Bible outline

Here is my attempt to show as many of the relations and categories that the different books of the Bible fall into. Instead of using a simple hierarchical graph I simply connected each category to its sub and super sets and connected each book to the one before and after and used Ge-phi to display the network that that created. Sorry this is hard to read I couldn't figure out how to get it to fit full size

A grand idea

I believe there should be a device that looks something like a wall clock, but .for its face has an opening where a long roll of paper with the Bible printed on it is being constantly fed through. This would allow anyone in the room to let there eyes randomly fall on scripture at any time; people in the room could discuss interesting passages that went by as they noticed them. This device should be well designed like a nice clock so that people will be more drawn to it. It would be easy (trivial) to do this electronically as a screen saver, but what would be ideal is if it was actually a scroll printed in one column like one long page that somehow looped so that it would always be scrolling forward, my wife suggested a mobius loop which seems like a good idea but i still cant quite visualize how to roll up part of a loop to keep the object compact.

Emphasizing what the Bible emphasizes

There is a lot of stress placed (rightly) on believing what the Bible teaches. But sometimes I get the feeling that after we have argued over the proper interpretation of one verse for hours and finally found out that it means what we thought it meant to start with, we sometimes are missing the forest for the leaf. The difficulty then is how to figure out how to properly emphasize different parts of the Bible:

perhaps the answer is to treat every word of the Bible with equal weight, and this seems at first like the best plan considering that it is all inspired of God. However it also seems ridiculous to say that 1 Chronicles 2:5 is of equal importance to John 3:16.

One strategy that I thought of would be to take an immense set of cross references and analize them the way Google analyzes hyper links to produce a "verse rank" (look up page rank if you don't know about this, it's pretty interesting) I would love to see this done, but don't know how to do it my self.

http://www.topverses.com/ uses popularity to determine its ranking of diferent Bible verses, there you can find all the verses of the Bible ranked by how often they are used, but this doesn't tell us which are the most important, merely which are believed to be most important.

So, what do you think? how do we determine what Bible passages are more or less important? or what am I missing in asking the question?

C.S.Lewis literary ancestry

In talking with one of my friends I came across the idea of a literary ancestry the idea that all writers were influenced by others and you could make a gigantic family tree of all of them. This project could very easily get out of hand if one attempted to show all the connections (surely in the hundreds for each author) but what if one merely chose the single biggest influence on each author. Now this is shakey ground because who that one influence is is quite debatable, but it is an interesting debate so let us charge forward with it. An easy starting place is C.S.Lewis who names his direct ancestor (his "master") as George MacDonald. MacDonald's work was a turning point in Lewis coming to Christ, Lewis used him as a character in The Great Divorce (as his Virgil, recalling Dante being guided by Virgil), and he made a collection of MacDonald's work. So then who was George Macdonald's bigest influence. The best I could come up with was a man named Novalis who wrote in very-dificult-to-translate German that George MacDonald translated. Now Novalis's childhood hero was Gottfried August Bürger who kept with him at all times Reliques of Ancient Poetry that a fellow named Bishop Percy compiled out of a manuscript of folk tales that he saved from being destroyed. That is my best stab at C.S.Lewis' main line of ancestry. Can you do better?

The Inhabited Web

I just installed The Inhabited Web on this blog, now whenever you are browsing here you can see small indicators along the side of the page that show the position of anyone else who is reading the blog. You can actually see other people who are on the same website with you.

Factor graph

Check this out. It's a pattern that I discovered about six years ago but this fellow has found out much more about it than I did. Here is another fellow who independently discovered the same pattern and whose picture of it I am using here. When I was first looking into it I could not find any references to it any where, considering that it is hard to Google something that you don't know the name of. I called it the factor graph, the first fellow I linked to called it the divisor plot, these are both perfectly logical names but Google is not smart enough to know that they are the same thing ^_^ .

The Lord's Prayer

This is a new project I am working on illuminating the Lord's Prayer with various scriptures that relate to each word, check it out here over at "Prezi". Prezi is a zooming presentation maker that allows me to actually place the other Bible texts inside the letters of the Lord's prayer. I feel that this project could be done better than I am doing it so if you want to try feel free to make a copy of it and improve it (right on the prezi sight). It is not currently finished (right now I have only finished "Our" "Father" and "Heaven") but you can check on my progress at that same link as I go, I will be posting updates and thoughts on the various passages and concepts as I go. It's interesting how a gimmick like this prezi tool makes this project so much more interesting to me than it would be other wise.