Sorry, due to an inauspicious conjunction of events comments were not working yesterday.
Event one: moving to Blogger Beta (a mistake, I thought from the way they were trying to encourage me to move that it was out of Beta :(
Event two: a problem at my host - somehow the disk was full, and so not accepting new material, not even comments to the blog!
Event two is fixed, and the new blogger seems to work OK (Barbara has her email back also I hope! ¶ 7:18 AM
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Video formats
Well, serves me right for being impatient ;-) Mea Culpa, I did put up links to the Who is God? video before I made other formats available.In the past I've used Windows Media (15MB for the HQ version) and Real Media (under 10MB!) both of which give nice small files. However, it seems they are a problem for anyone using Mac or Linux. So, how about Apple's MOV format, looks nice, but at 52MB it's a bit on the hefty side (perhaps its the CODEC, but trying to use Apple's proprietary Sorenson CODEC was going to take more than 3 hours to convert, maybe I'll set it to work over lunch, could give me an excuse for a long lunch break!?); or the equally proprietary Flash format (34MB for the SWF)...
[NB I tried the free Riva FLV encoder, but could not get past the opening screen which did not display correctly, despite downloading from two different sites...]
Seriously, any comments on which formats "work" for you, and the quality/size issue would be great, and does anyone know a non-proprietary way to do this, that users can actually watch?
OK, this should please the iPod fans, here's the mp4 iPod format (just 31MB, and not too bad quality ;-)
Labels: video
¶ 12:04 PM
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Sadly not. I use quick time, which is what my mac loves to export to, then use google video to host and playback. Their flash player is OK on most computers.
There is some quality loss, but less than Youtube. I like the share-ability of both sites, but I guess you have to ask if you want people to be able to embed into their sites.
By 
craig (mars-hill), at
December 20, 2006 12:17 PM
Tim, the video played in Quicktime on the iBook. The .m4v extension means that OS X really wants to copy it into iTunes to play it. Maybe change the extention to .mp4.
(BTW - the G3 based iBook struggled a few times with the video)
I'll pop it onto the iPod later and have a look at it there.
Why don't you start get all the biblioblogger people to compile a list of what they use to publish video online?
By 
Stephen G, at
December 20, 2006 5:43 PM
Hmm. If Craig's having problems playing it in Quicktime then it may be because you used the H.264 encoding which isn't supported by any version of Quicktime apart from version 7 on.
By Stephen G, at
December 20, 2006 5:47 PM
Can I get this right? Every version above, not only the PC native ones :
Windows Media (15MB for the HQ version)
Flash format (34MB so biggish)
Real Media (under 10MB!) though admittedly this needs a player download
But also:
MOV format, (looks nice, but 52MB big)
m4v iPod format (31MB but otherwise good)
But none of them is reliable on a Mac, unless I either fiddle with the filename - which BTW I've done now guys (and it STILL plays OK on a PC), or use ONLY Apple's proprietary encoding, and not the one that gives smaller files for Quicktime on PC. ...and they still claim the Mac as a user-friendly OS!
I think you've nearly succeeded in making me a Microsoft fan ;-)
By Tim, at
December 21, 2006 3:09 PM
Shouting Stones - seminar for churches
I've been giving myself some short breaks from the serious business of preparing next year's new courses (for the first semester 50% of three new ones) by working on a new short "video" introducing the seminar I offer for churches Shouting Stones: geography and archaeology reveal the Missionary God of the Old Testament. The full thing started life as a weekend camp, was cut down to just a few 50min academic hour sessions, and now I've made part one into a quarter of an hour's video called "Who is God?" (there is also a low bandwidth version).I wonder if I've used too many presentation slides and too few pictures, and also whether I should have adapted the material more as well as compressing or summarising... Do let me know what you think, I'm not really thin skinned! ¶ 5:24 PM
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(Insert imprecatory psalm about Windows Media codecs here)
Wouldn't play on the Mac (OS X 10.3.9) with Microsoft Media Player 9, nor with Quicktime with Flip4Mac installed, nor with the latest version of VLC.
Got sound (sort of), but lots of complaints about video.
Perhaps a different format would be more "open".
More info on Flip2Mac:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/player/wmcomponents.mspx
By Stephen G, at
December 18, 2006 8:12 PM
I'm with Stephen about the codecs. A superb tool is "Riva FLV Encoder" It will convert almost anything to flash (and almost anything to almost anything) another option would be the open source ffmpeg but you need a fairly high powered linux machine to make that work.
As for the video (which being a windows user I could watch) it is a very good (Web 1.0) presentation. I confess I did drift slightly once or twice. I like to put that kid of thing on while I do other stuff. I suspect that it depends upon your intended market. It would definitely make a good introduction to discussion in a conventional house group.
I have been thinking about how we best re imagine Christian learning in our current (western?) context. I think this kind of thing is a great idea if we could intertwine it with (web 2.0) interactivity.
Thanks for sharing it with is. (also thanks for the pod bible bookmarks, I must talk to you about that some time).
By Graham Doel, at
December 19, 2006 1:45 AM
Really liked the video. Anytime we can glorify the name! dt www.davetilma.com
By dt, at
January 14, 2007 2:46 PM
Thanks, Dave!
By Tim, at
January 15, 2007 6:57 AM
Same for me; no video, but some sound. I'd suggest using Flip4Mac: http://www.flip4mac.com/
Studio version. Very inexpensive and guarantees that everyone will be able to view the content. F4M is the most used piece of software on my Mac.
Looking forward to seeing the video.
By Antonio, at
January 24, 2007 5:52 AM
Nice one people, the consensus is none of the multiple formats in the post above works for every Mac user. So I need to buy Flip-4-Mac then the video will play on Macs. Trouble is I'd have to buy a Mac first to run Flipping-4-M. And people say MS uses too many proprietary formats ;-)
By Tim, at
January 24, 2007 9:14 AM
The new magical imperial toolkit: part 2
In part one I summarised the proposals of Freedman and his colleagues, which present a count of what they called "prose particles":- the sign of definiteness (or "article") ה
- the direct object marker את
- and the relative אשׁר
Amos 1:1 was prose, with a count of 8.7%, while 1:2 was poetry with a neat 0.0% (somehow in during the 1980s the article ה had ceased to count, or the scores would have been 16% and 15% respectively (or both "clearly prose") on the old scheme!
In this part I'll present my first attempt to test their hypothesis.
Three Chapters of Ezekiel as a Test Case
In 1987 Freedman had proposed:We can test the system in a provisional way against the book of Ezekiel... First, it is clear from every point of view that much of Ezekiel is straight prose. There are fourteen chapters over 15%, while another eighteen are in the range between 10% and 15%. The remaining sixteen chapters are under 10%; of these, twelve are in the range 5% and 10%, while four are under 5% (chs. 19, 21, 27, 28).1So, let's look at these chapters.
Ezekiel 21 is treated the same by both BHS and BHK with 109 words printed as poetry and 420 as prose. The 109 words of poetry with 6 of the particles have a score of 5.5%, which is only very slightly higher than Freedman's 5% threshhold, however the 420 words of prose have 19 particles and so score only 4.5% or more poetic than the poetry!2
Ezekiel 27 is printed somewhat differently by BHS and BHK. BHS has 181 words in prose and 226 as poetry, while BHK had 145 prose and 262 poetry. The scores are:
BHS prose 2.2% poetry 4.0%
BHK prose 1.4% poetry 4.2%
Either the editors of neither BHS nor BHK can accurately distinguish prose and poetry or the method is flawed. Every test so far has given the reverse of the predicted results!
At first sight Ezekiel 28 gives some comfort to Freedman's proposed toolkit. BHS prints it all as prose, but BHK gives 122 words as prose with a score of 6.6% and 230 as poetry with only 2.2%. The sort of result Freedman et al. would predict.
However, things get more complex and more interesting when we look at the location of the "prose particles". All of the particles in the prose sections occur in just three verses, vv.24-26. Many commentators see these three verses (or perhaps only two of them) as later additions to the text. If even the two verses are left out of the calculation the score drops to 1.3% (it would be 0% of course if all three were omitted).
These particles are commonly seen as typical of later biblical Hebrew. (Kaiser in his introduction to exegesis regards this as a fact not needing footnote support, Rooker and others include them in their characteristics of Late Biblical Hebrew.)
So, my provisional evaluation of the new magical imperial toolkit is that it does not function as neatly or well as advertised. But:
- there is considerable evidence (not least from Andersen and Forbes3) that these particles are more common in biblical Hebrew prose than poetry
- there is some evidence (in a notoriously difficult area) that they may be more frequent in later texts.
1. D.N. Freedman, "Another look at Biblical Hebrew Poetry" in E.R. Follis (ed.) Directions in Biblical Poetry (JSOTS 40; Sheffield, 1987), p.17. [return]
2. My counts differ from Andersen and Forbes only by one word (or less than 0.2%), therefore the differences in scores are negligible. [return]
3. F.I. Andersen & A.D. Forbes, "'Prose Particle Counts of the Hebrew bible", in C.L. Meyers & M. O'Connor (eds.) The Word of the Lord Shall Go Forth: Essays in Honor of David Noel Freedman in Celebration of his Sixtieth Birthday(Philadelphia, 1983), pp.165‑183.[return] ¶ 12:38 PM
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If I understand you correctly, you conclude that high counts of the two or three function words singled out by Freedman, Andersen, and Forbes distinguish prose from poetry at the highest level of abstraction only (all the prose vs. all the poetry of the Bible), but not on a pericope per pericope or verse by verse basis.
That rings true to me. For example, the relative pronoun, the object marker, and the article occur often in Zephaniah 1, but the contents of the chapter are marked by a high density of semantic, syntactic, and morphological parallelisms, and scan as verse just fine, as a look at the JPS Hebrew-English Tanakh will show.
What distinguishes poetry from prose in ancient Hebrew is that the former is characterized by a system of versification that the latter lacks. Students of literature have long recognized this to be a language universal. As Albert Willem de Groot put it, “Continuous correspondence of successive segments, called ‘lines,’ is the only constant feature which distinguishes verse from prose.”
By John, at
December 23, 2006 9:40 PM
Pretty much I agree, though I'd say that if the frequency of these particles changes dramatically it is usually a clue that something is "going on". Sometimes this is a change of genre between poetry and prose, sometimes it may be a change of writer (or editor?), BUT these changes at the level of individual pericopes are not reliable as a measure.
By Tim, at
December 24, 2006 7:35 AM
One Laptop Per Child at last a human computer interface?
Pentagram has some first ideas about how the user interface of the laptop in "One Laptop Per Child" will work.
Four views:
- Home: where you "set preferences like color"
- Friends: where you "chat with their friends"
- Neighborhood: where you "locate other users and gather around an activity"
- Activity: where you "focus on a project at hand"
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In his post "LazyWeb: OS Printers" AKMA proposes the brilliant and simple idea of a good enough repairable reusable printer:
isn’t there an opportunity for a company to manufacture printers specifically designed to be reparable, reuseable, and refillable — precisely the attributes that the present instant-obsolescence printer industry resists? Can’t someone on the LazyWeb develop a standard chipset and reservoir design that do a good-enough job for most family and small-office purposes, that can be repaired and refilled rather than replaced?Like him, rather than replace our current elderly and somewhat temperamental ink-jet with a newer but doubtless equally disposable printer, I'd love to buy a printer that I expect to be running in ten years or twenty, we can do it for cars, so why not Lazers?
Labels: pc
¶ 11:11 AM
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My laser printer drum needs replacing but the part costs another $100 more than buying a new laser printer containing exactly the same drum. Do I treat the new printer as 'packaging'?
By Stephen G, at
December 14, 2006 12:47 PM
Exactly, with an "Open Source" printer (i.e. one whose specs and design were standard and public property) the drum must cost less than the printer, because then we'd have a free(r) market...
Hey, this is a horrible rightwing conspiracy...
By Tim, at
December 14, 2006 2:49 PM
Fame/Fashion ::
Barney's (apparently an upmarket NY store) is offering the epitome of fashion/design gifts, for just $12 you get aLimited edition soup cans with authentic reproductions of Andy Warhol designed labels. Printed on special quality paper and with Andy's signature (reproduced).Sooo nice! I don't know where to start. A reproduction of an artwork, whose form mimics the original the artwork referenced. And it actually: "Contains Campbell's condensed tomato soup."
HT to Kottke's remaindered links
Labels: art
¶ 7:06 AM
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The new magical imperial toolkit: percentages, prose and poetry ::
I've decided, now I am (at last) home from SBL (Washington, DC, USA), family (Exmouth, Devon, UK) and the Aotearoa New Zealand Association for Biblical Studies (Christchurch, South Island, NZ), I need a bit of a rest! But I also need to blog, because as I discovered in the middle of the year an empty blog breeds unsubscribers. So, over the next week or so I will gradually post the guts of my paper from ANZABS.Biblical Hebrew Poetry
Biblical Hebrew (BH) poetry is both beautiful and problematic.The beauty rings echoing in the ears even of those who read it in translation, yet the problems are not minor.
Firstly, the very existence of BH poetry is denied. Scholars have argued (quite cogently and somewhat convincingly) that there is simply no distinction between prose and poetry in the Bible. And, if there is no distinction, then there is no poetry, since the concepts "poetry" and "prose" are each helpfully defined as being "not the other"!
Secondly, and if we admit that BH poetry does in fact exist: Which texts are which? How do we know? This problem is specially poignant for a student of biblical prophecy, no two editors seem ever able to entirely agree on which parts of a prophetic book are which.
So, thirty years ago (a couple of weeks back on the occasion of the Imperial annual festival of biblical studies, SBL) David Noel Freedman made his presidential address. In those days high profile SBL presidents like (most prominently) Muillenberg, in 1968, had used this opportunity to launch new approaches to biblical studies.
In his paper "Pottery, Poetry and Prophecy" Freedman claimed:
We have devised recently a mechanical test to separate poetry from prose in the Bible, and preliminary tests show that it will work efficiently in most cases.How deliciously "modern" this quote now sounds, with its talk of a "mechanical test" - actually electronically mediated - and working "efficiently". With its stress on numbers and testing this is biblical studies fit for a world of managers!
In his paper Freedman leaves the nature of the test undefined, though earlier that year Radday and Shore had published results of counting the article (as a percentage of its potential carriers "nouns, adjectives, and numerals... (and) certain toponyms"). They showed that this percentage (of articles to potential articles) was significantly different between halves of books that scholarship often sees as divided (by genre or origin),3 and also between prose books and poetic books.
In 1983 Andersen and Forbes published counts for every chapter in the Bible of what were becoming known as "prose particles":
- the sign of definiteness (or "article") ה
- the direct object marker את
- and the relative אשׁר
By 1987 Freedman was quantifying this (in "Another Look at Biblical Hebrew Poetry"):
- less than 5% of these particles the text is poetry
- more than 15% and it is clearly prose
- text with scores in the 5-15% range are either mixed or perhaps elevated or prophetic speech.
Coming soon: Part 2 - the "boy" examines the imperial toolbox...
1. D.N. Freedman, "Pottery, Poetry and Prophecy", JBL 96 (1977), 5-26. [return]
2. Y.T. Radday & H. Shore, "The Definite Article: A Type and/or Author Specifying Discriminant in the Hebrew Bible", Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing Bulletin 4 (1976), pp.23 31. [return]
3. Except the book of Zechariah, which did not show a significant difference (see also below). [return]
4. D.N. Freedman, "Another Look at Biblical Hebrew Poetry", in E.R. Follis (ed.), Directions in Biblical Hebrew Poetry (JSOTS 40; Sheffield, 1987), p.16. [return] ¶ 12:39 PM
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Thank you for touching on a subject matter that interests me very much.
Freedman indeed claims too much for "prose particle" counts. But he asks a helpful question, which I will reformulate as follows.
It is impossible to deny that texts like Gen 49, Exod 15, and Deut 32 differ from the the prose contexts in which we find them in a variety of ways: prosodic, syntactic, lexical, morphological, and so on. Research that describes the differences clearly and accurately would be most welcome.
By JohnFH, at
December 14, 2006 8:05 AM
I agree with you John! I must get the second part posted, it's just that yesterday was all meetings and this morning is too... Perhaps this afternoon... Next I'll present my critique of Freedman, then at the end move on to my conclusions.
By Tim, at
December 14, 2006 8:59 AM
When we start running computer algorithms to test for genre I think we have made things way more complicated than they are. What ancient person would sit there counting particles to determine if something is poetry? Pardee and O'Connor have followed much of this methodology and I think have missed the point.
YouTube and shameless self-promotion ::
I mentioned the Carey video clips on YouTube a while back, but Mike has asked us all to draw attention to them, and Paul has blogged about them, so here's another bit of shameless self promotion the list of video clips is here (well, it is not exactly SELF promotion, do NOT watch the one with me in, just look at the others)!Labels: video
¶ 6:00 AM
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