Archives for November 2005

Product Guides on Logos.com

| Tue, November 15, 2005 | Products

Thanks to one of our resident book experts (and book developer), Vincent Setterholm, we have launched a series of product guides on the Logos.com website. So far, these guides provide a basic introduction to the categories and sub-categories of books available for Logos Bible Software in the areas of Greek, Hebrew, and Other Ancient Languages. We hope to add additional categories soon.

I think Vincent does a great job of guiding the site visitor through the plethora of Logos tools and texts available for biblical language study.
For example, did you know that we now offer 9 Greek grammars and 8 Hebrew grammars that range from beginning to advanced, learning to reference? Or that we have a growing number of tools for studying Aramaic and Syriac?

These guides help fill a need I mentioned in an earlier post here on the Logos Blog: a need for “…objectively-written guides to books on Logos.com to help our users navigate the 5,000 titles now available for the system, much like a bookstore owner who offers suggestions based not on his own likes and dislikes but based on his extensive knowledge of what’s available.”
Thanks for leading us around a few aisles of the bookstore, Vincent!

Greek Syntax: Clauses in OpenText.org Material

| Mon, November 14, 2005 | Misc.

It’s been awhile since I’ve posted about Greek syntax. In the interim, Eli has been regaling us with graph theory and all sorts of other chunky syntactical goodness.
Well, the drought is over.

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Biblical Counseling Library

| Fri, November 11, 2005 | Products

The “Logos Pre-Pub Machine” has been in high gear for some time now…this week alone we shipped two significant, heavyweight products for biblical language study—Comfort & Barrett’s The Text of the Earliest New Testament Greek Manuscripts and The Targums—while in the past 10 days we’ve posted three new prepubs to take their place.

One of these new prepubs breaks new ground for us, and that is the Biblical Counseling Library, posted to the prepub page just yesterday.
What’s novel about it is this: it’s a thematic collection bringing together 29 books from 20 authors and 10 publishers…all on subjects related to biblical counseling. We’ve done lots of author collections, publisher collections, and so on…but not really a large, thematic collection like this.

Some of the titles included are breakout bestsellers (e.g., I Kissed Dating Goodbye and Finishing Strong) while others are evergreen category standards (e.g., Competent to Counsel and Inside Out). Authors include Jay E. Adams, Larry Crabb, Elizabeth George, Steve Farrar, Steve Gallagher, Jerry Bridges and Francis Schaeffer. Publishers represented include Tyndale, Navpress, Zondervan, Multnomah, and Harvest House.

This collection is discounted 61% off the list prices of the 29 books included. Any pastor or layperson who counsels others—whether professionally or in an informal way—would do well to add them to their digital library.
You heard about it here first…the NewsWire email hasn’t yet been sent. More tools for ministry…let the Pre-Pub Machine roll on!

Syntax: Why Graphs? Part II

| Thu, November 10, 2005 | Training

https://blog.logos.com/wp-content/uploads/2005/11/syntax_andersen.html Consider the simple graph to the right. A graph, you will recall, is a diagram made up of labels and lines. This particular graph has some further special characteristics: (1) This is a directed graph, because the lines are arrows that indicate which labels are “on top,” so to speak; if this were a corporate organization chart, the arrows would always point from manager to employee. (2) This graph is acyclic, which is a fancy word meaning “no cycles,” which is a fancy way of saying that if you follow the arrows in the direction they are pointing, you will never visit the same label twice. Put another way, if no matter where you start, you will eventually reach the end. (3) This particular graph is a tree, because it has exactly one topmost label (the CEO in our org chart), and each label has one and only one arrow that points to it. That is, each employee has only one boss — wouldn’t that be nice?

I think that I shall never seea graph as lovely as a tree.

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Syntax: Why Graphs?

| Wed, November 9, 2005 | Training

Why did we choose graphs to represent syntax instead of something else? Short answer: Because.
The long answer, however, is much more interesting: Because every method of graphically showing the syntactic form of a sentence or clause has its pros and cons. Graphs have a lot of pros, and not many cons.

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What’s a Syntax Graph Anyway?

| Tue, November 8, 2005 | Training

Good question. For mathematicians and linguists, a graph is a diagram that consists of nodes and edges. For the rest of us, who must communicate using words that we hope others will readily understand, graphs are diagrams that consist of points and lines between them. For our purposes, any diagram that consists of points and lines is a graph.

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Preaching Through the Bible in a Year

| Mon, November 7, 2005 | Misc.

Sometimes you hear a story that just sticks in your mind. Like the one about the pastor who preached through the entire Bible in a year, with his congregation reading along at a rate of 20+ chapters per week.

If you haven’t already heard this yarn, check it out. With National Bible Week coming up later this month, it’s a good time to think about what would happen if more churches followed this pastor’s lead. And without spoiling the story, I should mention that Logos Bible Software plays a central role in assisting Pastor Bolender with his massive undertaking.

Here’s an excerpt to whet your appetite…the full story is in the Leadership Journal archive.

In 2002, our church began an ambitious project: If the congregation would take up daily Bible reading again, I would teach scriptural surveys that covered the passages they were reading. By year’s end, the congregation had read Genesis to Revelation, and I had taught 250 messages on all 66 books. I had to preach five times a week to keep up with the church (they were devouring 20-30 chapters a week), but a simple plan and some well-organized software enabled us to do it.

See also:

G’Day, Hebrew Syntax

| Fri, November 4, 2005 | Products, Training

You may have noticed I haven’t been blogging much lately. Mostly, I’ve been too busy working on the Andersen-Forbes Hebrew Syntax project. As part of that work, I recently went down to Melbourne, Australia to visit with Frank Andersen and Dean Forbes, the gentlemen themselves. It’s rare that the two of them are ever in the same room, since Dean lives in California and Frank lives half a world away in Melbourne. When we found out that Dean would be visiting Melbourne for a month to work with Frank, we decided that I should crash the party.*

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Moved In

| Thu, November 3, 2005 | Misc.

Once we told the development teams they could move in, it didn’t take long.

At the front of the room is our web applications team and along the side is the application development team.

More Space

| Wed, November 2, 2005 | Misc.

On December 20, 2004, there was a fire in the restaurant next door. It was around six hours between the time the fire started and when it finally set off the smoke alarms on our side of the building. The result was that the restaurant was completely destroyed; everything was smoked thoroughly. The partial second floor had to be demolished and even the brick walls had to be soda-blasted to remove the odor. A third of our offices were evacuated and carpets, books, and computers had to be thoroughly cleaned.

The restaurant relocated around the corner and Logos took the opportunity to create additional office space that could connect to our existing offices.

For ten months we endured the sounds (and smells!) of demolition and construction on the other side of a very thin wall. But today it is all worth it, because we are finally able to move in.

From the back, at the top of the old second floor. Skylight is above and right.

From the front, towards the back and skylight.

From the back of the new second floor at nearly the same position as the first photo.