The Dead Sea Scrolls

My buddy Brett was right again. He recommended that we not miss seeing the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. The exhibit tied right into the reading Kelly, Christian, and I are doing on worldviews. In fact, one of the scholars we heard quoted in the exhibit (William F. Albright) was quoted in our worldview reading for the day of our visit. The exhibit was very well done. It was truly an incredible opportunity to have access to them. After all those years reading Biblical Archaeological Review, it was very gratifying to see some of the objects about which so much has been written. In addition to the scrolls themselves, we were especially fascinated by the textiles, the ossuaries, oil lamps, an ink well, and many other artifacts.

We found that the museum is will exhibit a history of chocolate next – with samples! We bought a year membership in the museum and plan to go back often. We took a couple other pictures at the museum along with a third of Lorena, Christian, and Kelly standing in front of the North Carolina Museum of History that is right across the street. The history museum looks great, too and we plan to go there soon. The middle picture does not do justice to the beauty of the butterflies we saw in the Museum of Natural Sciences, but we liked the picture anyway. This was the highlight of the weekend.

You can click on the images to make them larger

On another topic, I made great progress on my Python program to take the images I scan for each of the four panels of Kelly’s comic, resize them, add drop shadows and titles, create a thumbnail and save all of that to the disk. I used it for the last three comics she did and it worked great. It is still a command line program, but it saved me a ton of time. The next step is to create a GUI for it and then add scanner/webcam support. I have some additional ideas I would like to add, but I they are too far off in the future to mention right now.

June 2, 2004 – Back to work
June 3, 2004 – A job opportunity in Seattle