http://semanticbible.com/blogos God's Word | our words | meaning, communication, & technology | following Jesus, the Word made flesh Tue, 16 Jun 2009 21:29:58 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en My colleagues at Logos have launched http://ref.ly, a URL shortening service for Bible references: see this blog post. It provides the convenience of TinyURL (turning long unreadable URLs into something much more manageable), but unlike that service also provides readable, understandable content. Once you get past the prefix, you won't ... http://semanticbible.com/blogos/2009/06/16/httprefly-for-bible-references/ I had a head-slapper this morning when i realized i'd been using custom code for a long time to do something that's in a standard Python module. Here's the sorry tale, in hopes of saving others from a similar fate. I regularly use tab-delimited files for data wrangling: it's a nice, ... http://semanticbible.com/blogos/2009/06/12/reading-tab-delimited-data-in-python-with-csv/ An anthology of interesting posts that passed through my reader this week: Dostoevsky’s 1984 Saved Him from Our Brave New World (from John Dyer at Don't Eat the Fruit): reflections from education and learning author Neil Postman on Orwell and Huxley’s contrasting views on information overload. "The amount of information we intake overshadows ... http://semanticbible.com/blogos/2009/06/07/blog-echoes-for-2009-06-06/ These days all the cool kids are tweeting, twittering and telecasting their every thought and activity using services like Twitter and Facebook. While i'm usually willing to give new technologies a try, i've been hesitant to take the plunge into Twitter. It's not like i need additional sources of distraction: ... http://semanticbible.com/blogos/2009/06/02/social-communication-in-the-enterprise/ The title of this post is a deliberate take-off from a recent post at OpenBible.info entitled "What Are the Most Popular Verses in the Bible? It Depends Whom You Ask". That post combines data from an earlier ESV analysis of search results, TopVerses.com, a BibleGateway (internal) study, and OpenBible data ... http://semanticbible.com/blogos/2009/05/22/the-most-important-verses-it-depends-what-you-mean/ A number of bibliobloggers have been helping Oxford University Press advertise their new on-line website, Oxford Biblical Studies Online, with a free-access pass good through the end of May (I learned of it through my colleague Mike Heiser's blog). Since i wasn't one of them :-) i can give an ... http://semanticbible.com/blogos/2009/04/20/a-review-of-oxford-biblical-studies-online/ I'm not in the habit of posting YouTube videos here, but this one seemed like a great illustration of an important lesson. Have a look first before reading on below, or the rest won't make sense. Susan Boyle If i'm honest,  i'd have to admit my first reactions to seeing this rather ... http://semanticbible.com/blogos/2009/04/16/perceptions/ I must not have paying attention, since i don't remember hearing about this before. But if you use Firefox and look up Bible references, you should pay attention. Step #1: You can download here a search plugin for Firefox that goes to Bible.Logos.com. Once you've installed it, you'll see something like ... http://semanticbible.com/blogos/2009/04/15/quick-bible-searches-in-firefox/ I've posted an experimental visualization of the events of Holy Week, based on the Composite Gospel Index. I'd be interested in feedback on the layout: i struggled quite a bit with getting the colored bars to show the quantitative information, but also having links. In particular, i would have liked to ... http://semanticbible.com/blogos/2009/04/10/visualizing-holy-week/ BibleTech:2009 is past now, and (just like last year) was a great opportunity both to hear new ideas about Bible and technology, but also meet and talk with many others with common interests. The few scattered thoughts i jotted down as i was live-blogging talks certainly don't do justice ... http://semanticbible.com/blogos/2009/03/30/bibletech2009-postlude/