The sun is shining, the sky is blue, and in a minute I shall venture out! It’s the holiday weekend. Time for us all to get away from the keyboard!
Miscellaneous projects update
I’ve been really unwell this week, so all my projects are on hold. Fortunately, for most of them, the ball is in someone else’s court.
One project has been abandoned. The translation of the remains of Polychronius’ commentary on Daniel will not go ahead. The translator has decided to write an academic article around what he found. I am entirely in favour of academic publication, and I never had a strong attachment to this one anyway.
The translation of letters of Isidore of Pelusium is proceeding. I still need to pass the translation of the first 14 letters in front of a reviewer’s eyes, but this will happen when I feel somewhat better.
There’s a bit of confusion about how to handle one set of fragments of Philip of Side, coming from the Religionsgesprach text, a fictional dialogue set at the court of the Sassanids. It turns out that more than half of it has been translated. This raises the question of whether we may as well translate the lot anyway, and then make that available (plus excerpts to complete the Philip text). I need to do some calculations to work out what that should cost, but I’m not fit to do so just yet.
The British Library Catalogue-in-Progress book block for the Eusebius book arrived today. Also a note from the Coptic translator that corrections from that source will be delayed.
Next week I am due to go to the Patristics Conference in Durham. I’d like to meet potential customers for the book, and also potential translators for future projects. But of course I need to be fit, which at the moment I’m not. And after that, I do need to go and find a job that earns money. Not for the first time, I could wish that I had been born wealthy.
Freedom of speech ten miles away from me
This post is written under UK government restrictions on discussing homosexuality.
Premier Christian Radio reports today:
Preacher’s trial over homosexuality comments adjourned. While standing as an independent election candidate in Colchester Paul Shaw distributed leaflets on which he stated homosexual acts should be made illegal.
Christian Quoter tells us:
Colchester Magistrates today agreed to adjourn the case of Christian brother, Paul Shaw, … [who] said:
“I believe for example that homosexual and lesbian acts are immoral and that the law should reflect that; by making them unlawful as they once were; and so acting as a deterrent to such behaviour. The concept of homophobia is nonsense and a play on words; it is not and has never been a phobia! A phobia is an un-natural fear; whereas a rejection of perverse behaviour; is a righteous godly fear; that fears to do wrong because it knows that there are consequences and punishment otherwise! This is the most pronounced example of a nation that has lost its way …”
It was the Crown Prosecutor who applied for an adjournment. This was in order, he said, to consider the case in the light of freedom of speech. The Magistrate, District Judge David Cooper, agreed.
A further article in Pink News (why is there no Christian comment on this?) says he was arrested on June 11th, and is known around the town as a street preacher. eChurch Christian Blog tells us that Shaw was denounced to the police earlier in the year. The Chelmsford Weekly News has the same story:
District judge David Cooper told him: “You said you were spreading God’s word and when interviewed you said children needed to be protected and basically, homosexuals and lesbians should repent and ask for God’s forgiveness.”
Mr Shaw claimed that there would be “terrible consequences” if homosexuality was not made illegal again soon and warned that God’s judgment was “not very far away”.
He refused to be bound over to keep the peace, which is a criminal conviction. Instead, he said: “In four years, I’ve only dealt with homosexuality about twice. I have to act in good conscience, I’m afraid, and I think [homosexuality] is a particularly significant thing for this nation at this time.” The case was dismissed as the prosecution could offer no written evidence from complainants and Mr Shaw argued his right to free speech.
Mr Cooper warned him that further complaints could land him back in court and said: “There are other sorts of ‘sins’. Do you think you could concentrate on those for a bit?”
Shaw is now due for trial on 23rd September.
I suspect from all this that Mr Cooper is a sensible chap who finds himself wondering why on earth he is being asked to decide what people are allowed to say, and why people can’t just get along. But of course this is the front-line of a political war, and not a court matter at all. One side has managed to get a law passed, allowing it to lock up the other for expressing an opinion. So it was in the days of the State Trials, of evil memory.
At the bottom of the Pink News article is another article on a preacher arrested in May 2010. And on March 18th an American preacher in Glasgow was arrested.
I finish this account of religious persecution and interference with free speech with a link to a columnist for the Independent, one of the major UK national newspapers, on The Slow Whining Death of British Christianity, abusing Christians in the most hateful terms possible, for daring to complain of persecution. It reads like something from Der Sturmer.
Let us pray for the United Kingdom, for God’s mercy upon it, and also upon the persecutors, maddened by their vice and swollen with the arrogance that comes from believing oneself powerful. No good consequence comes of such things, except for the church itself. We might also read what Tertullian wrote to Scapula, in time of persecution.
UPDATE: Stephen Green notes in the comments that apparently the prosecution of Paul Shaw has been dropped by the CPS. Good news! Christian Quoter has the story.
How to sell your unwanted books online
Sentimental about old technology
- HP ScanJet 6350C
Old computers never die — they just get shoved to the back of the cupboard, and gather dust. Old peripherals are much the same.
I thought it would be nice to put online a picture of my scanner. Not the one I use today, but the one I bought more than 10 years ago, when I started getting serious about scanning material to place online.
I bought it on 2nd October 2000, on the web. It cost £328.93 — about $500. It had a sheet feeder, which would take a wodge of photocopies. It was fast, being a SCSI unit — most cheap scanners used the parallel port. I used a PC Card on my old laptop to connect to it.
In those days there were no PDF’s online. What I used to do was travel up to Cambridge University Library, and photocopy whole books, at 7p a sheet. I’d come back with a couple of inches of paper, and I would then feed them into this thing. Or I’d take a book, borrowed by inter-library loan, away with me during the week. One evening I would go to a Staples, and stand there for an hour while the copier whirred. As I write this, I remember driving down past Gatwick airport to some such establishment, back in 2004. I remember doing the same in Harlow in 2006.
The OCR technology of the day was primitive. But the better quality scanner — I’d been using a $70 piece of rubbish before then — instantly reduced the number of corrections I had to make by hand. The latter was always the slow part of OCR. The sheet-feeder made it possible to run a book into the PC.
It’s a month short of 10 years ago that I bought it. It has served me very well. It’s the scanner that built the Tertullian Project, especially once I acquired Abbyy FineReader 5.0 and started getting good quality OCR results.
But I haven’t used it for a few years now. It started to develop problems with the sheet-feeder, which left a vertical mark down the scanned page images and so made OCR more difficult. The glass grew slightly scratched. I was starting to do less OCR anyway.
Then I bought a Plustek OpticBook 3600, which was better for doing books. But the death-knell was when I bought a Fuijtsu scanner with sheet feeder that took up a fraction of the space and was far faster. I can’t remember where the SCSI card is any more. All the Scanjet is doing is occupying space. For years now I’ve used it as the place on which I stack my laptop when it’s not in use, which is a bit silly.
I think it is time to throw it away. I’ll take it down the dump this afternoon. I live in a small house, after all. It is of no use to anyone, after all, unless they have a SCSI card. No-one does, these days — they were rare even back then.
But … it will be a wrench, somehow. It’s like leaving a bit of yourself behind, something that helped define my identity for some of the most productive years of my life.
Good-bye, old friend.
More problems for UK Christians
During the 13 years of the Blair government, a considerable number of laws were passed whose effect was to interfere with Christians, their organisations, and their right to express their beliefs verbally, in print, or by preaching in public.
This was quite intentional. I remember one cabinet minister boasting that the churches had better start hiring lawyers. To understand the point of that remark, it is necessary to remember that only the rich can go to law in the UK, and that most people would be terrified to be dragged into court. As Ezra Levant has pointed out, “the process is the punishment”. Even if found “innocent”, the process of being dragged through the courts for months and years, at huge cost in fees, is a punishment itself. The threat of it is often enough to cause people to comply with the demands, legal or not.
Since I am a Christian living in the UK, I am naturally somewhat concerned. I don’t really want the police knocking at my door for what I say here. I don’t think I am in any great danger, but then I don’t really post on contemporary issues. But preachers have been accosted by gay activists acting as agent-provocateurs, demanding to know whether they agree that homosexuality is a sin, and then reported to the police when they give the biblical teaching and arrested. A bishop has been “questioned” for failing to declare clearly enough that he rejects the bible in this area. And so on.
The change of government has not stopped the process. Today I learn from the September issue of Evangelicals Now that Premier Radio, the only Christian radio station in the UK, has been taking an interest in the issue of freedom of speech that is resulting from this. Since 2008 they have been researching the question of Christian marginalisation, prompted by statements by high-profile Christians in the mass media. The station is very mainstream and inoffensive, but has had consistent difficulties with the authorities.
It is running a campaign — freedomofthecross.com — asking the public to share how they have seen the Christian faith marginalised. … Premier Christian Radio was refused permission to broadcast an advert calling on Christians to report any experience of Christian marginalisation in the workplace.
It is ironic that even investigating the subject is apparently not permitted. The station has applied for a judicial review; but since the judges were also purged by the last government, it may be doubted whether this will achieve much.
Let us pray that this intolerance and bigotry may cease, and peace prevail.
Eusebius book to be delayed
I had intended to try to get the Eusebius book out in September. I have just realised that this must be impossible.
I have quite a list of things which depend on others. The Greek can’t be proof-read any sooner than 20 September, and it may be later. I can’t proceed without the approval of the Sources Chretiennes, who are all evidently on holiday. Coptic corrections will be needed; and then corrections at proof. There needs to be a book cover, there needs to be a website, and all manner of other things.
If I have to hunt for jobs in September, as I do, then that will interfere. And if I start a job, for the first three weeks I won’t be able to do anything else. Starting a job is very stressful, without having urgent corresp
So … we may as well all relax. If it comes out in December, so be it. It will take as long as it takes.
From my diary
I seem to have done a bit too much on the Eusebius on Monday and Tuesday. I feel as if I have the equivalent of a work “hangover” today, and I have been useless for anything. Stupid of me to go at it that hard, I know. So don’t expect anything very useful out of me for a day or so! I’m going to potter for that time, and try to stay away from the computer while doing so!
Who are the classicists?
An interesting article from Vitruvian Design on how non-scholars are pushing the boundaries of technology in a way that must revolutionise much of what scholars do.
We heard from the Alpheios project about recent development of their language learning tools. I’m thrilled to be using alpheios this fall both as a teacher of intermediate Latin and a student of first-semester Arabic, but what continues to impress me most about the project is the thoughtfulness of its architecture. The lexica (such as Liddell-Scott-Jones for Greek, and Lewis-Short for Latin) and linguistic information (very comprehensive morphological analyses, and for some sets of texts, syntactic tree banks of the kind David Bamman’s research uses) are cleanly organized as services that are accessible over the internet. …
Also in attendance was Google’s Will Brockman, who was able to comment on the recent public release of scans of over 500 Greek and Latin texts. (Six copies from three different editions of Pomponius Mela! Can you do that in your home library?)
A dynamically constructed lexicon; network services exposing Greek and Latin lexical and linguistic information to the internet ; a corpus of freely available texts — individually, these are major contributions to the study of Classics. Collectively, they really do lay the foundations for a radically altered discipline — and they exist today. If I wasn’t constantly hearing from fellow classicists that our discipline is in crisis, I would think that there has never been a better time to study Greek and Latin. …
I’ve been involved in all three projects, and know some of the back stories. None of the junior members of the original Perseus project were tenured at their original home institutions: all moved to other jobs, or left the field altogether. When an external review committee visited the University of Kentucky in the 1990s, after an extensive presentation about the Stoa prominently including the Suda On Line, a classicist asked the late Ross Scaife, “In what way does any of this constitute scholarship?” (A curious question about the first effort ever to translate into any language the rich and complex text of the Suda.) …
I draw two conclusions: first, that the study of classics is far too important to leave to classicists; and second that the study of Greek and Latin is still exciting enough to attract brilliant contributions from committed scholars who are not shackled with a title like “Professor of Classics.” In 2010, I’m starting to envy my students, and wish I had a few more decades to continue this work.
I agree. We’re only starting to explore what is possible.
Scholars for a century have been using essentially the same methods to handle sources. Paper journals and so forth provided the majority of the infrastructure. This is now changing, and has been changing for some time. The TLG has made a huge difference. Google Books must make a huge difference. JSTOR, although only accessible to the privileged, is making a difference.
The best is yet to come.
How not to evaluate evidence
With kiddies editing Wikipedia to reflect what they wish was true, and other kiddies believing what they read is authoritative, universities are starting to try to get students to think more critically. This can only be a good thing.
Unfortunately, in the humanities, critical thinking comes a long way second to herd-instinct. This process was beautifully documented by Holzberg in his paper Lucian and the Germans, which showed that the academic consensus on Lucian between 1890 and 1945 — that it was second rate literature written by a Jew — was derived from a single important paper — nothing wrong with that — and that this was verbally identical with an article by non-academic Houston Stewart Chamberlain appearing in a popular anti-semitic rag some months earlier. We could discuss how New Testament Studies always seems to reflect the views of those who control academic appointments in a similar vein. The problem, then, is with the humanities as a whole, with the nature of the disciplines, rather than any one discipline.
This paper (via here) is one of the attempts to encourage people to think. Unfortunately it repeats a bit of atheist polemic without thinking about it, and I think it introduces a pitfall for the unwary.
Finally, the librarian should stress the skeptic’s rule: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
They do, do they? And how do we decide whether a claim is “extraordinary”? Well, “it’s obvious” isn’t it? Whatever is not considered “normal” in our society, of course!
Is there any practical difference between this and demanding “extraordinary evidence” for whatever we prefer not to believe? If not, surely this is merely an engine for introducing prejudice?
Perhaps I am influenced here by seeing how this supposed rule is actually used online. It is used routinely by atheists online to demand that Christians produce far more evidence for anything the atheist wishes to deny than would be the case in any parallel investigation. The atheists themselves, when questioned about their own beliefs, invariably duck the examination with stock excuses — evidence for their own claims is not something they wish to produce! It’s just a way to make things difficult for people you know you disagree with. This should warn us that the “rule” is ill-formulated, and productive of prejudice rather than information.
Suppose that we are investigating a claim that Barack Obama is a shape-shifting alien. Surely it is of no relevance to demand that a different standard of evidence should be used to that used for other purposes? We have no idea whether there are shape-shifting aliens — being in politics seems to make people behave oddly without the need for alien intervention! But I suggest that to dismiss the allegation on this ground would be improper. Never mind our prejudgements — let the evidence appear; or not. Let Occam’s Razor prune the unnecessary hypothesis, in favour of the simplest possible explanation of whatever facts there are. We need no “extraordinary evidence” — we simply need evidence, of a kind that we would consider adequate for any proposition. Or are we really saying that we don’t believe we have enough evidence for most of our propositions…?
So I would suggest that the correct basis for investigation is to demand to see all the evidence, without prejudging it. Once we have all the data, we can see whether or not the claim naturally arises from it, or is a wild story imposed upon it. But not before. Surely we need rules that promote balanced thinking, that descope our own prejudices, not reinforce and institutionalise them.
UPDATE 19/2/11: A typo fixed, and an explanatory parenthesis to Holzberg added.
UPDATE 30/11/11: Another typo fixed, and an couple of explanatory words added to the parenthesis in response to comment.