Use DuckDuckGo instead of Google search?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Marcel at Monday Evening today has written possibly one of the most important posts that I have read for some time.

Google grew and profited because it was useful. It made finding stuff on the web easier, it made email easier, and it made a good rss feed reader. Then Google became a threat to privacy, or people like me who should have known finally saw the threat they had always been. So using Google became a tradeoff, but I was usually willing to accept it because Google made things easier.

Now Google is becoming an obstacle to overcome. Google Reader has got to be too much trouble to use, so I’m back to open-all-in-tabs. Gmail keeps moving stuff around (recently the log-out button), and they’re always pestering me about something: give them my phone number; read their privacy policy; sign up for Google+. It was creepy when they started asking me if I wanted to cc random people, but I put up with it. Interposing these nag screens between me and my email is going to be the last straw that sends me back to Thunderbird.

Their search results page is increasingly crufty, and I have to watch that they aren’t “customizing” the results just for me. I use DuckDuckGo whenever I can, then Bing, and then Google search if I must. …

I was not even aware of DuckDuckGo, but I tried it out this evening and the results were no worse than Google’s, and probably a bit better.  And at least they aren’t fiddling with the results to show me what some wretched algorithm imagines I wanted to see last time I searched, as Google is.

The privacy concerns are real, and I worry about them more.

And yes, Google is getting very careless. 

I don’t like the new Google Mail interface, so I am using the old one, and putting up with the nagging.  I don’t like the new Google Groups interface — the first version, indeed, was buggy and didn’t even allow you to search! — and have stuck with the old one and, of course, the nagging.  I don’t really like Google Reader’s interface, although I can live with it.

I don’t like the way that I can’t even find some things any more in the main search engine.  I don’t like the way that they broke the Google groups search, and barely bother to fix it.  It’s often broken, and slothfully repaired.  I hate the Google Books searches, which are so bad that it is often better to find books through Archive.org.

You know, Marcel has a point. 

I’m not anti-Google.  I remember loathing directed at IBM, when it was dominant.  When IBM’s star waned, and that of Microsoft rose, somehow Big Blue became cuddly, while Micro$oft became the Great Satan.  Now it’s Google’s turn.  Such opposition is not meaningful.

But Google are getting lazy and sloppy.  And … now they don’t subscribe to their old motto, “Don’t be evil” … how far can we trust them with all our data?

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Would it really be so difficult to determine how chapter divisions are marked in all surviving ancient books?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The question of chapter divisions and headings in ancient literary and technical texts is a long term interest of mine, as anyone who chooses to look may discover by clicking on the tag at the end of this post.  We find, in later medieval texts, that these ancient texts are often divided, not merely into books, but also into chapters, with chapter headings.  It does not seem well known or classified, just how often we find this.  Chapter divisions and titles are a cinderella subject, largely ignored or treating in passing.

In my last post, I looked at what chapter divisions and titles there were in a renaissance manuscript of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History.  The NH is an interesting work to investigate, for this subject, since the author states in the preface that book 1 of the work is a list of capituli.  So we do know that these items existed in the autograph, whereas we generally have no such certainty in other works. 

Capituli, or “subject headings”, are perhaps just a list of topics covered, in the order in which they appear in the text.  There is no necessity to suppose that the text was formally divided into “chapters”, in the manner of a modern work –indeed some of the capituli refer to no more than a handful of lines of text, before the next capitulum appears in the margin, so we might better say “sections” — and we can see that in the Pliny ms. it is not. 

So while the English word “chapter” perhaps derives from the Latin capitulum — or does it?  Do we know this, and if so, how? — the term is perhaps one that is rather different.  Perhaps we need a word study of the appearance of the English word, and how it was originally used, and how it came to mean what it means today.  Is it used to translate capitulum in medieval English texts?  There is clearly a research project here.

Likewise we ought to locate all uses of the term capituli in ancient literature — and likewise the Greek kephalaia — and from this determine its meaning or meanings, and any change that they underwent during the ancient and medieval period.  This might begin with an electronic search, and it really should not take more than a couple of weeks to do.

But finally … we need to look at ancient books themselves, and see just what is in the margins, or gathered at the start of books, or whatever.  Do we have chapter titles marked?  Are they  numbered?  Are there collections of them at the start of the book, in a multi-book history?  Or is it a case that the early mss just have a list of topics at the start of each book, and that these are mirrored in the body of the work, gradually, by subsequent readers and copyists?  Which works have these elements?

It sounds like a large task.  But is it?  A commenter on my last post pointed out that, in some ways, it is a superficial task.  All we have to do is look through the manuscript at a high level.  And that may not be so hard to do.

For the number of actual ancient books is not that great.  The Codices Latini Antiquiores of E. A. Lowe lists all the fragments of ancient Latin books.  The number of codices which are more or else intact is probably not that great.  I don’t know about Greek mss from antiquity, but surely there is a list somewhere?

Nor does it necessarily involve a lot of travel.  The IRHT in France has a huge collection of microfilms of manuscripts.  Admittedly this is not nearly as good as colour images — and whether a link is in red ink or black might well be important here — but a couple of weeks work at a microfilm reader in Orleans might well answer many of these questions, and provide a base of data from which some solid conclusions might be drawn.  It sounds like a solid piece of work for a PhD thesis, for a student who is prepared to work hard.

I feel tempted myself; but of course I am not an academic, and I don’t have the time.  Sadly, I fear, I don’t have the energy any more either!  But the whole question of chapter divisions, titles, etc, is one that simply needs a pioneer to go into it.  It’s not that hard to do; just that no-one has really attacked it. 

I’ve always thought of the task of working out the history of the chapter titles for endless different literary and technical works was one that would require an army of scholars.  Indeed a great manuscript scholar once wrote to me that it would require scholarly collaboration.

But why not simply examine what is in all the surviving ancient codices, up to the 8th century, and publish details of what is to be found therein?

How long would that really take?

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Chapter titles in Pliny the Elder

Posted on by Roger Pearse

With the new availability online of images of the British Library ms. Harley MS 2676 (Pliny the Elder, Historia naturalis,  Florence, 1465-1467), we can now investigate just how the chapter titles are presented in a manuscript.

Technical note: there seems to be no way to link directly from here to the pages in question.  Ideally I would link the images below direct to the full page, so that readers could scroll around and examine for themselves, but sadly this does not seem to be possible.

In this manuscript, there is first a list of books, with a numeral at the front.  Then there are the chapter titles, gathered by book, but … with no chapter numeral at the front of each title!  Here is a screen grab of folio 2r, where the titles for book 2 (book 1 is a preface) appear, and the numerals do not:

It is unlikely that a humanist copyist would have removed the numerals, so I think we may take it that they were not present in the ancestor copies either.

And how do the titles appear in book 2, in the body of the text?  They appear, naturally, without numerals either, as marginalia.  Here is folio 20v (there seems to be no way to link directly to the page):

But here is the rub: the “titles” are not the same.  In the contents, the first title is “de forma eius” — “concerning its form” — which references the preceding sentence that indicates the book is about the world.  The next title, “de motu”, is the same in both.

Each of these titles has an initial.  But the third title, lower down the page, does not.  There is no paragraph break either: 

 

It is left to the reader to determine where, if anywhere, the break should be.  The paragraph breaks, the initials, do not relate to the chapter titles, then.

But … were the marginal chapter titles even present in earlier manuscripts?  Or were these placed where they are by the humanist copyist?

In book 1, which has no chapter titles, we find what are plainly renaissance glosses, highlighting a mention of Cicero, for instance, written in the column to the side.  Similar notes seem to appear later: on f.22r there is a marginal note “pythagoras”, written as if it was a chapter title.

The answer to this must appear from looking at more, and older, manuscripts.

All the same, we do see that numbering chapter titles in the body of the text was not something that just happened naturally, since these have none.  They seem, indeed, more like “headings”, indicating content, than chapter divisions as we would have them.  And indeed, “capituli” is precisely that … “headings”!

Perhaps we should take the Latin more seriously, and modern habits of book making rather less so.

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New BL mss online: technical texts

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I learn from the British Library manuscripts blog that a further bunch of manuscripts from the Harley collection have now been placed online at their site, courtesy of funding by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation.  These are described as “science manuscripts”, which of course covers a multitude of things, not all of them interesting to us.  The majority are of medieval texts.  But it includes a number of ancient technical texts.

We’re all familiar with ancient literary texts: Herodotus, Cicero, Livy, Tertullian, St. Augustine, and so forth.  But the technical literature of antiquity is much less well known, and much of it has barely been edited.  Very little exists in English.  This category includes medical handbooks, astrological works, and many others.

Skimming over the BL site, I note these manuscripts of works by ancient technical authors:

  • Harley MS 1585 Illustrated compilation of texts on herbs and making up medicines (Netherlands, 12th century) including various late-antique texts.
  • Harley MS 2650 Martianus Capella, De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, book 8 (=De astronomia) (France or England, 12th century)
  • Harley MS 2660 Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae and De natura rerum (Germany, 1136), plus four letters of Isidore.
  • Harley MS 2676 Pliny the Elder, Historia naturalis (Florence, 1465-1467)
  • Harley MS 2766 Iulius Firmicus Maternus, Mathesis (Italy, 15th century), the astrological compendium.
  • Harley MS 3015 Miscellany including Bede’s De natura rerum (England, 12th century) specifically: — (f. 1v); John Chrysostom, Homilies 1-30 (ff. 2r-62r); Augustine of Hippo, Sermones (Sermo 173) (ff. 63r- 64v);Isidore of Seville, De Differentis (ff. 65v-89r); Bede, De Natura Rerum (ff. 90r-99r); Anselm, De libero arbitrio (ff. 100r-108r).
  • Harley MS 3022 Collection of texts on theology, instruction and natural history (Italy, 14th century) — 1. Giles of Rome (Aegidius Romanus), De regimine principum (ff. 1r-32r); 2. Aristotle, De natura animalium (ff. 32v-54v);3. The Life of St Veridianus (ff. 55r-57v);4. Cassiodorus, Varia (ff. 57v-67v);5. Cassiodorus, De anima (ff. 68r-79v);6. Augustine, Speculum (ff. 80r-83v); 7. Augustine, Soliloquia (ff. 83v-128v);8. Pseudo-Augustine, Liber de vita Christiana (ff. 129r-139v).
  • Harley MS 3035 Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae and De natura rerum (Germany, 1495) — much the same as the earlier one, but with five letters of Isidore. 

The one that stands out for me is the ms. of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, and for an unusual reason.  The work was given chapter divisions by Pliny himself, as the preface indicates.  But did he also mark them in the text?  Were there numerals in the margins?  The colloquium on meta-textual elements at Chantilly in 1994 contained a paper discussing this, and noting that the editors of Pliny were “fort discrets” on these points.

It would be most interesting to know.  Ideally we would want pre-humanist manuscripts, of course; but it would still be interesting to know what this manuscript has.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’m just pottering around the blog, looking at this and that.  I’ve been checking some of the blogroll links.  The Egyptian State Information Service have changed their URL, I see.

Grey and rainy here, but the Luxor Travel Tips site tells us that it is 33C in Luxor today!!!  I am so envious.

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Some musings on comment spam

Posted on by Roger Pearse

This blog has been running for two or three years now (I can’t remember when).  In that time I have written 2,340 posts, which have attracted 6,866 comments, and … 215,300 spam comments!!  That is, an average of 100 spams per post.

Every morning I get a few of them in my inbox, which the spam filter has allowed through, and I have to go off to this site and manually remove them.  That takes time … minutes of my life stolen. 

Yet time is all we have.  We each have a fixed amount of it.  We sell it for money, in order to live, hoping to make something of the rest of our days.  To steal time is to steal life.  Some of my contemporaries at school had much less than they thought, and have already passed on.  How much time each of us has left is something that none of us can know.

100 spam comments, every time I post… that is a sobering amount of trouble, of lost time and nuisance.

I hesitate to ask government to deal with this problem.  Undoubtedly, eventually, access to the web will be controlled.  Only the registered will be allowed on.  That day will not be a good one for freedom, of course.  Will the spammer force us all to acquiesce in allowing weaselly politicans control of the web?

Yet even then spam will continue.  It will continue to arrive, this time from those big businesses with enough links to government to be allowed on the list as being “reputable”.  This is the reason why junk mail pops through our letter boxes every day.  No-one wants it, yet still it comes.

Perhaps we can endure the spammer, and his theft of our lives, then, if there is really no solution. 

UPDATE: It seems that I started blogging on 30th July 2006, at Thoughts on Antiquity (at neonostalgia.com, now seemingly defunct), and began this blog on 9th August 2009.

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Frustrated with Finereader

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve been working on placing Theodoret’s commentary on Romans on the web for a while.  I OCR’d it in Abbyy Finereader 11, and I finished proofing the OCR in Finereader before Easter.

Today I tried exporting the text to HTML.  It has rather a lot of italics in it, so imagine my fury when I discovered that exporting “formatted” text had lost all the italics!  A bit of experimentation revealed that the same happened when saving “formatted” text as .RTF.  Only saving “exact text” retained the italics.  And you don’t want all the crud that comes with that.

I imagine that it’s just a bug; but it is a frustrating one.  I really do not want to reitalicise some 100 pages.

Another annoyance was that Finereader now attempts to work out where footnotes are involved, and create its own numeration.  In Word this is fine, as inserting and renumbering footnotes is trivial.  In HTML, however, it simply creates work that has to be undone.

Finereader does excellent OCR.  But I wish they would spend some time getting the product user-tested, really I do.

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IVP’s Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Today I found myself wondering just what the early Christians would have to say on various controverted passages in Scripture, passages where modern issues cause us to look urgently at the text.  If Theodoret’s Commentary on Romans is any guide, not much: but I would like to know, all the same.

This naturally caused me to think about the Inter-Varsity Press series, the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture.  These take the catena approach to commentary, as is natural and sensible.

The volumes in this series are rather pricey, I recall, which is unfortunate.  This material ought to be online, surely?  It is slightly sad to read the following comment in the introduction to the series:

We have chosen and ordered these selections primarily for a general lay reading audience of nonprofessionals who study the Bible regularly and who earnestly wish to have classic Christian observations on the text readily available to them.[1]

 

Yes, but how will this audience ever access the product?  My only access to any of it vanished with Library.nu.

Now I was wondering just how the volumes were assembled.  We all know that the catenas have not been critically edited, and even accessing them is not a trivial matter.  There is some discussion of this in the general introduction (PDF) to the series, which appears to be in the Genesis I-II volume:

[We] identified these classic comments by performing global searches of the Greek and Latin patristic corpus. They have searched for these texts in the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG) digitalized Greek database, the Cetedoc edition of the Latin texts of Corpus Christianorum from the Centre de traitement electronique des documents (Universit. catholique de Louvain), the Chadwyck-Healey Patrologia Latina Database (Migne) and the Packard Humanities Institute Latin databases. We have also utilized the CD-ROM searchable version of the Early Church Fathers, of which the Drew University project was an early co-sponsor along with the Electronic Bible Society. …

Having searched Latin and Greek databases, we then solicited from our Coptic, Syriac and Armenian editorial experts selections from these bodies of literature, seeking a fitting balance from all available exegetical traditions of ancient Christianity within our time frame. To all these we added the material we could find already in English translation. …

[We] supplied to each volume editor a substantial read-out [=print-out] of Greek and Latin glosses, explanations, observations and comments on each verse or pericope of Scripture text. …

TLG and Cetedoc are referenced more often than Migne or other printed Greek or Latin sources for these reasons: (1) the texts are more quickly and easily accessed digitally in a single location; (2) the texts are more reliable and in a better critical edition; (3) we believe that in the future these digital texts will be far more widely accessed both by novices and specialists; (4) short selections can be easily downloaded; and (5) the context of each text can be investigated by the interested reader.[2]

 

Note that the searches were carried out by computer specialists, rather than scholars.  The editors also say that only a fraction of the material assembled was used, as is natural.

I think we may be fairly confident, therefore, that ancient catena material was not used. 

It’s still a good project.  Would that I could access it!!

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  1. [1]Introduction, p.xv.↩
  2. [2]Introduction, p.xiii.↩

Talmud in Arabic

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Via Paleojudaica.com: The Jerusalem Post reports that a team of Jordanians has translated the Talmud into Arabic.

A think tank on Middle East affairs in Jordan has for the first time published a translation of the Babylonian Talmud in Arabic.

Middle East Studies Center based in Amman produced the 20-volume work, which took six years to complete and is the labor of 95 translators, language experts and editors.

The center’s director Jawad Ahmad refused to speak about the project with The Jerusalem Post and a member of the staff said that Ahmad would not speak with the Israeli press.

The remainder of the JP article consists of Israelis darkly speculating on those evil Moslems and their wicked intentions, in a manner that would not be tolerated if it was Moslems speculating about evil Jews.  Isn’t identity politics, or “politically correct poker”, fun!!  The fun bit is working out who is allowed to criticise who.  But onwards!

On the Talmud Blog, I find more details.  But I also learn that it is on sale for $750.  That is sad, for how many Arabs can afford that?  Let us hope that it becomes accessible more generally online.

Jim Davila comments on the announcement:

I agree that there are precedents that raise potential concerns, and the petty refusal of the center to speak with Israeli journalists is not encouraging. I have discussed the problem of “Talmud libel” here and links. But all that said, Talmud libel depends on selective quotation out of context, and indeed quotations from made-up, spurious sources. To translate the whole Talmud for the purpose of Talmud libel would not only be ridiculous overkill, it would be counterproductive, since it would allow readers to evaluate quotations in context and verify sources. So I think there is good reason to give this translation the benefit of the doubt and not to assume bad motives on the part of the translators. Assuming it has been done accurately, I think the translation of the entire Talmud into Arabic is a welcome development and I hope it is widely read.

This is sound thinking, although I can’t say that I care about thought-crime (and interesting that a term, “Talmud libel”, has already been invented to try to stifle use of the Talmud for anti-Jewish polemic).  Let the Moslems hate the Jews, if they wish, or vice versa. I agree entirely that a complete translation must dispose of out-of-context quotation, and, in general, should be welcome. 

That said, I don’t see how use of mistaken information works, even from the anti-Jewish point of view.  This may be politically naive of me, but let’s explore the idea a bit.

Say that the Jews are truly the scum of the earth intent on screwing over the rest of the world.  This is, I believe, a popular view throughout history wherever Jewish people have lived, so clearly it cannot be true but must be a conspiracy, probably by the Jews, or the bankers, or the freemasons, or someone.  But if it is true, then surely that view does not need to be advanced using forged sources?  The truth would be a better weapon!  And if the Jews are not quite that bad, and buy their round when asked, then none of us need forged unhistorical claims polluting the web and our minds.  We’d all rather have the facts, surely?

But what if the Talmud does contain “Wrong Thinking”?  Well, since I don’t feel any need to tell people what to think, I have to say that I don’t care if the Talmud is indeed stuffed to the brim with Jewish racially motivated hatred of everyone else.  What business is it of ours?  Why shouldn’t it be?  Each race and nation believes that it is the best — although of course only the English are correct here –, and that the rest are just foreigners who are daft or malicious or shifty or Welsh or whatever.  Understanding that, and making allowances for national pride, is what we all used to do.  It used to be called “tolerance”, and it has become a very rare thing. 

Quite why the Jews of that period should not write a book for purposes of self-identification I do not know.  A Byzantine Jew of the 6th century AD who had been threatened and forced to pay money by one of Justinian’s tax-gatherers because he was a Jew has every right, surely, to sit down and compose something vitriolic about “Christians”, if he wishes.  Wouldn’t we, in his shoes? 

Live and let live, and let us crucify the zealots who demand the right to silence others.  With blunt nails.

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May God curse the NIV committee and its owners!

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I have, just this instant, come across an example of how the NIV is being corrupted deliberately, for politically correct reasons, in order to deceive.  It nearly caught me out, as I was doing a bible study. 

I was asked to do something on St. Paul and leadership of women (why me?!).  So I looked up 1 Corinthians 11:34 in the bible gateway.

34 Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says. 35 If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church.

OK, that’s fair enough.  But then I noticed something relevant to my bible study of the place of women in a congregation:

26 What then shall we say, brothers and sisters? When you come together, each of you has a hymn, or a word of instruction, a revelation, a tongue or an interpretation.

And that clarifies the subject, and is relevant to my subject: that “sisters” are taking part in the service, speaking and giving instruction, revelation, etc.

At this point a warning bell went off, and I went to consult my old printed NIV.  And I find … that “and sisters” is a modern interpolation!  It isn’t there in the Greek, which simply reads “adelphoi”, and which would never be translated any other way but “brothers” except through special pleading.  Verse 26, on this highly controversial subject, does NOT contain a relevant statement.  Yet I could have taught on this, to a congregation who knew no better, something that is actually not in the bible.

This is not trivial.  This is deliberate corruption of the scriptures, on a subject where the world is demanding that Christians follow its dogma.  I confess that I am furious.  The people who will be receiving this teaching are under every kind of moral pressure.  We should be able to rely on our bible translations!!!

Let us pray that God will vindicate his judgement on those who have chosen to do this evil, who have chosen to corrupt the word of life and to poison it with material designed to mislead and disarm Christians faced with urgent temptation by the evil one.  May these wicked men endure every evil that can befall a man; for they have chosen to pour contempt on the Holy Spirit.

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