Rashi

I just received a copy of Rashi's commentary on Psalms - that should give me some challenging reading!

I see I haven't posted for 2 weeks - well I've been busy on the next release of our diagramming software. That's the tool I use to make all those diagrams. They are a major piece of test data. In essence the Logic Modeler is like a three-legged stool -

1. a free form drawing surface. Associative thought process.
   
2. a reporting mechanism. Sequential thought process.
   
3. a configuration environment that allows integration with any available data in the database and on the web.

I have used the drawing surface and the configuration environment extensively in these Blog pages - but I have used only a small part of the reporting - nothing more than images and simple queries and charts. I am still wondering how to apply some of the ideas that might make an interactive playing field for my readers and for me. An environment where you could experiment and interact with the psalms - perhaps without even needing to be connected to the database - we expect to use web-services for this type of play. I will be pursuing this idea over the next few months.

I was playing with the diagram I wrote about two weeks ago - the letter samech ס as first letter occurs in combination with 13 of the other letters. Of these some two letter combinations begin only one or only a few words in the Psalms. There are so many combinations, it is hard to know where to begin to report in an essay - but an interactive diagram would not just report a selected sequential presentation of a few results, but would enable exploration with I think something more than a search mechanism, valuable though those are.

Here's a bit of trivia I observed: (Firefox does not display Hebrew correctly - like some version of Java - I don't know why. I hope they fix it.). These are the counts of all 423 two letter combinations in the first two letters of every word in the psalter. Where the count is 23, the letter also occurs with itself. [update - I posted a full matrix here]

Hebrew letter ט as first letter occurs with 9 second letters in the words of the psalms.
Hebrew letter ז as first letter occurs with 13 second letters.
Hebrew letter ס as first letter occurs with 13 second letters.
Hebrew letter ק as first letter occurs with 13 second letters.
Hebrew letter צ as first letter occurs with 13 second letters.
Hebrew letter ד as first letter occurs with 14 second letters.
Hebrew letter ג as first letter occurs with 15 second letters.
Hebrew letter פ as first letter occurs with 15 second letters.
Hebrew letter שׂ as first letter occurs with 16 second letters.
Hebrew letter ח as first letter occurs with 18 second letters.
Hebrew letter ר as first letter occurs with 18 second letters.
Hebrew letter ע as first letter occurs with 18 second letters.
Hebrew letter שׁ as first letter occurs with 20 second letters.
Hebrew letter א as first letter occurs with 22 second letters.
Hebrew letter ו as first letter occurs with 22 second letters.
Hebrew letter ב as first letter occurs with 23 second letters.
Hebrew letter י as first letter occurs with 23 second letters (only because of my abbreviation of the tetragrammeton - the Genesis typo is not included!)
Hebrew letter ל as first letter occurs with 23 second letters.
Hebrew letter מ as first letter occurs with 23 second letters.
Hebrew letter ת as first letter occurs with 23 second letters.
Hebrew letter נ as first letter occurs with 23 second letters.
Hebrew letter כ as first letter occurs with 23 second letters.
Hebrew letter ה as first letter occurs with 23 second letters.

The 13s are of course all differing subsets of the 23.

Rashi will likely be more interesting...