When I was originally doing research to develop an esoteric musical framework for the Pegataur Working, my initial line of questioning was primarily concerned with finding a way to map musical theory to hermetic or occult philosophy.  While it wasn't ultimately detailed enough in the low-level way I was looking for, I did stumble across an interesting bit of old world thinking about the Music of the Spheres.

If you're not familiar with the Music of the Spheres, this is a concept closely tied to the Old School pre-heliocentric worldview.  Basically, the heavenly hiearchy, with Earth at the center, of course, was thought of as a divine symphony that actually created a harmonius soundtrack for the universe.  As the Greeks had discovered some time ago, there were mathematical formulae underlying the divisions of tones into scales, and calculations about fret-spacing on the neck of stringed instruments that could be used to develop tonally accurate instruments.  It isn't a far stretch to take Pythagorean mysticism and combine it with a Western religious and scientific worldview and superimpose this earthly knowledge onto the heavens.  This is literally consistent with the old Hermetic axiom "As above, so below."    More...

After being out of town for the holidays and off the grid for several days, I came home to see some excited e-mails from friends about this awesome record review from Aquarius Records in San Francisco about the new Pegataur album, Eternal Flight.  This was particularly refreshing because some metal snob with a blog and a penchant for super obscure black metal killed us a week ago (why bother reviewing something that you hate unless you're Pitchfork?)... 

I think my favorite quotes from the review may be:

Any of you out there who perhaps found Boyjazz too jokey (you shoulda given them a chance anyway, what an entertaining band they were!), should have less of an issue with this, in fact, Pegataur not only shut up and play but really go off the deep end in terms of seriousness if you delve into their, um, mythology...Pegataur probably could have scored bagfuls of gold pieces (or weed) from The Sword or High On Fire in exchange for some of the best of these riffs and still had plenty of good ones left over.

Sweet....

I have to give Google props for creating a solid API for language detection and translation services in the cloud.  Using their free service, I've now added some cool new functionality to help people out when using the Esoteric Delights Gematria Database.  In the first panel for translation, I'm using the Google Ajax Language API to detect if someone is entering Hebrew or English into the input box, and then proposing a "feeling lucky" kind of translation. More...

I've improved the translation services available in the Esoteric Delights Gematria Database.  When you go to the database, you'll notice that I switched the order of the tools in the sliding tabs so that the "TRANSLATE" service is now at the top.  I've been analyzing the usage of the site to make improvements, and a major shortcoming that I found and corrected was that the call to the Babylon Online Dictionary was only really expecting a single word to be translated, but a lot of people are entering phrases into the translation and database searches.  I've corrected this to return results for all words entered, as shown below:

Another thing that I added was that in order to cast a wider net and help you find the closest translation possible, I've incorporated Google's Translation service that is made available through their Google Ajax API for Translation, which is totally awesome.  As demonstrated in the screenshot above, if Google has a translation for you, it will be provided at the bottom below the dictionary results.  This is also nice, because there may be times when the attempt to get a definition from Babylon doesn't return a result for whatever reason, but the Google result will - you can see this in the above example (notice there's no definition retrieved for "brave" in the Babylon section but the Google translation has all 3 words in a suggested translation). More...

Two quick updates about the Esoteric Delights Gematria Database:

1. It's way faster now. 
2. I added new database search functionality. 

The major improvement is in the responsiveness of the database and queries made of it.  For some reason the query response times were insanely slow, taking anywhere from 20-40 seconds (sometimes longer!) to do a simple number lookup.  I thought for some reason this was just how it had to be, but as it turns out, that's not true.  I've taken some steps to make the hosted database more attentive to the web site's needs, so now it's down to executing and returning the query results in a second or two.  Please let me know if you notice extremely long delays in processing your requests.  I've wired some alerts into the app to notify me if it's taking too long to server query results, but if you notice anything wacky, drop me a line.

In addition to being able to get English translations of Hebrew words and transliterating English into Hebrew characters, you can now search the text of the English translations that are stored inside the database directly.  This is a nice thing to have in conjunction with the translation service.  The translations are pretty "straight" in that they are coming from a standard Hebrew-English dictionary.  However, since the database contains words from other sources, some of which are more esoteric in nature, this gives you a second way to find things in the database specifically that may not be turned up in a standard dictionary.  The new database search shows up as the first panel and is labeled as "SEARCH the Gematria Database for Hebrew Words/Phrases by English Translation..."  This search function works more like a search engine and less like a normal database search in that it uses word stemming ("running" would also look for "run" and "ran") and will also look for words in a phrase, not just the word or phrase literally.

I hope you find these features/improvements useful!

I've just added some new functionality to the site: the Sigil Generator.  This is the same functional component that I used to generate the sigils used for the album artwork for the Pegataur album Eternal Flight.  To check it out, just select "Sigil Generator" from the navigation under Esoteric Tools.

The Sigil Generator requires that you input a Hebrew word or phrase.  You can use the Gematria Database page to lookup Hebrew words or transliterate English into Hebrew to use for the Sigil Generator.  I didn't bother with any obvious "export image" functionality, although I might do that later.  For now, if you want your sigil, just right-click (PC) or control-click (MAC, I think?) on the sigil and save from your browser.  If you don't want the colored background/lines, just uncheck the "Use Planetary Color Scales" box.

Enjoy!

I had an interesting synchronicity experience earlier this Summer at the end of June that is worth mentioning.

We were invited to a wedding that was to be hosted in Big Sur.  However, due to the fires that were spreading across California, the wedding had to be relocated the week of!  Our friends sent an e-mail out to a bunch of us to update us of the new location, etc.  This e-mail was sent to my fiancee, and I just happened to look over her shoulder while she was reading the e-mail.  Now, this was going to be a kind of wedding where you go and you only really know the folks getting married, but I noticed that I recognized one e-mail address.  

The e-mail address belonged to an ex-girlfriend of mine.  Not just an ordinary "ex," but perhaps the most significant "ex" in the history of my development as an individual growing into the bewildering world of love and finding oneself's place within that realm.  She was my first true love, and the first girlfriend that I lived with.  She was also the first girl to truly break my heart. So, in many ways, a first, and a relationship of that nature is sure to be stamped heavily into your psychic makeup.  I hold no ill will towards this person and think she's awesome, by the way.  We haven't really stayed in touch that well but we are on good terms whenever we do communicate, see each other, etc., although that is very infrequent. More...

I've decided to do all of my SharePoint-related blogging on the SharePoint Users Group site (www.thesug.org) instead of Esoteric Delights.

I'm doing this for a couple of reasons - 1) the SUG has way better search engine optimization than my blog, so my posts about SharePoint have a better chance of being found and helping other folks in the MOSS developer community on that site and 2) I'd rather keep my worklife and personal life separate ;)  Perhaps a false distinction, but it makes me feel better, and also may not alienate my friends and esoteric readers as much.

So...if you are looking for SharePoint stuff, check out my other blog dedicated only to that subject, A Rolling Stone that Gathers MOSS.