Logos Bible Software Blog

July 7, 2008

Chili Cook-Off 2008!

Today's guest blogger is Adam Navarrete, who works in the marketing department here at Logos.

A few weeks ago, I started renting and watching HBO’s John Adams. It has been an interesting and exciting series to watch. I chose the optional facts-popups to display during the episodes in order to learn about the underlying facts that are relevant to the scene, and have to say that I have found a new patriotism welling within me. Not wanting to miss further facts, I went down to my local library and checked out the book John Adams by David McCullough, on which the movie was based, in order to learn more about our founding fathers and what it was like for them to gain the freedom and independence we celebrated this holiday weekend. Before shutting our doors here at Logos in order to celebrate Independence Day, we went out with a bang (of-sorts) of our own—our annual Chili Cook-Off.

Twenty chilies lined the kitchen wall by noon, each with its distinct sign, smell, taste, and toppings. It is rumored that one contestant wanted to see how well an out-of-the-can chili would fare against the homemade chilies and so he heated up canned chili.

One surprising entrant in the cook off was Sarah Knepper, a Logos employee for all of three days! She is a welcomed addition to the graphics/marketing department and is clearly not intimidated around here. Nor is our Bible Study Magazine editor, John Barry. His Mama Victoria's Turkey Chili took home the win by a landslide. If his chili is in any way a foreshadowing of the magazine, we are in for an amazing treat come September. Bringing in the second place trophy was Jerry Godfrey, manager of customer service and organizer of this year’s event. Third place went to D&E’s Johnny Cisneros.

If recipes become available, we’ll be sure to share them.

June 18, 2008

8th Annual Logos Curry Cook-Off!

Today's guest blogger is Adam Navarrete, who works in the marketing department here at Logos.

Once again one of our quarterly cook-offs has come and gone. While there were some familiar faces in this year’s bunch, a few stepped aside so a new group of competitors could get a chance to claim the prestigious “Curry Champion” title.

The halls were quickly filled to overflowing as the inter-office email was sent out informing employees that the competition was underway.

As usual, the meal was blessed in prayer before the awaited array of curries and steamed rice was fair game. With the head-count nearing one hundred and fifty in the office, it was a mad dash to the front of the line to make sure a sample of the competing curries was available.

Once everyone had a chance to get their curry samples, side dish of rice, and a drink from the free-drink refrigerator, tasting each and deciding on a winner was in order.

After the votes were tallied, the cooks gathered in the large conference room and provided a little information about their recipe before the top three curries were revealed.

The number three spot went to Electronic Text Development’s (ETD) Anthony Apodaca and his Roasted Red Pepper Curry. Challenging for the number one spot was Paul Williams, also from ETD, who settled for second with his Number Two Vindaloo. And the winner of the 2008 Curry Cook-Off was Eli Evans from Design and Editorial, who prepared Red Pepper Beef.

The winners have graciously agreed to share their secret recipes with you. Enjoy!

See also the past Curry Cook-Off posts from 2007 and 2006.

April 28, 2008

Who Has the Logos Blog on Their Blogroll?

In the blog post on Friday, April 18, we invited you to add us to your blogroll and to let us know by leaving a comment on that post and sending an email to blog@logos.com. I thoroughly enjoyed checking out your blogs. I was already aware of a good number of them, but many were new to me.

Here's the list of everyone who responded, in chronological order:

Nick Norelli: Rightly Dividing the Word of Truth

Eric Morgan: Eric G. Morgan

Reid Ferguson: ResponsiveReiding

Charles Savelle: BibleX

Jonathan Swales: The Theological Ramblings of an Anglican Ordinand

"Roger Mugs": Theologer

Jason Siemens: Pastor Jason

Chuck Cherry: Scribblings

Richard Wilson: Bibbia Blog

Shawn Anthony: Lo-Fi Tribe

Randy McRoberts: The Upward Way Press

Andrew Tatusko Notes from Off-Center

Rob Kuefner: Why Would Anyone Read This?

Jay Crisostomo: Mu-pa?d-da

Mark Ward: MarkLWardJr

Kevin Purcell: KevinPurcell.org

Nathan Stitt: Discipulus Scripturae

Justin Langley: Woe to Me If I Do Not Preach the Gospel

Wendy Morgan WendyHMorgan

Mark Hoffman: Biblical Studies and Technological Tools

Garrett Ho: Seminarian

Terry Lange: From the Unknown

Adam Couturier: Thoughts from a Young, Slightly Cantankerous, Aspiring Theologian

Mike Aubrey: ?? ?????: Thoughts and Meditations

Stephen Jones: The Desert Chronicle

Mike Johnson: The Siberian Grinder

Howard Diehl: Sans Contexte

John Fidel: Bible Software Newsletter and Comments

Andy Naselli: Thoughts on Exegetical, Biblical, Historical, Systematic, and Practical Theology

Robert Austell: Lighthouse/Searchlight Church

Brian Henderson: TheGatherings!

Wilson Tan: The Inklings' Cafe

Michael Wilson: Living Free Today

Alan Gielczyk: The Truth IN Context

Samuel Powell: Nerd Heaven

Thomas C. Black: Truth Is Still Truth

John Norman: Truth Is Still Truth

Jacob Hantla: Hantla.com

Vitali Zagorodnov: Three Ways to Live

Pastor Wit: I Do You To Wit

Steven Baxley: Pleonast.com

Sean Boisen: ??????

Jeremiah Gumm: The Shepherd’s Study

Steve Allen: A Sermon a Day...

Christopher Gallagher: Preacher’s Pen

Jeff Brown: By Grace Alone

Brandon Schmidt: Shore Youth Ministry

Matt Flummer: Said at New Orleans Seminary

David Wells: Reformed Cruiser

Go give them a visit and find out how others are putting Logos to use.

If you have Logos in your blogroll but missed out, leave a note in the comments with a link to your blog.

April 21, 2008

Yo Quiero Salsa!

Whether they integrated pineapple, mango, shrimp or good ol’ cilantro the entries at the 2008 Logos Salsa Cook-Off did not disappoint. Sixteen Logos employees entered their best recipes in today’s cook-off – some were time-honored family secrets and others were spur-of-the-moment culinary experiments.

Today’s winner was long time Logos employee Tom Fay from the Dealer Sales department and his salsa titled "Clasico Domingo Salsa." There are always some creative names in this competetion but (in my humble opinion) winner of this year’s “Best Name Award” goes to Miles Custis of ETD with “The Michael Scott Dunder Mifflin Scranton Meredith Palmer Memorial Rabies Awareness Salsa.”

In all it was another great cook-off. The chips were salty. The salsas were spicy. And a great time was had by all.

Click on any of the images below to view a larger version.

April 17, 2008

Spider Webs, Video Games, and Fun at the Office

It's no surprise to regular readers of this blog that we like to have fun. While our fun usually involves food (our 2008 Salsa Cook-Off is tomorrow, by the way), sometimes it's just a good prank.

Vincent Setterholm, who works in our design and editorial department and contributes to the blog on occasion, has been enjoying a pretty good chunk of vacation time. (Some of us were starting to wonder if he still worked here.) David Mitchell, one of our developers, and Ben Swier, our systems administrator, decided that this was the perfect opportunity to decorate Vincent's office for him.

A prank like this doesn't have to be in response to anything, but in this case there was a little payback going on. Last September on the day of the launch of a well-known video game, Vincent decided he'd have a little fun with Ben. He hid Ben's brand new copy of the game (simply moving it 4 feet from its original resting place) while Ben was out of his office. Ben had been eagerly awaiting that day and had big plans to celebrate with some friends, so he was more than disappointed when it suddenly disappeared. Vincent was kind enough to show Ben where it was later that day, but enough time passed to warrant this nice little decoration party.

Vincent returned to the office yesterday. When I asked him if he had an official response to share with you, our blog readers, he declined to comment. He did point out, though, that his poor plants didn't get any water in his absence.

Someone even went so far as to take note of their dire situation but do nothing about it.

February 19, 2008

Now on Your Phone!

If you like the Libronix startup sound, you'll love the free Libronix ringtone. Now you can be reminded of your favorite Bible software every time your phone rings. You could even set it up as your alarm sound and wake up to it in the morning!

Imagine how cool it would be to meet another Libronix user in a crowd because one of you had the Libronix ringtone on your phone. Now when you're at the grocery store, the mall, the airport, or a conference, you'll have an instant connection with other users.

Here's what others are saying:

"My Bible-Software-Geek status has just improved by leaps and bounds." —Jacob Hantla

To get the free Libronix ringtone, text the number 349388 to 69937 (MYXER) or visit Myxer and follow the simple instructions. It will work on most phones, but there are a handful of phones whose carriers have disabled this service.

Enjoy!

February 1, 2008

Blogging the Code

Want to get technical? Want a really early preview of upcoming versions of Logos Bible Software? The software developers here at Logos have started a new code blog at code.logos.com. You'll find code snippets, technical discussions, and even some developer introductions.

We get a lot from other technical blogs, and our team wants to join the discussion and contribute what we have learned. With our move to new technologies like .NET 3.5, WPF, and WCF, there's a lot of ground to cover!

To get a taste of what's coming, check out our recent applications: NoteScraps, Shibboleth, and Logos Global Bible Reader. All three are .NET WPF applications that we built to explore new technologies -- and to do cool things!

January 3, 2008

Crocodiles, Mummies, Homer's Iliad and a Seminary Library

Those who have been Logos customers for awhile, those who follow our every move, may remember a blog post from over 2 years ago on a robotic book scanner. This is the APT Bookscan 1200; we've even got another web page describing it, with a video of the machine in action.

Many of the books that we put up on our Community Pricing page (to explore and see if there is enough interest in them as Logos books to pre-pub them) come from page scans that the book scanner made.

Don't worry, we're getting to the crocodiles. And the mummies. Actually, we'll be getting to crocodile mummies.

Really! Just please be patient; there's a lot of background to go through first.

But we do something else with these images. We have all of the books we've scanned up on a subscription service (targeted toward college/seminary use by students and faculty) called SeminaryLibrary.com. What is SeminaryLibrary.com? Here's the about blurb:

SeminaryLibrary.com is the perfect desktop companion to your present Bible software and print library. SeminaryLibrary.com is a good place to go for the books you don’t already own in print or digital form. Think of SeminaryLibrary.com as a collection of over 6200 8000 books you would love to have access to but are not likely to purchase or keep at your finger tips. These are the books for which you would plan a trip to the library or the books you would look up on microfiche. These are the valuable, but less frequently used books. They are too valuable to take out of circulation but too costly to reprint. These are the books that cause institutions to build large buildings just to house these titles for future generations. Unless you live near a large seminary library, you are probably not even aware of most of these titles and will never have an opportunity to view them or use them, until now.

I poke around SeminaryLibrary.com with some frequency. (Here's a recent example of other content I found in SeminaryLibrary.com)

I did some "poking around" awhile back, looking further into what kind of papyrological resources were available in the library. I just searched for where "papyri" occurred in book metadata (title, subjects, etc.). Yes, this is all "rabbit trail" stuff; but I still think it's pretty cool, and a pretty decent example of Facilitating Serendipitous Discovery. Here's what happened:

1. Search SeminaryLibrary.com for "papyri".
2. Come across the Tebtunis Papyri volume. Cool! Read the front matter. Realize that these are papyrus fragments retrieved from cartonage of crocodile mummies! (really, see a picture of them!)
   
   
3. Still paging through book on SeminaryLibrary.com. Wow, there's a fragment from Homer's Iliad (Book II) that was stuffed in crocodile mummy cartonage? Check it out:

   
   

4. Search Google for more info on "Tebtunis".
5. Come across The Center for the Tebtunis Papyri at the Bancroft Library at Berkeley.
6. View the webcast "Ancient Egypt and the Tebtunis Papyri" (look for item at 2:20 PM) and learn even more.
7. Poke around Tebtunis Papyri site. Whoa, this stuff is catalogued in APIS! (Advanced Paprylogical Information System). That means you can search the catalogue!
8. Search the APIS catalogue for where 'Homer' occurs in APIS items associated with Berkeley. There are 24 entries from Berkeley that reference 'Homer'. Some have images. Here's one that is pretty cool and actually has rather readable images.
9. Even cooler: Here's the catalogue entry for the item referred to above (P.Tebt.1.004) which aligns with the volume/numbering in Grenfell & Hunt's volume. From here view images of the papyri themselves! (Make sure to zoom in to see the lettering)

Admittedly, this is a bit of a rabbit trail. But I thought it was interesting, and that it showed some of the usability of SeminaryLibrary.com. Hopefully you've enjoyed the serendipity and perhaps have learned a few things to boot (Crocodile mummies? Yes!).

But all of this going-on about crocodile mummies really does have some applicability to Biblical Studies. One of the Tebtunis Papyri (P.Tebt.703) has some relevance to New Testament epistlography; particularly when considering the genre of First Timothy and Titus. I blog more about that over on PastoralEpistles.com. Had I not explored the SeminaryLibrary.com papyrological resources and dug a bit more into what the Tebtunis Papyri were all about, the references to P.Tebt.703 in several of the recent commentaries on the Pastoral Epistles (Witherington, Towner, L.T. Johnson) and introductions (Carson & Moo, plus Thielmann's NT Theology volume) would've fallen on deaf (or at least somewhat hard-of-hearing) ears.

Don't worry, I'll return to blogging about stuff like Greek syntax shortly.

December 13, 2007

2007 Logos Bake-Off

You've probably learned by now from our posts about Chili Cook-Offs (2007, 2006), Curry Cook-Offs (2007, 2006), Soup Cook-Offs (2006, 2005), Salsa Cook-Offs (2006), Bake-Offs (2006), and Thanksgiving Dinners (2007, 2006) that we like to eat! This is just one of the many reasons that working here is so much fun!

Last Friday we had the 2007 Logos Bake-Off. There were 12 entrants and lots of hungry judges! Here they are in action.

While everything was delicious, four desserts rose to the top.

Here are the winners:

1st Place: Don and Tara Everett's “Chocolate Everything” creation (#12)

2nd Place: Katie Swanson's Coconut Cream Cake (#6)

3rd Place: Pete and Shara Heiniger's Chocolate Bundt Cake (#8)

and: Deborah Mickens' Eggnog Butterscotch Cookies (#9)

We also have one recipe to share. While it's not one that placed, it's still sure to please.

Chocolate Star Cookies

by Ryan Husser

Components:

• ½ cup peanut butter
• ½ cup granulated sugar
• ½ cup brown sugar
• ½ cup (1 stick) butter or margarine
• 1 egg
• 1 ¾ cups flour
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• ½ teaspoon salt
• 2 tablespoons milk
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• About ½ cup addition granulated sugar in separate bowl
• About 60 Brach’s chocolate stars (available in bulk at Fred Meyer)

Assembly:

1. Preheat oven to 375° (190 Celsius).
2. Cream butter and sugars (granulated and brown) in large mixing bowl.
3. Mix in peanut butter and egg.
4. Mix in flour, baking soda, salt, milk and vanilla.
5. Roll dough by hand into ½ inch balls.
6. Roll dough balls in additional granulated sugar.
7. Bake for 4 minutes.
8. Remove from oven, press a chocolate star into the middle of each cookie.
9. Bake for another 3–4 minutes.

Recipe yields approximately 5 dozen cookies.

November 13, 2007

Thanksgiving Dinner on My First Day

I picked a great day to start my new job here at Logos. Today we had a very nice spread of turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, stuffing, and much more for our annual Thanksgiving Dinner. (It was early this year because some of the guys will be gone next week at the upcoming ETS and SBL national conferences.)

Here are some pictures from the party.

As you can see, I was a little too excited about the food to smile for the camera. (That's me in the gray sweater smiling instead at the turkey.)

I'm thrilled to be a part of the team here at Logos. I can already tell that it's going to be a great place to work. I'll be working in the marketing department, so I'll be contributing to the blog on a regular basis. Look for my official introduction in my next post.

August 9, 2007

Taking One for the Team

This past Saturday, August 4, eight stalwart Logos employees journeyed to Lynden, Washington (25 minutes north of our offices in Bellingham) to participate in the 2007 Mushball tournament. The tournament was a fundraiser for the Lynden Firefighters Association. Mushball is essentially volleyball, but instead of playing on a court or a sunny beach we trudged around in a slurry of soft mud and water for three hours. Sound gross? We thought so too but boy was it ever fun!

Becoming one with the mush	Yours truly getting a faceful of mush Photo courtesy of Sarah Richardson
"Go time" for Team Logos	Eliminated!

Team Logos dominated its first game thanks to some hot serving from Mark French (Technical Support) and Heidie Godfrey (Accounting). However, we didn’t last long in the winner’s bracket – losing our next two games and being quickly ousted from the tourney. Despite a few bruised knees and a lingering feeling of griminess we all had a great time and were able to help the firefighters raise thousands of dollars for some upcoming projects.

August 8, 2007

Fourteen Years and Counting

Today, August 8, 2007, marks my 14-year anniversary as an employee of Logos.

It was back in the summer of 1993, after I graduated from college, that I pestered my way into a job at a small Bible software company that had just moved to my hometown of Oak Harbor, WA. I would never have dreamed that I would grow and the company would grow in the ways we have.

I started in the sales department, answering calls from magazine ads to our 800 number. I can remember devouring the old Logos 1.6 product (on DOS 6.2/Windows 3.1, no less). This was before we even had company email at Logos; before we even had a web page at Logos.com. Hey, some of you long-time Logos users may have even purchased your software from me.

After two and a half years in sales, I moved over to the technical side of the operation, writing short programs to turn files supplied from publishers into Logos books. We worked on pioneering the pre-publication process with projects like Kittel's 10-volume TDNT and the Liddell-Scott-Jones Greek lexicon.

This has continued to change and evolve as both Logos and I have developed; now I get to play around with the annotation of Greek corpora on multiple levels, (that's "syntax", which I've blogged about a few times :)) and think about ways to represent that information and make it more accessible and profitable for exegesis of the Holy Scriptures.

Along the way, I met and married a wonderful woman and began a family. What an awesome blessing!

I can't underscore enough what a great place Logos is to work; and what great friends the people I work with have become. Bob and Dale Pritchett, along with my colleagues Eli Evans, Vincent Setterholm, Michael Heiser, Steve Runge and Sean Boisen (and their respective families) are less like colleagues and more like family to me. They challenge me, they encourage me, and they keep me honest. Working here is fun and rewarding. And the cook-offs!

As year 15 begins, I'm more excited than ever. We have some really cool stuff we're working on. Have you followed Sean Boisen's Bible Knowledgebase posts? And have you heard about BibleTech 2008? That's only the tip of the iceberg. I'm anxious to see where it all leads, and I'm privileged to play a part, however small, in making it happen.

Of course, you might be able to come and join us. We have a bunch of jobs posted online. Don't let the old dates on some of the descriptions fool you; these are typically standing openings—if you're the right person, we want to talk with you. So if any of this stuff sounds like it is up your alley, then check out the jobs page and come join the fun. Maybe you'll be writing your own "Fourteen Years and Counting" blog post on the Logos blog in years to come!

July 5, 2007

For the love of an old book

You might think that we "book digitizers" have little appreciation for the aesthetics of an old book but quite the opposite is true.

Fact is, most of us will disappear for hours when given the chance to wander a good, used bookstore.

One of the things I love about old books is leafing through the pages in the back to see the advertisements inserted by the publisher. For example, Lange's "Lost Volume" of commentary on the Apocrypha (published 1880) contains a list of "Popular and Standard" books published by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1879.

Some of the titles and authors that I recognized:

• The Letters of Charles Dickens (Dickens died nine years earlier)
• A commentary on Romans by W.G.T. Shedd
• Jules Verne's The Explorations of the World: Famous Travels and Travellers ("With more than 100 full-page Engravings") - I so want a copy of this!

I find these advertisement pages to provide a fascinating, if unscientific, glimpse into the milieu in which the author was writing—what other books and authors were on the scene at the same time.

We don't include these pages in Logos electronic editions simply because we never have. But I'd be interested in hearing from you...do you find value in things like the publisher's advertisements from public domain books? Do you think it would be odd or out of place to include these "historical artifacts" in an electronic edition?

I don't know that we would start including them, I'm just interested in hearing your thoughts!

July 2, 2007

Yee-Haw! The Logos Chili Cook-Off 2007

This past Friday was the seventh annual Logos Chili Cook-Off. Guest blogger Mark Van Dyke manned the camera, took some pictures, and files this report. Thanks, Mark!

On Friday, June 29 twelve Logos employees entered their time-honored (or recently 'Googled') chili recipes in a battle royale of meat, beans and tomato sauce.

Even before the clock hit high noon, this competition was unlike any other in Logos history. You see, when National Sales Representative Ed Hale heard about the contest he knew he had to enter. There was just one small problem – he lives in Escondido, CA and the competition was taking place at Logos headquarters in Bellingham, Washington. In order for Ed enter the competition he needed to figure out a way to get his chili to the Pacific Northwest.

The story could only end one of two ways: either this would turn into a messy disaster at the post-office or Ed’s chili would win and he would enter cook-off immortality. The result? Ed won the chili cook-off, got the girl and is selling his story to 20th Century Fox for millions.

And that was just in the "Mild Chili" category. This year's competition required contestants to declare their chili as being "mild" or "real". The "Real Chili" gold medal went to Scott Sanders of Logos' Electronic Text Development department. This was a great send off for Scott as it was his last day working at Logos. Scott will be taking his 'Roasted Robot Chili' on the road as he bikes around the northwest for the next couple weeks. All this made for an memorable event and a great time for all involved.

Check out the chili-rific pictures below!

June 19, 2007

What people say the Bible says about...

OpenBible.info just launched a new topical Bible service that is steeped in crowdsourcing-mashup-web-2.0 goodness. Since I just blogged about the "old school" What the Bible Says About... service from Logos I thought I'd give this upstart service a mini-review.

You can try it out: OpenBible.info Topical Bible 

Here's how it works: The developers compiled a topic list using Yahoo! Related Suggestions, then searched Yahoo! for the most relevant web pages about each topic, then pulled any Bible references from those pages. So what you end up with is a list of Bible verses that are most closely associated with a particular topic across the web.

The label next to the "find" box says, "What does the Bible say about..." But I think it's a stretch to say this service helps you find out what the Bible says about a topic. It would be more accurate to say you're finding out what people say the Bible says about a topic. Or maybe what people say about the Bible when speaking about a topic. And by people I mean "the people." The OpenBible.info project is truly trusting in the wisdom of crowds.

Admittedly, any topical index to the Bible involves editorial decisions and inferences. Orville James Nave (1841-1917), who spent 14 years working on his project to "...note and classify everything found in the Scriptures", certainly did not work in a vacuum. (The New Nave's Topical Bible used at What the Bible Says About and available inside Logos Bible Software is a revision of Orville Nave's classic work.) But he was methodical, thorough and consistent in his appproach to the task.

Don't get me wrong, though, I do think there's value to a service like the OpenBible Topical Bible.

What I like about it:

1. It offers current topics. If you want to find out what people say the Bible says about Harry Potter...you can.
2. It offers a constantly-growing list of topics. If you enter a topic that's new to the database, the topic is added and you'll get some initial results after a few moments of waiting for the server to do its work. I entered "Iraq War", which was brand new to the database.
3. It offers a constantly-improving data set. The Helpful/Not Helpful buttons by each Bible verse or passage allow me to help fine tune the results, while the Suggest a Verse box lets me associate a verse to my topic.

Suggestions:

1. Allow the user to associate a new topic with an existing topic. I found later that "War" (of course) and "The War in Iraq" are both existing topics. Before adding "Iraq War" as a new entity, the service could ask, "Did you really mean 'The War in Iraq'?" and learn from my response. In this way, I would be training the database to understand that the two terms mean the same thing.
2. I don't know what method the Topical Bible service uses to identify Bible verses on web pages, but it seems to me such an undertaking is fraught with perils. Sean Boisen has raised some good questions about this in the context of counting Scripture references in blog posts. Since the web is full of unruly data (unlike the carefully tagged books we work on here at Logos) the only solutions seem to be a) push people to adopt something like Bible reference microformat standards or b) develop ever-smarter verse extraction routines.

All in all this is a pretty cool service and I'm sure we'll see more like it in the days to come. 

June 18, 2007

What the Bible says about...

Did you know about the free service offered by Logos that lets Internet users find out what the Bible says about a topic? And did you know you could host this free topical lookup on your own site?

The URL is http://wbsa.logos.com and here's what it looks like:

Enter topic, click "Search!" When you click through on a result, you'll see a list of Bible verses linked to Bible Gateway so you can read verses in the Bible version of your choice. I searched on riches, which also wildcard-matches ostriches.

Who knew the Bible had so much to say about ostriches? Even a quick survey of these 12 verses shows some difference of opinion among translators as to whether the animal named is an owl or an ostrich. And there's a strong association between jackals and ostriches/owls as inhabitants of desolate places.

I hinted at the beginning of the post that you could put this lookup on your own site, and you can! Just paste this code into your site:

<iframe frameborder=0 src="http://wbsa.logos.com/module.htm" width=540 height=138></iframe>

The result looks something like this:

June 13, 2007

FamilyLife Today (Logos on the Airwaves 3)

Part 1 | Part 2

Just about a year ago, Scott Lindsey sat down with Dennis Rainey and Bob Lepine and recorded an interview that aired over two days on the FamilyLife Today national radio show. That week, a number of us got a call from mom who was excited to hear Logos on the radio!

We, too, were thrilled that they so clearly saw the value of Logos that they would devote two half-hour shows to Bible software! It's fun to hear Dennis and Bob's excitement as they run searches in Logos Bible Software and discuss what the software can mean for family Bible study...and the part it's already playing in their own families.

Midway through the first segment, Bob Lepine tells a story about his 14-year-old son asking about the word that gets translated as rubbish when Paul says he counts everything as rubbish compared to the glory of knowing Christ. His son's teacher had hinted that the word might mean something more than rubbish, and Bob was able to answer his question thanks to Logos. As he tells it,

So we...popped up Logos, and we pulled up that verse, and we found it, and I right-clicked on my mouse, I pulled up the Strong's Concordance – right there was a wealth of information about that word, its usage, and we were able to study the Bible together. It was wonderful, and it was something that I'm picturing, again, 15 years ago, a father and a son having that conversation, and the dad going, "I don't have a clue, son."

Scott Lindsey also shares a story about a young man who attended one of Scott's presentations and asked his mom for Bible software instead of an Xbox for Christmas! It's enough to make any parent get a lump in the throat.

Enjoy the radio shows...and if you have a friend or family member who should hear this, be sure to send them a link! (You can use this shortened URL which won't break if you send it in an email: http://snipurl.com/Logos_FamilyLife)

FamilyLife Today radio shows

A Library at the Tip of Your Fingers (Day 1 | 25 minutes)

Now Bible College Comes to You (Day 2 | 25 minutes)

June 11, 2007

Teaming Up with AFR (Logos on the Airwaves 2)

Part 1 | Part 3

A cool thing about partnering up with American Family Radio for the Bible Study Bus road trip this year is that AFR has about a billion radio stations nationwide. So they've been able to promote the events with radio spots sprinkled throughout their normal programming in every city we visit.

That means hundreds of thousands of people across the country are hearing about Logos Bible Software this summer. And it might sound something like this...

Bible Study Bus (mp3 | 60 seconds)

Or far more entertaining, this...

Harry and Margaret (mp3 | 60 seconds)

June 6, 2007

Radio Ads (Logos on the Airwaves)

Part 2 | Part 3

Logos doesn't do a lot of radio advertising, but sometimes we have occasion to dabble in this area. Of course, it's always a challenge to convey a very visual product via an aural-only medium. We've pretty well established the fact that when people see Logos Bible Software, they "get it" and are eager to own a copy...but when they hear about it (especially when limited to a 60-second spot) the response is not so automatic.

We don't have a big budget to go out and hire a flashy advertising firm to create ads, so when we do a radio ad it's usually written in-house. Since we've got a couple buildings full of smart, creative people, the Logos marketing department will solicit ideas from the whole office and run with the best idea that comes in.

The two radio spots linked below recently ran on our local Christian radio station, Praise 106.5. You can download and listen to them as MP3s. I edited out the special URL given for the radio campaign (can't spoil our sales source tracking with a massive influx of orders from the blog!) so you may notice an abrupt ending or jump.

Radio Spots

College Roommates - concept from Brenna Sebens, executive assistant

Leatherbound Bible - concept from Mark VanDyke, marketing assistant

June 5, 2007

Biblioblogs.com Interviews Rick Brannan

Biblioblogs.com is a list of blogs on biblical topics, maintained by Jim West and Brandon Wason. Besides being a great resource to discover blogs on topics that may interest you, it also features a different biblioblogger every month and posts an interview with that person.

Why do I mention it now? Because June's Featured Blogger is none other than our very own Rick Brannan, who writes for the Logos Blog, Ricoblog and PastoralEpistles.com.

Check out Rick's interview to learn the origins of the name Ricoblog, what Space Invaders and a TRS-80 have to do with Bible software, and how Say's Law relates to the future of blogging. Oh, and while you're reading about Rick, stop by Ricoblog and congratulate him on his brand new baby. She's a cutie!

June 1, 2007

InterVarsity Press Blogs!

The good people over at InterVarsity Press have ramped up their blogosphere presence with a couple of cool, new, behind-the-scenes blogs. Welcome!

In Andy Unedited, IVP editorial director Andrew T. Le Peau writes about publishing from the inside. One recent post discussed what goes into crafting a good (or bad) book title. Something I've always wondered about myself.

Addenda & Errata is written by the IVP Academic editorial team. A couple of recent posts shared jokes that weary authors inserted into indices and dictionaries. Ever heard of the theologian Franz Bibfeldt?

(In the software business we call these hidden jokes Easter Eggs, though I'm not able to say whether the current version of Logos has any.)  :-)

Yet another great IVP blog that launched in the past couple of months is called Behind the Books. Its authors have also been on the theme of levity among the bookish, with a great post about ancient scribal blogs. These are great tidbits found in the margins of ancient manuscripts...things like:

"He who does not know how to write supposes it to be no labor; but though only three fingers write, the whole body labors."

"As travelers rejoice to see their home country, so also is the end of a book to those who toil [in writing]."

Or these "text messages" between Irish scribes, carried out in the margins of a 9th century commentary:

"It is cold today."

"That is natural; it is winter."

I, for one, look forward to learning more about our print publishing brethren from these blogs. I'll also take the opportunity to remind you that our very own publisher relation guy Bill Nienhuis is back in the blogging saddle at Original Expression and recently shared some insightful thoughts on the battle between authors and publishers over print-on-demand rights.

And who said book publishing isn't fun...?

May 25, 2007

Top 50 Women in the Bible

As promised, I'm back for one final post on this whole "most important people in the Bible" topic. The first two posts in the series are here and here.

Today we'll take a quick look at a visualization of the top 50 women of the Bible, as determined by Logos information architect Sean Boisen's calculations. This data is also available at Many Eyes for anyone to manipulate and try out new information visualizations.

Here's the scatterplot; click the thumbnail for a full view.

This time, dot size is the final "importance" score using all the weights and factors calculated. The x-axis is the total number of mentions in the Bible. Bigger dot = more important; further right = more mentions.

One of the most interesting things we see here is the name Zeruiah with a pretty big dot and fifth place in terms of mentions. I don't know about you, but I don't recall ever hearing a Bible story about Zeruiah. My girls (ages 3 and 4 1/2) and I are on our second time through the cartoon Picture Bible and we haven't encountered any such person.

Who is this mystery woman?

With the help of the Biblical People Addin tool within Logos Bible Software 3, it's pretty easy to find out. I fired up the tool and typed "zeruiah" to generate the following graph.

Turns out Zeruiah was King David's sister. But if she's the fifth most-frequently mentioned woman in Scripture and is closely related to a major character within the biblical narrative why wouldn't I know anything about what she did or said?

The answer to this question is also provided by the Biblical People tool. I can hover over or click each of the Bible references to see every mention of Zeruiah in brief context. Or better yet, type Zeruiah's name into Bible Speed Search and get all the verses on one screen.

Looking through the results, we find that 24 of the 25 mentions of Zeruiah consist of the phrase, "Son(s) of Zeruiah." The exception is in 1 Samuel 17:25 where we read that David's sister Abigail (not to be confused with David's wife named Abigail) is a "sister of Zeruiah."

So it turns out that we don't know anything about Zeruiah except for her relation to other people. We don't know of a single thing she did or said. Commentators speculate that her sons are frequently identified by her name because of the link back to King David. Anyone who trailed an older sibling through high school or has a star athlete in the family could commiserate with Zeruiah—"Wait...aren't you Abigail's sister?" "You're Joab's mom, right?"

It may be that Zeruiah points up another opportunity for improving Sean's "importance" weighting factors. Can somebody who appears in Scripture by name only, with no speaking or acting role, be numbered among the most important? I'd ask Sean for comment but he's presenting a case study at the Semantic Technology Conference in San Jose so I'll just have to wait until he gets back.

In the meantime, I've got to quit playing around with Many Eyes and get back to work. :-)

May 22, 2007

Top 50 People in the Bible

Earlier this month, we blogged about the process used to quantify the The Most Important Person in the Bible by computing factors such as frequency of mentions and the dispersion of those mentions across biblical books and chapters.

As you might suppose, Jesus Christ is the most important person in the Bible.

But what I find interesting is how the Bible characters fall into rather distinct first, second and third rate clusters when we use Sean Boisen's algorithm. These three clusters really jump out when the data is loaded into Many Eyes, IBM's online visualization engine. 

 

Click the screenshot above to see a full-size static image that I enhanced with name labels...or click here to play with the live visualization at Many Eyes (Java required).

Three Clusters

Moving from right to left (descending order of importance), the three clusters that emerge are:

1. Jesus, David, Moses, Jacob
2. Abraham, Aaron, Solomon, Judah, Isaac, Saul (Son of Kish), Joseph, Paul, Joshua, Peter
3. The remaining 36 characters...starting with Levi, Benjamin, Hezekiah and ending with Jehoshaphat, Uzziah and Adam.

If you wanted to study the various people in the Bible using a top-down list, it wouldn't hurt to begin with Jesus, David and Moses. Jacob might be a little higher up the list than I would think warranted. But the second cluster seems pretty solid, with Abraham, Joseph, Paul and Peter definitely looming large in the pages of Scripture.

A few biblical figures I didn't expect would be buried so far down in Cluster 3: Noah and Adam, those staples of bedtime Bible stories and flannelgraphs. Plus prophets with whole books named after them such as Jeremiah and Isaiah. Of course, these are the top 50 Bible people out of 2,987...so we're not talking about obscurity for any of them.

"Where are all the ladies?" you may rightly ask. None of them made the Top 50 using this name weighting scheme...but Sean did generate a data set for the Top 50 Women of the Bible which I plan to blog about in a follow-up post...

Dot Size vs. Position

Many Eyes also helps illustrate how Sean's inclusion of factors such as dispersion over books and chapters affects the overall ranking. Here's a close-up of Cluster 2:

The X-axis is the overall "importance ranking" and the dot size is the number of mentions. So Sean's weighting is evident in those places where you see a smaller dot like Abraham promoted far above a larger dot like Saul. Ranking the Bible names strictly by number of mentions would put Saul above Abraham, so we're clearly getting a more nuanced view here.

The upshot of all this? We're not solving the Bible Code or anything...and not trying to. But I find it very cool that an average joe like me can play around with these data and visualizations without knowing a lick of programming. I made this visualization just by selecting a visualization style and choosing which data to put on which axes. Once the data set is complete (thanks, Sean!) we'll be able to do all kinds of additional cool things not possible today...and be able to do it using Logos Bible Software!

Related posts around the blogosphere:

• Blogos: Name Weights for Biblical Characters
• OpenBible.info - Name Weights for Biblical Characters
• ESV Bible Blog: Mapping New Testament Social Networks

May 15, 2007

Protesting the Postage Rate Increase?

Today's guest blogger is Dan Pritchett, director of marketing for Logos Bible Software.

Ever since my blog post about saving 10% on postage, I've been thinking more and more about the reality of all the postage out there that has never been used.

Then I realized that today is May 15th, the day (according to several mass-emails I received titled "Do not pump gas on May 15th") that we as a nation are going to show our solidarity and stick it to the gas companies by boycotting the pump for one day. This email explains that if we all get together we can take the gas companies for billions of dollars, and they will choke on their stockpiles.

In a way, the post office has created their own form of stockpiling of postage. The stockpile of collectible stamps has definitely contributed to their bottom line, but will never be used. They know there are collectors out there that need to have a complete collection, so why not make more designs just to sell stamps that will never be used?

Big deal I say. The post office has a good idea. They won't be more popular by raising rates every week, but they will be popular by releasing more collectibles, and keeping rate increases down by ensuring they sell more postage than is actually used.

Sure, I know I have better things to do than to dream about postage all day, you probably do too - but if you are curious about what is really out there, take a look at what I found out...

I called up my new buddy, Tim, at the local Stamp and Coin shop and asked if there were an industry association for Stamp & Coin stores - sure enough - the American Philatelic Society. After looking over their website I stumbled on the dealer member directory which boasts 1,800+ entries. Now Tim is not a member, and it looks like most of his peers at other local Stamp & Coin shops aren't either. A quick yellow pages search for Stamp and Coin in Seattle shows eight stores, yet a search for member stores in the APS directory yields only two. If you apply that multiplier to the country you get 7,200 Stamp & Coin shops. Hardly scientific I know, but this is a blog post, not an investigative journalist's life's work.

Tim says if you are any kind of stamp store at all, you have to have at least the basic collection of plain old postage issues including five issues of each stamp, mini sheets (which can have 20 stamps), rolls, regular sheets, blocks of 4, and so on and so forth. That can easily run around $5,000 of face value postage for a small mom & pop store - not to mention the bigger stores.

Since Stamp & Coin shops are always buying and selling inventory of stamps, add to that another thousand or two just to make sure you have more of the popular stuff, and an estimated $15,000 to $20,000 face value of old postage that they picked up at estate auctions or bought from the heirs of collectors like I mentioned in my previous post.

Inventory adds up pretty quickly, and pretty soon we are looking at say - $25,000 of face value postage stamps at each little shop, not counting the face value of the collectible stamps that are actually worth far more than their face value and which no sane person would ever dream of using as postage. If we take our conservative estimate of $25,000 in face value and multiply that by 7,200 stores we are looking at $180,000,000.00 in unused postage just sitting around in store inventory. Not to mention millions of dollars in unused postage in private collector's hands, old desk drawers, lost, you name it.

Let's add in the private collections. Apparently more than 55,000 members receive The Journal of the American Philatelic Society. Don't get me wrong. I like stamps. I use stamps. I think they're great. I've always had a roll or book of stamps in my desk drawer, but I've never once thought about joining the special stamp club. I figure in order to want to join the APS desperately enough to pay a membership fee and get their journal, you probably have to be pretty serious about stamps.

Tim says if you are pretty serious about stamps you've got to have at least a couple thousand in face value postage. Take over 55,000 members and multiply that by a couple thousand bucks and you're looking at well over $100 million dollars, and that's just for the dedicated "card-carrying" members. Now you have to believe that if there are more than 55,000 people who want to pay to be members of the APS there have got to be tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands more, that think stamps are cool enough to collect, but don't want to join the club. For every one person that is serious enough to join the membership club, there have got to be dozens who are interested enough to collect stamps, but not enough to pay to join. Add their collections into the mix.

Now some people may be thinking that this is too hard to believe. Seriously, "hundreds of millions" of dollars in stamps? Come on. Well how about this for starters: since most "collectors" are by nature not "sellers" imagine how much postage they are holding onto compared to what they have for sale. A quick scan of the APS auditors' report from three years ago shows that they had almost $14,000,000.00 of members' stamp books sitting around on consignment waiting to be sold. Who knows what that number is today, and that just counts the stuff that they are trying to get rid of. Most collectors "collect" and don't sell, so if there is $14 million sitting around on consignment waiting to be sold, imagine how much they have in their private collections.

Any way you slice it, it looks to me like there are hundreds of millions of dollars of unused postage out there just sitting around with no special collectible value. So forget the forever stamp, there are already "forever" stamps out there. Every stamp ever issued in the USA is still worth every penny that it says it is.

Don't go nuts. Do not send an email to everyone you know that says something like this:

"Protest the postage rate increase! Don't buy stamps from the post office for the entire month of May! Buy old postage from Stamp & Coin shops and don't go to the Post Office for the entire month in protest of the postage rate increase! If we all get together we can take hundreds of millions of dollars out of the Post Office's hands and put it back into the hands of the small business owners. That will teach the Post Office that we don't want a stamp hike!"

Oh rats, I forgot. I should have written that in ALL CAPS!

Obviously this won't work for the same reason not buying gas on May 15th won't work. As long as there are collectors, and as long as the Stamp & Coin shops keep inventory, they will just go out and buy more. If you don't stop the consumption nothing changes when you put off purchasing for a brief time.

But what if people realized that the stamps that they were collecting were never going to make them rich? What if people who were sitting on stamp collections decided to take them out of their mint condition books and use them on a letter? Is the Post Office ready to operate on budget with an unforeseen $200 million dollar shortfall in postage sales?

It makes me wonder.

Now seriously, you need to get back to work because this post is way too long, and isn't even remotely related to how to get the most out of the best Bible Study Software in the world like it should be.

If you are on your day off, and happen to be in the mood for some more crazy rambling, keep reading.

Is the USPS recognizing unused postage as a liability on their books, just like some gift card retailers do?

Does the postmaster general even discuss the fact that there are untold hundreds of millions of dollars in stamps out there that haven't really been accounted for? They just assume that they will never be used, and they go about their business. Are they held to the same level of accountability that gift card or stored value card retailers are? Or does the government get different treatment?

Over a year ago it was reported that Home Depot Inc. saw $43 million in pretax profit from cards sold before 2002 that went unused. The same report revealed that Limited Brands Inc. had unspent gift cards worth $30.4 million on the books. It would be interesting to see if that same year the postmaster general's report including a line item for unused postage… Big retailers are raking in tens of millions of dollars in profit on totally unused gift cards that people lose, throw away, collect, or just never spend - and those cards are way more versatile and useful than a sheet of stamps.

But once again we see that the Internet changes the way the world works. Now there are several websites that do nothing but facilitate trading or selling unused gift cards...not to mention eBay. People are already selling unused postage at a discount on eBay and other places.

• www.CertificateSwap.com
  
• www.Cardavenue.com
  
• www.swapagift.com

Will we see new sites popping up selling "Unused postage" (hurry, that domain was still available when I wrote this post) or what about the new forever stamps? The USPS printed 4 billion "forever" stamps already and people are snapping them up like crazy. A quick search of the web shows a lively discussion on the merits of "forever stamp arbitrage" or forever stamps as investments. Since even the new forever stamp will always be worth the price of a first class mail piece, having, oh I don't know…say 10,000 more stamps than you need when your kids inherit your shrewd investment may still flood the local Stamp & Coin shops with a ton of inventory that they will need to blow out. Of course it will be more convenient to use, so it may be easier to sell, but still - they will be sitting on lots of inventory, and that is a recipe for a discount.

Well, I have to get back to work now, then take some envelopes over to the Stamp & Coin place to get stamped, then run over to the gas station to fill up my car. Hey, I'm on empty, give me a break! :-)

May 9, 2007

The Secret to Beating the Postage Increase

Buy your stamps for 10% off.

Yes, it's pretty obvious I know, but 99% of the people reading this article don't think it is possible – "isn't it against the law for the post office to give discounts on stamps?" So what – you don't have to buy them from the post office.

I know it sounds too good to be true, I thought so too until I figured out how to do it.

If you are like me, you have spent hours of your life poring over your expenses in every category, trying to find a place to shave off a percent or two here and there. Then you come to the postage category. You look at that solid and steadily increasing dollar amount, shed a few tears, and move on since you know there is no way to save on the actual postage itself. You can't just stop mailing invoices or statements, and you can't use bulk mail for them – you're stuck.

After crying a few of those tears year after year, I read "Chapter 9: You Can Always Find 5%" from my favorite business book Fire Someone Today and was determined to once and for all find a way to shave something off that number somehow. Everyone said it couldn't be done – "Everyone knows there are no discounts on postage other than bulk mail." I was more determined than ever to find a way to shave at least 5% off my postage expenses.

I talked to my post office representative, I called the postmaster, I asked the UPS guys, the mail forwarders, the bulk rate mailers, and everyone else I could think of. Then I called the local "Stamp & Coin" shop and hit pay-dirt.

It turns out that there are thousands upon thousands of people happily stockpiling stamps while completely oblivious to the fact that the vast majority of all stamps are, guess what… used as stamps, and will never be worth more than their face value. They buy every roll or book of postage issued, no matter how mass-produced they may be, hoping they will strike it rich with a bunch of collector's items someday. Eventually they pass on and their heirs inherit tons of old postage with no special collectable value at all. They can't use that much postage themselves, so they sell it to the local stamp and coin place at pennies on the dollar.

The beauty of the old postage is that it never loses its face value or expires. While it may be worthless as a collector's item, it is still worth every penny printed on its face. Just like any other inventory item, the old postage purchased at a discount is often passed on at a discount. The more dollars the local shop has tied up in old postage inventory, the more likely they are to blow it out at a discount.

I went over to my local stamp and coin place and made a deal with them. They agreed to hand-apply the correct postage to my statement envelopes when they had down time if I agreed to buy my postage from them. Sounded like a no-brainer to me. They sold the postage to me for 10% off face value and applied it for free. Now I am saving 10% on all my postage and getting the labor for free in an expense category that I originally thought there wasn't a penny to be saved in.

As a bonus, it seems like my invoices and statements are being opened more often. When my customers see the rare and often antique hand-applied postage stamps, they know a real person had to touch this envelope and not just a postage-meter or bulk mailer.

Every penny counts. On May 14th the postage rate change is a 5% increase to your competitors' postage budgets.

Let it be the day it becomes a 10% decrease in yours.

Today's guest blogger is Dan Pritchett, director of marketing for Logos Bible Software.

Related post: Protesting the Postage Rate Increase?

May 4, 2007

The Most Important Person in the Bible

Today's guest blogger is Sean Boisen, senior information architect at Logos.

Logos Bible Software is continually undertaking new projects to expand our tools for Bible study. Many of these involve wading through data, usually lots and lots of data.

For example, the Biblical People feature (described in this previous post) provides Bible references, family relationships, social roles, and other information for every person mentioned in the Bible, some 3000 different individuals in all.

I'm currently working to enrich this data set much further to include place names, other named entities (like ethnic groups and languages), and an even richer set of relationships: people who knew each other or collaborated together, places they lived or visited, their beliefs, and many other kinds of information.

But too many projects chasing too little time means you have to prioritize. This raises an interesting question: how to prioritize development for our people data so we spend the most effort on the names that will matter most to those studying the Bible?

Since I'm inherently a data-driven, quantitative type of guy, my practical answer is to:

• assign a numeric weight to each name
• start at the top and work my way down the list in order
• stop when when the available resources, enthusiasm, or both are exhausted

Since we've got the data that connects people to the passages that refer to them, a good starting place is simply to go through and count how many times each