Earlier this year a professor sent me his collection of 18,000 images of the biblical lands. As I have time, I look through some. In my first pass through, I set Irfanview to advance each one every half second. So I’m watching these pictures fly by, many from different angles than I’m used to, and I’m struck by what is happening. In one half second (or less), my brain is seeing the picture, interpreting it as a certain place and from a certain angle, and then running it against all of my photos of that place and all of the previous photos in this same collection. While I’m marveling over the genius of Mother Evolution that so naturally selected brains like mine can do this, I consider who gets the glory in an evolutionary model. I think actually that I get some of it. I’m part of the chain, and I’ve adapted from what was passed down, and I’ll pass on superior traits (or the heirs will be eliminated). So this made me realize that congratulations are in order. Good job, Todd!<\/p>\n
I recently read an outstanding paper on the failures of the Low Chronology proposal of Finkelstein. It was very insightful on a number of archaeological points. One curious note: the guy who wrote it was at IBEX but did not<\/em> take my OT Archaeology class. Which means that just because you didn’t take the archaeology class either doesn’t mean that one day you won’t end up publishing a paper on it. <\/p>\n This is going to seem most trivial to many, but it’s a minor crisis in my life. I cannot figure out, and no one I have asked seems to know, when I need to dial a 1 before a number and when I cannot. In the DFW area, you always dial the area code. But sometimes you have to dial a 1, and sometimes not. And it absolutely will not work if you do it the other way, and the phone company absolutely will not allow the call to go through, and my phone absolutely requires me to re-dial the entire number (with or without the offending 1). And this whole thing is not area code dependent. Sometimes the 972 area code (which we are in) requires a 1 and sometimes it forbids it. There must be some solution to this ordeal, or I suppose that the whole city would be going mad.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Earlier this year a professor sent me his collection of 18,000 images of the biblical lands. As I have time, I look through some. In my first pass through, I set Irfanview to advance each one every half second. So I’m watching these pictures fly by, many from different angles than I’m used to, and\u2026 Read More »<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-679","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/679","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=679"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/679\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=679"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=679"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=679"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}