Emily at three months has begun to communicate about things that are not immediately related to her physical needs.

The other day I was bouncing her on my knee and singing a song, she was paying attention and sort of giggling. When I finished, she began waving her arms and vocalizing, so I started singing another song, and she smiled.

Very exciting.

Posted: July 3rd, 2009 under Journal.
Comments: none

Why you can’t trust the evidence of your eyes.

Posted: June 25th, 2009 under General.
Comments: none

Why are we taught in Sunday school that Jesus raised Jairus’s daughter from the dead?

It has always seemed completely obvious to me that she was in a coma — because Jesus said so! You would think that being endowed with divine knowledge he would know better than the townspeople…

In an extremely unscientific search of the internets, I keep coming across sermons that say as an aside “well, she may just have been in a coma, but that doesn’t detract from the miracle, because she was as good as dead”.

Why the defensiveness? It’s not as if the NT is lacking in resurrections. Why do we in effect call Christ a liar in order to boost his supernatural powers? Why isn’t coma-girl the default interpretation?

Posted: June 23rd, 2009 under Rants.
Comments: 2

What with all this biblioblogging going around maybe I’ll do a few posts in an exegetical vein.

First off, I’ve been meaning to get into the Church Fathers, an aspect of my theological education that has been sorely neglected in favour of Arabic and statistical machine translation. So I found a more or less readable translation of I Clement — my Greek is far too rusty for a lunchtime read.

My impression: “be nice.” I like the bit about the Phoenix, though.

Posted: June 23rd, 2009 under Rants.
Comments: none

I just stumbled across the blog of Peter Kirk, who knows his stuff when it comes to Biblical languages. There’s been a bit of an uptick in the Evangelical blogosphere discussion of gendered language in Scripture and liturgy, and Mr. Kirk offers a wonderful suggestion, sure to make explode the heads of both patriarchists and prescriptivists alike:

Perhaps, if I put my tongue in my cheek a little, the best solution is to call the Holy Spirit “they”. For some this will be understood as a singular “they”. But, to those who might object to the singular “they” or insist that it carries nuances of plurality, I point out the ancient Christian tradition of the sevenfold Spirit, based on Isaiah 11:2 and repeated references in Revelation (1:4, 3:1, 4:5, 5:6) to the seven Spirits of God. So there should be no objection to using an apparently plural pronoun to refer to them.

Posted: June 22nd, 2009 under Linguistics, Rants.
Comments: none

Not that anyone will care, but I have removed Better Bibles Blog from my list of links. It has become over the last couple of years a bastion of white male conservatism, promoting a fundagelical agenda and driving out any form of real discussion.

Now that the administrators have invited a blatantly dishonest white spremacist to contribute, it’s time to say good riddance.

Update: it appears I misinterpreted the phrase “moderated status”; Peter Kirk informs me that Hobbins has not been invited to contribute.

Doesn’t materially change my opinion of BBB, which is (my opinion, that is) mostly motivated by one individual whose folksy style masks a wilful ignorance of critical thought and a rock-hard intolerance of anything outside a carefully circumscribed conservative belief system.

My opinion is overly harsh perhaps because I grew up in the same heretical sect as he, and suffered for it.

Posted: June 22nd, 2009 under Rants.
Comments: 2

After the Iranian regime slaughtered dozens and maybe hundreds of protestors today, President Obama released a statement calling on the Iranians to not be “unjust” — to pick only the bad teenage girls to shoot in the head, I guess.

Then he went out for ice cream.

We can now reveal that the President had vanilla frozen custard in a cup with hot fudge and toasted almonds.

Wow.

I have refrained from comment on the revolution-in-the-making in Iran because I would far rather pay attention to my infant daughter’s growing grasp of motor control.

But just the other day I expressed the hope that Obama’s apparent waffling on the Iran situation was aimed at not providing the regime with an excuse to suppress the protests as being instigated by the Great Satan.

But if that was the case, and he has now decided to change his approach, is “don’t be unjust” the best he can come up with? Surely there could have been some “grave concern” or “strongly-worded” diplo-speak.

But it is even more evident now than it has been that the President is simply floundering.

I predicted on his election that he would be the next Carter. Ironically, it looks like Iran will prove the character of both.

Posted: June 20th, 2009 under World.
Comments: none

Mia edzino kaj nia bebineto ekvojaĝis hodiaŭ al Kalgario por viziti la gepatrojn de Andrea.

Kompreneble mi profitos dum la tri sekvaj tagoj de la ŝanco rigardi perfortajn filmojn, kaj komputile ludi, kaj manĝi tiujn, kiujn la obejendino ne kutime ŝatas.

Estante introverto, mi ĝuas ĉiun maloftan kaj malmultan momenton de soleco.

Posted: June 9th, 2009 under Journal.
Comments: none

I have released a new version of IronMeta. It makes the syntax closer to the usual OMeta syntax.

I also fixed a bug that caused some redundant evaluation to be done. Performance is still pretty bad, though.

I will be focusing on

You can download the new version at SourceForge, or via Subversion at https://ironmeta.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/ironmeta/tags/1.2/.

IronMeta provides a programming language and application for generating pattern matchers on arbitrary streams of objects. It is an implementation of Alessandro Warth’s OMeta system for C# on .NET.

Posted: May 31st, 2009 under Computing.
Comments: none

Lileks on the horror that is suburbia:

we drove deep into the exurbs for a little dinner gathering at her piano teacher’s house, where a brilliant young kid played flamenco guitar on the porch. Home-schooled. Arranges his own stuff; wants to go into economics. As I twittered at the time: ah the culturally destitute burbs, with the sound of an expertly strummed guitar floating over the golf course behind the house. Good thing the street wasn’t a cul-de-sac, or people might have come out with pitchforks. Stop that art there! This is the suburbs! Only grey, materialistic lives are permitted here!

Posted: May 26th, 2009 under World.
Comments: 1