Kneading Bread

Just last week I got my Kindle 2 and I purchased this semester’s books for it. I have used it almost non-stop. It is a wonderful reading device that allows for a relatively transparent reading experience. It is simply you and the content contained in the text. Overall, excellent – for many books (save reference works and certain major texts) it is my new preference for reading, both books and magazine (although not newspapers).

Now, my few gripes: no easy conversion to page numbers for citation (and not their fault, but I cannot find provisional styles for citation in Turabian or MLA for the location references given in the Kindle). Either no support, or lazy presses have led to near unreadable Hebrew and Greek text (which in the books I own have been imported as images and look horrible). Some spectacular OCR or data entry issues that are particularly horrid in passages with Latin (the could be solved with a reporting feature, such as used in Logos where the text can be highlighted, fixed and reported).

With the recent announcement of Logos for the iPhone a day may soon be coming when I no longer have to bring my laptop along with me to most places! That will be a blessed day.

The folks over at Logos Bible Software have gotten the alpha version of the software for the Macintosh out the door and into the hands of their eager fans who have been waiting for years to see it released. I installed it on my mac and was greeted with repeated crashing in the gospel of John… oh well. Great Job Guys! I look forward to using this natively on my mac and am looking forward to each bug-fix and patch with quiet anticipation.

click on me to go to the
Logos for the Mac website

For those who are wondering, alpha is the stage before beta, which is generally the stage where you get kinks out… in the alpha you are still adding features! So lets be clear, if you want this to be perfect out of the gate, wait until it is shipped GM (gold master.)

If the meaning of Jesus is this different from what he was understood by his Palestinian disciples and adversaries to mean, and if those ordinary meanings need to be filtered through a hermeneutic transposition and replaced by an ethic of social revelation? Is there such a thing as a Christian ethic at all? If there be no specifically Christian ethic but only natural human ethics as held to by Christians among others, does this thoroughgoing abandon of particular substance apply to ethical truth only? Why not to all truth as well?

-John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus, 2nd ed.

You might not think that a white background on a website would be an ecological decision, but with millions of people out there browsing the web you should consider that, like rain, one drop might be small, but a billion or so can add up!

Black Google Would Save 750 Megawatt-hours a year 

Take at look at Google, for instance, who gets about 200 million queries a day. Let’s assume each query is displayed for about 10 seconds; that means Google is running for about 550,000 hours every day on some desktop. Assuming that users run Google in full screen mode, the shift to a black background will save a total of 15 (74-59) watts. Now take into account that about 25 percent of the monitors in the world are CRTs, and at 10 cents a kilowatt-hour,
that’s about $75,000/year, a goodly amount of energy and dollars for changing a few color codes.

Note: there was a picture here, but it broke my blog… who knows why.