Jon Aquino's Mental Garden

On forgetting an anniversary

2012-01-15T20:17:00.004-08:00

I have been trying to buy some roses each month for the woman I am courting, on the monthly anniversary of our courtship. Today, it didn't go as planned - I actually bought the roses, but I forgot to give them - I left them behind in the car when I picked her up for Mass. And she told me later that she was expecting them too. So I felt a bit bad.

How does one deal with the guilt or regret that accompanies failure? She said that I could just bring the roses tomorrow, but you still feel bad because things didn't go perfectly. One approach is to follow the advice of the AA prayer ("God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change...") and just accept the fact that it now lies outside of your control, and just move on. But still, you feel bad about the failure. Is there another way to look at it?

You could say, it's God's fault/will (or it's fate). Then you wouldn't feel so bad. But then you'd start feeling bad again because you know deep down that it actually was your fault.

The way that works for me is to realize that yes, it is my fault, but God can make some good come of it. Aquinas demonstrated that God is existence itself; so as I see it, when we mess up, he can order things so that good can come of it nevertheless. There is also a Bible verse that says that "in everything God works for good." So it is interesting to see, when bad things happen, whether any positive things can happen as well.

Such as this blog post! It's something good that sprung up from my failure, and maybe there's someone that will be helped by it.

How to shred a document by hand

2011-12-31T10:37:00.001-08:00

Here's a simple way to shred a document by hand. It's easier and more effective than just ripping it up haphazardly.

First, take the thing you want to shred (a document, or just your address), and fold it many times:

Then cut it once:

Finally, put one half in your recycling bin and the other half in a garbage can. If you do that, it should be pretty safe.

20 seconds of courage

2011-12-30T20:44:00.001-08:00

A couple of days ago, I watched a movie called "We Bought A Zoo". I thought it was pretty good. Anyway, I liked the following quote:

Sometimes all you need is 20 seconds of insane courage. Just, literally, 20 seconds of just embarassing bravery. And I promise you, something great will come of it.

Buying gas like an investment

2011-12-29T11:37:00.002-08:00

My brother does this interesting thing when he buys gas, similar to "dollar cost averaging" in investing (i.e., investing the same amount each month, regardless of whether the price is high or low).

Basically he pays the same amount at the pump on each visit ($20), regardless of whether gas prices are high or low.

I was trying to think if this has any real benefit, and actually I think it does. When gas prices are low, $20 will last a long time, which is good. When gas prices are high, $20 will last a short time, and you will be forced to retry again soon - so you will have more frequent opportunities to try again for a lower price. Kind of makes sense.

Compare this to filling the tank to the top every time. You will be visiting the gas station at a constant time interval, without the automatic adaptation mechanism described above.

Interesting!

Most versatile dance move for any music

2011-12-28T23:06:00.000-08:00

I recently found myself in a dancing situation at a Christmas party, and really had no clue what I was doing. Afterwards, I did some googling on the subject, and found this useful video on a basic dance move that works for a variety of types of music.

If you are as inept at dancing as I am, check out the following video:

Giving up RSS feeds

2011-11-20T17:09:00.000-08:00

I'm considering giving up daily reading of RSS feeds, in order to gain some extra time each day.

This Wikipedia article is spurring me on to try this: How to Live on 24 Hours a Day.

Undercurrent

2011-10-31T08:33:00.001-07:00

There is in this place an undercurrent of muck
But under this muck is a bed of stone
And sweet music makes a space in the muck
And in places, massy walls push the muck aside.

But sometimes the muck seeps in through the walls
Weakens them to the verge of collapse
Then sweet music cleans the muck from the stone
And fire burns the muck away.

Concoction for killing a cold

2011-10-24T22:18:00.000-07:00

My friend Dale bombards himself with the following medications at the onset of a cold or flu. He says it works every time:

Cold FX
Airborne
Buckley's
Echinacea tea
Humidifier with Eucalyptus drops
Halls
Fisherman's Friend
Spicy food
Teas

iPhone earbuds have a built-in microphone

2011-10-24T17:58:00.000-07:00

Wow - I did not know that the earbuds that come with your iPhone have a built-in microphone. And it seems clearer than the iPhone's built-in mic. This is cool. I was a bit concerned about cell-phone radiation on long calls (sometimes I get a "cell-phone headache"), and this saves me from having to buy a headset.

BGE method for eliminating blindspots from vehicle mirrors

2011-10-21T18:09:00.000-07:00

There is an interesting idea called the Blindzone Glare Elimination method for almost eliminating blindspots in your car's mirrors. So you theoretically wouldn't need to shoulder check. It's kind of weird but it's also kind of neat. And it takes some getting used to.

One showstopper for me though is that when your mirrors are set up this way, you can't use them to check parking lines when backing in. So I don't think I'll be switching to this method.

Friend looking for Special Education Assistant job near Vancouver

2011-10-20T21:57:00.000-07:00

A good friend of mine will soon be looking for a Special Education Assistant job (or similar work with disabled children) in or near Vancouver. If anyone knows of any openings coming up, please let me know.

How to close the flap on an OtterBox iPhone case

2011-10-15T21:21:00.001-07:00

There are many complaints that the bottom flap on an Otter Box Defender iPhone case fails to close.

I studied the flap, and the problem is that there is a big ridge along the outer edge of the flap (probably to ensure a tight friction fit). So if you want to close the flap and have it stay closed, give the flap a good hard squeeze on both sides when closing it. This will push the ridge in; when you relax it, the ridge will expand and push out against the hard case wall.

Connecting the dots looking backwards = Teleology

2011-10-09T14:33:00.000-07:00

I was thinking about something Steve Jobs said in his 2005 Stanford Commencement Address, that "you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future."

It struck me that this is simply Aristotle's long-lost idea of teleology: that a basic feature of reality is that things have ends, that there is a sort of "invisible hand" that guides things towards their ends. The dots somehow connect.

IPhone love

2011-10-02T20:28:00.001-07:00

Man, I can't believe how long I waited to get an iPhone. It truly increases the quality of one's life in certain ways (provided one is not busy with it in the presence of friends, that is). For instance, I am at present writing this blog post on a bus from the ferry to Victoria. The windows are fogged up and it is nighttime, so I cannot see where we are, but I can tell by looking at the Google Maps app. Man! This is great.

Update

2011-09-29T20:04:00.000-07:00

Lots happening in my life at the moment. I'm moving to Surrey, BC (near Vancouver) in a month, to be closer to friends, the Dominican Laity, etc. I also have too many books to read (let me guess, gentle reader – you have this problem as well).

Wish me luck!

My two favorite grammatical constructs

2011-08-29T12:33:00.003-07:00

I have two favorite grammatical constructs, from my English 11 course with Mr. Featherstone back in high school. They both have to do with parallelism.

The first uses semicolons and commas, and it looks like this:

Consequently, one must infer that Plato would have programmed in Smalltalk; Aristotle, in Java; Descartes, in Python; and Hume, in Basic.

Note that each item in the list is separated by a semicolon – and even cooler, we use a comma in place of the repeated words (“Aristotle, in Java” is used instead of “Aristotle would have programmed in Java”). Isn’t that neat?

A second favorite grammatical construct is a mix of grammar and formatting. When I do a bulleted list, you can insert headings at the start of each item, in bold italics. Like so:

Step 1. Print out the code. Sometimes the code you face is so gnarly blah blah blah...
Step 2. Tidy up the code. Tidying up whitespace and fixing the style of the code is a great blah blah blah...
Step 3. Make the code easier for yourself and others to understand. What I mean here is adding doc, and especially renaming variables, methods, and classes blah blah blah...

I get a warm, fuzzy feeling when I get to do either of the above. Try it – you’ll like it.

Thanks, Mr. Featherstone!

Two Lands

2011-08-20T22:36:00.001-07:00

γηθόσυνος δ᾽ οὔρῳ πέτασ᾽ ἱστία δῖος Ὀδυσσεύς.
αὐτὰρ ὁ πηδαλίῳ ἰθύνετο τεχνηέντως
ἥμενος

HOMER

By God’s grace, I was given a boat
And for fifteen days I rowed
I knew not whether they were lands or clouds on the horizon

I was not, thank God, one of those who drowned
Nor one of those adrift on rafts, asleep
But whether my destination were real or a mirage, I did not know

Then I turned my head and saw two lands
In one direction lay lands with lofty mountains;
In the other, grassy lowlands
But alas, how distant they were
And all the more after all my rowing

I question the sun as to which way to go
I question the moon and the stars
But they do not answer

Cream cheese on rice

2011-08-13T21:56:00.000-07:00

Today I discovered that it is possible to eat cream cheese and rice. We didn't have much in the fridge – we did have cream cheese and rice though. If you want to try this, it is really quite simple.

Ingredients:
cream cheese
rice

Place rice in a bowl.
Heat it up for 45 seconds in the microwave.
Add a dollop of cream cheese.

I believe it is an acceptable substitute if you don't have any bread and you have a hankering for cream cheese and something. Bread and rice are related foods, so I think this is acceptable.

Need help understanding teleology

2011-08-13T03:11:00.007-07:00

I’m finding it hard to sleep, so I’m jotting down some thoughts on a question that has been troubling me. I’m having trouble grasping the Aristotelian idea of teleology, or final cause. This is basically the idea that many things in nature have an (unconscious) goal or function. An example would be kidneys – their function is to filter the blood. Evidently, contemporary philosophy of science has been trying to do away with the notion of final causes for the past 300 years, but it is apparently making a bit of a comeback these days with the “new essentialism” philosophy of nature. But I digress.

In the book I’m reading by Edward Feser, he gives the kidney example above as an example of something with a final cause. I get that example – kidneys do seem to have a function (i.e., a final cause). He gives another example: human action. For example, I go to the kitchen in order to get coffee. This is an example of (conscious) goal-directedness – my goal is to get some Java – i.e., a final cause.

But he gives some other examples that I’m having trouble seeing as (unconscious) goal-directedness. A match is “‘directed towards’ the generation of flame and heat as its final cause”. I wouldn’t call the flame and heat a “goal” of the match. That said, elsewhere in the discussion Feser uses terms like “inherent power” and “tendency” – these seem to fit the match better. So are there different kinds of teleology? Teleology of function (kidneys), teleology of conscious goal-directedness (getting coffee), teleology of inherent power (the match)? Or am I just having trouble seeing what these different examples have in common? I suspect it is the latter.

In fact, Feser reduces the idea of final cause to the following: “if there is a regular efficient causal connection between a cause A and an effect B, then generating B is the final cause of A”. He gives the example of ice making something cold. Because ice causes the drink to be cold, generating coldness is the final cause of ice. Ice inherently “points to” coldness or is “directed at” coldness as its natural effect. Hmm. Well if that is all it is, what’s so notable about that? What is it about final causes that contemporary philosophy of science finds so hard to believe? Is it Hume’s modern idea that we cannot say that cause A has an inherent power to bring about effect B, only that event E1 seems to be regularly followed by event E2?

Actually yes, I think that is the issue. Aristotle (and the average person) would say that a cause A (such as ice) has an inherent power to bring about effect B (making the drink cold). On the other hand, modern philosophers of science would say that all we can say is that an event E1 (putting ice in the drink) is regularly followed by an event E2 (drink gets cold). I believe this distinction is what separates Aristotelian “efficient causality” from modern “efficient causality”; that is, the Aristotelian thinks that there is something in the cause that has the power to bring about the effect, whereas the modern does not think in those terms at all – he just sees the first event regularly followed by the second event.

I'm not sure why the modern has such trouble with A-B, why he will commit only to E1-E2. Perhaps A-B has implications that are troubling to the modern mind? I would be interested to know what those would be?

Back to bed.

Moleskines and other notebook thingees

2011-07-30T16:49:00.002-07:00

Are you the kind of person who buys a shiny, expensive notebook journal and faithfully writes profound thoughts in it for a few days, then forgets about it and never uses it again? I have several expensive Moleskine and Paperblanks journals that only have the first couple of pages filled out. It's quite sad, really.

And yet I want to get another one and start again, afresh. I have this need to write things down as I read; or if I make some resolution about a new way to do things, I need to write it down. I believe Thomas David Baker keeps a daily journal - Tom, how do you keep it up? Anyway, I'm not talking about something daily here - I'm talking about occasional jottings.

I thought I could do this on my PDA. But electronic does not cut it for this sort of thing. It has to be pencil on paper (yes, pencil for me, not pen - I need the ability to erase). It can't be on a luminous screen or touchpad. No automatic backups, alas, but real paper - fibrous, ligneous, blottable pulp.

So I am thinking about buying, yet again, an expensive Moleskine thingee. I'm thinking a mini one (2.5×4) for my wallet, and a small but skinny one (the 3.5×5.5 ones that come in a three-pack) for my profound inner thoughts at my desk. To avoid the phenomenon of journals that are barely started then discarded, these journals are going to be mixed purpose: rather than dedicating a volume to a single purpose (such as "Reflections" or "Notes From Lectures" or "Comments on Scriptures"), they will have all of these things smushed together - separated only by dates. So they will be a stream of different things that I need to write down. Perhaps never to be read again - the act of writing it down is what is needed.

Or I could take up one of my existing barely-filled-in journals and continue using those.

Nah.

On the meaning of "Have a Great Summer"

2011-07-30T13:48:00.004-07:00

I saw this on the signboard of Claremont High School today: "HAVE A GREAT SUMMER". If we were to take this seriously, what would it mean? Different people have different ideas of what it means to have a great time. For some, it could be watching lots of TV. For others, it could be visiting museums and studying great books. For others, it might be spending each day high on drugs.

What does it mean for something to be great? I think a good answer is to be found in Aristotle and Aquinas. I will be learning more about this later, but from the very little I have read on "natural law theory", what is good for a thing is anything that develops the thing toward its true nature. The nature of a human being is to be a rational animal. So anything that makes us more fully a rational animal will be good for us.

From our three examples above, (1) the visits to the museum and the reading of good books will develop our rationality. Good thing. (2) Watching TV? Depends on the programs, I guess. Could be good, could be not so good. (3) Getting high on drugs? This hampers the animal quality of human nature, so, not good. On the other hand, getting exercise and eating healthy food benefits the animal quality of human nature, so those would be good.

Have a great summer!

Cursocommentarial reading, or how to stay awake while reading heavy stuff

2011-07-24T20:59:00.005-07:00

I have recently been feeling frustrated with reading some heavy books and, after a day or two, completely forgetting what I read. It's as if the hard work I put into understanding the text was vaporized.

But now I'm trying something new. The idea is basically to annotate each page of the book with a sentence or two, at the bottom, with a key insight or summary for the page. You could also add clarifications from the web or from other books, or pretty much whatever you like.

In effect, you're keeping a sort of running commentary in the bottom margin of the book. "Running commentary" in Latin is "Commentarius cursor", so I think that an appropriate name for this method would be cursocommentarial reading.

Why do it? It keeps you awake, since you must pay attention to get the key insight from each page. As a bonus, you can come back weeks later and instantly refresh your memory about the book by glancing down at your annotations. Note that this will slow down your reading (which is not necessarily a bad thing), so you will want to save this technique for books that deserve a close reading.

Below is an example of cursocommentarial reading. Note the brief annotations that I put at the bottom of each page.

Recent must-read comments

2011-07-23T23:42:00.001-07:00

During my accidental neglect of comments building up in the moderation queue for this blog, there were some great comments left by some people. I had the pleasure of reading through them recently, including:

Darius recommends Bohnanza as a great game for 4+ people.
David wonders if the mind is a purely physical thing.
Chris Sivori enjoyed the video series The Western Tradition and also recommends Kenneth Clarke's Civilisation.
Thomas David Baker quotes Wendy Cope's A Nursery Rhyme, As It Might Have Been Written By TS Eliot
Alex Ksikes and w demonstrate that they haven't forgotten their calculus.
あじ and Jeff Werner give their views on the definition of postmodernism.
And Andrey suggests that a good way to disagree with someone is to say “False”.

Apologies for not responding to blog comments

2011-07-21T18:58:00.000-07:00

I'm terribly sorry for not responding to blog comments - it seems that the have been queued up for moderation and I wasn't getting email notifications about them. There are some juicy ones in there, and I am definitely going to reply to them this evening.

Turning adjectives into nouns

2011-07-09T20:20:00.002-07:00

I recently came across this title in my reading: "The problem of temporary intrinsics". Temporary intrinsics sounds cool, but we also have no idea what it means. I would like to propose that if you need a new word for something, an option available to you is to take an adjective and turn it into a noun (as "intrinsic" was above). Chances are that no-one will have done it before, so you will have your new noun. And it will have the advantage of sounding esoteric. But as with most esoteric words, it can turn off your readers.

For example, suppose you are doing some sociological work, and you need a special term for something that has to do with relationships. What's a similar adjective? How about "relational"? Now treat that as a noun and you've got your new word: a relational. The relational in the blah blah. Several relationals. Relationals in the Historical Contexts of Social Agent Consciousness.

Relational isn't a noun in the dictionary. It's all yours.

Another example. You are writing a paper on poetry or some sort of imaginative literature, and you need a special term for things that are fantastic or out of this world. You choose the adjective "atypical". Turn it into a noun: Atypicals in Dante's Purgatorio. The atypical shown above is the blah blah. A characteristic example of an atypical is Dante's use of...

Atypical ain't no noun in the dictionary. It's all yours, baby.

Adjectives which have been turned into nouns (which shall henceforth be known as potents) work better for some adjectives than others. For example, if we examine the thesaurus for synonyms for changeable, we see that "fickles", "uncertains", and "varyings" don't make great potents, whereas "transitionals", "commutatives", and "spasmodics" are more promising. They have that technical, hard-to-understand vibe to them.

I suspect that adjectives ending in -ic, -al, -ent (think referent), and a short list of others would make good candidates for potents.

History in the Movies

2011-07-03T21:38:00.000-07:00

This is neat. Paul Halsall has an extensive webpage listing ancient history in the movies, medieval history in the movies, and modern history in the movies. Could be an entertaining way to get a bit more familiarity with the history of the world.

Free online OCR service (image => text)

2011-06-30T15:04:00.000-07:00

I like to use Free OCR when I have an image and want to extract the text from it. You simply upload a < 2MB pdf, jpg, gif, tiff, or bmp, and it will do a reasonable job of giving you the text from it.

The "intelligibility of the world" according to Aristotle

2011-06-25T18:46:00.000-07:00

I am trying to puzzle out what Aristotle could mean in declaring the world to be "intelligible", and how far it differs from the modern viewpoint. (I'm reading about these ideas in Jonathan Lear's Aristotle: The Desire to Understand.)

The example I'd like to consider is the "sodium-potassium pump" – this is something we learned about in high-school biology. It's basically a molecule that pumps sodium atoms in one direction and pumps potassium atoms in the other direction, across a cell membrane. I forget the details, but note that we speak of it as a "pump", as if it were a thing with a purpose. I think this illustrates the difference in thinking between the Aristotelian and the modernist. The modernist would say that it is is in actuality just a collection of atoms – that it doesn't really have a purpose. Any "purpose" there is ascribed by our minds as a convenience, a convention – just a way of speaking to make things easier to grasp.

On the other hand, the Aristotelian would say that the sodium-potassium pump has been assembled for a purpose. Not, indeed, by a Creator (Aristotle was not a theist), but by a weird thingy in the sodium-potassium pump known as its "form". All objects in the natural world (rocks, trees, moose, etc.) have this weird thingy, or form, that defines them, determines their structure, and, in the case of living things, makes them grow and mature. So for the Aristotelian, the sodium-potassium pump does have a real, objective purpose (not just in our minds, not just a convenience of speaking) that is given to it (by its "form").

This much I have been able to gather from Chapter 2 of Jonathan Lear's book. Many of Aristotle's ideas provide a framework for Catholic teaching (particularly that of Thomas Aquinas), so I am naturally quite interested in how it works. And yet classical philosophy is taught neither in the schools nor from the pulpit.

Click2Mail: A service that lets you upload a file to be sent via snail mail

2011-06-25T15:24:00.000-07:00

Sometimes you want to send a message via snail mail and don't want to walk to the nearest letter box to drop it off. Click2Mail lets you upload a file (such as a pdf) and they will print it and mail it with a stamp. This is great if, for example, you are affected by the current Canada Post strike and want to send some documents to the U.S. Or you have a 75-page document to send and don't have enough paper or ink.

I have used this to send some documents (and scans of handwritten letters) to my aunt in the U.S. during the Canada Post strike.

History of the World on an index card

2011-06-24T22:49:00.001-07:00

Here's a timeline of the history of the world that you can print on an index card and stick in your pocket. You never know when it might come in handy. You might be visiting a university and one of the professors invites you to try out a time machine – how will you know what year to choose? If you have this card on hand, it is not a problem – at a glance you know when to visit Genghis Khan's conquest of Asia, or the invention of the sail.

The dates come from here.

Infographic: Some Key Moments in World History

2011-06-20T00:05:00.003-07:00

I have often wished I had a big-picture view of the history of the world, or at least of Western civilization. If only I had a list of key historical dates that could serve as pegs on which to hang other historical knowledge.

Richard Overy's article "The 50 Key Dates of World History" is a great start, but it's hard to internalize a list of 50 things. But if we superimpose those dates on a map, it chunks up the list nicely and makes it, perhaps, a bit easier to grasp.

Check out the map (pdf):

Job openings at Ning.com

2011-06-18T21:44:00.000-07:00

Ning.com has job openings for the following areas: software engineers, advocacy and support, marketing, designers, MySQL DBAs, and system administrators.

I've been a software engineer there since 2005 and quite like it. If you have questions about what it's like, drop me an email.

Western Civilization for people who never took a Western Civilization course

2011-06-18T12:18:00.002-07:00

A good article/list.

Imagine If

2011-06-14T22:04:00.002-07:00

Here's some philosophy that will blow your mind.

Imagine if the things around you – man-made things like tables and houses, and natural things like trees and cats and puddles – imagine if these things were not just made of matter, but also had another immaterial aspect to them called a "form". So a table would be a composite of matter (wood, nails, glue, etc.) and form (the form of a table). A house would be a composite of matter (brick, concrete, metal, etc.) and form (the form of a house). A tree would be a composite of matter (xylem cells, phloem tissues, etc.) and form (the form of a tree). A cat would be a composite of matter and form. A puddle would be a composite of matter and form.

Imagine if this were how the world really is – objects consist not only of matter but also of this weird "form" thing. Well this is actually a respectable position in the world of philosophy. It is Aristotle's theory of hylemorphism (hyle = matter, morphe = form), and in the philosophical arena its defenders include David Oderberg, Anthony Kenny, Edward Feser, Elizabeth Anscombe, and John Haldane.

I am getting acquainted with this view through Jonathan Lear's book Aristotle: The Desire To Understand. In the case of man-made objects, the form is transmitted from the mind of the craftsman to the table, house, or other object being made. In the case of natural things (cats, plants, people), the form is transmitted from parent to child. A third way in which form is transmitted is through teaching: form is transmitted from the mind of the teacher to the mind of the student.

I think it's a lovely way to look at the world – that the keyboard I'm typing on not only has parts of metal and plastic but also the form of a keyboard. And I suppose if I am imparting any ideas to you, the forms of those ideas are being transmitted from my mind to yours. And to think that forms are not a trick of the mind but a basic ontological feature of reality – what a wonderful world.

There are a lot of interesting ideas that flow from this – check out Lear's book for more.

Song for Voice and Google Logo

2011-06-08T23:00:00.002-07:00

Today's Google homepage has a guitar that you can strum with your mouse, in honor of the birthday of Les Paul, the guitarist and inventor. It's pretty neat.

Here's a song I made by strumming it and singing along.

Unable to display content. Adobe Flash is required.

Give it a try.

How to Carry on a Debate in a Comment Thread: A Case Study

2011-06-05T23:52:00.000-07:00

Like most people, I am not fond of debating others. And I wonder how some people can do it while remaining calm and collected, whereas most people lose their tempers.

Here I do an informal study of how Father Robert Barron engages his commenters on his YouTube threads. Fr. Barron is a learned Catholic priest who takes the time to dialogue with people leaving comments. I wanted to know how he handles comments that are ill-informed or spiteful, so I examined a sampling of his responses on a thread on one of his more popular videos, on Bill Maher's movie "Religulous", with 7,966 total comments.

This may be a useful model if you ever find yourself in a vigorous internet debate on a topic that you are passionate about.

* * * * *

Fr. Barron typically answers objections using reasoning, from premises to conclusions:

But if the first cause is truly non-contingent, then it must be a reality which exists through the power of its own essence. And this means that it is the unlimited act of existence itself and hence perfect. The claims of Catholic theology concerning the attributes of God follow from this insight.
wordonfirevideo 2 years ago

He answers objections directly and concisely, drawing on science and philosophy:

The scientific consensus is that time and space came into being at the Big Bang. This in itself proves that they are, to use my language, contingent, dependent. Therefore, we must search for a cause outside of them. If we are to avoid an infinite regress of caused causes, we must come, eventually, to that which exists through itself, that which, in principle, has no cause. This is what Catholic theology means by God.
wordonfirevideo 2 years ago

He sometimes has to repeat points, which he does patiently:

Again, anything that comes into being, that oscillates, that proceeds from potency to act is contingent, according to the classical definition. And therefore it stands in need of an explanation. We can't just go back indefinitely through a chain of similarly contingent causes. And so we must come finally to that which exists through itself. This is what Catholic theology calls God.
wordonfirevideo 2 years ago

He acknowledges points of agreement, and clarifies unapologetically where he differs:

You're absolutely right in saying that the source of our trouble is sin. Religious people are sinners, and non-religious people are sinners. What I have resisted resolutely on this forum is the insinuation that religion is, in itself, the privileged source of evil.
wordonfirevideo 2 years ago

If someone says something dumb, Fr. Barron calls him on it. To save time, he points to relevant books. You can tell, too, that he is a lover of language:

Well, now you're just being silly. Take a look at Martha Nussbaum's book Upheavals of Thought in order to see how the visceral and the emotional can have a properly cognitive valence.
wordonfirevideo 2 years ago

Sometimes Fr. Barron gets exasperated, and he lets it show a bit with some mild sarcasm:

Ah, more tiresome binary options! It's either rational or emotional; it's either literal science or nonsense. Every real act of cognition involves a subtle blending of what one might call the rational and the emotional. There is no "purely rational" perception. Like all really great texts, the Bible appeals to the whole of the person.
wordonfirevideo 2 years ago

And sometimes his personal exasperation is more pronounced:

Oh come on! Why are you laying all of this on me? I'm proposing things that I think are true. Tell me where you think I'm wrong. Anyone--very much including yourself--who makes a truth claim is trying to bring others to his position. What's so surprising or objectionable about that?
wordonfirevideo 2 years ago

Sometimes a quick word is all that is needed:

That's why you need the church!
wordonfirevideo 2 years ago

He corrects misconceptions about Catholicism by stating accurately what the Catholic Church believes:

I saw Maher's movie and I have heard him for years. I'm well acquainted with his views on the Bible. I simply wanted to point out how naive they are. In regard to your question, the Catholic answer is "the church," which is to say a 2000 year tradition of conversation, reflection, and interpretation. The Bible is indeed a collection of complex texts. Why should we expect that they should be easy to understand?
wordonfirevideo 2 years ago

A knowledge of art helps:

So there's no truth in the Illiad, The Divine Comedy, The Canterbury Tales, Hamlet, The Old Man and the Sea? These are, from a journalistic standpoint, all untrue stories. But are they therefore worthless? Aren't they in fact some of the treasures of our intellectual tradition? Come on, folks, let's get beyond fundamentalism!
wordonfirevideo 2 years ago

A knowledge of influential thinkers helps:

Ah yes, another prophet of the end of religion. Please consult the similar prophecies of the imminent demise of religion penned by Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, Auguste Comte, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Jean-Paul Sartre, Mao Tse-Tung, and Sigmund Freud. They're all gone; religion is still here!
wordonfirevideo 2 years ago

A knowledge of history helps:

Friend, do a little elementary research into the fathers of the church and you'll find that spiritual and theological readings of Genesis have been offered for nearly 20 centuries. And has it occured to you that God doesn't want to "work around our flaws" but rather to speak his Word precisely through our culturally-conditioned human words?
wordonfirevideo 2 years ago

Fr. Barron sometimes takes the time to answer silly comments, when the questioner is merely uninformed rather than spiteful:

a library is big! with billion of books. the bible is 300 pages long! hello.!   
scienceissexxxy 2 years ago

Well, my Bible is two thousand pages of very small print. And it's made up of over seventy texts, from a wide variety of literary genres and from different periods and written by a whole slew of different authors. That makes it like a library, it seems to me.   
wordonfirevideo 2 years ago

Sometimes Fr. Barron sees beyond the question to a personal problem or block in the questioner, and pursues that:

Hmmm. Tell that to Paul, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, John Henry Newman, Mother Teresa, John of the Cross, and John Paul II. They've all found a fair amount of truth in the Biblical narratives. Like so many others on this forum, you have expand your notion of what counts as truth.
wordonfirevideo 2 years ago

If the person is uninformed, sometimes the best thing to do is to tell them to read up:

Friend, you have got to read some basic theology. You're just talking nonsense now. Perhaps I shouldn't be, but I'm continually surprised how pervasive fundamentalism is, especially among the non-believers.
wordonfirevideo 2 years ago

Note Fr. Barron's tone. He is not a soggy towel letting people walk all over him. Neither does he resort to insulting or name-calling. The tone is that of the mildly exasperated, mildly sarcastic, though patient, intellectual:

Friend, please give me the chapter and verse where God is depicted in the Bible as "a magical man in the sky clicking his fingers?" As I've said now about a thousand times, the Bible often speaks the evocative, multivalent language of poetry. The book of Genesis, in sublime theological poetry, teaches that all reality comes from the creative power of an intelligence that stands outside of nature and finitude. What is ridiculous about that?
wordonfirevideo 2 years ago

Fr. Barron doesn't have enough space in a YouTube comment to give a comprehensive explanation of some matters, so sometimes he will leave important concepts unexplained (for example, he mentions "intelligibility" which could be expanded into a whole discussion on Aristotelian teleology). Hopefully it sows a seed of a concept that the reader will look into further:

God didn't put fossils in place so that science could later "discover" them. But God did indeed put intelligibility in things. Otherwise, science would have nothing to know!
wordonfirevideo 2 years ago

A micro-analogy can help to make a point:

So religion doesn't get questioned at all by its followers? Have you read any serious theology? Have you consulted any serious journal of religion? Some of the sharpest critics of religion I know are religious people. Just as loyal Americans can be critical of America, so deeply believing people can turn a critical eye toward the problems within religion.
wordonfirevideo 2 years ago

* * * * *

The general tone is that of someone who is knowledgeable and trying to be patient. A little bit of exasperation, a little sarcasm, the occasional curt reply are all expected and fine. But it never degenerates into name-calling or insulting the other person. To save time, he gives a quick analogy, or gestures toward ideas that would require further explanation (such as intelligibility), or points to relevant books/authors.

Refocusing my studying

2011-06-05T15:55:00.000-07:00

I like to spend my free hours reading. The trouble is, there aren't many free hours. And when I do read, I tend to pick up a book haphazardly, from my pile of books, without any particular focus. The result is that I don't finish what I'm reading - always hopping from book to book.

Sometimes I ask people how much free time they have in the evenings for leisure. It seems to vary from an hour and a half to three hours. For me, it's an hour and a half, often less. So I really need to make the most of this time.

I'm going to try focusing on fewer books/resources:

* Philosophy: The Last Superstition
* Theology: Introduction to the Devout Life
* History: The Catholic Church Through the Ages
* Scripture: Read the Bible and the Catechism in a Year
* Technology: Learn TCP/IP in 24 Hours
* Literature: Mark Twain's Joan of Arc

I could easily double the size of this list, but then I would get nothing done. Wish me luck.

Pride and Prejudice: A Third Reading

2011-05-23T00:05:00.000-07:00

Several days ago I picked up Pride and Prejudice again and spent a number of late nights reading it. I am trying to figure out why I enjoy reading the novels of Jane Austen and her contemporaries. Not everyone likes Pride and Prejudice. From the back matter of the book, I note that Mark Twain, referring to this book, found it not "to his taste". And yet...and yet...when I pick up the book, it is two hours before I set it down again.

I suppose it is because when I read the book I am getting reacquainted with old friends. Fascinating old friends, witty and articulate, some fabulously rich, some charmingly beautiful. And of course, you fall in love with one of them. In the end, justice is done, and life turns out happily.

And when the book ends, you wish you could continue in their company. Which I suppose you could do by revisiting your favorite parts of the book, or perhaps reading it in its entirety after a while. It's bittersweet at the end - you have enjoyed your visit, have not regretted your time spent there, but must now depart from that world. Until the next time you open its covers.

“My dear Mr. Bennet,” said his lady to him one day, “have you heard that Netherfield Park is let at last?”

Difficulties with Aquinas' First Way of Arguing for God's Existence

2011-05-21T14:54:00.004-07:00

I blogged a few weeks ago about Aquinas' First Way of arguing for God's existence, as described in Edward Feser's TLS. Aquinas thought the First Way (the Argument from Change) was the most evident of the arguments for God's existence. If I have it right, the basic idea is that every change is caused by (1) something else that changes or (2) something that does not change (which is called God). In other words, any change has an immediate causal chain that must terminate with an unchanged changer. For computer programmers, it's a bit like recursion, which must have a base case.

I do find myself running into problems when applying this to some real-life examples though. For example, I pick up a book. That change is caused by my flexing my arm muscles. That change is caused by neurons firing. Now we could continue to trace along the causal chain to molecules and atoms and thence to the unchanged changer. But could we not also trace down the causal chain to the human mind and say that the human mind, not God, is the unchanged changer in this case? But perhaps we need to ask a couple of other questions first: How can something immaterial like the mind cause a change in something material like the body (the "mind-body problem")? And is a thought in the mind something with its own immediate causal chain that we can trace down? I haven't read much on the philosophy of mind, so I don't have answers for these questions.

Another example that I have trouble with is this: Consider two billiard balls that hit each other and rebound. Can we use this example to argue for God's existence using the First Way? The change in question is that Ball A's velocity changes from 1 m/s to -1 m/s. This change is caused by Ball B. It's not clear to me how to follow the causal chain from this point. Do we say the next cause is the law of conservation of momentum (m1v1 + m2v2 = m1V1 + m2V2)? Or is this where we trace the causal chain down to molecules and atoms? If we do that, we will encounter other laws of physics, such as electromagnetic forces (F = kqQ/r^2, etc.). Do we count these laws as "causes" in the causal chain which themselves need to be explained by other causes? Have we shifted from arguing from change (the First Way) to arguing from cause (the Second Way), and is there a way for us to stick purely to the First Way?

I'm sure these questions have explanations that I'm not seeing. Let me know!

The Unmoved Mover as Argument for God's Existence

2011-05-01T23:37:00.003-07:00

I am trying to understand Aquinas's First Way of arguing for God's existence as explained by Edward Feser in TLS (p. 94–96 on "The Unmoved Mover"), and I think I'm close to understanding it. Suppose you are pressing down a key on your keyboard. Let us consider the chain of causes in that instant of time. What causes the key to go down? Your finger applying force. OK, let's continue to drill down into this instant of time. What causes your finger to apply force? Your muscles contracting.

What causes your muscles to contract? Your neurons firing.

What causes your neurons to fire? Interactions between neurotransmitter molecules.

What causes the neurotransmitter molecules to interact? Interactions between atoms.

What causes the atoms to interact? Interactions involving electromagnetism, the weak force, the strong force, etc.

And so forth. We continue looking down the chain of causes in this particular instant of time, looking at deeper and deeper levels of reality. This "vertical" chain of causes has to stop somewhere – it cannot be infinite (which is obvious if you think about it). And when it stops, it stops with an action that is not caused. This action-that-is-not-caused is what Aquinas calls God. An interesting implication is that this action-that-is-not-caused keeps the world in existence from moment to moment (p. 98).

The Kinds of Board Games that I Like

2011-04-30T22:51:00.005-07:00

My friend and I have spent several hundred dollars on different board games in the past. Then I burned out on board games and stopped playing for a few years. Now we're slowly getting back into it (playing a game every 3 weeks or so). Having wasted a lot of money on games that didn't work for us, I think I finally know what kind of games I find fun.

No longer than 60 minutes. For some reason, when we play, it's always twice as long as it says on the box. Twilight Struggle is the #1 game on boardgamegeek right now. And yes, we bought it. But it says it takes 3 hours on the box to play. That's too long for me, and the way we play, it takes way longer than that.
Interesting subject matter and game graphics. It doesn't matter if the game is brilliantly designed – if it doesn't look good or if we find the theme embarassing, it's not going to get played. Schotten Totten is supposed to be a very fun game. It is "full of surprising subtleties, deeply satisfying"[1]. But man – the graphics are of these cartoonish overweight Vikings. I think that's why my friend never asked to play it after a couple of times.
Rules that fit into one's head. If the rulebook is very long or complicated or has all sorts of exceptions that you need to remember (i.e., it's "fiddly"), the game is going to be painful for me. We bought Axis & Allies Europe 1940. The components look amazing. The map is beautiful. We never played it and are trying to sell it. Why? I couldn't fit the rules into my head. That doesn't mean we don't find meaty games fun. Consider Tigris and Euphrates. It's a meaty game, with deep strategies. But the rules are relatively few – they can fit into your head.

Today I went to the board game store and bought Ticket To Ride: Europe. So what if it's considered a "gateway game" for non-gamers, a "filler game", a "lightweight game"? I am not a true gamer and maybe not even a casual gamer. For me, it had the right length (60 minutes), beautiful board and pieces, and rules that easily fit into my head. We had a game in the afternoon and I'm still thinking about strategies to try for next time.

Web 2.0 Stylesheet

2011-04-27T16:21:00.001-07:00

Want to make your boring Times New Roman internal-use web app more "Web 2.0"? Slap on the CSS from this Web 2.0 Stylesheet. Don't forget gradient.jpg.

It's a tongue-in-cheek site, but it's actually not a bad way to make an unstyled webpage look a bit better.

If you are too lazy to copy files around, just stick this line at the top of your HTML:

<link href="http://jonathanaquino.com/web2.0/web2.0.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />

Wikipedia article on the history of Western civilization

2011-04-21T00:05:00.000-07:00

Today's fascinating reading is the Wikipedia article on the history of Western civilization. In a few dozen pages, you are treated to a sweeping narrative of the 2500 years leading up to present-day Western culture - from Plato to the 2011 Libyan uprising.

How To Tell A Story

2011-04-17T20:23:00.000-07:00

It is good to know how to tell a story. Some Googling led me to the following interesting pages.

* YouTube - NPR's Scott Simon: How to Tell a Story
* Noise Between Stations » How To Tell A Story
* Seth's Blog: Ode: How to tell a great story
* A Quarter for a Tale: How To Tell A Story
* How to tell a story like Malcolm Gladwell

Blink Hud: An Attention-Grabbing Growl Style

2011-04-14T23:00:00.001-07:00

All the Growl styles I've seen are pretty subtle - they don't really grab your attention. Which is problematic if you want to be notified when your meetings are starting. I modified Rogie King's "Hud" Growl style by adding a blinking icon for notifications with Emergency priority - see the video clip below.

Modifying a Growl style is pretty easy. It's just a folder with an HTML file and a CSS file, basically.

Graphical diff tool for Git

2011-04-08T11:29:00.000-07:00

I think I'm in love again. I had to resolve some hairy git conflicts, and the in-file conflict markers were not giving me insight into what was going on. It was basically showing me two big chunks of code that were pretty different.

I installed an open-source 3-way graphical diff tool called DiffMerge and configured git to use it, and it became obvious what to do (in this case, removing the green portion).

Check out the screenshot below, which shows ours on the left, the common ancestor in the middle, and theirs on the right. It's worth studying what the colors mean (in the DiffMerge preferences).

icalBuddy - command-line tool for querying iCal events and tasks

2011-04-07T22:18:00.001-07:00

I think I'm in love. icalBuddy is a simple command-line tool for extracting events and tasks from your Mac. For example,

icalBuddy eventsToday+7

prints out the calendar events for the next week, including recurring events. I was googling around for applescripts to do this, and handling recurring events was going to be a major pain, so I'm glad I stumbled on this tool.

Similarly,

icalBuddy uncompletedTasks

will print out all uncompleted tasks.

This is great. I'm going to use it to export my calendar and tasks to my Windows Mobile PDA. Which means I get to continue holding off on buying an iPhone. Yay!

Alarms: Reminder program for Mac

2011-04-06T12:37:00.002-07:00

I'm trying out this neat reminder program for Mac called "Alarms": http://gigaom.com/collaboration/alarms-intuitive-task-management-for-the-mac/ Its menubar icon flashes, it it makes a little pinging sound. It's also quite pretty. A bonus is that you can pull down on the menubar icon to start a countdown timer. I only wish it had recurring events.

Update: The developer points out that there is an app called Again that works with Alarms to do recurring tasks. It works well.

Classes are Platonic, Interfaces are Aristotelian

2011-04-03T21:12:00.006-07:00

I'm reading The Last Superstition and am trying to grasp the difference between Plato's and Aristotle's views of reality, and it struck me that they seem to be similar to some concepts in object-oriented programming.

Classes are Platonic. Plato believed that there is another dimension where universals (i.e., classes) live. In this dimension live the Tree class, the Chair class, the Dog class. In the regular world live instances of Tree, instances of Chair, and instances of Dog.
Interfaces are Aristotelian. Aristotle did not believe in another dimension containing universals. Rather, he believed that the universals somehow live in the objects, and that our intellects have the ability to look at objects and mentally extract the universals from them. In other words, objects have interfaces: tree objects implement the Tree interface, chair objects implement the Chair interface, dog objects implement the Dog interface.
Duck typing is Cartesian. Descartes subscribed to the Conceptualist view, in which universals (interfaces) don't have any kind of existence in the world – they are just in the mind.
No typing is Humean. This is the Nominalist view, in which there are no universals – in the world or in the mind.

Consequently, one must infer that Plato would have programmed in Smalltalk; Aristotle, in Java; Descartes, in Python; and Hume, in Basic.

The State of GTD on the Mac

2011-04-03T14:47:00.000-07:00

It seems that there isn't a perfect setup for GTD on the Mac. Lots of people like the desktop application The Hit List, but it has no iPhone app. Things has an iPhone app, but it lacks some cool things that The Hit List has, like hierarchical tasks. OmniFocus is the most expensive application, and it has an iPhone app, but people say it has a steep learning curve and isn't fun. And to top it off, if I did get an iPhone or iPod Touch for GTD, it has security issues.

I'm going to continue using Entourage for email and calendar. For tasks, I'll switch from Entourage to The Hit List, because I do need a change. Instead of buying an iPod Touch, I'll continue syncing to my old Windows Mobile PDA.

Video of zooming in on the Mandelbrot set

2011-03-20T20:15:00.002-07:00

Hard to believe that everything that you see in this video is generated from this simple formula: z_n+1 = z_n² + c.

Plato posited that mathematical reasoning has its own existence, outside of time and space and outside of the mind.

The Western Tradition: 52 half-hour videos on the history of Western civilization

2011-03-19T17:35:00.001-07:00

This online video series looks interesting. It's Eugen Weber's 1989 TV documentary series, The Western Tradition, which presents the history of civilization in the West.

Check out the 5-minute intro video.

The titles of the videos are a useful summary of Western history:

1. The Dawn of History
The origins of the human race are traced from anthropoid ancestors to the agricultural revolution.

2. The Ancient Egyptians
Egyptian irrigation created one of the first great civilizations.

3. Mesopotamia
Settlements in the Fertile Crescent gave rise to the great river civilizations of the Middle East.

4. From Bronze to Iron
Metals revolutionized tools, as well as societies, in the empires of Assyria, Persia, and Neo-Babylonia.

5. The Rise of Greek Civilization
Democracy and philosophy arose from Greek cities at the edge of the civilized world.

6. Greek Thought
Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle laid the foundation of Western intellectual thought.

7. Alexander the Great
Alexander's conquests quadrupled the size of the world known to the Greeks.

8. The Hellenistic Age
Hellenistic kingdoms extended Greek culture throughout the Mediterranean.

9. The Rise of Rome
Through its army, Rome built an empire that shaped the West.

10. The Roman Empire
Rome's civil engineering contributed as much to the empire as did its weapons.

11. Early Christianity
Christianity spread despite contempt and persecution from Rome.

12. The Rise of the Church
The old heresy became the Roman empire's official religion under the Emperor Constantine.

13. The Decline of Rome
While enemies slashed at Rome's borders, civil war and economic collapse destroyed the empire from within.

14. The Fall of Rome
Despite the success of emperors such as Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius, Rome fell victim to barbarian invasions.

15. The Byzantine Empire
From Constantinople, the Byzantine Empire carried on the traditions of Greece and Rome.

16. The Fall of Byzantium
Nearly a thousand years after Rome's fall, Constantinople was conquered by the forces of Islam.

17. The Dark Ages
Barbarian kingdoms took possession of the fragments of the Roman Empire.

18. The Age of Charlemagne
Charlemagne revived hopes for a new empire in Western Europe.

19. The Middle Ages
Amid invasion and civil disorder, a military aristocracy dominated the kingdoms of Europe.

20. The Feudal Order
Bishop, knight, and peasant exemplified some of the social divisions of the year 1000 A.D.

21. Common Life in the Middle Ages
Famine, disease, and short life expectancies were the conditions that shaped medieval beliefs.

22. Cities and Cathedrals of the Middle Ages
The great churches embodied the material and spiritual ambitions of the age.

23. The Late Middle Ages
Two hundred years of war and plague debilitated Europe.

24. The National Monarchies
A new urban middle class emerged, while dynastic marriages established centralized monarchies.

25. The Renaissance and the Age of Discovery
Renaissance humanists made man "the measure of all things." Europe was possessed by a new passion for knowledge.

26. The Renaissance and the New World
The discovery of America challenged Europe.

27. The Reformation
Voiced by Martin Luther, Protestantism shattered the unity of the Catholic Church.

28. The Rise of the Middle Class
As the cities grew, new middle-class mores had an impact on religious life.

29. The Wars of Religion
For more than a century, the quarrels of Protestants and Catholics tore Europe apart.

30. The Rise of the Trading Cities
Amid religious wars, a few cities learned that tolerance increased their prosperity.

31. The Age of Absolutism
Exhausted by war and civil strife, many Europeans exchanged earlier liberties and anarchies for greater peace.

32. Absolutism and the Social Contract
Arguments about the legitimate source of political power centered on divine right versus natural law.

33. The Enlightened Despots
Monarchs considered reforms in order to create more efficient societies, but not at the expense of their own power.

34. The Enlightenment
Intellectual theories about the nature of man and his potential came to the fore.

35. The Enlightenment and Society
Scientists and social reformers battled for universal human rights during a peaceful and prosperous period.

36. The Modern Philosophers
Freedom of thought and expression opened new vistas explored by French, English, and American thinkers.

37. The American Revolution
The British colonists created a society that tested Enlightenment ideas and resisted restrictions imposed by England.

38. The American Republic
A new republic, the compromise of radicals and conservatives, was founded on universal freedoms.

39. The Death of the Old Regime
In France the old order collapsed under revolutionaries' attacks and the monarchy's own weakness.

40. The French Revolution
Liberty, equality, and fraternity skidded into a reign of Terror.

41. The Industrial Revolution
Technology and mass production reduced famine and ushered in higher standards of living.

42. The Industrial World
A consumer revolution was fueled by coal, public transportation, and new city services.

43. Revolution and Romantics
Leaders in the arts, literature, and political theory argued for social justice and national liberation.

44. The Age of the Nation-States
The great powers cooperated to quell internal revolts, yet competed to acquire colonies.

45. A New Public
Public education and mass communications created a new political life and leisure time.

46. Fin de Siècle
Everyday life of the working class was transformed by leisure, prompting the birth of an elite avant-garde movement.

47. The First World War and the Rise of Fascism
Old empires crumbled during World War I to be replaced by right-wing dictatorships in Italy, Spain, and Germany.

48. The Second World War
World War II was a war of new tactics and strategies. Civilian populations became targets as the Nazi holocaust exterminated millions of people.

49. The Cold War
The U.S. and Soviet Union dominated Europe and confronted each other in Korea.

50. Europe and the Third World
Burdened with the legacy of colonial imperialism, the Third World rushed development to catch up with its Western counterparts.

51. The Technological Revolution
Keeping up with the ever-increasing pace of change became the standard of the day.

52. Toward the Future
Modern medicine, atomic energy, computers, and new concepts of time, energy, and matter all have an important effect on life in the 20th century.

T.S. Eliot's Ash Wednesday

2011-03-08T22:18:00.001-08:00

Because it is Ash Wednesday tomorrow, I give you the first few lines of T.S. Eliot's poem of the same name.

Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man's gift and that man's scope
I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should the aged eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?

It's one of my favorites – go find it in your local library and give it a read! Or even better, listen.

Outlook HTML Email Online Validator

2011-03-04T18:25:00.001-08:00

If you want to create an HTML email, you probably are aware (or should be aware) that Outlook 2007 email clients disallow a whole bunch of HTML and CSS elements.

I wrote a simple tool to check your email's HTML for elements ignored by Outlook 2007.

On Dysons and other expensive vacuum cleaners

2011-02-21T21:09:00.005-08:00

Thought this was interesting: expensive vacuum cleaners (like Dysons) are becoming a kind of status symbol.

"View of vacuum cleaners as status symbols is picking up"
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06050/656646.stm

I must confess to being tempted to get a Dyson – I guess the subtle hype was getting to me.

I ended up not getting a Dyson but getting a replacement hose for our old vacuum.

Proof of Fermat's Last Theorem

2011-02-14T21:13:00.000-08:00

It's cool to look over Andrew Wiles' 100-page proof of Fermat's Last Theorem (i.e., prove that no three positive integers a, b, and c can satisfy the equation a^n + b^n = c^n for any integer value of n greater than two).

For mere mortals like myself, the Wikipedia article is cool as well. Obviously, the map between R and T is an isomorphism if and only if two abelian groups occurring in the theory are finite and have the same cardinality.

Music that doesn't give me headaches

2011-02-09T20:52:00.001-08:00

Usually when I listen to music while reading or doing something requiring concentration, I get a bit of a headache. However, I have found 2 CDs that do not give me a headache when I am doing something else.

One of them is the transcriptions of Bach organ pieces for piano I mentioned earlier.

The other is a 2-CD set called Glorious Pipes, which is basically a bunch of famous organ pieces. It's good to turn up the volume when listening to this one.

It's all good stuff, but I find that I particularly enjoy the last two pieces, written by Olivier Messiaen, who was a major composer of the 20C. He found birdsong fascinating and incorporated it into his works. I hadn't heard of him before.

Kindle Text-to-Speech

2011-02-06T16:45:00.001-08:00

My new favorite feature of the Kindle is its text-to-speech. I took the bus/ferry to Vancouver yesterday and listening to a book on the Kindle was a great way to pass the time – especially on the hour-long bus/train rides, on which reading can give one a headache.

Another thing I like about the Kindle is that if you want to see the dictionary definition of a word, you just move the cursor beside the word and a definition pops up.

An Ultracompact Abridgement of "Programming Pearls"

2011-02-03T21:48:00.002-08:00

Below is an extreme abridgment of Jon Bentley's popular algorithms book, Programming Pearls. A sentence has been selected from each of its 15 chapters. Interested readers are referred to Bentley's original 173-page work.

Programming folklore and theory abound with time-space tradeoffs; it has been my experience more frequently, though, that reducing a program's space requirements also reduces its run time. Binary search in a sorted table is remarkably efficient and can be used in main memory or on disk; its only drawback is that the entire table must be known and sorted in advance. Let the data structure the program: data can structure a program by replacing complicated code with an appropriate data structure. Deciding which assertions to include in real software is an art that comes only with practice. And write automated tests: the tests would have been dreadfully boring (and therefore error prone) by hand, but they use an insignificant amount of computer time.

When performance problems can't be sidestepped, thinking about design levels can help focus a programmer's effort. And the following reminders can be helpful in making back-of-the-envelope calculations: two answers are better than one; do quick checks; use rules of thumb. Important algorithm design techniques include saving state to avoid recomputation, preprocessing information into data structures, and divide-and-conquer. Code tuning locates the expensive parts of an existing program and then makes little changes to improve its speed; for example, exploiting common cases, exploiting an algebraic identity, and collapsing a procedure hierarchy. We then survey a few important techniques for reducing space: recomputing, sparse structures, information theory, and allocation policies.

The C library qsort is easy and relatively fast; it is slower than handmade Quicksorts only because its general and flexible interface uses a function call for each comparison. Explore the design space: knowledge of the literature is invaluable at this stage of the design process. The importance of space: finely tuned linked lists do half the work of arrays but take twice the time. Why? Arrays use half as much memory per element, and access memory sequentially. Heaps are a data structure that we use for sorting and priority queues. Finally, we examine important data structures used for representing strings: hashing, balanced trees, and suffix arrays.

An Ultracompact Abridgement of "Aristotle: The Desire to Understand"

2011-02-02T23:53:00.006-08:00

Below is an extreme abridgment of Jonathan Lear's engaging book on Aristotle's thought: Aristotle: The Desire to Understand. A sentence has been selected from each of its 29 sections. Interested readers are referred to Lear's lucid 352-page work.

The aim of this book is to come to a deeper understanding of Aristotle's claim that all men by their nature desire to know. Nature is a principle or cause of change or rest in that to which it primarily belongs. We do not think we understand something, Aristotle says, until we have grasped the why of it. He thinks there are four ways in which we cite the cause of a thing: the matter, the form, the primary source of the change, and the end or that for the sake of which something is done. Aristotle believes that the organization and development of animals manifests a certain rationality (though of course he does not understand the basis for this rationality).

For change to be possible, there must be something which exists before the change which has the potentiality to become what emerges in the change. If one needs to specify a distinct cause of a change, as Aristotle does, one must specify a thing, a substance, and not an event. Aristotle argues that if we are to understand space, time, and matter, we must understand the infinite. Aristotle develops his theory of the inifinite in order to account for three apparently distinct phenomena: the infinite divisibility of magnitudes, the infinity of numbers, and the infinity of time. It is worth seeing how the developed theory copes with one of the great challenges to the possibility of change: Zeno's paradox of the arrow.

Aristotle thinks he can give an adequate account of soul and its relation to body by relying on his distinction between form and matter. Aristotle's strategy is to shed light on the form of living organisms by a study of their characteristic activities, most notably perception and movement: for a sense faculty to take on the sensible form is for it to become like the perceptible object with respect to sensible form. He argues that there must be a special faculty of mind which is able to grasp essences. Active Mind is the prior actuality needed to explain how thinking occurs in the individual; ultimately, another way to describe this active thinking is to call it ‘God.’ Aristotle's theory of deliberation (bouleusis) is a theory of the transmission of desire.

The point of the Nicomachean Ethics is not to persuade us to be good or to show us how to behave well in the various circumstances in life: it is to give people who are already leading a happy, virtuous life insight into the nature of their own souls. Only in the peculiar activities of human life will we discover the peculiarly human ability to be happy. The organization of desire which enables man to live a truly happy life Aristotle calls virtue. One form of failure particularly fascinated him: that in which a man decides that a certain course of action would be best for him, and then acts against his own judgement – in other words, incontinence. One of the high-water marks of ethical activity is a particular exercise of human freedom: that in which a person who has absorbed ethical values consciously acknowledges and endorses his own character. The reason the Politics follows almost inevitably from the Ethics is that man is not an animal for whom the good life comes easily; laws are needed.

Man is not only a political animal; he also has within his breast the desire to understand. One of Aristotle's greatest intellectual achievements, and one for which he is rightly famous, is the discovery of formal logic. And Aristotle suggests that what is needed for mathematics to be both true and knowable is for there to be a bridge between the physical world and the (fictitious) world of mathematical objects.

Rather than focussing solely on particular aspects of reality – say, the heavens or living organisms, as the sciences of astronomy and biology do – man can also abstract from all the particular properties which make things they are and consider them merely as existing things (being as being). The most certain principle of being is that a property cannot both belong and not belong to a subject at the same time and in the same respect – this principle is commonly known as the principle of non-contradiction.

Metaphysics VII represents Aristotle's mature thoughts on substance, yet understanding what he says there is extraordinarily difficult. His task is to find a candidate for substance which will satisfy both these beliefs: that the world is ultimately intelligible, and that reality forms a hierarchy. Aristotle's world needs a mind that is actively thinking primary substance: God does not intervene in the world, but the world can be conceived as an expression of desire for God. Man is a creature who bridges the gap between the divine and the natural world, and Aristotle commends the contemplative life above all others.

Book: The Heresy of Formlessness

2011-01-30T22:24:00.002-08:00

I came across this beautifully written book The Heresy of Formlessness by Martin Mosebach, about the Traditional Latin Mass. This is the Mass that was celebrated in every country from 1570 to 1962, and is making a bit of a comeback since Pope Benedict XVI's 2007 document Summorum Pontificum, authorizing a wider use of the old Mass.

I've only read a Kindle sample of the first chapter of Mosebach's book, and it seems to capture the beauty and solemnity of the old Mass (which I'm fortunate to be able to attend in Victoria). Mosebach writes:

Gregorian chant is not art music. It exists to be sung in every village church and every suburban church, in spite of the fact that some of it is difficult and requires practice—and people did practice it, hearing it every Sunday all their lives. Only later did I realize, however, that the liturgy and its music must not be regarded as an occasionally edifying or impressive concert or as a help toward meditation; no, it is something that must be practiced one's whole life long. The obligation to go to church every Sunday should be seen in connection with the liturgy: the liturgy must permeate our lives at a level deeper than deliberation and thought; it must be something that, for us, is “taken for granted”; otherwise it cannot have its full effect on us.

Good stuff.

One more excerpt:

Now it was quiet. Everyone was kneeling, and Professor Gessner was whispering, turning pages in the Missal, and Hermann in his soutane was kneeling beside him, the bell in one hand while, with the other, he held the chasuble up a little. Professor Gessner bent forward and whispered a little more distinctly, then genuflected; the little bell was rung, and he lifted a little, white, round wafer high in the air while the bell rang three times, and Ludwig forgot that Hermann had taken the wafer from the wooden box and put it on the little golden plate on top of the chalice. This white disc in a cloud of incense—he did not see it as something material at all, or rather, he saw it, for one moment, as something very fine and delicate, like solidified light. Then the hands came down and Professor Gessner started reading in a whisper again.

That's a beautiful description of the moment of consecration at a Traditional Latin Mass.

Organizing cables with a cardboard box

2011-01-29T23:47:00.000-08:00

Add me to the list of people who think that a cardboard box with holes in it is a superb way to organize cables.

It's not going to be fun hunting through this box to pull out the laptop adapter.

Alternative methods of learning textual material

2011-01-29T13:43:00.003-08:00

Some people can absorb information from books by reading them straight through. I cannot – if I simply read a textbook, the information goes in one eye and out the other.

What I have found however is that there are some alternative ways of approaching textual material that do make it stick in my brain. See if one of them works for you.

By drawing pictures (visual learning). When confronted with a long or complex text, I often like to create a simple 1-page diagram/infographic showing the main points. Personally, a mind-map of words isn't good enough for me – it has to have some pictures: a silhouette, a hand, a star, whatever. Making this “cheat sheet” imprints the gist of the text on my mind.
By discussion. This doesn't happen very often for me, but when I am able to get into a group discussion of a chapter of a book, the ideas really stick in my head. Also, hearing the interpretations of others gives me new insights and sometimes corrects my own interpretations.
By examples (inductive learning). Sometimes you are in a class or meeting and the teacher is speaking in abstract terms and you don't get it. Ask the teacher for an example – examples often clarify things. Maybe you're an inductive learner like me and really benefit from concrete examples.
By reading aloud. This one doesn't always work for me (especially if the text is long), but sometimes reading a passage aloud can clarify it. Use in small doses.
By abridgment. This is my new favourite way to absorb textual material. Basically, abridging a book by selecting a key sentence from each chapter. You don't have to write anything new – you're just selecting existing content. You end up with a nice half-page overview of the book; and in the process of selecting and discarding material, you gain familiarity with it. For example, it took me a little over an hour to abridge the 600-page Summa Theologiae: A Concise Translation.

If you're faced with learning an especially long or tedious book, try one of the above alternative ways for getting the information into your head. They lay the groundwork for a more detailed reading of the text.

How to Polish One's Shoes

2011-01-28T23:18:00.000-08:00

This 5-minute video inspired me to go out and buy a basic Kiwi shoe polish kit and polish my shoes each month. That was a couple of months ago, but I hope to make it a lifetime habit.

An Ultracompact Abridgement of "Summa Theologiae: A Concise Translation"

2011-01-28T22:09:00.001-08:00

Below is an extreme abridgement of Timothy McDermott's 600-page Summa Theologiae: A Concise Translation, itself an abridgement of Thomas Aquinas' 3000-page Summa Theologiae. The intent of this extreme abridgement is to give a bird's eye view of the whole. Interested readers are referred to McDermott's excellent work.

My aim in this book is to introduce beginners to what God taught us [in the scriptures] as concisely and clearly as the subject-matter allows, and in scientific order. Our words for God do not express him as he is in himself; they express him in ways more appropriate to the material creatures we naturally know. God is happiness itself; whatever we desire in any happiness whatsoever, true or imagined, exists in a transcendent way in God's happiness. We had to know about the Trinity, primarily so that we might be clear about the salvation of mankind, which was accomplished by the Son made flesh in the giving of the Spirit. God planned to create many distinct things, in order to share with them and reproduce in them his goodness. That man is made in the image of God's nature implies that all three persons of God are represented in him. God gives form to things, maintains them in existence, applies them to their actions, and is the goal of all activity.

Happiness is above all the activity of contemplating the things of God; virtue is a disposition befitting one's nature, a goodness directed towards good deeds. Three things oppose virtue: sins (or misdeeds), evil (the opposite of goodness), and vice (disposition unbefitting to one's nature). The New Law fills up what the Old Law lacked; it primarily consists of the grace of the Holy Spirit showing itself in faith working through love. In charity God is loved and we do the loving. The function of prudence is not to set the goals of moral virtue, but simply to determine means to those goals. Moral virtues do not pursue contemplation of truth; but moral virtues are dispositions to the contemplative life.

We needed God to become flesh if we were to be saved; Christ came into the world to wipe out not only the sin of Adam that we all inherit, but also all subsequent sins. Because Christ's soul did not repel from his body the hurt inflicted on it, but was willing for his bodily nature to suffer, we say he laid down his life, or died willingly. The whole power of the sacraments derives from the sufferings of Christ. The sacraments dispose and strengthen men to worship God according to the religion of Christian life, and to remedy the effects of sin.

Gradually finding my way home [Catholicism]

2011-01-24T21:48:00.003-08:00

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

—T.S. Eliot

By degrees, I feel that I am finding my way home. It started with my return to Roman Catholicism during my university years. Catholicism—that ancient faith, the faith of my childhood, and the religion of Dante and Tolkien, Raphael and Michelangelo, Cauchy, Mendel and Lemaître, Haydn and Mozart. And Colbert.

Intellectually, this past year I’ve been finding my way home in the philosophy of Aquinas and Aristotle. This is a sphere of knowledge that I'm just starting to get into. Aristotle concludes in Physics ii.8 that “action for an end is present in things which come to be and are by nature.” It’s an interesting view, coming from philosophy. I wonder why high schools don’t teach ancient philosophy—it seems to have much useful food for thought.

Which brings me to the present. I’m exploring the possibility of becoming a lay member of an 800-year-old Catholic group called the Dominicans. There are a number of reasons for this. I love their focus on study and prayer. Famous Dominicans include St. Thomas Aquinas, one of my heroes, and St. Catherine of Siena, whose Dialogue I am looking forward to studying. There is unfortunately no Dominican group in Victoria, but there is a group in Vancouver, so I'm going to take the ferry there on a weekend in February to see what their meetings are like. I have a feeling that this could be a good place for me.

I saw this on the Lay Dominicans website, and I thought, yes, that’s me:

To discern if you are called to become a Dominican, consider whether the following things describe you: you love to study and are a motivated learner; you long to read more and know more about the life of Christ and the Church, and you cannot contain your desire to share the fruits of your study with others; you prefer good literature that contains universal truths; you appreciate the many avenues through which truth can be taught, whether it be literature, science, theater, or visual art.

The Religious Sense: A Concise Summary

2011-01-22T00:29:00.000-08:00

Below is a summary of Luigi Giussani's book “The Religious Sense”, in the form of extracts from the book (one sentence per chapter). With all of its digressions, excerpts from poems, and technical language, it can be hard to see the forest for the trees. So it is helpful to see the structure of his argument in a few short paragraphs.

Summary

Our first premise is the need for realism, and this points to the primacy of the object: the method by which something is approached is determined by the object; it is not imagined at the subject’s whim. The second premise is reasonableness – emphasizing concern and love for rationality, and this brings to light the acting subject, and the manner of the subject’s movements. The third premise is that we must love the truth more than ourselves, we must love the truth of the object more than the image that we have formed of it, we must acquire a poverty of spirit, we must have eyes that confront reality and truth wide open, like the eyes of children.

From a methodological point of view, the starting point for an inquiry into the religious sense is one’s own experience, oneself-in-action. In addition, only the hypothesis of God, only the affirmation of the mystery as a reality existing beyond our capacity to fathom entirely, only this hypothesis corresponds to the human person’s original structure.

People assume “unreasonable” positions before the questions which constitute the religious sense; for example, they attempt to empty the questions of their content. Or they reduce it to positions that do not entirely correspond to all of the factors which experience shows to us to be in play. The consequences of these positions are contrary to nature: the individual breaks with the past, becomes incommunicative, and loses his freedom. Yet people abandon themselves to these positions because of the domination of preconception, the tyranny of prejudice.

The way reality strikes an individual awakens within him a voice which draws him towards a meaning which is further on, further up. The world in its impact with the human being functions as a sign, “demonstrates” something else, it demonstrates “God.” The sign is an event to interpret and freedom is exercised in the interpretation of the sign. The fundamental problem of the great adventure of this “sign” which is the world, is education in freedom because only through this education, this adventure, can destiny become evident.

Reason, in order to be faithful to its nature and to the nature of the calling of reality, is forced to admit the existence of something else underpinning and explaining everything, of the Beyond. This hypothesis of revelation must respect two conditions: it must be a word that is comprehensible to man, and it must not reduce mystery but rather deepen it.

A Shorter Summary, from Chapter 14

The world is a sign. Reality calls us on to another reality. By nature, the human being intuits the Beyond. Reality awakens his religious sense. But it is a suggestion that is misinterpreted. Existentially, the human being is driven to interpret it prematurely, with impatience. The intuition of our relationship with mystery becomes degraded into presumption. Thus, as Aquinas says, it was “necessary to teach men this divine truth with a divine revelation.”

On Chess

2011-01-20T21:08:00.000-08:00

For some reason, I felt like reading some articles about chess today. Here are some Wikipedia articles that are quite interesting:

Deep Blue. The computer that defeated Garry Kasparov.

Bobby Fischer. One of the greatest chess players of all time.

The Game of the Century. One of the most famous games of chess, played by Bobby Fischer at the age of 13.

More Agony of Aquinas in Translation

2011-01-18T01:06:00.004-08:00

I continue to wring my hands over how best to start studying Aquinas. The approach I now have in mind is to study primarily McDermott's flowing translation of Aquinas' selected works: Aquinas: Selected Philosophical Writings. I am tempted also to get Brian Davies's highly regarded exposition of Aquinas: The Thought of Thomas Aquinas. But perhaps the McDermott will suffice for now. I also wish to conserve time and money somewhat.

I currently have Kreeft's Shorter Summa (on Kindle unfortunately), so I could keep studying that for a while. I don't have to move on to McDermott right away. As I mentioned previously, I am also enjoying Jonathan Lear's delightful Aristotle: The Desire To Understand.

I am also tempted to read W. Norris Clarke's The One And The Many, which is his take on Thomistic metaphysics – especially if it is anything as exciting as Lear's book. But while inspired by St. Thomas, it's not St. Thomas himself, and I want to learn from the master before the disciple.

If I had infinite time, I would read McDermott's SPW, Davies, Clarke, Irwin and Fine's Aristotle: Selections, and McDermott's Summa Theologiae: A Concise Translation.

But then Jeanne Follman of Aquinasblog went with Davies + McDermott's STACT: “I settled on the Brian Davies book The Thought of Thomas Aquinas. This is still the best summary I've seen, rigorous but readable, and the one that I think brings you closest to the sense of the text of the Summa itself. The Summa Theologiae, A Concise Translation, has also been a key resource, as it is the text of the Summa itself (abridged) in a somewhat perkier translation.”

But then on the other hand, Romanus Cessario's Theological Studies review of McDermott's STACT is, while positive, somewhat more measured: “When one chooses an abridgement of a classic, one does not expect to find a faithful rendition of the original. An abridgement gives us some idea about whether or not we might like eventually to pick up the unabridged version, even in translation. As an abridgement, M.'s volume deserves commendation.”

Decisions, decisions.

I guess I'll order McDermott's SPW and study that for a while; if I get bogged down, I may enlist the help of Davies. After a couple of years of this, I might check out Aristotle: Selections or The One And The Many - either of which would be a challenging but satisfying read. Or I may instead do more Aquinas, i.e., STACT.

How To Read A Novel

2011-01-18T00:17:00.001-08:00

In How To Read A Book, Adler and Van Doren offer the following advice on reading a novel carefully:

1. "[Compress] the reading of a good story into as short a time as feasible." (p. 218)

2. "Read...with total immersion...Let the characters into your mind and heart...Try as hard as you can to live in his world" (p. 218)

3. "[Grasp] the unity of the whole work" (p. 209) and "discover how that whole is constructed out of all its parts" (p. 210). (Try this form from Rafe Esquith's "Teach Like Your Hair's On Fire" p. 55: protagonist, antagonist, conflict, setting, plot, climax, denouement, theme.)

4. Say "what is good or bad about the book and why...[You] must objectify your reactions by pointing to those things in the book that caused them." (p. 214)

data_hacks: Command line utilities for data analysis

2011-01-14T11:02:00.000-08:00

Someone sent around this link at work a while back: data_hacks (command-line utilities for data analysis).

It can do a few different things – I like it for quickly generating histograms:

$ cat data | bar_chart.py --sort-keys
# each * represents a count of 2
19:0 [     1] 
19:1 [    24] ************
19:2 [     3] *
19:3 [     9] ****
19:4 [     5] **
19:5 [    41] ********************
20:0 [   115] *********************************************************
20:1 [   181] ******************************************************************************************
20:2 [   136] ********************************************************************
20:3 [   155] *****************************************************************************
20:4 [   150] ***************************************************************************
20:5 [    79] ***************************************
21:0 [    64] ********************************
21:1 [     8] ****

ReviewBoard, Aquinas, and God

2011-01-10T21:45:00.000-08:00

The rationality of Aquinas is blowing my mind. An engineer at work who was getting frustrated with ReviewBoard said on IRC, “*sigh* God hates me.” Immediately I directed her to the Summa Theologica, Part 1, Question 20, Article 2, which I reproduce below. The Summa is pure, unadulterated rationality. It's good stuff.

Article 2. Whether God loves all things?

Objection 1. It seems that God does not love all things. For according to Dionysius (Div. Nom. iv, 1), love places the lover outside himself, and causes him to pass, as it were, into the object of his love. But it is not admissible to say that God is placed outside of Himself, and passes into other things. Therefore it is inadmissible to say that God loves things other than Himself.

Objection 2. Further, the love of God is eternal. But things apart from God are not from eternity; except in God. Therefore God does not love anything, except as it exists in Himself. But as existing in Him, it is no other than Himself. Therefore God does not love things other than Himself.

Objection 3. Further, love is twofold--the love, namely, of desire, and the love of friendship. Now God does not love irrational creatures with the love of desire, since He needs no creature outside Himself. Nor with the love of friendship; since there can be no friendship with irrational creatures, as the Philosopher shows (Ethic. viii, 2). Therefore God does not love all things.

Objection 4. Further, it is written (Psalm 5:7): "Thou hatest all the workers of iniquity." Now nothing is at the same time hated and loved. Therefore God does not love all things.

On the contrary, It is said (Wisdom 11:25): "Thou lovest all things that are, and hatest none of the things which Thou hast made."

I answer that, God loves all existing things. For all existing things, in so far as they exist, are good, since the existence of a thing is itself a good; and likewise, whatever perfection it possesses. Now it has been shown above (Question 19, Article 4) that God's will is the cause of all things. It must needs be, therefore, that a thing has existence, or any kind of good, only inasmuch as it is willed by God. To every existing thing, then, God wills some good. Hence, since to love anything is nothing else than to will good to that thing, it is manifest that God loves everything that exists. Yet not as we love. Because since our will is not the cause of the goodness of things, but is moved by it as by its object, our love, whereby we will good to anything, is not the cause of its goodness; but conversely its goodness, whether real or imaginary, calls forth our love, by which we will that it should preserve the good it has, and receive besides the good it has not, and to this end we direct our actions: whereas the love of God infuses and creates goodness.

Reply to Objection 1. A lover is placed outside himself, and made to pass into the object of his love, inasmuch as he wills good to the beloved; and works for that good by his providence even as he works for his own. Hence Dionysius says (Div. Nom. iv, 1): "On behalf of the truth we must make bold to say even this, that He Himself, the cause of all things, by His abounding love and goodness, is placed outside Himself by His providence for all existing things."

Reply to Objection 2. Although creatures have not existed from eternity, except in God, yet because they have been in Him from eternity, God has known them eternally in their proper natures; and for that reason has loved them, even as we, by the images of things within us, know things existing in themselves.

Reply to Objection 3. Friendship cannot exist except towards rational creatures, who are capable of returning love, and communicating one with another in the various works of life, and who may fare well or ill, according to the changes of fortune and happiness; even as to them is benevolence properly speaking exercised. But irrational creatures cannot attain to loving God, nor to any share in the intellectual and beatific life that He lives. Strictly speaking, therefore, God does not love irrational creatures with the love of friendship; but as it were with the love of desire, in so far as He orders them to rational creatures, and even to Himself. Yet this is not because He stands in need of them; but only on account of His goodness, and of the services they render to us. For we can desire a thing for others as well as for ourselves.

Reply to Objection 4. Nothing prevents one and the same thing being loved under one aspect, while it is hated under another. God loves sinners in so far as they are existing natures; for they have existence and have it from Him. In so far as they are sinners, they have not existence at all, but fall short of it; and this in them is not from God. Hence under this aspect, they are hated by Him.

Teach Like Your Hair Is On Fire

2011-01-08T20:20:00.000-08:00

Someone at work recommended this book to me: Teach Like Your Hair Is On Fire. It's about a schoolteacher named Rafe Esquith whose 5th grade class, in a school in a poor neighbourhood, puts on an amazing (unabridged) Shakespeare play each year, and whose students go on to Ivy League universities. Check out these two 5-minute videos on Rafe and his class.

Top 10 Desert-Island Book List

2011-01-08T10:59:00.000-08:00

If you were stuck on a desert island for the rest of your life, what 10 books would you like to have on hand?

My list would be:

1. Summa Theologica (transl. Dominican Fathers)
2. Bible (RSV 2nd Catholic ed.)
3. Aristotle: Selections (transl. Irwin and Fine)
4. The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Avila (transl. Kavanaugh and Rodriguez)
5. The Catechism of the Catholic Church
6. Introduction to the Devout Life (transl. Ryan)
7. Jane Austen: The Complete Novels
8. The Complete Works of Shakespeare (ed. Bevington)
9. Dante's Divine Comedy (transl. Pinsky, Merwin, and Mandelbaum)
10. The New Penguin Book of English Verse

How to tackle the Summa?

2011-01-02T02:05:00.003-08:00

I'm rather undecided on how to tackle Aquinas' "Summa Theologica".

One approach - let's call it the "traditional" approach - is to read the Dominican Fathers' (accurate but hard-to-understand) translation of Aquinas - approaching it a little at a time, using Kreeft's Shorter Summa to start with, then moving on to Kreeft's Summa of the Summa, then perhaps Pegis's Aquinas in 2 volumes, then, perhaps, on to the full 5 volumes.

Another approach is the "cheater" approach. Here I would read McDermott's paraphrase "The Summa Theologiae: A Concise Translation", together with Brian Davies's explanatory "The Thought of Thomas Aquinas" (or Feser's "Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide"). All of these books are well spoken of. But I'm not really reading Aquinas - I'm reading these interpretations of him.

But what is my goal? Is it to get at Aquinas's ideas, or to be an Aquinas scholar? I would say it is to get at his ideas, so if interpretations make it easier, so be it.

On the other hand, Kreeft (in his "Shorter Summa" intro) and Adler (in "How To Read A Book") discourage this approach of using secondary sources, saying to mine the ore from the primary source. And what can I say - Flannery O'Connor read the Dominican Fathers' translation.

Then again, if an easy way presents itself (McDermott's paraphrase), why not take it? I like easy.

So I am torn between ease and ought.

- - - - -

And of course there are other interesting books to read, to "take a break" from the above plan: W. D. Ross's "Aristotle", Irwin and Fine's "Aristotle: Selections", Clarke's "One and the Many", Maritain's "Degrees of Knowledge"... This sounds too ambitious - let's not do it. Well, maybe the W. D. Ross.

- - - - -

Anyway, back to the question: How to approach the Summa?

Life is short. I think I'm going to go with the cheater approach. That is, McDermott's paraphrase, interspersed with Brian Davies when I need to take a break. When done, maybe I'll do the 2-volume Pegis to get at the primary source.

On the joy of borrowing CDs from the library

2011-01-01T19:08:00.000-08:00

Borrowing CDs from the library is a Good Thing, for two reasons. First, buying music can get expensive. Second, you will eventually tire of listening to the music - with the library, you return the CDs and can get different ones.

I'm listening to a delightful CD from the library - it's Bach Arrangements, by pianist Angela Hewitt. The interesting thing about this CD is that it consists of 17 multi-instrumental works of Bach, transcribed into piano pieces. At times, the pieces sound curiously modern when brought to the piano - it's quite cool. Listen to some samples to see what I mean.

Kindled

2010-12-31T18:27:00.001-08:00

My brother ordered a Kindle for me for Christmas. I am so looking forward to it.

There's a used book I've been waiting for to arrive in the mail. I'm tempted to just get the Kindle version and start reading it on Kindle For Mac.

I'm a bit concerned that the Kindle does not have a touch interface. Isn't it awkward to highlight and annotate passages using the cursor buttons?

I am tempted to download a bazillion free and paid books onto the device. A temptation I shall resist. What would be the point of doing that? I would be building up a library of books that, honestly, I would never get around to reading.

Even with a Kindle, there are not enough hours in an evening to read even a fraction of everything that one would like to read.

Overheard on a bus: What we need in this country

2010-12-30T16:05:00.000-08:00

Man: "What we need is affordable housing; really, truly affordable housing."

Woman: "What we need in this country is a guaranteed income. If people want to make more, they can. But a guaranteed income, where there's no need to fight for scraps."

Infographic: Aristotle's Thought

2010-12-29T00:39:00.005-08:00

I created the infographic below (pdf) to give a rough indication of the range of ideas covered by Aristotle's works.

Ning is hiring software engineers

2010-12-21T23:43:00.002-08:00

The company I work for (ning.com) is hiring software developers. I've been working there for five years and I enjoy it—mainly because my co-workers are (1) super-smart and (2) super-easy to get along with. Give us a look if you're in the job market and are passionate about software development.

Where does the time go?

2010-12-21T00:45:00.003-08:00

There are 24 hours in a day. So if you sleep for 8 hours, and work for 8 hours, then theoretically you have 8 hours free to do anything you like.

One can do a lot of amazing things in 8 hours.

So where do those 8 free hours go each day? It is instructive to ponder.

Aristotle on what constitutes a good life

2010-12-19T18:39:00.004-08:00

This is a list of components of a good life according to Aristotle, found in Chapter 12 of Aristotle for Everybody:

external goods: food, drink, shelter, clothing, sleep
bodily goods: health, vitality, pleasure
goods of the soul: knowledge, skills, friendship, self-esteem, honor
moral virtue: temperance, courage, justice
good fortune (luck)

Table of Contents for "Aristotle for Everybody"

2010-12-12T22:59:00.002-08:00

Here is the remarkable Table of Contents from Adler's Aristotle for Everybody. This is actually the alternative Table of Contents which he gives on p. 193. It seems heavy, but it's actually way easier than Aristotle's crazy-hard-to-understand translations.

PART I. ARISTOTLE'S UNIVERSE OF DISCOURSE: HIS CATEGORIES AND HIS TAXONOMY

1. Aristotle's Fourfold Classification of Sensible, Material Substances: Inorganic Bodies, Plants, Animals, Men
2. The Range of Beings: The Ten Categories
3. Productive, Practical, and Theoretic Reason or Mind

PART II. ARISTOTLE'S PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE AND OF ART

4. Nature as an Artist and the Human Artist as Imitator of Nature
5. The Three Main Modes of Accidental Change: Change of Place, Change of Quality, Change of Quantity
6. Aristotle's Doctrine of the Four Causes: Efficient, Material, Formal, and Final
7. Further Developments in the Theory of Potentiality and Actuality, and of Matter and Form, Especially with Respect to Substantial Change, or Generation and Corruption
8. Aristotle's Analysis of the Intellectual Factors in Artistic Production and His Classification of the Arts

PART III. ARISTOTLE'S MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

9. The End as the First Principle in Practical Thinking and the Use of Means as the Beginning of Action: The End as First in the Order of Intention and Last in the Order of Execution
10. Happiness Conceived as That Which Leaves Nothing to Be Desired and, as so Conceived, the Final or Ultimate End to Be Sought
11. Aristotle's Distinction Between Real and Apparent Goods, or Between Goods That Ought to Be Desired and Goos That ARe in Fact Desired, Together with His Distinction Between Natural and Acquired Desires
12. The Real Goods That Are the Components of the Whole of Goods That Constitute Happiness, and Moral Virtue as Indispensable to the Pursuit of Happiness
13. Moral Virtue and Good Fortune as the Two Indispensable Operative Factors in the Pursuit of Happiness
14. The Obligations of the Individual With Regard to the Happiness of Others and With Regard to the Welfare of the Organized Community
15. The Role of the State in Abetting or Facilitating the Individual's Pursuit of Happiness

PART IV. ARISTOTLE'S PSYCHOLOGY, LOGIC, AND THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE

16. The Senses and the Intellect: Perception, Memory, Imagination, and Conceptual Thought
17. Immediate Inference and Syllogistic Reasoning
18. Theoretical and Practical Truth
19. Aristotle's Theory of Knowledge and His Distinction Between Knowledge and Right Opinion

PART V. ARISTOTLE'S COSMOLOGY AND THEOLOGY

20. The Actual and the Potential Infinite
21. The Eternity of the World and of Motion or Change
22. The Immateriality of the Human Intellect: Conceptual Thought as Involving the Abstraction of Forms From Matter
23. The Prime Mover: The Divine Being as Pure Actuality

A shorter road from Aristotle to Aquinas

2010-12-12T22:11:00.004-08:00

Not sure what I was thinking, but I had a grand plan to read translations of most of Aristotle's works, before moving on to Aquinas' 3000-page Summa Theologiae. Great minds consider the combination of Aristotle and Aquinas to be the greatest and truest philosophical system, so it was an admirable goal.

Too hard, too hard it is to read translations of all of Aristotle, especially when one does not have much free time. I grinded to a halt after several months of plodding through Aristotle's Categories and Prior Analytics.

Given that "Seventy is the sum of our years, or eighty, if we are strong," I have decided to take some shortcuts. First, Adler's book Aristotle for Everybody instead of Aristotle's original works. I should be able to get through that over a few Sundays. Then on to Kreeft's Shorter Summa, which is a richly footnoted super-slim abridgement of the Summa to 5% of its original size (162 pages). If I get through that, I'll do another iteration with Kreeft's Summa of the Summa, another footnoted abridgement to 18% of its original size (539 pages). And if I get through that, I may try to tackle the 3011-page original. Maybe.

Giving up feeds for Advent

2010-12-01T21:53:00.002-08:00

Advent (the time before Christmas) is actually a time for penance, as we patiently wait for Christmas Day. For Advent I am giving up reading RSS feeds. It's been a couple of days so far, and I have no idea what is going on in the land of tech. On the plus side, it's giving me a bit of extra time each day.

I'll emerge from the dark on December 25th and see what you all have been up to.

Procrastination Activity: Sewing Up Holes In Pockets, Etc.

2010-12-01T21:38:00.003-08:00

Here's a great activity for structured procrastination: Repairing holes in your clothes. Recently I've found myself having to repair some holes in pockets and collars. I just used a whip stitch, which is where you go around and around and around the edge of the cloth:

I found the following video useful: how to create knots at the start and the end of the stitch.

Secure a Knot & Tie Off Thread (eHow.com)

Rubber Ducking method of Problem Solving

2010-11-30T00:39:00.005-08:00

The C2 wiki has an interesting thread on rubber ducking. Basically you put a rubber duck on your desk. When you have a problem, you explain it to the duck, and 9 times out of 10, the answer will come to you in the middle of your explanation.

People on the thread also suggested a Winnie the Pooh doll, a teddy bear, a troll, a tubby toy, and a granite cobblestone.

If you don't want to go out and buy a duck, I have created a video below of me listening and nodding. Try bouncing an idea or a problem off me in the video.

Restrained Ringtones

2010-11-29T22:42:00.005-08:00

I came across this interesting forum post on a "restrained ringtone" that a guy made, i.e., a minimal, almost unnoticeable ringtone (mp3). Mainly to not be annoying.

I also learned that cheap phones have a way to type in ringtones. My Motorola W233 has a "New iMelody" option that lets me type one in. Here's my take on a "restrained ringtone": 3GqRwRwRwRwRwRwRwRwRwRwRw (restrained_ringtone.ogg)

Swiss Army Knife RescueTool

2010-11-27T19:35:00.004-08:00

I liked this 3-minute video about the Swiss Army RescueTool Knife, which evidently won some Knife Of The Year award in 2007.

Idea Capture Tool: Digital Voice Recorder

2010-11-27T12:13:00.003-08:00

I mentioned before that I was using an old-school tape recorder to capture ideas—while walking, while in the shower, while sitting at my desk, wherever. Having happily used it for nine months, but experiencing some glitches, I decided that I deserved an upgrade to a digital one (also recommended by Doug in the comments).

I got the $80 Sony one, which has great reviews on Amazon. There's a $60 Sony one as well, but it doesn't have a USB connection, which actually came in handy for me once so far. The digital has a lot of advantages over the analog, including: a battery indicator, no cassette door that could be partly open, ability to replay/delete individual notes, 5 folders, consistent playback quality.

For me, a dedicated voice recorder is the fastest way for me to jot down an idea—faster than writing it down in my wallet pad; more space than on my cell phone recorder; no need to enter a password as I would with my PDA.

New favorite newspaper-style feedreader: Feedly

2010-11-25T01:15:00.002-08:00

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how much I liked Acrylic Times as a feedreader for Mac. But a few days before the trial expired, I looked around and found something better: Feedly.

Feedly is another newspaper-style feedreader (so it shows excerpts from articles and image thumbnails), but it's web-based (so it works on both Mac and Windows), it's less buggy, and it's free.

On the Mac, I set it up with Fluid so that it opens in its own window.

Whether someone subject to the law can act outside the letter of the law

2010-11-15T20:33:00.004-08:00

A dose of sanity from the great Medieval thinker, Thomas Aquinas.

“All law is ordered to the common well-being of men and gains the force of law from precisely that fact. To the degree that it fails in accomplishing this end, it loses its binding force. Thus the Jurist says, "No reason of law or advantage of equity allows us to interpret harshly and render burdensome those healthy measures which were originally enacted for man s welfare."

“It often happens that a law aimed at the general welfare is useful in most cases and yet on occasion is very harmful. Because a legislator cannot foresee all possible individual cases, he promulgates a law which fits the majority of cases, having the common good in mind. If a case emerges in which the law is harmful to the common good, it should not be observed. For example, if a law says that the gates of a certain besieged city should remain closed, such a law is beneficial to the city in most cases; yet if the enemy is pursuing some of the very citizens by whom the city is defended, refusal to open the gates and let them in would be harmful to the city. In such cases, the gates should be opened despite the letter of the law, in order to attain the common good intended by the legislator.

“Note, though, that if obedience to the letter of the law involves no immediate danger calling for instant remedy, not everyone is competent to decide what is good or bad for the city, but only the leaders, who have authority to dispense with the law in such cases. If it is indeed a matter of immediate danger allowing no time to consult a superior, such necessity carries its own dispensation, for necessity knows no law.”

Translated by D. Burr.

Newspaper-like RSS reader: Acrylic Times

2010-11-14T21:29:00.005-08:00

I'm trying out a newspaper-like RSS reader for Mac called Acrylic Times. It's a bit hard to find the trial download of the Mac version because the company is currently promoting their iPad version. Also it's a little buggy. And it's a bit expensive ($30).

But it looks really cool:

Marble Slab ice cream

2010-10-31T14:45:00.000-07:00

I recently went to one of those fancy ice cream shops that mix toppings into the ice cream as you watch – the ones that sell you an ice cream cone for $7.50. (Fortunately I had a gift card. Thanks Sam!) I ordered a White Chocolate Raspberry Swirl.

And I must say, it was actually quite good. The first thing I noticed was that the ice cream on the cone was quite soft. So instead of licking it, you suck chunks of it into your mouth. Quite nice. And because the ingredients are mixed in, you find yourself chewing on various tasty bits (chunks of raspberry, almonds, and caramel in my case). Yum.

So I think I will get another $7.50 Marble Slab ice cream cone sometime. And maybe even again when the gift card runs out. But instead of the White Chocolate Raspberry Swirl (which I found a bit too fruity and tart – what did I expect?), I'll probably go for something along more chocolatey lines – like Peanut Butter Crunch, Rocky Road, or Cookie Dough Drizzle.

Have you tried boutique ice cream?

The White Chocolate Raspberry Swirl was intense. Photo from marbleslab.com.

Shrook - free RSS reader for Mac

2010-10-30T18:27:00.004-07:00

I am a longtime user of Google Reader for reading my RSS feeds, but that delay of a couple of seconds while waiting for a feed or a folder of feeds to load – I know it's nothing, but it gets annoying. So I started looking around for a desktop feedreader for Mac, to give me instant response when I click a feed or a folder of feeds.

In the reviews, Shrook kept popping up again and again. This is a free program for Mac that's been around for a number of years. Everyone says it is ugly: "Evidently Shrook's founders are function over form types" "The user interface however, is the worst I’ve seen in a while!" "beneath this ugly carcass lies a beautiful app". It's good enough for me, and it seems to work well.

Below is a 3 minute screencast I made showing Shrook and why I like it. Click the icon in the lower-right to make it full screen.

Unable to display content. Adobe Flash is required.

Horlicks drink

2010-10-30T00:56:00.002-07:00

Tonight I tried Horlicks for the first time. It was at a late night Chinese restaurant. I asked for Ovaltine, but they said they ran out. They said they did have "Horlicks" though. "What's that taste like?" "It's...uh..." "It doesn't have caffeine right?" "Right." "OK, I'll take the Horlicks."

It's alright - it's kind of weird. It's kind of like weak Ovaltine, with a definite barley-like undertaste. It was also quite cheap ($1.50). I may order it again in the future, if only for the cheapness factor.

Horlicks is evidently a big thing in India.

What does "postmodernism" mean?

2010-09-26T20:35:00.006-07:00

I hear the term "postmodern" here and there. But what does it mean? Can someone help me to understand the flavor of what this term conveys?

I assume that "modern" is like "Progress, Science, and Technology Will Make Life Better And Give Us Hope.". Whereas "postmodern" is like "Um, Hiroshima and Auschwitz. Life is absurd; life has no meaning. I grow old, I grow old; I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled."

I take it that "modern" is like Aaron Copland, Billy Joel, and Pablo Picasso whereas "postmodern" is like Arnold Schoenberg, Lady Gaga, and Jackson Pollock.

Hope in science/progress ("modern") vs. giving in to depression/apathy ("postmodern").

Is that the distinction?

Modern? Pablo Picasso, Three Musicians (1921)

Postmodern? Jackson Pollock, No. 5 (1948)

Cute pic of the day: Sleepy pug

2010-09-21T00:22:00.001-07:00

This is my brother's pug, in its customary attitude of burying its face in a pillow.

Two lessons learned from ordering pizza

2010-09-19T11:10:00.002-07:00

Yesterday, with 12 minutes to spare before I had to be somewhere, I ordered a small pizza. I ended up burning the roof of my mouth (because the pizza was too hot), and being a couple of minutes late for my appointment.

From this I draw two lessons:
1. If the food is too hot, don't eat it yet.
2. If there isn't enough time to do something, don't do it yet. Unless, of course, the thing is so important that it's a risk worth taking.

We already live in a multiverse

2010-09-19T09:59:00.002-07:00

In a sense, we already live in a sort of visible multi-universe. I'm talking here about the cell phones, video games, iPods, iPhones, iPads, iWhatevers that are being used by half of the people in a room or on a bus. This generation is a small-screen generation—half the time they are looking at a small screen of some sort. Their presence is fragmented—instead of everyone in one place being in that one place, each person is only half-there; the other half of them is somewhere else—in a conversation with someone tens or hundreds of miles away, or in the information-space of the web, or in the artificially created world of a game.

And I'm not sure that being fragmented for most of your life is a good thing.