What We Did for FHE Last Summer
Drawn in Photoshop, obviously influenced by xkcd.
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Life sketches in Family Tree
I’ve been doing more family history lately (more on that soon), and one thing I’ve started doing is writing simple life sketches for each ancestor and putting them in Family Tree. For example, I took the data for Manuela Gandara Cobo and wrote this:
Manuela Gandara Cobo was born around 1811 in Setién (Marina de Cudeyo, Santander, Spain) to José Gandara Valdecilla of Ceceñas (Medio Cudeyo, Santander, eight kilometers from Setién) and Josefa Cobo of Setién. She was the second oldest of five children that we know of (she had an older brother, Manuel, younger sisters Nicolasa and Vicenta, and a younger brother Remigio).
She married José Fuentevilla Fuentevilla when she was 18 and he was 20, in his hometown of Polanco (around 36 kilometers from Setién). They had nine children (seven girls, two boys), three or four of which lived to adulthood. Their first child died within the first year, Josefa died when she was two, Francisca died when she was almost eight, Maria Dolores died the day after she was born, and José Maria died when he was six months old.
Her mother died at age 47 in 1836 when Manuela was 25, and her father died at age 71 in 1853 when she was 42.
Manuela was 68 years old when she died in 1879, a year after her husband José died. (Incidentally, she died just ten days after her older brother Manuel.) At her death she had had ten grandchildren through her daughters Maria Remedios and Maria Isabel.
The prose is far from poetic, and it’s just a restatement of the basic facts of her life (and as you can see, the information I have is somewhat death-heavy), but I think it has a couple benefits: it’s a story, so it’s more parseable and memorable, and including ages and context makes the dates more meaningful. For example, seeing that Francisca was born in 1835 and died in 1843 doesn’t convey the same weight for me as reading that she was seven years old when she died.
I’m haven’t added these for very many ancestors yet, but I plan to do it for all of them, even the ones we know next to nothing about.
Update: My friend Barney Lund recommended adding world events as well. I haven’t done this yet, but I like the idea a lot. I’d probably add a paragraph at the end listing the major events that happened during Manuela’s lifetime (and probably how old she was and what her family composition was at that point).
Thai consonants chart
I’ve wanted to put the Thai alphabet up on our wall so my kids can start learning it, and I’ve learned a lot about design since I made the Thai script card (which was really just a touchup on an existing card design I received in the MTC), so I made a new Thai consonants chart:
This one adds the consonant class (low/medium/high) and colors the initial consonant transliteration so it’s clearer.
I made it in PlotDevice, using a setup very similar to the Latin conjugation charts — YAML data file with a script that turns it into a PDF.
I’m planning to make two companion charts later — one for vowels and one for the miscellaneous marks, numerals, tones, etc.
Latin conjugation charts
I’m years behind on this, but I’ve finally made some Latin conjugation charts to go along with the declensions chart I made back in 2009:
There’s one for each of the major conjugations (1st, 2nd, 3rd, 3rd i-stem, and 4th).
I made them in PlotDevice, using a YAML data file for each conjugation with a script that takes the YAML and generates the PDF.
Greek and Latin vocab lists
This is cool: Haverford College has created a tool called Bridge that creates Latin or Greek vocab lists from texts and textbooks. For example, I was able to start with the vocab from Moreland and Fleischer’s Latin: An Intensive Course (the text we used in my first Latin course in college) and then limit it to just nouns and verbs. You can export to Excel/TSV as well. Pretty neat.
The Circle Book paperback edition
I’m pleased to announce that the paperback edition of The Circle Book is now available on Amazon for $7:
CreateSpace requires a minimum of 24 pages for this type of book, so I added four new illustrations along with some draw-your-own pages at the end.
On mental frames and faith
I’ve been thinking a lot the past few weeks about mental frames, ever since reading Greg Hamblin’s post about John Dehlin. The more I study about Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon, the more clearly I see that there’s persuasive evidence on both sides, each convincing enough that evidential analysis alone results in a draw. It thus becomes a matter of faith: I must make a decision, entering a mental frame of either belief or doubt.
If I choose doubt, I decide that the positive evidences must be wrong or misinterpreted; if I choose belief, I decide that the negative evidences must be likewise wrong or misinterpreted.
I hope it’s obvious that I’ve chosen belief. There are many things I don’t understand about church history or the gospel, but I’ve chosen to believe, and so the positive evidences — the goodness I see in the doctrines of the Church and the lives of its members, the brilliant testimony of Christ in the Book of Mormon, the way I feel when I try to follow the Mormon path to discipleship — now outweigh and overwhelm the negative evidences. When I occasionally come across those negative evidences, I remind myself that I’ve made the choice to believe, and the confusing darkness then fades away and I can see clearly again.
I know that it’s not this way for everyone, and that choosing belief often comes hard. Life is messy. But while there are many grey areas and complicating factors, some things do in fact have simple yes/no answers. Joseph Smith was a prophet of God, or he was not. He may or may not have acted the way we expect a prophet of God to act, but that doesn’t change the truth that it has to be one or the other. Joseph cannot be a prophet of God while not being a prophet of God at the same time.
Same with the Book of Mormon — either it’s of God and is what it says it is, or it’s not. Historical/literary/anthropological/etc. evidence on either side can’t change that.
And so I continue to believe, partly because I’ve felt the Spirit tell me in my bones that this is real and good and true, partly because I can easily see the good fruits of the gospel, and partly because belief is the path I’ve chosen to commit to.
Home teaching slips
I’m currently serving as elders quorum president in my ward, which means home teaching changes every couple months or so. I’ve been bad about printing out slips because it took too long to make them (I don’t really like the default MLS style, so I was doing it by hand in Excel), but I finally buckled down and wrote a PlotDevice script that takes the assignments in easy-to-write YAML and outputs PDFs, one page per file (because I haven’t been able to get it to output to just a single PDF).
Here’s what it looks like, with dummy data:
The code is on GitHub. It’s somewhat messy right now, but it works.
First Vision Triptych II
I was never very happy with the color version of my First Vision Triptych, so I decided to go ahead and redo it:
Painted in Photoshop.
Tree of Life
A depiction of the tree of life from Lehi’s vision. I originally intended for this to be part of my circle series, but the painting wanted to be a little more representational.
Painted in Photoshop.