What ideas are you wrestling with this week? January 19, 2023

The popular recommendation is that there should be between 40 and 75 characters per line. The findings of multiple studies conclude that "short line lengths are easier to read". Regarding learning and information retention: "Subjects reading the narrow paragraphs had better retention than those reading the wide paragraphs"

Like any journal, Thoreau’s is repetitive, which suggests naturalplaces to shorten the text but these are precisely what need to be keptin order to preserve the feel of a journal, Thoreau’s in particular. Itrimmed many of Thoreau’s repetitions but kept them wheneverpossible, because they are important to Thoreau and because theyare beautiful. Sometimes he repeats himself because he is drafting,revising, constructing sentences solid enough to outlast the centuries.

Sometimes, Isuspect, he copied his own words because he liked to copy: no one’scommonplace books could run to a million words—those are just theones that survive, in addition to a two-million-word Journal, andenormous quantities of other writing—without a sheer love of sittingwith pen in hand, a printed book and a blank page both open before

Her work on borrowed function words was so far manifest in her Konkordanz der nichtflektierten griechischen Wörter im bohairischen Neuen Testament, Göttinger Orientforschungen VI/6, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz 1975, the tip of the iceberg as we know now.

Tobeuseful,thenotestakenatmedicallecturesshouldbeasummaryonly;noattempt shouldbemadetotakeaverbatimreport

This independent confirmation ofthe testimonythat Dr Gowers has personally borne to the helpfulness ofPhonography in his professional career, is peculiarlyvaluable, because there are still some able men in themedical world who discourage the practice of note- takingby students . Professor Struthers, for instance, is reportedto have said before the General Medical Council that" the student takes his notes, puts his book in his pocket,and walks out, knowing no more about the subject than amere reporter would do."

But you should also be aware that current PKM theory has a hard-on for writing all your notes in your own words which, to me, seems like a limitation of "knowledge management" as compared to "information management". I'm fine excerpting and citing because some texts have better phrasing I could ever have.

Expansion is led by focus. By taking time to edit, carve up, and refactor our notes, we put focus on ideas. This starts the Great Wheel of Positive Feedback. All hail to the Great Wheel of Positive Feedback.

record-keeping of animal behaviour in systematic units of time and incorporating at least one verb.

Sumerologists place the origins of the development of writing around 3300 bc in the pictograms associated with abstract marks representing numbers; ‘the writing system invented or developed … of a pictographic character; its signs were drawings’ and cuneiform gradually developed out of this, which ‘is a script, not a language’ (Van de Mieroop Reference Van de Mieroop1999, 10: our emphases).

One common definition of ‘writing’ is that it is written language, i.e. not only acts as a notational system but one which has a connection to the phonetic form of the language spoken by the writer (Van de Mieroop Reference Van de Mieroop1999).

Using a database of images spanning the European Upper Palaeolithic, we suggest how three of the most frequently occurring signs—the line <|>, the dot <•>, and the <Y>—functioned as units of communication.

I couldn’t have written this book without the aid of laying out all of thedifferent sections on my desk. I created a hub of cards that had collectivecardlinks on them. Each card was organized by topic and contained subtopicsthat pointed me to various card addresses in my Antinet. I then moved themaround a large table to create the perfect logical layout for this book. Here’sa picture of it:

Let's say you want to tell your audience that your character is angry. You could just have them say “I'm angry.” But how often does a person in real life ever plainly announce their anger that way? Have you ever been able to tell someone was angry without them telling you? What if instead of having our character say “I'm angry,” you write them entering their house and slamming the door behind them so hard that picture frames fall off the wall and shatter on the floor. Air hisses out of their mouths as they huff and puff through gritted teeth. That's usually better writing. That's what “show, don't tell” means. But what if I told you that Kare Kano breaks this golden rule of writing, and does so with incredible results?

Educators are now administering the Turing test in reverse: What are questions that only humans can answer well? What kinds of thinking does writing make possible for us? 

GPT-3 threatens to “[undermine] the kind of writing intensive course that had served as the backbone of [his] teaching for two decades.” “I was less worried about whether GPT-3 is genuinely intelligent,” Symons writes, “and more worried about whether the development of these tools would make us less intelligent.” 

I’m a screenwriter. One of the reasons I use Obsidian is the ability to hashtag. It sounds so simple, but being able to tag notes with #theme or #sceneideas helps create linkages between notes that would not otherwise be linked. My ZK literally tells me what the movie is really about.

Is the ZK method worth it? and how it helped you in your projects? .t3_zwgeas._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; } questionI am new to ZK method and I'd like to use it for my literature review paper. Altho the method is described as simple, watching all those YT videos about the ZK and softwares make it very complex to me. I want to know how it changed your writing??

You can't think well without writing well, and you can't write well without reading well. And I mean that last "well" in both senses. You have to be good at reading, and read good things.

Talking about your ideas with other people is a good way to develop them. But even after doing this, you'll find you still discover new things when you sit down to write.

if you need to solve a complicated, ill-defined problem, it will almost always help to write about it. Which in turn means that someone who's not good at writing will almost always be at a disadvantage in solving such problems.

Bun is written in Zig, a low-level programming language with manual memory management.

Don’t try to convince everyone that what you say, feel, think, or have done is better than everyone else.

My goal with my content is to make it so recognizable that you would know it was me even if it didn't have my name on it. The same style. The same thought process. The same character.

But Thamus replied, " Most ingenious Theuth, oneman has the ability to beget arts, but the ability tojudge of their usefulness or harmfulness to their usersbelongs to another ; and now you, who are the fatherof letters, have been led by your affection to ascribeto them a power the opposite of that which theyreally possess. For this invention will produce for-getfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it,because they will not practise their memory. Theirtrust in writing, produced by external characterswhich are no part of themselves, will discourage theuse of their own memory within them. You haveinvented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding ;and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom,not true wisdom, for they will read many thingswithout instruction and will therefore seem to knowmany things, when they are for the most part ignorant

even Socrates himself, we learnby way of his followers, derided the emerging popularity of taking physicalnotes.

you’ll spend the beginning phases learning by readingbooks in brand new fields and noting down brand new ideas. You’ll mostlybe writing reformulation notes in this phase.

the Antinet can serve both states. It can assist someone who’s in thegrowth state (without a clear end goal), and it can also assist someone who’sin the contribution state (with a clearly defined book or project).

Fact-based disciplines such as natural sciences have less potential for deeply linked, atomic zettel notes than arts and humanities. There is not much to discuss about or 'generate insight' on photosynthesis, algebra or network protocols if you are not a scientist.

For example I had a few notes on principles of modern cryptography that came in handy when I had to write a paper about a related topic for my studies. But these cases were rare at best, most of these notes were never looked at again.

“I thought that art schools should just be places where you thought about creative behavior, whereas they thought an art school was a place where you made painters,” he said later.

The extraordinary ignorance on questions of society and history displayed by the men and women reshaping society and history has been the defining feature of the social-media era.

Which is why I wonder if this may be the end of using writing as a benchmark for aptitude and intelligence.

Perhaps there are reasons for optimism, if you push all this aside. Maybe every student is now immediately launched into that third category: The rudiments of writing will be considered a given, and every student will have direct access to the finer aspects of the enterprise. Whatever is inimitable within them can be made conspicuous, freed from the troublesome mechanics of comma splices, subject-verb disagreement, and dangling modifiers.

I’ve also long held, for those who are interested in writing, that you need to learn the basic rules of good writing before you can start breaking them—that, like Picasso, you have to learn how to reliably fulfill an audience’s expectations before you get to start putting eyeballs in people’s ears and things.

Then there were the three lots of blank notebooks, tied with twine. They went for $9,000, $11,000, and $11,000 each. They were empty, some still wrapped in plastic, yet they were totally talismanic. I wondered: Would you write in these notebooks, having paid that price? Perhaps that’s the whole appeal—to write in a blank space that Didion might once have intended to use herself. Maybe the buyer had a hidden wish that somehow her intent might infiltrate their own work—that in owning these notebooks they might crack some secret code to making sentences like hers. There are sillier superstitions. But more likely, I think, you would have paid too much for these notebooks to ever touch them, and they would sit in a drawer or on a desk, unused and empty, just as they sat on hers.

Duolingo or whatever French and I had this idea well basically what it reminds me of is Stefan's Vig the Austrian

if people annotate a generated text, is that a diminished conversation compared to one with a human authored text?

That sounds challenging, of course, but I find that the writing, at this stage, is actually relatively easy: the card organization has already done most of the work. The cards tell the story, you now just need to (skillfully!) weave them together.

This is the absolute hardest part of the writing process, in my mind. The most exciting, too, because you’re never quite sure where it’s going to end up.

I’ve also got a vague sense in my head of how they should be organized — that is, what the structure of the book is going to be. This is generally when I write the formal book proposal. I know enough about the topic, now, that I have a good idea of what my central arguments are going to be and how I am going to organize the chapters.

I have a very specific method for organizing my research and thoughts whenever I’m writing anything longer than a short article. I learned this method from a teacher in middle school, and I cannot imagine how a human being could write a book any other way.

For whom do we make knowledge and why? This question could not be timelier as humanists and administrators seek to make disciplines appear more relevant to students, applicable to social problems, and attendant to political, social, and economic exigencies” (2019, p. 351)

When we are collecting new data to address a research question addressed in another context, it can be near impossible to re-create ex-act contexts with participants; researchers simply do not have that sort of control over any research context. This suggests that reproduction, rather than replication, may be a more useful goal.

Mark: Yeah. And I actually think the Agile revolution in software development is software development catching up to the fact that it’s a writer-ly art. Writers don’t know where they’re going or how they’re going to express it when they start out. Neither, it turns out, does software developers. They can pretend by writing it the first time in a spec language and then coding it and then, checking the specification, then finding out that they’ve written the wrong thing and writing a new specification. That was when I was getting started, the right way to write software.

“In literacy education, particularly for developing writers, instructors are looking for the level of desirable difficulty, or the point at which you are working yourself just as hard so that you don’t break but you also improve,” Laffin told Motherboard. “Finding the right, appropriate level of desirable difficulty level of instruction makes their capacity to write grow. So if you are doing compensation techniques that go beyond finding that level of desirable difficulty and instructing at that place, then you’re not helping them grow as a writer.”

Honestly, at this point, I don't even know what tools I'm using, and which is responsible for what feature. Diving into the code of capybara and cucumber yields hundreds of lines of metaprogramming magic that somehow accretes into a testing framework. It's really making me loathe TDD despite my previous youthful enthusiasm.

And with diagrams as text close to the code chances are they will be kept to up to date (and created to begin with…).

Fifty years ago, coinciding with the centennial of the release of Darwin’s manuscript, author Morse Peckham collected all six editions into a single “variorum” text. Peckham painstakingly created a reference system that denotes the modifications and changes between editions. The text was created by Peckham’s careful enumeration of every sentence from every edition, copied onto index cards; from these cards, he carefully assembled them into a final text.

above

I’m much less worried about free writes happening all the time, than that kids are writing with purpose about topics they care about

Justice Louis D.Brandeis instructedlawyers that “there is nosuch thing as good writ-ing. There is only goodrewriting.”23

“Broadly speaking, the shortwords are the best, and the old wordswhen short are best of all,” attestedformer British Prime Minister WinstonChurchill,

“Usethe smallest word that does the job,”advised essayist and journalist E. B.White.20

“[T]here is always a short word for it,”Rogers said. “‘I love words but I don’tlike strange ones. You don’t under-stand them, and they don’t understandyou. Old words is like old friends– you know ‘em the minute you see‘em.”17

Novelists Ernest Hemingway and Wil-liam Faulkner, for example, went backand forth about the virtues of simplic-ity in writing. Faulkner once criticizedHemingway, who he said “had nocourage, never been known to use aword that might send the reader to thedictionary.” “Poor Faulkner,” Heming-way responded, “Does he really thinkbig emotions come from big words?He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollarwords. I know them all right. But thereare older and simpler and better words,and those are the ones I use.”15

Justice Felix Frankfurter,a prolific writer as a Harvard lawprofessor before joining the SupremeCourt, was right that “[a]nything thatis written may present a problem ofmeaning” because words “seldomattain[] more than approximate preci-sion.”12

Guy de Maupassant, was no lawyer,but his advice can help guide lawyerswho seek precision in their writing.“Whatever you want to say,” he assert-ed, “there is only one word to expressit, only one verb to give it movement,only one adjective to qualify it. Youmust search for that word, that verb,that adjective, and never be contentwith an approximation, never resortto tricks, even clever ones, and neverhave recourse to verbal sleight-of-hand to avoid a difficulty.”11

Samuel Johnson’s maxim, “No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.”

the front endpapers are oftenthe most important. Some people reserve them for a fancybookplate.

writing your reactions downhelps you to remember the thoughts of the author.

Second, reading, if it is active, is thinking, and thinking tendsto express itself in words, spoken or written. The person whosays he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually doesnot know what he thinks.

A commonplace book is what a provident poet cannot subsist without, for this proverbial, reason, that "great wits have short memories;" and whereas, on the other hand, poets, being liars by profession, ought to have good memories; to reconcile these, a book of this sort, is in the nature of a supplemental memory, or a record of what occurs remarkable in every day's reading or conversation. There you enter not only your own original thoughts, (which, a hundred to one, are few and insignificant) but such of other men, as you think fit to make your own, by entering them there. For, take this for a rule, when an author is in your books, you have the same demand upon him for his wit, as a merchant has for your money, when you are in his. By these few and easy prescriptions, (with the help of a good genius) it is possible you may, in a short time, arrive at the accomplishments of a poet, and shine in that character[3].

Mason Currey’s book “Daily Rituals: Women at Work.” It gives cheerful summaries about how some of the most prolific, successful artists managed their time.

When he was coming up as a writer, the author and journalist Rex Murphy would write out longhand favorite poems and passages. He was asked, what’s that done for you? “There’s an energy attached to poetry and great prose,” Murphy said. “And when you bring it into your mind, into your living sensibility, by some weird osmosis, it lifts your style or the attempts of your mind.” When you read great writing, when you write down a great line or paragraph, Murphy continues, “somehow or another, it contaminates you in a rich way. You get something from it—from this osmotic imitation—that will only take place if you lodge it in your consciousness.”

David Brooks talks about what he calls the “theory of maximum taste.” It’s similar to what Murphy is saying. “Exposure to genius has the power to expand your consciousness,” Brooks writes. “If you spend a lot of time with genius, your mind will end up bigger and broader than if you [don’t].”

The novelist and screenwriter Raymond Chandler said he avoided reading books written by someone who didn’t “take the pains” to write out the words. (It used to be common for writers to dictate into a recorder then have an assistant transcribe those words.) “You have to have that mechanical resistance,” Chandler wrote in a 1949 letter to actor/writer Alex Barris. “When you have to use your energy to put those words down, you are more apt to make them count.”

If you are like Lebron James or Paul Simon, if you were born with a gift for recall, you might not need a note-taking system.

Zettelkasten with the complicated digestive system of a ruminant. All arbitrary ideas, all coincidences of readings, can be brought in. The internal connectivity then decides.

A recent writer has called attention to apassage in Paxson's presidential address before the American Historical Associationin 1938, in which he remarked that historians "needed Cheyney's warning . . . not towrite in 1917 or 1918 what might be regretted in 1927 and 1928."

the writer of "scissors and paste history" ;

None of these notes wasever used in his writing; probably they were taken with no thoughtof specific use, but out of absorption in the American scene.

the author must not merely articulate his sources; he mustdigest them. A long passage quoted or closely followed "remainsan undigested bit of foreign matter." "Over quotation may meanunder thought."

‘What tho’ his head be empty, provided his common-place book be full?’ sneered Jonathan Swift.

I feel sympathy for Robert Southey, whose excerpts from his voracious reading were posthumously published in four volumes as Southey’s Common-Place Book. He confessed in 1822 that,Like those persons who frequent sales, and fill their houses with useless purchases, because they may want them some time or other; so am I for ever making collections, and storing up materials which may not come into use till the Greek Calends. And this I have been doing for five-and-twenty years! It is true that I draw daily upon my hoards, and should be poor without them; but in prudence I ought now to be working up these materials rather than adding to so much dead stock.

It is possible to take too many notes; the task of sorting, filing and assimilating them can take for ever, so that nothing gets written.

will improve collaboration

Creating a ZK Don't Break the Chain Calendar in Obsidian

For Tim, the practice is managed by routine.“My quota for writing is two crappy pages a day,” he explains. Those two pages help him get started, matter what other commitments he is meeting that day. And even if they’re bad, they’re at least done.The idea is to set goals that are “easily winnable” so you don’t panic when one day passes and you don’t make that goal, because you always know you can easily pick back up the next day.“If I don’t write my two pages I don’t panic and go into the spiral.”

As an example, in The Crown season 1 episode 4 “Act of God” (Netflix, 2016) there is a scene portraying former British Prime Minister Clement Atlee in his office in which he is prominently bookended in the background by two four drawer card indexes: one 3 x 5″ and the other 4 x 6″.

I’m excited to see community efforts like Obsidian Ava

The sentence in italics above was not written by me. It was autocompleted as I wrote in Obsidian, using the Text Generator plugin.

In some ways it is surprising that filtering text is so technically challenging. Text seems like it would be easier to manipulate than images.

don’t take critiques from someone who wouldn’t work as hard on their art as they are telling you to work on yours, they have no frame of reference, they have no foot in reality. Rae works as hard as I do, who better to take advice from?

Repairing my errors has always led to the actual interesting places in the work, slowly emerging out of some fog, to surprise me

Later, I have to fix everything. Tie it all up, make it gel. Connect the dots even further, which is just a way of saying ‘reverse engineering.’ I have a clerical mess to rearrange, but while I’m rearranging all of it logistically, I get a chance to enhance the language so it matches the characters and the place, which I had to discover through writing it all anyway.

Then for the next draft I make a little punch list/index card of new scenes to create to properly finish ‘the thing.’ The cards become a vague map I can leaf through when I get stuck. Working through that punch list often happens out of linear order, too. Just jumping to which new scene I feel most like working on.

That’s what I mostly do. Write about things I’m really excited about. In the beginning I don’t have a plan, maybe just one or two scenes but I write them, and bumble towards creating things around them that thrill me in some way

Be ready, as soon as you have read or heard the thing, to repeat it exactly in as far as you want to fix it in your memory. If it is a book, do not leave it without being able to sum it up and to estimate its value. Ta

You are all computer scientists. You know what FINITE AUTOMATA can do. You know what TURING MACHINES can do. For example, Finite Automata can add but not multiply. Turing Machines can compute any computable function. Turing machines are incredibly more powerful than Finite Automata. Yet the only difference between a FA and a TM is that the TM, unlike the FA, has paper and pencil. Think about it. It tells you something about the power of writing. Without writing, you are reduced to a finite automaton. With writing you have the extraordinary power of a Turing machine.

Anybody who writes knows you don’t simply write what you believe. You write to find out what you believe, or what you can afford to believe. So when I write something and it sounds good, I leave it in, usually, to see what it sounds like to someone else. To somebody else it might sound awful or brash, but I want to be able to have the courage of my brashness. I don’t leave things in that I know to be terrible, or that I don’t, as it were, find interesting—I don’t do that—but if there’s a doubt about it and it sounds interesting, I’ll leave it in. And I want to be free to do that, because that’s why I write. When I write, things occur to me. It’s a way of thinking. But you can perform your thinking instead of just thinking it.

if you're thinking without 00:03:26 writing chances are you're fooling yourself we're only

In the words of the cartoonist Dick Guindon:Writing is nature's way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is.

In the second case, checking “Connection” in my Index would lead me to this card. I might then compare this thought to others that use the same keyword, to see how it supports or modifies the idea of connection.

I might even say the best books are the best books because they stubbornly defy being reduced to a synopsis and some notes. Another way of saying that is, great books have so much in them that many different people with many different interests can all find something they’ll value in their pages.

Andere Sammlungen sind ihrem Verwendungszweck nie zugeführt worden. Der Germanist Friedrich Kittler etwa legte Karteikarten zu allen Farben an, die dem Mond in der Lyrik zugeschrieben worden sind. Das Buch dazu könnte jemand mit Hilfe dieser Zettel schreiben.

Blumenberg’s near-obsessive reliance on this writing machinery

The freedom to play with ideas, and to explore new ways of thinking, critiquing, deploying, and analyzing ed tech provided by metaphors, is much needed if we are to develop a better appreciation of its possibilities, implications, and limitations.

Fichiers et fiches de lecture autour des Souffrances du jeune Werther de Goethe

Here again we seethe emphasis on writing as a movement that resists reification andall the intimidations of language. It is not surprising that Barthesshould have sought a form that would foster this infinite process. Theform lay, not in the fragment as such, but in the organization orarrangement that could be made from the fragments. He underlinedthis on an unpublished index card from 16 July 1979: ‘I can clearlysee this much (I think): my “notes” (Diary) as such, are not enough (Iincline towards them but in fact they’re a failure). What’s needed isanother turn of the screw, a “key”, which will turn these Notes-Diaryinto the mere notes of work that will be constructed and writtencontinuously: basically, to write notes, the index cards: to classifythem, turn them into bundles, and as I usually do, compose by takingone bundle after another.’11

The most important thing about research is to know when to stop.How does one recognize the moment? When I was eighteen orthereabouts, my mother told me that when out with a young man Ishould always leave a half-hour before I wanted to. Although I wasnot sure how this might be accomplished, I recognized the advice assound, and exactly the same rule applies to research. One must stopbefore one has finished; otherwise, one will never stop and neverfinish.

Sincecopying is a chore and a bore, use of the cards, the smaller thebetter, forces one to extract the strictly relevant, to distill from thevery beginning, to pass the material through the grinder of one’s ownmind, so to speak.

Deutsch himself pointed to criticswho called him a ‘chiffonier’ or historical rag-picker, though he defended his ‘incon-venient though undeniable facts’ (Deutsch, 1916). A number of contemporaries recog-nized the limits of his interest in individual facts. ‘I get the impression’, one figure put it,‘that the charm of the facts of history, was so great for Deutsch, he lost himself socompletely . . . in the study of them, that he was never altogether able to say he is throughwith studying them and that he is ready for writing’ (Schulman, 1922). One review ofDeutsch’s Scrolls (1917), which collected some of his scattered articles, reflected thatthe articles lacked organization. ‘In order to obtain value,’ the reviewer insisted, ‘factsmust be organized . . . Isolate a fact as one isolates a germ in the laboratory, such a factbecomes worthless for historical purposes’ (Leiber, 1917).

Does Deutsch’s index constitute a great unwritten work of history, as some have claimed, or are the cards ultimately useless ‘chips from his workshop’?

Writing4ever_3