Back in October we started our Mormon Artist podcast, releasing new episodes every two weeks on Tuesdays. You can subscribe on iTunes or via the RSS feed. So far we’ve interviewed Melissa Leilani Larson, Scott Jarvie, and Blair Treu. (I should add that my involvement is limited to putting the episodes on the web; Katherine Morris does all the interviewing and audio editing.)
I’m back to making ebooks, this time continuing the colored fairy book series with The Red Fairy Book, edited by Andrew Lang, available in EPUB and Kindle editions.
Also, I’ve put the ebook source files on GitHub. (Mostly to allow for pull requests to fix typos, but also because I thought it would be nice to make the source files freely available as well.) I’ll eventually be posting sources for all my existing ebooks as well, though it’ll take some time to go through them.
For a while I had been itching to have a better way to track genealogy research todo items — something that organizes items by family and links back to Family Tree, mainly. And thus Gent was born:
I’ve been using it for a couple months now and really like it. Before, I felt disorganized and didn’t know where all my notes were; now, even if I come back to my research after a month or two away, it’s easy to get back into it.
The app is built on Django (Python), and I’m calling it a 0.1 release since there are almost certainly bugs I haven’t found. But it does work for me. (For what that’s worth.)
From Sustaining the Presence, a great essay by Karandeep Singh in the book Finding God at BYU:
The Lord’s University taught me a new tongue, one that enables me to do three things: (1) delineate between spiritual discourse and worldly discourse; (2) recognize when I have slipped from the spiritual into the worldly and rectify the slippage; and (3) check my tendency to hijack the language of the spiritual to suit my convenience in the worldly.
And:
I returned to BYU for a graduate degree because of the abundance of the spirit on its campus. Partaking of this spirit creates the courage to dream, and consequently there are dreamers aplenty here. So I returned to the machine shop to mend the tires, knowing that I must leave again to go elsewhere for a Ph.D. But this time I will leave understanding that unless one is careful, there is a negative correlation between advanced intellectual inquiry and spiritual preservation. When I went away the first time, I found that the more I pursued only the nuances of political, economic, and social history, the more the spirit eluded me. When I go away the second time, I will do so understanding that it doesn’t work the same way if the two factors are turned around: Beginning with the spirit, no depth of intellectual inquiry is outside of one’s grasp. It is possible for disciples to do first-rate intellectual work, work that has meaning. Indeed, to use religion to excuse substandard academic performance and intellectual sloppiness is to strengthen the false dichotomy of faith and reason.
What is my dream? I want to be part of a counter-renaissance of men and women who call themselves servants of God who will reclaim from the world the arts and sciences. I dream that the abundance of spirit at the BYU campus will, even in the face of apathy and materialism, initiate a resurgence of learning where disciples will once again create the standards for meaningful intellectual inquiry. Of course this is a grandiose dream. But there are dreamers aplenty at BYU in body and in spirit as embodied in the history and unique heritage that is BYU’s. If one is not careful, one can be infected with their vision. I stopped being careful a long time ago.
I like Kris Sowersby’s suggestions for a more ideal OpenType user interface in document design apps like InDesign.
Some words I came across in J. R. Clark Hall’s A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary that struck me as amusing or interesting:
A good blog post by Gregory Crane (editor-in-chief of the Perseus Digital Library at Tufts) back in February about the Digital Loeb Classical library and the digitization of Greek and Latin texts:
We need transcriptions of public domain print editions to provide a starting point for work. These editions do not have to be the most up-to-date and they do not even have to be error free (99% may be good enough rather than 99.95%). If the community has the ability to correct and augment and to add features such as are described above and to receive recognition for that work, then the editions will evolve rapidly and outperform closed editions. If no community emerges to improve the editions, then the edition is good enough for current purposes. This model moves away from treating the community as a set of consumers and towards viewing members of the community as citizens with an obligation to contribute as well as to use.
The post has links to some fascinating projects I didn’t know about, like the Open Philology Project and the Homer Multitext Project.
This is cool:
Ancient Greek OCR is free software to accurately convert scans of printed Ancient Greek into unicode text and PDF files, which can be easily searched, copied, archived, and transformed. It uses the excellent Tesseract OCR engine, tailored for Ancient Greek typography, syntax and vocabulary.
I haven’t used Tesseract in 10+ years, but back then it wasn’t too great. According to their website, however: “Between 1995 and 2006 it had little work done on it, but since then it has been improved extensively by Google.” That’s encouraging. (I wonder if that’s what they’re using behind the scenes for Google Books and Google Drive and their other things.)
As promised, “Queen of the Cruel Sea” is finished and available for reading on the web and in EPUB, Kindle, and PDF. I hope y’all enjoy it. (FYI, the background cover art is Seastorm, a piece I painted a few years ago.)
I’m still waking up early every morning to write, which is the only reason this story is finished instead of having fallen by the wayside like so many other stories and novels I’ve begun. So that’s good — I’m finally getting the hang of this writing thing. Expect many more stories and poems and novels in the years to come.