Thursday, April 02, 2009

About to Get Owned in my Ecclesiastes class

Today in class I have to present a sermon on Ecclesiastes 10. My classmate in the previous class had three verses to cover and I have twenty. In addition, my commentary says things like, "This is the most difficult section of Hebrew in this book... we are simply uncertain what much of it means."

So I get to go in and do a lesson on it.

I am taking my newfound "Talk Guideline" with me: "Try Not To Say Anything Stupid." I am looking forward to the day when I can do this in every talk. Yeeha.

My talk (and indeed the chapter... at least I hope) hinges around the idea that small things matter. A few flies in the perfume gives the perfume a stench of death instead of a pleasing aroma. During my intro I'm talking about Edward Lorenz, chaos theory and the butterfly effect to show how small things matter. We'll also take a look at the geometry brain teaser below (completely stolen from a post on boingboing a while ago):



You guys are geniuses, I'm sure you can figure this out. It appears that the rearranging of the shapes above has created an alteration in the area they cover. How can this be?

Anyway, I'm off to go share this bad boy. Hopefully my professor doesn't surprise me with some hitherto unrealized curve ball from the Hebrew (or Akkadian or any of the many other languages he speaks).

If you all are interested I'll post the notes somewhere and you can take a look at them.

2 comments:

  1. How did it go? I am troubled by this diagram. What?

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  2. It went pretty well. Other than my professor disagreeing that the chapter was as unified as I thought it was.

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