New Apps
On the road again this week. So no new talk. But, this week we are releasing 2 new web apps. One of which might be giving a weekly framework for studying headlines. Read on for more.
400 Stories
Our earliest work on removing uninspired material from the Bible was based on rules. Eventually Acts 15 provided a riddle, that when solved identified the editors. This made the process of finding additions much easier because we could categorize edits by type and ascribe specific motives to specific editors.
This only goes so far. Once past the biggest additions, then what?
The problem shifts to finding internal structure. From the alphabet itself we expect the inspired Quad character, an end-of-story marker, to be spread around and become the inspired form of what was once chapter breaks.
The total count of these breaks is hinted at when Abraham buys a burial plot for Sarah. 400 pieces of silver. Remembering that gold marks the 75 books, and so this reference to silver marks the next level down. (Some day, verses become copper.)
So the riddle of recovery shifts to finding 400 specific stories. It also shifts to finding structural relations between those stories. The folded, or technically the chiastic, structure of the alphabet as well as related commandments is a big help in this work.
In order to study this problem in depth, we built a specific tool. It lets us graph out those 400 stories and look at their relationships. We have been using the tool for a long time. A few weeks ago we let some close friends start using it. Sort of a beta test.
This week we've finished a scrub of that app. I've put a link to the tool on our public list of web apps at paleo.in. Here is the direct URL for this new app.
Like all progressive web apps, the app can be installed to your device and used off line.
It is still very much a draft, of course. So any content is subject to change. All material in the 400 app, related to Scroll 4, is still not solved. Treat that material as a reading selection, not as even a rough draft of the answer. This is why we have not released this app so far. If this changes I will post here on the blog the details.
Calendar Changes
About 3 weeks ago I felt confident enough in the work so far to drop all the non-inspired holidays from the annual calendar. I noted those changes in a blog post here.
It, too, is a web app and here is the direct link.
2 weeks ago, days after dropping the not inspired holidays, I woke with an insight to the annual calendar. There are usually around 52 weeks in a year, and 2 of those weeks are used by Unleavened Bread and by Tabernacles. Since these are 1/2 year apart, there will usually be 25 weeks between each holiday.
There are, of course, 25 symbols in the alphabet. In the 400 Stories app there are 25 very important columns, each headed by one of those symbols.
It is possible to assign those symbols to the 25 weeks between holidays. Even more interesting, the columns in the 400 are an alternative read of The Testimony. So this assignment provides a natural reading schedule for non-holiday Sabbaths.
After fiddling with the math, I realized these letter to week maps work in all years given a few assumptions. Since Tabernacles has a reading plan, the Sabbath in that week is busy. So the letter assignments build out from Tabernacles towards Unleavened Bread.
The Sabbath in Unleavened Bread will be the flexible Sabbath to handle any overrun, which happens occasionally. The Sabbath month in Sabbath years has a few unassigned Sabbaths too, as would be expected.
So the app linked above is updated, and gives the paleo alphabet markers for all Sabbaths. I don't particularly like the calendar's artwork around these letters, and will update when time allows.
Sabbath Reads
A long discussion with Ryan over this lead us to put together yet another progressive web app.
This app takes the material in The Testimony and refactors it into 25 different Sabbath Reads.
Thus the name for our new app, Sabbath Reads. It too is now linked off the main paleo.in website. The direct link is here.
This answers a long outstanding question about Sabbath reading practice. We have references in The Testimony about how Sabbaths involve reading from diverse select parts of The Testimony itself. Now we know why.
The annual Tabernacles holiday is for reading The Testimony in order across a week, usually while away from home and work.
The rest of the year, there are obvious reading selections for normal Sabbath reading. Basically 16 of the 400 stories, usually less than 1 hour of material.
There are still wrinkles in this material. Stories will be moving around as we continue this work. The material from Scroll 4 is mostly ignored in this app for now. We will update as we make more progress on this riddle. The TT, 400 and SR apps are updated together most Fridays.
Prophetic Use
I hunched when we saw this coming together that this reading schedule might be prophetic against regular headlines. To understand if this really works this way will require maybe a year of tracking against actual weekly headlines. It can also be tested against historical headlines too, which I will study soon. Headlines from this week, though, are a great example of how this might actually work.
The letter for this week is the Du, or purse. This week saw the US Federal Reserve become impotent in controlling markets. First, an interest rate drop that did not move assets up, as such drops normally do. Second, an announcement by the Federal Reserve to buy assets caused a collapse in asset prices. Again, not what might be expected. In any case this week also saw a 1987 grade crash in financial markets.
These are the markets from which most retirement plans get the money to pay retirees, so this is the biggest purse. Note, of course, this is very much Egyptian to have grain stored in 1 big place. Not a good thing. In any case, the markets in New York matter to the world.
The commandment for this week is Don't Kill. So headlines saw the public taking serious note of the Wuhan Coronavirus. Especially this involved closed schools, travel restrictions and stockpiling of household supplies. All of this is to save lives by slowing down virus spread rates so medical systems can cope over weeks to come.
Since the virus is the subject of the week, this week's Sabbath Read theme may be showing whomever resequenced its DNA was breaking the commandment, Don't Kill.
This week's headlines are why I've rushed out these apps. There is much more to say, which I will do in future posts.
More Later,
Phil