A couple of months I posted this picture to my Flickr account:
It’s a fine photo, and I did a great job of masking off the background so you only see the floppy drive unit.
It’s also my most-frequently viewed picture there now.
Why? Do people who only used 3.5″ floppies, and for the last four years only USB drives, really not know how lousy these things were?
I was driving to the hospital yesterday listening to the local Christian radio station. Somebody (I listened, but never heard who) was explaining why his Bible was better than the one person who had called in preferred.
“The New American Standard,” he said, “is based on the Nestle Text, where the King James is based on the Textus Receptus. And the Textus Receptus is a more pristine text.”
(Pristine? I’m reminded of the Monty Python “Cheese Shop” sketch. [See here if you’ve never had the pleasure of watching it.] The proprietor says his shop, which is out of dozens of kinds of cheese, is nevertheless “the finest in the district.” The customer demands that he “explain the logic underlying that conclusion.” The shopkeeper replies, “It’s so clean!” To which the customer replies, “It’s certainly uncontaminated by cheese!” The TR may be pristine, but reality is messy.)
This “expert” went on to prove his point by citing Revelation 12:18-13:1, which may be merged in your Bible into a single verse 13:1.) The Nestle text says estathe (“he stood”) while TR says estathen (“I stood”). The difference is a single letter, like the difference between “he” and “she” in English. So either the dragon stood on the beach and watched the beast coming up out of the sea, or the author did.
1. Is this a major theological topic? Really? Does this level of difference really matter, or is this a case of hair-splitting (and probably mint-tithing) Protestant Scholasticism? How does it really matter whether the dragon stood watching or John did? (No. I take that back. Spare me. Please!)
2. The reading “I stood” is supported by the Byzantine Majority Text, Latin Vulgate, and others. The reading “He stood” is supported by P47, a 2nd century papyrus, in addition to the codices Sinaiticus and Alexandrinus.
In short, the King James reading is a fine translation of an inferior text. (Pristine though it may be.) The most popular evangelical translations all have “he/the dragon” as, of course, do the more scholarly translations like the NRSV and the NAB.
(For more about the TR read these summaries of its history, its critics, and its defenders (links within one longer article).)
I feel for the people who have no better resources to turn to than Christian talk radio. Bummer for them. And shame on the flat-earthers who continue to support the TR.
I was just in the kitchen a moment ago. I was recharging my AM/PM 44-oz tankard with Wal*Mart “Dr. Thunder” beverage (which, from the taste, is relabeled “Mr. Pibb,” a knockoff of Dr. Pepper foisted upon us by Coke).
When I was there, I noticed that the people preparing for the luncheon tomorrow had left a package of “premium napkins” open on the counter. The brand name was “Vanity Fair.”
I wondered what Bunyan would think, then I wondered how it is that “Vanity Fair” came to be a positive-sounding thing you’d like to associate with your product.
You may recall the troubles I have had in the past with elliptical trainers. And now, for the first time, I can show you that the troubles are by no means over:
There were some additional problems with this unit, but they pale beside the great honking one you see here. Think about this before you drop $170 on a Weslo 620. (Made by Icon, who make Image and Ironman brands as well.)
It isn’t that I’ve died, although I’ve been away from this site for awhile. Rather, I’ve signed up for some of these time-waster Web 2.0 social networking sites. So in addition to Flickr, which I’ve had forever — 18 months at least — now I’ve begun to use del.icio.us pretty seriously, and I’ve gotten a Backpack site and Facebook and Twitter accounts. (Why they invented tabbed browsers.) So if you’re curious what I’m up to, that’s what.
Quick impressions: Twitter is just right.
I don’t like Facebook much. It’s got that gated-community (“franchulate”) vibe, which is irritating. Also, it’s way too ambitious. Comparing it to Twitter is like comparing Yahoo! to Google circa 1998: an overdone “portal” vs. a clean and elegant search engine. Today, Google can get away with doing everything, because they’re bloody geniuses. Facebook? Eh. For them it’s 1998, and they should realize it.
Backpack, I’m not sure about. The potential is there for me to do something useful with it, but I haven’t, so far.
On the other hand, they’re social networking sites, so they have a lot (“almost everything”) in common with pyramid schemes. I don’t want to go invite all my buddies to join your site, thank you very much. I actually like the no-strings commitment free approach of blogs, myself: surf over there, read it, and be on your merry way. Bookmark it if you like it, or move along if you don’t.
I like this video clip that shows the relative size of some things we might, otherwise, think are pretty big: the Sun, Pollux, Arcturus, Rigel, Betelgeuse, My Cephei.
Vacation time, and I’m — well, never “catching up,” but let’s just say I’m doing more reading than I usually am able to do.
And I just read Greg Bear’s Darwin’s Radio, a horrifying science fiction story about a speciation event in humans. Briefly, the idea is this: mixed in among the “junk DNA” in the human genome are gene-ish blocks of DNA that either prevent or allow large-scale modifications of the genotype; occasionally some set of external conditions trigger the activation of this DNA code; with the result that a (sub-)speciation event occurs. (Picture something of the sort envisioned at the end of the last ice-age when — in this scenario — Neanderthals began to have “deformed” (i.e., cro-magnon) babies.
Continue reading
Waiting at the doctor’s office today, I finished reading John Ortberg’s God Is Closer Than You Think. Very good book, with allusions to everyone from Brother Lawrence to the man in black.
Typographically the book is too busy, with subheads and headings and little pull-out quotes in boxes. To its credit, the decisions about what to set off visually were usually the right ones: I didn’t have to underline nearly as many things here as I often do. (Having said that, I still prefer books that aren’t so cluttered-up visually.)
Less than 24 hours from release to upgrade!
Usually I don’t find out for two or three weeks, but this time Gruber mentioned it. Of course, he was referencing this article about how the WP people took a month to issue a fix for a security problem.
I have been preaching the Gospel text from the revised common lectionary every week so far during year C. That’s all well and good, you say, and, yes, the exegesis has helped my Greek reading skills inordinately.
But! I was just translating Psalm 121 from the ‘brew for an upcoming funeral and whoa! I’ve forgotten all of the 11 Hebrew roots I actually used to know. I knew I was in trouble when I couldn’t remember what SH-M-R meant (“keep”, “observe”, “guard”). Yikes.
(Also, the audioscriptures web site appears to have de-emphasized Hebrew. So to hear someone with a clue read it, I had to go here instead.)