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We've hand-picked 64 titles to compete in the 2010 Logos March Madness tournament and it is up to you to decide which one we should sell at 75% off!

The premise is simple—at www.logosmarchmadness.com we’ve taken 64 titles available in Logos Bible Software and split them into four divisions. You vote for your favorite titles in each division and the ones with the most votes at the end of each of the six rounds advance. Titles that don’t advance are then offered at a discounted rate between 25% and 50% off the retail price. The title that gets crowned the champion will be discounted at 75% off!

Voting is now open for the first round, and will remain open thru March 20th. The complete schedule is as follows:

Round 1: March 18-20
Round 2: March 21-23
Sweet 16: March 24-26
Elite 8: March 27-29
Final 4: March 30 – April 1
Championship: April 2-5
See the full brackets

As I said, the titles that don't get enough votes to advance out of a round will be offered at a discount. Here is how the discounts will break down:

Titles not advancing out of round 1 will be 25% off.
Titles not advancing out of round 2 will be 30% off.
Titles not advancing out of the sweet sixteen will be 35% off.
Titles not advancing out of the elite eight will be 40% off.
Titles not advancing out of the final four will be 45% off.
The second place book in the tournament will be 50% off.
The tournament champion will be 75% off.

So, go check out the full list of titles being offered and vote for your favorites. Of course, if you really want a title to win (so you can get it for 75% off) be sure to spread the word to all your friends and family and tell them to go to www.logosmarchmadness.com and vote for your favorites!

So, what are you waiting for?

If you've followed our company for any length of time, you probably know that cook-offs are a regular part life at Logos (view our cook-off archive). A few weeks ago, we started off the 2010 cook-off calendar with our annual Soup Cook-off. We had a strong field of 12 this year and as one developer (who shall remain anonymous) put it, "They were really good this year. There wasn't a single one that I wanted to spit out."

With that said, here are the 2010 entrants:

Deborah Mickens -- Captain Awesome’s Potato, Onion & Bacon Soup
Kat Hutchinson -- Southwest Chicken and Black Bean Stew
Paul Williams -- Gluten Free Yammy ‘tato Jubilee
Jana Gering -- African Peanut Soup
Yuri Pineda -- Lentil and Bacon soup
Sarah Wilson -- Cheddar Ham Chowder
Rebekah Richoux -- Chicken and Sausage Gumbo
Ryan Husser -- Chicken on Your Noodle Soup
Hayley Price -- Vegetable Cheddar Chowder
Peter Venable -- Thai tom ka gai
Darren Wright -- Crab Bisque
Kyle Anderson -- Pumpkin Black Bean Soup

Like all our cook-offs, everyone in the office was invited to come and taste the entries. Then, each person voted for their top 3 choices. Votes were then tallied and the winners announced via email.

This year's winners are (pictured above):

1. Kat Hutchinson -- Southwest Chicken and Black Bean Stew
2. Pete Venable -- Thai tom ka gai
3. Yuri Pineda -- Lentil and Bacon Soup

Kat was kind enough to share the winning recipe:

Southwest Chicken and Black Bean Stew
(from the kitchen of SaraAnn Evans)
Yield: A little over 1 ½ gallons of soup (approx. 30 1 c. servings)

Ingredients:
· ½ lb. thick sliced bacon
· 1 ½ lbs. boneless chicken meat
· Salt and fresh ground pepper to taste
· 1 lg. yellow sweet onion, diced
· 1 jalapeño pepper, finely diced
· 1 red bell pepper, coarsely chopped
· 2 tsp. chili powder
· 1 tsp. fresh ground cumin
· ¾ c. dark beer (I used Old Rasputin) – the stew will have a lighter, fresher taste if you omit this. (and it will be gluten-free)
· 2 (8 oz.) cans of black beans, drained
· 1 chipotle pepper, dried – omit for lighter, fresher taste
· 3 c. low sodium chicken broth
· 3-4 Tbsp. chopped fresh cilantro
· 2 limes

Extra addins to try– cooked rice, lime wedges, sour cream, grated cheese, tortilla chips

Directions:
1. In large pot, cook bacon over medium high heat until slightly crisp. Drain bacon and coarsely chop, then set aside. Reserve grease in pot.
2. Season chicken with salt and pepper and cook in bacon grease until browned. Remove and set aside
3. In remaining fat in pan, sauté onions, jalapeño and red pepper. Stir often and continue cooking until onions turn translucent and begin to caramelize.
4. Raise the heat to high and add chili powder and cumin. Cook 1 – 2 minutes.
5. Add beer and cook until reduced and liquid is nearly gone (about 4 minutes)
6. Add beans, chipotle pepper and chicken broth. Let mixture come to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer 5-10 minutes.
7. Add the chicken and bacon to the stew and take the chipotle pepper out.

*At this point you can do one of two things. You can throw everything in a Crock pot and wait a day for the flavors to get richer and smokier, or you can move ahead. I recommend the Crock pot. However, if you’re in a hurry, you can just move on and the flavors will be somewhat fresher.

8. Juice 1 lime and add to stew.
9. Add cilantro or other addins, and you’re ready to eat. Enjoy!

Notes: At step #6, for thicker stew, you can remove 2 cups of mixture (not the chipotle pepper) and puree in a blender, then mix back into the pot.

We're Hiring
If you like the idea of working for a company that knows how to work hard and have fun, visit our jobs page. It might just be your recipe we share next time.

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Logos is happy to announce the winner of our second Seminary Scholarship award, Justin Hoke. Justin is currently working to finish his MDiv through the distance education program at Reformed Baptist Seminary.

As the winner of the Seminary Scholarship, Justin received a $1,000.00 tuition scholarship and a copy of the Logos 4 Scholar's Library.

Next Scholarship to be Awarded May 10th

If you're a seminarian (whether you're full time, part time, distance, or residential) and you're interested in applying for a $1,000.00 scholarship for tuition and a copy of Logos 4 Scholar's Library, then visit www.SeminaryScholarship.com and apply today.

Not a seminarian? Well, it is likely that you know one. Please take a moment and send them an email, tweet, Facebook message, or even an old fashioned letter letting them know about this great opportunity.

Already a Logos Bible Software user?
Visit our custom upgrade discount calculator to see what discounts you qualify for on an upgrade to a brand new Logos 4 base package.

Want to be a Logos Bible Software user?
New customers should visit http://www.logos.com/4 to learn more and see what discounts are currently available.

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Last June, Dan walked into my office and said, "I want to do a Bible giveaway... a huge Bible giveaway." We talked through the details, called some of our publisher friends, and a few weeks later launched a six month promotion in which we gave away 78 ultra-premium Bibles, worth over $12,000.

The response to the promotion was overwhelming, with thousands of people participating. One of the highlights for me was contacting the winners every month. Numerous times I got to hear stories of people who were so very blessed by the promotion. One email I received was from a preacher who had won the NASB Large Print Bible. He wrote, "This Bible will go to good use as my vision is failing (even though I am only in my 30's) and I have been struggling reading from my NASB as I preach." It brought me such joy to send him his Bible.

While we only had 78 people selected as winners in the Great Bible Giveaway, in a way everyone is a winner. The whole purpose of the giveaway was to introduce people to our online Bible. During the promotion, we saw site traffic and usage of Bible.Logos.com increase by more than 20% and many people sent in emails thanking us for sponsoring the promotion because it was through the giveaway that they learned about the site.

One More Bible to Give Away

During the course of the giveaway, one of our winners sent his Bible back and asked that we give it away to another person. So, honoring his request, here's one last chance to win. Leave a comment on this blog post with your favorite Bible verse. On Monday (Jan 18) we'll select a winner at random from the comments.

NOTE: Our randomly selected winner is Billy Stevens. While you can no longer enter to win, please feel free to continue posting your favorite verses in the comments below.

December Winners

• 1 ESV Study Bible, Black Calfskin (Retail $239.99) from Crossway (winner: E. Amerman)
• 6 HCSB Legacy Bibles, Black Genuine Leather (Retail $100) from B&H Publishing (winners: J. Rozema, G. Stadler, R. Mills, A. Manning, M. Macaluso, and D. Mora)
• 1 KJV Cambridge Premier Concord Reference, Black Goatskin (Retail $199.99) from Cambridge Bibles (winner: R. DuBois)
• 1 NASB In Touch Ministries Wide Margin Edition, Burgundy Calfskin (Retail $149.99) from Lockman Foundation (winner: P. Robin)
• 1 NASB Large Print Ultrathin Reference, Black Calfskin (Retail $149.99) from Lockman Foundation (winner: D. Buckham)
• 1 NASB Side Column Reference Wide Margin Special Limited Edition, Black Calfskin (Retail $149.99) from Lockman Foundation (winner: J. Swain)
• 1 NIV Archaeological Study Bible, Venetian Brown Renaissance Fine Leather (Retail $109.99) from Zondervan (winner: A. Beaver)
• 1 NIV Study Bible, Black Renaissance Fine Leather (Retail $124.99) from Zondervan (winner: A. Bartlett)
• 1 NIV Study Bible, Burgundy Goatskin ($229.99) from Cambridge Bibles (winner: E. Hernandez)
• 1 NKJV UltraThin Bible Signature Series, Tan Calfskin (Retail $129.99) from Thomas Nelson (winner: A. Dobuss)
• 2 NLTSB Tyndale Select, Black Calfskin (Retail Unavailable) from Tyndale (winners: J. Hoffman and D. Larson)
• 1 TNIV, Black Renaissance Fine Leather ($99.99) from Zondervan (winner: R. Irvin)

Special Thanks!

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One of the cool features of our new Bible study iPhone app is that it can also be run on an iPod Touch. This means that you don't have to change cell phone carriers or buy an expensive iPhone just to get this great Bible study tool. On top of that, we've recently added an offline reading mode that allows you to store some of your book on your device and read them without even being connected to WiFi or a mobile carrier.* Logos on the iPod Touch is even more useful than before.

We're so excited about the advances our app is taking that we decided to buy some iPod Touches and give them away! In fact, if you follow Logos on Twitter you know that we've given two of these iPods away already. Our current iPod Touch giveaway is being run for all our Facebook fans. So, if you're on Facebook, head over and see how you can enter to win.

If you like giveaways like this one, be sure to become a fan of Logos on Facebook and that you're following Logos on Twitter. It is a great way to keep up to date with Logos and hear about cool things like iPod giveaways.

*Downloading a book to your iPod or iPhone for offline reading requires an internet connection via WiFi or through your cell phone provider.

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I'm a coffee drinker, and perhaps, have a small-to-medium addiction to it. I make myself feel better by reading medical studies that highlight the fact that drinking coffee could lower my risk of diabetes, Parkinson's disease, colon cancer, as well as lift my mood, treat headaches, and lower my risk of cavities. My personal issues aside, we drink a lot of coffee at Logos and 2009, with the launch of Logos 4, was no exception. So, with 2010 upon us, I thought we'd take a stroll down Logos' coffee lane.

On June 21, 2004, Logos received its beloved Coffee Machine. To be precise, it is a Saeco Super Automatic IDEA De Luxe espresso machine. Since the initial purchase, this magnificent coffee making machine has made over 106,000 cups of coffee! That averages out to more than 73 cups of coffee EVERY WORK DAY!

As far as I can tell, our first public mention of the coffee machine was back in October, 2005, when, after almost a year and a half of service, the machine was taken in for repairs. According to the blog post, we had already consumed 20,000 cups of coffee. That's about 57 cups per work day.

Since then we've blogged about it a few times, showing pictures of coffee and using it as an opportunity to sell Logos branded merchandise... which, by the way, how would you like to buy a very nice Logos glass coffee mug for just $6.95?

While the public blog didn't cover much more about the coffee machine, I did come across an internal wiki that chronicles some of the machine's past. It would appear that the time between its October 2005 fix and the next service was about 2 1/2 years. In April, 2008, we sent the coffee machine off for a number of issues that had sprung up, including a "loud noise, followed by clicking sounds," "brownish water coming out of the steam wand," "an error message which states: load circuit," and several of other problems. Perhaps the problem was that we had now consumed 72,907 cups of coffee. That averages out to, over those 2.5 years, about 81 cups per work day.

Later in 2008 the machine was again sent in for repairs. Despite the initial diagnosis that the turbine needed to be replaced, it was in fact a clogged brewer unit. In those brief 5 months we managed to drink another 7,842 cups of coffee, or about 71 cups per work day.

Which leads us to today. As we enter 2010, we have collectively consumed over 106,000 cups of coffee. That's about 73 cups a day over the last 5 1/2 years and about 83 cups a day since October, 2008.

If you're looking for something more inspiring than the history of our coffee machine, then I highly recommend you open Logos 4 (upgrade if you haven't already) and get into God's Word in 2010 and reflect on His goodness in the year ahead.

And, if you need a cup of coffee to sip during your study, we'll be open until 5 p.m. PST. You're welcome to stop by and add your cup to our running total.

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As the 12 Days of Logos draw to a close, we can't help but think of all the people who wanted to take advantage of the spectacular deals we offered, but for whatever reason missed out. We realize that 24 hours is a short window of time and that, while most of the Logos staff lives in front of a computer, not everyone else does and it could be very easy to have missed a title that you truly intended to buy. So, after some consideration, we decided, as an extra-special holiday treat, to re-open and extend all of our 12 Days of Logos coupon codes through December 31st! For the next 10 days you can buy all of the 12 Days of Logos titles at their discounted rate. But hurry, these deals will disappear on January 1st.

Before you start ordering, please read these important notes:

• You must manually enter your coupon codes into the coupon code section at the bottom of the checkout page.


• Our coupon code system will only support 5 coupon codes at a time, so if you want to buy more than 5 items, you'll need to do so in multiple transactions.


• If using more than one coupon code, they must be comma separated (Example: 12DAYS1, 12DAYS4, 12DAYS5, 12DAYS9).


• After entering your coupon codes, be sure to click "Update Cart" and confirm that all your discounts have been applied.


• Due to diminished inventory, we are not reopening the coupon code for the Insulated Travel Mug or the Stainless Steel Mug.

Now, the moment you've been waiting for... the deals:

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Retail $4.95
SALE: $0.95
Use code: 12DAYS1
Learn more about A Christmas Carol or buy it now.

Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary
Retail $269.95
SALE: $189.95
Use coupon code: 12DAYS2
Learn more about Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary or buy it now.

Dictionary for Theological Interpretation of the Bible
Retail $ 54.99
SALE: $ 24.95
Use coupon code: 12DAYS4
Learn more about Dictionary for Theological Interpretation of the Bible or buy it now.

Centered Preaching: Redeeming the Expository Sermon
Retail $29.99
SALE: $13.95
Use coupon code: 12DAYS5
Learn more about Centered Preaching: Redeeming the Expository Sermon or buy it now.

Word Biblical Commentary (WBC 59 Vols.)
Retail $1199.99
SALE: $399.95
Use coupon code: 12DAYS6
Learn more about Word Biblical Commentary (WBC 59 Vols.) or buy it now.

The Drama of Scripture
Retail $ 19.95
SALE: $ 9.95
Use coupon code: 12DAYS7
Learn more about The Drama of Scripture or buy it now.

Kingdom of Priests: A History of Old Testament Israel, 2nd ed.
Retail $39.99
SALE: $19.95
Use coupon code: 12DAYS8
Learn more about Kingdom of Priests: A History of Old Testament Israel, 2nd ed. or buy it now.

The Essential IVP Reference Collection Version 3
Retail $190.00
SALE: $89.95
Use coupon code: 12DAYS9
Learn more about The Essential IVP Reference Collection Version 3 or buy it now.

Jesus in Context: Background Readings for Gospel Study
Retail $28.00
SALE: $13.95
Use coupon code: 12DAYS10
Learn more about Jesus in Context: Background Readings for Gospel Study or buy it now.

Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament
Retail $59.99
SALE: $24.95
Use coupon code: 12DAYS11
Learn more about Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament or buy it now.

An Exposition on Prayer in the Bible (5 Vols.)
Retail $259.95
SALE: $159.95
Use coupon code: 12DAYS12
Learn more about An Exposition on Prayer in the Bible (5 Vols.) or buy it now.

1 year subscription to
Bible Study Magazine
PLUS a free copy of
The Unexpected Adventure
SALE - $19.95
Subscribe now
No Coupon Code Needed

With only 14 days left in the final month of the Great Bible Giveaway, we're excited to announce that we have 6 additional Bibles to give away. The good people at Broadman & Holman, who have partnered with Logos to bring the HCSB to both our free Bible.Logos.com, have sent us 6 HCSB Legacy Bibles to add to the prize list. That means we'll be giving away 18 ultra premium Bibles this month!

To learn how to enter, visit the Great Bible Giveaway page.

December Prize List

• 1 ESV Study Bible, Black Calfskin (Retail $239.99) from Crossway
• 6 HCSB Legacy Bibles, Black Genuine Leather (Retail $100) from Lifeway
• 1 KJV Cambridge Premier Concord Reference, Black Goatskin (Retail $199.99) from Cambridge Bibles
• 1 NASB In Touch Ministries Wide Margin Edition, Burgundy Calfskin (Retail $149.99) from Lockman Foundation
• 1 NASB Large Print Ultrathin Reference, Black Calfskin (Retail $149.99) from Lockman Foundation
• 1 NASB Side Column Reference Wide Margin Special Limited Edition, Black Calfskin (Retail $149.99) from Lockman Foundation
• 1 NIV Archaeological Study Bible, Venetian Brown Renaissance Fine Leather (Retail $109.99) from Zondervan
• 1 NIV Study Bible, Black Renaissance Fine Leather (Retail $124.99) from Zondervan
• 1 NIV Study Bible, Burgundy Goatskin ($229.99) from Cambridge Bibles
• 1 NKJV UltraThin Bible Signature Series, Tan Calfskin (Retail $129.99) from Thomas Nelson
• 2 NLTSB Tyndale Select, Black Calfskin (Retail Unavailable) from Tyndale
• 1 TNIV, Black Renaissance Fine Leather ($99.99) from Zondervan

November's Winners

Congratulations to the 12 winners from November.

• 1 ESV Study Bible - C. Woodruff
• 1 KJV Concord Wide Margin Reference - B. Lowe
• 1 NASB In Touch Ministries Wide Margin Edition - N. Lentfer
• 1 NASB Large Print Ultrathin Reference - R. Marx
• 1 NASB Side Column Reference Wide Margin Special Limited Edition - D. Langston
• 1 NIV New Women's Devotional - T. Barcak
• 1 NIV Study Bible - D. Knight
• 1 NIV Thinline - M. Litzinger
• 1 NKJV UltraSlim Bible Signature Series - L. Paschke
• 2 NLTSB Tyndale Select - P. Shirley and C. Terry
• 1 TNIV - A. Hart

The Great Bible Giveaway began in July, and since starting the promotion we've given away 60 premium Bibles worth nearly $10,000! Read our first Great Bible Giveaway blog post to see how it all began.

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With Christmas just around the corner, many of you have asked if we are going to have any special sales or promotions to celebrate. While we did just launch Logos 4 and have some absolutely amazing deals on upgrades and base packages that are perfect for the holiday season, we dug a little deeper in our bag of goodies and found 12 more incredible deals for you. From December 9th--20th visit www.12daysoflogos.com and find a new deal every day!

Starting December 9th and running through December 20th, we’ll be posting a new deal every day on www.12daysoflogos.com. Each day, there will be something new, and the offer will only last for 24 hours. So, you’ll have to act fast to grab it. With some titles going for up to 85% off, you’ll want to be sure to check the site every day to get the latest offering!

So, how are we starting it off? Today's deal is Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol for $0.95. At less than a buck, this is a deal that even Scrooge wouldn't pass up.

Now, these deals only last for 24 hours, so don't wait around or you'll miss out. While you're on the site, be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed or register for daily email reminders. I've seen the deals we're offering over the next 12 days and, believe me, you don't want to miss any of them!

Since the launch of Logos 4 coincided with the beginning of the month, we've had to delay posting an update to the Great Bible Giveaway. That said, I've got great news. We still have 24 premium leather Bibles to give away through the end of December!

Entering the Great Bible Giveaway is easy, and you can enter up to 5 times per month. To find out all the details, visit http://bible.logos.com/content/giveaway.

November’s Prize List

Enter the Great Bible Giveaway this month for your chance to win:

• 1 ESV Study Bible, Black Calfskin (Retail $239.99) from Crossway
• 1 KJV Concord Wide Margin Reference, Black Goatskin ($229.99) from Cambridge Bibles
• 1 NASB In Touch Ministries Wide Margin Edition, Burgundy Calfskin (Retail $149.99) from Lockman Foundation
• 1 NASB Large Print Ultrathin Reference, Black Calfskin (Retail $149.99) from Lockman Foundation
• 1 NASB Side Column Reference Wide Margin Special Limited Edition, Black Calfskin (Retail $149.99) from Lockman Foundation
• 1 NIV New Women's Devotional, Espresso Renaissance Fine Leather ($59.99) from Zondervan
• 1 NIV Study Bible, Black Goatskin ($229.99) from Cambridge Bibles
• 1 NIV Thinline, Ebony Renaissance Fine Leather (Retail $49.99) from Zondervan
• 1 NKJV UltraSlim Bible Signature Series, Black Calfskin (Retail $129.99) from Thomas Nelson
• 2 NLTSB Tyndale Select, Black Calfskin (Retail Unavailable) from Tyndale
• 1 TNIV, Black Renaissance Fine Leather ($99.99) from Zondervan

October Winners

• ESV Study Bible winner: S. McIlrath
• KJV Concord Wide Margin Reference winner: L. Swingrover
• NASB In Touch Ministries Wide Margin Edition winner: J. Carter
• NASB Large Print Ultrathin Reference winner: N. Lee
• NASB Side Column Reference Wide Margin Special Limited Edition winner: M. Jones
• NASB Wide Margin Reference winner: M. Hoskinson
• NIV Thinline winner: T. Black
• NIV Study Bible winner: B. Burkett
• NKJV UltraSlim Bible Signature Series winner: J. LaFreniere
• NLTSB Tyndale Select winners: E. Weiss and M. Sale
• TNIV winner: A. Turner

The Great Bible Giveaway began in July, and since starting the promotion we've given away 48 premium Bibles worth nearly $8,000! Read our first Great Bible Giveaway blog post to see how it all began.

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The medicinal benefits of laughing are well documented:

• A good, strong laugh provides a heart rate increase equal to 15 minutes of biking
• Laughter decreases stress and increases immune cells and infection-fighting antibodies, thus improving resistance to disease
• Laughing helps to deepen breathing, improving respiration
• A hearty laugh relieves tension, reduces stress and can leave your muscles relaxed for up to 45 minutes

It leaves one to wonder why, if there are so many advantages to laughing, is there so little levity in the Scriptures? Any physical benefits of laughing were designed and hardwired into us by the Creator himself, so would it be so difficult for him to tell a casual joke? To use the periodic pun? To exchange the occasional bon mot?

An article in Bible Study Magazine suggests that perhaps He did. Samuel Lamerson, Dean of Faculty and Associate Professor of New Testament at Knox Seminary in Fort Lauderdale, proposes that perhaps the disconnect between us and the funnier comments and stories Jesus told is cultural—maybe we just don’t understand what they would have found funny in Palestine 2,000 years ago. He also suggests that perhaps we just don’t like the idea of a jovial Jesus and prefer to picture our Savior as a “man of many sorrows, acquainted with grief." Lamerson walks us through some examples of stories Jesus told which his listeners would have found humor in, showing that Jesus may have been a little more wry than we would typically admit.

Bible Study Magazine provides many previews of these kinds of amazing articles, as well as interactive tools to accompany many of the articles in print. But subscribing today is the only way to ensure you don’t miss a single issue.

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On the blog we try to take opportunities to show you what it is like to work at Logos. We've shown you our cook-offs. We've introduced you to some of our employees. We've even shown you our Bible study bus.

Well, Friday we shipped the New International Commentary and thought that this would be a perfect time to show you what it is like around the office when we ship a new product.

Later today we will award our first SeminaryScholarship.com scholarship. The scholarship includes $1,000.00 towards tuition, plus a copy of Logos Scholar's Library which contains more than 330 titles, which in print would cost over $6,100.00.

Next Scholarship--January 10, 2010

While we'll announce the scholarship winner next week, we wanted to let you know that we'll be awarding another SeminaryScholarship.com scholarship on January 10, 2010. So, if you didn't get around to applying for our last scholarship, you can apply now. For those who applied for our last scholarship, we encourage and invite you to apply again.

Not in Seminary?

Help the seminarians around you by letting them know about this scholarship opportunity. Post a link on Facebook, tweet about it, or just send the link (http://www.seminaryscholarship.com/) in email to someone you know in seminary.

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With the weather in Bellingham turning cooler, we decided to heat things up last Friday with our annual Salsa Cook-off. This year we had fourteen competitors vying for fame and glory. Congratulations to our winners!

In the HOT category
First place: #7, Eric O. – Vicious Verde, with 90 points
Second place: #1, Darren W. – Cilantro Lime, with 70 points
Third place: #9, Lindsey K. – Deliciously Spicy, with 67 points

In the MILD category
First place: #14, Sarah E. – Pampered Palate, with 99 points
Second place: #2, April T. – California Dreaming, with 87 points
Third place: #12, Lindsey K. – Cool and Refreshing, with 66 points

Sarah E. was kind enough to share her winning recipe for Pampered Palate Salsa:

16 servings (2Tb. Each)

Note: I served this to 9 people and it was enough to have seconds.

Ingredients:
1 jar (6.5 ounces) marinated artichoke hearts, undrained
1/4 cup pitted ripe olives, chopped
2 tablespoons chopped red onion
3 medium plum tomatoes, diced
1 garlic clove, pressed
2 tablespoons snipped fresh basil leaves

Directions:
1. Drain marinade from artichokes into bowl. Chop artichokes, olives and red onion. Dice tomatoes.

2. Place vegetables into bowl. Add pressed garlic. Add basil to vegetable mixture; mix gently. Season to taste with salt and black pepper.

Yield: 16 servings

Nutrients per serving: (2 tablespoons): Calories 17, Total Fat 1 g, Saturated Fat 0 g, Cholesterol 0 mg, Carbohydrate 2 g, Protein 0 g, Sodium 80 mg, Fiber less than 1 g

As a former seminarian, I can say with great confidence that I always appreciated the person who told me about opportunities to get money to help pay for my education. If you know a seminarian, today is your day to be that person! Today is Help-a-Seminarian Day.

In just 13 days, Logos will award its first Seminary Scholarship, which includes $1,000.00 towards tuition and a copy of Scholar's Library.

Help the seminarians around you by letting them know about this scholarship opportunity. Applying is easy and only takes less than 15 minutes.

How can you help a seminarian? Spread the word!

Facebook: Login to your Facebook account and post the link http://www.SeminaryScholarship.com on your wall. Be sure to include a line that lets your friends know what the link is all about. Something like, "If you are in seminary, here is a scholarship that might help you out." You can also just click here to share on Facebook.

Twitter: Post a tweet with a link to http://www.SeminaryScholarship.com. Not sure what to tweet? You can just click here and tweet this.

Blog: If you have a blog, you can help out seminarians two ways. First, you can write a post on your blog letting seminarians know about the scholarship. Second, you can add one of our new Seminary Scholarship web banners to your site.

Not sure what to write? Try this:

Need Money for Seminary?

Searching for a seminary scholarship is tough. Everywhere you turn there are requirements. Degree track, financial need, denominations, demographics —what seminarian has time for all that!?!

Now there is a scholarship that is open to everyone and doesn’t take a week’s worth of late nights to apply for. At www.SeminaryScholarship.com all you have to do is watch a demonstration of Logos Bible Software and fill out a brief application. Once your application is submitted you will be entered to win a $1,000.00 scholarship AND a digital theological library that, in print, would cost over $6,100.00!

www.SeminaryScholarship.com

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Today marks the halfway point for our Great Bible Giveaway. To date we've seen more than 40,000 visitors to the giveaway site, received more than 7,000 official entries, and given away 36 ultra-premium Bibles worth nearly $6,000.00. All that, and we've still got three more months to go! If you haven't won yet, stick with it. October could be your month!

This October, Bible.Logos.com is giving away another 12 exquisitely crafted premium Bibles. Visit the Great Bible Giveaway for details on how to enter, as well as the full contest rules and prize list.

This month we will be giving away:

1. ESV Study Bible, Black Calfskin (Retail $239.99) from Crossway
2. KJV Concord Wide Margin Reference, Black Goatskin (Retail $229.99) from Cambridge Bibles
3. NASB In Touch Ministries Wide Margin Edition, Burgundy Calfskin (Retail $149.99) from Lockman Foundation
4. NASB Large Print Ultrathin Reference, Black Calfskin (Retail $149.99) from Lockman Foundation
5. NASB Side Column Reference Wide Margin Special Limited Edition, Black Calfskin (Retail $149.99) from Lockman Foundation
6. NASB Wide Margin Reference, Black Goatskin (Retail $229.99) from Cambridge Bibles
7. NIV Thinline, Ebony Renaissance Fine Leather (Retail $49.99) from Zondervan
8. NIV Study Bible, Black Renaissance Fine Leather (Retail $124.99) from Zondervan
9. NKJV UltraSlim Bible Signature Series, Tan Calfskin (Retail $129.99) from Thomas Nelson
10. NLTSB Tyndale Select, Black Calfskin (Retail Unavailable) from Tyndale
11. NLTSB Tyndale Select, Black Calfskin (Retail Unavailable) from Tyndale
12. TNIV, Black Renaissance Fine Leather (Retail $99.99) from Zondervan

To read how the Great Bible Giveaway got started, check out our original Bible Giveaway post.

You should follow us on Twitter here.

Twelve more people have now received a top-of-the-line premium leather Bible from the Great Bible Giveaway.

Will you be next? You still have 6 more days to enter for your chance to be one of our September winners! Visit the Great Bible Giveaway for full details and to enter today.

Congratulations to our August winners:

Want to see how this all started? View our original Great Bible Giveaway blog post.

While I try to keep God’s Word in my heart and mind on a regular basis, I must say that among email, work projects, family, Facebook, Twitter . . . my heart and mind tend to stray a little. That’s why I’m excited about the new project we’re launching today.

Today we are announcing the launch of 7 new Twitter accounts that are designed to help you take a moment in your day and meditate on God’s word.

We set the accounts up about a couple week ago to run them through some testing, and I’ve been following them in my personal twitter account. It has been really encouraging to glance over at my feed throughout the day and see a simple reminder of who God is and who I am in Christ.

We hope that these accounts will be a blessing to all you Twitter users and that, amongst the endless chatter of Twitter, you will stop for a moment focus your heart and mind on God’s Word.

Here are the accounts you can follow:

Encouraging Verses from Scripture

Follow @BibleHope

Every three hours we'll send out a tweet with an encouraging verse from Scripture.

Example tweet: The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom... http://ref.ly/Ps27.1

Hourly Bible Verses

Follow @BibleHour

We'll tweet a different verse from Scripture every hour.

Example tweet: When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. http://ref.ly/Ac2.1

Old Testament Verse of the Day

Follow @OToftheDay

Once a day we'll tweet a verse from the Old Testament.

Example tweet: Keep this Book of the Law always on your lips; meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do... http://ref.ly/Jos1.8

Proverb of the Day

Follow @PRoftheDay

Receive wisdom from Proverbs with this once daily tweet.

Example tweet: There is a way that appears to be right, but in the end it leads to death. http://ref.ly/Pr14.12

Psalm of the Day

Follow @PSoftheDay

This once daily tweet will give you Psalms to meditate on.

Example tweet: RT @PSoftheday: Praise the LORD, my soul, and forget not all his benefits - http://ref.ly/Ps103.2

New Testament Verse of the Day

Follow @NToftheDay

Once a day we'll tweet a verse from the New Testament.

Example tweet: Who gave himself for us to redeem us from all wickedness and to purify for himself a people that are his very... http://ref.ly/Tt2.14

Bible Reading Plan

Follow @BiblePlan

Read the Bible in a year. Every day includes a reading from the Old Testament, New Testament, Psalms, and Proverbs.

Example tweet: Today's Reading: http://ref.ly/Ge27.1-28.9 http://ref.ly/Ps9.10-16 http://ref.ly/Pr2.3-5 http://ref.ly/Mt10.1-15

When people ask me what I do for work, I half-jokingly tell them that I Twitter for a living. At any given time I can have up to 4 different Twitter clients up on my screen. I monitor a lot of different conversations and do my best to keep tabs on the vast number of discussion taking place. This can be a little crazy since @Logos has almost 5,000 followers and we follow all of them (spammers and SEO experts excluded, of course).

While there is a lot of information being thrown at me, there was one tweet that caught my eye the other day. @pastorjamie tweeted this:

I immediately stopped and thought, "Wow, what a great use of Twitter." Here we have a pastor using Twitter to not simply share that he's having a cup of coffee, or that he's washing the dog. Rather, he is using Twitter to lead his church, or at least those following him on Twitter, to engage in the study of God's Word. I was also pretty happy that he used our tool, Ref.ly, to do it.

The advancement of technology, especially in the social sphere, is nothing short of amazing. The challenge is how we can harness this technology for the kingdom and glory of God. At Logos, we are trying to do our part with projects such as Ref.ly (for Twitter and Facebook), RefTagger (for blogs and websites), and Bible.Logos.com. We hope that these tools serve you well and help you engage in a meaningful way.

So, how about you? Are you using Ref.ly or RefTagger? Drop a comment below with a link. Also, what are your thoughts on social media? What ideas do you have for engaging people in a meaningful way?

You should follow us on Twitter here.

The second month of our Great Bible Giveaway is over, and 12 ultra premium Bibles are on their way to the winners! If you didn't win last month, don’t worry—we have 48 more Bibles to give away between now and the end of December.

This September, Bible.Logos.com is giving away another 12 exquisitely crafted premium Bibles. Visit the Great Bible Giveaway page for details on how to enter, as well as the full contest rules and prize list.

This month we will be giving away:

1. ESV Calfskin Study Bible (retail: $239.99) from Crossway
2. KJV Concord Cambridge Calfskin (retail: $199.99) from Cambridge
3. NASB In Touch Ministries Wide Margin Edition, Burgundy Calfskin (Retail $149.99) from Lockman Foundation
4. NASB Large Print Ultrathin Reference, Black Calfskin (Retail $149.99) from Lockman Foundation
5. NASB Side Column Reference Wide Margin Limited Edition, Black Calfskin (Retail $149.99) from Lockman Foundation
6. NIV Fine Leather Archaeological (retail: $104.99) from Zondervan
7. NIV New Women’s Devotional Renaissance Fine Leather (retail: $59.99) from Zondervan
8. NKJV Wide Margin Reference Goatskin (retail $229.99) from Cambridge
9. NKJV UltraSlim Bible Signature Series, Black Calfskin (Retail $129.99) from Thomas Nelson
10. NLT Tyndale Select, Black Calfskin (Retail $135.00) from Tyndale
11. NLT Tyndale Select, Black Calfskin (Retail $135.00) from Tyndale
12. TNIV Reference Bible, Black Renaissance Fine Leather (Retail $99.99) from Zondervan

To read how the Great Bible Giveaway got started, check out our original Bible Giveaway post.

You should follow us on Twitter here.

The anticipation of the yet-to-be-completed Logos Bicycle Jersey Pre-Pub didn't stop a group of Logos employees from gathering for this year’s Tour de Whatcom. Even without the jersey, the Logos team looked sharp on the road as they led the peloton in both the 50- and 105-mile rides.

In order to gather more interest for the Logos jersey, Jim Straatman, our IT Manager, actually took a prototype of the Logos jersey and safety-pinned sections of it onto his regular jersey! Place your Pre-Pub order to help move it into production and soon enough, you can look for riders around the country sporting the new Logos Bible Software bicycle jerseys . . . if you can keep up. ;)

Tour de Whatcom Wrap-Up

In the century leg of the Tour, a ride spanning the same distance from the U.S./Canadian Border (Peace Arch Crossing) down to Seattle, Jim Straatman and Scott Alexander averaged almost 20 mph—good enough to finish first. For Jim, this was his first organized 100+ mile ride where several hundred people participated. And leave it to our IT Manager to capture the ride’s GPS data!

For the 50-milers, it was Sean Fields, Director of Visual Design here at Logos, who finished first with an average speed of over 19 mph. The Tour has become a traditional birthday celebration ride for Sean, who remarked, "It's a great way to start off a new year of my life—a fun fast bike ride!"

In all, nine Logos employees participated in this year’s Tour:

Related posts:
Bike-to-Work Day
People behind the Product: Jim Straatman

You should follow us on Twitter here.

Anyone who has heard John Piper preach or read one of his MANY books knows that he is a man passionate about God's Word. That's why we are excited to have him as the cover story for our September-October issue of Bible Study Magazine.

While the magazine is still at the printer and won't officially ship for a couple weeks, we decided to go ahead and let you check out the article. Visit the John Piper page on BibleStudyMagazine.com and read the article in its entirety. It is a great article with lots of insight and advice from Piper's personal time spent in God's Word, so be sure to tell your friends and spread the word. But that's not all...

Get a FREE copy of Finally Alive

In conjunction with the John Piper issue of Bible Study Magazine we wanted to announce the release of Finally Alive for Logos Bible Software. For one month only (August 14-September 14) we will be giving away Finally Alive for FREE! For full details on how to get your copy, visit the John Piper page and, remember, spread the word.

You should follow us on Twitter here.

We are excited to announce the first round of winners for the Great Bible Giveaway. With 12 premium Bibles given away in July, we have 60 more to go! Be sure to head over to the Great Bible Giveaway and enter this month’s drawing. This month we’re giving away 12 more premium Bibles, including a limited edition King James calfskin Bible that comes in a cherry wood display case!

Congratulations to last month’s winners. Will you be on this list next month? Enter today!

1. T. Marshall, NC—TNIV, Black Renaissance Fine Leather (Retail $99.99) from Zondervan
2. P. Albright, AL—NIV New Women's Devotional, Espresso Renaissance Fine Leather (Retail $59.99) from Zondervan
3. C. Land, TX—NIV Study Bible, Black Goatskin (Retail $229.99) from Cambridge Bibles
4. M. Peterson, TX—NASB In Touch Ministries Wide Margin Edition, Burgundy Calfskin (Retail $149.99) from Lockman Foundation
5. M. Kiesewetter, AZ—NASB Large Print Ultrathin Reference, Black Calfskin (Retail $149.99) from Lockman Foundation
6. M. Gatlin, MN—NASB Side Column Reference Wide Margin Special Limited Edition, Black Calfskin (Retail $149.99) from Lockman Foundation
7. S. Di Mauro, ON—ESV Study Bible, Black Calfskin (Retail $239.99) from Crossway
8. T. Dinkins, CA—NLT Tyndale Select, Black Calfskin (Retail $135.00) from Tyndale
9. J. Kaess, FL—NLT Tyndale Select, Black Calfskin (Retail $135.00) from Tyndale
10. T. Cavalier, TX—NKJV UltraSlim Bible Signature Series, Black Calfskin (Retail $129.99) from Thomas Nelson
11. J. Dunne, MI—NIV Study Bible, Black Renaissance Fine Leather (Retail $124.99) from Zondervan
12. D. Banks, IL—TNIV, Black Renaissance Fine Leather (Retail $99.99) from Zondervan

You should follow us on Twitter here.

The first month of our Great Bible Giveaway is over, and 12 ultra premium Bibles are on their way to the winners! If you didn't win last month, don’t worry—we have 60 more beautiful Bibles to give away between now and the end of December.

This August, Bible.Logos.com is giving away another 12 exquisitely crafted premium Bibles. Included in this month’s giveaway is a limited edition KJV from Cambridge Press that is bound in Moroccan goatskin leather and comes with a cherry wood display case. No longer in production, this Bible is sure to be a treasure to one of this month’s winners. Will it be you?

Visit the Great Bible Giveaway page for details on how to enter, as well as the full contest rules and prize list.

This month we will be giving away:

1. ESV Calfskin Study Bible (retail: $239.99) from Crossway
2. ESV Wide Margin Goatskin (retail: $229.99) from Cambridge
3. KJV Concord Cambridge Calfskin (retail: $199.99) from Cambridge
4. NASB In Touch Ministries Wide Margin Edition, Burgundy Calfskin (Retail $149.99) from Lockman Foundation
5. NASB Large Print Ultrathin Reference, Black Calfskin (Retail $149.99) from Lockman Foundation
6. NASB Side Column Reference Wide Margin Limited Edition, Black Calfskin (Retail $149.99) from Lockman Foundation
7. NIV Fine Leather Archaeological (retail: $104.99) from Zondervan
8. NIV Fine Leather Thinline (retail: $49.99) from Zondervan
9. NKJV UltraSlim Bible Signature Series, Black Calfskin (Retail $129.99) from Thomas Nelson
10. NLT Tyndale Select, Black Calfskin (Retail $135.00) from Tyndale
11. NLT Tyndale Select, Black Calfskin (Retail $135.00) from Tyndale
12. TNIV Reference Bible, Black Renaissance Fine Leather (Retail $99.99) from Zondervan

To read how the Great Bible Giveaway got started, check out our original Bible Giveaway post

You should follow us on Twitter here.

Aaaah, summertime! Fourth of July, the Mid-Summer Classic (MLB’s All-Star game), and, of course, your favorite pie! Today, eleven employees treated the Logos office to one of the sweetest lunches ever—for the Logos Pie Bake-off! As soon as you stepped foot into the kitchen, it smelled like a sweet-factory . . . too bad you can’t capture smell and taste in a photo.

The pies were so good, and the competition so close, that there was a tie for third until a straggling voter cast his last-minute ballot pushing Brittany Young’s Chocolate-Dipped Strawberry Shortbread into third place. But that was not the only close call. Marketing’s very own Sarah Knepper just barely edged out Kyle Anderson’s Family Peanut Butter Pie with her Pavlova—by only two votes!

Sarah has graciously made her Pavlova recipe available, so after enjoying a few photos, give her Pavlova a try for your next summer party!

Today marks the 500th anniversary of the birth of John Calvin (July 10, 1509 – May 27, 1564). Hundreds of thousands commemorate this day with gratitude to God for this man and his influence on the church.

Many who disagree with his theology still regard him as a gift to the church. John Wesley called him “a great instrument of God,” and Jacob Arminius considered Calvin “incomparable in the interpretation of Scripture” and recommended Calvin’s commentaries second only to the Bible itself. So learning and benefiting from Calvin isn’t just for the five pointers.

To join in the celebration of the grace of God in the life of John Calvin, we decide to launch Calvin500.com—a resource site devoted to everything John Calvin—and create several new Calvin collections, including the impressive Calvin 500 Collection, which contains more than 100 books by and about John Calvin.

If you missed the original announcement and haven’t yet seen the site or the collections, be sure to give them a look.

In addition to the site and the collections, don’t miss out on the two special birthday presents we have for you.

More Books, No Additional Charge!

First, we’ve added 11 new volumes to the Calvin 500 Collection, bringing the total up to 108! To cover the addition of these new titles, the price needs to go up. But instead of raising it immediately, we decided that we’d keep it at the already crazy price of $299.95 through the weekend. If you’ve been contemplating placing your pre-order, you have one last chance to pick up the most comprehensive Calvin collection on the planet at the lowest possible price. First thing Monday morning (July 13), the price will increase.

If you’ve already pre-ordered the Calvin 500 Collection, you’ll get all of these 11 new titles at no additional charge, but we need your help to cover the added cost. Please spread the word about the even bigger Calvin 500 Collection. Blog it. Tweet it. Facebook it. Or email it.

Get a Free Copy of Calvin’s Institutes!

Second, we’re giving away the Beveridge translation of Calvin’s Institutes through the end of the month. To get your free book, you’ll need three things:

1. a copy of the Libronix Digital Library System installed on your PC or Mac
2. a Logos.com account with a credit card on file
3. a Libronix Customer ID that is connected to your Logos.com account

Here are the steps to follow to get all set up:

Step 1: Download and install Libronix for Windows. (Mac users can purchase the Mac version of the engine, or buy a Mac base package.) If you already have Libronix up and running on your computer, jump to the third step.

Step 2: Activate Libronix. When you do, you’ll create a Libronix Customer ID (usually your email address, if you enter it). You can find your Libronix Customer ID by going to Help > About Libronix DLS.

Step 3: Create a Logos.com account. If you already have one, just log in.

Step 4: Make sure that your Libronix Customer ID is associated with your Logos.com account. Go to My Account, enter your Libronix Customer ID from Step 2, and click “Confirm.” If it’s already there, no need to do anything.

Step 5: “Buy” the Institutes of the Christian Religion by John Calvin. Go to the page and click “Add to Cart,” or just add it straight to your cart from here, and then make sure to add the CALVIN-500 coupon code to your cart and click “Update Cart.” Proceed through the checkout process and then click “Submit Order.” If you don’t have a credit card on file, you’ll need to enter your credit card information. Don’t worry. You won't be charged. It’s an unfortunate inconvenience in our current checkout system, and we hope to change it at some point.

Step 6: Unlock and download your new book. If you’re on a Windows machine, just click the orange “Unlock & Download” button. If you’re on a Mac, just synchronize your licenses (Tools > Library Management > Synchronize Licenses) and manually put the book file in your resources folder (Macintosh HD/Library/Application Support/Libronix DLS/Resources on the startup volume).

Step 7: Start using your new book! Open Libronix, open My Library, then type Institutes to find it. Double-click it to open it.

Most Americans celebrated the 4th of July by watching fireworks, but five Logos employees celebrated by spending more than 80 hours working outside—in temperatures approaching 100 degrees in the afternoon—putting on a massive fireworks display for others to enjoy. Customer Service representatives Justin Kooy, Debbie Mickens, Kat Hutchison, and Christy Powell and software developer James Van Noord joined three others to put on a fireworks display at Fort Spokane over the July 4th weekend.

All but one of the Logos pyrotechnicians have done professional displays in the past, and Justin will be getting his official pyrotechnics license later this summer. We thought you’d enjoy seeing how some of the people behind the product spent their 4th of July.

Here’s a slideshow of some of the pictures—courtesy of James Van Noord.

A congratulations is definitely in order to Justin Kooy, who proposed to his now-fiancée Katie during the fireworks show (see the second to last picture). Congratulations, Justin and Katie!

We’re about to give away 72 ultra-premium versions of the most amazingly bound Bibles ever printed. From the finest you can imagine top-end offerings in leather and calfskin—to the limited production run—“only a handful in existence” type heirloom quality of ultra-premium goatskin in a custom-carved Rosewood box imported from England!

Wow, was that breathless or what? …but seriously, if you are used to the feel of the paperback Bible you got from church the first day you visited youth-group as a teenager, you won’t believe how different these bindings can be.

We know “…the Word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.” and we love it no matter what it is printed on and no matter what it is bound with. In fact, some of the most “heirloom quality” Bibles in the world are the most plainly bound, simple, worn and weathered Bibles. What makes many Bibles “heirloom quality” is the deep personal connection to God’s Word that they represent for those privileged to steward them.

So why are we giving away such high-end Bibles? Well, it all started when I received an ESV Study Bible in Premium Calfskin. I literally had no idea that leather could feel so supple, so smooth and so cottony-soft. I found myself wondering if it was fair to say that my new Bible could actually be creamy, velvety, and like butter all at the same time. When it came time to launch Bible.Logos.com I wanted to do something spectacular. I wanted to highlight the brand-new ultra-premium access to the Bible that Bible.Logos.com provides, with some ultra-premium print Bibles that people would be more familiar with.

Over the next 6 months Logos is giving away 72 premium print Bibles on Bible.Logos.com—worth over $11,500.00!

Every month from July thru December, we will give away 12 premium Bibles featuring the most popular translations from Bible.Logos.com, including ESV, KJV, NIV, NASB, NLT, and NKJV. These Bibles are the top-of-the-line versions and feature the highest quality leather and binding—some are valued at over $400.

This month we will be giving away these 12 Bibles:

1. ESV Study Bible, Black Calfskin (Retail $239.99) from Crossway
2. KJV Concord Wide Margin Reference, Black Goatskin (Retail $229.99) from Cambridge Bibles
3. NASB In Touch Ministries Wide Margin Edition, Burgundy Calfskin (Retail $149.99) from Lockman Foundation
4. NASB Large Print Ultrathin Reference, Black Calfskin (Retail $149.99) from Lockman Foundation
5. NASB Side Column Reference Wide Margin Limited Edition, Black Calfskin (Retail $149.99) from Lockman Foundation
6. NIV New Women’s Devotional, Espresso Renaissance Fine Leather (Retail $59.99) from Zondervan
7. NLT Tyndale Select, Black Calfskin (Retail $135.00) from Tyndale
8. NIV Study Bible, Black Goatskin (Retail $229.99) from Cambridge Bibles
9. NIV Study Bible, Black Renaissance Fine Leather (Retail $124.99) from Zondervan
10. NKJV UltraSlim Bible Signature Series, Black Calfskin (Retail $129.99) from Thomas Nelson
11. NLT Tyndale Select, Black Calfskin (Retail $135.00) from Tyndale
12. TNIV Reference Bible, Black Renaissance Fine Leather (Retail $99.99) from Zondervan

For details on how to enter, as well as the full contest rules and prize list, visit The Great Bible Giveaway page.

The Anchor Yale Bible was our biggest Pre-Pub ever in terms of its size, the number of hours it took to get it from print to digital, and the team assembled to tackle it.

Pictured below are the folks in our Electronic Text Development department who did the lion’s share of the work.

Several others are not pictured here because they forgot to wear their t-shirts! Many more were involved in other ways like working with the publisher and doing things like marketing, sales, testing, shipping, and support.

Since this was a special Pre-Pub, we did something out of the ordinary. One of our artists designed a t-shirt that those who worked closely on the project received. Here’s a close-up of someone wearing his new t-shirt proudly.

I know some of you are thinking how much you’d like to add this to your wardrobe. Well, if you wear a medium, you just might be able to. We have three medium t-shirts left. If you bought the Anchor Yale Bible and want one of these cool shirts, leave a comment below. We’ll randomly pick out three winners and send out the shirts in the next day or two.

Rick Brannan is no stranger to longtime users and readers of the Logos blog. He’s been with Logos since 1993 and is approaching his 16th anniversary of employment with the company. Rick is an information architect in our design and editorial department and blogs at Ricoblog and PastoralEpistles.com.

Though he’s a regular contributor to the Logos blog and has done dozens of videos, most of his posts and videos are about Greek and not about Rick. In this People behind the Product video, you’ll get to find out a little bit about one of Logos’ earliest employees.

Other Posts about Rick:

• Video Interview with Rick: What's So Cool about the LGNTI?
• Fourteen Years and Counting
• Time for an Introduction

A little over a year ago we launched RefTagger. Since launching, RefTagger has been installed on thousands of sites and helped bloggers and site owners engage readers with the text of the Bible.

The other day we began talking about how cool it would be to have something like RefTagger, only for Twitter. A couple emails, a designer, and one developer later, we launched ref.ly.

Ref.ly is a URL shortening service with a twist. Simply go to ref.ly, type in a Bible verse, and a custom link is automatically generated that you can use to link your friends and followers to the Bible. The added beauty of ref.ly is that the URL structure is really easy to remember, so you can simply create the link on your own. In fact, ref.ly recognizes almost every conceivable Bible referencing scheme, so you can share Matthew 16:18 as http://ref.ly/Mt16.18, http://ref.ly/Mat16.18, http://ref.ly/Matt16.18, or http://ref.ly/Matthew16.18.

Along with an easy to remember structure, you also have the ability to share a single verse (http://ref.ly/Ro8.28), a range of verses, (http://ref.ly/Jn1.1-18), a chapter (http://ref.ly/Ps23), or an entire book (http://ref.ly/3Jn). You can even specify a particular version by simply adding @ followed by the version abbreviation (http://ref.ly/1P2.2@ESV).

With ref.ly you can now help your Twitter followers and Facebook friends engage more deeply with scriptures you reference in your updates.

ref.ly – To the point.

Last Friday we enjoyed our annual chili cook-off here in the office. We had about a dozen different entries, and they were quite tasty! But three stood out from the crowd.

By popular vote, the winners were:

• 1st Place: Jana Gering’s Mojito Chicken Chili (#2)
• 2nd Place: John Barry 8 Bean Fit n’ Lean Turkey Chili (#6)
• 3rd Place: Dave Dunkin’s Basic Chili (#1)

Jana has graciously allowed me to share her winning chili recipe with you, our readers. So be sure to download the PDF and give it a try. It’s sure to please!

With National Bike-to-Work Day coming up next Friday, we thought we’d take a moment to share with you a little corner of the Logos offices that you might not know exists—the bike shop.

Equipment purchases at Logos typically include laptops, servers, and networking gear. So Bob was a little surprised to see an IT department purchase request that included everything necessary to set up a bicycle repair shop, but he supported the project from the get-go.

When asked about the bike shop, Bob said, “It was a great idea. Many of our employees bike to work, and others go for rides during the day. Having a fully equipped bike shop on site is a great way to encourage healthy habits that are good for the environment, too.”

The bike shop is equipped with everything you would find in your local bike shop. With so many specialty tools, thankfully we have a number of avid bikers and former bike shop employees—including our IT Manager, Jim Straatman—who are more than willing to lend a helping hand to employees who aren’t sure what to do.

Hopefully we’ll see a big response from employees next Friday, and lots of folks will bike in to work. For added motivation, that Friday will also be the day of our annual Chili Cookoff. Now we can all enjoy an extra helping of chili, knowing that we can bike off the extra pounds on our way home from work.

This year marks the 500th anniversary of the birth of the great Protestant Reformer John Calvin. For several years we have had Calvin’s Commentaries and Institutes available, but there is a large portion of Calvin’s writings that we don’t yet have (e.g., his collected writings in Latin span 59 dense volumes!). So we decided that 2009 was the perfect time to work on digitizing as much of Calvin’s corpus as possible—and to update our existing Calvin material.

Seven New Calvin Collections

We are excited to make available for pre-order seven new Calvin collections:

• The Calvin 500 Collection (97 Vols.)
• Calvin’s Commentaries (46 Vols.)
• The Institutes of the Christian Religion, by John Calvin: English, Latin, and French (9 Vols.)
• The Letters of John Calvin (4 Vols.)
• Tracts and Treatises of John Calvin (8 Vols.)
• John Calvin Biography Collection (10 Vols.)
• Calvin and the History of Calvinism (20 Vols.)

The Calvin 500 Collection contains all of the volumes from the other six collections and is an unbelievable value. It offers an additional 50% off the cumulative Pre-Pub prices for the individual collections—which themselves are already priced very low! It’s 97 volumes, nearly 40,000 pages (!), and currently just $299.95. That makes this the lowest priced Pre-Pub (in terms of price per page) that we have ever offered! In short, this is an amazing deal that you won’t want to pass up.

If you already own our earlier editions of Calvin’s Commentaries and Institutes, don’t worry. There’s an upgrade collection available that offers you an even lower price based on what you already own—and you’ll get all of the newly updated content at no additional charge.

Calvin’s Sermons

What about Calvin’s sermons? Most of Calvin’s extant sermons were translated into English in the late 1500s, but 16th-century English uses different spelling, and the majority of these volumes haven’t been updated to modern English spelling. We’re in the process of evaluating our options for a Calvin Sermons Collection and hope to be able to put it on Pre-Pub in the near future.

Additional Titles

The literature by and about Calvin is as massive as the great Reformer’s influence has been. It’s possible that we missed important books in our research, so we may add additional volumes to many of these collections over the next few months. That means the prices will probably have to go up to cover the additional production costs, so you’ll definitely want to pre-order early to lock in the lowest price! If you pre-order now, any additional volumes that we add to these collections will essentially be free!

Calvin500.com

In conjunction with the release of these new collections, we’ve also just launched a brand new website: Calvin500.com. We’ve done a fair bit of research on Calvin, so we thought we’d share it with you. You’ll find information about Calvin, bibliographies of Calvin’s works and literature on Calvin, a list of all Calvin 500 conferences, a page that tracks all Twitter mentions of John Calvin, and some fun stuff like a Calvin quiz and a couple of birthday countdown widgets. There’s also a blog where we will post news and announcements. Be sure to subscribe to the Calvin 500 feed to stay in the loop.

Blogging at Conferences

By the way, if you’re planning to attend any of the Calvin conferences this year and would like to blog the conference at Calvin500.com—or even if you blog about them on your own blog—let us know. We’d love to feature you on our site.

Go check out the new site and collections, and help us spread the word by blogging about it or mentioning it on Facebook, Twitter, and the other social networking sites you frequent.

Last Friday Logos participated for the fourth time in the annual Trivia Bee sponsored by the Whatcom Literacy Council. There were 28 teams, and for the first time we made it all the way to the finals. We ended up placing 5th overall, beating out teams of librarians and engineers. I hear that our team has their sights set on 1st place for next year’s contest.

Ken Smith, the head of our Electronic Text Development department and a former team member, was this year’s coach. Team members were software developer James Van Noord, who has participated every year, and first-timers Heather Anderson and Isaiah Hoogendyk, both of whom work in ETD.

All three of this year’s team members are originally from Lower Michigan, so they decided to call themselves the Trolls (see Wikipedia for details).

Jeopardy champ Ken Jennings participated again this year as the lifeline. Each team could buy up to 3 lifelines. If the team didn’t know an answer, they could substitute Ken’s answer for their own. If he got it right, their team got it right. I’d guess that going with the answer of a guy who won 74 times in a row on Jeopardy was a pretty safe bet!

Here are some pictures of the event, courtesy of of former Logos employee Mark French.

The Champ Is Crowned
From the start of the final round it was clear that Schaeffer was going to be the run-away winner of the 2009 Logos March Madness tournament. Having made it through a field of 64 titles, The Complete Works of Francis A. Schaeffer is now available at 75% off using the code MMCHAMP at checkout.

Runner-Up
While it isn’t the champ, The Existence and Attributes of God performed well in every round of the competition and, as runner up, is now available for 50% off using the code MMTWO at checkout.

Everyone Is a Winner!
During the course of the Logos March Madness tournament, we have received numerous emails and comments from people who found out about the contest after it started or forgot to check the site and missed out on one of the many spectacular deals we offered. After some consideration, we decided to give everyone one last chance to reap the benefits of our first Logos March Madness tourney. That said, we have re-opened ALL the discount codes used during the tournament. All discount codes are good between now and midnight (PST) April 12th. Below is a list of all the titles and their discount codes.

Important Purchasing Note:
The Logos checkout system can only accommodate one discount code per purchase. So, if you want to buy titles that have different discount codes, you will need to make them as separate purchases.

After five rounds of competition with almost 40,000 votes cast, we’re down to the championship game of the 2009 Logos March Madness book tournament. There have been some close-fought battles and surprising upsets along the way.

Who will rise to the top and become the Logos March Madness champion?

The final match is between The Complete Works of Francis Schaeffer by philosopher and apologist Francis Schaeffer and The Existence and Attributes of God by Puritan Stephen Charnock. The winner will be awarded a 75% discount, and the loser a 50% discount.

Voting begins today and runs through Sunday night, at which time the champion will be decided. You will then have until the following Sunday night (April 12) to take advantage of the discounts. Head on over and place your vote now for your favorite title!

By the way, the two titles that got knocked out in the Final 4 round are currently available at 45% off using coupon code MMFF. The code is good through Sunday night (April 5).

• The Life and Work of St. Paul (2 Vols.) by F. W. Farrar
• The Prophecy of Isaiah by J. Alec Motyer

The Sweet 16 round of Logos March Madness has closed, and we now have 8 titles (listed below) eligible for a 35% discount using the code MMR3. This code will expire on March 28th, so grab these books now.

Voting is currently open for the Elite 8 round. Remember, the further a title advances, the greater the discount. Head over now and vote for your favorite titles.The grand champion of Logos March Madness will be offered at 75% off retail!

UPDATE: We have set up a live twitterfeed of the conference on the BibleTech website.

Today’s guest post is from J. D. Elgin, a member of the Marketing Department and the coordinator for this year’s BibleTech conference.

BibleTech:2009 officially begins today at 9:00 AM Pacific Time. If you’re reading this, chances are you’re missing out on all the excitement! We certainly don’t want any of our faithful blog followers to feel left out, so we’ve assembled a list of speakers who will be covering the conference live via their personal blogs and Twitter feeds. We invite you to use the links below to follow all of the action.

Three conference speakers will be sharing their thoughts on the conference, so you can get the latest by checking out their blogs or subscribing to their RSS feeds.

• Rev. Wesley Allen of ABCNJ from New Jersey (RSS)
• Sean Boisen of Logos Bible Software (RSS)
• Antoine RJ Wright of Mobile Ministry Magazine (RSS)

Or try out this Google Blog Search (also available via RSS) to catch any blogs we may have missed.

Also, you can follow these speakers on Twitter:

• Ellen Frankel and JT Waldman of The Jewish Publication Society at @JewishPub
• Rob Christenson of Geeks & God and Mustard Seed Media, Inc. at @Rob_Feature
• Stephen Johnson of Olive Tree Bible Software at @RearCog

Or just follow the BibleTech:2009 hashtag, #BibleTech09, to get all of the Twitter action in one place.

You will also want to stay tuned to the BibleTech Conference website in the coming weeks. We will be recording the conference audio and will post the MP3 files as soon as we are able.

Update: Follow along with the Twitter action right at http://www.bibletechconference.com/live.htm.

Round 2 of Logos March Madness has closed, and we now have 16 titles (listed below) eligible for a 30% discount using the code MMR2. This code will expire on March 28th, so grab these books now.

Voting is currently open for the Sweet 16 round. Remember, the further a title advances, the greater the discount. Head over now and vote for your favorite titles.The grand champion of Logos March Madness will be offered at 75% off retail!

At Logos we tend to love books more than we love basketball. So, with March Madness starting today we thought we’d spin our own variation of the tournament and launch LogosMarchMadness.com.

The premise is simple—we’ve selected 64 of our titles and placed them in 4 divisions: OT, NT, Theology, and Popular. You visit LogosMarchMadness.com and vote for which titles advance each round. In each division, titles will compete based upon your votes. The highest voted titles advance until we have a grand champion.

To make things more interesting, we’re offering discounts on ALL the books in the tournament and YOU control how much the discount is. Every round that a book advances in the tournament, the discount increases. Discounts will be between 25% and 75%. That means that if you see a title you really want, it is up to you to spread the word and get people to vote. Post it on your blog, tell your Facebook friends, and tweet it on Twitter! If you want the discount, you need to get the votes. The discount is in your hands!

The tournament will run from March 19 through April 6 and will have 6 rounds. We’ve posted the full schedule and brackets on the site.

Opportunities like this don’t come along often, so don't miss out. Be sure to subscribe to the Tournament RSS feed to receive updates on what books are advancing and the all important discount codes!

Logos March Madness—When books move up, prices go down. Spread the word!

A week and a half ago we announced the Logos–Facebook Photo Contest and invited you to take pictures of yourself with Logos Bible Software and upload them to Facebook. The response to the contest was super. Nearly 900 new people connected with us on Facebook, and close to 400 photos were uploaded and tagged.

The deadline for entering was Sunday, March 1, but we allowed all photos submitted by the time we picked the winners yesterday afternoon. With so many creative and cool entries, it was very difficult to pick the winner for each category, but here’s what the judges came up with.

Most Creative

There were several really creative photos, but the award for most creative goes to Richard Flink.

Oldest Logos Stuff

The oldest actual Logos product in any of the pictures we saw was Logos 1.6, which I believe came out in 1993. (There were some pictures of CDWord from 1989 and 1990, but that was before CDWord became a Logos product, so we had to exclude them.) Five people had Logos Bible Software 1.6 pictured, but only three included themselves in the photos. So we had a three-way tie between Mike Monroe, Stephen Hustedde, and Dennis Martin.

Congratulations to these faithful, longtime users!

Coolest Setup

The coolest setup went to Tyson Heyn who has Logos running on an Intel Cord 2 Quad Q9550 CPU with 8GB of RAM and four monitors!

Most Unique Location

The coolest location was especially difficult to pick, but after much deliberation we decided to award it to Raymond Minot for his picture of Bible study on the balcony of a monastery overlooking the Swiss Alps. (Click through to see some nice shots of the Alps.)

Most Logos Stuff

The award for the most Logos stuff goes to pastor and Logos user Andrew Rappaport, who has accumulated over 325 disks and 4,585 digital resources! Wow!

Congratulations to all of you! If you were one of our seven winners, you may call 800-875-6467 to use your $100 unlock credit whenever you’d like on any downloadable books at Logos.com.

And a big thanks to all of you who participated. We thoroughly enjoyed seeing all of the pictures of you and Logos!

If you haven’t yet seen them, go take a look at all of the entries.

Our Logos–Facebook Photo Contest is off to a great start. We’ve made hundreds of new connections with Logos users around the world, and we’ve seen some really cool photos. If you haven’t yet entered any pictures of you and Logos, you still have a few more days left. But remember, the deadline for entering your photos is this coming Sunday, March 1, so don’t miss out. And don’t forget to tag both yourself and “Logos Bible Software” so we get notified and include you in the contest. See the previous post for all of the details.

If you’re looking for ideas of what to do, how about taking the “extreme ironing” approach. (Extreme ironing involves taking pictures of yourself ironing in some of the craziest conceivable locations, like on the top of a mountain, on the beach, under water, while skiing or jumping off a cliff, etc.)

Just grab your laptop, water bottle, coffee mug, or Logos t-shirt and head to a cool location, like . . .

The Center of South America

The Grand Canyon

The Mall of America

The Hockey Hall of Fame

Disney World

Cabela’s

Your Favorite Hunting Spot

If you live in a unique, beautiful, or famous area, you have the perfect opportunity to enter to win $100 worth of Logos books. Are you a missionary in a picturesque or notable location? Why not give your fellow Logos users a glimpse into your part of the world?

We’re looking forward to seeing what else you come up with!

Like free Logos books? Get your cameras ready! Starting now and running through the end of the month, we’re having a Logos–Facebook Photo Contest. Here’s how it works. You take pictures of yourself with Logos Bible Software, upload them to your Facebook account, and tag yourself and Logos in the pictures; and we’ll award the owners of the five best photos with $100 unlock credit to use on downloadable titles at Logos.com.

Here’s what you need to do, step by step:

1. Log in to your Facebook account. (If you’re not already a member, you can sign up for free.)
2. Become a friend of Logos Bible Software on Facebook, if you aren’t already.
3. Take as many pictures as you want of yourself and Logos Bible Software.
4. Upload as many of those pictures as you want to your Facebook account.
5. Tag both yourself and “Logos Bible Software” in all of the photos that you uploaded. (Note: you won’t be able to tag “Logos Bible Software” properly until we accept your friend request. We’ll try to respond ASAP.)
6. Check the Logos blog on March 3 to find out if you were one of the five winners of the $100 unlock credit for Logos.com.

On Monday March 2 we will choose five winners, one for each of the following categories:

1. Most Creative
2. Oldest (disk, box, logo, version of Logos running, etc.)
3. Coolest Setup (could be your computer setup or your setup of Logos stuff)
4. Most Unique Location
5. Most Logos Stuff

The following day, Tuesday March 3, we’ll post the top five photos, announce the winners, and award the $100 unlock credit.

Here are some additional details:

1. What counts as Logos in a picture? Anything that is identifiably Logos Bible Software, like Logos running on your computer, a Logos box, disk, t-shirt, mug, etc., or the Logos logo sticker on your computer.
2. How many photos can I enter? Enter as many photos as you want. The more you enter, the greater chance you have of winning!
3. How long do I have? The deadline for entering is March 1, 2009.
4. Why can’t I tag Logos in my photos? You won’t be able to tag “Logos Bible Software” properly until we’ve accepted your friend request. We’ll do our best to respond ASAP.

Have any other questions? Drop a note in the comments, and we’ll answer them.

Need help getting some ideas? Check out Ryan’s picture below. But don’t just copy what he did. Be creative. Come up with something that you think will set you apart from the competition!

Share the fun with others. Click on the Facebook icon to the right (may not work in your feed reader—visit the post) to let others on Facebook know about the Logos–Facebook Photo Contest. Of course, feel free to share it on your blog, on Twitter, and wherever else you’d like.

Oh, by the way, if you’re not a fan of Logos or in the Logos user group yet, don’t forget to do that too.

Last Friday was our annual Curry Cook-off. I missed it, but I heard from a somewhat picky eater that several of the curries were simply amazing.

We covered the event on Twitter, so if you’re not following us and missed out, here’s a rundown of the action Twitter style courtesy of my office partner, Ryan Burns:

• Curry Cook-off has begun! 12:02 PM Feb 13th
• http://twitpic.com/1gyej - Serving line. 12:13 PM Feb 13th
• The line is growing - http://twitpic.com/1gyb5 12:13 PM Feb 13th
• http://twitpic.com/1gyf4 - Yup... I am at the back of the line. 12:13 PM Feb 13th
• Twitterverse place your votes - http://twitpic.com/1gybz // @logos your top 3 choices and I'll vote top twitter picks for my vote. 12:21 PM Feb 13th
• http://twitpic.com/1gyxv - Happy people. 12:33 PM Feb 13th
• RT @o1mnikent: eating curry @logos 12:44 PM Feb 13th
• http://twitpic.com/1gz98 - Brought mine back to my office to savor. 12:46 PM Feb 13th
• http://twitpic.com/1gz9k - Perfect palette cleanser. 12:46 PM Feb 13th
• RT @ryan_burns: 12seconds - Logos curry cook off. http://tiny12.tv/JVS0B 12:50 PM Feb 13th
• http://twitpic.com/1gzn6 - It was bound to happen. Curry spill. 1:02 PM Feb 13th
• Looks like everyone is finished eating. Now it is time to tally the votes. 1:22 PM Feb 13th
• http://twitpic.com/1h0zl - Official curry cook-off results are on the way. 1:57 PM Feb 13th
• Logos Annual Curry Cook-off results: 1st place @danpritchett2 with #8. 2nd place Vincent with #1. 3rd place Jenni with #15. 2:06 PM Feb 13th

First place went to my boss, Dan Pritchett, second place went to Vincent Setterholm, and third place went to Jenni Pritchett. If I can round up the recipes, I’ll update the post later.

Here’s a brief slideshow of some pictures of the event. (Notice that the winner entered three different curries!)

Today's guest blogger is Kent Hendricks, the main Pre-Pub man here at Logos.

When he's not thinking about Bible software, Bob Pritchett, the co-founder and CEO of Logos Bible Software, speaks to business and academic groups around the country.

On Tuesday, January 27, from 4-6 PM, Bob will be speaking at Room2Think here in Bellingham, Washington. Room2Think is the most creative and innovative meeting space in our area, and this will be a great chance to meet business leaders from the community and network with others.

Bob will be presenting on "Entrepreneurial Lessons from the Frontline," topics taken from his book, Fire Someone Today, And Other Surprising Tactics for Making Your Business a Success. (The book is based on mistakes and successes at Logos Bible Software over the years. You'll find reviews at Amazon.com.)

The event is $25 and includes wine and cheese, tasty treats from Old World Deli in downtown Bellingham, a copy of Bob's book, and an opportunity to connect with others from the community. If you live in the Bellingham area, you won't want to miss this.

Space is limited, so register now to reserve your spot! View the PDF invitation for all the details. If you have any questions, simply send an email to Room2Think at info@room2think.com or call 360-778-3635.

We hope to see you there!

We've been searching the Internet to see what people are saying about Bible Study Magazine, and it's been great! We are thrilled to see so many positive reviews and to be getting so many new subscribers.

In the course of our searching we found that someone even wrote their own ad for Bible Study Magazine and our Kutless track giveaway:

"Hey kids! How would you like to win a FREE subscription to Bible Study Magazine?!? And can you also imagine the idea of getting a FREE mp3 rockin-roll audio music song? Have you ever fantasized about what would happen if your parent's #1 favorite religious magazine teamed up with your #1 favorite rock band and threw a double-threat mega-contest giveaway with a whole buncha cool stuff?!?"

Sounds cool to me!

I did find the copy a bit breathless and "over-the-top", but when you've got an "opponent and satirist of Christianity" (Wikipedia) who was chosen to speak at the 29th American Atheists Convention pumping your Bible Study Magazine, well... I'll forgive the hyperbole. (The man paints his head red and wears little devil horns; he's clearly a dramatic personality.)

I'm not sure this ad (placed on a page where the artist mocks the email he receives from outraged Christians) will be bringing us many new subscribers, but we're flattered, after just two issues, to be on the radar of fans and scorners alike.

We want to live up to the copy and become your "#1 favorite" magazine soon!

For all you Twitter users out there, we wanted to let you know that Logos is now on Twitter.

As a self diagnosed Twitteraholic (shameless plug) I'm pretty excited to see the Logos Twitter page up and running. I've been using Twitter for almost a year now and have really enjoyed it as a way to stay up to date with not only my friends, but ministries and companies I'm interested in.

If you're on Twitter and want to follow us, you'll soon see that Twitter is a great way for you to keep tabs on things like new prepubs, blog posts, tips and tricks from Morris Proctor, office news, and (of course) the occasional Twitpic. Outside of these common uses, we'll be experimenting with Twitter and how to use it in such a way that the Logos Twitter community can really benefit. While we'll likely have multiple people contributing, I'll be the main monitor for now. So, feel free to DM me @Logos if you have any ideas for how to make our Twitter better for all of our users.

For those of you reading this post and wondering what Twitter is all about, here's a short video explanation:

When I travel, I almost always take my laptop with me. Being able to read and study the Bible and Christian literature without having to pack print books is perfect for flying, especially now that many airlines charge extra for your luggage. I've heard that some airlines have even considered charging by weight.

But Logos is more than just a Bible study tool. It's great for fun and games too. I'm sure most of you are aware of the Word Find. You can find it under Tools > Bible Puzzles > Word Find. I've used it on a couple of occasions while traveling. It's not just for kids.

During my last trip to Minnesota to spend Thanksgiving with my wife's family, I found a couple of new uses for Logos when we were playing games around the kitchen table.

First, I was introduced to a word game called Boggle. The goal is in three minutes to come up with as many words as you can that no one else comes up with—the longer the word the better. As you can imagine, you often have to come up with words that are uncommon. This sometimes involves a bit of guessing, which in turns requires that a dictionary be handy.

I pulled up Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, which comes in most of our base packages, and the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, linked them together, and had fun looking up and learning many new words.

My brother-in-law tried to use a traditional paper dictionary, but I don't think he even got to the right section of the dictionary before I had looked the word up in two dictionaries. I highly recommend using Logos the next time you need a dictionary for family game time. Less waiting and more time having fun.

Second, another game we played with Logos was one I made up myself. I would read a random verse of Scripture after performing a Bible Speed Search, and the first person to guess the book it was found in would get a point. (You get only one guess until everyone has guessed.) If you could guess the full reference, you'd get a bonus point. This one was a lot of fun, but a little lopsided since my oldest brother-in-law is a pastor and was winning most of them.

These are just a couple of examples that illustrate how Logos is more than just a Bible study tool and can be a great addition to family game time.

How about you? What creative ways have you found to use Logos for more than just Bible study?

Last week I wrote a post about my Logos epiphany; that moment when I realized I can have my entire theological library with me all the time. Over the week many users posted comments about the time when they had that same realization. Reading the comments, I was deeply encouraged to see how having a Logos library has helped men and women serve their churches, ministries, and communities. Since I know that a lot of people don't often go back and read comments on old posts, I thought I'd share a couple that really impressed and inspired me.

Mark said, "In the fall of 2005, I deployed to Iraq as a chaplain with my bible and Logos on my laptop. I was able to do full exegesis and exposition in my sermons thanks to Logos."

Mike shared that his epiphany came "while teaching a new group of believers the Bible in the remote villages of southern Siberia."

Caroline, who serves in a ministry to senior citizens, said, "Having my Logos Library ready to answer questions is wonderful. It is difficult for a senior citizen to always have an immediate answer but my Logos gives a rapid response."

David is experiencing the difference in travel now that he has Logos. "Traveling between the US and India during the early 1990's to teach in a theological college for a few month meant carrying half of my luggage allowance in books. So about 70 pounds of books went with me. Currently I'm in India again; I brought a few books that are not in Libronix data, but much of what I need is on this notebook computer."

Eric, a missionary currently traveling around the country, said, "There is no way I could carry my "other" library around the country while I raise my support."

Sam said, "I realized this when I spent last summer helping plant a church in Northern China. I never could have carried enough books to do good study for preaching and teaching every week with me. Libronix made it possible for me to do a lot of study without luggage overcharges or lack of space in the apartment. And also saved me so much time giving me more to use teaching instead of studying."

Comments and stories like these remind me why Logos is such a special company and product. Logos is helping people to do in-depth study of the Bible and share its message around the world.

QUICK NOTE - Speaking of around the world, Dan just pointed me to a post from about 2 1/2 years ago that shows the shipping costs to send the print equivalent of a Logos library overseas. The crazy thing to note is that the shipping costs in the 2006 post were as much as $6,650. Since then, the USPS has increased international shipping costs by 13.8% in 2007 and plans to increase it another 8.4% in 2009. At those prices, shipping books overseas does not make sense. For that kind of money you could double or triple your Logos library!

Now, you don't have to be in a foreign country to appreciate Logos. Maybe you're like Caroline and ministering in your community, or like me and just doing Bible study on a bus. No matter what you do or where you are, having (and growing) a Logos library simply makes in-depth Bible study easier and more convenient.

As I was riding the bus to work last week, I was reading 1 Peter 1:3-5 on my Beta copy of Logos for Mac (part Bible study, part Beta testing). I sat there thinking about all the great promises of God within this text and thought, "I wonder what Dr. K. has to say about this." So, I hit apple+L (that's control+L for you windows users) and opened my library. At that moment I had an epiphany. Now, if you've been a Logos users for a while, you've probably already had this epiphany. For some of you, this epiphany is the reason you bought the software in the first place. For me, it was a new thought... I have a library on my computer.

Now, sure, everyone who has a Logos base package knows that he or she has a library on his or her computer, but this day was different. As I opened Kistamaker's commentary, I thought about how big the print edition of this book would be. I own a couple hard copies from Baker's New Testament Commentary Series and these are big, heavy, hardcover books. I chuckled as I thought about how funny it would look if I were on the bus trying to read my Bible and this commentary. It just wouldn't work out too well.

Then I opened my Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary to see what it had to say about hope and remembered from my seminary days how incredibly large this book would be if I had it in my lap right now. I clicked more and more resources. As I opened the ESV English-Greek Reverse Interlinear of the NT and my Analytical Lexicon of the Greek New Testament to study the original language in a little more detail, it just got funnier. By this point I probably had 5 or 6 books open, in my lap, on a crowded and bouncy bus. This kind of study would simply be impossible with the print equivalent.

The bus rounded the corner and I saw my stop approaching. I quickly closed my computer and tossed it in my bag. As I stepped off the bus and started walking towards Logos, I thought back to my campus ministry days. OH, how I wish I had Logos back then! I constantly battled between having my library at the church office or my home office. I was continually toting books back and forth. Then there were my trips to study on campus. Between these three places it was inevitable that I would want or need one of the books that weren't where I was at the moment. How easily this could have all been solved if I only had Logos back then.

So, what about you? When did you have this epiphany? Where do you find yourself saying, "I could never do this if it weren't for Logos?" Drop a comment below and share your story.

I'm a people person. Maybe it comes from my years as a college pastor, but I really love to just sit down and hear people's stories. Finding out the little (and big) things in people's lives makes me appreciate them at a level that is deeper than the passing, "Hey, how ya doing? Nice weather today, huh?"

So, as a new employee at Logos, I've enjoyed getting the chance to meet lots of new people. It got me thinking that maybe some of you would like to meet them as well. I mean, sure, knowing that the VP of marketing is a die hard Flyers fan and top-notch ping pong player or that most of the customer service department has a Nerf gun at their desk won't help you with your Anderson-Forbes syntax resources or getting more out of your Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary but it might help you get to know some of the people who help make Logos more than just a software company.

With that in mind, we're going to start a regular feature on the Logos blog that will introduce you to some of the people behind Logos Bible Software. From kite surfers to PhDs, you'll get a chance to see Logos from a whole new angle. We hope you enjoy it.

For our first video I want to introduce you to Deborah. Deborah is a member of our customer service department and has been with Logos for a little over a year. Here is some footage from when I stopped by her desk the other day.

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

To play our part in the ever present need for blood, Logos organized a mobile donation unit from Puget Sound Blood Center (PSBC) to park outside our downtown offices this past Friday as our employees volunteered their arms—some, for the first time—and collected 19 units of life-sustaining blood.

Nearly 900 units of blood are needed each day in order to maintain PSBC's desire to have a four-day supply of blood at all times. According to the PSBC website, "every two minutes someone in western Washington needs a blood transfusion."

It is great knowing that PSBC, a non-profit, community-supported organization, supplies patients and hospitals in western Washington, allowing our donations to be redistributed throughout our own communities.

We were privileged to contribute to our community in a meaningful and practical way. Our one-day drive helped register 82 donors, collect 19 units of blood, and will benefit up to 57 patients! A needle prick is not a bad trade-off when a life can be saved.

Enjoy some pictures and a short video clip below.

Here's a short clip of the action.

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.

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.

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-pàd-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: ἐν ἐφέσῳ: 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: Βλογος

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.

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.

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.

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!

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!

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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!

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!

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!

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. 

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:

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)

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)

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

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!

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...?

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. :-)

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

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! :-)

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?

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 person is mentioned in the Scriptures. There's an important technical detail here: I really do mean references to people, not just names (as strings). To see why this matters, consider:

• the same person can be known by several different names (Peter, Simon, Simeon and Cephas are all names used in the New Testament for Jesus' disciple)
• the same name can be used for several different people, or even different kinds of things

As an example of this second point, it's not enough to find the string "Judah" in a verse: you want to know when it's Judah the person, as opposed to a cover term for Israel or the Southern Kingdom. For hard cases like Judah, the only way to know is to go through verse by verse by hand and decide. (This investment of effort is one thing that makes Logos' Biblical People data such a uniquely valuable resource.)

For many other cases, while the name is only used to refer to people, there are numerous individuals with the same name. Zechariah is the toughest case here: there are 30 distinct ones in our database. So just counting occurrences of the string "Zechariah" doesn't get it right: you need to know whether it's the prophet Zechariah (from the Old Testament book of the same name), the father of John the Baptist, or one of the 28 others (most of which are only mentioned once in the entire Bible). So some pretty detailed data is required to do a reasonable job with this computation.

There are many different ways you could count and compute weights on a per-person basis. Here's one (there are other reasonable possibilities too):

• Let frequency be a count of the number of verses that mention a given individual (only counting one for verses like Luke 22:31, "Simon, Simon, Satan has desired to sift you like wheat", which shouldn't really count as two observations of Simon's significance as a Biblical character).
• Let book dispersion be the number of books of the Bible that mention the individual. The intuition here is that, for two individuals with the same frequency, the one that's mentioned in more books is probably more important, broadly speaking.
• Let chapter dispersion similarly be the number of chapters in which a mention occurs. This helps distinguish people mentioned frequently but within a relatively shorter range of verses.
• Normalize these values by their maximums (frequency=1370, book mentions=31, chapter mentions=258) just to scale things more nicely
• Assign a weight to each of these three factors (I used 0.6 for frequency, 0.2 for book dispersion, and 0.2 for chapter dispersion: clearly this choice affects the outcome).
• Multiply each factor by its weight, and add the results to get a number between 1 and 0.

Here's a graph that shows this metric for the top 50 people, along with the individual factors. (The image is linked to a larger version where the names can be read.)

While the top names (Jesus, David, Moses, Jacob, Abraham) are no surprise, there are some interesting observations farther down.

First, the composite metric really does change the rankings: Levi is #15 by this method, but #52 if you only ranked by frequency. Likewise, King Saul would be #51 if you only ranked by book mentions, because he's mentioned in just a few books: but he's clearly one of the most important characters in those books, and so it seems fitting that incorporating frequency and chapter dispersion boosts him up to #10 in the composite metric rank.

Graphically, the places where the lines approach each other are the cases where the various factors are more equal, and places where they're farthest apart (Judah's a good example) where they're most skewed. Back to the previous point about counting genuine person name instances versus strings: only 99 of the approximately 780 occurrences of "Judah" actually refer to Jacob and Leah's son, so counting strings would be highly misleading here.

Since names, like many linguistic phenomena, typically follow a Zipfian Distribution (sometimes called a "long tail" or power law distribution), it's no surprise that the majority (1634 of the 2987) of these names occur exactly once in the Bible, and the 59 most frequent names account for about half of all the name mentions in the Bible. So clearly these top names deserve much more attention than the long tail. Important disclaimer: I'm not making any claims here about theological or historical importance. That's a subjective matter, and you'd get different answers depending on your perspective.

One advantage of making ideas explicit and quantifiable is that you can compare their predictions against your intuitions and see how they compare. Some other factors that might improve the estimate even further (and remember, this is just an estimate):

• Though we value the whole of Scripture, there's a sense in which certain sections are broader in their implications. For example, anyone mentioned in the first chapters of Genesis should probably get an extra measure of importance: these are the foundational stories of Hebrew and Christian history.
• We're only counting proper names here: other descriptions and pronouns would help refine these measurements even further (we don't have this data yet, however)
• External sources (like Bible dictionaries) are a rich and quantifiable source of judgments about importance: the more words or sentences used to describe an individual, the more important they're likely to be. By consulting several dictionaries, you can overcome the biases of an individual work or editorial slant. The key feature here is making the connection between the described individual (often in a numbered paragraph) and the Biblical character: we don't have that data yet, but it's in our plans for the future, and an approximation with a bit of programming ought to be possible at better than 90% accuracy.

Postscripts

• Some of this material was previously posted here at my Blogos weblog. Unfortunately, as of this writing, some problems with my service provider have made these posts unavailable.
• This post at OpenBible.info is a response to the original series, with some interesting thoughts about alternative ways to rank names.

Related Posts

Follow-up posts here at the Logos Blog using Many Eyes to further analyze and visualize the data:

• Top 50 People in the Bible
• Top 50 Women in the Bible

Update 5/25 -- Chris Anderson, author of the best-selling book The Long Tail and editor-in-chief at Wired magazine wrote about this post on his blog! Check it out: The Long Tail of Bible People (AKA Jesus is #1!)

Today marks the 7th Annual Logos Curry Cook-Off!

The very first Logos Curry Cook-Off occurred in early April, 2001, with Rick Brannan taking top honors and Eli Evans coming in a close second. I just dug back into my email folder and found a link to photos from the First-Ever Logos Curry Contest at Rick's website. Seems like ancient history.

Of course, curry has a great history of its own—stretching back to biblical times no less! Peter & Colleen Grove write in their work Curry, Spice & All Things Nice,

"The earliest known recipe for meat in spicy sauce with bread appeared on tablets found near Babylon in Mesopotamia, written in cuniform text as discovered by the Sumerians, and dated around 1700 B.C., probably as an offering to the god Marduk."

Curry is Cooking!
In the first English cookbook, published in 1390, the word cury denotes cooking.

Our curry is enjoyed for its own sake, with no religious connotations except a prayer before the meal. But perhaps the Ancient Near East connection explains why we at Logos love curry so much! (I will be concerned, however, if Vincent Setterholm and Mike Heiser team up to decode the Sumerian cuneiform and enter Marduk Curry next year.)

The Grove book has a chapter devoted to the origins of curry, which includes an extensive discussion of the etymology of the word curry, the lineage of this noble food, and the following delightful poem by Thackeray. The authors introduce the poem thus:

"In 1780 the first commercial curry powder appeared and in 1846 its fame was assured when William Makepeace Thackeray wrote a ‘Poem to Curry’ in his ‘Kitchen Melodies’."

                       Curry

Three pounds of veal my darling girl prepares,
And chops it nicely into little squares;
Five onions next prures the little minx
(The biggest are the best, her Samiwel thinks),
And Epping butter nearly half a pound,
And stews them in a pan until they’re brown’d.
What’s next my dexterous little girl will do?
She pops the meat into the savoury stew,
With curry-powder table-spoonfuls three,
And milk a pint (the richest that may be),
And, when the dish has stewed for half an hour,
A lemon’s ready juice she’ll o’er it pour.
Then, bless her! Then she gives the luscious pot
A very gentle boil - and serves quite hot.
PS - Beef, mutton, rabbit, if you wish,
Lobsters, or prawns, or any kind fish,
Are fit to make a CURRY. ‘Tis, when done,
A dish for Emperors to feed upon.

It looks like Amazon.com is doing an experiment in social tagging. UnSpun beta allows users to create lists of anything they want, associate links with each item, then open up the list to the community of Internet users to rank and comment.

One of the most popular lists at UnSpun right now is titled Best Blogs about Biblical Studies. It lists 65 blogs that deal with biblical studies issues. It's worth visiting as you will probably find some new blogs or sites to check out.

The way their ranking system works is that visitors can "vote" for items on the list by clicking the up or down arrows as shown below (see the "click" pointer). 

If you click the Your Ranking link and sign in, you can create your own ranking of some or all of the items in the original list.

Just click the left-pointing arrow to move items to your list (as shown below). This impacts their spot in the Community Ranking even more than the simple up or down vote.

Check it out and show your support for the Logos Blog if you are so inclined.

Other UnSpun lists that may be of interest:

• Best English Bible Translation
• Favorite Verses in the Bible (Book, Chapter, Verse)

Last Friday, Ken Smith, general manager of electronic publishing services at Logos and author of a number of blog posts, conceived of an idea for a new Muppets movie: The Muppets in Middle-Earth. That's right, a muppet cast for Tolkien's Lord of the Rings!

During the lunch hour, Ken sent an officewide email that began:

"I got to thinking about which Muppet characters I would cast into which LOTR roles and decided it would be a fun little diversion to share with anyone who wanted to give their opinion."

When somebody throws down the gauntlet like that, what can you do but rise to the challenge?

A number of people did so, resulting in the following consensus cast list for The Muppets in Middle-Earth (with comments from Ken Smith). Feel free to leave your own nominations, cheers or jeers in the comments section!

Frodo: Kermit
Sam: Fozzie Bear
Gandalf: Big Bird
Aragorn: Kermit (There was no clear second choice)
Legolas: Gonzo
Gimli: Tie between Rizzo the Rat and Cookie Monster
Merry/Pippin: Ernie/Bert
Gollum: Tie between Oscar the Grouch and Animal
Galadriel: Janice
Arwen: Miss Piggy
Elrond: Tie between Dr. Teeth and Sam the Eagle (Sam definitely has Elrond's permanent scowl)
Saruman: Tie between Dr. Bunsen Honeydew and Count von Count
Eowyn: Miss Piggy (dual-role? I think she could handle it.)
Wormtongue: Rizzo the Rat
Orcs: Animal, Sweetums
Black Riders: Count von Count, Statler & Waldorf

No consensus (see below):
Bilbo, Boromir, Faramir, Theoden, Eomer

Not on the original list:
Treebeard: Big Bird
Cave Troll: Sweetums

Here are other nominations, with comments from those who submitted them:

Frodo: Grover, Fozzie Bear

Sam: Scooter, Elmo, Grover

Gandalf:
Sam the Eagle, Dr. Bunsen Honeydew, Swedish Chef
Rowlf (with a dorky hat)
John Denver (if he were still alive--maybe some CGI magic?)

Aragorn:
Floyd, Big Bird, Rowlf
Grover (with possible appearance by Super Grover)
Here I would cast a live-action actor, say, Christopher Walken

Legolas: Janice, Grover, Elmo, Floyd

Gimli: Sweetums (muh-nah-muh-nah), Fozzie Bear, Gonzo

Merry/Pippen: Gonzo/Rizzo the Rat, Dr. Bunsen Honeydew/Beaker

Gollum: Beaker

Galadriel: Miss Piggy, Camilla the Chicken

Arwen: Sam the Eagle in a wig

Elrond: Elmo, Grover, Big Bird

Bilbo:
Swedish Chef, Gonzo, Cookie Monster, Telly, Floyd
Statler… or Waldorf (they could switch off, like Mary Kate and Ashley did)

Boromir: Statler, Cookie Monster, Zoot, Scooter, Bert

Faramir: Waldorf, Rowlf, Grover, Ernie

Saruman: Statler

Theoden: Swedish Chef, Sam the Eagle, Dr. Bunsen Honeydew, Rowlf

Eomer: Rowlf, Elmo, Robin the frog, Gobo (Fraggle Rock)

Eowyn: Janice, Camilla the Chicken, Mokey (Fraggle Rock)

Wormtongue: Beaker, Waldorf, Oscar the Grouch, Marvin Suggs

Orcs:
Oscar the Grouch, Clifford, Bobo, Floyd, Dr. Teeth, Pepe the Prawn
One Million Swedish Chefs (Just picture it...)

Black Riders:
Sam the Eagle, Zoot, The Fraggles
the purple siamese twin monsters from Sesame Street
Gonzo (fell beasts, chickens, same difference)

Other fun comments:

Aside from the hobbits listed above, all the other hobbits would have to be those aliens from Sesame Street that just walked around saying “yip-yip-yip-yip yuuuuuup“.

I know that having the Swedish Chef as Gandalf is bizarre, but just think how funny it would be to hear him shouting out lines like "YOU SHALL NOT PASS!“

At the end, we find out that that … Sauron … is … really …

… ELMO!

As I put the finishing touches on the Ugaritic Library, I realized that this was an excellent opportunity to talk about the Logos Bible Software philosophy of data type tagging. After all, there are more than 83,000 Ugaritic data type references tagged so far as part of this project. (83,266 and counting!) Using the Ugaritic Library as a test case, I made a video showing how good data type tagging makes for powerful digital library software, and helps you get the most out of your books.

Check it out!

Flash Video - 11 MB

Note: The Ugaritic Library ships Friday - it's not too late to take advantage of the great pre-publication sale.

I hope everyone took advantage of National Clean Off Your Desk Day last month...I did not.

But the last few times I cleaned my computer desk at home (which happens precisely as often as we're expecting overnight guests, since the computer is in the guest room) I noticed a particular kind of detritus that accumulated around and under my monitor and keyboard. I'm not talking about dust (which was also plentiful) but note scraps.

That's right, little bits of paper with important stuff written on them. Like the username and password for the website I built for my brother-in-law last year. Or the name of a book I heard about on NPR during my drive home one day, scribbled on the corner of a napkin, and deposited near the computer "for later". Or library card numbers (which the library website unhelpfully refuses to store on my behalf, forcing me to re-enter them every time my kids' Sesame Street videos need to be renewed).

So when I heard about a simple note-taking application being cooked up by Bob Pritchett, members of the Logos development team, and our graphic artist...I got pretty excited about its potential to help me get (at least slightly) more organized.

NoteScraps: Simple. Elegant. Cheap.

This new application is called NoteScraps and it's the ideal place to store bits and scraps of information. The stuff you might write on a post-it note and stick to your monitor...or keyboard...or litter around your desk. The notes that you might not need right now but are pretty sure you'll need later...long after you forgot where you put them.

There are other note-taking programs out there but NoteScraps is cool because of its simplicity. It sets out to do one thing only and do it well.

• Taking notes is quick and easy: my phone rings, a quick keystroke opens a new note, and I can start typing as my caller talks.
• Finding notes is instantaneous: another keystroke (or click in my system tray) brings me to the find box, I start typing a word, and the app brings forward notes that contain the word.
• Using the app is fun: the design is thoughtful and balanced, and there's just enough eye candy to enhance the experience by shuffling my notes on the screen as I interact with them.

NoteScraps is designed for Windows Vista but we also offer a version for Windows XP. Be sure to check out the demo video and download your own copy—the trial version is free!

Appendix: What Does NoteScraps Have to Do With Logos Bible Software?

In the words of Bob Pritchett, "Nothing specific -- but we've all got little notes to manage." And as he elaborated in our beta newsgroup, "NoteScraps has also served an important role in helping us explore and master the next generation technologies. Before we try to use .NET 3 and WPF in Logos Bible Software we want to play with them in a smaller sandbox."

I'm not a programmer but my geek streak gets fired up by new visualizations of data, especially visualizations that are interactive. Logos 3 includes a ton of neat-o (and useful) visualizations—from wee, data-dense sparklines to the "word wheel" graphs in Bible Word Study, and Timelines of biblical people and events.

So last week I was excited to come across three different sites with creative and useful visualizations—one exploring data of a political nature and two biblical.

Following President Bush's State of the Union address, The New York Times website offered an interactive visualization that makes it easy to explore vocabulary usage trends across the president's 7 State of the Union addresses.

Then, at the Blogos blog (whose author Sean Boisen now works here at Logos), there was this interactive treemap that makes it easy to see which pericopes are common or unique among the Gospels.

The ever-interesting ESV Blog lit up the blogosphere with their visualization of New Testament social networks based on proximity within the text.

As the ESV Blog aptly notes, a more reliable map of actual relationships between biblical people could be produced via semantic tagging. This involves identifying or "disambiguating" each person in the Bible and describing the relationships between them.

The Biblical People addin in Logos Bible Software 3 is a first pass at portraying these relationships, though at this point the data is limited to explicit family ties expressed in the text. You'll see a richer data set at some point in the future.

For many of us, exploring biblical information in such a visual way is a new experience. Here at Logos, we strive to incorporate stunning new technologies and visualizations into our products in a way that demands little or no specialized knowledge on the part of the user. In other words, we want to hire people who are super smart about linguistics, library science, programming, and visualization...so you don't have to be!

That said, you might be inspired, as I have been, to grow your familiarity with the concepts and basic vocabulary of visualization. So here's one final link to some "knowledge maps"—visualizations that help explain visualizations—at Visual-Literacy.org.

In particular, be sure to check out the very cool Periodic Table of Visualization Methods, which provides examples of visualizations such as the "iceberg," the "hyperbolic tree" and "mintzberg's organigraph".

 

All work and no play makes for a gloomy office...especially around Christmas. So here are some highlights of our play during the past few weeks.

This year's office decorating contest was a battle of the grinches with two departments independently hitting upon a "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" theme.

The text developers ultimately triumphed (they not only decorated but also put on a performance for the judges, complete with a 6 or 8 member choir). And there was a strong showing from a number of other departments and individuals as well. (See more photos...)

Of course there were some scrooges who didn't decorate at all.

The annual bake-off was a sweet success, with nearly a dozen entries to spoil our collective appetite for lunch. For some of us, the baked treats were lunch.

First place went to Ryan Husser, Logos book designer, with his Magic Cookie Bars. Second and third place went to Kelsey Sebens' peanut butter bars and James VanNoord's "O Little Mint of Bellingham" bars, respectively. Two of the recipes are below.

The Logos Christmas Party was a great chance to fellowship with one another, meet spouses and "significant others", and even meet some co-workers for the first time.

Bob told us the story of the first ever company Christmas party, held in a stairwell at the Oak Harbor office, with a menu that included Oscar Meyer cold cut and Wonder Bread sandwiches. It was pretty amazing to look around at the largest Logos Christmas party to date and be thankful for the ways God has blessed this company.

We hope you have a merry Christmas and look forward to serving you in the New Year!

Magic Cookies Bars

Ingredients:
1 stick (½ cup) butter
1 ½ cup crushed graham crackers (sandwiching between two pieces of waxed paper works best for me)
1 can sweetened condensed milk
1 cup (6 oz) chocolate chips
1 cup (6 oz) butterscotch chips
1 1/3 cup coconut flakes
1 cup chopped walnuts (optional)

Directions:
Preheat oven to 350°
Melt butter in 13 x 9 inch pan
Sprinkle graham cracker crumbs onto butter, shake pan gently to disperse evenly
Drizzle sweetened condensed milk evenly over butter/graham cracker crumbs
Sprinkle chocolate chips, then butterscotch chips, then coconut, then walnuts (if desired) over sweetened condensed milk
Bake for 25 minutes
Let cool and cut into pieces

O Little Mint of Bellingham
(Creamy Mint Bars )

Recipe from Genny Gerrits; Holland, MI; April 1996
Grease 9x13 pan. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Base/Crust:
1 Chocolate Mint Pillsbury Cake mix
or 1 double chocolate pudding cake mix plus 1 teaspoon mint extract
1/3 cup softened margarine
1 egg
1/4 cup water
Combine all ingredients and mix at low speed. Press into greased pan and bake for 10 minutes in preheated oven. Allow to cool.

Filling:
1 envelope unflavored Knox gelatin. Sprinkle on 1/4 cup cold water and heat according to package directions to dissolve gelatin.
4 cups powdered sugar, divided
1/2 cup margarine
1/2 cup Crisco or butter flavored shortening
1/4 teaspoon peppermint extract
2 to 5 drops green food coloring
After gelatin is dissolved, allow to cool. Mix soft gelatin with 2 cups of powdered sugar, margarine, shortening, flavoring and coloring. Beat one minute at medium speed or until creamy. Blend in balance of sugar. Spread over crust.

Frosting:
6 oz milk chocolate chips
3 T shortening
Melt chips and shortening and drizzle over filling. Refrigerate.

Notes:
-- The base/crust is very thick and sticky. It will probably take longer than 10 minutes to be done.
-- I doubled this recipe for the bake-off and used a 18x13 half sheet pan
-- I substituted butter one-for-one in place of margarine.

As Bob has mentioned and as regular blog readers know, from time to time we love to do some cookin' here at Logos.

Bradley Grainger preparing some condiments
for his 2006 Curry Cook-off entry

When we have cookoffs, we usually post winning recipes on this blog.

If you're interested in some of the winners, try searching the blog using the search box on the sidebar for the word recipe. Or just click this link.

Who knows, you could find something you'd like to make for dinner next week!

This year’s National Bible Week Essay contest has been a resounding success!

Nearly 200 essays have been submitted and dozens of Logos users have opened their email inboxes to find they have won. Take a look at some of the winning essays to get some fresh inspiration for your own Bible study.

Although all of the essays are centered around the general theme of "Bible study" the diversity of content has been remarkable. Who knows? Maybe there will be an essay that jump starts your own Bible study or reveals an approach to Bible study that has never occurred to you:

Do you often feel you need to make more time for Bible study? Here is an excellent solution!

Do you want to take your Bible study to the next level, but don't know any Original Languages? Find some encouragement here!

Are you looking for an interesting book of the Bible on which to focus your Bible study? Try Deuteronomy!

Or read an honest (and inspirational) reflection on how Bible study has helped this reverend mature in his faith.

Each selected essay has earned its author $30 of unlock credit to be used towards purchases from Logos. In total, we have doled out almost $1,000 in unlock credits and more essays are being selected every day.

If you have not submitted one yet, your window of opportunity is shrinking as essays will only be accepted through Friday, December 1. To submit an essay go to www.logos.com/nationalbibleweek (and don't forget to read the official rules before you send your entry).

It's been a great year for Logos in so many ways. We're thankful for the enthusiastic response to the Logos 3 release, safety on the Bible Road Trip and a warm reception wherever we travelled, strong sales growth, deepening relationships with key constituencies, and a great team of people to work with here in Bellingham and around the world.

"The Lord has done great things for us, and we are filled with joy." Psalm 126:3

If you're a regular reader of the Logos Blog, you know that we love to eat. So it's no surprise that Logos does Thanksgiving in style. Bob has turkey, stuffing and gravy catered in, and we all bring sides and drinks—good old church potluck style.

Here's a little video I put together of the Thanksgiving feast we had last Wednesday: Thanksgiving2006.wmv (Windows Media Video, 1:37, 6MB).

I also snapped a few photos, trying not to get anyone with their mouth full. Though after yesterday's photo of the SBL team asleep in the van, maybe I shouldn't have worried about it.

The ETS and AAR/SBL conferences were awesome. We were able to meet all sorts of folks at both conferences and talk with them about Bible study software and especially about syntax.

But it was a long week. Time in the booth, catching sessions, giving papers, catching up with old friends and making new friends have a way of wearing a guy out. As a matter of fact, on the way to the airport for the flight home, Eli (in the back), Mike (on the right) and Rick (on the left) crashed in the minivan while John was playing the role of chauffeur. Vincent apparently obliged in snapping the picture.

We may have other pictures later, and I hope to post the papers I presented later as well.

In honor of National Bible Week, which is this week, we're sponsoring an essay contest on Logos.com. You are invited to write and submit a brief essay on Bible study. If we display the essay on the site, you'll receive a $30 book unlock credit. The sign-up form is here.

During last year's contest, more than 70 essays were submitted, approved, and posted, with a nice variety of themes and perspectives represented. You can read last year's essays on the Selected Essays page.

As you reflect on how the Bible has shaped your life and give thanks for the privilege and ready accessibility of Bible study materials, I encourage you to put your thoughts into writing and share them with us!

Logos Bible Software has launched a year-long radio campaign on Praise 106.5, a Christian radio station in Northwest Washington, and we are looking for Logos users that want to be on the air in our ads.

So, if you love Logos Bible Software and wouldn't mind a little fame, leave us a message and you might just get your own voice on the radio!

Follow the simple steps below to record a brief testimonial that may be selected for inclusion in a Logos radio ad:

1. Call our toll free endorsement line at 1 (888) 286-5662
   
2. Leave a short message about how you love the new Logos Bible Software 3
   
3. Make sure you start with your name. "Hi! This is Joe Smith and I love Logos Bible Software because…"
   
4. You can re-record your message if you would like. Remember, it could end up on the radio.

Some things to keep in mind when recording your endorsement of Logos:

• Enthusiasm! This could go on the air! Make it exciting.
  
• Speak clearly—if no one can understand what you are saying it won't work.
  
• Keep the message between 10 and 20 seconds in length.
  
• State your full name before the message so we know it’s you.
  
• Feel free to mention which collection you have (“I love using my Logos Scholar’s Library because…”)

It’s that easy! Call today and take your first step toward radio immortality!

Chuck Brannan, my Dad and perennial soup fan, can't be kept away from the soup cookoff. But that's OK because he brings some mighty fine soup along with him when he comes.

This year, his Spicy Seafood Bisque placed on top. And count yourself lucky, he agreed to share his recipe. So here it is!

Chuck's Spicy Seafood Bisque

1/2 c chopped sweet onion
1/2 c chopped celery
2 tbsp butter
4 c chicken broth
3 c tomato juice
1 14 oz. can diced tomatoes undrained (I used garlic and onion flavored)
1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
1 tsp Old Bay Seafood seasoning
1 tsp dried oregano
1 tsp garlic powder
1/2 to 1 tsp hot pepper sauce (to taste)
1/4 to 1/2 tsp cayenne pepper (to taste)
1 bay leaf
1/2 c small shell pasta (may use any small pasta)
1 lb uncooked med. shrimp (31-40 count)
2 6 oz cans crab meat or 12 oz dungeness crab meat drained, flaked, cartilage removed
1 lb white fish (such as true cod or halibut)
1 lb mussels in shell
1 lb small steamer clams in shell (such as Manila clams)

In a large sauce pan, saute onion and celery in butter until tender. Add broth, tomato juice, tomatoes, Worchestershire sauce and all seasonings. Bring to a boil, cover and simmer for 20 min.

Discard bay leaf, add pasta, cook uncovered until tender. Add shrimp, crab, and white fish. Cook until shrimp are pink. Add mussels and clams, cook until shells open. Remove from heat and serve with warm garlic bread. Yield 10-12 servings.

Naomi Boyer, project manager in the Logos Text Development department, graciously consented to allow her 2nd place soup recipe, Big Toe Baked Potatoe Soup, to be posted here on the Logos Bible Software Blog.

So ... here's the recipe, straight from Naomi!

Big Toe Baked Potatoe Soup

2/3 cup butter
2/3 cup flour
7 cups milk
4 large baking potatoes, baked, cooled, peeled and cubed, about 4 cups
6 green onions, thinly sliced
14 strips of bacon, cooked, drained, and crumbled
1 1/4 shredded mild cheddar cheese
1 cup (8 oz) sour cream
1 tsp. salt
3/4 tsp. pepper
1/2 tsp. chives

In a large Dutch oven or stockpot over low heat, melt butter. Stir in flour; stir until smooth and bubbly. Gradually add milk and raise to medium heat, stirring constantly, until sauce has thickened. Add potatoes and onions. Continue to cook, stirring constantly, until soup begins to bubble. Add bacon. Reduce heat; simmer gently for 10 minutes. Add remaining ingredients; stir until cheese is melted. Ideally, serve baked potato soup immediately.

Serves 6-8.

The trick to this soup is to have your husband do the “stirring constantly” part while he reads Leviticus and you chop up the rest of the ingredients. And also have the potatoes cooked well in advance to give them time to cool.

Original recipe gleaned (and slightly altered) from: http://southernfood.about.com/od/potatosoups/r/bl30324f_p.htm (Baked Potato Soup)

Last Friday (Sept. 15) was Soup Cookoff Day at Logos. We blogged the soup cookoff last year and wanted to do something similar this year.

This year the winner was actually my Dad (!) who loves soup so much we can't keep him away on soup day. Congrats to Dad and to the other winners:

• 1st Place: Chuck Brannan with "Chuck's Spicy Seafood Bisque"
• 2nd Place: Justin & Naomi Boyer with "Big Toe Baked Potatoe Soup"
• 3rd Place: Dave Kaplan with "Cheesy Chicken"

We had 20 soups this year. Your intrepid Logos bloggers didn't fare so well in the contest. My soup, "Sweet Panang'd Squash" didn't place; nor did Eli's "Ye Olde Lentils". I guess the Logos palatte wasn't ready for squash & lentils. Maybe next year ...

More photos of the day are below the fold, so check 'em out!

Update: Several have asked about recipes. I'll see if the chefs who created the top 3 recipes will allow their recipes to be posted on the blog.

As a city, Bellingham has some unique characteristics. And more than a few unique characters.

One particular street that I often walk along seems to be a favorite for folks living in vehicles. Buses, cars, VW microbuses, campers, you name it...but one of the stranger sights was this car, covered in compact discs.

I suppose the owner/tenant was mostly interested in the discs' reflective properties that served to keep his vehicle cool. He was probably less interested in the contents of the discs...

Yes, closer inspection revealed that this fellow had plastered his car with hundreds of Logos Bible Software discs! When Logos 3 shipped, we had to throw away a lot of old inventory (sans serial numbers, of course). Normally, our shipping department spray-paints discs that go into the dumpster as an added precaution...but this time quite a number of bright, shiny discs made it into the dumpster and were re-purposed in a way we couldn't have imagined.

"It was a scorcher, but the training was fantastic." That seemed to sum up the views of those who attended National Camp Logos here in Bellingham in late July.

About 80 Logos users turned out for Morris Proctor's 2-day training seminar, held at a local church. They came from all over the U.S. (and Canada) to take their Bible software skills to the next level and to hang out with other Logos users. The temps reached the upper 80s on Friday, but that didn't seem to dry up the crowd's enthusiasm.

For many attendees, this was not their first Camp Logos experience. A handful of users come back every year. A common theme I heard when asking attendees what they get out of attending multiple times is that Camp shakes them out of a rut, pushes them to use more of the software's features, use it more effectively, and try new things.

The folks who attended also had an opportunity to interact with Bob and Dale Pritchett, dine together at a local restaurant, and tour the Logos facility. If you missed it, don't worry—we'll do another one next year. And in the meantime you can check the Camp Logos calendar for an event near you...without some of the fringe benefits of the "National" event but very worthwhile, nevertheless.

Click any of the photos on this page to see a larger version and be sure to check out the video to watch some Camp clips and brief interviews with Camp Logos attendees. As you'll see, everyone I talked to was very fired up about Logos 3 and Camp Logos!

Windows Media Video, 3:48, 4.3MB

Today's guest blogger is Erland Injerd, a developer who works in the Network and Systems department at Logos.

So you're sitting at your desk at the end of a long day inside. The sun is shining outdoors, and the sky is the deepest crisp blue you've ever seen.

"Hey," a coworker drops by your desk. "Let's play some Ultimate Frisbee."

This sounds promising.

"There are eight other people already on their way -- meet you at the park!"

Off to the park you go...and sure enough, there's a whole crowd of familiar faces, ready to start running in a friendly game of Ultimate.

Sound like a pleasant, post-lunch daydream?

Not at Logos Bible Software. During the summer months, what better way to work out some stress, get a bit of fresh air, and enjoy God's creation than a game of Ultimate Frisbee, right after a hard day's work?

"But getting enough people together is like pulling teeth," the skeptic might say. "Schedules conflict, people leave early, no one knows exactly what park you're going to...the list goes on."

Fortunately, we work for a software company full of enterprising developers. Several years back, one of our devs made a website that manages the Ultimate games for interested employees. Just tell the site what days you can play, and it will send you an E-mail in the morning, asking you to sign up that day. If enough players sign up on a given day, all the Ultimate Heroes get a "Game On!" E-mail -- we're headed to the park! The game is always at the same place and the same time, so no one gets confused, and if not enough people sign up, well, no one arrives at the park wondering where everyone else is (we hope).

But it's not enough to know that some of Logos secretly plays Ultimate. How do the games go?

Thankfully, nowhere in the hiring process at Logos does it mention "skill at Ultimate Frisbee." While some of us are fairly gifted at running and throwing and yelling (or just yelling), most of us are pretty casual, average players. The little website that schedules our games is also smart enough to take past results, crunch the statistics, and figure out the real movers and shakers. They all get stuck on one team, and everyone else....

Actually, the teams tend to shake out pretty balanced, after each player has a few games recorded. There have been some embarrassing 15-3 or 15-5 final scores (yes, we play to fifteen), but for the most part, the games tend to end up fairly close.

Of course, that keeps things interesting. When the score is 13-12, and it's 7PM, people start getting focused. Do you really want to throw long? How about we send someone to the end zone. Cover that guy, he's getting physical...just give him a little elbow. Some of us are good at throwing, some are good at catching, some are good at guarding -- and there's my personal favorite: running a lot.

But when the day is done, and everyone shakes hands, gives high-fives, talks a little smack about "that last pass," you know the Ultimate game was worth it. Lots of exercise, lots of sun, lots of great times with friends -- what a way to end a day's work for an awesome company. So, the next time you're wondering: how do we do it, remember the Ultimate. Sometimes, making software isn't all about a computer screen.

Today's guest blogger, Bradley Grainger, is a software developer for Logos.

On the weekend, my wife Susan and I took my uncle and aunt to visit Oak Harbor. The Logos headquarters were located there (in a converted barn) before the company moved to Bellingham four years ago. After Logos moved out, the building remained empty for quite some time, so I was surprised to discover that almost all the suites were rented to new tenants. However, there apparently hasn't been any reason to take down the old sign:

The Development department has now been turned into MS Nails, a “a sensual and eclectic boutique shop”:

Marketing has become a salon and day spa:

And Electronic Text Development has become—what else?—a tattoo parlour:

As promised, here are the results of the seventh annual Logos Chili Cook-Off. A good time (and a little indigestion) was had by all. There were thirteen chilis entered, but three were named the crowd favorites.

Watch a 3.5 minute video of Chili Day 2006! (.wmv | 9.4MB)

Every year, around the 4th of July, Logos has a company Chili Cook-Off. This is the grandaddy that started them all (the curry cookoff, the soup cookoff and the salsa cookoff are spinoffs of the chili cookoff!).

Today, July 7, 2006, is our Seventh Annual Chili Cookoff. You can check out some photos and commentary from last year's Chili Cookoff if you'd like.

We'll post the results on Monday, so stay tuned!

This is post #250 for the Logos Blog. We've posted nearly every weekday since the blog launched last July.

We've had posts on curry, coffee, and Christmas decorating. We've announced company news, introduced some of the Logos staff and our publishing partners, and shared in the joy and trials of the Bible Road Trip. We've also used the blog to pull back the curtain on new features of Logos Bible Software 3, explore new reports such as Bible Word Study in detail, give examples of how to use specific features, and introduce the concepts and resources of syntax.

To take this post beyond a pat on the back for the blogging team, let us hear from you. Leave a comment and let us know what you've most enjoyed, which posts stand out in your memory, what you'd like to see more of, and what we're sorely lacking.

This communication channel is here to serve our users, so let us know what it is that keeps you coming back for more!

We mentioned our Sixth Annual Logos Curry Cook-Off last week and promised recipes of the top three curries.

James Van Noord's curry "Green Monster" was another excellent curry, garnering the third most votes. Here are James's curry making notes:

My base recipe can be found at AllRecipes.com.

My modifications (with thanks to Vincent and Eli for pointers):

• added lime juice
• added kafir lime leaves
• added bird's eye chilies
• added extra green curry paste
• I didn't use as much lemon grass as is called for. I fished out most of the lemon grass before lunch.
• I used 14-oz cans of coconut milk

I tripled this recipe for the cook-off.

We mentioned our Sixth Annual Logos Curry Cook-Off last week and promised recipes of the top three curries.

David Kaplan's curry "Fire and Nice" was second only to Bob's first-place effort. Here's the recipe. David's notes are a little more involved, but the curry was really yummy so it is worth the effort.

• Three pounds chicken tenders – DO NOT CUT UP
• ¼ cup vegetable oil
• Two tablespoons Habanero powder
• Two 15 oz. cans of chicken broth
• 5 large onions – cut into large chunks
• Three medium heads of Broccoli – using only the flowerets.
• Two very large red apples — Peel and cut into ¼” thick slices. DO NOT DICE UP.
• A Boat load of curry powders — three different kinds. One was a Jamaican Style by “Spice Right” where the first ingredient was ginger. One was a “Miami Spice” curry powder where the ingredients are unknown, all it said was “A Blend of Natural spices including Tumeric”. The other Curry powder was from the bulk section at the grocery store. I never measured the curry powder, just kept dumping it in until I saw the color I wanted and it smelled robust.
• Salt
• Pepper
• one tablespoon Garlic powder – not too much. It will overwhelm the other flavors.

First I put the chicken tenders in a huge bowl and dumped in a boat load of curry powders and mixed it up real good. Then I let the tenders sit for about 15 minutes mixing every five minutes. It was kind of like doing a rub.

Then I put the chicken tenders and vegetable oil in a large soup pot and cooked them until firm – stirring often.

Then I added the onions cut into large chunks. (This is for texture in the final product). and more curry powders. Cook for another 15 minutes stirring every three minutes or so.

Then add in the Chicken broth, garlic powder and the Habanero powder, cook for another 20 minutes. Stirring every five minutes.

Then add in the apple slices, and broccoli and more curry powder and cook until you can’t discern that there was ever any broccoli in the recipe (about 45 minutes). Stir vigorously every ten minutes or so. There will be a few small chunks of apples still discernable. The chicken will be fairly chunky still, but a lot of it will have broken down into the mix.

All the while you’re cooking - keep tasting, and salt and pepper to taste.

Then put it in the fridge over night. It tasted better the next day.

We mentioned our Sixth Annual Logos Curry Cook-Off last week and promised recipes of the top three curries.

Bob Pritchett's curry "Columbus' Loss" garnered the most votes in our 2006 Curry Cook-Off. Bob's notes on the recipe are brief:

Here's the recipe.
I used boneless chicken thighs and ground ginger. And the strongest cumin I've ever tasted.
— Bob

So if you like curry, check it out and slip it in the recipe box. The folks at Logos approve!

Last Friday was the sixth annual Logos Curry Cookoff. Logos Cookoffs are always fun days; the curry cookoff is one of the most fun. We had 17 different curries this year, and they were all excellent.

This year's winners were:

• Bob Pritchett with Columbus' Loss
• David Kaplan with Fire and Nice
• James Van Noord with Green Monster

More pictures from the day are "below the fold". We also hope to blog at least the top three recipes so Logos users can enjoy some curry at home, too.

If you've read the Logos Bible Software Blog for awhile, you have probably heard us refer to the oh-so-cool automated espresso machine that does its part to keep Logos running smoothly.

And you've probably seen us refer to the Logos Clear Glass Mug. I use mine every day; it does the trick and does it well.

(pauses to sip from his double americano, no milk, no sugar)

But I don't know that you've seen us extol the virtues of the Logos Insulated Travel Mug. This is a beautiful thing, it allows us to take 16 ounces of sweet java elixir from the machine out the door and on the road.

And it is the perfect conversation starter to tell your friends, neighbors, or even the person sitting next to you on the bus or train about your Bible software!

Logos Insulated Travel Mug

Folks who plumb the depths of the Logos Bible Software website probably already know that we have a few desktop backgrounds available for download.

But if you are a newer Logos Bible Software user, or a new reader of this blog, you might not have found them yet. So check out this page that has all sorts of different resolutions of the two backgrounds we currently offer:

• Logos Desktop Wallpaper

I'm a fan of Wallpaper #2, myself.

In response to last week's Power Law post, Jim Darlack commented:

Interesting idea. Now, apply it to citations of the Old Testament found in a book of the New Testament. This would allow someone to judge the density of quotes from a particular part of the Old Testament. This could be helpful for judging where allusions or even echoes may be found in the New Testament text.

Jim is suggesting that the same Power Law relationship that exists between a corpus of "biblical studies literature" and Bible passages could also be observed between the New Testament and the Old Testament.

In response to Jim's response (don't you love the blogosphere?), the folks over at the ESV Bible Blog crunched the data to explore this in detail.

They found that, "in absolute terms, the New Testament writers cited Psalms and Isaiah most often." When controlling for book length (since longer books tend to get cited more often than short books), Malachi and Habakkuk get the prize for being most often cited by NT writers.

Head over to the ESV Bible Blog and check out their charts showing citation density and a table showing how many times each NT book cites each OT book.

Two quick thoughts...

First, the next step might be to plot density in a more granular fashion. Which chapters or pericopes in the OT are most often cited? And which chapters or pericopes in the NT do the most citing?

This could make for a cool report in Logos Bible Software, plotting parallel passages data (OT quotes in the NT) against chapter or pericope data from a version of choice.

Second, I don't know what data the ESV team is using to generate their chart, but I would guess data produced by an editor. In other words, a really smart person (or team of smart people) analyzed the New Testament and figured out all the places the NT author was quoting the OT.

Another way to get at that information—a way that is better for some purposes, less suited for others—would be for the software to analyze and plot out similarities between the OT and NT, based on vocabulary plus syntax. This would put the Bible software user in the editor's seat, or at least provide a way to view the data and perhaps discover additional textual similarities (in this case, between the Septuagint and Greek NT). We're not there yet in terms of the data, but it never hurts to dream!

All this talk makes me eager to tell the world about all the new, useful ways we're already combining and displaying data in Logos Bible Software 3 (now in Release Candidate 1). We've been spilling the beans about Logos 3 here on the blog; if you're a new reader, here's a place to start.

It's also exciting to realize that the new reports and tools in Logos 3 are just the tip of the iceberg. With all the new data we now have, and are still producing, there's plenty more to dream and plenty more to realize.

Update: 3/20/2006 - 3:00pm PST

Today's post on the ESV Bible Blog provides additional charts that go beyond OT-in-NT quotations to show Power Law patterns based on some 80,000 cross references spread across the Bible. One chart plots cross references between books; another plots them between chapters. The raw data is also provided in an Excel spreadsheet so you can produce your own charts. Cool!

See also: Jim Darlack's blog post proposing a way to chart quotation density information along 2 or 3 axes.

Logos business trips can be a little out of the ordinary.

Guillermo Powell, international director for Spanish products, was in Perú recently to establish agreements with national distributors. Two major distributors there will now carry and promote the Spanish and Bilingual libraries from Logos Bible Software.

Perú joins Argentina, Guatemala, Costa Rica, and Spain as Spanish-speaking countries where Logos Bible Software is now available through national distributors. A number of other countries will follow.

In addition to the business side of the trip, Guillermo visited the city of Iquitos in the Amazon jungle, to preach and teach the Word among some of the poorest churches in the country.

This Bora Indian chief didn't purchase a Logos library, but it was striking to compare lifestyles. Guillermo said, "This chief is a Christian, along with his family that greeted us along the Amazon river." Common ground in a seemingly unlikely place.

 

I honestly didn't mean to immediately write another post that refers to another blog, but this one is just too cool.

Stephen C. Carlson of the blog Hypotyposeis posts about Power Law in Biblical Citations. Here is the gist; please see his entry for specific counts that he gathered via Google.

It has been long noticed that links are not uniformly distributed in many networks, and in many cases the distribution of links follows a power law in which only a few of web pages (or bloggers) get a lion share of the links (see, e.g, Clay Shirky, “Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality” [Feb. 8, 2003]).

Can the same phenomenon be observed in Biblical citations? Clearly, some verses are much more popular (e.g. John 3:16) than others, but can the power law still be seen?

This is an interesting question to ask, though the specific findings may well depend on the corpus of texts being searched. Oddly enough, some time ago we explored a feature that answers this kind of question using the resources inside Logos Bible Software. We even wrote a prototype report that does it using a "brute force" approach just to see what happened. We haven't made it a priority to refine and speed up the report, though we may return to the concept in the future.

Stephen's post reminded me of the prototype, so I asked Bob and he pointed me to it. Our implementation is a little different; we take three variables and then run the report. First we take a collection of resources; then we take a range of references; then we specify a pericope set.

The report searches the collection of resources for Bible references within a specified range, then "maps" the results onto pericopes. This provides results that correspond to meaningful textual units.

For the below example, I used a collection that consisted of the New Testament volumes of the International Critical Commentary (ICC). I specified a range of "Galatians" and also specified the ESV Pericope Set.

Here's what the report comes up with. This is sorted by hit count. So, at least in the ICC NT, these are the popular citations of Galatians, grouped by pericope:

• Galatians 1:11-24: Paul Called by God (264 hits in 199 articles)
• Galatians 2:1-10: Paul Accepted by the Apostles (241 hits in 174 articles)
• Galatians 3:15-29: The Law and the Promise (186 hits in 142 articles)
• Galatians 5:1-15: Christ Has Set Us Free (168 hits in 131 articles)
• Galatians 2:15-21: Justified by Faith (150 hits in 125 articles)
• Galatians 5:16-26: Walk by the Spirit (146 hits in 108 articles)
• Galatians 4:8-20: Paul's Concern for the Galatians (144 hits in 111 articles)
• Galatians 6:1-10: Bear One Another's Burdens (126 hits in 98 articles)
• Galatians 1:1-5: Greeting (113 hits in 82 articles)
• Galatians 4:1-7: Sons and Heirs (112 hits in 84 articles)
• Galatians 6:11-18: Final Warning and Benediction (112 hits in 88 articles)
• Galatians 1:6-10: No Other Gospel (104 hits in 78 articles)
• Galatians 3:1-9: By Faith, or by Works of the Law? (94 hits in 64 articles)
• Galatians 2:11-14: Paul Opposes Peter (73 hits in 63 articles)
• Galatians 3:10-14: The Righteous Shall Live by Faith (68 hits in 51 articles)
• Galatians 4:21-31: Example of Hagar and Sarah (67 hits in 56 articles)

So, when looking across the 30 volumes of ICC that cover the New Testament, and restricting our focus to Galatians, we see that the most frequently-cited portion of Galatians is 1:11-24...with 2:1-10 a pretty close second. After that, the hit count drops off pretty fast.

It's worth noting a couple of differences between what we're doing and what Stephen did.

Stephen's search (using Google) pulled from a corpus that consists primarily of web pages, with some Word docs and PDFs included. The web corpus will tend to reflect a broader usage pattern than that found in Logos Bible Software, which is primarily copyrighted, published material produced by professional scholars and authors. For these purposes, one is not superior to the other...but different samples could be expected to produce different results.

Another difference comes to light in the comments section of Stephen's post. As Stephen readily acknowledges, searching Google for "Gal 2:1" is a pretty blunt instrument. It fails to consider verse ranges, alternate notation schemes, or even occurrences where the author bothers to spell out all of G-a-l-a-t-i-a-n-s.

Bible references inside Logos books, on the other hand, have been encoded in such a way that Gal 2:1, Gal 2:1-10, Galatians 2.1 and even "verse 1" (given proper context) all count as hits for Galatians 2:1.

Corpus studies have their own literature and science. Perhaps someday we'll introduce features that allow you to run comparisons between various corpora to see how they differ. With 5,000+ books digitized, tagged and available for Logos Bible Software, this kind of thing starts to be a real possibility. But for the moment, it's a nice diversion.

In Eli's post on how Logos Bible Software facilitates serendipitous discovery he suggested that the phrase belonged on a t-shirt. A few readers agreed, so we went ahead and whipped one up.

We will be printing them on Hanes 100% cotton t-shirts.

To make sure we order enough in the right sizes, place your order now. (We will order the shirts at the end of this week, and ship them when we get them back.)

Update 3/13/2006: Pre-ordering for the FSD tshirt is now closed. Thanks to all who ordered! We'll submit the screenprinting order right away. When we get the shirts back from the print shop, we'll process customer orders and ship them out.

We were treated to some excellent salsa from 11 competitors this past Friday. It was tough to vote for just three salsas from all the tasty picos de gallo, tomato salsas, and an avocado concoction...but that's what some would call a "high class problem."

The results were announced shortly after the event and one of the Logos bloggers placed...congrats, Eli!

First Place: Guillermo Powell’s Powe - R - Salsa
Second Place: Kim Vail’s Salsa con Aquacate
Third Place: Eli Evans’ Hello Pain-o

Some photos from the event (click for a larger version):

Kim Vail, salsa 2006 coordinator, prepares the salsa buffet.

I entered, missed 3rd by 2 points, but am proud of my sign

Eli (speed eating?)

Jahan, Logos book designer, narrows the field

The happy remains

What...Leftovers?

And the winner is...

Followed by this shocking revelation from the winner, Guillermo Powell
Windows Media (416KB)

The winning recipe:

Powe - R - Salsa
from GuillermoPowell ("actually should be Elsa Powell, my wife")

1 - Pace Picante sauce (4 lbs) can be purchased at Walmart
1 - cucumber, minced
1 - bundle of fresh cilantro
1 - lemon (squizzed fresh by Guillermo)
1 - onion, medium size, minced
Add salt and tabasco to taste.