Author: Roger Pearse

From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I pulled up the OCR project for the Book of Asaph the physician in Finereader 11 this lunchtime.  It’s a 6th century Jewish medical text, which apparently contains interesting quotes from classical writers.

Readers may remember — I can hardly remember myself — that I was experimenting with deskewing the pages, increasing the brightness, etc, in order to improve OCR.

Pretty much the last thing that I did was to open the PDF and import it into FR11, without doing any work.  I ran the OCR anyway, just to see what the raw result would look like.

The raw result is certainly better than some of the rubbish that I have had to clean up in the past.  But it is far from simple.  I think deskewing etc would be the answer.  However there are 250 pages to do, one at a time.   It might be a gentle task to do some time.

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A camel for your thoughts, my dear

Posted on by Roger Pearse

In certain societies, in order for a marriage to take place, the groom must purchase the bride from her father, in return for a certain number of camels.  (I vaguely remember reading this somewhere, or perhaps heard it on the radio, so it must be true)

In others, the father is obliged to pay the groom to take his daughter away, again in livestock, i.e. camels.

One can only speculate as to why this is so.  Possibly the daughters in the first tribe are more attractive than those in the second. 

But the important thing is the central role played by the camel.  It is hardly important in which direction the camel is travelling, after all.

Which leads naturally to the question of why this foul-tempered, evil-smelling, vicious quadruped has become the medium of exchange necessary for the continuance of the human race in these tribes?

Possibly it explains the preference for raiding instead, in which obtaining a wife does not require the involvement of camels.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Proofing of the Latin text of Origen’s Homilies on Ezekiel 8-10 has completed, and I have been sent a revised text of these, plus some tweaks to the English. 

Tommy Heyne has kindly sent me a copy of his article on Tertullian and Medicine from Studia Patristica 50, for upload to the Tertullian Project.  I’ll do this in a day or two.  Tertullian’s works contain considerable allusions to ancient medicine, including fragments of writers like Soranus, and he refers to abortions performed by these bunglers in condemning the practice.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

This afternoon I sat down with Origen, Homilies on Ezekiel 8-10 (and Jerome’s preface), and compared our translation with the 2010 ACW one.  The object of the exercise was to locate any serious differences in understanding, and allow us to revise the translation if the ACW version suggested an improvement.  I am pleased to say that I think all the deviations so far are in our favour.  There is one obscure section where I am not convinced that we are right, but we’ll see.  I’ve passed this material over to the translator for review.  I still have homilies 11-14 to do, but I think I have done what I will do today.  It is hard work!

This evening I’ve been playing with Abbyy Finereader 11, using the PDF’s of the unpublished translation of Book of Asaph the Physician, discovered by Douglas Galbi at the US National Library of Medicine.  I don’t know a sausage about this text, I should say at once, so it’s a voyage of discovery here.  I’m not committed to OCR’ing it either!  But it’s a convenient vehicle for experimentation.

Now in the past I found that Finereader 11 wouldn’t play with my Finereader 10 projects, so I ignored it.  But starting afresh, I’m discovering some interesting and useful new facilities.

The photos of Asaph are all rather skewed.  This is inevitable in photographing books, unless you can press the pages on a glass to get them flat.

But in Finereader 11, I find that some new tools have been added to the image editor.  There’s a very nice facility to adjust for “trapezium” effects — and it works well.  Even better is the line straightener.  Also there is a brightness/contrast control. If the type on the far side of the paper shows through, you can lose it by increasing the brightness.

The image files for Asaph are pretty bulky, so things are slow.  But I was able to turn a page that was skewed to blazes back into something straight.  Skewed pages require intervention on pretty much every line, which slows OCR to a crawl.  But Finereader 11 can cope with this.  I’d like the facility to apply the same deskew to a bunch of images, rather than one-by-one, tho.

Something Abbyy could usefully do is allow us to change the background colour of the OCR window.  The green-ish coloured images result in a green-ish coloured background in the text window, for some reason, and this is very unpleasant and impossible to remove.

One pleasing thing that I see has at last arrived: an “insert symbol” facility.  Long overdue and very welcome it is too!

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A false quotation circulated by Christians?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Curious Presbyterian falls into what seems to be a pot-hole:

Janie B. Cheaney asks out loud what a lot of us have quietly thought: Why are Atheists So Mean?

Seen on Answerblog.com: “How do atheists express their love for the rest of humanity?” Answer: “You don’t need religion to express love, you complete idiot.  Why are all your questions so ignorant?”  Genuinely warmhearted atheists exist, but warmheartedness is not the first descriptive quality that comes to mind.  The more vocal ones betray themselves sooner or later: To reject God is almost always to despise people.

George P. Wood copies this also here.  Trees for lunch does the same.  All three base this on an article in World magazine here.

Trouble is, I can’t find any “Answerblog.com”, outside of what is plainly a cyber-squatting site.  I can’t find any references to it either.

I can’t find that question online, outside of this article and its reposts.  Nor can I find the answer given.

I do not know why this is, and I have written to the editor of World magazine to enquire.  I’ve also posted a query in the comments of two of the three blogs above (Curious Presbyterian provides no mechanism to comment or email, as far as I can tell).  It’s probably a slip of  the memory or something.  But … it is not actually true, as far as I can tell.

Now there’s no denying that many atheists are very nasty people.  The anecdote above is doubtless true “in substance”, since material of this kind may be found easily online. 

But … it does not seem to be true in the narrowest sense.

It is not right to circulate material which is critical of others unless it is actually true, in the strictest sense.  Let’s be careful to check our facts.

UPDATE: A commenter has managed to find the source on www.answerbag.com here:

http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/1828195

The question and the first response are as advertised.  Thank you!

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More Origen Update

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Further to my post earlier today, the 7th homily of Origen on Ezekiel is now done, complete.  That was a very quick turnaround, thankfully.  We should have about an hour’s worth of formatting on homilies 8-14, and then an unspecified (but hopefully short!) period of checking the Latin text of 8-14 for typos. 

I, for my sins (which are evidently considerable), get to compare 8-14 with the existing translation (which I shall do tomorrow).  And then, really, the book is done.  The translator will write his own preface, of course, but that won’t hold anything up.

What I shall have to do after that is typesetting.  This is done in Adobe InDesign, and I shall have to get a copy and see if I can work it out. 

Because the rival translation came out in 2010, I don’t really expect to make any money on this volume.  So I hope to keep costs to a minimum!  That means doing more myself.

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A 1918 list of English translations from ancient Greek

Posted on by Roger Pearse

This evening I ran across F. M. K. Foster’s English translations from the Greek: a bibliographical survey, Columbia, 1918 (Google books here).  A book of this date ought to be of great interest, in that all the translations listed will be public domain in the USA.  There’s even a good chance that they will be on Google Books or otherwise accessible.

I’m rather enjoying my first browse.  There are many pages of translations of Aristotle, and Euripides, of course.

But how many of us have heard of Aristoxenus of Tarentum? (p. 34 — from where I learn of a translation of his Harmonics).  Not me, that’s for sure.  But his book is here.

Or Artemidorus of Ephesus, better known as Artemidorus of Daldi, a 2nd century AD interpreter of dreams?  All the translations of his book, The interpretation of dreams, are old — 1722 is the last reprint shown.  I could not find it online.

Hyperides, The orations against Athenogenes and Philippides, were translated by F. G. Kenyon in 1893, I see.  There are quite a few versions of Longinus On the sublime — a work that perhaps few of us today have read (not me, again).

The lately discovered fragments of Menander, by “Unus Multorum” were edited and translated in 1909.  I had no luck finding it online, tho.

The list does not look nearly complete to me.  Likewise it omits all except classical Greek.  But the thing was done as a PhD thesis, under the lash, as it were, so perhaps we should not complain!

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Origen update

Posted on by Roger Pearse

There’s not that much more to do on the Origen on Ezekiel book, and the translator has been in touch.  Homily 7 needs revision, which is the next priority.  After that, there’s some formatting changes to homilies 8-14, which is a couple of hours work, plus removing the Greek fragments from the footnotes (as these are now in a much more extensive section by themselves).

We need some proofing done on the Latin text of 8-14, and I’ve emailed a couple of people to ask if they’d do it. 

I also need to go through the existing translation by Thomas Scheck for the same homilies, and highlight any serious deviations for consideration by the translator.

It would be nice to get all this done this week…  No real reason why not.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve been trying to do a little scanning today, but not getting very far.  I have a copy of Michael Bourdeaux’s Patriarch and Prophets : Persecution of the Russian Orthodox Church (1968) here to do.  Interesting he salutes the courage of the people of Czechoslovakia in the introduction — the “Prague Spring” had just been crushed, one imagines.

They say that today is the most depressing day of the year (how encouraging!)  Dark with heavy rain this lunch time — just turning to hail! –, and the high winds are blowing down trees.  There’s something to be said for spending winter in a warm climate every year, you know!

I’m going into hospital later on today, for a small procedure.  I’m told that it is not very risky, but it doesn’t sound much fun.  With luck I won’t know anything about it.  I’d appreciate prayer that all goes well all the same.

UPDATE (4/1/12): just to say that I am out and had the all-clear, and am waiting for the sedation to disappear.  Apparently I shouldn’t drive, use heavy machinery, or make any financial decisions.  Not sure whether blogging is allowed, tho.:)

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The forum of Nerva

Posted on by Roger Pearse

One of the images in Du Perac’s 1575 collection of sketches of Rome is of the forum of Nerva.  Here’s what he saw:

Forum of Nerva, Du Perac, 1575

The Temple of Minerva is at the front left.

From the Murray guidebook of 1843, p.271, I learn that

Paul V (Borghese) took down an entablature and pediment in the Forum of Nerva to build a fountain on the Janiculum,…

A modern map of the imperial forums is here.  This extract shows the forum of Nerva:

Du Perac’s view is looking up the forum, and along the right-hand side of the temple at the top of it.

An 1869 view from here is this:

1869 image of the forum of Nerva

There are a series of images (including Du Perac’s) here.

But … I  gather there may be some confusion between the forum of Nerva and the forum of Augustus?  This site has an image by Piranesi, of what is plainly the same place.

Forum of Nerva, Piranesi, 1756

But the text on the page says “The Forum of Augustus (erroneously called Forum of Nerva)”. 

Finally on Flickr I find this image of what can be seen today.

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