"I'm sorry, Dave, but I can't parse that"

My parents got a flyer on the door the other day. On one side it said:

Leonard

Steinman

Mayor

Jefferson City

2011

On the other side it said (verbatim):

Leonard Steinman

Think Positive

Running Tea Party

Democrate

4th District

2010

Here's an article about him filing for both the 4th Congressional district as well as wanting to run for mayor next year. I like the photo - it's veryleonine. I wonder if he's ever played the lion in "The Wizard of Oz?"

I also wonder if the Tea Party knows they have someone running for them as a "Democrate?" I wonder how that works?

What a character

Here's a "captcha" I failed today:

I failed it when I typed in KeZLNDdM. I presume because the Z was supposed to be a z. Which would lead me to:

Lehmer's First Law of Captcha Design: If you are going to make your captchas case-sensitive, then only use instances of letters where their case is apparent from the character's glyph, not just its size. Which means that you can use D and d, E and e, G and g, but not Z or z.

Which reminds me of an observation I had when we were teaching the kids to read - children don't have to learn 26 letters, but 52, in pairs of characters that "mean" the same thing. Although actually it's less than 52, since some letters look alike (or close enough) in both upper- and lowercase.

A serif font makes the differences even more apparent:

• Aa - 2
• Bb - 2
• Cc - 1
• Dd - 2
• Ee - 2
• Ff - 1
• Gg - 2
• Hh - 2
• Ii - 2
• Jj - 2
• Kk - 1
• Ll - 2
• Mm - 1
• Nn - 2
• Oo - 1
• Pp - 1
• Qq - 2
• Rr - 2
• Ss - 1
• Tt - 1
• Uu - 1
• Vv - 1
• Ww - 1
• Xx - 1
• Yy - 1
• Zz - 1

The numbers above are my own personal reckoning of whether the two versions of a letter are similar enough to be recognizable in both cases by learning only a single character (counted as 1), or are they so different that a child has to remember that both R and r refer to some Platonic R (and hence count for 2). Using that criteria kids have to learn 38 letters to read, but we only teach them to sing 26. It's almost like a cruel joke.

Conversion is vocation

[Warning: This post is probably not interesting to anyone but me.]

I am writing the following down just because they struck me strongly while reading for the Introduction to the New Testament course I am taking online from MSR. They are two related sets of quotes from the course textbook and the book I've chosen for my book report.

Today, in spite of important connections between Paul's own words and the accounts of Acts (e.g., Paul's having "seen the Lord" and the link with Damascus, we need to recognize the sharp distinction between "apocalypse" and "conversion," at least as generally conceived. The term "conversion" usually implies both a moral turnabout, so that one ceases doing evil and starts leading a "good" or upright life, and/or a change of religions, say, from Judaism or no religion to Christianity. On both counts "conversion" is inadequate to describe what Paul says happened for him. Before he encountered Christ, Paul was, "as to righteousness under the law, blameless," so it would be wrong to say he became morally upright only after becoming a follower of Christ. And although it is common to think that, on the road to Damascus, Paul stopped being Jewish and became a Christian, as if he were changing religious affiliations, Paul never stopped thinking of himself as "Jewish." For him, becoming an apostle of Christ Jesus in no way meant changing religions.

Where "conversion" suggests a significant change within a linear progression of events, like the peripeteia or "turning point" in a Greek drama, "apocalypse" connotes a radical disjuncture in time and space, like the discovery of an entirely different plot. Apocalypse is the word Paul chooses to describe the sudden encounter with the risen Christ that transformed him into Christ's "slave" and "apostle," commissioning him to proclaim the gospel of Christ Jesus to the Gentiles.

- Richard E. Sturm, Chalice Introduction to the New Testament (Dennis E. Smith, ed.), p 33 [scripture references elided, emphases in the original]

And:

There was a point at which Paul the Jew became, without ceasing in his own understanding to be a Jew, a Christian. The point is traditionally referred to as his conversion. It is often said now that this is a misnomer; the event was not a conversion for Paul did not take up a new religion with a different God. He continued to worship the God of the Old Testament; the event was not a conversion but a vocation. He was called to become a missionary of the Christian way of understanding the God and the religion of his fathers. This distinction is unreal; no one has ever made clearer than Paul himself did that to become a Christian is at the same time to receive a call to some kind of Christian service - for Paul, the call to missionary work among the Gentiles. Conversion is vocation.

- C.K. Barrett, Paul: An Introduction to His Thought, p 10 [emphases mine]

"Conversion is vocation." Hmmm...I am going to have to chew on that one for a while.