90-Day Whole-Bible Reading Plan

Posted on January 1, 2010 by Andy

This post has moved here.

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The philosophic turn

Posted on June 29, 2009 by Andy

I have four main projects on the front burner at the moment: studying the Oxford Companion to Philosophy, creating a flowchart of the Theophostic process, helping with my church’s demographic research, and assembling a rough systematic spirituality of the NT. On the side I’m reading about quantum mechanics and various apologetical topics. I’m developing an itch to get moving on my rule-based algorithmic tonal music composition program, but I’m being good and limiting my projects to those four. If it develops into a rash, however, I may have to do something about it.

I’m studying the OCP to introduce myself to the discipline of philosophy, because I’m aiming to enter the field, but I only know bits and pieces from a few corners of it. To accomplish this, I’m planning to read the whole thing, take notes in the form of an outline, and transform the outline into a set of flashcards for use in jMemorize, using a script that I will write. It’s a large project (2,176 entries; 1002 pages, if you include the appendices), the kind I usually give up on or drop, out of distraction by other projects, but I feel pretty dedicated to this one because it is serving a larger, somewhat specific goal.

I’m actually kind of proud of my progress lately. I’ve become much more focused. The past week has been spent scanning and proofreading the list of entry titles and writing a script to put the person entries in chronological order. Today I began putting the entry titles into an outline to give my reading a somewhat sensible order. I consider myself to be past the boring part. Proofreading is tedious, but organizing concepts is fun! Once I finish the reading outline, I’ll post it and shift my attention to one of the other projects, which I’ll write about another time.

On the side I’m reading Quantum Reality by Nick Herbert, a book I’ve owned for about 15 years but have never read much of. It shares that in common with most of my other books. But a few weeks ago my web wandering led me into a number of QM-related articles, so I finally decided to dig into it. The reason I chose this book over others is that it covers eight different interpretations of quantum theory, rather than simply assuming one of them as given. That’s the whole purpose of the book, in fact: to explain and evaluate physicists’ competing understandings of the quantum world. Very interesting. Whatever’s going on down there, it’s weird. Which, of course, is exactly why I like it. 🙂

Once I’m done, I may post a summary of the book, if I don’t find another satisfactory explanation of QM online. I need a quick way to introduce people to it, though summarizing such complicated ideas is a recipe for misunderstanding. I don’t feel that I adequately understand quantum theory myself.

Lately I have also wandered back into apologetics, which I’ve been away from for a long time. It used to be one of my major obsessions. This time it was my penchant for reading about strange things that drew me back. It went from mysteries like the Voynich manuscript and the Shroud of Turin to the accounts of near-death experiences in Beyond Death by Moreland and Habermas. I was led to this book a while back by a video of Habermas describing some of these experiences. After picking up that book, I was reminded that I wanted to learn more about Reformed epistemology, so I put that on my mental “to read soon” list. Then I ran across the modern Ebionite movement via several Amazon reviews and became intrigued, in an appalled sort of way. And this weekend I began watching Aaron Shafovaloff’s videos on Mormonism. I suspect this interest in apologetics will snowball. Which is fine. Since one of my philosophical interests is philosophy of religion, it’s right on time.

That’s it for today’s semi-annual blog update! Tune in next time for more riveting accounts of my latest projects!

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Twitter

Posted on April 28, 2009 by Andy

Most of my posting activity is happening on Twitter at the moment, so I’ve added the Twitter widget to my sidebar here.

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At long last, a care receiver!

Posted on February 16, 2009 by Andy

After almost a year of officially being a Stephen Minister, tonight I finally got a care receiver! One of the Stephen Leaders called me tonight to tell me about him. I’ll call him tomorrow to set up our first meeting. And that’s all I can say about it. :o) Stephen Ministry is really big on confidentiality, which is one of its many good qualities.

Tonight I’m rereading the chapter in the training manual on how to conduct the first meeting. I’m kind of glad it took so long. I was feeling pretty overwhelmed with everything at the end of the training last year. Now that all the details have had time to settle into the back corners of my mind, I feel only slightly intimidated.

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Wha? What’s this blog doing here?

Posted on February 10, 2009 by Andy

It’s time for my semiannual post. I have many things swimming through my head these days. I mean I always do, but the conceptual fish seem to congregate and multiply when their river is dammed, and right now the blockage is the need to get my finances up to date and to clear out some of the junk in my little apartment and get it organized so I have space to live. I’m procrastinating on these but also not working on anything else really, so my brain is getting a little antsy (fishy?) to get back to the fun stuff—all my many personal projects. Since this site is mostly about my projects, let me tell you about the ones that have been on my mind.

First, a side note. As an experiment, I am embedding the song from IMEEM that I am listening to while writing this so you can experience the same musical environment, if you wish. Just scroll to the bottom of the entry and click the start button. You might also want to click the loop icon in the upper right corner of the player. Isn’t it nice of me not to have it play automatically?

Second, a housekeeping note. I am planning to switch my site back to WordPress. Drupal is flexible, but WordPress seems better coordinated, and I don’t need all that flexibility for this site at the moment. Plus WordPress now does the things I switched to Drupal for (versioning, autosave, tags). Also we use WordPress for our website at work, and I suspect I’ll build other sites in the future, and I’d rather spend my time getting to know one tool well than to try to learn WordPress plus Drupal plus whatever else.

With that out of the way, my main project at the moment is giving myself a fake computer science degree. This project started about a year ago when I got frustrated with my inadequate and disorganized coding practices and set out to improve them. I began by learning about software development techniques and methodologies, and that, as usual, has expanded into something much more comprehensive.

The problem with programming is that everything you learn about has prerequisites you have to know about to really understand what you’re doing. My programming knowledge is pretty much all self-taught, and I’ve acquired it in a random fashion, so I often feel like I’m missing a lot. It’s certainly humbling to read programming blogs and realize how much I don’t know, but it also gives me something to reach for.

So to help myself feel like more of a real programmer, I’m collecting introductory books on the major topics I would study if I were getting an undergrad computer science degree, plus any other programming topics that are relevant to my areas of interest, and reading them. I’ll post a list of them soon.

I need to go to bed, so I will leave you with a list of some other things that have been pooling in my mind: graphic design, algorithmic music composition, The Shack, Theophostic prayer. I will try to go into more depth in the next few days.

I see right through you – Angelina

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Surprise! I’m posting. Also, Lovecraft.

Posted on September 30, 2008 by Andy

Why hello! I bet you thought I was dead. Well, I’m not.

Various things have happened since I last posted, but today I’m going to talk about my latest literary adventures.

I’ve been watching Alias lately, and that has gotten me interested in fantasy related to conspiracies and secret histories of the world, and that has led me, among other things, to Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos. It’s something I’ve been wanting to get a handle on for a while. So last week I went to the library, made a quick reading list, and got started.

I tried reading some Lovecraft a while back—”Under the Pyramids” and maybe one or two others—but it didn’t really grab me. I heard “horror” and was hoping for maybe Stephen King, but horror seems to have meant something different back then, something closer to Edgar Allen Poe. I could see he had a certain appeal, but I was disappointed.

Well, I must have read the wrong stories, because what I’m reading now is great! I can see why so many people have written stories set in his universe. He’s detailed enough to give you a lot to work with and vague enough to leave a lot to the imagination, and his language and settings are evocative enough to keep you motivated.

My goal was to read all the main Cthulhu stories written by Lovecraft himself, in chronological order of writing. Phillip Schreffler wrote a short book called The H. P. Lovecraft Companion that has a chart of Lovecraft’s major gods (see here) and a glossary of a lot of his characters, with references. So I looked up the gods from the chart in the glossary, collected the references, and put them in chronological order according to this Wikipedia article. Here’s the list:

  • Dagon (1917)
  • Nyarlathotep (1920)
  • The Rats in the Walls (1923)
  • The Call of Cthulhu (1926)
  • The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1926)
  • The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1927)
  • The Dunwich Horror (1928)
  • The Whisperer in Darkness (1930)
  • At the Mountains of Madness (1931)
  • The Shadow over Innsmouth (1931)
  • Through the Gates of the Silver Key (1932)
  • The Dreams in the Witch House (1932)
  • The Thing on the Doorstep (1933)
  • The Shadow Out of Time (1934)
  • The Haunter of the Dark (1935)

I’m already noticing some problems with this list and making edits, so it will probably change a lot by the time I’m done, but if this subject interests you and you want a simple place to start, try that. You can read these online at dagonbytes.com. If you want some maps, try here. Here are a couple of other, longer reading lists. And here’s some sinister music for you to listen to while reading.

Right now I’m in the middle of “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath,” which is just what it sounds like—a quest in a dream world for a city called Kadath. I was surprised and pleased by this, because I wasn’t expecting such a traditional type of plot, and not all of it is creepy. In fact, a lot of it is kind of nice. The Myst and Riven soundtracks work well for this one.

Posted in Bibliography, HP Lovecraft | 1 Comment

Project: Reading strategies

Posted on June 11, 2008 by Andy

Most of my projects involve a lot of reading, and for various reasons, that ends up taking way more time than I feel it should. When it comes to the actual reading, I’m not slow at it. It’s other factors that get in the way—taking notes, lack of concentration, losing interest, processing the information.

So to balance these factors and become a more efficient and productive researcher, I have started a project on reading strategies. This will be a lighter weight project than my others because I won’t be doing a lot of book research, just thinking about the problem, experimenting as I do my other projects, and writing about my findings. I’ve already done some work on it that I will post later.

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Some observations on painting and sculpture

Posted on May 11, 2008 by Andy

I was just looking at the Wikipedia page for abstract expressionism, and it led me to a discovery about my psychology of art.

While looking at their examples of the genre, I learned that there is abstract expressionist sculpture as well as painting, and I immediately concluded that I didn’t mind its sculpture, because that at least has to look like real objects, because they are real objects. Objects in paintings can have all kinds of unrealistic boundaries and can generally not look like anything. I prefer paintings that look like something.

Then I thought, well, the objects in these sculptures aren’t anything you’d find in the real world, so they’re not “real” objects, but what I mean is that the sculptures themselves are something real that I could walk around and touch (if that were encouraged). Of course, the paintings are real objects too. The canvas is real. The paint is real. It’s just that what they’re depicting doesn’t look like anything that could really exist.

So I realized that I automatically think of paintings as depicting three-dimensional objects. I always think of them as a window onto a scene. I even think of color fields that way. I think of the color as being projected onto some kind of cloth or screen. Since this style is called abstract expressionism, I wonder if the artists are trying to get away from that way of looking at things. Well, at least the ones like Jackson Pollock.

I think I like the three-dimensionality of sculpture because it allows me to look at it from different angles, which gives me a sense of discovery. And I like paintings that act like windows for a similar reason—I can imagine that something is happening or at least that I’m there interacting what whatever I’m being shown, which again delivers a sense of discovery. Discovery, and newness in general, is one of my major motivating values.

I don’t usually read about art. A couple of days ago I found an iGoogle artist theme by Reg Mombassa, and his style reminded me of a painting I had seen at the Dallas Museum of Art in high school. I had stuck in my mind, but I couldn’t remember the artist, which had always bugged me. It was next to Edward Hopper’s Lighthouse Hill, which I had reproduced in colored pencil for an art history project. So after finding Reg Mombassa, I searched for 20th-century American painters, found a list of them on Artcyclopedia, and started clicking. Finally I just scrolled through the thumbnails and found one that sort of reminded me of the painting, and by chance it was the guy I was looking for: Thomas Hart Benton. The painting was Prodigal Son. From the Wikipedia article on Benton I ended up in the one on abstract expressionism. For some reason I have a compulsion to trace my trains of thought like that, probably because I like to know that my ideas are grounded in something.

Posted in Abstract expressionism, Art, Discovery, Painting, Psychology, Sculpture | 2 Comments

A full week

Posted on May 9, 2008 by Andy

This week has been rather busy!

Last weekend we finally switched to our new server at work. We got Exchange running and copied all our files over to the new machine, and I stayed up very late Sunday night finishing it. Since then I’ve been fixing things that got broken in the move.

On another front, one of our project managers has left, so now I am mostly managing one of his projects because I was pretty involved in it anyway, preparing the manuscripts for typesetting. So that is challenging, but it’s also kind of fun, coordinating all those pieces, keeping people informed. 🙂 But don’t tell my bosses that; they’ll give me more. o.o;;

The guy they’re bringing in to replace him is interesting. He’s a marketing consultant and also a pastor, and he has many ideas for helping us brand our company and take ourselves in new directions. I was a little nervous at first because I didn’t know how it would all affect my job, and more specifically my pet projects, but I’ve relaxed since then. I’m glad he’s here.

At home I’ve been defining my next project (yes, another one)—going to various libraries, checking out books, reading bits of them, writing. I thought I had the topic down and was going to blog about it, but then my ideas for it expanded. But now they’ve narrowed again, so I will write about it soon.

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Instructions to myself on productivity

Posted on April 30, 2008 by Andy

After my thoughts on Saturday, I gathered the ideas my mind had been quietly collecting about what my productivity problems were and what I thought I could do about them. I wrote them in my offline journal and present them to you here, revised a little for public presentation:

Okay, so I need to get more focused.

So how do I do it?

  1. Unsubscribe from all my RSS feeds except my friends, podcasts, and webcomics. Reading all those little things takes a lot of time that I could be spending working. Everything that is spent on one thing is time taken from something else! When I subscribe to feeds, my purpose is to keep up with what’s going on in those subject areas. The purpose of that is mostly to have things to talk about with people. I think the real purpose ends up being simply to fill my mind with more and more interesting things.

    Those are decent goals, but they’re really unnecessary. If I need to find out about a subject, I can just research it. I don’t need to keep up with it all the time through a regularly updating source. And the benefits aren’t worth the cost of not getting projects done that I care about more.

    So unsubscribing from everything feels somewhat uncomfortable, like I’m giving up too much, but I was living just fine without them before I subscribed.

  2. Multitask less. I think that when I’m doing more than one thing at once, it increases the time it takes to do the main task by three. This is not good. I need to toughen up my mind so that I can endure the boredom and difficulty of work. I need to turn off IM, close Google, and work. I need to say no to my whims and write them down to return to them later.

  3. Give myself permission to do half a task. Otherwise, I’ll wait till an unknown time in the future when I have enough time to do the whole task. So think of my work as happening in 5 or 15 minute chunks when I feel busy. This has been working well for blogging this week. Amazingly well.

  4. Do my work in large chunks when possible. I get bogged down looking at how much farther I have to go on a task, but I sometimes can make a lot of progress in a short amount of time. I need to observe how this happens. It happened tonight [Saturday] with An Ordinary Day with Jesus. I finished the last three lessons, one of which was rather long, plus some of the back matter. Maybe it was because it was the final stretch, or it might have been the time of day (specifically, night—sorry, people who think morning is the only time of day God declared good, night is just the best time for my mind; deal with it).

  5. Avoid delays. I often crave large chunks of time for my projects. This would happen if I would leave work on time, get home quickly, and get to work right when I finish dinner, or perhaps work during dinner. I should do this rather than having to work late because my schedule got thrown off earlier in the day, dawdling on the computer after work, doing errands after work that I could put off till the weekend, and leaping onto IM and the web after dinner. Everything I say yes to is a no to something else! Similarly, a no to what is immediate may be a yes to what is more important.

  6. Write before reading. My first impulse is usually to research, but often (a) I don’t know exactly what I’m looking for, and sharpening my question would focus my research; or (b) I already know what I’m trying to find out, but I needlessly feel dependent on other people’s input or I feel too lazy to write. Before I wrote this I began looking for information on productivity, but I realized that I already had a lot of ideas in my mind for what my problems were and what I needed to do differently.

  7. Plan before implementing. This is especially important in programming, and I am already trying to put it into practice there. I still need more practice. Planning is also important for other tasks, though I tend to discount it for research. At some point I want to learn (or create first!) tools for planning.

  8. While researching or writing, eliminate excess. I would like to be able to work on autopilot, but really my mind has to always be working while I’m reading or writing. In order to take effective notes, for example, I have to know exactly what kind of information I’m looking for and actively ignore everything else, as in, acknowledge it and pass it over on purpose. And if the author is too wordy, I have to rewrite his points so my notes don’t sprawl and I don’t quote the whole work. I just have to make sure my rewriting is reworded enough so that it isn’t a quote, or I have to make it clear that it’s almost a quote so I can further rewrite it later. I need to come up with my semi-mechanical paraphrasing method.

    The same may go for writing. I tend to write somewhat stream of consciousness, but I think there’s something to be said for boiling my thoughts down to their unnuanced essence and just recording that for time’s sake. I’m not sure though. I might reserve that technique for only certain occasions, since I think recording the whole thought process and all the nuances is so valuable. What brought this paragraph on was mostly that I was thinking today about how reading takes so long because authors are often so wordy when it really isn’t necessary.

  9. Don’t research aimlessly. This is sort of the flip side of 6 and a corollary to 7, 8, and maybe 5. I research a topic looking for more information that will be useful. But I don’t know what I’m looking for exactly, and in my present-immersed mind, anything that seems interesting feels important, so my searching could go on forever. I need ways to limit this, and maybe simply not searching is the best way to start. But also I need to cultivate the habit and skill of evaluating my searches as I go. I need to be present to what I’m doing and not simply do it.

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