Advent links - week 1

A detailed interaction between two scholars on the beginning of the separation of Christianity from Judaism - When Christians were Jews by Paula Fredriksen, review by Larry Hurtado.

Here is a meditation on Isaiah 9 from Jim Gordon (verse numbers differ from the Hebrew.) And my work on it from January '17. Jim's is seasonally timed. Mine was not. I heard Evelyn Glennie in New York at Carnegie Hall when the Winnipeg Symphony played there in May of 2014.

This article is too hard for me but fascinating if one were trained in the software of mtDNA. The concluding comment underlines Occam's razor: Science greedily seizes simplicity among complexities. Poetics among scientists.

Species are islands in sequence space.
COI barcode NJ tree and Klee diagram of American Robin
(Turdus migratorius) and closely related Turdus species.

This sentence gave me brief pause:

Therefore the biological classification is simultaneously a man-made system of pigeonholes devised for the pragmatic purpose of recording observations in a convenient manner and an acknowledgement of the fact of organic discontinuity.

Does this ask the question, what is 'in' the database? And does our database design preclude our seeing other possibilities?

OUP has another post on genetics these past few days.

Given that the family of Jesus was a refugee family, perhaps this art exhibit of the itinerary of recent refugees will be of interest. CRASSH is a very full and busy site with many RSS feeds on events and articles of interest. The copyright image of a refugee gripping razor wire reminds me of the picture I took in Israel in 2010 of the pomegranate in razor wire. (In the recent somewhat too serious carnival.)

Take note - a bit of internationalization for Prof J. Simon.

A detail or two on the redaction of Daniel, showing the similarities to the story of Joseph's dream interpretation.