Monthly Archives: December 2010

Recently Read

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I’ve rather gotten out of the habit of writing book reviews; but rather than give up on it entirely, here’s a list of some of the books I’ve been reading recently.

Law of the Broken Earth, by Rachel Neumeier. This is the third book in Neumeier’s Griffin Mage trilogy, which I’ve written about before. I got the first volume as a review copy, and bought the second and third myself, and I was not disappointed. Much fun.

First Lord’s Fury, by Jim Butcher. This is the sixth and (presumably) final volume in Butcher’s high fantasy series the Codex Alera, which began with The Furies of Calderon. I enjoyed it thoroughly; and as I think I’ve said about the previous four volumes, you should go find a copy of The Furies of Calderon and get started. Note that the Codex Alera has a very different feel than Butcher’s Harry Dresden books (which I also like).

Light of the World, by Pope Benedict XVI and Peter Seewald. I was overjoyed to hear about this book, as I really liked Seewald’s two previous books with then Cardinal Ratzinger. It’s a good book, but not quite as good as I’d hoped; which is to say, I prefer its predecessors (Salt of the Earth and God and the World).

Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Persuasion, by Jane Austen. Every once in a while it’s time to re-read Jane Austen, except for Northanger Abbey which I enjoyed well enough but have never felt any urge to pick up again, and Mansfield Park, none of the characters of which I liked at all. I shall most likely re-read Emma in short order, and then I shall be done.

On Knowing Thyself

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From my quote journal:

And, of course, it is difficult, almost intolerable, for us to live with the awareness of ourselves as other than wholly good, successful, happy, strong, and so on. That is why we find it so hard to live with ourselves in truth. We should prefer to live with someone we could admire more wholeheartedly. So we try to present ourselves in some way that we can admire. And so we deceive ourselves.

— Simon Tugwell, The Beatitudes

On Having It All Together

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From my quote journal:

Christian maturity is not just a matter of pulling ourselves together and being very impressive characters who have got it all right, who know exactly what it means to be a Christian and who have the will-power and the staying power actually to live up to it.

— Simon Tugwell, The Beatitudes

On Being the Right Shape

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Human love is soft, gauzy, shrouded in emotion. It shrinks from what is necessary. God’s love is hard, crystalline, and yet exactly right. It is like a case designed to hold and protect a delicate, oddly shaped piece of machinery. Human love is never quite the right shape—indeed, is sometimes grossly the wrong shape. To protect the device it must be padded, must shroud the hard edges and sharp points with foam and bubble wrap. But God’s love is always the right shape, precisely the right shape. The device fits exactly, every joint and extrusion supported perfectly by God’s hard and unyielding and crystalline love. Human love constrains and pinches, because only by pressure can its softness be made to fit. But God’s love allows us to be exactly what we are supposed to be.

On Forgiveness

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From my quote journal:

And we can receive that [forgiveness] only if we are prepared to accept the company the forgiveness places us in. It is no good wanting to be forgiven and then reserving the right to look round disapprovingly on all the other fellows.

Simon Tugwell, The Beatitudes

Mary Nodded

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The song “The Little Drummer Boy” has been coming under a certain amount of fire around the Catholic Blogosphere this year, prompted by Shane MacGowan’s recent rendition (about which the less said, the better…and I’m a Pogues fan). A number of bloggers, notably Simcha, have expressed their dislike of it.* Not just of the various odd celebrity versions floating around, but of the song itself. Fair enough; no one has to like it.

But I like it. And I think I know why the various odd celebrities have recorded it over and over again. Like the Little Drummer Boy, they have no gift to bring that’s fit to give the king, and they know it. All they have is their music. All they have are the gifts God has given them. Should they play for Him? You betcha.

And the rest of us, we’re all in the same boat. St. Therese of Lisieux said that we don’t need to do great things for God; we need to do little things with great love. This is good, because next to the infinite majesty of God, little things are all we are truly capable of.

And sometimes, as we do little things for God with great love, perhaps He will do great things through us, things we could not have accomplished ourselves. Perhaps the ox and lamb really will keep time.

Mary nodded. Let’s play our best for Him.

Merry Christmas!

* Not to be banging on Simcha; she makes me laugh out loud on a regular basis.

Voyage of the Dawn Treader

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So we went and saw The Voyage of the Dawn Treader this past weekend. I had low expectations—see my review of the movie erroneously called Prince Caspian to see how low—and so I guess I have to say I was pleased. It was frequently stupid, and often absurd, but it wasn’t evil.

First, the Good. Reepicheep was a delight. The Dawn Treader itself was gorgeous. Eustace was well-done. The Dufflepuds were funny. The closing credits, with Pauline Baynes-inspired drawings, were fabulous. The Dark Island was particularly well-rendered; I’d always wondered just what it would look like, and now I know. The visuals were stunning throughout. They sort of followed the plot of the book, a little. They changed a lot of stuff, but many of the changes make sense.

So much for that; now for the Stupid and the Absurd. (If you’ve not seen it, you might want to stop reading.)

  • There was far too much “You just have to BE-L-E-E-E-E-E-VE and everything will be all right.” It ain’t so, no how, no matter how many times Hollywood says it is.
  • The direction was frequently odd. Shouldn’t Lucy and Caspian have been a little more surprised to find each other in the middle of the ocean, hundreds of miles from anywhere?
  • OK, so Lord Drinian comes in and explains that they have two weeks rations left, and that they need to turn back immediately if they are to make it back to their previous landfall. Well, yes—but he gives this advice in the middle of a storm when the ship is racing along before the wind with reefed sails. In this situation, turning back is Not An Option. Not unless you like drowning.
  • An island of “pure evil”? There’s no such thing as pure evil; evil is necessarily parasitic on good.
  • It was less a movie than a video game, and not a very interesting one: enter the world, explore a little, receive a quest, hunt down the seven swords one by one, fight the big boss using the power of the seven swords, game over. (It would have been nice if the power of the seven swords made any sense.)
  • Not to mention that the big boss is the Staypuft Marshmallow Serpent—a name I wish I had made up, but I confess read it somewhere.
  • They left out one of the best lines in the entire series. Eustace apologies for being an ass, and Edmund says, “You were just an ass; I was a traitor.”

I could go on; but on the whole I’m grateful that they got as much right as they did.

A Week with Pomodoro

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A week ago I wrote about the Pomodoro Technique. I’ve now been experimenting with it for a week (actually, a week-and-a-half) and I’ve got some preliminary impressions.

First, it really only makes sense when you’re trying to manage your use of a large tract of time. On the days when I’ve been working pretty much entirely on my own, it’s been very helpful; I’ve gotten more done than usual, and haven’t had nearly as much of a slump in the middle of the afternoon.

Because you work in 25-minute “pomodoros”, with varying lengths of time between them, the technique isn’t as useful for managing shorter periods of time. If you finish a pomodoro, and you’ve got a meeting in twenty minutes, you’re not going to fit in another pomodoro before the meeting starts.

However, even if you’re following the technique strictly you don’t do all of your work during pomodoros. Before each pomodoro, you consider all of the work you have to do, and decide which activity to work on next. It’s natural during this time to add new activities to your activity inventory, to re-prioritize activities, and so forth. Then, when you start a pomodoro you’re free to focus solely on that particular activity.

The 25-minute interval often feels rather short; I’m often surprised by the timer going off. In a way, though, this is a good thing. In using the timer, you get practice at concentrating on whatever the problem is without worrying about what the clock is doing, which makes clock-watching less likely. I’m not going to start a pomodoro unless I think I have time to complete it; and then the clock can do what it likes.

So, all things considered, the Pomodoro Technique is proving to be somewhat useful. It does have one drawback—I was really tired at the end of the week.

Nothing New Under The Sun

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I’ve been studying Aristotle’s Physics with the aid of St. Thomas Aquinas’ commentary, and today I began on Chapter 8 of Book II. Aristotle has asserted that nature acts for an end—that acorns are for the sake of oak trees, that teeth are for the sake of chewing, and so forth. Many modern scientists deny this kind of final causality on evolutionary grounds. Teeth aren’t really for the purpose of chewing; it just happened, evolutionarily, that creatures with teeth chewed better than those without. It just worked out that way. (I over-simplify, of course.)

In Chapter 8, Aristotle describes the argument of those who deny that nature acts for an end. Here’s what he has to say; it’s unusually straightforward. First, he points out that the rain doesn’t fall to make the corn grow:

…the sky rains, not in order to make the corn grow, but of necessity…. What is drawn up must cool, and what has been cooled must become water and descend, the result of this being that the corn grows. Similarly if a man’s crop is spoiled on the threshing-floor, the rain did not fall for the sake of this—in order that the crop might be spoiled—but that result followed.

Got that? He’s described the evaporation and condensation cycle. Rain falls because that’s simply what water does. That’s what he means by “necessity”: water simply works that way. The Greeks didn’t have the same notion of physical laws that we do, but that’s what he’s talking about.

Well, if that’s true of water, then why not of, say, teeth?

Why then should it not be the same with the parts in nature, e.g., that our teeth should come up of necessity—the front teeth sharp, fitted for tearing, the molars broad and useful for grinding down down the food—since they did not arise for this end, but it was merely a coincident result…such things survived, being organized spontaneously in a fitting way; whereas those which grew otherwise perished and continue to perish, as Empedocles says his “man-faced ox-progeny” did.

In other words, why shouldn’t teeth grow simply because that’s the way matter works (organized, as we now know, in terms of DNA molecules), the successful arrangements being retained and the unsuccessful perishing.

Aristotle just summarized the basic notion of natural selection, and used it as an argument against final causality, much as the so-called “New Athiests” do. He disagrees, of course; he’s raised the argument to strike it down. I’m quite curiously to see how he does it.

Google Docs

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As you might or might not be aware, Google has a suite of office software called Google Docs. You can use it from almost any web browser; your documents are saved on Google’s cloud (you can also save them locally).

I’ve been rather skeptical of the whole Google Docs thing; on the whole, I like to have my files under my control. Yesterday, though, I was beginning to look for some help in keeping records for the Pomodoro time management system. By default, all you need is a pencil and three sheets of paper; but the fact is, I don’t want to carry the three sheets of paper around with me. Virtually all of the activities I do at work involve a computer (I write software; what would you expect?); and I do my work in a variety of places. I’ll always have a computer with me, but I might not have those pesky sheets of paper.

There are a number of Pomodoro software packages available; but a big part of the technique is letting your own needs and experiences drive the record keeping you do, which in turn lets you adopt the process to your own needs. The packages I’ve looked at (the ones that go beyond being a simple timer) are simply too inflexible.

I decided to try using an Excel spreadsheet. Much of the data the technique uses takes the form of lists; and since I can put anything I want in any cell, I can use any notation I like. It’s completely flexible, plus it computes statistics. Very nice. But, I work on different computers in different places. I don’t want to have to copy an Excel file from machine to machine. I thought about using a spreadsheet on my iPad, since I carry that pretty much everywhere I might be working, but spreadsheet usability is low on the iPad; even Apple’s own Numbers app takes a lot of heat.)

Then I remembered hearing that Google Docs is now usable on the iPad. And it is, sort of; you can enter data, but formatting and setting up the spreadsheet structure is a nuisance. But, I reflected, it’s available everywhere, right? So I tried it on my laptop—and wow. It’s not as powerful as Excel, certainly, but it’s plenty powerful enough for my needs. I quickly set up a spreadsheet with three work sheets, typed in my current list of activities, and I was off. It was readily available throughout the day; and it was a pleasure to use.

So call me a Google Docs user. The only time I foresee any problem saving Pomodoro data on Google Docs is if I’m going somewhere without web access; and in that case I can save the spreadsheet to my laptop as an Excel file, or use my iPad. If worst comes to worst, I can revert to paper for the duration, and enter my history into the spreadsheet when I get back.

Take a look, if you haven’t.