Minor updates:

A few paradigms were corrected, most notably the polel yiqtol of ??, which was just plain wrong. Also I’ve fixed a bug in the parsing window, in which a certain order of operations would make certain options unavailable. If you’ve not noticed, then rest easy.

Thanks to Bek, Chris, and Bathgate for error checking.

It’s worth noting that on Leopard Systems, drop-down sheets appear to function differently, and don’t work properly in Paradigmatic. This means that the Editor functionality won’t work if you’ve got OS X 10.5 installed. I’m sorry, but I can’t promise I’ll have this fixed any time soon (unless someone wants to sponsor development by buying me a copy of Leopard… ).

To get the new version, download it (0.5.1, 2.0 MB zipped .app file), or hit ‘Check for updates’ in the Paradigmatic menu bar. If you like, see the full notes, or read the FAQ.

To keep updated about any posts related to Paradigmatic, subscribe to the following RSS feed:

 http://feeds.feedburner.com/paradigmatic

Working much like the category cloud you see in the right column of your browser window, in which categories with more related posts receive greater size and prominence, Wordle is ‘a toy for generating word clouds’. It takes a slab of text, either typed/pasted in or uploaded as a file, and creates quite beautiful word pictures by giving greater emphasis to more frequent words.

As an example, here’s my recent doctrine essay, on the relationship between the doctrine of the Trinity and the doctrine of the church:

In this one, I like it how ‘divine’, ‘perichoretic’, and ‘persons’ are all clustered together. Random, but nice.

Wordle provides some rudimentary controls for tweaking the layout, colour, and font. It’s quite fun playing around to create something that looks quite appealing, and actually communicates quite a lot of information.

See if you can guess what my sermon for this Sunday is about:

[UPDATE: Justin proposes the wordle test for sermons; Michael puts his PhD through its paces.]

There are some (many?) newspaper articles that play out exactly like you thought they were going to. Stereotypes are imported wholesale. Straw men are hastily erected, and attacked mercilessly. Certain phrases capture the thought of the piece so concisely and completely, that reading the remainder of the article is just killing time.

Sort of like watching Titanic.

Two articles from the Herald grabbed my attention for this reason over the weekend. One was a tech article, on the opening of the new Apple store in Sydney. The straw men, in this case, are the ‘mac faithful’:

For the cult who worship the Mac, the company co-founder and chief executive Steve Jobs has become the high priest and the Apple Store his temple. It is a place to go to worship and give thanks for having an alternative to Microsoft, PCs and Windows.

Hmm. That’s right. Mac users are zealots, sort of, you know… different… to normal people.

The other was an astounding juxtaposition of ideas, in a short piece on the Anglican church:

Archbishop Jensen is one of the leaders of 1000 conservative churchmen from 17 Anglican provinces who will gather at the Jerusalem Global Anglican Futures Conference this month. Mainly from Africa, the Middle East and Asia, they are united on one principal issue: hostility to homosexuality.

But Archbishop Jensen argues: “This dispute is not really about homosexuality. It’s really about authority and who runs the church. And fairly clearly, to most of the rest of us, God runs the church through the Bible.”

(h/t David Ould)

Not a great example of listening skills, it seems.

Fascinating.

Kristy spotted the typo on the cover of the Sydney Morning Herald’s News Review section today.

Oops.

Particularly given one of the highlight policy differences is the continued presence in the Middle East.

(For one such as I, relatively unschooled in what is actually going on in US presidential-hopeful politics, the actual article itself was quite good. A helpful summary.)

New version (again).

I’ve gone up a whole point this time (from 0.4 to 0.5) as I’ve added in an auto-updating framework, so from now on you should get an seamless upgrade experience. Sparkle, written by Andy Matuschak, is the thing that does the magic. Hopefully it works well.

The other thing that is really worth upgrading for is the data – I’ve done some extensive revision of the data entries, using a different text book and set of paradigms, and made a reasonable amount of changes. There should only be sporadic errors from now on.

There are currently two known major issues:

• Firstly, if you do a manual check for updates (from the Paradigmatic menu) and you have no internet connection, the ‘checking for updates’ screen will hang indefinitely. Not ideal. This is not my problem, it’s Sparkle’s, and as soon as it’s fixed I’ll push out a new update. If it happens to you, just quit and restart. It doesn’t happen on automatic (background) checks.
• Secondly, if you try and save when you’re either adding a paradigm or editing an entry in the Editor screen (two tasks that almost no-one will do on a regular basis), then sometimes you will get data corruption. Same solution – quit and restart. Any unsaved changes, unfortunately, will be lost. This is a significant issue, and I’m working on it, but as I say almost no-one will know the difference. This exists in previous version of the app too, by the way.

Hope it works out for you. 2nd- and 3rd-year MTC students should find that the parsing tool works ok for their purposes, at least before the exam.

As usual, So, download the latest version (0.5.0, 2.0 MB), see the full notes, or read the FAQ.

To keep updated about any posts related to Paradigmatic, subscribe to the following RSS feed:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/paradigmatic