It’s certainly been a while since I’ve been able to update Withering Fig. “What could have possibly brought me out of my Salinger-like public coma?” you ask. Well, images of papyri, of course!

Goodacre, over at the NT Gateway, has called my attention (via his excellent blog) to some new images of papyri that Harvard is making available. Here’s is Goodacre’s post:

Harvard Papyri Online

I must say that the quality of these scans is quite good. During my 18 months on Harvard’s LDI (Library Digital Initiative) Project (via.harvard.edu), I was always pleased with the images that we were putting out. It looks like the folks in charge of this project have done superior work.

Categories: Biblical Studies · Technology · Bible Tech · New Testament

I took delivery of a new Macbook (the Blacbook) Monday. Since then, I’ve been working to get everything setup just how I like it (the thought of just copying over a Home directory sounds boring. Plus, this way I get a chance to keep things clean—as if that’s going to last).

First off, this thing is freakin’ cool—and I must say that I look smokin’ hot while sittin’ at the driver’s seat. HOWEVER…there are a few issues.

For my money, the Intel version of OS X seems to be a bit buggy. I’ve had strange things happen with signatures in Mail, Calculator has crashed, and, most disturbing of all, unicode keeps giving me issues. Because I do a lot of typing in Greek (and a little in Hebrew), unicode is absolutely imperative.

For the first several days, it was impossible to get this thing to show a final sigma (ς) in a web browser. I have several unicode fonts installed (such as Lucida Grande and Gentium). But these weren’t working. I contacted Joe Weaks over at the Macintosh Biblioblog. He ran me through a couple of ideas, but nothing seemed to work.

While all of this was going on, my little sigmas started working in other applications. I could now type them in Word and Mellel. Then they started popping up just fine in Safari. Still, Firefox and Camino (my browser of choice) were not working properly.

This morning, I woke up and logged on to Withering Fig, only to find final sigmas a-plenty being displayed by Camino.

What is going on?

I’m not going to complain, since things are working now. I’m not even going to investigate the issue further for fear of upsetting my volatile little blacbook. I am just going to go on my merry way and chalk it up to the Intel gremlins. I have clicked off the item in my OmniFocus that says “Fix Greek characters…unicode is being poopy…” — it is no longer an issue.

Anyone else had Intel gremlins?

Categories: Technology

5 Superheroes of the Bible >> Bible Study at Church Hopping

So, I just submitted my entry for ProBlogger.net’s group writing project: “Top 5.” I started browsing through other entries, and I happened upon this awesome one! Josh Rives list’ includes:

• David (aka Batman)
• Elijah (aka The Flash)
• Moses (aka Captain Planet)
• Josheb-basshebeth, Eleazar and Shammah
  (a.k.a The Fantastic Four) [although points off for only being three]
• Samson (aka Superman)

Sweeeeet…

Categories: Old Testament · Technology

Joe Weaks of the Macintosh Biblioblog notes that the makers of the ESV (English Standard Version) have used a data visualization technology (Many Eyes) to create a social networking map of new testament characters.

I don’t know much about data visualization, but it appears to be a technology that is being used more and more outside the hard sciences.

Do you think the other dots are jealous of the size of the Jesus dot?

UPDATE: Brandon Wason of Novum Testamentum Blog posted another use of Many Eyes data visualization technology. Brandon mapped out the length of New Testament books.

Categories: Technology · Bible Tech · New Testament