Besides learning cool tricks, I found something interesting. I searched for all the imperative verbs within the Old Testament. Then I opened up the hits graph and the table bar chart for the average number of hits for each book and this is what I got (click on image to blow it up):

Joel has the highest average number of imperatives, but that makes sense, because it is such a short book. Next in line is Psalms, and it makes sense, because we are often instructed to “Praise the Lord.” What surprised me most is Leviticus having the least average number of imperative verbs in the entire Old Testament canon. What? Leviticus? Least imperatives? I have always thought of Leviticus as full of instructions and commandments from the Lord.

Interesting, huh? I don’t know what to make of this yet, but if you have any thoughts, please drop a note below.

As I have always said, good software is worth paying for. The free version works very well and is good for 10 articles, but if you are willing to shell out $4.95, the pro version bumps it up to 250 articles and gives you an in-app dictionary, functioning very much like Kindle’s.

Try it out. It has helped me to clear out a bunch of articles I have wanted to read but never had time to read at my desk (e.g. qideas.org.)

(The jaw-dropping fill beginning at 4:00 is what I want to comment about.)

I think this is a perfect illustration of what N.T. Wright proposed as his five-act play to understand what biblical authority means. The role of the church as living in the fifth act of a play with unscripted scenes ahead, is not to simply repeat what was done in the previous acts, but try to improvise with a sensitivity that maintains consistency and congruency with the overall theme and thrust of the plot, such that the end can achieve its intended grandeur.

So in order to be a church that is faithful to the biblical narrative and calling, we have to be a “Context-Aware Fill” church. Perhaps we need to upgrade first, eh?

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software has always been expensive and unaffordable for most users. Now I have found a poor man’s version (unlimited usage free trial, and only $29 if purchased), yet it still yields very accurate results!

VelOCRaptor is a very easy to use OCR application for Mac OSX, based on an open source OCR engine. You just simply drag an image into the program, wait 10 seconds, then it’ll make most of the text selectable and you can save the document as a searchable PDF file. I tested it with a nice and clean scanned document at 600 dpi, and it came out to be almost perfect. The only things it has a little trouble recognizing are super-scripted words and apostrophes. I also read that strange fonts will be difficult to recognize, so stick with fonts like Times New Roman and Arial.

Of course this is not a high-end professional OCR software, but it can recognize enough words in the document that you can search for it in spotlight. Check out this demo video:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=EK5FmZeVRh4

P.S. After you have created a bunch of PDF files, another great freeware to combine them into a single document is Combine PDFs.

最近出咗一個新嘅 search engine，叫 WolframAlpha，專查一些 quantitative 的資訊。求知欲甚強的我，八卦打了兩個 search term “deaths per year” 和 “births per year” 試玩一下。結果如下：

55 million deaths/year = 104.6 deaths/minute = 1.744 deaths/second

131 million births/year = 249.8 births/minute = 4.164 births/second

試想一下，你返工行上兩層樓梯時那稍為快的心跳速度，你個心每跳一下，世上就有一個人離世。

或試想一下，當你看完精彩的演唱會，encore 時越拍越快的那節奏，拍到每秒四下的速度，每一下就等於一個新生命的來臨。

……

請靜默片刻感受一下這兩個數字的震憾性。

……

我第一樣觀察到的，不是死亡有多麼的瀕密，而是上帝那豐盛的恩典。雖然人世間免不了有疾病、死亡、痛苦，但上帝是那賜生命的，是宇宙生生不滅的源頭。上帝施恩賜下生命比收取生命的更加多。

第二樣觀察到的，就是世界人口迅速膨漲的驚人程度。每年世上將會多添 76 million 個人。根據 wikipedia 所指，按這個速度，2040 年時世界人口將會由現在的 6.7 billion 升至 9 billion，亦即是多了三份之一的人口。

若今日貧富縣殊和不公平貿易的問題已經那麼大，世上多了三份一人的景況又會如何呢？可想而知，建立一個公平、公義、懂得分享資源、懂得和平共處的社會，是我們這一代為著下一代設想的當急要務。

Here’s the solution:
Doodle lets you create a poll, forward the link to the poll to the participants, and follow online what the participants vote for. It even supports multiple time options within a day. It’s free, and no registration is required.

Just remember this phrase: “Wanna schedule? Use Doodle.”

Having lived in North America for more than 16 years, it becomes harder and harder for me to recall and write Chinese characters. Some input methods become quite unusable for me, such as Changjie (倉頡), Array (行列), and all those that require you to recall how the character looks like, and dissect it according to their radicals (部首). Similarly, hand writing pads (手寫版) do not work either, since I don’t even remember how the characters looks like. Hence the most direct way is to go by Cantonese Pinyin (廣東話拼音), since the phonetic sound the only thing I can retain.

So for you Cantonese-speaking Mac users out there, this is how you do it:

Download and Install:

1. Download Yahoo! Key Key 奇摩輸入法 from http://tw.media.yahoo.com/keykey/ (As of writing, latest version is 1.1.2510 for Leopard or later)
2. Follow the installation instructions on the download page.

Prepare the Cantonese Data File Folder:

1. Create a new folder called “DataTables” on your desktop.
2. Within the “DataTables” folder, create another folder called “Generic”.
3. Download this canton.cin data file (right-click and save link as).
4. Copy canton.cin to the “Generic” folder.

Install the Cantonese Data File into Yahoo! KeyKey:

1. Now locate “Yahoo! KeyKey.app” in /Library/Input Methods.
2. Right-click on it and choose “Show Package Contents”.
3. Go inside Contents/Resources.
4. Drag the entire “DataTables” folder from your desktop into the “Resources” folder.
5. It might ask you to type your admin password to authenticate the copying process. (Note: If there are multiple users on your computer wanting to use this input method, make sure you add read and write access rights to the “DataTables” folder for everyone by right-clicking on the folder, choose “Get Info”, then do it under “Sharing & Permissions”.)
6. Now log out and log back in.

Final Setup:

1. Switch to the Yahoo! KeyKey input method and click on the input method icon on the menu bar.
2. You should see “Canton” as one of the choices. Check it.
3. Also remember to turn on “Associated Phrases” (this is very useful).
4. Congratulations! You can start typing away!

Advanced Tweaking:

1. You can turn off all the other input methods by going to Yahoo! KeyKey’s preferences under the General tab.
2. In preferences, under the Generic tab, check “Put recently chosen candidates in front” to make frequently typed characters appear further in the front of the character selection pages.
3. If you want to add new characters, modify pinyins, or adjust the character position in the selection bar, you can just open up canton.cin in a Unicode text editor like TextWrangler (my favorite!) and edit it yourself. It should be pretty self explanatory, but do it at your own risk! If you want the data file’s formatting documentation, read this.