Stephen Smith of Good News Publishers was kind enough to share a list of New Testament names and their counts with me, gleaned from the English Standard Version. I've posted it (with his permission), with two minor changes: i re-sorted by frequency, and merged a few possessive forms (Paul's, Jesus') with their non-possessive versions. From Aaron to Zion, it includes almost 600 names of people, places, and as a few other kinds of capitalized words (Stephen says the list for the whole Bible is about 3000).

When you order it by frequency and graph it on a log scale, you get a pretty good illustration of Zipf's Law, the power-law relationship between frequency and rank. Boisen's Name Novelty Corollary (okay, i just made that up) also holds: almost exactly half of the names occur only once (294 out of 594).

One project i'm interested in: annotating the New Testament with name markup. It should be doable with a little string matching, and would enable computing some correlation statistics.

Last weekend our church did a workshop called "An Experience in Visual Worship". We talked for a while about images, both metaphorical and representational, and the technology of digital photography, and then went around with our digital cameras and took pictures to illustrate Psalm 104. I didn't come away with any real winners, but here's one that donna helped me with to illustrate "when You open your hand, they are satisfied with good things".  

I enjoyed the experience of learning to "think more visually", and it helped me dig deeper into the passage and the visual images it uses to describe God (thanks Brian, Blair, and Gary!). Almost anything that engages us more deeply in Scripture (rather than just reading words) is helpful to me. By the way, i recommend Blair's website A Visual Planet if you're looking for images and designs: she's very talented.

Brian started the time with a quote from Leonard Sweet's book "Soul Tsunami" that bothered me, though. I don't have an on-line reference or the book, but here's an interview with comparable opinions. The kernel thought is that the post-modern worldview has become much more image-based than word-based.

Though i can't argue that things have changed, I stumble over embracing this approach because it makes real communication so difficult. We exemplified this in our workshop last weekend: Blair showed a series of images and we talked about the metaphors they used. Some were very clear: for example, a No Trespassing sign, or an expectant mother. But others were very ambiguous: does a picture of a telephone off the hook say "God wants to talk to you", or "you ought to talk to God", or just "you ought to hang up the phone before it starts beeping"? And when it's not clear, how do we disambiguate it: with images? No, we write words! As i recently learned from Donald Norman's book "The Psychology of Everyday Things", an excellent introduction to industrial design: when you have to put a label on a device, it probably means you didn't get the design right. Devices and artifacts are simple enough that they can reveal themselves through good design: but communication is much more difficult, and images aren't enough. Another excellent work on this is Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death": going on 20 years old, but even more relevant today in its decrying the surrender of content to image.

In the "small world" department, i had no idea Sweet's ideas were influenced by the work of Charles Sanders Peirce. I've had a folder of work by Peirce on my desktop for months now, waiting for me to find time to read it, recommended both by a work colleague and a high-level director of a large government agency.