Anthony Campbell's Blog

Four new reviews (written earlier in the year, actually, but only just uploaded): The Mongol Art of War, by Timothy May; Jitterbug Perfume, by Tom Robbins; Smile or Die, by Barbara Ehrenreich; Breakthrough, by Ken Grimwood.

I've posted two new reviews on my book reviews page: The Naked Civil Servant, by Quentin Crisp, and What Mad Pursuit, by Francis Crick.

Canon Dr Alan Billings started off his "Thought for the Day" this morning by quoting "a second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience", which he attributed to Oscar Wilde. Always check your attributions, Dr Billings; it was, of course, Samuel Johnson who said this.

I've posted a review of David Sloan Wilson Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society. This takes an unusual view of religion based on Wilson''s theory of multilevel selection in evolution.

I just came across Tom Martin's page, Integrative Acupuncture. Martin is a traditionally trained acupuncturist who has come to the view that the received wisdom held by tradionalists in the West is based on misunderstanding and mistranslation.

In recent years numerous researchers, practitioners and commentators of contemporary traditional acupuncture have questioned the validity of central concepts in this practice and therefore the integrity and accuracy of its core theories. The theoretical basis of contemporary traditional acupuncture is thus shown to be not what it has been made to appear like – an extraordinary metaphysical system linking all parts of the body/mind in a subtle energetic system. It is now clear to those who are prepared to think and look beyond the self enclosing loops of traditional dogma, that after four decades of research there is no evidence meridians exist nor that Qi as energy that moves around exists. Even precise acupoints for the most part don’t exist.

This is the opening of his article describing where he has arrived in thinking about acupuncture.

Acupuncture is essentially a simple and effective technique, which can be taught in a simplified and contemporary manner, refined through experience, and integrated widely into modern biomedicine.

Absolutely right.

I've published my review of The Cambridge Companion to Atheism, edited by Michael Martin.

Some time ago I posted an entry about writing methods, in which I said that, unlike many writers, I prefer to write directly on the computer rather than draft in longhand. I compose in an editor (vim), which I find is better than a word processor because you concentrate on the text instead of bothering with formatting. If I need it to look fancy, e.g. for a book, I transpose what I've written to LyX.

The logical next step from writing on the computer might seem to be to use more sophisticated tools such as mind-mapping software. I've experimented with some of these and found that Freemind was the best for me. Yet I don't use it. In fact, I don't even use the outlining facility that vim provides, which lets you collapse paragraphs down to a single line.

When I first tried Freemind I was most impressed. It allows you to make tree views of your ideas. Here is an example.

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It ought to be useful for planning any large or complex piece of writing, yet somehow it isn't, at least for me. This tells me something about the way I write, I suppose. I'm not able to plan what I'm going to say in any detail before I actually start to write. At the most, I can jot down half a dozen headings, but if I try to expand these in the way that Freemind allows me to do, I end up with an ever more complicated scheme which I then ignore when I start the real writing. So instead I just put the jottings down at the top of the piece I'm writing and glance at them occasionally, but nothing more. I may alter these sketchy notes as I go on but there is no need to use something like Freemind to do this; in fact, it would be a distraction. What this tells me is that I seem to be one of the probably pretty numerous writers who don't really know what they think until they see what they say.

None of this is meant as a criticism of Freemind, which I think is a brilliant piece of software - and free! I shall probably find a use for it eventually, but not for planning my writing in advance.