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Justification and hyphenation

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Why is virtually nothing on the web justified and hyphenated? Grab any book off the shelf in your home or office and I’ll bet you it’s justified and hyphenated. In fact, I challenge you to find me a book that isn’t.

Hundreds of years of making books and it seems to me everyone agrees justified and hyphenated is the way to go. Now all of a sudden it’s controversial whether or not it’s really better for reading, easier on the eyes, &c. The technology exists to easily hyphenate any website or app,1 but many developers either aren’t aware it’s possible or choose not to do it because they somehow think ragged-right is better.

And I’m not just talking about average blogs or news websites. I’m looking squarely at sites like Instapaper and Readability, and apps like Flipboard and Articles, who claim to offer a superior reading experience (and for the most part I think they do), yet continue to feature rag-right text. I’m also looking at e-book readers like Amazon’s Kindle or Apple’s iBooks,2 or Bible apps like OliveTree BibleReader or Crossway’s ESV Bible.

For all this new-fangled technology we have, e-reading is just not like reading a real book. It seems to me justification and hyphenation are a cheap and easy way to get closer to the real thing, so why aren’t they being utilized more universally? 

  1. For example, I use the excellent hyphenator.js right here on this site. [↩]
  2. Although, for all I know Kindle and iBooks may very well have justification and hyphenation baked in as options and the decision not to leverage those features could be up to publishers at the level of the individual books, in which case my complaint is still valid, but should be leveled at publishers, not the platforms they publish on. [↩]

My only iPhone 5 prediction

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As should be patently obvious, this prediction is not based on any inside information.

I’ve read some rumors to the effect that the next iPhone will be half an inch wider and half an inch taller than iPhone 4. I’m trying to imagine how Apple could increase the size of the screen without compromising their much touted Retina display. Apple’s always bragged about iPhone 4’s display being greater than 300 dpi, which is supposedly some kind of sweet spot where the human eye can no longer perceive individual pixels. Setting aside the possible dubiousness of that claim, it’s inescapable that increasing the screen size by a half inch on each side without also increasing the resolution would decrease the dpi to around 280 (by my very rough calculations) and basically ruin their whole marketing shtick.

So here’s my totally half-baked prediction: iPhone 5 will have a 720p HD display in order to preserve the 300+ dpi on a larger display. I imagine this will ruffle the feathers of a few iPhone app developers who’ve had to work over the past year to redesign their apps for 960×640, since now they’ll have to turn around and redesign for 1080×720, but wouldn’t it be a fantastic blow to all the competing handset makers who seem to be standardizing around qHD?

My setup: Password Hasher and KeePass

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Padlock My friend Aaron recently blogged about an innovative way to generate and remember many passwords using convenient password cards. His post has inspired me to share my own method for randomizing my passwords across many sites. Let me say at the outset, though, I really like Aaron’s approach, and don’t mean to imply by this post that I think my approach is superior to his (in fact, for portability and forward compatibility, his solution is perhaps superior to mine). The point is to find a method that works and then discipline yourself to stick to it.

Let me start with a short story. You may remember that I used to be the proprietor of the Homestar Runner Wiki and its accompanying discussion forum. Well, there was some drama there one year (as there was every year and as there is with all online fora) and one of our members decided to start his own forum and tried to persuade other members to leave us and join him since we were so dumb and he was so cool. I almost signed up on his forum just to see what all the fuss was about, but before I got around to it, one of our forum’s moderators signed up on his site. Shortly after she signed up, he was able to retrieve her password from his own forum’s database, and, since she had used the same password for his site as she had used on our site, he was able to log into our site using her password.

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“Blessings” by Laura Story

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My new favorite Christian music track is “Blessings” by Laura Story. Here are the lyrics:

We pray for blessings,
We pray for peace,
Comfort for family, protection while we sleep.
We pray for healing, for prosperity,
We pray for Your mighty hand to ease our suffering.
All the while, You hear each spoken need,
Yet love us way too much to give us lesser things.

‘Cause what if your blessings come through raindrops?
What if Your healing comes through tears?
What if a thousand sleepless nights
Are what it takes to know You’re near?
What if trials of this life are Your mercies in disguise?

We pray for wisdom,
Your voice to hear,
And we cry in anger when we cannot feel You near.
We doubt Your goodness, we doubt Your love,
As if every promise from Your Word is not enough.
All the while, You hear each desperate plea,
And long that we’d have faith to believe.

‘Cause what if your blessings come through raindrops?
What if Your healing comes through tears?
What if a thousand sleepless nights
Are what it takes to know You’re near?
And what if trials of this life are Your mercies in disguise?

When friends betray us,
When darkness seems to win,
We know the pain reminds this heart
That this is not, this is not our home.
It’s not our home.

‘Cause what if your blessings come through raindrops?
What if Your healing comes through tears?
And what if a thousand sleepless nights
Are what it takes to know You’re near?
What if my greatest disappointments
Or the aching of this life
Is the revealing of a greater thirst this world can’t satisfy?
And what if trials of this life,
The rain, the storms, the hardest nights,
Are your mercies in disguise?

His oath, his covenant, his blood

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Yesterday morning in Bible study we discussed Luke 22:14-20 where Jesus institutes the Lord’s supper and asserts that the new covenant is sealed with his blood:

And he took bread, and gave thanks, and brake it, and gave unto them, saying, “This is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me.” Likewise also the cup after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is shed for you.”

In our study we then connected that back to the new covenant promises found in Ezekiel 36:22-38:

Then I will sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be clean: from all your filthiness, and from all your idols, will I cleanse you. A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh. And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes, and ye shall keep my judgments, and do them.

My forgiveness, my assurance of salvation, my living a new life, my having God’s spirit in me, is all grounded upon an oath, a covenant that God has made and which has been sealed with Christ’s blood shed for me.

With all that in mind, I was particularly struck by the third verse of the hymn, “The Solid Rock”, which we sang in worship service this morning:

His oath, His covenant, His blood
Support me in the whelming flood;
When all around my soul gives way,
He then is all my hope and stay.

On Christ, the solid Rock, I stand;
All other ground is sinking sand,
All other ground is sinking sand.

Are we leaning on other people in our lives—parents, spouses, friends? Are we leaning on ourselves and our own abilities? Or is our salvation built on Christ and Christ alone, his oath and covenant sealed with his blood, which is our only “hope and stay”? 

The one where Joey goes off the grid

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So, a few friends tried to contact me to make sure I’m okay since I recently announced I’m going radio silent on Facebook. One friend commented that my message about cleaning up messes was “cryptic” and that I had piqued his interest and left him hanging. I really didn’t mean for my message to be cryptic. If I caught you by surprise or caused you to worry, please forgive me.

By “cleaning up messes” I simply meant that I’m having some time-management difficulties juggling several commitments and Facebook is just a really big timesuck. I could probably manage my Facebook time a little better if I was more self-disciplined, but in this particular situation it seemed more effective to just hit the big red button and go cold turkey for a while. I have every intention of coming back to the Facebook world once I get things a little better organized elsewhere.

While I’m absent from Facebook, you’re welcome to communicate with me using a more ancient form of communication such as a phone call, text message, instant message, e-mail, or even snail mail. If you don’t have my current contact information you are welcome to utilize the contact form on this site to get in touch. I do look forward to hearing from you. 

The “omnis” of God

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I don’t know why, but the “omnis” of God have always held a sort of fascination for me1. I think everybody has heard of three of them: omnipotence (all-powerful), omniscience (all-knowing), and omnipresence (everywhere-present). A couple years ago I stumbled upon omnibenevolence (all-good).

I’ve been reading the book of Job and got a little mind-boggled this morning and went looking for context and background to help me understand what I was reading. I started with Wikipedia, not because I think it’s a really good resource for understanding the scriptures, but just because it’s as good a place as any to start. Lo and behold, in the Wikipedia article on the Book of Job, I came across two “omnis” I had never heard before: omnisapience (all-wise), and omniliberty (all-sovereign, or all-free—able to do whatever he pleases), though I can’t seem to find omniliberty anywhere else on the Internet, and wonder if whoever added it to Wikipedia just made it up2.

Are there other “omnis” I’ve never heard of? Can anybody recall any others I haven’t listed here? Is it possible that all God’s attributes can be expressed as “omnis”? 

  1. I guess, really, the attributes of God in general have always fascinated me. I started, but never finished, reading a book called What is God?: An Investigation into the Perfections of God’s Nature, a survey of all God’s attributes—immanence, transcendence, aseity, etc. Fascinating stuff. I should pick that book up again. [↩]
  2. See this Google search. Interestingly, this post is already the number one result after having been published a little under two hours ago! Virtually all other results are copies/quotes of the Book of Job Wikipedia article. [↩]

NPR miscellany #7: opening blind eyes

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I heard a fascinating story this morning on NPR Morning Edition about a man whose blindness was corrected by doctors, but who still can’t see very well. As it turns out (and this really should come as no surprise), sight not only depends on hardware (your eyeballs) but has a pretty significant software component as well (neuron pathways in the brain). This man had lost his sight at the age of three, and, by the time it was restored at age 43, he had lost many of the neuron pathways necessary to drive the sight experience. Based on his hardware, he should have 20/20 vision, but, because of the state of his brain, he can make out only vague shapes and movement, but no detail. To really cure blindness, it turns out, we’ll need to figure out how to restore all those pathways in the brain.

The reason this story fascinates me is that I’ve recently been reading a lot about the kind of new birth Jesus talks about in John 3:3 where he says that we must be born again or we cannot see the kingdom of God. Elsewhere the new birth is compared to God opening one’s eyes so they can see him for who he really is and accept him by faith. The implication I see from this story is that, in our sinful and dead state, not only do we need new eyes, but a new heart, mind, and soul. We need to literally be reprogrammed or we cannot have our eyes truly opened. I think this is what second birth is really about. Of course, there are also accounts of Jesus literally healing the blind in the Gospels, and I see implications in this story for those accounts as well. God is the great physician, healing the whole person, hardware and software, able to perform miracles modern medicine and science can only speculate about.

You can read and listen to the story on NPR’s website: “Treating Blindness Takes More Than Meets The Eye” (listen). 

NPR miscellany #6: jazz guitarist Charlie Hunter

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I heard a great interview early this morning on NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday. NPR’s Liane Hansen interviewed Charlie Hunter, a jazz musician who plays an instrument unlike any I’ve ever heard of before, a modified eight-string guitar. I’m given to understand an eight-string guitar is usually nothing more than a regular guitar with a slightly extended range, adding one string to the top and one to the bottom. However, Hunter has his guitar modified and tuned in such a way that his three bottom strings are genuine bass guitar strings and the other five are regular guitar strings, though he notes in the interview that he’s recently removed his top string and prefers to play without it since he felt it got in his way. Eight strings or seven, though, what’s fascinating is this guy is simultaneously playing the bass guitar, rhythm guitar, and solo guitar parts in real time! My dad plays both guitar and bass (though not simultaneously, of course), so I thought he especially would get a kick out Hunter’s unique instrument and style.

Hunter’s latest record has a nice jazzy, upbeat feel with the 7-string guitar plus a couple trombones, a trumpet, and drums. The few song clips they aired during the interview were really fun to listen to. Besides talking about his unique instrument and playing style, they also discussed his practice regiment, why he chose to record the album in mono instead of stereo, and how he is learning to play the drums because it informs the way he plays the guitar, so the interview was generally entertaining for all these reasons. I’m going to be looking around online for Hunter’s albums now.

You can listen to the article on NPR’s website: “Charlie Hunter Has ‘Neglected To Inform You’” (listen). End mark

Google Wave

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I got an invitation to Google Wave today (thanks, Cory!), so I’ve been playing around with it a bit. One of the default welcome messages that popped into my shiny new account included the following YouTube video. It’s a good overview of the system, and much shorter than the original 80-minute presentation, so I thought I would share it with you all here.

Right now I only have three contacts with Wave accounts, none of whom I really collaborate with much, so I don’t know if I’ll get much use out of the system early on. If anybody out there has a Google Wave account and wants to chat, click here to see my address. Oh, and you, my dear readers, will be the first to know if/when I’m allowed to invite other people to the party. Stay tuned. End mark