Archive for February 2010

Words of the decade

22 February 2010

I’m just reading the paper by the American Dialect Society (PDF) about the word of the year (2009) and the word of the decade (2000–2009).

The word of the decade was google. The word of the year was tweet. But there are some other interesting winners. […]

0·999…

20 February 2010

When many maths students encounter the expression 0·999… = 1·000…, they are a bit uneasy. It challenges their preconceived notion that each number can be represented in one and only one decimal way. One stumbling-block might be that they think of 0·999… as a large but finite string of digits—even if they accept an infinite string of nines, they may still think in terms of there being a last digit ‘at infinity’. Also, some students imagine 0·999… as more of a ‘process’ than a representation of a number. […]

Propitiation

17 February 2010

Here’s a quotation from Paul’s letter to the Romans:

. . . whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood . . .
Romans 3:25a KJV

What does the word propitiation mean? That’s a question many would be hard pressed to answer. […]

Feed readers

13 February 2010

Do you visit mine every week—or even every day (or more!)—just to see if there’s anything there? Then you’re wasting your time!

If you read anything else on the Internet besides my blog, you might want to look at Google Reader. Have you noticed that a blog is just a collection of individual posts that are date-stamped and filed into categories? Google Reader can give you these individual posts as updates. You won’t miss anything, and you won’t waste your time visiting all those sites, only to find that most of them haven’t been updated. […]

Harvey Newcomb

10 February 2010

How to be a man and How to be a lady are two books by the nineteenth-century pastor and writer Harvey Newcomb. These two books are unfortunately not very well known nowadays, but they are excellent books on character and manners. They are realistic, not sentimentalized; plain, not complicated; direct, not meandering. […]

Hebrews 1:7

9 February 2010

Last week I read a blog post from the Better Bibles Blog discussing the proper translation of Hebrews 1:7 and the Old Testament passage it quotes, Psalm 104:4. The article itself goes into some depth, but the main thrust of it was this: most translations translate Hebrews 1:7 inaccurately, and they should read something like Psalm 104:4 NIV. […]