Bible

A Texas school district is scrambling to remove books from its library shelves ahead of the fall semester, after they were challenged by parents and community members. Among the books removed are a graphic novel adaptation of Anne Frank’s diary, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and the Bible.It’s not clear why more than 40 books were challenged.The move came after the board of the Keller independent school district, in Dallas-Forth Worth’s Tarrant county, set a new policy that called for reviewing books. Three members whose…

Watching The Sandman on Netflix (or reading the DC Comic) can be an exercise in “spot the reference.” The story hangs together perfectly even if you don’t know that Dream’s raven Matthew is a resurrected Swamp Thing character or that the guy with Shakespeare in the pub is supposed to be Christopher Marlowe — but it can still be fun to trace everything back to its origin. John Dee? That’s the given name of the dream-controlling Justice League foe Doctor Destiny. Fiddler’s Green? Thats a legendary afterlife realm of…

The cryptocurrency collective built around a copy of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune script bible will no longer be a collective and is trying to sell its Dune bible. Spice DAO (short for decentralized autonomous organization) recently began “Redemption Phase One,” a fundamental shift in its direction. After a series of setbacks in an ambitious plan for a crypto-powered media studio, the group is letting people who hold its $SPICE token cash out by withdrawing their money from the group’s treasury. It will change its name…

The second part of our NLP exploration: Topic modelling, word embeddings and text similarity through TF-IDF and transfomersImage by Simon Berger on UnsplashWelcome back to this introduction to the NLP world. Click here if you missed the very first part of this introduction to NLP:Today we’ll explore new NLP tools, to analyse the Bible:Topic modelling: from documents (Bible’s books) to topicsWord embeddings: how to get embeddings and what info can we get out of this approach?Text similarity: how similar are the Gospels…

When evangelical Americans began talking about Donald Trump as God’s chosen president, the religious phrasing around his leadership – miracles, destiny, calling – triggered something in the memories of Lynette Wallworth, the Emmy-winning Australian virtual reality film-maker. As a young woman, she had been drawn into a Pentecostal community and came to hold “extreme beliefs” about God’s will. She became a “prophetess”; fellow members would come to her with questions to hear her “give prophecy” from literal and earnest…