Religion, Ecotheology, and Consciousness
http://research.uchicago.edu/highlights/resources/media/roth_512k.mov
The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary is coming to completion (if that’s possible for a dictionary of this scope!) after 80 years of hard work:
Martha Roth, Ph.D., Professor of Assyriology, discusses the final volume of the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, a comprehensive lexicon of ancient Akkadian dialects 86 years in the making. Roth has served as Editor-in-Charge of the project for the past 11 years.
Um… yes.
I was fortunate enough to take a couple of courses on Shakespeare from the great Dr. John Cobb at Wofford College. Prof Cobb was beyond phenomenal and his presentation of Shakespeare changed my life and helped me understand the power of word, language and literature.
Evidently that’s not the case for almost half of NC college students (unfortunately):
According to a study by The John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy study, 48 percent of North Carolina colleges and universities do not require English majors to take a Shakespeare class to graduate. The center is a Raleigh-based nonprofit.
CITIZEN-TIMES.com: Schools mixed on requiring Shakespeare-devoted classes
I’m presenting a workshop that’s sort of a “how to” on affiliate marketing and “web2.0” (blogs, video, etc).
You can see the slides from the presentation here:
http://docs.google.com/Presentation?id=ahndmmnhz3b_2475n7xvp
I was amazed at the last Buncombe County Democrats convention that there was such a strong presence of delegates who wanted to pass a measure stating that the NC State Gov’t should not require vaccinations of children based on fears of heavy metal poisoning, autism, etc.
I’ve followed some of Robert Kennedy Jr’s work in this area, but I have to tell you that I’m not convinced. Anna (who is a physician) and I have had many conversations about childhood vaccinations, especially since the birth of Mary Hudson. Sure there is some corruption by the big pharma companies, but in general, I’d rather have MH protected from such preventable things as the whopping cough (which seems to be prevalent here in Asheville b/c of the number of children that aren’t vaccinated by choice). Here’s a fun riff on the subject:On the other hand, pharma-funded think tank wingnuts say the real problem is baseless lawsuits by money-grubbing autistic kids. Either way, you just know the issue is screwed up when Mississippi and West Virginia come off sounding like the reasonable ones.
Crazy Hippies Pose As Jesusfreaks To Avoid Vaccinating Their Kids — Daddy Types
JANES (Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society) is online at the Jewish Theological Seminary! Lots of fun Assyriology and Hebrew Bible material to dig through!
Thanks to PaleoJudaica for the tip.
JANES, the Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society, was founded in 1968 at Columbia University, and has been housed at the Jewish Theological Seminary since 1982. Over these approximately forty years 30 volumes have been published under the editorship of JTS professors Ed Greenstein and David Marcus.
Articles have been written on all aspects of the Bible and Ancient Near East covering areas such as art history, archaeology, anthropology, language, linguistics, philology, and religion. There are articles on Assyriology, Ugaritic, Phoenician, Hittite, and all areas of Hebrew and Aramaic and on almost every book of the Bible.
JANES at the JTS
Since Google owns my email, feed reading, docs&spreadsheets, web history, attention data, calendaring, etc I could proclaim them as a deity as well (thanks to Larry McGehee for the link):
The Church of Google – Googlism – Proof Google is God!
We at the Church of Google believe the search engine Google is the closest humankind has ever come to directly experiencing an actual God (as typically defined). We believe there is much more evidence in favour of Google’s divinity than there is for the divinity of other more traditional gods.
» The Church of Google
Holy Bibble is by far my favorite (web) comic. Today’s episode is great:
Laban’s SignsInteresting new book-in-progress by Siva Vaidhyanathan with the subtitle “How one company is disrupting culture, commerce, and community – and why we should worry.”
This reminds me of Cory Doctorow’s excellent piece called “Scroogled” which supposes what would happen if (when?) Google goes evil. Fun stuff to ponder as I surf through my GMail and Google Reader and GCal and Google Notebook and Google Desktop and… well… you get the point:This blog, the result of a collaboration between myself and the Institute for the Future of the Book, is dedicated to exploring the process of writing a critical interpretation of the actions and intentions behind the cultural behemoth that is Google, Inc. The book will answer three key questions: What does the world look like through the lens of Google?; How is Google’s ubiquity affecting the production and dissemination of knowledge?; and how has the corporation altered the rules and practices that govern other companies, institutions, and states?
This my new favorite song.
Who else but They Might Be Giants could bring Ashurbanipal into a pop song?? I give it 5 awesome’s (out of a possible 5).
Thanks to Laughing Squid for the link to the video and also to The Mesopotamians t shirt!
They Might Be Giants – The Mesopotamians
http://lads.myspace.com/videos/vplayer.swf
Add to My Profile | More Videos
The book (Steven Holloway’s excellent work Orientalism, Assyriology and the Bible) where I was footnoted for the first time (Prof Ben Foster of Yale’s Ancient Near Eastern Dept cited my work Asia Has Claims Upon New England) was just reviewd by the Review of Biblical Literature.
How I found this book is a great story… I was in Nashville this past Spring for the regional meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature / American Academy of Religion meeting and hit the bookstore that had been set up at the conference. While scanning a book table, I noticed the unusual cover and read the title. Immediately, I knew I had to have this book (not too many non-journal publications on Assyriology these days). I had to wait until the last day of the show to pick the book up because it was the only copy the publisher had with them and they wanted to keep it on display. So, as my group was headed out of Nashville, I stopped by and picked it up and began flipping through the pages. I noticed that one section was written by an old Yale Prof (well, I never had a class with him, but I did take a class with his wife and I did bird sit for them one summer). As I skimmed through his article, my name caught my eye and I had to do a triple take before I realized I had been footnoted by a top Professor in the field of Ancient Near East studies. It was quite a moment for me… it’s the little things, you know?
Nonetheless, I can’t say this is good bed time reading for the general public, but if you’re into history or 19th Century “western” perceptions of ancient history, this is a must-read:
Description: “Orientalism” refers both to the academic study of the Orient and to Western scholarship that clings to stock images of the timeless East and oriental despotism. This landmark collection of essays, the first in its field, is written by seasoned art historians, Assyriologists and biblical specialists; it is organized under four rubrics:
Just picked up Macy from the vet’s office after her surgery for a torn ACL. She’s doing great and has officially joined the stitch club with Schaefer and Sylvia. With all of our pups’ surgeries, amputations and blocked intestines, we’ll be more than prepared for Mary Hudson’s schoolyard bumps and bruises that will inevitably happen!
ConvergeSouth is happening this Friday and Saturday down the mountain in Greensboro, NC. I’ll be speaking there on affiliate marketing and web2.0 stuff, but there will be some real luminaries from the tech world there as well. Should be a blast!They’ve even put together a spiffy map if you’re in town:
ConvergeSouth 2007 Venues:Google Maps
Let me know if you’ll be there and we’ll grab a coffee.
While downloading mail from GMail via pop today (something I do every month) I got this wonderful screen on my GMail acct (which, of course I use for work and personal mail):
That’ll learn me, eh? Especially after I left a few glowing comments about GMail on Andrew Wee’s post about GMail memory usage.
I’m chocking on the irony here, folks.
Anyways, if you want to reach me please use the me@samharrelson.com address.
I’ve been using the release client of Ubuntu 7.10 (the final release is due this Thursday) for the last few days and think it’s a great step forward for the Ubuntu distro. Lots of great features (better power management, integrated Compiz, better monitor resolution, new Gimp, Tracker search etc) make this my favorite distro so far.
Just wanted to note that this morning there was a huge update in the repositories for all sorts of programs and the Ubuntu desktop. So, if you’re already using 7.10, prepare to hand over some cycles to the update manager!
I’ve been following the Ellington Hotel / Condo issue here in Asheville for a while and I still don’t understand the various arguments from the critics (“the building is too high!” “it will cause too much traffic on Biltmore!”, etc). While I am a fan of sustainable growth, it doesn’t seem as if the Ellington will add anything unbearable to the Asheville skyline or the already crazy traffic on Biltmore. The locals know how to avoid all that anyway 🙂
ASHEVILLE – For opponents of The Ellington hotel and condominium building, a key question as the project goes to City Council tonight is whether city streets can handle the additional traffic. For backers, the answer is clear: no problem.
Seems like more political pandering by city council members seeking re-election to me.
CITIZEN-TIMES.com: Ellington critics question accuracy of traffic studyPowered by ScribeFire.
Macy tore her ACL on Sunday while doing her favorite thing in the world… chasing squirrels around the yard.
She’s undergoing surgery on Tuesday morning to repair the tear, so keep her in your thoughts if you don’t mind. She’s not happy about being benched or going through rehab.
Put me in Coach on Flickr – Photo Sharing!
Powered by ScribeFire.
Steve Rubel writes on his MicroPersuasion blog that there is a looming recession in the pay per click advertising business and gives 5 reasons why he thinks this is so:
For the last several years, search engine marketing has been on a tear. While the big advertisers sat on the sidelines in the beginning, they have lately been ramping up their spend on pay-per-click advertising, primarily on search engines but also affiliate sites like those that run Google Adsense.
However, I am calling a top to this market now. Here are five reasons why a pay-per-click advertising recession looms. (If you depend on Adsense for the bulk of your revenue, this applies to you as well.)
Steve is an always thoughtful writer and one of my favorite bloggers, so you should definitely head over and read his 5 reasons.
Nonetheless, I have to disagree a bit (not just because I work for a paid search agency). I’ll keep it short and sweet and say that Steve is correct in his 5 reasons as to why pure search marketing on a PPC metric will hit a glass ceiling (if it hasn’t already). However, smart marketers and advertisers have already noticed this trend and have positioned themselves to evolve with the marketplace. This is especially true with his #2 (“Transition to CPA”) and #3 (“Rising Costs”) reasons. However, there is still a promising market for the search companies and agencies wise enough to blend PPC into a CPA or affiliate model and insure performance metrics that work out on the back end. Rising costs are definitely an issue for the PPC world to tackle with, especially in the realm of ad networks like Commission Junction with their respective commission structures. The trick there, as many search agencies have already figured out, is to go direct. So, I agree with Steve that the PPC model in its pure state will see a cap or even downturn. However, smart marketers and advertisers have already seen the writing on the walls (or search results) and have moved to make their businesses flexible and wide enough to deal with these market changes. Look for those agencies to rise to the top.Awesome…
Just when you thought the current crop of “I make money blogging” bloggers couldn’t get any more annoying, here’s even more fuel to the fire:
Ad network AdBrite announced this morning that they have begun selling full-page ad units of the sort that you’ve no doubt seen on some of the bigger, more old-school web sites like PCMag and the New York Times. Now you too can interrupt your readers’ time with a full page ad in the middle of their time on your site.
More power to the “I make money blogging and so can you!” crowd out there, but I just don’t see why you’d want to pollute your space of creativity and expression with ads that are probably not going to make you much (if any) money anyway. Sure, a few ads here and there are fine, but interrupting your readers attention and experience by throwing up a full page ad before they can visit your site or splicing AdSense units into your post just seems pathetic to me.
For bloggers with less than a million page views per month, the trade off just doesn’t seem worth it since all you’re doing is propping up the ad networks by participating in these schemes.
AdBrite: Full Page “Skip This Ad” Units Now Available for Everyone
One of my main passions offline is research into Dura Europos. I had the privilege to catalogue, photograph and work with much of what remains of Dura Europos’ artwork while a grad student at Yale (Yale led the Dura Europos excavations in the 1930’s and brought thousands and thousands of pieces back to the Yale Art Gallery where much of it resides in the basement of the Gallery now).
I’ve always been intrigued by the Synagogue at Dura Europos. It’s an amazing and even puzzling place for westerners who like to assume that Jewish communities have always followed the non-graven images rule strictly in their worship spaces since Sinai. However, the Dura Europos Synagogue is filled with artwork, both biblical and pagan in nature, and shows a complex artistic tradition that extended beyond the Syrian desert where Dura Europos is located.
Here’s a well thought out (and researched) post expanding that idea entitled “The Protestant Revision of History” from the Turretin Debate Blog (Turretin was a Reformed theologian who was especially influential in Calvinist and Puritan circles… evidently this blog should be read through those lens):
Neither were later Jews against images and veneration. The ancient synagogue at Dura-Europos, which was destroyed in the mid 200s AD is filled with icons and imagery. And ancient house churches from the same period were also found containing icons. As the Christians inherited Jewish worship practices, they must have been guided in interpretation of Exodus 20:4 by the Jewish practices, which clearly were not iconoclastic. No wonder Orthodox churches are covered in images, since the Jewish synagogues were the same. And yet there is no condemnation of the Jews by Christians over this issue…Protestants think to themselves that the early church must have been
primitive and basic, with no relationship to the ornate and colourful
world of Orthodoxy with its churches and vestments. But the facts and
archeology say differently. Ancient Jewish and Christian worship is
characterised by the ornate, by images, icons and symbolism. The
ancient Christian catacombs contain icons, including those of Mary
holding the Christ child as would be familiar to any Orthodox
Christian. (Ouspensky, Leonid, Theology of the Icon, Vol 1, Crestwood,
NY (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press), c1978, pp. 74-75).
Fun stuff to ponder on a beautiful Monday afternoon!
I use a service called “Callwave” to handle my voicemail. Basically, it turns incoming voicemail into txt messages so I don’t have to listen to every message.
Or that’s what it’s supposed to do. Looks like the service has been down all morning and I can’t login to my account via the website to even check on things or cancel my account. I’ve spoken to a couple of other Callwave users who are seeing the same thing on their accounts.
They’ve got a blog but haven’t updated it with any issues today. Ugh.
Looks like I’m declaring voicemail bankruptcy! The joys of being an early adopter…
Callwave
Everyone loves fame (except for the wise ones), so it’s no surprise that there’s been an over abundance of “popular” lists and rankings emerging from all areas of the blogosphere lately.
The sad fact is that no one really cares.
Hot on the heels of the Techmeme Leaderboard, the newest offenders are Scoble and TechCrunch:
So Google recently made it fairly easy to determine the number of Google Reader subscribers around a particular blog. Gabe Rivera at Techmeme did a little work on excel and came up with an unofficial list of the top blogs and the number of subscribers each blog has on Google Reader. He sent the list around to people for comments – with his permission we’ve published it below.
Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim has the right idea:
Here’s some honesty. I love seeing Marketing Pilgrim on any list–like many bloggers–and I suggested MP be added to this new list. Guilty, as charged. But then I stopped and asked, “when will this blog-list insanity stop?” Do we really need to keep compiling lists of top blogs?
The blogosphere is all about the “long tail.” If we continue to highlight only the top 0.0001% blogs we do nothing but encourage the echo-chamber when instead we should be trying to delve deeper/wider into the blogosphere.
I’ve recently discovered a great trick to get past my disgust at such navel gazing… unsubscribing. Seriously, it works wonders to vote with your feet eyeballs attention and let the free market figure out when bloggers have spent too much time staring into the puddle of Narcissus.
There’s a wide world of incredible things happening online in terms of new platforms, new programs and new marketing paradigms… I’d rather focus on those and read bloggers who are doing the same instead of admiring the size of their feed numbers.
Two of my favorite writers, Cory Doctorow and Ursula K Le Guin, are in a bit of a spat over the perception of fair use and creative commons in relation to a short Le Guin piece that Doctorow published on the uber popular boingboing.net blog:
In a nutshell: I quoted, in its entirety, a one-paragraph story that Ms Le Guin sent to the fanzine Ansible, in which she made fun of a book review in Slate that said that Michael Chabon “has spent considerable energy trying to drag the decaying corpse of genre fiction out of the shallow grave where writers of serious literature abandoned it.” Le Guin’s paragraph was a long one, about 500 words, and I pasted the whole thing in, because I thought it was delightful.
In my own non-important view, I have to side with Doctorow here… he seemed to have nothing but the best of intentions and wanted to introduce a new crowd of readers from boingboing to Le Guin’s excellent work. Additionally, his explanation of Fair Use seems to be right on… but I’m not a copyright lawyer (thank the gods), so what do I know?
Yet again, here’s an instance of the offline and online publishing worlds having a difficult time grok-ing the intricacies of each others’ systems, customs and practices.
You say tomato, I say tomato… let’s call the whole thing off.
Stephen Colbert assumes the role of Maureen Dowd in today’s NY Times. Very very funny:
Surprised to see my byline here, aren’t you? I would be too, if I read The New York Times. But I don’t. So I’ll just have to take your word that this was published. Frankly, I prefer emoticons to the written word, and if you disagree :(I’d like to thank Maureen Dowd for permitting/begging me to write her column today. As I type this, she’s watching from an overstuffed divan, petting her prize Abyssinian and sipping a Dirty Cosmotinijito. Which reminds me: Before I get started, I have to take care of one other bit of business:
Bad things are happening in countries you shouldn’t have to think about. It’s all George Bush’s fault, the vice president is Satan, and God is gay.
There. Now I’ve written Frank Rich’s column too.
Great stuff… go read the whole thing.
I’ve had a couple of people email me to find out where the videos and pics of Mary Hudson, etc are located on the web.
Pictures: http://photos.samharrelson.com (or you can just go straight to my Flickr site which is the same thing).
Videos: http://tv.samharrelson.com (or you can just go straight to my YouTube site which is the same thing).
There’s a constant stream of pics and videos flowing these days since Mary Hudson is having a lot of “firsts!” so be sure to check in or subscribe to those places if you’re into feed reading.
BTW, I’m also a heavy Twitter user. If you’re a user add me (http://www.twitter.com/samharrelson) or sign up and give it a go. It’s good for your constitution.
Wow (you have to watch all 8 mins):
Thanks to Ze Frank for the link.
What does this say about the affiliate marketing industry when leading “affiliates” …er… publishers can’t decide on a proper definition for themselves. Let’s debate how many angels can dance on the head of a pin next:
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Affiliates Grow Up and Exit
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