Links for 2012-03-23

"Not to us" is an important step in biblical interpretation. We need to have ears to hear how a story would have resonated with Babylonian exiles; we need ears to hear how "Jesus is Lord" might have resonated, or caused dissonance, for a first century Roman. We need to know that when we read, "Expel the immoral brother!" that it is a word for a first century church and might not be God's word to us about, say, the man in our meetings with a flatulence problem. "Not to us" is a significant moment in our biblical interpretation.

We published a paper recently. We also posted the code used to generate the results. The day after the paper came out, somebody found an error. A potentially very serious error. I went through a lot of fear and panic, and then I thanked the person who found it and my students and I worked on the problem. The error was a rather embarrassing one, a mistake that we really shouldn't have made. The buck stops with me, and what it boils down to is that I had not gone line-by-line through code that somebody else wrote. I had checked some of the code, but as the project got bigger and the students displayed more competence, I stopped checking line-by-line and started focusing on output.

It won't surprise anyone to learn that Internet Explorer still accounts for more page views than any other browser -- Microsoft's penetration into the workplaces of the world is a pretty difficult mountain to move. However, what happens at weekends, when people are free from office software and have their own choice of browser? It turns out that Chrome is the major beneficiary here, almost completely at Internet Explorer's expense.

Stephen Fry has confirmed he and Sir Ian McKellen will pay a copyright licence fee so a Southampton pub can carry on trading as The Hobbit. The pub was threatened with legal action by Hollywood film firm the Saul Zaentz Company (SZC) which accused it of copyright infringement. It later offered to resolve the dispute over the pub's name and decor by licensing it to use JRR Tolkien brands.