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This year saw a lot of churn in the top 100 things people were giving up for Lent.

The pope announced his resignation on Monday, leading many to say that he was giving up “being pope” for Lent. It came in at #1. (Related, at #18, people said they were giving up “the pope” for Lent.)

Specific social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook generally dropped this year, with the generic term “social networking” (#4) taking over as a catchall. Instagram (#10), Pinterest (#52), and Snapchat (#78) were all new to the top 100.

With Valentine’s Day falling on the day after Ash Wednesday this year, it came in at #13. My wife suggests that the timing may also have contributed to the drop in “chocolate” from #2 last year to #17 this year. “Valentines” is #97.

“Horse meat” (#20) refers to the ongoing European scandal.

The only celebrity to make the list was British boy band One Direction, up substantially at #41.

I learned several new words this year: “twerking” (#34), a type of dance move, “selfies” (#46), or self-shot photos taken with a phone, “subtweeting” (#57), or tweeting about someone without mentioning them by name, “oomf” (#71), or “one of my [Twitter] followers,” and “Nando’s” (#76), a chicken restaurant.

This list draws from 263,000 tweets from February 10-15, 2013, and excludes most retweets.

Rank	Word	Count	Change from last year’s rank
1.	Being pope	5,654
2.	Swearing	4,944	+1
3.	Soda	2,648	+2
4.	Social networking	2,264	+19
5.	Alcohol	2,217	-1
6.	Chips	1,690	+8
7.	Virginity	933	+23
8.	Marijuana	784	+17
9.	Fast food	776	-2
10.	Instagram	755	+270
11.	Twitter	672	-10
12.	Cookies	643	+19
13.	Valentine's day	514
14.	Masturbation	510	+18
15.	Takeout	465	+59
16.	Sweets	444	-7
17.	Chocolate	417	-15
18.	The pope	394	+10,224
19.	Facebook	380	-13
20.	Horse meat	375
21.	Junk food	362	-8
22.	Smoking	355	-3
23.	My swag	331	+373
24.	Desserts	325	+21
25.	Life	325	+40
26.	New year's resolutions	313	+47
27.	My boyfriend	309	+99
28.	Catholicism	255	+11
29.	Straightening my hair	228	+89
30.	Fried food	225	+5
31.	Netflix	216	+255
32.	Work	216	-5
33.	Sobriety	213	+4
34.	Twerking	185	+698
35.	The playoffs	184	+3,556
36.	French fries	173	+19
37.	Coke	168	+1
38.	Feelings	168	+207
39.	Laziness	160	+28
40.	Meat	158	-30
41.	Onedirection	155	+103
42.	You	154	-24
43.	Procrastination	153	+1
44.	Makeup	150	+16
45.	Internet	149	+61
46.	Selfies	149	+2,328
47.	Exercise	144	+58
48.	School	141	-36
49.	My phone	135	+15
50.	Classes	129	+84
51.	Dip	127	+132
52.	Pinterest	125	+133
53.	Church	124	+33
54.	Emotions	122	+397
55.	Going to school	119	+163
56.	My girlfriend	111	+207
57.	Subtweeting	110	+253
58.	College	106	+5
59.	My face	106	+4,168
60.	Ice cream	106	-27
61.	McDonald's	102	-32
62.	Being ugly	101	+256
63.	Snacking	99	+19
64.	Spending	96	+89
65.	Dunkin Donuts	96	+475
66.	Chew	95	+418
67.	Eating out	94	+28
68.	Elevators	94	+99
69.	Food	93	-47
70.	Moaning	93	+123
71.	Oomf	93	+78
72.	Chick Fil A	90	+135
73.	Healthy food	88	+180
74.	Football	87	+145
75.	Swimming	87	+200
76.	Nando's	86	+72
77.	DVDs	84	+1,326
78.	Snapchat	84
79.	Broccoli	83	+206
80.	Ranch	81	+250
81.	The snooze button	80	+176
82.	Crystal meth	80	+219
83.	Dignity	79	+116
84.	Cake	77	-13
85.	Unhealthy food	77	+34
86.	Homework	76	-65
87.	Busyness	75
88.	Schoolwork	74	+88
89.	Chemistry	74	+34,949
90.	Frozen yogurt	72	+480
91.	iPhone	72	+100
92.	FIFA	71	+143
93.	Betting	70	+315
94.	Doing homework	69	+158
95.	Myself	68	+267
96.	Supermarkets	67	+1,797
97.	Valentines	66
98.	Domino's	63	+323
99.	Being negative	63	+212
100.	Hookah	63	+340

Categories

Rank	Category	Number of Tweets
1.	food	11,642
2.	habits	8,083
3.	religion	6,519
4.	technology	4,782
5.	smoking/drugs/alcohol	3,928
6.	sex	1,771
7.	relationship	1,399
8.	health/hygiene	1,270
9.	school work	1,095
10.	irony	792
11.	sports	648
12.	entertainment	392
13.	celebrity	246
14.	clothes	235
15.	money	133
16.	shopping	111

The image is a Wordle.

See the top 100 things people are giving up in 2013 for Lent on Twitter, continually updated until February 15, 2013.

As I write this post, with about 5,000 tweets analyzed, the new hot topics so far this year are: meowing, Valentine’s Day, and Snapchat.

Look for the usual post-mortem on February 16, 2013.

Google yesterday announced that they’ve expanded their street view functionality throughout Israel, including a number of sites that you’d visit on any tour of the Holy Lands. Of particular note are the archaeological sites they walked around and photographed. Here, for example, is Megiddo:

View Larger Map

Previously available were many places in Jerusalem, like the Via Dolorosa. But the new imagery covers much more area–I can imagine it being particularly useful in Sunday School and classroom settings, where a semi-immersive environment communicates more than static photographs.

Via Biblical Studies and Technological Tools.

The semiannual release schedule of the Javascript Bible Passage Reference Parser continues. This release:

• Improves support for parentheses.
• Adds some alternate versification systems.
• Supports French book names.
• Removes the "docs" folder because it was getting unwieldy; the source itself remains commented.
• Reorganizes some of the source code.
• Increases the number of real-world strings from 200,000 to 370,000. I ran the parser on all 85 million tweets and Facebook posts in the Realtime Bible Search database to produce the list.

One of the main goals of this parser is to give you a starting point to build your own parser, so the source is thoroughly documented and has many tests you can use to validate your code.

Try a demo or browse the source on GitHub.

The Pelagios Project has produced a lovely zoomable map of the Greco-Roman world. Below, for example, is a static view of Israel during the Roman period.

A blog post about the map discusses how they created it (plus bonus technical background). I’m most impressed by how attractive the maps are—a lot of online maps present you the data but don’t try to be beautiful; this map succeeds on both counts.

More generally, the Pelagios Project, which I admit I hadn’t heard of before today, incorporates linked data to help people study the ancient world. It encompasses a variety of efforts (need to search for an inscription from ancient Palestine? No problem)—it’s all fascinating.

(Note the “Mortuum Mare” instead of the “Dead Sea.”)

Via O’Reilly Radar.

Stanford University recently unveiled ORBIS, a site that lets you calculate the time and cost required to travel by road or ship around the Roman world in A.D. 200. It takes into account a lot of factors—my favorite is that it models ancient sea routes based on historical sources and wave height.

The apostle Paul went on three missionary journeys from A.D. 46 to 57, traveling around much of Asia Minor and Greece. In 60, he was also taken to Rome. ORBIS allows us to calculate how long these journeys would have taken in pure travel time (excluding time spent at each destination) and how much they would have cost.

Journey	Distance (miles)	Travel Time (days)	Cost per Person (denarii)*
First	1,581	53	237
Second	3,050	100	314
Third	3,307	92	481
Rome	2,344	36	699

* Ship travel only. According to Wikipedia, the denarius from 200, used here, is roughly 22% weaker than a denarius from the mid-first-century.

I conclude a few things from this exercise:

1. The journeys get progressively costlier as more of each journey happens by ship. Sailing is fast but expensive---of course, Paul and his companions may not have had to pay the full fare.
2. I like to imagine that Paul's overnight escape from Thessalonica to Berea was partially by riverboat (though the costs above assume it was by road).
3. Not much of the route of Paul's journey is in doubt---Luke describes the trips pretty precisely in Acts. About the only question is whether Paul traveled from Berea to Athens by ship or by road. The above costs follow the ESV Study Bible and assume it was by ship.

For more about Paul’s missionary journeys, Dale Bargmann has written a good walkthrough with maps and photos.

Download the raw data (Excel).

In a recent issue of Wired, Steven Levy writes about Narrative Science, a company that uses data to write automated news stories. Right now, they mostly deal in data-intensive fields like sports and finance, but the company is confident that it will easily expand into other areas—the company’s co-founder even predicts that an algorithm will win a Pulitzer Prize in the next five years.

In February 2012, I attended a session at the TOC Conference given in part by Kristian Hammond, the CTO and co-founder of Narrative Science. During the session, Hammond mentioned that sports stories have a limited number of angles (e.g., a “blowout win” or a “come-from-behind victory”)—you can probably sit down and think up a fairly comprehensive list in short order. Even in fictional sports stories, writers only use around sixty common tropes as part of the narrative. Once you have an angle (or your algorithm has decided on one), you just slot in the relevant data, add a little color commentary, and you have your story.

At the time, I was struggling to understand how automated content could apply to Bible study; Levy’s article leads me to think that robosermons, or sermons automatically generated by a computer program, are the way of the future.

Parts of a Robosermon

After all, from a data perspective, sermons don’t differ much from sports stories. In particular, they have three components:

First, as with sports stories, sermons follow predictable structures and patterns. David Schmitt of Concordia Theological Seminary suggests a taxonomy of around thirty sermon structures. Even if this list isn’t comprehensive, it would probably take, at most, 100 to 200 structures to categorize nearly all sermons.

Second, sermons deal with predictable content: whereas sports have box scores, sermons have Bible texts and topics. A sermon will probably deal with a passage from the Bible in some way—the 31,000 verses in the Bible comprise a large but manageable set of source material (especially since most sermons involve a passage, not a single verse; you can probably cut this list down to around 2,000 sections). Topically, SermonCentral.com lists only 500 sermon topics in their database of 120,000 sermons. The power-law popularity distribution (i.e., the 80/20 rule) of verses preached on (on SermonCentral.com are 1,200 sermons on John 1 compared to seven on Numbers 35) and topics (1,400 sermons on “Jesus’ teachings” vs. four on “morning”) means that you can categorize most sermons using a small portion of the available possibilities.

Third, sermons generally involve illustrations or stories, much like the color commentary of sports stories. Finding raw material for illustrations shouldn’t present a problem to a computer program; a quick search on Amazon turns up 1,700 books on sermon illustrations and an additional 10,000 or so on general anecdotes. You can probably extract hundreds of thousands of illustrations from just these sources. Alternately, if a recent news story relates to your topic, the system can add the relevant parts to your sermon with little trouble (especially if a computer wrote the news story to begin with).

Application

You end up being able to say, “I want to preach a sermon on Philippians 2 that emphasizes Christ’s humility as a model for us.” Then—and here’s the part that doesn’t exist yet but that technology like Narrative Science’s will provide—an algorithm suggests, say, an amusing but poignant anecdote to start with, followed by three points of exegesis, exhortation, and application, and finishing with a trenchant conclusion. You tweak the content a bit, throwing in a shout-out to a behind-the-scenes parishioner who does a lot of work but rarely receives recognition, and call it done.

Why limit sermons to pastors, though? Why shouldn’t churchgoers be able to ask for custom sermons that fit exactly their circumstances? “I’d like a ten-part audio sermon series on Revelation from a dispensational perspective where each sermon exactly fits the length of my commute.” “Give me six weeks of premarital devotions for my boyfriend and me. I’ve always been a fan of Charles Spurgeon, so make it sound like he wrote them.”

Levy opens his Wired article with an anecdote about how grandparents would find articles about their grandchildren’s Little League games just as interesting as “anything on the sports pages.” He doesn’t mention that what they really want is a recap with their grandchild as the star (or at least as a strong supporting character—it’s like one of those children’s books where you customize the main character’s name and appearance). Robosermons let you tailor the sermon’s content so that your specific problems or questions form the central theme.

The logical end of this technology is a sermonbot that develops a following of eager listeners and readers, in the same way that an automated newspaper reporter would create fans on its way to winning a Pulitzer.

You may argue that robosermons diminish the role of the Holy Spirit in preparing sermons, or that they amount to plagiarism. I’m not inclined to disagree with you.

Conclusion

Building a robosermon system involves five components: (1) sermon structures; (2) Bible verses; (3) topics; (4) illustrations; and (5) technology like Narrative Science’s to put everything together coherently. It would also be helpful to have (6) a large set of existing sermons to serve as raw data. It’s a complicated problem but hardly an insurmountable one over the next ten years, should someone want to tackle it.

I’m not sure they should; that way lies robopologetics and robovangelism.

If you’re not an algorithm and you want to know how to prepare and deliver a sermon, I suggest listening to this 29-part course on preaching by Bryan Chapell at Biblical Training. It’s free and full of homiletic goodness.

Jonathan Ogden runs Typographic Verses, a collection of about seventy-five Pinterest-friendly Bible verses designed as posters. Here are three of my favorites:

Also see Jim LePage’s Illustrations of Every Bible Book.

This year, Twitter continues to take top honors. Facebook drops a few places compared to last year–has it become less-central to people’s lives? This year’s hot new site, Pinterest, almost makes the list, showing up at #118. (Incidentally, Pinterest has a number of Lent-related boards.)

Chocolate comes in at #2–however, if you add up all the mentions of chocolate in its various forms (“chocs,” “chocolate chips,” etc.), it totals over 14,000 mentions, enough to put it at #1.

This year’s biggest gainers are “breathing” and “makeup,” both of which jumped up more than 30 places in the list.

No celebrities make the top 100 this year. Boy band One Direction (aka #1D) is at #144, followed by Justin Bieber at #194 and Tim Tebow at #221. Last year’s curiosity, Charlie Sheen, only got two mentions; he dropped to #10,000 or so.

Overall, food was by far the most popular thing given up.

This list draws from about 300,000 tweets from February 19-25, 2012, and excludes retweets.

Rank	Word	Count	Change from last year’s rank
1.	Twitter	13,937	0
2.	Chocolate	13,001	+1
3.	Swearing	11,737	+1
4.	Alcohol	9,998	+1
5.	Soda	9,942	+2
6.	Facebook	9,025	-4
7.	Fast food	6,529	+3
8.	Sex	6,146	-2
9.	Sweets	4,973	+2
10.	Meat	4,444	-1
11.	Lent	4,171	-3
12.	School	3,976	+1
13.	Junk food	3,388	+6
14.	Chips	3,150	+4
15.	Coffee	2,263	0
16.	Candy	2,217	+6
17.	Bread	2,124	+3
18.	You	2,056	-2
19.	Smoking	2,002	+2
20.	Giving up things	2,001	-8
21.	Homework	1,908	+11
22.	Food	1,800	+5
23.	Social networking	1,754	-6
24.	Religion	1,701	-10
25.	Marijuana	1,594	+4
26.	Beer	1,359	+4
27.	Work	1,331	-3
28.	Stuff	1,302	-3
29.	McDonald's	1,249	+21
30.	Virginity	1,152	+7
31.	Cookies	1,137	+3
32.	Masturbation	1,134	+4
33.	Ice cream	1,113	+15
34.	Shopping	1,068	-6
35.	Fried food	993	-4
36.	Boys	956	+6
37.	Sobriety	910	+7
38.	Coke	899	+3
39.	Catholicism	881	-13
40.	Cheese	858	-7
41.	Nothing	831	+5
42.	Carbs	818	+16
43.	Red meat	758	-8
44.	Procrastination	738	+1
45.	Desserts	733	+26
46.	Pizza	714	+15
47.	Pancakes	650	-9
48.	Sugar	645	-5
49.	Rice	633	-10
50.	Breathing	631	+34
51.	Me	628	+12
52.	Texting	627	+3
53.	Starbucks	623	+1
54.	Fizzy drinks	595	+12
55.	French fries	593	+7
56.	Diet Coke	572	+21
57.	Porn	562	+10
58.	Tumblr	548	+12
59.	Wine	546	-7
60.	Makeup	539	+31
61.	Liquor	534	-5
62.	Booze	530	-22
63.	College	524	+18
64.	My phone	508	+30
65.	Life	486
66.	Caffeine	466	-17
67.	Laziness	453	+11
68.	Chipotle	452	+30
69.	Tea	445	+6
70.	Chicken	442	+2
71.	Cake	440	+3
72.	Sarcasm	429	+4
73.	New Year's resolutions	422	+15
74.	Takeout	417	+11
75.	Men	412	-10
76.	Pork	394	-3
77.	Christianity	388	-18
78.	Sleep	386	+1
79.	People	384	+8
80.	Caring	377
81.	Juice	357	+11
82.	Snacking	345
83.	Lying	333
84.	TV	332	-31
85.	Complaining	331	-2
86.	Church	328	-35
87.	Him	327	+2
88.	Sweet tea	326
89.	Lint	326	-21
90.	Vegetables	324
91.	Talking	323
92.	Bacon	321
93.	Being mean	320
94.	Pasta	316
95.	Eating out	316	+5
96.	Negativity	314	-39
97.	Eating	298
98.	Biting my nails	294
99.	Nutella	291
100.	Being nice	258

Categories

Rank	Category	Number of Tweets
1.	food	79,977
2.	habits	21,836
3.	technology	19,190
4.	smoking/drugs/alcohol	19,073
5.	health/hygiene	11,101
6.	sex	9,948
7.	irony	9,352
8.	school/work	8,567
9.	relationship	6,919
10.	religion	4,157
11.	generic	2,841
12.	shopping	1,491
13.	entertainment	1,344
14.	money	526
15.	sports	512
16.	celebrity	461
17.	possessions	376
18.	clothes	111
19.	politics	105

The image is a Wordle.

See the top 100 things people are giving up for Lent on Twitter, continually updated for the next few days.

Look for the usual post-mortem later this week.