Legal Notice

Blogger has been sending around the following notice:

European Union laws require you to give European Union visitors information about cookies used on your blog. In many cases, these laws also require you to obtain consent.

As a courtesy, we have added a notice on your blog to explain Google's use of certain Blogger and Google cookies, including use of Google Analytics and AdSense cookies.

You are responsible for confirming this notice actually works for your blog, and that it displays. If you employ other cookies, for example by adding third party features, this notice may not work for you. Learn more about this notice and your responsibilities.

I have checked and if you are viewing this from an EU country then an ugly banner informing you of Blogger's  use of cookies does indeed cover the header of the site.

For those curious I know of the following cookies that blogger uses (explanations come from here, and here; different browsers may get different sets of cookies):

• TL
• S
• SID
• HSID
• SSID
• APISID
• SAPISID
• _utmt
• _utma

This cookie is used to determine new and returning visitors.  It has an expiration time of 2 years.  If the ga.js library is executed and no _utma cookie exists, this will be recorded as the users’ first visit and a _utma cookie will be set.  If a _utma cookie is already in place, the expiration time is reset and the user is recorded as a return visitor.

So let’s go through a quick run through of what the string of numbers means.  The string starts with a domain hash, this defines which domain the cookie relates to and is unique for every domain.  The Unique Identifier is what defines the user/browser. The time stamp refers to the visits the user makes to your website and the number of sessions refers to how many times they have visited your website.

This cookie is what’s called a “persistent” cookie, as in, it never expires (technically, it does expire…in the year 2038…but for the sake of explanation, let’s pretend that it never expires, ever). This cookie keeps track of the number of times a visitor has been to the site pertaining to the cookie, when their first visit was, and when their last visit occurred. Google Analytics uses the information from this cookie to calculate things like Days and Visits to purchase.

• _utmb

This cookie is used to determine a new session.  The cookie is set when the ga.js library executes and there is no _utmb cookie in place.  It has an expiration time of 30 minutes, therefore if a user is inactive for a period longer than this, a new cookie will be set when the library executes and the interaction will be recorded as a new session.

The _utmb cookie contains the same domain hash as above.  This cookie records information about this particular session. 

• _utmc

The B and C cookies are brothers, working together to calculate how long a visit takes. __utmb takes a timestamp of the exact moment in time when a visitor enters a site, while __utmc takes a timestamp of the exact moment in time when a visitor leaves a site. __utmb expires at the end of the session. __utmc waits 30 minutes, and then it expires. You see, __utmc has no way of knowing when a user closes their browser or leaves a website, so it waits 30 minutes for another pageview to happen, and if it doesn’t, it expires.

• _utmz

This cookie is used to determine the traffic source, medium, campaign name and campaign term which delivered the user to your website.  It is created when the javascript library executes and expires after 6 months.  This helps Google collect the data which can then help them to determine which traffic sources assist conversions within the multi-channel section of Analytics.

Again the domain is the same as the above cookies as it refers to the same domain.  From this cookie we are able to determine the campaign source, campaign name, campaign medium and campaign terms.

Mr. __utmz keeps track of where the visitor came from, what search engine you used, what link you clicked on, what keyword you used, and where they were in the world when you accessed a website. It expires in 15,768,000 seconds – or, in 6 months. This cookie is how Google Analytics knows to whom and to what source / medium / keyword to assign the credit for a Goal Conversion or an Ecommerce Transaction. __utmz also lets you edit its length with a simple customization to the Google Analytics Tracking code.

• GoogleAccountsLocale_session
• GAPS

This stands for Google Apps Password Sync and according to here:

Google Apps Password Sync (GAPS) automatically keeps your users' Google Apps passwords in sync with their Microsoft^® Active Directory passwords. Whenever a user's Active Directory password is changed, GAPS pushes the change to Google Apps immediately.

GAPS never changes your Active Directory passwords; it only syncs Active Directory password changes to Google Apps.

If you object to these cookies you should be able to change the settings on your browser to accept or reject them or to have them expire at the end of a session.

I have not set any cookies on this site although Blogger has.

A Totally Trivial Note

I just noticed that this is my 1000th blog post on this blog. And I have just wasted it on something entirely unsubstantial.

Some Useless Trivia

In honor of my one year anniversary of blogging, I look back at the most popular posts with some notes:

11. A report on the resignation of a university administrator. It is not often that people publicly tie their actions to repentance, even rarer that people will repent of their improper actions relating to someone else's crime.

10. The debunking of a certain malicious rumor.

9. A report on book burning at San Jose State. The irony of someone opposed to carbon emissions deliberately burning something is both astounding and hypocritical.

8. A response to the accusation that I believe the Book of Abraham is pseudepigrapha.

7. A memorial about some great people that I have been privileged to work with. These were and are really great people.

6. A report on an article discussing a bullseye from the Book of Abraham.

5. A report on Syvia Nasar's lawsuit against her own university for misusing the funds of her endowed chair.

4. A retrospective on Hugh Nibley's famous (or infamous) talk on Leaders to Managers. This talk was one of Nibley's more popular talks but was very unpopular in certain quarters. Nibley's reading of the Book of Mormon was usually very careful, but I think he distorted it a bit here to make his point.

3. A report about an archaeologist claiming to find the city of Abraham. There are reasons to be cautiously optimistic about this particular site.

2. The survey of things that Elder Maxwell had to say about doing ancient scholarship.

1. The day's Maxwell quote back on March 29th. From this quotation we know exactly what Elder Maxwell would have thought about one issue because he directly addressed it.

A number of people enter my blog through the very first post, so I do not count that one.

---------------------------------------------------

Those were not necessarily my favorite posts. Some of my favorite posts, in no particular order, were:

One can find some very strange practices in the apocrypha. This one from Tobit I find amusing.

There is a different way of looking at the Christmas story in Luke which would probably dramatically rewrite your typical Christmas pageant.

Looking at leadership and management among the Vikings. In many ways I think the earlier Vikings had the right idea. The earlier notions of leadership may have worked better than the later ones.

You would not normally think about foreign relations between the Roman and Chinese empires, but there was some ancient Chinese influence on Roman economic policy. The ancient world was much more interconnected than many of those of us who study it would like to think.

I have always found the notion of Coptic Buddhism amusing, but it actually exists in a way.

---------------------------------------------------

All told I have published 758 posts in the past year on this blog, averaging just over two a day. Originally I thought that I would be putting out about one every two weeks.

---------------------------------------------------



One of the constant themes in this blog was expressed by Screwtape in C.S. Lewis's book, The Screwtape Letters (chapter 27):

Only the learned read old books and we have now so dealt with the learned that they are of all men the least likely to acquire wisdom by doing so.

Old books should be read by more than just the learned. Things in old books enlarge the memory of people (Alma 37:8) and seeing their mistakes might help us to avoid those same mistakes (Mormon 9:31). Perhaps that is being too optimistic.

Some Notices that Bear Repeating

I have mentioned these before, but I will repeat them.

From this entry:

Normally blogs have some sort of comment feature. The purpose behind such a feature is to have readers leave behind thoughtful comments. In reality, however, comments on most blogs that I have read are ignorant, hate-filled, and incoherent diatribes.

For that reason I do not allow comments on the blog, even the occasional good one.

From this entry:

The views expressed in this blog are the author's own. They do not necessarily represent those of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, Brigham Young University, or The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. 

I understand some people view that as an understatement.

Telling the Terrible Tale

Recently a colleague exasperatedly asked me why my blog covered such dreadful things all the time.

Well, forn spǫll fira means the ancient story of man. If it had been the forn gods spǫll, that is the ancient story of God, then it might be different. Men make a mess of things in ways that God does not. Men generally have not and do not treat their fellow mortals in a godly fashion. History reflects that. To contrast the way of God and the way of man, we actually have to look at both and see the differences; they are not hard to miss.

The fact that we repeat the same mistakes again and again show that we clearly have not learned from the past. One illustration of that is Paul Simon celebrating in not just one but two songs his ignorance. "Don't know much about history," he sang in one. "When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school, it's a wonder I can think at all," he sand in the other. Granted Paul Simon is a bit dated, he was singing these things about the time the parents of today's children were born. Studies show that today's students are actually studying considerably less than they were when Paul Simon extolled the virtues of knowing nothing. History repeats itself, depressingly so.

But telling the ancient tale of man is actually telling a story. The narrator's art, or lack thereof, can make some difference, but there is the actual story itself. A first rate storyteller, J. R. R. Tolkien, put it this way:

Now it is a strange thing, but things that are good to have and days that are good to spend are soon told about, and not much to listen to; while things that are uncomfortable, palpitating, and even gruesome, may make a good tale, and take a deal of telling anyway. (J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, chapter 3.)

What makes a story good to listen to and good to live in are usually not the same things.

Quote of the Day

A cooking blog provides one of the funnier quotes about blog statistics that I have run across:

Every once in a while I will look at the stats of my blog.  I am always surprised at what people like.  Naturally I like everything that I put on the blog, but I did sort of put the macaroni and cheese in a box on as a bit of a joke.  It isn't really cooking after all.  As one of my friends says, it is assembling.  But it has almost 100 hits on it.  Really?  Is it curiosity or do you really want to know how make macaroni and cheese out of a box?

Forn Spǫll Fira

The title for this blog comes from the Vǫluspá in the Elder Edda. The forn spǫll fira means the ancient story of men in Old Norse.

The purpose of this blog is to deal with ancient stories. Most of them will probably not be about Vikings. Often there will be a modern connection but I will usually not make the connection explicit. "He who hath ears to hear, let him hear."
 
Ideally I hope to post something about once a week.

Someday, I hope to figure out how to fix the fonts so that they will display the necessary strange characters properly.