Month: January 2012

A new weekly project from Dan Kimball. He first tackles Samuel 18:27 ("David took his men with him and went out and killed two hundred Philistines and brought back their foreskins. They counted out the full number to the king so that David might become the king’s son-in-law. Then Saul gave him his daughter Michal in marriage"):

In reading this story straight from the Bible, it even states how after David brought the foreskins back to Saul that they counted them to show how many there were. What an incredibly weird image of David standing there counting out 200 foreskins. … The Bible isn't all cleaned up and all the stories cheery and shiny. There are stories and things in the Bible which we may never understand in this lifetime. But for me, this actually brings more confidence about its inspiration. The Bible is not all edited and superficial. The faults and sins of human beings (even Bible heroes) are kept in…

(Hat tip: Mark Frauenfelder)

Alan Jacobs contemplates the future of religion and technology: 

[E]specially in eastern and southern Africa, the people likely to have cell phones and to seek Internet access are disproportionately likely to be Christians as well. And of those, many will use their phones to get access to the text of Scripture. Curiously, what these tiny screens do to the Bible is almost identical to what the big [projection] screens [in megachurches and elsewhere] do: reduce it to chunks of one or two verses. It is true that the cell phone reader looks down, and looks down upon his own screen, as opposed to the upward-turning congregant sharing one big screen with many others, but the same decontextualizing effect is at work.

(Image: The binary Book of Genesis by Michael Greer)

Steve H. Hanke and Richard Conn Henry want to replace our Gregorian calendar. Stephanie Pappas summarizes:

Under the Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar … every date falls on the same day of the week — forever. …  To account for extra time, Hanke and Henry drop leap years and instead create a "leap week" at the end of December every five or six years. This extra week, dubbed "Xtr", would adjust for seasonal drift while keeping the 7-day cycle on track.

The two also tackle time:

"The time in Australia is the same as it is for us, but their clocks are set different," Henry said. "We’re just saying, ‘Set your clocks to the same time, because it is the same time.'" All the world’s clocks would be set to Universal Time, or Greenwich Mean Time as it’s generally known. Time zones would be abolished, as would Daylight Saving Time, of which Henry is especially not fond. "Suppose the government decided that in summer we should drink more water, and so in the summer had the size of the quart increase, so that you got more water with a quart," he said. "It’s as stupid as that."