σησι μενοινας

So it’s two clauses:

θεοι τοσα δοιεν
οσα φρεσι σησι μενοινας

The latter clause is a relative clause, with μενοινας as the main verb. It’s a standard progressive active indicative, 3nd singular from μενοινάω, “to desire eagerly, be bent on a thing” according to Middle Liddell. The adjective σησι is just a possessive, with φρεσι as its head noun. So the phrase is something like “whatever/as much as you desire for your heart.”

Now to the main clause. δοιεν took me awhile because it’s an optative (not used to those in the NT). But the root δο is your clue, and it’s listed in Great Scott: Aor. act opt. 3rd plural from διδωμι. I think τοσα is nueter plural, the antecedent of οσα.

So here is my translation

May the gods give [to you] as many things as you desire for you heart.

Or more idiomatically (removing the repetitive relative pronoun and treating the dative of advantage as idiomatic):

May the gods give to you all your heart’s desire.

Or you could just search on the transliteration in the Perseus Project (I assumed it was a quote from something). It’s from Homer, Od. 6.180. Here.

Update: The bottom line, by the way, is the following

θεοι δε τοι ολβια δοιεν

This one is much easier. ὄλβιος, α, ον, used substantively here, means “blessing,” or “riches”. This line is actually listed in Middle Liddell as an example, and is also from the Odyssey. So the translation:

And may the gods give you riches/blessing.

Academic Earth Helps You Educate, or Get an Education

 Culture, Webapps and Websites  1 Response »
Mar 242009
 

Academic Earth LogoThink Hulu, but for nerds. TechCrunch has the scoop:

Ludlow launched Academic Earth with the goal of building a user-friendly platform for educational video that would let anyone be able to freely access instruction from the scholars and guest lecturers at the leading academic universities. The site offers 60 full courses and 2,395 total lectures (almost 1300 hours of video) from Yale, MIT, Harvard, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and Princeton that can be browsed by subject, university, or instructor through a user-friendly interface. Additionally, editors have compiled lectures from different speakers into Playlists such as “Understanding the Financial Crisis” and “First Day Of Freshman Year.”

And here is a description from their web site:

As more and more high quality educational content becomes available online for free, we ask ourselves, what are the real barriers to achieving a world class education? At Academic Earth, we are working to identify these barriers and find innovative ways to use technology to increase the ease of learning.

We are building a user-friendly educational ecosystem that will give internet users around the world the ability to easily find, interact with, and learn from full video courses and lectures from the world’s leading scholars. Our goal is to bring the best content together in one place and create an environment that in which that content is remarkably easy to use and in which user contributions make existing content increasingly valuable.

That’s right, lots of lectures to listen to! Every nerdlings dream! The selection is somewhat limited at this point (merely an aggregate of what is already out-there on the web), and there does not appear to be a way for smaller academic organizations to easily participate, but this shows great promise, and in the future could be a great way to “get the word out” about great teachers.

In the mean time, why not learn more about Ancient Greece, the Pluto Problem, or measuring space and time.

Saving Money with Open Source Software

 Computing, Culture, Software  No Responses »
Feb 242009
 

The times, they are a changing. One interesting, and in my opinion welcome, change is a new push by businesses and institutions to move to Open Source Software. Aside from the fact that most open source software is free, there are a whole host of other advantages worth considering. Two that stand out: (1) interpolability and (2) security. These are things every organization needs—you want people you like to be able to see and use the information you provide and you want people you don’t like to, well, not.

Apparently Obama is considering moving government-run technology to a more open model. Obama asked Sun’s chairman Scott McNealy, an open source advocate, to write a white-paper on the benifits. McNealy’s (admittedly biased) take:

It’s intuitively obvious open source is more cost effective and productive than proprietary software….The government ought to mandate open-source products based on open-source reference implementations to improve security, get higher-quality software, lower costs, higher reliability–all the benefits that come with open software.

Read the whole story here.

In these tough times it will benefit many homes, churches, and non-profit institutions to look into free Open Source software as an alternative to high-priced proprietary solutions. Even just switching from MS Office to openoffice.org could take a significant chuck out of your fixed-costs! Or consider the Gimp instead of Adobe Photoshop, or Zotero instead of EndNote, and Thunderbird or Gmail instead of Outlook.

Wear Your Network on Your Sleeve

 Strangelets  No Responses »
Feb 122009
 
wifi tshirt

In today’s troubled times, it’s a wonder that so many strange ideas can survive. Today’s Strangelet: a T-shirt that notifies you of adjacent Wi-Fi networks. From DigitalInspiration:

The wi-fi shirt, made of pure cotton, can detect wireless networks in your vicinity and displays the signal strength as animated glowing bars as shown in the picture.

It requires three AAA batteries, so this shirt is not for jogging.

Want proof? Doubt the usefulness of such a Tee Shirt? Watch the video!


Nicole Lapin Shows Off Her Wifi T-Shirt – Click here for another funny movie.

New Old Game for the iPhone

 Strangelets  No Responses »
Feb 112009
 
Updated version of Oregon Trail coming to the iPhoneIt’s been awhile since the last Strangelet, the Nerdlets.org repository of all wacky, weird, or unexpected news. But today marks a strange blast from the past. Those familiar terms like “CGA” and “Cobal” will be glad to learn that their nostalga for outdated games will soon be satisfied, curtosy of the iPhone.

That’s right: the Oregon Trail, the ultimate in ambiguously educational gaming will soon be available for the iPhone. Now you can get sick with Malaria in the comfort of the passenger seat of your minivan.

Real Time Twitter Chatter and its Implications

 Christian Living, Christianity, Computing, Culture, Webapps and Websites  No Responses »
Feb 072009
 

A variety of applications (like TweetDeck) can monitor twitter chatter based on keywords and other filters. Imagine if you were monitoring this data during a certain important time period. You could put your finger on exactly what people were interested in at a certain place and time, and the difference between interests at different places.

The NYT has done just that with SuperBowl related tweets, organized along a time-line punctuated by various markers such as TD and FG.

Twitter Chatter

The implications are pretty staggering. Take advertising as a simple and obvious example. Advertisers could set up a Twitter filter using words tailored for their ad. The data provided could tell them what areas of the country responded most favorably (or at least most often), when, and possibly even why. Notice, for example, that at a particular point in the game, when the Steelers have the lead, Arizona is all a-twitter about the Cardinals, and presumably couldn’t care less about the Hulu commercial. By contrast, that’s the dominant topic of conversation in the NE.

Any thoughts on how to harness this kind of information for the church? There is a Sunday morning #rollcall hash-tag that could make this an interesting topic of conversation.

Old Institutions, New Media

 Culture  2 Responses »
Jan 232009
 

Several stories have caught my intention of late. We all know, of course, that the proliferation of computers, and especially the Internet, has changed the way we communicate, shop, talk, think, and research. What’s interesting to me is the trickle-up trends that have been occurring more recently. Old and stalwart institutions are often the slowest to change and embrace new technology, and often for good reasons, but two stories indicate that those days are over.

The first involves the Pope. More particularly, the Pope’s new You Tube channel.

The second is more complicated (and therefore interesting) due to security issues. The Obama administration is changing the way the government uses technology. There are quite a few indicators here.

  1. First, Obama will be getting his Blackberry, despite initial security concerns.
  2. The official site of the White House has received a significant upgrade, and a good web designer has apparently taken the lead on this one. Finally, pictures of people (one in particular, of course). That’s a pretty firm rule in web development—include pictures of faces. Many churches could benefit from this one—people care more about your people than your building! Of course my site breaks that rule…
  3. news.USA.gov now has an RSS feed. I’m a big believer in RSS as it helps all of us keep updated without having to constantly visit individual web sites. (If you need a good RSS reader, consider Google Reader).
  4. Apparently many in Obama’s administration are upset about the suspicious lack of Apple products at the White House.
  5. Most importantly as far as I’m concerned, Obama is looking into Open Source software as a possibility for government agencies.

All in all, an interesting trend!

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