Joey Gibson's Blog

Two Updates and a Trophy

2010-03-17T13:19:09Z

Update, the First: As I said back on February 19, I’m working on translating the Gospel of Luke from Greek into English as a Lenten project. Once I changed the project from simply reading the text in Greek, to translating and analyzing the Greek text in two different forms and writing down a reasonable translation, I knew that my timeline was going to shift. I am now certain that I won’t be finished with the project before Easter. There’s just no way around it. I haven’t had nearly as much time for translation as I’d hoped, and the additional research takes up what little time I do have. Does this mean I’m giving up on the project? No. What it means is that even though I won’t be finished by Easter, I’m going to continue the work until it’s completed, however long that might take. If I’m still working on it in May, that’s fine. I will complete it, it just won’t be when I originally planned.

Update, the Second: As I said on March 1, I have started a new exercise regimen. I am getting up at 5:00 AM, Sunday – Friday, to workout. (To be honest, I have slept in until 5:30 a couple of days.) Each day I get up, do some warmups to get my blood pumping, and then practice every Tae Kwon Do kick, block and punch that I’ve learned so far, multiple times per side. I then go through my TKD forms (3 of them, so far), and then do pushups & sit-ups or squats. I may be dropping the 100 Push-Ups challenge from the regimen, for now, because yesterday when I tried to do a push-up, my right biceps made a sound that was not a good one, and it felt like if I continued, something was going to snap. Last Thursday, the last 5 push-ups really hurt, and not in that “pain is just fear leaving the body” sort of way. This was “if you do one more of these, at least one muscle in this group is going to break” way. I need to at least lay off the push-ups for a week or so and then try again. We’ll see.

The good news is that so far, I’ve lost 13 pounds. It’s been well over a year since I’ve been at this weight, so I’m quite happy with that. I just need to stay motivated and keep at it.

And finally, the trophy. I’ve been a member of Grayson NPS Tae Kwon Do since August 2009. This past weekend, 22 of us went to the ICMA Region 2 Martial Arts Tournament. I was part of the demo team, which took 2nd place (out of 7 teams) in the team demo competition. I also won 3rd place (out of 5) for martial arts forms (I did Taegeuk Ee Jang, for those of you familiar with TKD). Between us, we won 14 trophies, which is pretty darn good.

Much video was shot of the various competitions. As it gets posted, I will provide links.

My New Habit: Getting In Shape

2010-03-01T13:38:56Z

Anyone who has known me for any length of time knows that I’ve pretty much always had a weight problem. Even if you don’t know me, you can see from that picture over there to the right, that I’m a big guy.

I don’t like that.

I’ve tried many times to lose the weight and get into proper shape, with varying degrees of success. Back in 2001, I joined Weight Watchers, and thanks to an excellent leader, I lost 40 pounds in just over a year. Now, eight years later, all of those pounds are back, and then some. With a rather large value for “some”, too.

Last August, I joined a Tae Kwon Do club, which has me working out for two hours each week, and while I know that has helped, that alone is not enough. Last week, I had my six-month visit with my doctor. I was all excited to tell him that I was doing Tae Kwon Do, but the day before my visit, I got on the scale. I was heartbroken. Not only was I heavier than the last time I visited him, I was at my heaviest ever. It may sound unbelievable to say that it snuck up on me, but it did.

And that day, I made a decision: Being fat sucks, and I’m not going to accept that any more. The weight problem ends, now.

So, what am I doing? Getting up earlier, for one thing. Starting yesterday (Sunday morning), I am now getting up at 5:00 AM, Sunday through Friday. I have a workout plan that consists of doing certain things every day, and other things on a rotating basis. The do-every-day list consists of

jumping jacks (40+)
stretches
kicks, 10x on each leg
- front
- roundhouse
- side
- back
- inside-out crescent
- outside-in crescent
- axe
- hook
blocks, 10x
- low
- inside
- outside
- high
punches, 10x
- middle
- 2x middle
- 3x middle
- high
- side
- cross
- low
- down
forms, 5x
- Four Directions
- Taegeuk Il Jang (form 1)
- Taegeuk Ee Jang (form 2)

That’s the stuff I’m doing every day. On Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday, I am doing both the One Hundred Pushups and the Two Hundred Situps programs. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday, I am doing the Two Hundred Squats program. All three of these plans have you take a day off between plan days, so this works out well. Pushups and situps go well together, and squats can be happy on their own. Thanks to iPhone apps for each of these programs, I can feed my geek nature and get in shape at the same time. And after completing a plan day, each app updates my Twitter and Facebook streams with my progress: #100pushups, #200situps, #200squats.

What about Saturday, you ask? Well, I’m probably going to sleep until 7:00 AM or so, and then I have Tae Kwon Do practice at 9:30. I don’t think I could handle two workouts in the same morning, at least not yet. :-)

I will be updating the blog with progress reports as I move through this life-change, this new habit. I’m only two days into it, but I can tell something is different from the last time I tried to change myself. It’s going to work this time. I know it.

Getting up at 5:00 also has other benefits, which is why I chose that time. The first thing I will do each morning is my workout. Then shower and change clothes, and then eat a good breakfast. (I haven’t been eating breakfast on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which are the days I have to drive to my office.) After breakfast, and the checking of email, Twitter and Facebook, I plan to spend one to two hours on my Greek studies. As you know, I’m translating the entire gospel of Luke for Lent, and I’m two days behind the pace right now. I need to get caught up, or I won’t finish on time. This extra time every day will help me achieve that goal.

Wish me luck. :-)

I’m Glad the Ho’s Can Find Gainful Employment

2010-03-01T04:42:12Z

Submitted without further comment:

I’m Working on My Greek – Hard!

2010-02-27T04:18:01Z

From an interview with Daniel B. Wallace, there is this question and Dr. Wallace’s response

Lastly, if there is one piece of advice you could give to someone entering New Testament Greek scholarship, what would it be?

Work on your languages hard. Without a solid foundation in Greek and Hebrew—and for doctoral students—German and French and/or Latin, Coptic, and Syriac—you can’t have an influence on biblical studies. It’s imperative that you take language acquisition and maintenance very, very seriously.

Well, I’m working hard on my Greek, as you can probably tell. I had some French in high school, and I do have a book on Coptic that I plan to read at some point. I definitely have plans to learn Hebrew, after I reach a certain point in my Greek studies. Where that point is, I don’t know. I suppose I’ll know it when I see it.

As for picking up German, Latin or Syriac, or of advancing in French… I need 63 hour days… :-(

A Comma Can Make Quite a Difference

2010-02-21T00:36:23Z

As I said, I am reading the book of Luke in Greek as a Lenten project. At the urging of a friend, I have decided to write down my translation, which I will post here when completed. So today, I started working on the verses I’d already read, but had not written down. As I was doing this, I decided to read the Greek not only in my UBS4, but also in my Byzantine text. (The Byzantine textform is essentially the Greek text that underlies the Textus Receptus, which was used by the translators of the King James bible, so it is quite different in some places from the NA27/UBS4.) I have now noted two places in my translation where there are differences between them.

The one that was most interesting today was Luke 1:35b. Here it is from the UBS4,

διὸ καὶ τὸ γεννώμενον ἅγιον κληθήσεται, υἱὸς θεοῦ.

And here it is from the Byzantine,

διὸ καὶ τὸ γεννώμενον ἅγιον κληθήσεται υἱὸς θεοῦ.

Can you spot the difference? The UBS4 has a comma after κληθήσεται, but the Byzantine does not. Thus, the UBS4 would be translated something like,

And because of this, the one who is born will be called holy, the son of God.

But without the comma, the Byzantine comes across something like this,

And because of this, the holy one who is born will be called the son of God.

You can argue that there’s not a whole lot of difference between the two, and there probably isn’t, but the feel of the two is different. At least I think it is. The King James bible takes it even farther, with unusually awkward language,

therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God.

I think I’ll stick with my UBS4 translation. :-)

Of course, in antiquity, when these documents were originally written down, they didn’t use any punctuation at all. Or spaces between words! It wasn’t until the Middle Ages (I believe) before Greek writing included spaces, punctuation and accents. So, the placement of a comma or not is certainly up for debate.

I said I’d noticed two differences between the two texts, and even though this one has nothing to do with a comma, I will point it out for those who care. It is an additional clause in Gabriel’s greeting to Mary in Luke 1:28. The UBS4 has,

καὶ εἰσελθὼν πρὸς αὐτὴν εἶπεν, Χαῖρε, κεχαριτωμένη, ὁ κύριος μετὰ σοῦ.

and the Byzantine has

καὶ εἰσελθὼν πρὸς αὐτὴν εἶπεν, Χαῖρε, κεχαριτωμένη· ὁ κύριος μετὰ σοῦ, εὐλογημένη σὺ ἐν γυναιξίν.

The first would be translated,

And he went in to her and said, “Greetings, O favored one, the Lord is with you!”

And the second,

And he went in to her and said, “Greetings, O favored one; the Lord is with you. Blessed are you among women.”

There was a bit of a punctuation change, a semicolon for a comma, but nothing major. The real difference was that the Byzantine had the extra bit about being blessed among women. I love this sort of thing, by the way: seeing differences between manuscript traditions and thinking about why one has something and another does not. I can’t tell you why the Byzantine has the extra clause and the UBS4 doesn’t, but it’s still an interesting thing to think about.

My Lenten Project: Reading Luke In Greek

2010-02-19T14:36:40Z

In 2007, I announced that I was going to try to translate all of the book of Jude from Greek into English as a Lenten project. It did not go well. I realized pretty quickly that my skills were not at a point where I could do the work, and so I quietly stopped working on it after a few days, and never mentioned it again.

Now it’s three years later, my translation skills have improved, and I have more confidence. I heard about this Yahoo group called LentenGreekReading a couple of weeks ago and their announced plans to tackle the book of Luke for Lent. I joined the group and on Ash Wednesday, I began my reading.

Lent, as you may recall, lasts 40 days. Well, we say it lasts 40 days, but the actual time varies by denomination. Basically, you just don’t count the Sundays between Ash Wednesday and Holy Saturday (the day before Easter). If you do that, you get 40 days, even though it’s really 46. Anyway, Lent is observed by the Catholic church, and some Protestant denominations, like mine, the United Methodist Church. While Lent is traditionally a time of fasting and self-denial, more recently, some Protestants have used it as a time of devotion to a special purpose or project. Hence, the reading plan.

So on Ash Wednesday, I read Luke 1:1 – 38, which took me about 2.5 hours. Yes, 2.5 hours to read 38 verses. Those verses covered Luke explaining to Theophilus why he wrote the book and the foretelling of the births of John the Baptist and Jesus,

The next day, I read Luke 1:39 – 66, and that only took about an hour. Yes, there were fewer verses, but I could tell I was moving at a better pace. Those verses included Mary’s visit to Elizabeth, the Magnificat, and the birth of John.

Today’s reading was Luke 1:67 – 2:20. I finished it in about an hour, but I had a bit of a head start, since I had already translated all of Luke 2:1 – 20 for Christmas. This reading included Zechariah’s prophesy about John, and the birth of Jesus.

I am pleased with my progress so far, and I feel good about my changes of actually finishing the project before Easter. I will post occasional updates if I find something interesting in the translation. Wish me luck; I’m sure I’m going to hit some rocky spots along the way.

A Page From A Medieval Greek Bible Is Now Mine – Huzzah!

2010-02-11T20:16:48Z

See those two images up there? Those are scans of my latest acquisition, and I’m so excited about it. It’s a page from a Greek Bible that was printed in 1526. If you don’t want to do the math, that’s 484 years ago. According to the seller,

This is a leaf from a Biblia Graeca, Old Testament (Septuagint), printed in Strassburg by W. Kopfel in 1526. Originally from volume 2 of a 4 volume set and is the third edition of the complete Greek Bible by Johannes Lonicerus (Lonitzer). The octavo paper measures 162 x 99 mm. in totality and contains 30 lines of Ancient Greek script printed single column. The verso contains the same amount of lines and type.

I found this on eBay about two weeks ago, and I just had to have it. It’s nothing really special, as old documents go, but it’s the oldest thing that I have ever owned, and it fits in nicely with my Greek hobby. It contains bits of two chapters of the book of Esther. It starts partially through chapter 6, verse 1, on the front and goes through about half of chapter 7, verse 8, on the back. ~~I can read some of it, but since it’s in Ancient Greek, and I am a student of Koine, it will take some extra effort to actually translate it.~~

One thing that is very interesting about it is the typography. There are symbols that I’ve never seen before, and weird ligatures that make it quite hard to read in places. I don’t know if this is typical of printing in the 1500’s or not.

What I really like about this piece is thinking about what the world was like when it was printed. Think about it: it was printed in 1526. That was only 34 years after Columbus set sail in 1492. The first British colonies in what would eventually become the United States would not be founded for another 81 years. It was printed 9 years after Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg, Germany, and only 5 years after he was excommunicated from the Catholic Church. It was the same year that William Tyndale first published a version of the bible in English.

This thing was printed a long time ago. And now it’s mine.

Video: The Unexpected Blessing

2010-02-05T14:46:38Z

I don’t know which country this commercial aired in, but it’s pretty good. And there’s a twist.

Didn’t see that coming, did you?

Slides From My Presentation on Operator Overloading In Scala

2010-01-16T02:56:09Z

Last night I spoke at the Atlanta Scala Enthusiats meeting about operator overloading and a little on implicit conversions. I think the talk went well as I got lots of really good questions from the audience, and they laughed at my jokes. This presentation grew out of a blog post I wrote a few months ago entitled Scala Gets Operator Overloading Right; I beefed it up and made some slides and more code samples. Incidentally, if you Google for “scala operator overloading” that blog post is the first result.

For those of you who weren’t there, here are my slides and the code samples that go with them. I wrote these samples against Scala 2.7.7.final. They should work with the latest Scala 2.8, but I haven’t verified this.

Operator Overloading In Scala

View more documents from Joey Gibson.

And here’s the source code: oopres.zip

What the Heck Is a Tuple, Anyway?

2010-01-13T14:51:58Z

Yesterday I was talking with a friend about Scala and the subject of tuples came up. We both had a bit of a laugh that neither of us was sure how to pronounce it, though we both leaned toward TUH-ple instead of TOO-ple. Anyway, the utility of tuples in Scala was not immediately apparent to him, so I thought I’d take a whack at explaining it here.

A Tuple in Scala is an immutable container used for storing two or more objects, possibly of different types. While a List or Array can only store objects that all have the same type, Tuples can store objects of any type. The most common use of tuples is when you have a method that needs to return more than one value, but creating a class for that return value is more trouble than it’s worth. It’s true that for same-type objects you could return a List, and for different-type objects you could return a List[Any], but both of these have downsides, which we’ll discuss.

Let’s look at a very contrived example. Let’s say you created a function that takes a string and returns the starting index of the first numbers if finds and the numbers themselves. That code might look like this

def reFind(str: String) = {
	val re = """(\d+)""".r

	val m = re findFirstMatchIn str

	m match {
		case Some(m) => (m.start, str.substring(m.start, m.end))
		case None => (0, "")
	}
}

(I’ve removed any error checking for brevity.) You can see here that we’re creating a regular expression that looks for one or more numbers grouped together. We then match that against the passed-in string. The matching method returns a Some[Match], so we pattern match against that to see if we actually got a match. If we did, we create a tuple with the starting index of the match, and the match itself, and return it. If not, we return a tuple with 0 for the starting index and an empty string.

Calling this function looks like this

scala> val t = reFind("foo 123 bar")
t: (Int, java.lang.String) = (4,123)

You can see that what was returned is something with type (Int, java.lang.String); that’s actually an instance of Scala’s Tuple2 class. (There’s a synonym for Tuple2, called Pair.)

Now that we have this tuple, what do we do with it? If you want to access the values it contains, you do it in a way that might seem a bit strange at first. To get at the elements, you could do this

scala> val i = t._1
i: Int = 4

scala> val m = t._2
m: java.lang.String = 123

There are two things to point out here. First, unlike Lists and Arrays, you don’t use the () notation. You use a method consisting of an underscore and the index of the part you want. Second, unlike Lists and Arrays, tuples are 1-based instead of 0-based. (According to Programming In Scala, this is a nod to Haskell and ML.) Also notice the types of the vals you are assigning. That’s one of the benefits of using a Tuple instead of something like List[Any]; you still get compile-time type safety. Had you instead written the function like this

def reFind(str: String) = {
	val re = """(\d+)""".r

	val m = re findFirstMatchIn str

	m match {
		case Some(m) => List[Any](m.start, str.substring(m.start, m.end))
		case None => List[Any](0, "")
	}
}

and called it, look what happens when you try to store the Int index in a local variable

scala> val l = reFind("foo 123 bar")
l: List[Any] = List(4, 123)

scala> val i: Int = l(0)
<console>:10: error: type mismatch;
 found   : Any
 required: Int
       val i: Int = l(0)
                    ^

You would get a similar error trying to assign the String element to a local String val. That’s the major downside to using a List[Any]. (In the first example I used Scala’s type inference to set the types of the local variables; this time I wanted to be explicit to show the failure.)

As I mentioned earlier, you could define a class just to handle the return values of this function. There is nothing wrong with that solution, and some will find it superior to using a tuple, because you can assign meaningful names to the elements. You could define it like this

class ReResult(val index: Int, val part: String)

def reFind(str: String) = {
	val re = """(\d+)""".r

	val m = re findFirstMatchIn str

	m match {
		case Some(m) => new ReResult(m.start, str.substring(m.start, m.end))
		case None => new ReResult(0, "")
	}
}

and call it like this

scala> val l = reFind("foo 123 bar")
l: ReResult = ReResult@57c52e72

scala> val i: Int = l.index
i: Int = 4

scala> val m: String = l.part
m: String = 123

If you think this is more maintainable, then by all means, use it. If you just want to easily return more than one value from a function, then consider using a tuple.

Another point on tuples is that you can assign all the elements of a tuple to local variables in a single step, rather than using multiple calls. So this is equivalent to all the assignments from the earlier examples

scala> val (i: Int, m: String) = l
i: Int = 4
m: String = 123

Depending on what you’re doing, this could be a useful way to get at the elements.

And one more thing. There are tuple classes that range from two elements all the way up to twenty-two. The classes are named Tuple2, Tuple3 … Tuple22. The () notation for creating tuples applies all the way up to twenty-two arguments, so you rarely need to actually use the class names. For example,

scala> val t = (23, "foo", 18.0)
t: (Int, java.lang.String, Double) = (23,foo,18.0)

scala> t.getClass
res31: java.lang.Class[_] = class scala.Tuple3

scala> val t1 = ('a', "quick", 23, "year-old", """foxy""".r, List(1, 2, 3))
t1: (Char, java.lang.String, Int, java.lang.String, scala.util.matching.Regex, List[Int]) = (a,quick,23,year-old,foxy,List(1, 2, 3))

scala> t1.getClass
res32: java.lang.Class[_] = class scala.Tuple6

I’m not going to provide an example of creating a Tuple22; that is left as an exercise. :-) I would argue that if you need more than three elements, you really should define a class to hold them. I think that beyond three elements it gets difficult to keep them straight. Tuples are great for holding two or three pieces of information, but don’t go crazy with them.