4,949 Matching Annotations
  1. Jul 2022
    1. american philosopher wilford sellers is this way that impressions and thoughts appear to be simply given to us as the events they are as instances of the types they instantiate 00:05:48 and this i take to be the deepest form of what sellers identified as the myth of the given the most difficult one to extirpate we always forget that our knowledge of our own states is as mediated by 00:06:00 language and conceptual apparatus as any other knowledge so when we attribute beliefs or knowledge when we attribute cognitive states when we attribute even sensations 00:06:13 to ourselves or to others we're always i'm going to suggest uh engaged in an active interpretation a kind of self hermeneutics or a hermeneutic of the other and we use 00:06:25 language to model our inner life we use external properties to to uh model our inner life and we're always modeling our inner life we don't simply have it as it is

      Wilfred Sellers called this the "myth of the given"

    1. now we go back to jakub von ogskul and we find him critiquing exactly the 00:09:20 same thing for exactly the same reasons 30 years after john dewey there on the left he has picked out the reflex arc pointing out that it is a linear throughput which leaves no room 00:09:34 for subjectivity no room for intentional action no room for meaning to arise if you if the middle is only animated by inputs then it's a puppet 00:09:47 he replaces this with a model on the right that will whose terms will not be entirely clear to you as you read the article but i want you to notice one thing about it it's circular it's not a linear 00:09:59 throughput it's circular he starts by noting the embeddedness of the body in the world and the fact that the activity of the 00:10:13 body is meaningful at all times and not separable into inputs and outputs his replacement of the linear throughput with this circular model that he elaborates in various ways 00:10:25 is remarkably prescient of the basic cybernetic insight that will arise after the second world war in which it's all feedback systems positive feedback systems negative feedback systems 00:10:37 homeostatic systems um reciprocity is always involved the fact that you do something and something is done to you at the same time that that we dance in the world 00:10:50 rather than standing apart from it and recording a movie of it so his um uncovery of this basic cybernetic principle with which one might approach the body and its being in the world is 00:11:02 remarkably prescient but these profound ideas of vulnerable are often hidden because he's well frankly so charming well he's a problematic character as we'll see lately 00:11:14 but he tells a good story and he does cool experiments

      30 years after Dewey's paper, Uexkull affirms the same finding as Dewey in his article: A Stroll Though the Worlds of Animals and Men (1934).

      In his article, Uexkull compares two diagrams, a linear input/output and a circular with subjectivity in the middle. Uekull anticipates the fundamental cybernetic concept of positive and negative feedbacks - you do something to the world and the world does something back to you.

    1. let me comment on your quantum physics i have only one objection please i think it's uh uh it's 01:01:21 what you said about the two uh sort of prototypical uh quantum puzzles which is schrodinger the double slit experiment uh it's uh it's perfect um my only objection is that in my book 01:01:34 i described of course i had a chapter about schrodinger cat but i don't use a situation in which the cat is dead or alive 01:01:46 i prefer a situation in which the cat is asleep or awake just because i don't like killing cats even in in in in mental experiments so after that 01:01:58 uh uh replacing a sleep cut with a dead cat i think uh i i i i completely agree and let me come to the the serious part of the answer um 01:02:10 what you mentioned as the passage from uh the third and the fourth um between among the the sort of the versions of 01:02:25 wooden philosophy it's it's exactly what i what i think is relevant for quantum mechanics for this for the following reason we read in quantum mechanics books 01:02:37 that um we should not think about the mechanical description of reality but the description reality with respect to the observer and there is always this notion in in books that there's observer or there are 01:02:50 paratus that measure so it's a uh but i am a scientist which view the world from the perspective of 01:03:02 modern science where one way of viewing the world is that uh there are uh you know uh billions and billions of galaxies each one with billions and billions of 01:03:14 of of of stars probably with planets all around and uh um from that perspective the observer in any quantum mechanical experiment is just one piece in the big story 01:03:28 so i have found the uh berkeley subjective idealism um uh profoundly unconvincing from the point 01:03:39 of view of a scientist uh because it there is an aspect of naturalism which uh it's a in which i i i grew up as a scientist 01:03:52 which refuses to say that to understand quantum mechanics we have to bring in our mind quantum mechanics is not something that has directly to do with our mind has not 01:04:05 something directly to do about any observer any apparatus because we use quantum mechanics for describing uh what happened inside the sun the the the reaction the nuclear reaction there or 01:04:18 galaxy formations so i think quantum mechanics in a way i think quantum mechanics is experiments about not about psychology not about our mind not about consciousness not 01:04:32 about anything like that it has to do about the world my question what we mean by real world that's fine because science repeatedly was forced to change its own ideas about the 01:04:46 real world so if uh if to make sense of quantum mechanics i have to think that the cat is awake or asleep only when a conscious observer our mind 01:05:00 interacts with this uh i say no that's not there are interpretations of quantum mechanics that go in that direction they require either am i correct to say the copenhagen 01:05:14 school does copenhagen school uh talk about the observer without saying who is what is observed but the compelling school which is the way most 01:05:27 textbooks are written uh describe any quantum mechanical situation in terms okay there is an observer making a measurement and we're talking about the outcome of the measurements 01:05:39 so yes it's uh it assumes an observer but it's very vague about what what an observer is some more sharp interpretation like cubism uh take this notion observer to be real 01:05:54 fundamental it's an agent somebody who makes who thinks about and can compute the future so it's a it's a that's that's a starting point for for doing uh for doing the rest i was 01:06:07 i've always been unhappy with that because things happen on the sun when there is nobody that is an observer in anything and i want to think to have a way of thinking in the world that things happen there 01:06:20 independently of me so to say is they might depend on one another but why should they depend on me and who am i or you know what observers should be a you know a white western scientist with 01:06:32 a phd i mean should we include women should we include people without phd should we include cats is the cat an observer should we fly i mean it's just not something i understand

      Carlo goes on to address the fundamental question which lay at the intersection of quantum mechanics and Buddhist philosophy: If a tree falls in the forest, does anybody hear? Carlo rejects Berkeley's idealism and states that even quantum mechanical laws are about the behavior of a system, independent of whether an observer is present. He begins to invoke his version of the Schrödinger cat paraodox to explain.

  2. www.vanta.com www.vanta.com
    1. Section 1. Services. The “Services” mean the products and services that are ordered by Customer from Vanta in an Order Form referencing this MSA . Services exclude any products or services provided by third parties, even if Customer has connected those products or services to the Services. Subject to the terms and conditions of this MSA, Vanta will make the Services available to Customer during the Term.

      The Exchange: Standard for all customers

    2. This Vanta Master Subscription Agreement (“MSA”) is effective as of the effective date of an applicable signed order form (such form an “Order Form” and such date the “Effective Date”) and is by and between Vanta Inc., a Delaware corporation with a place of business at 369 Hayes St, San Francisco, CA 94102 (“Vanta”), and the customer set forth on the Order Form (“Customer”) (each a “Party” and together the “Parties”). In the event of any inconsistency or conflict between the terms of the MSA and the terms of any Order Form, the terms of the Order Form control.

      The Exchange: Standard for all customers

    1. When we see the world from the vantage point of all-at-oneness, always right here, we can be said to be like a pearl in a bowl. Flowing with every turn without any obstructions or stoppages coming from our emotional reactions to different situations. This is a very commonly used image in Zen — moving like a pearl in a bowl. As usual, our ancestors comment on this phrase, wanting to break open our solidifying minds even more. Working from Dogen’s fascicle Shunju, Spring and Autumn, we have an example of opening up even the Zen appropriate phrase — a pearl in a bowl. Editor of the Blue Cliff Record Engo ( Yuan Wu) wrote: A bowl rolls around a pearl, and the pearl rolls around the bowl. The absolute in the relative and the relative in the absolute.   Dogen: The present expression “a bowl rolls around a pearl” is unprecedented and inimitable, it has rarely been heard in eternity. Hitherto, people have spoken only as if the pearl rolling in the bowl were ceaseless.

      This is like the observation I often make in Deep Humanity and which is a pith BEing Journey

      When we move is it I who goes from HERE to THERE? Or am I stationary, like the eye of the hurricane spinning the wild world of appearances to me and surrounding me?

      I am like the gerbil running on a cage spinning appearances towards me but never moving an inch I move while I am still The bowl revolves around this pearl.

    2. I have always liked the weaving loom as a metaphor for weaving the absolute and relative together into one cloth. The absolute can be the warp, the relative can be the woof, and the shuttle or the jade works , can spin them all together into one cloth. It’s not that we have to make them into one cloth, they are always manifesting together in simultaneous realization . The jade works is the activity of life itself, the total dynamic functioning of the activity of the universe. Sometimes translated as: The Whole Works. Always right here. All-at-oneness.

      Weaving loom analogy! In life, weave the absolute and the relative into one clothes. The absolute is the warp The relative is the woof the Jade Works is the shuttle spinning appearances into one beautiful tapestry. one beautiful simultaneous realization The Whole Works!

      OR

      The absolute and relative are two sides of the same coin

    3. Dogen is constantly and repeatedly trying to knock us off our intellectual center and interrupt our thinking.  He does not confirm any one solid view of so-called reality. He doesn’t want us to get stuck to one side or the other in the dynamic pivoting of life’s opposite. Do not cling to the absolute or the relative truth. They dynamically and mutually work with each other. Dogen would describe this interaction as “The Whole Works.”

      This is a nice way to describe this process...."repeatedly trying to knock us out of our intellectual center and interrupt our (one sided) thinking."

      We should observe this inherent property of our thinknig process, its one-sided nature.

    1. I removed the in-feed upvote button, making posts only up-votable at the bottom of the post itself. This increases the vote quality (if not the quantity).

      Putting upvoting at the bottom of a post is a better indicator of quality than at the top where it's less likely to have been read and more of a knee-jerk reactions, particularly for the punch-the-monkey crowd.

      Similar to how I use read, listen, and watch posts.

  3. bafybeibbaxootewsjtggkv7vpuu5yluatzsk6l7x5yzmko6rivxzh6qna4.ipfs.dweb.link bafybeibbaxootewsjtggkv7vpuu5yluatzsk6l7x5yzmko6rivxzh6qna4.ipfs.dweb.link
    1. An important aspect missing in typical flow models is that in order to produce enduringcommitment a goal should correspond to something truly valuable. For example, while the goal ofshooting a maximum number of spaceships in your game of Space Invaders may be clear, it doesnot satisfy any real needs. Therefore, playing games, however enjoyable at the time, if continuedlong enough will eventually leave you with the feeling of having wasted your time. One way gamedesigners try to overcome this limitation is by creating a sense of “epic meaning” (McGonigal,2011), i.e. situating the game action in a narrative context which implies that something truly greator valuable is being achieved (like saving the world from alien invaders).

      The epic meaning of "Bend the Curve" is saving civilization, co-creating a future worth living in the next few years, averting disaster.

      On a personal level the transformation of the individual also conveys epic meaning.

    1. Thanks be to Heaven, we have arrived at the eve of the birthday at last! You will own, I think, that I have got you over the ground this time, without much loitering by the way. Cheer up! I’ll ease you with another new chapter here–and, what is more, that chapter shall take you straight into the thick of the story.

      Often a chapter ends with a rhetorical and formulaic address to the reader, now doubt a feature of older British fiction. This one is a bit humorous. What can Python tell us about these passages' typical length and how they create rhythm, "intonation," and simulated interaction in a chapter ? How is this rhetorical address now repurposed to get readers interested in the new genre of detective fiction? is the reader somehow changing into one of the characters?

    2. “We have certain events to relate,” Mr. Franklin proceeded; “and we have certain persons concerned in those events who are capable of relating them. Starting from these plain facts, the idea is that we should all write the story of the Moonstone in turn–as far as our own personal experience extends, and no farther. We must begin by showing how the Diamond first fell into the hands of my uncle Herncastle, when he was serving in India fifty years since. This prefatory narrative I have already got by me in the form of an old family paper, which relates the necessary particulars on the authority of an eye-witness. The next thing to do is to tell how the Diamond found its way into my aunt’s house in Yorkshire, two years ago, and how it came to be lost in little more than twelve hours afterwards. Nobody knows as much as you do, Betteredge, about what went on in the house at that time. So you must take the pen in hand, and start the story.”

      Mr. Franklin suggests that more first- and third-person narrators i.e., characters in the story, be included to tell the tale about the Diamond and its disappearance. But how reliable is the evidence that each one has to offer? This is probably at the heart of this detective story.

    1. to do our own work to develop our own teams to 00:13:48 grow our own networks so based on that we decided to organize a movement to build these kinds of new models to arrive at much more sustainable public goods funding not just sustainable ideally regenerative 00:14:01 systems with possible externalities they're not just sustaining themselves at some level but actually creating a lot more value around themselves and we hope to also create structures for much better value alignment within these networks 00:14:13 so we decided to throw an event uh last year uh so it's less than a year ago um there's probably a number of other people that helped put this on if um uh i in my memory yesterday i remembered a set of folks who are here uh which i 00:14:26 want to thank for for driving this and really creating this this event but it really takes a village to put this on especially the pl events team um uh and many others who have helped uh and since then we've now had uh three 00:14:37 events two virtual one and one in person and we're scaling the community in the size of the conversations the um systems that we're reviewing the mechanisms that we're exploring the studies that we're doing and so on uh so 00:14:50 in this conference we've gone from you know 11 18 talks and now 56 really encourage you to like attend all of them simultaneously of course you can do that of course you can later in time they're all recorded 00:15:02 and we're also very fortunate to be working with a whole bunch of other folks in the ecosystem building out the broader public goods movement in the blockchain space great uh 00:15:15 thanks to the github community and shelling point and many other manila groups that are very focused on building regenerative structures so all of this leaves me uh very hopeful um you know our impact so far has been 00:15:28 to explore a set of funding mechanisms here's a few uh that i pulled from the youtube uh channel a bunch of these mechanisms are explained explaining explored and so on some of them also have kind of experimental review still early days so 00:15:41 a lot of it is still kind of not very systematic not very well experimented upon and so on but i'd love to kind of crank that up and get to drastically better study to the point where we can like analyze these systems with the same 00:15:53 level of rigor that we analyze things like network protocols or like hardware devices and things like that we've also [Music] sort of revived the impact certificates um 00:16:05 idea and and field we've um gotten to explore a number of novel entity types i know that a few of these are actually getting booted up now which is really awesome impact for just a few months of talking about things um and we've 00:16:19 created some uh we've talked about some coordination systems that could be um extremely useful i think this is a very promising area but probably under under um understudied and an area that that is 00:16:31 maybe harder or seems um diffic much more difficult to get traction on so it doesn't get studied as much

      Funding the Commons Event

    1. "Ignorance really is blissful, especially for the powerful" Q&A with Linsey McGoey, author of "The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World".

      Title: "Ignorance really is blissful, especially for the powerful" Q&A with Linsey McGoey, author of "The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World".

    1. Speculation, herd exuberance, irrational optimism, rent-seekingand the temptation o f fraud drive asset markets to overshoot andplunge - which is why they need careful regulation, something Ialways supported. (M arkets in goods and services need lessregulation.)
    1. Ronald Wright: Can We Still Dodge the Progress Trap? Author of 2004’s ‘A Short History of Progress’ issues a progress report.

      Title: Ronald Wright: Can We Still Dodge the Progress Trap? Author of 2004’s ‘A Short History of Progress’ issues a progress report.

      Ronald Wright is the author of the 2004 "A Short History of Progress" and popularized the term "Progress Trap" in the Martin Scroses 2011 documentary based on Wright's book, called "Surviving Progress". Earlier Reesarcher's such as Dan O'Leary investigated this idea in earlier works such as "Escaping the Progress Trap http://www.progresstrap.org/content/escaping-progress-trap-book

    1. Since 1945 this “Great Acceleration” has permitted the tripling of the human population and the crowding-out of the rest of the planet’s biosphere. Lewis and Maslin tell us: “Populations of fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals have declined by an average of 58 percent over the last forty years… On land, if you weighed all the large mammals on the planet today, just 3 percent of that mass is living in the wild. The rest is made up of human flesh, some 30 percent of the total, with domesticated animals that feed us contributing the remaining 67 percent.”

      Fourth Transition: The Great Acceleration

      Will Steffen et al: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2053019614564785

    2. So the first transition, they say, was about 10,500 years ago with the beginning of agriculture. Some have said farming was our biggest mistake: it supported more of us, but at the cost of more disease, poor nutrition, grinding labour, and hierarchical societies that turned into warring empires. But we gained more energy from domesticating animals, and more information by the invention of writing. “Serendipitously,” the authors write, “farming created environmental conditions across our home planet that were unusually stable. This gave time for large-scale civilizations to develop.” That is, humans launched global warming not in the 1800s but with the first agriculture. By burning off forests to make farmland, we began to pump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere — coincidentally, just as the earth was moving on schedule back into another glacial period. Over the next few thousand years farming spread across Asia, Africa, Europe, and much of the Americas, keeping the planet just a little too warm for a return of the glaciers.

      First transition The authors make an extraordinary claim that the Holocene not only coincided with the beginnings of agriculture, but that humans, in large scale burning of forests to create agricultural fields released sufficient quantities of CO2 emissions from the burning to prevent the coming of the next ice age!

      Do a literature review to see if there is evidence for such an extraordinary claim.

    1. The richest 10 percent accounted for over half (52 percent) of the emissions added to the atmosphere between 1990 and 2015. The richest one percent were responsible for 15 percent of emissions during this time – more than all the citizens of the EU and more than twice that of the poorest half of humanity (7 percent).

      This is a key leverage point strategy for Stop Reset Go for Rapid Whole System Change (RWSC) strategy. As argued by Kevin Anderson https://youtu.be/mBtehlDpLlU, the wealthy are a crucial subculture to target and success can lead to big decarbonization payoffs.

      The key is to leverage what contemplative practitioners and happiness studies both reveal - after reaching a specific level of material needs being met, which is achievable for staying within planetary boundaries, we don’t need any more material consumption to be happy. We need an anti-money song: https://youtu.be/_awAH-JJx1kamd and enliven Martin Luther King Junior’s quote aspirational: the only time to look down at another person is to give them a hand up. Educate the elites on the critical role they now play to solve the double problem of i equality and runaway carbon emissions.

    1. As time passed, primates as a whole became more social and evolved to live together in groups, but only humans became truly monogamous. Today, other primate species such as bonobos and chimps mate with multiple individuals in their groups.
  4. Jun 2022
    1. (2) The influence of the various concepts for the induction of lateral structure formation in lipid membranes on integral functional units like ionophores is demonstrated by analysing the single channel current fluctuations of gramicidin in bimolecular lipid membranes.
    1. If a guy got lucky at a restaurant, it got included.” Jauregui waxes poetic about The Address Book, calling it “sexual memory…told by spaces.”

      Something interesting here about a "gossipy collaboration" of an address book that crystallized a "sexual memory...told by spaces".

    1. Between 1914 and 1980, inequalities in income and wealth decreasedmarkedly in the Western world as a whole (the United Kingdom,Germany, France, Sweden, and the United States), and in Japan,Russia, China, and India, although in different ways, which we willexplore in a later chapter. Here we will focus on the Western countriesand improve our understanding of how this “great redistribution”took place.

      Inequalities in income and wealth decreased markedly in the West from 1914 to 1980 due to a number of factors including:<br /> - Two World Wars and the Great Depression dramatically overturned the power relationships between labor and capital<br /> - A progressive tax on income and inheritance reduced the concentration of wealth and helped increase mobility<br /> - Liquidation of foreign and colonial assets as well as dissolution of public debt

    2. 22. We may note in passing the archaic nature of the US Supreme Court, whosejudges are named for life like the pope of the Catholic Church and the apostles of theMormon church. However, a pontifical bull of 1970 denied cardinals over eighty yearsold the right to vote in papal elections, which proves that all institutions can be re-formed, even the most venerable ones.
    3. 18. The success of the referendum orga nized by Uber and Lyft to preserve their ex-tremely precarious model in California in 2020 illustrates the limits of an idyllic visionof direct democracy, as well as the need to reconceive a salarial status that makes it pos-sible to reconcile protection and autonomy.
    1. If we overlay the four steps of CODE onto the model ofdivergence and convergence, we arrive at a powerful template forthe creative process in our time.

      The way that Tiago Forte overlaps the idea of C.O.D.E. (capture/collect, organize, distill, express) with the divergence/convergence model points out some primary differences of his system and that of some of the more refined methods of maintaining a zettelkasten.

      A flattened diamond shape which grows from a point on the left so as to indicate divergence from a point to the diamond's wide middle which then decreases to the right to indicate convergence  to the opposite point. Overlapping this on the right of the diamond are the words "capture" and "organize" while the converging right side is overlaid with "distill" and "express". <small>Overlapping ideas of C.O.D.E. and divergence/convergence from Tiago Forte's book Building a Second Brain (Atria Books, 2022) </small>

      Forte's focus on organizing is dedicated solely on to putting things into folders, which is a light touch way of indexing them. However it only indexes them on one axis—that of the folder into which they're being placed. This precludes them from being indexed on a variety of other axes from the start to other places where they might also be used in the future. His method requires more additional work and effort to revisit and re-arrange (move them into other folders) or index them later.

      Most historical commonplacing and zettelkasten techniques place a heavier emphasis on indexing pieces as they're collected.

      Commonplacing creates more work on the user between organizing and distilling because they're more dependent on their memory of the user or depending on the regular re-reading and revisiting of pieces one may have a memory of existence. Most commonplacing methods (particularly the older historic forms of collecting and excerpting sententiae) also doesn't focus or rely on one writing out their own ideas in larger form as one goes along, so generally here there is a larger amount of work at the expression stage.

      Zettelkasten techniques as imagined by Luhmann and Ahrens smooth the process between organization and distillation by creating tacit links between ideas. This additional piece of the process makes distillation far easier because the linking work has been done along the way, so one only need edit out ideas that don't add to the overall argument or piece. All that remains is light editing.

      Ahrens' instantiation of the method also focuses on writing out and summarizing other's ideas in one's own words for later convenient reuse. This idea is also seen in Bruce Ballenger's The Curious Researcher as a means of both sensemaking and reuse, though none of the organizational indexing or idea linking seem to be found there.


      This also fits into the diamond shape that Forte provides as the height along the vertical can stand in as a proxy for the equivalent amount of work that is required during the overall process.

      This shape could be reframed for a refined zettelkasten method as an indication of work


      Forte's diamond shape provided gives a visual representation of the overall process of the divergence and convergence.

      But what if we change that shape to indicate the amount of work that is required along the steps of the process?!

      Here, we might expect the diamond to relatively accurately reflect the amounts of work along the path.

      If this is the case, then what might the relative workload look like for a refined zettelkasten? First we'll need to move the express portion between capture and organize where it more naturally sits, at least in Ahren's instantiation of the method. While this does take a discrete small amount of work and time for the note taker, it pays off in the long run as one intends from the start to reuse this work. It also pays further dividends as it dramatically increases one's understanding of the material that is being collected, particularly when conjoined to the organization portion which actively links this knowledge into one's broader world view based on their notes. For the moment, we'll neglect the benefits of comparison of conjoined ideas which may reveal flaws in our thinking and reasoning or the benefits of new questions and ideas which may arise from this juxtaposition.

      Graphs of commonplace book method (collect, organize, distill, express) versus zettelkasten method (collect, express, organize (index/link), and distill (edit)) with work on the vertical axis and time/methods on the horizontal axis. While there is similar work in collection the graph for the zettelkasten is overall lower and flatter and eventually tails off, the commonplace slowly increases over time.

      This sketch could be refined a bit, but overall it shows that frontloading the work has the effect of dramatically increasing the efficiency and productivity for a particular piece of work.

      Note that when compounded over a lifetime's work, this diagram also neglects the productivity increase over being able to revisit old work and re-using it for multiple different types of work or projects where there is potential overlap, not to mention the combinatorial possibilities.

      --

      It could be useful to better and more carefully plot out the amounts of time, work/effort for these methods (based on practical experience) and then regraph the resulting power inputs against each other to come up with a better picture of the efficiency gains.

      Is some of the reason that people are against zettelkasten methods that they don't see the immediate gains in return for the upfront work, and thus abandon the process? Is this a form of misinterpreted-effort hypothesis at work? It can also be compounded at not being able to see the compounding effects of the upfront work.

      What does research indicate about how people are able to predict compounding effects over time in areas like money/finance? What might this indicate here? Humans definitely have issues seeing and reacting to probabilities in this same manner, so one might expect the same intellectual blindness based on system 1 vs. system 2.


      Given that indexing things, especially digitally, requires so little work and effort upfront, it should be done at the time of collection.


      I'll admit that it only took a moment to read this highlighted sentence and look at the related diagram, but the amount of material I was able to draw out of it by reframing it, thinking about it, having my own thoughts and ideas against it, and then innovating based upon it was incredibly fruitful in terms of better differentiating amongst a variety of note taking and sense making frameworks.

      For me, this is a great example of what reading with a pen in hand, rephrasing, extending, and linking to other ideas can accomplish.

    2. Third, sharing our ideas with others introduces a major element ofserendipity. When you present an idea to another person, theirreaction is inherently unpredictable. They will often be completelyuninterested in an aspect you think is utterly fascinating; they aren’tnecessarily right or wrong, but you can use that information eitherway. The reverse can also happen. You might think something isobvious, while they find it mind-blowing. That is also usefulinformation. Others might point out aspects of an idea you neverconsidered, suggest looking at sources you never knew existed, orcontribute their own ideas to make it better. All these forms offeedback are ways of drawing on not only your first and SecondBrains, but the brains of others as well.

      I like that he touches on one of the important parts of the gardens and streams portion of online digital gardens here, though he doesn't tacitly frame it this way.

    3. We’ve been taught that it’s important to work “with the end inmind.” We are told that it is our responsibility to deliver outcomes,whether that is a finished product on store shelves, a speechdelivered at an event, or a published technical document.

      Example of someone else saying this...

      We focus too much on the achievement and the end goal and the work and process doesn't receive its due.

    1. And with hope, we can change the world.

      Each human being is born sacred. We each enter the world without pre-conceptions, filters or biases. We certainly do not enter the world with hatred or animosity. As scientist Gerald Edelman once said, we come into an undivided world. There is no division, there is only an experience of nature experiencing herself through a human body, a human form.

      This initial embodiment of the sacred is transformed by culture's and introduced by culture's leading agent, our mother. She first introduces us to language and enculturates us into the world of other humans like us. And along the road of life, the diverse environments individual human beings find themselves (ourselves) in can cause us to stray from embodying the sacred as a living principle to the same degree as that first moment of birth.

      In this moment of our collective human history, when the project of civilization building reveals a fundamental flaw and we are tasked to undo our impact on the natural world as exponentially quickly as we have damaged it, rekindling awe may be our final saving grace. For we need something extraordinary to turn things around at this point, and that extraordinary is something that has always been inside of each of us.

      In the human-created world which now fills us with anguish, reminding each of us that we are sacred, returning to our primordial roots as being incarnations of nature herself, can accelerate system change in the nonlinear way now required.

    2. It’s as if we need the gravitational pull of both worlds to keep us on track, locked on a good and righteous path. Without both worlds pulling on us, we would crash into one, or simply lose our way, hurtling through the universe on our own, intersecting nothing, helping no one.

      As neuroscietist Beau Lotto points out, the Anthropocene is creating greater and greater uncertainty and unpredictability, but the one human trait evolution has created to help us deal with this is the sense of awe. See my annotation on Beau Lotto's beautiful TED Talk: How we experience awe and why it matters https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2F17D5SrgBE6g%2F&group=world

      In short, the sacred is the antidote to the increase in uncertainty and unpredictability as we enter into the space of the Anthropocene. Awe can be the leverage point to the ultimate leverage point for system change that Donella Meadows pointed out many years ago- it can lead to rapid shift in paradigms, worldviews and value systems needed to shift the system.

    1. Now all I had learned on my travelsFell into a new kind of placeEven maths and hard sciencesNo longer at oddsWith Art or HumanityBut serving to showA side of the storyInsufficient to stand on its own

      The great Zen teacher Daisetz Suzuki said upon his Satori experience: "The elbow does not bend backwards".

    2. When I was around eight years old, having recently made the trip with my family back ‘home’ to London from where I was born and lived my earliest years in Nairobi, Kenya, I contracted measles, the first of many childhood illnesses that confined me to bed and disrupted my schooling. My father sat by my bedside and read stories to me about the planets and outer space, infecting me with his love of scientific exploration. I was given books to read about natural history and I learned to identify the garden birds in the tree that grew outside my bedroom window. I made watercolour paintings of these and others that I had never seen from illustrations on the pages of ‘Collins Pocket Guide to British Birds’. Then, whenever I was well enough, I was taken out into the countryside and spent many happy days bird-spotting for myself. I was taken on my first ‘fungus foray’ to a place called Burnham Beeches, west of London. It was led by the redoubtable figure of a man called Bayard Hora and I was awestruck by what I many years later described as ‘The Fountains of the Forest’ as they erupted from ground and trees in manifold shapes and colours, not least the legendary ‘fly agaric’ (Amanita muscaria), the ‘parasol’ (Macrolepiota procera) and numerous ‘brittle gills’ (Russula spp). I found that their Latin names came easily to me and I delighted in showing off my recall to peers and teachers.

      When we are young and provided with such opportunity to marvel and immerse ourselves in the patterns of nature, we keep the creative flow alive.

    1. it's really worth reading some of the things 00:18:00 that they're saying on climate change now and so what about 2 degrees C that's the 46th pathway that's the thousand Gigaton pathway the two degrees so you 00:18:13 look at the gap but between those two just an enormous that's where where no English edding we're all part of this and that's where we know we have to go from the science and that's where we keep telling other parts of the world begun to try to achieve the problem with 00:18:26 that and there's an engineer this is quite depressing in some respects is that this part at the beginning where we are now is too early for low-carbon supply you cannot build your way out of this with bits of engineering kit and 00:18:39 that is quite depressing because that leaves us with the social implications of what you have to do otherwise but I just want to test that assumption just think about this there's been a lot of discussion I don't know about within Iceland but in the UK quite a lot me 00:18:51 environmentalist have swapped over saying they think nuclear power is the answer or these one of the major answers to this and I'm I remain agnostic about nuclear power yeah it's very low carbon five to 15 grams of carbon dioxide per 00:19:03 kilowatt hour so it's it's similar to renewables and five to ten times lower than carbon capture and storage so nuclear power is very low carbon it has lots of other issues but it's a very low carbon but let's put a bit of 00:19:15 perspective on this we totally we consume in total about a hundred thousand ten watts hours of energy around the globe so just a very large amount of energy lots of energy for those of you I'm not familiar with these units global electricity consumption is 00:19:30 about 20,000 tarantella patelliday hours so 20% of lots of energy so that's our electricity nuclear provides about 11 a half percent of the electricity around the globe of what we consume of our 00:19:42 final energy consumption so that means nuclear provides about two-and-a-half percent of the global energy demand about two and a half percent that's from 435 nuclear power stations provide two 00:19:56 and a half percent of the world's energy demand if you wanted to provide 25% of the world's energy demand you'd probably need something in the region of three or four thousand new nuclear power stations to be built in the next 30 00:20:08 years three or four thousand new nuclear power stations to make a decent dent in our energy consumption and that assumes our energy consumptions remain static and it's not it's going up we're building 70 so just to put some sense 00:20:21 honest you hear this with every technology whether it's wind wave tidal CCS all these big bits of it technology these are going to solve the problem you cannot build them fast enough to get away from the fact that we're going to 00:20:34 blow our carbon budget and that's a really uncomfortable message because no one wants to hear that because the repercussions of that are that we have to reduce our energy demand so we have to reduce demand now now it is really 00:20:48 important the supply side I'm not saying it's not important it is essential but if we do not do something about the men we will not be able to hold to to probably even three degrees C and that's a global analysis and the iron would be 00:21:00 well we have signed up repeatedly on the basis of equity and when we say that we normally mean the poorer parts of the world would be allowed to we'll be able to peak their emissions later than we will be able to in the West that seems a 00:21:13 quite a fair thing that probably but no one would really argue I think against the idea of poor parts the world having a bit more time and space before they move off fossil fuels because there that links to their welfare to their improvements that use of energy now 00:21:27 let's imagine that the poor parts the world the non-oecd countries and I usually use the language of non annex 1 countries for those people who are familiar with that sort of IPCC language let's imagine that those parts of the 00:21:39 world including Indian China could peak their emissions by 2025 that is hugely challenging I think is just about doable if we show some examples in the West but I think it's just about past possible as 00:21:51 the emissions are going up significantly they could peak by 2025 before coming down and if we then started to get a reduction by say 2028 2029 2030 of 6 to 8 percent per annum which again is a 00:22:02 massive reduction rate that is a big challenge for poor parts of the world so I'm not letting them get away with anything here that's saying if they did all of that you can work out what carbon budget they would use up over the century and then you know what total carbon budget is for two degree 00:22:16 centigrade and you can say what's left for us the wealthy parts of the world that seems quite a fair way of looking at this and if you do it like that what's that mean for us that means we'd have to have and I'm redoing this it now 00:22:28 and I think it's really well above 10% because this is based on a paper in 2011 which was using data from 2009 to 10 so I think this number is probably been nearly 13 to 15 percent mark now but about 10 percent per annum reduction 00:22:40 rate in emissions year on year starting preferably yesterday that's a 40 percent reduction in our total emissions by 2018 just think their own lives could we reduce our emissions by 40 percent by 00:22:52 2018 I'm sure we could I'm sure we'll choose not to but sure we could do that but at 70 percent reduction by 2020 for 20-25 and basically would have to be pretty much zero carbon emissions not just from electricity from everything by 00:23:06 2030 or 2035 that sort of timeframe that just this that's just the simple blunt maths that comes out of the carbon budgets and very demanding reduction rates from poorer parts of the world now 00:23:19 these are radical emission reduction rates that we cannot you say you cannot build your way out or you have to do it with with how we consume our energy in the short term now that looks too difficult well what about four degrees six that's what you hear all the time that's too difficult so what about four 00:23:31 degrees C because actually the two degrees C we're heading towards is probably nearer three now anyway so I'm betting on your probabilities so let's think about four degrees C well what it gives you as a larger carbon budget and we all like that because it means I can 00:23:43 attend more fancy international conferences and we can come on going on rock climbing colleges in my case you know we can all count on doing than living the lives that we like so we quite like a larger carbon budget low rates of mitigation but what are the 00:23:54 impacts this is not my area so I'm taking some work here from the Hadley Centre in the UK who did some some analysis with the phone and Commonwealth Office but you're all probably familiar with these sorts of things and there's a range of these impacts that are out there a four degree C global average 00:24:07 means you're going to much larger averages on land because mostly over most of the planet is covered in oceans and they take longer to warm up but think during the heat waves what that might play out to mean so during times 00:24:18 when we're already under stress in our societies think of the European heat wave I don't know whether it got to Iceland or not and in 2003 well it was it was quite warm in the West Europe too warm it's probably much nicer 00:24:31 in Iceland and there were twenty to thirty thousand people died across Europe during that period now add eight degrees on top of that heat wave and it could be a longer heat wave and you start to think that our infrastructure start to break down the 00:24:45 cables that were used to bring power to our homes to our fridges to our water pumps those cables are underground and they're cooled by soil moisture as the soil moisture evaporates during a prolonged heatwave those cables cannot 00:24:56 carry as much power to our fridges and our water pumps so our fridges and water pumps can no longer work some of them will be now starting to break down so the food and our fridges will be perishing at the same time that our neighbors food is perishing so you live 00:25:08 in London eight million people three days of food in the whole city and it's got a heat wave and the food is anybody perishing in the fridges so you think you know bring the food from the ports but the similar problems might be happening in Europe and anyway the tarmac for the roads that we have in the 00:25:19 UK can't deal with those temperatures so it's melting so you can't bring the food up from the ports and the train lines that we put in place aren't designed for those temperatures and they're buckling so you can't bring the trains up so you've got 8 million people in London 00:25:31 you know in an advanced nation that is start to struggle with those sorts of temperature changes so even in industrialized countries you can imagine is playing out quite negatively a whole sequence of events not looking particulate 'iv in China look at the 00:25:44 building's they're putting up there and some of this Shanghai and Beijing and so forth they've got no thermal mass these buildings are not going to be good with high temperatures and the absolutely big increases there and in some parts of the states could be as high as 10 or 12 00:25:56 degrees temperature rises these are all a product of a 4 degree C average temperature

      We have to peak emissions in the next few years if we want to stay under 1.5 Deg C. This talk was given back in 2015 when IPCC was still setting its sights on 2 Deg C.

      This is a key finding for why supply side development cannot scale to solve the problem in the short term. It's impossible to scale rapidly enough. Only drastic demand side reduction can peak emissions and drop drastically in the next few years.

      And if we hit a 4 Deg C world, which is not out of the question as current Business As Usual estimates put us on track between 3 and 5 Deg C, Kevin Anderson cites some research about the way infrastructure systems in a city like London would break down

    1. https://www.uopeople.edu/

      Mentioned at Hypothes.is Social Learning Summit.

      Generally looks legit, though it has faced accusations of being a diploma mill and some balanced sounding reviews of it are not good.

      A masters will run about $3-4,000 in fees.

      Based in Pasadena, CA

    1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awce_j2myQw

      Francis Ford Coppola talks about his notes and notebook on The Godfather.

      He went to the Cafe Trieste to work.

      Coppola had an Olivetti typewriter. (4:20)

      Sections on pitfalls

      I didn't need a script cause I could have made the movie just from this notebook.

    1. Now he’s giving the public a peek into that creative process with The Godfather Notebook (Regan Arts, Nov. 15, $50), an exact reproduction of his original, right down to the handwriting, plus rarely seen photos. A signed $500 limited edition even comes in a replica three-ring binder.

      Francis Ford Coppola published an exact reproduction of his original prompt book for The Godfather called The Godfather Notebook (Regan Arts, 2016).

    2. To organize his thoughts, Coppola made a “prompt book,” a theater trick he learned in college at Hofstra. Into a three-ring binder he stuffed his annotated copy of the novel, scene-by-scene breakdowns, notes on the times and setting, cliches to avoid and casting ideas.

      Francis Ford Coppola created and used a prompt book to organize his notes and annotations on Mario Puzo's The Godfather to create the 1972 Paramount blockbuster.

      Having learned the stage managers' technique of keeping a prompt book at Hofstra, his contained an annotated copy of the novel with scene-by-scene breakdowns, notes on setting, cliches to avoid, and even casting ideas.

    1. Archaeology of Reading project

      https://archaeologyofreading.org/

      The Archaeology of Reading in Early Modern Europe (AOR) uses digital technologies to enable the systematic exploration of the historical reading practices of Renaissance scholars nearly 450 years ago. This is possible through AOR’s corpus of thirty-six fully digitized and searchable versions of early printed books filled with tens of thousands of handwritten notes, left by two of the most dedicated readers of the early modern period: John Dee and Gabriel Harvey.


      Perhaps some overlap here with: - Workshop in the History of Material Texts https://pennmaterialtexts.org/about/events/ - Book Traces https://booktraces.org via Andrew Stauffer, et al. - Schoenberg Institute's Coffe with a Codex https://schoenberginstitute.org/coffee-with-a-codex/ (perhaps to a lesser degree)

    1. before you can think out of the box, you have tostart with a box

      Can it be?! Twyla Tharp has an entire chapter in her book on creativity that covers a variation of the zettelkasten note taking concept!!!


      Does the phrase "thinking outside of the box" make a tacit nod to the idea of using a card index (or the German zettelkasten) for note taking, sense making, and thinking?

    1. https://briansunter.com/graph/#/page/logseq-social

      Brian Sunter (twitter) using Logseq as a social network platform.

      What simple standards exist here? Could this more broadly and potentially be used to connect personal wikis, digital gardens, zettelkasten, etc?

      Note that in this thread Dave Winer asks about how it can be tied into other standardized pieces to interconnect?

      How can I hook my outlines into your net if I’m not running Logseq?

      — dave.rss (@davewiner) June 13, 2022
      <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
    1. In contrast to the unhelpful but common argument about whether ‘the problem’ is population growth or consumption, it is not novel to argue that the problem is both—plus waste. Because of ongoing need for progress on all three, this point of intervention is nonetheless key. Unlike research on impact as a function of population, affluence and technology (1 = PAT), we point to strong opportunities to decouple affluence from material consumption [leverage point 1]. We also side with those who argue that more efficient production is insufficient, and that volumes of production and consumption are key variables

      All three variables - population growth, consumption and waste must be minimized simultaneously in order to bend the curve back to a safe operating safe for humanity

    1. https://christiantietze.de/posts/2020/05/digital-gardening/

      Christian Tietze's take on digital gardens from 2020-05-19, when they were still very nascent as a topic breaking into the mainstream.

    2. The summary of Hoy’s post makes a point similar to Caulfield’s piece, but more pronounced: the wide-spread adoption of the blog format killed gardens. The dichotomy is the same; here, we also have a causality of demise.

      The blog killed online gardens in some sense because of it's time-ordered stream of content. While it was generally a slower moving stream than that of social media platforms like Twitter which came later, it was still a stream.

    1. when Britannica conducted followup research on whether or not the books were actually being read, they found that buyers who really read the books were the exception. The two largest sub-categories among buyers who were more likely to have read the books were housewives and men trained in some sort of technical profession.

      Research by Britannica (source?) indicated that the Great Books of the Western World sold well but were not often read.

      Link to: A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking Owen Gingerich Copernicus

    2. certain sub-currents in their thought. One being the proposition that the original (or translated) texts of the most influential Western books are vastly superior material to study for serious minds than are textbooks that merely give pre-digested (often mis-digested) assessments of the ideas contained therein.

      Are some of the classic texts better than more advanced digested texts because they form the building blocks of our thought and society?

      Are we training thinkers or doers?

    1. It would lack a unique personality or an “alter ego,” which is what Luhmann’s system aimed to create. (9)

      Is there evidence that Luhmann's system aimed to create anything from the start in a sort of autopoietic sense? Or is it (more likely) the case that Luhmann saw this sort of "alter ego" emerging over time and described it after-the-fact?

      Based on his experiences and note takers and zettelkasten users might expect this outcome now.

      Are there examples of prior commonplace book users or note takers seeing or describing this sort of experience in the historical record?


      Related to this is the idea that a reader might have a conversation with another author by reading and writing their own notes from a particular text.

      The only real difference here is that one's notes and the ability to link them to other ideas or topical headings in a commonplace book or zettelkasten means that the reader/writer has an infinitely growable perfect memory.

    1. Mortimer J. Adler's slip box collection (Photo of him holding a pipe in his left hand and mouth posing in front of dozens of boxes of index cards with topic headwords including "law", "love", "life", "sin", "art", "democracy", "citizen", "fate", etc.)

      Though if we roughly estimate this collection at 1000 cards per box with roughly 76 boxes potentially present, the 76,000 cards are still shy of Luhmann's collection. It'll take some hunting thigs down, but as Adler suggests that people write their notes in their books, which he would have likely done, then this collection isn't necessarily his own. I suspect, but don't yet have definitive proof, that it was created as a group effort for the 54-volume Great Books of the Western World and its two-volume index of great ideas, the Syntopicon.

    1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWkwOefBPZY

      Some of the basic outline of this looks like OER (Open Educational Resources) and its "five Rs": Retain, Reuse, Revise, Remix and/or Redistribute content. (To which I've already suggested the sixth: Request update (or revision control).

      Some of this is similar to:

      The Read Write Web is no longer sufficient. I want the Read Fork Write Merge Web. #osb11 lunch table. #diso #indieweb [Tantek Çelik](http://tantek.com/2011/174/t1/read-fork-write-merge-web-osb110

      Idea of collections of learning as collections or "playlists" or "readlists". Similar to the old tool Readlist which bundled articles into books relatively easily. See also: https://boffosocko.com/2022/03/26/indieweb-readlists-tools-and-brainstorming/

      Use of Wiki version histories

      Some of this has the form of a Wiki but with smaller nuggets of information (sort of like Tiddlywiki perhaps, which also allows for creating custom orderings of things which had specific URLs for displaying and sharing them.) The Zettelkasten idea has some of this embedded into it. Shared zettelkasten could be an interesting thing.

      Data is the new soil. A way to reframe "data is the new oil" but as a part of the commons. This fits well into the gardens and streams metaphor.

      Jerry, have you seen Matt Ridley's work on Ideas Have Sex? https://www.ted.com/talks/matt_ridley_when_ideas_have_sex Of course you have: https://app.thebrain.com/brains/3d80058c-14d8-5361-0b61-a061f89baf87/thoughts/3e2c5c75-fc49-0688-f455-6de58e4487f1/attachments/8aab91d4-5fc8-93fe-7850-d6fa828c10a9

      I've heard Jerry mention the idea of "crystallization of knowledge" before. How can we concretely link this version with Cesar Hidalgo's work, esp. Why Information Grows.

      Cross reference Jerry's Brain: https://app.thebrain.com/brains/3d80058c-14d8-5361-0b61-a061f89baf87/thoughts/4bfe6526-9884-4b6d-9548-23659da7811e/notes

    1. Alito relies on sources such as Hale without acknowledging their entanglement with legalized male supremacy. The men who cited Hale as they constructed the early American legal order refused to give women the right to vote or to otherwise enjoy full citizenship. Relying on that history of injustice as a reason to deny modern women control over their own lives is a terrible argument but apparently the best Alito can do.

      Relying on a history of injustice to continue to deny justice to any person is a predatory argument.

    1. Your personal dev environment travels with you no matter which device you use

      A lot of these ideas are junk. This one, though, is achievable. triplescripts.org.

    1. Baby, I'm cookin' with gas

      A lyric from "I Can Cook Too" written by Leonard Bernstein which appears in the 1944 Broadway musical "On the Town" sung by Nancy Walker and later in the 1949 film.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Town_(musical)


      I heard it last night at the end of the final episode of Julia S1, E8 Chocolate Souffle (May 5, 2022).

      https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10975574/

    1. What may be required, therefore, is a significant reduction of societal demand for all resources, of all kinds.”

      This is consistent with the recommendations from "Ostrich or the Phoenix".IPCC latest report AR6 Ch. 5 also advocates the huge emissions reduction achievable with demand reduction.

    2. An in-depth 2021 study by Simon Michaux at the Geological Survey of Finland illustrated this inconvenient reality. It calculated that to replace a single coal-fired powered plant of average size producing seven terawatt-hours per year of energy would require the construction of 213 average sized solar farms or 87 wind turbine array facilities. Renewables just have to work harder. The global economy currently operates 46,423 power stations running on all types of energy, but mostly fossil fuels noted Michaux. To green the sector up and still keep the lights on will require the construction of 221,594 new power plants within the next 30 years.

      See comment above about Kevin Anderson's talk Ostrich or the Phoenix?

    3. They also ignore that it took 160 years to build the current energy system at a time when petroleum and minerals were abundant and cheap. Now they propose to “electrify the Titantic” as ecologist William Ophuls puts it, at a time of expensive fossil fuels, indebted financial systems and mineral shortages.

      Professor Kevin Anderson has been advocating for years that whilst renewable energy must be built, significant demand side reduction is the only tenable way to reduce carbon emissions in the next few years so that emissions can peak and rapidly decline. See his 'Ostrich or the Phoenix' talks:https://youtu.be/mBtehlDpLlU

    1. https://app.thebrain.com/brains/3d80058c-14d8-5361-0b61-a061f89baf87/thoughts/32f9fc36-6963-9ee0-9b44-a89112919e29/attachments/6492d41a-73b2-20d8-b145-3283598c612b

      A fantastic example of an extensive mind map from Jerry Michalski using The Brain.

      There are lots of interesting links and resources, but on the whole

      How many of the nodes actually have specific notes, explicit ideas, annotations, or excerpts within them?

      Without these, it's an interesting map and provides some broad context, but removes local specific context of who Jerry is and how he explicitly thinks. One can review the overarching parts to extract what his biases may be based on availability heuristics, but in areas of conflicting ideas which have relatively equal numbers of links within a particular area, one may not be able to discern arguments from each other.

      Still a fascinating start and something not commonly seen in the broader literature.

      I'll also note that even in a small sample of one video call with Jerry sharing his screen while we talked about a broad sub-topic it's interesting to see his prior contexts as we conversed. I've only ever had similar experiences with Bill Seitz who regularly drops links to his wiki pages in this sort of way or Kevin Marks (usually in text chat contexts and less frequently in video calls/conversations) who drops links to his extensive blogging history which also serves to add his prior thoughts and contextualizations.

    1. On examination, you will find this very judiciary oppressively constructed; your jury trial destroyed, and the judges dependent on Congress.

      Gerrymandering has provided exactly the idea of "judges dependent on Congress" just as Patrick Henry suggested, though it has been done more circuitously than he imagined.

    1. In 1968, he resigned as Secretary of Defense to become President of the World Bank.

      Similarly Paul Wolfowitz was U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense running the U.S. war in Iraq before leaving to become the 10th President of the World Bank.

      McNamara was the 5th President of the World Bank.

    1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9dK76BqKJ4

      Jerry has been using The Brain for 24 years as of ~November 2021.

      In October 2021 he had approximately 484,000 thoughts in his graph.

      Ideas to explore: Lessons from My Brain

      We Are an Amnesic Society

      Loose guide:

      favicons indicate links to external sources

      Colors indicate

      • yellow - collections of things
      • purple - opinions
    1. With first-class keyword arguments in the language, we don’t have to write the boilerplate code to extract hash options. Unnecessary boilerplate code increases the opportunity for typos and bugs.
  5. May 2022
    1. The indicative potential of demand-side strategies across all sectors to reduce emissions is 40-70%15by 2050 (high confidence)

      The focus on demand side reduction can play a major role in peaking emissions in the next few years. Among others Prof. Kevin Anderson has been vocal about the key role of demand side reduction in peaking emissions, as per his Ostrich or Phoenix presentations: https://youtu.be/mBtehlDpLlU

    1. An Introduction to PLAN E Grand Strategy for the Twenty-First-Century Era of Entangled Security and Hyperthreats

      Planetary Boundary / Doughnut Economic Main Category: SOCIO-ECONOMIC: Culture, Education

      Although culture and education are chosen as the main categories, Plan E applies to all planetary boundaries and all socio-economic categories as it is dealing with whole system change.

      Visit Stop Reset Go on Indyweb for detailed context graph and to begin or engage in discussion on this topic. (Coming soon)

    2. The HRF design intends to operationalize entangled security (figure 8). It provides orchestration logic at ecoregional, nation-state, and local levels and is expected to vary  according to context. It comprises four main task groups: HRF support; planetary security; human security; and state security.

      These are umbrella categories that can allow for the classification of vast numbers of existing transition projects. With the use of disaggregated planetary boundaries, doughnut economics framework, Inner and Outer transformation, and Bend-the-Curve gamification, the impacts of each type of operation can be measured.

    3. However, deep framing analysis directs that a frame or narrative is not static, but rather holds that to remain truthful, the frame or narrative necessarily evolves in an intra-active way with other “matter.

      The public Indyweb supports this through its inherent conversational structure and focus on knowledge at the edge.

    4. A guiding principle will be to make the hyper-response as not only fun and enjoyable as possible but also meaningful via a vibrant grand narrative approach that connects the mission to conceptions of identity, values, and evolving worldviews.

      Gamification will play a critical role to tap into the human psychology that will encourage proactive action. Bend-the-Curve is the glocal game proposed as a way to mobilize ordinary citizens aggregate community scale response teams.

      As part of this gamification, a private Transform application within the public and open Indyweb can facilitate individual inner transformation, synchronize that to individual outer (behavior) transformation and synchronize that to collective inner and outer transformation at the respective community collective scale and finally aggregating all community impacts, to the global collective transformation scale. Built in data privacy of the Indyweb insures that everyone can contribute data to the aggregator in a completely anonymous way. All of this is designed to operationalize Donella Meadow's insight that inner transformation of worldviews, paradigms and value systems is the most powerful of all leverage points.

    5. A bottom-up approach involves aiming for maximum participation at a society-wide level. While this relates to achieving “mass and speed” of response, it also connects to psychological and philosophical research on the need for belonging and agency. One way a bottom-up approach can achieve maximum participation is through asking individuals, “How do you help us win?” or “How do you help us reach our destination of safe Earth?” This differs from most employment circumstances that issue top-down-directed work. It is anticipated that surprising answers will emerge, which allows people to align their aptitude and best skills to the mission. Two examples follow: Retired elite athletes have skills in goal setting, visualizing success, and motivating action. They could be employed as ecocoaches, supporting teams that are working on difficult transition tasks or leading health and fitness programs for the community. An elderly woman loves exploring thrift shops. She might contribute in circular economy and local recycling programs.

      Indyweb harnesses the wisdom of the crowd. By providing a global space for meaningful dialogue, exchange and sharing, a diversity of solutions will emerge

    6. For four years, an accelerated and intensive global effort will be made to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and restore ecological stability. It will be “fast and furious” because it will involve startup action as well as implementation. It is focused on the remaining “low-hanging fruit” for fastest global reductions

      The Tipping Point Festival can introduce the Bend-the-Curve (BtC) gamification to engage as many cities, towns, rural communities and bioregions as possible. A 3 year research program to dis-aggregate planetary boundaries can allocate a fairshare of local biophysical targets each city, town, rural community and bioregion must aim to achieve if we as a civilization are to meet the 1.5 deg C target, as well as other Anthropocene and planetary boundary targets.

      Doughnut economic framework can be adopted immediately and educated across all communities to plant seeds of local change actor chapters who can start their own local doughnut economies and begin reshaping their local economy into circular bio WEconomies.

      When the dis-aggregated planetary boundary metrics are available, then each community can adopt and aim to bend their local curve, in order that we altogether bend the global curves back to a safe operating space.

      it may be questionable whether we are able to develop highly accurate targets, but even if we are close enough, the greater value is to allow citizens to have a tangible and compelling and measurable reason to work together, organize and mitigate our human impacts in a systematic way. In this way, we can expose the hyperthreat by breaking it down into digestable, identifiable pieces that are cognitively more accessible and can lodge into the salience landscape of the individuals of a community.

    7. “low-hanging fruit”

      IPCC AR6 WGIII Chapter 5: demand, services and social aspects of mitigation identifies that up to 45% of mitigation can result from a demand-side socialization strategy and collective action mobilization. This gives us tremendous power of impact to mobilize people. The low hanging fruit can be identified by comprehensive, ongoing, deep, global conversations with the greatest diversity of actors with a common vision collectively searching for the social tipping points, leverage points and idling resources and scaling massively thru the Indyweb as a cosmolocal network (what's light we share, what's heavy we produce locally).

      Climate scientist and realist Professor Kevin Anderson has argued for many years that demand side changes are the only solutions that can be implemented rapidly enough to peak emissions and drop emissions rapidly in the short term (next few years), buying time for reneewable energy solutions to scale globally.

    8. The hyper-response takes the viewpoint that, in the context of the enormous amount of work that needs to be done in a short period of time, Earth’s large human population is an asset if it can be effectively leveraged as part of the hyper-response

      The billions of ordinary people whose potential as appropriate level change actors has remained untapped. It is a significant reservoir of collective agency, an enormous repository of idling resource. It just needs a compelling enough narrative to lower the threshold to participatory collective action.

    9. This hyper-response is a six-phase operation that will extend until the year 2100. It is civilian-led and involves a whole-of-society layered mobilization.

      Aligned to Stop Reset Go, global bottom-up, social superorganism approach and the "awaken the sleeping giant" campaign, to awaken the sleeping social superorganism giant composed of the ordinary citizens of the globe.

    10. The global security environment has degraded. Worldwide, increased military spending reflects expectations of greater conflict during the decade between 2022 and 2030, including the prospect of major intrastate warfare.

      The complexity, as the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine of war is that it is yet another feedback loop reinforcing the impact of the hyperobject. From a climate change perspective, war has the highest carbon footprint of all because it is actually the willful distruction of purpose-made human cultural objects that each have an embedded energy cost. Hence war requires the construction of offensive and defensive weapons and equipment, as well as munitions, whose sole purpose is destruction. This comes at its own embedded energy cost and the destruction of human lives and human infrastructure is also prematurely ending the human and material lifetimes of living beings and objects respectively, each of which required high energy cost to bring into existence. It also takes enormous energy resources to maintain armies.

    1. Why is the title of the book “The medium is the massage” and not “The medium is the message”? Actually, the title was a mistake. When the book came back from the typesetter’s, it had on the cover “Massage” as it still does. The title was supposed to have read “The Medium is the Message” but the typesetter had made an error. When Marshall saw the typo he exclaimed, “Leave it alone! It’s great, and right on target!” Now there are four possible readings for the last word of the title, all of them accurate: “Message” and “Mess Age,” “Massage” and “Mass Age.”

      Quote from the Commonly Asked Questions (and Answers) on https://marshallmcluhan.com/common-questions/ with answers written by Dr. Eric McLuhan, Marshall McLuhan's eldest son.

    1. We document the order of hooks, but I don't think we document where in that order we integrate Rails helpers which makes this confusing, I do sort of think this is a bug but as we use RSpec to integrate Rails here and RSpec Core has no distinction that matches before / after teardown its sort of luck of the draw, we could possibly use prepend_after for Rails integrations which would sort of emulate these options.
    1. Thus, the sensitive seismographer of avant-garde develop-ments, Walter Benjamin, logically conceived of this scenario in 1928, of communicationwith card indices rather than books: “And even today, as the current scientific methodteaches us, the book is an archaic intermediate between two different card indexsystems. For everything substantial is found in the slip box of the researcher who wroteit and the scholar who studies in it, assimilated into its own card index.” 47
      1. Walter Benjamin, Einbahnstra ß e, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 4 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1928/1981), 98 – 140, at 103.

      Does Walter Benjamin prefigure the idea of card indexes conversing with themselves in a communicative method similar to that of Vannevar Bush's Memex?

      This definitely sounds like the sort of digital garden inter-communication afforded by the Anagora as suggested by @Flancian.

    2. a constellation already described in 1805 by Heinrich von Kleist in his fascinat-ing analysis of the “Midwifery of Thought”: “If you want to know something and cannotfind it through meditation, I advise you, my dear, clever friend, to speak about it withthe next acquaintance who bumps into you.” 43 The positive tension that such a conversa-tion immediately elicits through the expectations of the Other obliges one to producenew thought in the conversation. The idea develops during speech. There, the sheeravailability of such a counterpart, who must do nothing further (i.e., offer additionalstimulus through keen contradiction of the speaker) is already enough; “There is a specialsource of excitement, for him who speaks, in the human face across from him; and agaze which already announces a half-expressed thought to be understood often givesexpression to the entire other half.”44
      1. Heinrich von Kleist, “Ü ber die allm ä hliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden,” in Sämtliche Werke und Briefe. Zweiter Band, ed. Helmut Sembdner (M ü nchen: dtv, 1805/2001), 319 – 324, at 319.
      2. Ibid., 320.

      in 1805 Heinrich von Kleist noted that one can use conversation with another person, even when that person is silent, to come up with solutions or ideas they may not have done on their own.

      This phenomena is borne out in modern practices like the so-called "rubber duck debugging", where a programmer can talk to any imagined listener, often framed as a rubber duck sitting on their desk, and talk through the problem in their code. Invariably, talking through all the steps of the problem will often result in the person realizing what the problem is and allow them to fix it.

      This method of verbal "conversation" obviously was a tool which indigenous oral cultures frequently used despite the fact that they didn't have literacy as a tool to fall back on.

    1. in 1950, when as a young editorial assistant at Doubleday in Paris she rescued the diary of Anne Frank from a pile of rejects and persuaded her superiors to publish it in the United States — a stroke of fortune that gave the English-speaking world the intimate portrait of a forgotten girl, the child everyone had lost in World War II.

      As an editorial assistant at Doubleday in Paris, Judith Jones rescued the diary of Anne Frank from a pile of rejects in 1950. She proceeded to persuade a superior to publish the diary in the United States.

    1. I have no doubt that the four children, now in their 70s and 80s, who spent their early years in the basement house would never tolerate such activity in their own neighborhoods today.
    1. Microsoft researcher Cathy Marshall found students evaluated textbooks based on how "smart" the side margin notes seemed before purchasing. In an effort to discover methods for using annotations in eBooks, Marshall stumbled upon this physical-world behavior, an approach to gaining a wisdom-of-crowds conclusion tucked away in the margins [3].
      1. Marshall, C.C. Collection-level analysis tools for books online. Proc. of the 2008 ACM Workshop on Research Advances in Large Digital Book Repositories. (Napa Valley, CA, Oct. 26–30) ACM, New York, 2008.

      Cathy Marshall has found that students evaluated their textbooks prior to purchasing based on the annotations within them.

    1. Nhiên liệu sinh học trong tiếng anh gọi là Biofuel. Là dạng nhiên liệu tái sinh có nguồn gốc từ các loại nguyên liệu vi sinh, thực vật hoặc động vật. Một số ví dụ về nhiên liệu sinh học có thể kể đến như: Ethanol ( hay cồn thực phẩm) thường được sản xuất từ cây ngô mỹ (cồn ngô) hay sắn (cồn sắn) hoặc mía brazil) Dầu diesel sinh học từ thực vật và mỡ động vật lỏng khí sinh học metan có nguồn gốc từ phân động vật và xác động vật,. nhiên liệu sinh học hữu ích nhất ở dạng lỏng hoặc khí thuận tiện trong quá trình vận chuyển và chiết xuất.
    1. I think it may have been the British Library interview in which Wengrow says something like, you know, no one ever challenges a new conservative book and says, so and so has just offered a neoliberal perspective on X. But when an anarchist says something, people are sure to spend most of their time remarking on his politics. I think it's relevant that G&W call out Pinker's cherry-picking of Ötzi the ice man. They counter this with the Romito 2 specimen, but they insist that it is no more conclusive than Ötzi. So how does a challenging new interpretation gain ground in the face of an entrenched dominant narrative?

      This sentiment is very similar to one in a recent lecture series I'd started listening to: The Modern Intellectual Tradition: From Descartes to Derrida #.

      Lawrence Cahoone specifically pointed out that he would be highlighting the revolutionary (and also consequently the most famous) writers because they were the ones over history that created the most change in their field of thought.

      How does the novel and the different manage to break through?

      How does this relate to the broad thesis of Thomas S. Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions?


      The comment Wengrow makes about "remarking on [an anarchist's] politics" as a means of attacking their ideas is quite similar to the sort of attacks that are commonly made on women. When female politicians make relevant remarks and points, mainstream culture goes to standbys about their voice or appearance: "She's 'shrill'", or "She doesn't look very good in that dress." They attack anything but the idea itself.

    1. is one of the solid East's who's you know all the Enlightenment salons have had sort of women facilitators who of course it's been forgotten and and marginalized in the history but she was one of those and she wrote a book which

      Enlightenment-era salons were led by women facilitators, but they have largely been marginalized since for their contributions.

      (reference?)

    2. pretty much all the arguments that we would be making too if we've met a bunch of Jesuits fear right of kings and reveal the faith and it's actually it's 00:41:37 the indigenous sort of looking rationally

      Perhaps summarizing Graeber and Wengrow too much here, but..

      The Enlightenment came to us courtesy of discussions with Indigenous Peoples from the Americas.

    1. The last element in his file system was an index, from which hewould refer to one or two notes that would serve as a kind of entrypoint into a line of thought or topic.

      Indices are certainly an old construct. One of the oldest structured examples in the note taking space is that of John Locke who detailed it in Méthode nouvelle de dresser des recueils (1685), later translated into English as A New Method of Organizing Common Place Books (1706).

      Previously commonplace books had been structured with headwords done alphabetically. This meant starting with a preconceived structure and leaving blank or empty space ahead of time without prior knowledge of what would fill it or how long that might take. By turning that system on its head, one could fill a notebook from front to back with a specific index of the headwords at the end. Then one didn't need to do the same amount of pre-planning or gymnastics over time with respect to where to put their notes.

      This idea combined with that of Konrad Gessner's design for being able to re-arrange slips of paper (which later became index cards based on an idea by Carl Linnaeus), gives us an awful lot of freedom and flexibility in almost any note taking system.


      Building blocks of the note taking system

      • atomic ideas
      • written on (re-arrangeable) slips, cards, or hypertext spaces
      • cross linked with each other
      • cross linked with an index
      • cross linked with references

      are there others? should they be broken up differently?


      Godfathers of Notetaking

      • Aristotle, Cicero (commonplaces)
      • Seneca the Younger (collecting and reusing)
      • Raymond Llull (combinatorial rearrangements)
      • Konrad Gessner (storage for re-arrangeable slips)
      • John Locke (indices)
      • Carl Linnaeus (index cards)
    1. There’s many examples around the world of communities banding together to collectively govern a shared resource, like forestry, grazing grounds, and wells.

      If we all take action to do these things collectively, then it isn't a "tax" on any individual or corporation.

    1. the death of Gerri Santoro, a woman who died seeking an illegal abortion in Connecticut, ignited a renewed fervor among those seeking to legalize abortion. Santoro’s death, along with many other reported deaths and injuries also sparked the founding of underground networks such as The Jane Collective to offer abortion services to those seeking to end pregnancies.
    1. The second way that people use their Second Brain is to connectideas together. Their Second Brain evolves from being primarily amemory tool to becoming a thinking tool. A piece of advice from amentor comes in handy as they encounter a similar situation on adifferent team. An illuminating metaphor from a book finds its wayinto a presentation they’re delivering. The ideas they’ve capturedbegin gravitating toward each other and cross-pollinating.

      Missing from this description is the work that is involved in revisting, re-reading, and interacting with your notes. This is not an easy process, but this paragraph belies the work involved and makes it seem "magical" with the use of the words 'illuminating', 'gravitating', 'cross-pollinating' which are all external processes or forces that don't require work from the individual.

    2. . In a 2004 study byAngelo Maravita and Atsushi Iriki, they discovered that when monkeys andhumans consistently use a tool to extend their reach, such as using a rake toreach an object, certain neural networks in the brain change their “map” of thebody to include the new tool. This fascinating finding reinforces the idea thatexternal tools can and often do become a natural extension of our minds
    3. I’ve spent years studying how prolific writers, artists, and thinkersof the past managed their creative process. I’ve spent countlesshours researching how human beings can use technology to extendand enhance our natural cognitive abilities. I’ve personally

      experimented with every tool, trick, and technique available today for making sense of information. This book distills the very best insights I’ve discovered from teaching thousands of people around the world how to realize the potential of their ideas.

      All this work just for this? When some basic reading of historical note taking, information management, and intellectual history would have saved him the time and effort? Looking through the references I'm not seeing much before even 2010, so it seems as if he's spent most of his time reinventing the wheel.

    1. Amalia S. Levi@amaliasl·Jun 8, 2020The gap we see between April 13 and April 30, 1816, in #TheBarbadosMercury gazette does not signify lack of material. It reflects the slave revolt between April 14 to April 16 that shut down the island for nearly two weeks (printing house included). 6/ https://dloc.com/AA00047511/00001/allvolumes…12Amalia S. Levi@amaliasl·Jun 8, 2020(It is interesting that when the April 30 issue came out, there is no mention of the revolt. Only on the second page do we find information about the “perfidious league of slaves” that went around pillaging and destroying the island, and about their fate). 7/

      It's interesting to see how these gaps can form - and without background knowledge on the history of that period, the gap would have no context or meaning. It would just be a blip. But that gap has significant historical importance, particularly how information about the revolt was suppressed at the time.

    1. Whig history (or Whig historiography), often appearing as whig history, is an approach to historiography that presents history as a journey from an oppressive and benighted past to a "glorious present".[1] The present described is generally one with modern forms of liberal democracy and constitutional monarchy: it was originally a satirical term for the patriotic grand narratives praising Britain's adoption of constitutional monarchy and the historical development of the Westminster system.[2] The term has also been applied widely in historical disciplines outside of British history (e.g. in the history of science) to describe "any subjection of history to what is essentially a teleological view of the historical process".[3] When the term is used in contexts other than British history, "whig history" (lowercase) is preferred.[3]

      Stemming from British history, but often applied in other areas including the history of science, whig history is a historiography that presents history as a path from an oppressive, backward, and wretched past to a glorious present. The term was coined by British Historian Herbert Butterfield in The Whig Interpretation of History (1931). It stems from the British Whig party that advocated for the power of Parliament as opposed to the Tories who favored the power of the King.


      It would seem to be an unfortunate twist of fate for indigenous science and knowledge that it was almost completely dismissed when the West began to dominate indigenous cultures during the Enlightenment which was still heavily imbued with the influence of scholasticism. Had religion not played such a heavy role in science, we may have had more respect and patience to see and understand the value of indigenous ways of knowing.

      Link this to notes from The Dawn of Everything.

    1. "I didn't fully understand it at the time, but throughout my time as a freshman at Boston College I've realized that I have the power to alter myself for the better and broaden my perspective on life. For most of my high school experience, I was holding to antiquated thoughts that had an impact on the majority of my daily interactions. Throughout my life, growing up as a single child has affected the way am in social interactions. This was evident in high school class discussions, as I did not yet have the confidence to be talkative and participate even up until the spring term of my senior year."

    2. "Specifically, when one of my classmates stated how he was struggling with the concept and another one of my classmates took the initiative to clarify it, I realized that that individual possibilities vary greatly among students."

    3. "The need to engage with people in terms of evaluating them for the aim of acquiring a different point of view was one occasion this semester where the knowledge I received in class positively changed the way I approached an issue. I was patient enough to explore other perspectives, some of which disagreed with mine, so that I might learn about their opinions without bias or prejudice."

    1. Who can integrate bidi links into a larger system, expand in concentric circles, and take them to their logical conclusion — ubiquity across all information surfaces. ... Across Closed Worlds (Chat, Notes, Projects) to Open Worlds (Twitter, Blogs, Feeds) & everything in between The [[wiki link]] is just like #'s and @'s — public-domain innovations in hypertext. But just cause your social app has @'s and #'s doesn't mean people will use it.

      This is a fine sentiment, but a networked version of wikilinks is bound to cause conflicts in folksonomies and issues with sourcing and verifiability. The potential for context collapse is potentially too great to have these scale for this type of knowledge production. One would need to have trusted groups to create usefulness. Search at scale for these is likely to be at issue as well.

      Are the affordances beyond the local scale really any better than current web technologies? What about the potential effects on the commons?

    1. QuickBooks error 3371 usually occurs while you attempt to re-configure your system or when you try to activate QuickBooks. This error may also pop up in case of damaged company files. This error is often associated with a damaged QB system file, namely 'entitlementDataStore.ECML'. To know about this error, ensure that you go through this article till the very end. Our expert team provides you with the most reliable support and ensures that all your queries and issues get resolved in a timely manner. This article enumerates the various causes and the necessary troubleshooting measures for fixing the QuickBooks Error 3371 Status Code 11118.

    1. Principles of Shaping

      When we shape the work, we need to do it at the right level of abstraction: not too vague and not too concrete. Product managers often err on one of these two extremes.

    2. Second, we shape the work before giving it to a team. A small senior group works in parallel to the cycle teams. They define the key elements of a solution before we consider a project ready to bet on. Projects are defined at the right level of abstraction: concrete enough that the teams know what to do, yet abstract enough that they have room to work out the interesting details themselves.

    3. At the time I wasa a web designer with a focus on usability and user interfaces. I executed Json's design direction for key features of the app and collaborated with him to fill in details of the concept.

    1. instead of the “Mastodon appraoch” we take the “Replit approach”

      I'm confused by the continual references to the Replit. Once you have Replit-style power, you can do Mastodon interop—but it keeps you dependent on third-party SaaS. Continuing to violate the principle of least power isn't really any improvement. If you're going to shoot for displacing the status quo, it should be to enable public participation from people who have nothing more than a Neocities account or a static site published with GitHub Pages or one of the many other providers. Once you bring "live" backends into this (in contrast to "dead" media like RSS/Atom), you've pretty much compromised the whole thing.

    2. What happens if - maybe! - there’s a model of decentralization that feels more like a bunch of weird Replits networking with each other.

      Get rid of the networking, and make it more like the RSS/Atom model.

      ActivityPub, for example, shouldn't really require active server support if you just want publish to the clear Web (i.e. have no use for DMs). Anyone, anywhere can add RSS/Atom "support" to their blog—it's just dumping another asset on their (possibly static!) site. Not so with something like Mastodon, which is unfortunate. It violates the Principle of Least Power at a fundamental level.

    1. I wrote about my idea for Library.json a while back. It’s this idea that we might be able to rebuild these monolithic centralized services like Goodreads using nothing by a little RSS.

      See also this thread with Noel De Martin, discussing a (Solid-based) organizer for your media library/watchlist: https://noeldemartin.social/@noeldemartin/105646436548899306

      It shouldn't require Solid-level powers to run this. A design based upon "inert" data like RSS/Atom/JSON feeds (that don't require a smart backend to take on the role of an active participant in the protocol) would beat every attempt at Solid, ActivityPub, etc. that has been tried so far. "Inert"/"dead" media that works by just dumping some content on a Web-reachable endpoint somewhere, including a static site, is always going to be more accessible/approachable than something that requires either a server plug-in or a whole new backend to handle.

      The litmus test for any new proposal for a social protocol should be, "If I can't join the conversation by thumping on my SSG to get it to produce the right kind of output—the way that it's possible with RSS/Atom—then the design is fundamentally flawed and needs to be fixed."

    1. Theoretically, there are many plugins for webservers adding support for scripting using any scripting language you can name. These are sometimes used to host full-blown web applications but I don't see them being used to facilitate mildly dynamic functionality.

      All in all, despite its own flaws, I think this piece hints at a useful ontology for understanding the nuanced, difficult-to-name, POLP-violating design flaws in stuff like Mastodon/ActivityPub—and why BYFOB/S4 is a better fit, esp. for non-technical people.

      https://hypothes.is/search?q=%22black+and+dead+is+all+you+need%22+user:mrcolbyrussell

    2. it's far easier for me to write a PHP script and rsync it to a web server of mine
    3. They might have a style selector at the top of each page, causing a cookie to be set, and the server to serve a different stylesheet on every subsequent page load.

      Unnecessary violation of the Principle of Least Power.

      No active server component is necessary for this. It can be handled by the user agent's content negotiation.

    1. The justices held their final arguments of the current term on Wednesday. The court has set a series of sessions over the next two months to release rulings in its still-unresolved cases, including the Mississippi abortion case.

      It's very likely that the decision on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization would have been released late in the typical cycle. The leak of this document prior to the midterm elections may have some profound effects on the election cycle.

    2. Alito’s draft opinion includes, in small type, a list of about two pages’ worth of decisions in which the justices overruled prior precedents – in many instances reaching results praised by liberals.
    3. Alito approvingly quotes a broad range of critics of the Roe decision. He also points to liberal icons such as the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe, who at certain points in their careers took issue with the reasoning in Roe or its impact on the political process.

      But didn't they also criticize the original decision because they felt that there were better and stronger arguments in favor of maintaining the right?

    4. No draft decision in the modern history of the court has been disclosed publicly while a case was still pending.
    1. DICER1 syndrome is an autosomal-dominant,pleiotropic, tumor-predisposition disorder arisingfrom pathogenic germline variants in DICER1, whichencodes an endoribonuclease integral to processingmicroRNAs

      DICER1 is the gene name. PubMed ID, HGCNCID, and Variant: I can't find Inheritance Pattern: autosomal-dominant The disease entity: DICER1 syndrome The type of mutation: germline. Zygosity: not known. Family Information: a family was used, DICER1 carriers, and non DICER1 variant used, some of the family members had tumors from DICER1 Case Information: mean age is 34, the range of age is 18.6 to 43 years, male, and female used, ethnicity can't find Case Presenting HPO: cancer testing, chemotherapy, radiotherapy gnomeAD: 9.2,8.3.2 Mutation type: Pleiotropic, loss of function, missense

  6. Apr 2022
    1. it starts with 00:32:31 this one kind of thing called single finger and these are all just variations or practice styles [Music] 00:32:45 and then octave double stop skills [Music] and you know just down the list but you know these things are all developed 00:32:59 through the practice the daily practice but then once once they've been developed then i can just plug them into songs and and create so that's just i'm really excited about this form like the fiddle wrong is because

      Jason Kleinberg takes basic tunes and then has a list of variations of practice styles which he runs through with each one (eg. single-finger, octave double stops scale, old-time, polkafy, blues, etc.) and he plays those tunes in these modified styles not only to practice, but to take these "musical conversations" and translate them into his own words. This is a clever way of generating new music and potentially even new styles by mixing those which have come before. To a great sense, he's having a musical conversation with prior composers and musicians in the same way that an annotator will have a conversation in the margins with an author. It's also an example of the sort of combinatorial creativity suggested by Raymond Llull's work.

    1. https://forum.artofmemory.com/t/the-contestant-who-outsmarted-the-price-is-right/43337

      Circling back to this a few years later... I just watched the documentary Perfect Bid: The Contestant who Knew Too Much (2017) which follows the story of Theodore Slauson from the article. Apparently he had spent a significant amount of time watching/taping the show and documenting the prices.

      The documentary provides a single example of Slauson using a visual mnemonic for remembering the price of one item. The majority of his method seemed to be the fact that he put his pricing lists into a self-made spaced repetition system which he practiced with extensively. For some of his earliest visits to the show he mentions that a friend who travelled with him quizzed him on items on his price list on the way to the show. This, likely combined with an above average natural memory, allowed him to beat TPIR.

      Outside of the scant memory portion portrayed, it was a reasonably entertaining watch.

      https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6854248/

    2. I was doing some research on counting cards and memory and came across this story from 2010 in Esquire relating to several who were using (unnamed) memory methods to perform better on The Price is Right game show. If nothing else, it’s a fascinating example of applied memory methods in modern culture.

      The Contestant Who Outsmarted ‘The Price Is Right’

      I was doing some research on counting cards and memory and came across this story from 2010 in Esquire relating to several who were using (unnamed) memory methods to perform better on The Price is Right game show. If nothing else, it’s a fascinating example of applied memory methods in modern culture.

      https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a7922/price-is-right-perfect-bid-0810/

      2019-10-26 20:00

    1. Excerpts from “The Price is Right” in “Perfect Bid” show this and other events happening exactly as Slauson remembers them. While he dismisses suggestions that he has a photographic memory, his ability to recall details — prices, prizes, contestant names and their bids — is impressively accurate. “Perfect Bid” director C.J. Wallis marvels at Slauson’s memory. “When we interviewed him, he sat down and, without any notes, remembered everything about probably a dozen different times he was in the studio audience,” he said.
    1. The lateral keyword allows us to access columns after the FROM statement, and reference these columns "earlier" in the query ("earlier" meaning "written higher in the query").
    1. This latter equivalence does not hold exactly when more than two tables appear, because JOIN binds more tightly than comma. For example FROM T1 CROSS JOIN T2 INNER JOIN T3 ON condition is not the same as FROM T1, T2 INNER JOIN T3 ON condition because the condition can reference T1 in the first case but not the second.
    2. A LATERAL item can appear at top level in the FROM list, or within a JOIN tree. In the latter case it can also refer to any items that are on the left-hand side of a JOIN that it is on the right-hand side of.

      Unlike with most joins (IIUC), order is important with lateral joins. Weird. Why?

      Maybe because it is equivalent to a cross join lateral (see example), and in an explicit cross join, you have a LHS and RHS?

    3. This allows them to reference columns provided by preceding FROM items.
    1. solo thinking isrooted in our lifelong experience of social interaction; linguists and cognitivescientists theorize that the constant patter we carry on in our heads is a kind ofinternalized conversation. Our brains evolved to think with people: to teachthem, to argue with them, to exchange stories with them. Human thought isexquisitely sensitive to context, and one of the most powerful contexts of all isthe presence of other people. As a consequence, when we think socially, wethink differently—and often better—than when we think non-socially.

      People have evolved as social animals and this extends to thinking and interacting. We think better when we think socially (in groups) as opposed to thinking alone.

      This in part may be why solo reading and annotating improves one's thinking because it is a form of social annotation between the lone annotator and the author. Actual social annotation amongst groups may add additonal power to this method.

      I personally annotate alone, though I typically do so in a publicly discoverable fashion within Hypothes.is. While the audience of my annotations may be exceedingly low, there is at least a perceived public for my output. Thus my thinking, though done alone, is accelerated and improved by the potential social context in which it's done. (Hello, dear reader! 🥰) I can artificially take advantage of the social learning effects even if the social circle may mathematically approach the limit of an audience of one (me).

    2. A 2019 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy ofSciences supports Wieman’s hunch. Tracking the intellectual advancement ofseveral hundred graduate students in the sciences over the course of four years,its authors found that the development of crucial skills such as generatinghypotheses, designing experiments, and analyzing data was closely related to thestudents’ engagement with their peers in the lab, and not to the guidance theyreceived from their faculty mentors.

      Learning has been shown to be linked to engagement with peers in social situations over guidance from faculty mentors.

      Cross reference: David F. Feldon et al., “Postdocs’ Lab Engagement Predicts Trajectories of PhD Students’ Skill Development,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116 (October 2019): 20910–16


      Are there areas where this is not the case? Are there areas where this is more the case than not?

      Is it our evolution as social animals that has heightened this effect? How could this be shown? (Link this to prior note about social evolution.)

      Is it the ability to scaffold out questions and answers and find their way by slowly building up experience with each other that facilitates this effect?

      Could this effect be seen in annotating texts as well? If one's annotations become a conversation with the author, is there a learning benefit even when the author can't respond? By trying out writing about one's understanding of a text and seeing where the gaps are and then revisiting the text to fill them in, do we gain this same sort of peer engagement? How can we encourage students to ask questions to the author and/or themselves in the margins? How can we encourage them to further think about and explore these questions? Answer these questions over time?

      A key part of the solution is not just writing the annotations down in the first place, but keeping them, reviewing over them, linking them together, revisiting them and slowly providing answers and building solutions for both themselves and, by writing them down, hopefully for others as well.

    3. One of the field’sleading textbooks was authored by literature scholar Edward P. J. Corbett, whonever relinquished the notion that emulating the work of the masters was the firststep toward developing one’s own distinctive style. “Imitate, that you may bedifferent!” Corbett thundered.

      Literature scholar Edward P.J. Corbett used to command "Imitate, that you may be different!" While his rhetoric and composition textbook may have encouraged students to emulate the masters, this pattern goes back to ancient Greek rhetoricians who also admonished

      Link to rhetoric examples in antiquity. Link to the Finding Forrester example.

    4. Humans’ tendency to“overimitate”—to reproduce even the gratuitous elements of another’s behavior—may operate on a copy now, understand later basis. After all, there might begood reasons for such steps that the novice does not yet grasp, especially sinceso many human tools and practices are “cognitively opaque”: not self-explanatory on their face. Even if there doesn’t turn out to be a functionalrationale for the actions taken, imitating the customs of one’s culture is a smartmove for a highly social species like our own.

      Is this responsible for some of the "group think" seen in the Republican party and the political right? Imitation of bad or counter-intuitive actions outweights scientifically proven better actions? Examples: anti-vaxxers and coronavirus no-masker behaviors? (Some of this may also be about or even entangled with George Lakoff's (?) tribal identity theories relating to "people like me".

      Explore this area more deeply.

      Another contributing factor for this effect may be the small-town effect as most Republican party members are in the countryside (as opposed to the larger cities which tend to be more Democratic). City dwellers are more likely to be more insular in their interpersonal relations whereas country dwellers may have more social ties to other people and groups and therefor make them more tribal in their social interrelationships. Can I find data to back up this claim?

      How does link to the thesis put forward by Joseph Henrich in The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous? Does Henrich have data about city dwellers to back up my claim above?

      What does this tension have to do with the increasing (and potentially evolutionary) propensity of humans to live in ever-increasingly larger and more dense cities versus maintaining their smaller historic numbers prior to the pre-agricultural timeperiod?

      What are the biological effects on human evolution as a result of these cultural pressures? Certainly our cultural evolution is effecting our biological evolution?

      What about the effects of communication media on our cultural and biological evolution? Memes, orality versus literacy, film, radio, television, etc.? Can we tease out these effects within the socio-politico-cultural sphere on the greater span of humanity? Can we find breaks, signs, or symptoms at the border of mass agriculture?


      total aside, though related to evolution: link hypercycles to evolution spirals?

    5. three steps required to solve the all-importantcorrespondence problem. Step one, according to Shenkar: specify one’s ownproblem and identify an analogous problem that has been solved successfully.Step two: rigorously analyze why the solution is successful. Jobs and hisengineers at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, California, immediately got towork deconstructing the marvels they’d seen at the Xerox facility. Soon theywere on to the third and most challenging step: identify how one’s owncircumstances differ, then figure out how to adapt the original solution to thenew setting.

      Oded Shenkar's three step process for effective problem solving using imitation: - Step 1. Specify your problem and identify an analogous problem that has been successfully solved. - Step 2. Analyze why the solution was successful. - Step 3. Identify how your problem and circumstances differ from the example problem and figure out how to best and most appropriately adapt the original solution to the new context.

      The last step may be the most difficult.


      The IndieWeb broadly uses the idea of imitation to work on and solve a variety of different web design problems. By focusing on imitation they dramatically decrease the work and effort involved in building a website. The work involved in creating new innovative solutions even in their space has been much harder, but there, they imitate others in breaking the problems down into the smallest constituent parts and getting things working there.


      Link this to the idea of "leading by example".

      Link to "reinventing the wheel" -- the difficulty of innovation can be more clearly seen in the process of people reinventing the wheel for themselves when they might have simply imitated a more refined idea. Searching the state space of potential solutions can be an arduous task.

      Link to "paving cow paths", which is a part of formalizing or crystalizing pre-tested solutions.

    1. In this case, for a test to be statistically significant, p-value must be lower than 0.05.

      statistical significance should be less than 5%

      tf your confidence that the results are not due to chance is 95%

    1. We are 99% confident that the true average “attitude” difference betweenliving environments is between 1.32 and 7.88. At a significance level of 0.01we can say that living in a minority environment is associated with higherscore

      99% confident that the true average (result) is between these two numbers;

      at 1% (0.01) significance, we can scientifically assume there is a causal relationship

    1. This inflector is like the basic one, except it expects lib/my_gem/version.rb to define MyGem::VERSION.

      really? just for that? that's an unfortunate exception

    1. Every work of art can be read, according to Eco, in three distinct ways: the moral, the allegorical and the anagogical.

      Umberto Eco indicates that every work of art can be read in one of three ways: - moral, - allegorical - anagogical

      Compare this to early Christianities which had various different readings of the scriptures.

      Relate this also to the idea of Heraclitus and the not stepping into the same river twice as a viewer can view a work multiple times in different physical and personal contexts which will change their mood and interpretation of the work.

    1. Marino van Zelst🌱. (2021, October 27). #COVID19NL Positief getest: 7.301 Totaal: 2.100.866 (+7.260 ivm -41 corr.) Perc. Positief 19 okt—25 okt: 15,7% Opgenomen: 113 Huidig: 659 (+2) Opgenomen op IC: 21 Huidig: 200 (+8) Overleden: 17 Totaal: 18.357 https://t.co/BOKxqmyHiX [Tweet]. @mzelst. https://twitter.com/mzelst/status/1453349923462725632

    1. Marc Lipsitch. (2021, July 20). At the risk of boiling down too much and certainly losing some detail, one way to summarize this wonderful thread is that when we think about vaccine effectiveness, we should think of 4 key variables: 1 which vaccine, 2 age of the person, 3 how long after vax, 4 vs what outcome. [Tweet]. @mlipsitch. https://twitter.com/mlipsitch/status/1417595538632060931

    1. Will be executed right after outermost transaction have been successfully committed and data become available to other DBMS clients.

      Very good, pithy summary. Worth 100 words.

      The first half was good enough. But the addition of "and data become available to other DBMS clients" makes it real-world and makes it clear why it (the first part) even matters.

    1. 3. Who are you annotating with? Learning usually needs a certain degree of protection, a safe space. Groups can provide that, but public space often less so. In Hypothes.is who are you annotating with? Everybody? Specific groups of learners? Just yourself and one or two others? All of that, depending on the text you’re annotating? How granular is your control over the sharing with groups, so that you can choose your level of learning safety?

      This is a great question and I ask it frequently with many different answers.

      I've not seen specific numbers, but I suspect that the majority of Hypothes.is users are annotating in small private groups/classes using their learning management system (LMS) integrations through their university. As a result, using it and hoping for a big social experience is going to be discouraging for most.

      Of course this doesn't mean that no one is out there. After all, here you are following my RSS feed of annotations and asking these questions!

      I'd say that 95+% or more of my annotations are ultimately for my own learning and ends. If others stumble upon them and find them interesting, then great! But I'm not really here for them.

      As more people have begun using Hypothes.is over the past few years I have slowly but surely run into people hiding in the margins of texts and quietly interacted with them and begun to know some of them. Often they're also on Twitter or have their own websites too which only adds to the social glue. It has been one of the slowest social media experiences I've ever had (even in comparison to old school blogging where discovery is much higher in general use). There has been a small uptick (anecdotally) in Hypothes.is use by some in the note taking application space (Obsidian, Roam Research, Logseq, etc.), so I've seen some of them from time to time.

      I can only think of one time in the last five or so years in which I happened to be "in a text" and a total stranger was coincidentally reading and annotating at the same time. There have been a few times I've specifically been in a shared text with a small group annotating simultaneously. Other than this it's all been asynchronous experiences.

      There are a few people working at some of the social side of Hypothes.is if you're searching for it, though even their Hypothes.is presences may seem as sparse as your own at present @tonz.

      Some examples:

      @peterhagen Has built an alternate interface for the main Hypothes.is feed that adds some additional discovery dimensions you might find interesting. It highlights some frequent annotators and provide a more visual feed of what's happening on the public Hypothes.is timeline as well as data from HackerNews.

      @flancian maintains anagora.org, which is like a planet of wikis and related applications, where he keeps a list of annotations on Hypothes.is by members of the collective at https://anagora.org/latest

      @tomcritchlow has experimented with using Hypothes.is as a "traditional" comments section on his personal website.

      @remikalir has a nice little tool https://crowdlaaers.org/ for looking at documents with lots of annotations.

      Right now, I'm also in an Obsidian-based book club run by Dan Allosso in which some of us are actively annotating the two books using Hypothes.is and dovetailing some of this with activity in a shared Obsidian vault. see: https://boffosocko.com/2022/03/24/55803196/. While there is a small private group for our annotations a few of us are still annotating the books in public. Perhaps if I had a group of people who were heavily interested in keeping a group going on a regular basis, I might find the value in it, but until then public is better and I'm more likely to come across and see more of what's happening out there.

      I've got a collection of odd Hypothes.is related quirks, off label use cases, and experiments: https://boffosocko.com/tag/hypothes.is/ including a list of those I frequently follow: https://boffosocko.com/about/following/#Hypothesis%20Feeds

      Like good annotations and notes, you've got to put some work into finding the social portion what's happening in this fun little space. My best recommendation to find your "tribe" is to do some targeted tag searches in their search box to see who's annotating things in which you're interested.

    2. Where annotation is not an individual activity, jotting down marginalia in solitude, but a dialogue between multiple annotators in the now, or incrementally adding to annotators from the past.

      My first view, even before any of the potential social annotation angle, is that in annotating or taking notes, I'm simultaneously having a conversation with the author of the work and/or my own thoughts on the topic at hand. Anything beyond that for me is "gravy".

      I occasionally find that if I'm writing as I go that I'll have questions and take a stab only to find that the author provides an answer a few paragraphs or pages on. I can then look back at my thought to see where I got things right, where I may have missed or where to go from there. Sometimes I'll find holes that both the author and I missed. Almost always I'm glad that I spent the time thinking about the idea critically and got to the place myself with or without the author's help. I'm not sure that most others always do this, but it's a habit I've picked up from reading mathematics texts which frequently say things like "we'll leave it to the reader to verify or fill in the gaps" or "this is left as an exercise". Most readers won't/don't do this, but my view is that it's almost always where the actual engagement and learning from the material stems.

      Sometimes I may be writing out pieces to clarify them for myself and solidify my understanding while other times, I'm using the text as a prompt for my own writing. My intention most often is to add my own thoughts in a significantly well-thought out manner such that I can in the near future reuse these annotations/notes in essays or other writing. Some of this comes from broad experience of keeping a commonplace book for quite a while, and some of it has been influenced on reading about the history of note taking practices by others. One of the best summations of the overall practice I've seen thus far is Sönke Ahrens' How to Take Smart Notes (Create Space, 2017), though I find there are some practical steps missing that can only be found by actually practicing his methods in a dedicated fashion for several months before one sees changes in their thought patterns, the questions they ask, and the work that stems from it all. And by work, I mean just that. The whole enterprise is a fair amount of work, though I find it quite fun and very productive over time.

      In my youth, I'd read passages and come up with some brilliant ideas. I might have underlined the passage and written something like "revisit this and expand", but I found I almost never did and upon revisiting it I couldn't capture the spark of the brilliant idea I had managed to see before. Now I just take the time out to write out the entire thing then and there with the knowledge that I can then later revise it and work it into something bigger later. Doing the work right now has been one of the biggest differences in my practice, and I'm finding that projects I want to make progress on are moving forward much more rapidly than they ever did.

    1. Reviewing The Original of Laura, Alexander Theroux describes the cards as a “portable strategy that allowed [Nabokov] to compose in the car while his wife drove the devoted lepidopterist on butterfly expeditions.”

      While note cards have a certain portability about them for writing almost anywhere, aren't notebooks just as easily portable? In fact, with a notebook, one doesn't need to worry about spilling and unordering the entire enterprise.

      There are, however, other benefits. By using small atomic pieces on note cards, one can be far more focused on the idea and words immediately at hand. It's also far easier in a creative and editorial process to move pieces around experimentally.

      Similarly, when facing Hemmingway's White Bull, the size and space of an index card is fall smaller. This may have the effect that Twitter's short status updates have for writers who aren't faced with the seemingly insurmountable burden of writing a long blog post or essay in other software. They can write 280 characters and stop. Of if they feel motivated, they can continue on by adding to the prior parts of a growing thread. Sadly, Twitter doesn't allow either editing or rearrangements, so the endeavor and analogy are lost beyond here.

    2. Having died in 1977, Nabokov never completed the book, and so all Penguin had to publish decades later came to, as the subtitle indicates, A Novel in Fragments. These “fragments” he wrote on 138 cards, and the book as published includes full-color reproductions that you can actually tear out and organize — and re-organize — for yourself, “complete with smudges, cross-outs, words scrawled out in Russian and French (he was trilingual) and annotated notes to himself about titles of chapters and key points he wants to make about his characters.”

      Vladimir Nabokov died in 1977 leaving an unfinished manuscript in note card form for the novel The Original of Laura. Penguin later published the incomplete novel with in 2012 with the subtitle A Novel in Fragments. Unlike most manuscripts written or typewritten on larger paper, this one came in the form of 138 index cards. Penguin's published version recreated these cards in full-color reproductions including the smudges, scribbles, scrawlings, strikeouts, and annotations in English, French, and Russian. Perforated, one could tear the cards out of the book and reorganize in any way they saw fit or even potentially add their own cards to finish the novel that Nabokov couldn't.


      Link to the idea behind Cain’s Jawbone by Edward Powys Mathers which had a different conceit, but a similar publishing form.

    3. https://www.openculture.com/2014/02/the-notecards-on-which-vladimir-nabokov-wrote-lolita.html

      Some basic information about Vladimir Nabokov's card file which he was using to write The Origin of Laura and a tangent on cards relating to Lolita.

    1. structural and functional psychology. I am not sure that I understand the difference, but it probably has something to do with what I have privately been accustomed to distinguish as the analytical and the clinical points of view in psychological observation

      Here James (1907) Is trying to distinguish study of the mind and the treatment of the mind. With structural the organizational study how the mind work, alternatively functional how are mind functions.

    1. One of his last works, the Aurifodina, “The Mine of All Arts and Sci-ences, or the Habit of Excerpting,” was printed in 1638 (in 2,000 copies) andin another fourteen editions down to 1695 and spawned abridgments in Latin(1658), German (1684), and English.

      Simply the word abridgement here leads me to wonder:

      Was the continual abridgement of texts and excerpting small pieces for later use the partial cause of the loss of the arts of memory? Ars excerpendi ad infinitum? It's possible that this, with the growth of note taking practices, continual information overload, and other pressures for educational reform swamped the prior practices.

      For evidence, take a look at William Engel's work following the arts of memory in England and Europe to see if we can track the slow demise by attrition of the descriptions and practices. What would such a study show? How might we assign values to the various pressures at play? Which was the most responsible?

      Could it have also been the slow, inexorable death of many of these classical means of taking notes as well? How did we loose the practices of excerpting for creating new ideas? Where did the commonplace books go? Where did the zettelkasten disappear to?

      One author, with a carefully honed practice and the extant context of their life writes some brief notes which get passed along to their students or which are put into a new book that misses a lot of their existing context with respect to the new readers. These readers then don't know about the attrition happening and slowly, but surely the knowledge goes missing amidst a wash of information overload. Over time the ideas and practices slowly erode and are replaced with newer techniques which may not have been well tested or stood the test of time. One day the world wakes up and the common practices are no longer of use.

      This is potentially all the more likely because of the extremely basic ideas underpinning some of memory and note taking. They seem like such basic knowledge we're also prone to take them for granted and not teach them as thoroughly as we ought.

      How does one juxtapose this with the idea of humanist scholars excerpting, copying, and using classical texts with a specific eye toward preventing the loss of these very classical texts?

      Is this potentially the idea of having one's eye on a particular target and losing sight of other creeping effects?

      It's also difficult to remember what it was like when we ourselves didn't know something and once that is lost, it can be harder and harder to teach newcomers.

    2. An alternative kind of note-taking was encouraged in the late Middle Agesamong members of new lay spiritual movements, such as the Brethren of theCommon Life (fl. 1380s–1500s). Their rapiaria combined personal notes andspiritual reflections with readings copied from devotional texts.

      I seem to recall a book or two like this that were on the best seller list in the 1990s and early 2000s based on a best selling Christian self help book, but with an edition that had a journal like reflection space. Other than the old word rapiaria, is there a word for this broad genre besides self-help journal?

      An example might be Rhonda Byrne's book The Secret (Atria Books, 2006) which had a gratitude journal version (Atria Books, 2007, 978-1582702087).

      Another example includes Rick Warren's The Purpose Driven Life (Zondervan, 2002) with a journal version (Zondervan, 2002, 978-0310807186).

      There's also a sub-genre of diaries and journals that have these sort of preprinted quotes/reflections for each day in addition to space for one to write their own reflections.


      Has anyone created a daily blogging/reflection platform that includes these sorts of things? One might repurpose the Hello Dolly WordPress plugin to create journal prompts for everyday writing and reflection.

    3. James Boswell (1740–95) defended the state of learning in his day: “It has been maintained that this superfoetation, this teeming of the press in modern times, is prejudicial to good literature, because it obliges us to read so much of what is of inferiour value, in order to be in the fashion; so that better works are neglected for want of time, because a man will have more gratification of his vanity in conversation, from having read modern books, than from having read the best works of antiquity. But it must be con-sidered that we now have more knowledge generally diffuse; all our ladies read now, which is a great extension.”

      Link to earlier note about Caleb Deschanel

    1. The book was reviewed in all major magazines and newspapers, sparking what historian Ronald Kline has termed a “cybernetics craze,” becoming “a staple of science fiction and a fad among artists, musicians, and intellectuals in the 1950s and 1960s.”

      This same sort of craze also happened with Claude Shannon's The Mathematical Theory of Information which helped to bolster Weiner's take.