This guy created a brilliant series of Lego versions of well-known cartoon characters. Really incredibly minimalistic Lego versions of well-known cartoon characters. And yet, despite containing almost no detail, it’s easy to tell who they are. It’s amazing to me that there’s enough information present, but there is. Anyway, go take a look
Category Archives: Linkage
God and the Machine
Thomas L. McDonald, he of the gaming blog State of Play, has a new blog about the effect of technology on morality and religion. It looks like it’s going to be both thought-provoking and fun. Check it out!
Snark: How to Do It
Over at First Things, back in 2007, Alan Jacobs wrote a…well, I can’t quite call it a review, of the collected works of Kahlil Gibran. I have never read The Prophet, though I’ve had bits of it quoted to me, so I can’t say whether Jacob’s work is just…but it’s certainly entertaining. This isn’t simply a snarky, nasty review; this is snark raised to a higher, more elegant level, in which Jacobs explains to us exactly why he does not like Gibran’s work, and does so in Gibran’s own style.
I don’t go in for snark, much; but this is something else.
JPL Open House
For any of my readers who happen to be in the Los Angeles area, you might be interested to know that JPL’s annual Open House is this coming weekend. If you’re interested in space exploration, Mars rovers, and all around cool stuff, don’t miss it.
Tactics vs. Mechanics
John C. Wright has posted a fascinating discussion of how human society works. He points out that we tend to think of human society like a machine. If we want to have a society that runs smoothly, we analyze the problem as an engineer would and try to come up with a carefully engineered solution. And just as our science and technology continues, year by year, to improve, we expect our society to progress, to improve, to get better, as we work the bugs out.
The trouble is, it ain’t so, no how, because we aren’t dealing with impersonal laws of nature; we’re dealing with people. And when people realize that someone is trying to engineer their behavior, they tend to throw a spanner in the works.
Here’s a simple example from present day society. Ten or twenty years ago, someone observed that people tend not to make eye contact in elevators. Everyone gets in the elevator, and they all face the doors and don’t look at each other. Having read this, I kept my eyes open and observed that it was largely true, at least in the elevators I was in. But that was then. Now it’s become a commonplace that everyone behaves this way; and what do I see? Nowadays, people tend to stand with their backs to the walls of the elevator, facing in toward the center. Only those away from the walls face the door.
When people are told how they tend to behave, that makes them self-conscious and they start to behave differently.
A similar pattern occurs in war. It’s famously been said that no battle plan survives contact with the enemy; that’s why they are called the enemy. In any war, the tactics you adopt depend on what you think your enemy is likely to do. There’s no one proper tactic or set of tactics that will serve in all times and places. The engineering model simply doesn’t apply.
And that’s Wright’s point. The problem of having good government and a just society is much more like fighting a war—against venality, corruption, and tyranny, or what Wright terms the Leviathan problem—than it is like engineering a machine. It’s a thought well-worth contemplating.
The Franchise Affair
In a few weeks, Julie & Scott’s A Good Story is Hard to Find podcast will concern Josephine Tey’s mystery The Franchise Affair. I read through Tey’s entire oeuvre quite a few years ago now, and enjoyed them considerably; and they’ve been sitting on my shelf untouched ever since. And as it happens, The Franchise Affair is the first of Tey’s books that I read. And as it further happens, I’m home with a cold. All in all, this seemed a fortuitous time to renew the acquaintance. And when I opened the book, I ran headlong into this line on page 5, which reminded me why I was so enchanted with Tey to begin with. This is in a small English town, circa 1950:
…the scarlet and gold of an American bazaar flaunted its bright promise down at the south end, and daily offended Miss Truelove who ran the Elizabethan relic opposite as a teashop with the aid of her sister’s baking and Anne Boleyn’s reputation.
Fifteen Vocalists in Fifteen Minutes
Julie just did a meme, and tagged me:
From a Facebook thing I got tagged with, but I’m sharing it here also. I found it interesting to see what vocalists swam to the surface of my mind when I was just staring at the sky and thinking about music.
The rules: Don’t take too long to think about it. Fifteen vocalists that will always stick with you. List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes. And in no particular order. Tag fifteen friends.
Here are my fifteen:
- Ian Anderson
- Al Stewart
- Pete Townshend
- Bob Dylan
- Maddy Prior
- Leonard Warren
- Johnny Cash
- Arlo Guthrie
- Pete Seeger
- Allan Sherman
- Levon Helm
- Bruce Springsteen
- Harry Belafonte
- Mark Knopfler
I confess I looked at my iTunes library to complete this, as there were names from Julie’s list that were rattling around in my brain that I wouldn’t have picked.
Forgotten Classics
Blog-friend Julie Davis has, in addition to her
Happy Catholic blog, a podcast called Forgotten Classics in which she reads aloud a variety of obscure but entertaining works from the public domain. I confess that I have never listened to Forgotten Classics; my daily commute is about ten minutes each way, and I can’t pay attention to a podcast while I’m writing software at work. Despite that, I’ve embarked on a bit of an endeavor; I’m going to be recording a few classics of my own, which Julie has graciously offered to host. The first, my overly dramatic reading of Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky”, is now available, both at the Forgotten Classics blog, and through iTunes. Give it a listen!
Google Docs
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.
Fifteen Authors
Julie has suggested that I might try my hand at this meme:
The Rules: Don’t take too long to think about it. List, in no particular order) fifteen authors (poets included) who’ve influenced you and that will always stick with you. List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes.
Here’s the list I came up with, as quickly as I could:
- J.R.R. Tolkien
- C.S. Lewis
- Lewis Carroll
- Ray Bradbury
- Terry Pratchett
- Lois McMaster Bujold
- Peter Kreeft
- Thomas Aquinas
- Aristotle
- Pope Benedict
- P.G. Wodehouse
- Roger Zelazny
- Patrick O’Brian
- Jonathan Spence
- G.K. Chesterton
The order is the order in which they occurred to me, which is not necessarily the order of importance. Tolkien and Lewis are undeniably at the top of the list; Chesterton should be much higher, and Bradbury much lower; Benedict and St. Thomas should be higher.
The instructions were to pick the authors as quickly as possible; looking back at it a few hours later, I question how influential some of these authors have really been in my life. But there it is; it’s a meme, not a deeply reasoned analysis.
The View from the Foothills 