2,726 Matching Annotations
  1. Feb 2022
    1. Working with the slip-box, therefore, doesn’t mean storinginformation in there instead of in your head, i.e. not learning. On thecontrary, it facilitates real, long-term learning

      The forms of thinking, writing, and elaboration that go into creating permanent notes for a slip box are natural means of facilitating actual, long-term learning.

    2. he best-researched and mostsuccessful learning method is elaboration. It is very similar to whatwe do when we take smart notes and combine them with others,which is the opposite of mere re-viewing (Stein et al. 1984)Elaboration means nothing other than really thinking about themeaning of what we read, how it could inform different questions andtopics and how it could be combined with other knowledge

      Elaboration is thinking deeply about the meaning of what we've read, how it could inform or answer different questions, and how it can be linked or combined with other knowledge. It is one of the best-researched and most successful learning methods. While it seems to have some subtle differences, it sounds broadly similar to the Feynman technique and is related to the idea of writing questions based on one's notes in the Cornell note taking method.

    3. Bjork, Robert A. 2011. “On the Symbiosis of Remembering,Forgetting and Learning.” In Successful Remembering andSuccessful Forgetting: a Festschrift in Honor of Robert A. Bjork,edited by Aaron S. Benjamin, 1–22. New York, NY: PsychologyPress.
    4. While it is obvious that familiarity is not understanding, we have nochance of knowing whether we understand something or just believewe understand something until we test ourselves in some form.

      The Cornell notes practice of writing questions in the empty left column as a means of testing knowledge can be an effective tool after taking notes to ensure that one has actually learned and understood the broad concepts. They can also be used for spaced repetition purposes as well.

      Valuable though they may be as teaching and learning tools, they don't figure directly into the idea of permanent notes from a zettelkasten perspective.

    5. Also, we shouldn’t underestimate the advantages of writing. In oralpresentations, we easily get away with unfounded claims. We candistract from argumentative gaps with confident gestures or drop acasual “you know what I mean” irrespective of whether we knowwhat we meant. In writing, these manoeuvres are a little too obvious.It is easy to check a statement like: “But that is what I said!” Themost important advantage of writing is that it helps us to confrontourselves when we do not understand something as well as wewould like to believe.

      In modern literate contexts, it is easier to establish doubletalk in oral contexts than it is in written contexts as the written is more easily reviewed for clarity and concreteness. Verbal ticks like "you know what I mean", "it's easy to see/show", and other versions of similar hand-waving arguments that indicate gaps in thinking and arguments are far easier to identify in writing than they are in speech where social pressure may cause the audience to agree without actually following the thread of the argument. Writing certainly allows for timeshiting, but it explicitly also expands time frames for grasping and understanding a full argument in a way not commonly seen in oral settings.

      Note that this may not be the case in primarily oral cultures which may take specific steps to mitigate these patterns.

      Link this to the anthropology example from Scott M. Lacy of the (Malian?) tribe that made group decisions by repeating a statement from the lowest to the highest and back again to ensure understanding and agreement.


      This difference in communication between oral and literate is one which leaders can take advantage of in leading their followers astray. An example is Donald Trump who actively eschewed written communication or even reading in general in favor of oral and highly emotional speech. This generally freed him from the need to make coherent and useful arguments.

    6. Separate and Interlocking Tasks

      Chapter 9 of How to Take Smart Notes looks at some of the psychology research involving attention, multitasking, decision making, willpower, concentration, expertise, planning, to highlight the value of the design and structure of the zettelkasten as a positive tool for helping one to be more productive in their thinking and writing work.

    7. The slip-box provides not only a clear structure to work in, but also forces usto shift our attention consciously as we can complete tasks inreasonable time before moving on to the next one.

      Ahrens provides a quick overview of some research on distraction, attention, and multi-tasking to make the point that:

      The simple structure and design of the zettelkasten forces one's focus and attention on small individual tasks that cumulatively build into better thinking and writing.

      (Summary of Section 9.2)

    8. Theseemingly pragmatic and down-to-earth-sounding advice – to decidewhat to write about before you start writing – is therefore eithermisleading or banal.

      Properly framed note taking methods are themselves a hermeneutic circle for thinking and creating.

    9. Every intellectual endeavour starts from an already existingpreconception, which then can be transformed during further inquiresand can serve as a starting point for following endeavours. Basically,that is what Hans-Georg Gadamer called the hermeneutic circle

      (Gadamer 2004).

      All intellectual endeavors start from a preexisting set of ideas. These can then be built upon to create new concepts which then influence the original starting point and may continue ever expanding with further thought.


      Ahrens argues that most writing advice goes against the idea of the hermeneutic circle and pretends as if the writer is starting with a blank page. This can prefigure some of the stress and difficulty Ernest Hemingway spoke of when he compared writing to "facing the white bull which is paper with no words on it."

      While it can be convenient to think of the idea of tabula rasa, in practice it really doesn't exist. As a result the zettelkasten more readily shows its value in the writing process.

    10. Even ifyou decide never to write a single line of a manuscript, you willimprove your reading, thinking and other intellectual skills just bydoing everything as if nothing counts other than writing.

      Is there evidence that this is true?

    11. We need a reliable and simple external structure tothink in that compensates for the limitations of our brains

      Let's be honest that there are certainly methods for doing all of this within our brains and not needing to rely on external structures. This being said, using writing, literacy, and external structures does allow us to process things faster than before.


      Can we calculate what the level of greater efficiency allows for doing this? What is the overall throughput difference in being able to forget and write? Not rely on communication with others? What does a back of the envelope calculation for this look like?

    12. By adding these links between notes, Luhmann was able to addthe same note to different contexts.

      By crosslinking one's notes in a hypertext-like manner one is able to give them many different contexts. This linking and context shifting is a solid method for helping one's ideas to have sex with each other as a means of generating new ideas.


      Is there a relationship between this idea of context shifting and modality shifting? Are these just examples of building blocks for tools of thought? Are they sifts on different axes? When might they be though of as the same? Compare and contrast this further.

    13. a system is neededto keep track of the ever-increasing pool of information, which allowsone to combine different ideas in an intelligent way with the aim ofgenerating new ideas.

      The point of good tools of thought is to allow one to keep track of the ever increasing flood of information that also allows them to juxtapose or combine ideas in novel and interesting ways. Further, this should provide them with a means of generating and then improving upon their new ideas.

    14. A good structure is something you can trust. It relieves you fromthe burden of remembering and keeping track of everything. If youcan trust the system, you can let go of the attempt to hold everythingtogether in your head and you can start focusing on what isimportant:

      Whether it's for writing, to do lists, or other productivity spaces, a well designed system is something that one can put their absolute trust into. This allows one to free themselves from the burden of tracking and dealing with minutiae so they can get serious work done.

    1. https://reallifemag.com/rank-and-file/

      An interesting example of someone who fell into the trap of thinking that a particular tool or tools would magically make them smarter or help them do a particular line of work without showing any deep evidence of knowing what they were doing. The discussion here flows over a number of mixed note taking domains with no clear thrust for what they were using it pointedly for. The multiple directions and lack of experience likely doomed them to failure here.

    2. This is a widespread mistake among those who think that a sexy note-taking app like Roam will suddenly free their minds, or that they can train themselves into geniuses with enough spaced repetition, or that they can build a zettelkasten capable of thinking original thoughts for them.

      Thinking that the tool will solve a particular problem without knowing what the tool does or how to use it properly will surely set one up for failure. You can use a screwdriver like a hammer, but your results won't be as good as using a hammer and using it properly.

    1. Amid seemingly intractable problems here on Earth, a vision of the future can resemble a life raft, and in the absence of viable alternatives, substanceless promises of space travel, crypto-utopias, and eternal life in the cloud may become the only things to look forward to.

      Is that a bad thing, to have something to look forward to? It implies that new technological inventions are the only way to make progress, but it is undeniably progress. Not everyone will hold this view, and no one should force it upon you. So why are people constantly criticing "techno-utopia" views instead of creating and moving towards their own visions of the future?

    1. What tabs would be particularly useful for is new music discovery, like an album you’ve been wanting to get around to hearing but haven’t yet had the time. I bump into this problem quite a bit. Adding a new album to my “Liked” songs on Spotify shuffles it in with all of my favorite stuff, and decluttering that playlist later is a hassle. Making a new album a playlist almost assures that it’ll be forgotten about. My decrepit, goldfish memory doesn’t have the space to remember to return to a playlist of an album two weeks later. As my colleague Victoria notes, she’s always “forgetting what I’m supposed to listen to next.” You know what would help with that? Tabs.
    1. https://www.obsidianroundup.org/ite-not-second-brain/

      Eleanor Konik describes why second brain is a terrible term for note taking apps.

    2. As much as I automate things, though,none of my thinking is done by a tool.Even with plugins like Graph Analysis, I never feel like I'm being presented with emergent connections — tho this is what the plugin is intended for, and I believe it works for other people.

      At what point could digital tools be said to be thinking? Do they need to be generative? It certainly needs to be on the other side of serendipitously juxtaposing two interesting ideas. One can juxtapose millions of ideas, it's the selection of a tiny subset of these as "better" or more interesting than the others and then building off of that that constitutes this sort of generative thought.

    1. there remains adearth of research on societal-level factors of IPV in theUnited States (Gressard, Swahn, & Tharp, 2015; Spivaket al., 2014).

      topic sentence

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  2. Jan 2022
    1. https://vimeo.com/232545219

      from: Eyeo Conference 2017

      Description

      Robin Sloan at Eyeo 2017 | Writing with the Machine | Language models built with recurrent neural networks are advancing the state of the art on what feels like a weekly basis; off-the-shelf code is capable of astonishing mimicry and composition. What happens, though, when we take those models off the command line and put them into an interactive writing environment? In this talk Robin presents demos of several tools, including one presented here for the first time. He discusses motivations and process, shares some technical tips, proposes a course for the future — and along the way, write at least one short story together with the audience: all of us, and the machine.

      Notes

      Robin created a corpus using If Magazine and Galaxy Magazine from the Internet Archive and used it as a writing tool. He talks about using a few other models for generating text.

      Some of the idea here is reminiscent of the way John McPhee used the 1913 Webster Dictionary for finding words (or le mot juste) for his work, as tangentially suggested in Draft #4 in The New Yorker (2013-04-22)

      Cross reference: https://hypothes.is/a/t2a9_pTQEeuNSDf16lq3qw and https://hypothes.is/a/vUG82pTOEeu6Z99lBsrRrg from https://jsomers.net/blog/dictionary


      Croatian acapella singing: klapa https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sciwtWcfdH4


      Writing using the adjacent possible.


      Corpus building as an art [~37:00]

      Forgetting what one trained their model on and then seeing the unexpected come out of it. This is similar to Luhmann's use of the zettelkasten as a serendipitous writing partner.

      Open questions

      How might we use information theory to do this more easily?

      What does a person or machine's "hand" look like in the long term with these tools?

      Can we use corpus linguistics in reverse for this?

      What sources would you use to train your model?

      References:

      • Andrej Karpathy. 2015. "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks"
      • Samuel R. Bowman, Luke Vilnis, Oriol Vinyals, et al. "Generating sentences from a continuous space." 2015. arXiv: 1511.06349
      • Stanislau Semeniuta, Aliaksei Severyn, and Erhardt Barth. 2017. "A Hybrid Convolutional Variational Autoencoder for Text generation." arXiv:1702.02390
      • Soroush Mehri, et al. 2017. "SampleRNN: An Unconditional End-to-End Neural Audio Generation Model." arXiv:1612.07837 applies neural networks to sound and sound production
    1. “One cannot think without writing.” (Luhmann 1992, 53)

      Similar statements have been made by others:

      I could quote Luhmann on this as well, who thought that "without writing one cannot think," But there is nothing peculiarly "Luhmannian" about this idea. Isaac Asimov is said to have said "Writing to me is simply thinking through my fingers." And, to give one other example, E. B. White (of "Strunk and White" fame) claimed that "writing is one way to go about thinking." In other words, writing is thinking. And since I do almost all my significant writing in ConnectedText these days, it might be called my "writing environment."—Manfred Kuehn

      I think this was Luhmann's full quote:

      Ohne zu schreiben, kann man nicht denken; jedenfalls nicht in anspruchsvoller, anschlussfähiger Weise.

      (Translation) You cannot think without writing; at least not in a sophisticated, connectable way.

      Luhmann’s “you” or "one" in his quote is obviously only a Western cultural referent which erases the existence of oral based cultures which have other ways to do their sophisticated thinking. His ignorant framing on the topic shouldn’t be a shared one. Oral cultures managed to do their thinking through speech and memory.

    1. Even major corporations such as Qantas Airlines, Red Bull, and the Los Angeles Clippers have started putting a Linktree in their Instagram and TikTok bios, Anthony Zaccaria, Linktree’s co-founder and chief commercial officer, told me. These companies all have expensive websites, but he said that link-in-bios have come to represent a space in between social media and websites: a regularly updated page where artists can plug their new music, airlines can promote their new flight routes, and even non-influencers can list out the TV shows they’re currently watching. While a traditional website might remain relatively static over time—an airline like Qantas, for instance, is always going to want its flight-booking tool to be front and center—a link-in-bio is a sort of ever-shifting homepage, the ideal spot for brands and influencers to house updates or tout new products.

      Who says the link in bio needs to go to a company's homepage? Why couldn't it be a custom landing page geared toward the social media site the link is placed on?

      The reasoning here is completely false.

    1. New Developments, Frontline Golf, Sea Views, Frontline Beach and more

      Great Marbella Estates is a group of professionals with years of experience in the real estate market, the important mission we pursue is helping our clients to meet and get their right property.

      Our team has access to all the properties available for sale in the Costa del Sol and direct contact with the new development constructors and developers.

      We are people who understands people, we ourselves has bought properties before and know all the challenges involved first hand.

    1. in Luhmann’s mind theprocess of writing things down enables disciplined thinking in the first place: “Underlying the filing tech-nique is the experience that without writing, there is no thinking.”22
      1. Luhmann, Zettelkasten II, index card no. 9/8g (my translation).

      The act of taking notes helps to focus the mind and one's concentration. This facilitates better and deeper thinking. While he erases oral cultures and those who used mnemonic techniques, Niklas Luhmann said, "without writing, there is no thinking."

    1. The server generating a 401 response MUST send a WWW-Authenticate header field (Section 4.1) containing at least one challenge applicable to the target resource.

      Meaning that 99% of the people use it are using it "wrong" because they're not using it for HTTP authentication and don't send a WWW-Authenticate header field with their 401 response?

      Hmm. That's a tough one. On the one hand, the spec does say they must send it.

      Initial opinion

      But on the other hand, one could argue that that requirement only applies if using 401 for HTTP authentication. And that saying it's wrong to do so (as they claim at https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3297048/403-forbidden-vs-401-unauthorized-http-responses/14713094#14713094 and https://hyp.is/JA45zHotEeybDdM_In4frQ/stackoverflow.com/questions/3297048/403-forbidden-vs-401-unauthorized-http-responses) is having a too strict/narrow/literal interpretation.

      HTTP is meant to be used widely in many very different uses and contexts, most of which do not use this very specific HTTP authentication scheme; my opinion is that they shouldn't be denied from using it, just because they don't have anything useful WWW-Authenticate header field. (Or (which is also fine with me), just put something "emptyish" in the field, like "Unused". Unless that would trigger a Basic auth modal in the browser, in which case we shouldn't, for practical reasons.)

      Why shouldn't we be able to repurpose this same status code for uses that are still authentication, but just not HTTP authentication per se?

      Is it really wrong to repurpose this useful status code for other contexts, like cookie-based app-defined authentication systems?

      I say that it's okay to repurpose/reuse 401 for any authentication system (that uses HTTP as a part of it, even though not using HTTP's own authentication system), as long as we try to maintain the same semantic as originally intended/described here. I think it's okay to use 401 as a response to a XHR request, and then have the client redirect to a login page, which provides a way to authenticate again (reattempt the authentication challenge), analogous to how it works for HTTP authentication.

      Revised opinion

      https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3297048/403-forbidden-vs-401-unauthorized-http-responses/14713094#14713094 has made me change my mind and convinced me that...

      Authentication by schemes outside of (not defined by) RFC7235: Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP/1.1): Authentication should not use HTTP status 401, because 401 Unauthorized is only defined (by current RFCs) by RFC7235: Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP/1.1): Authentication, and has semantics and requirements (such as the requirement that "A server generating a 401 (Unauthorized) response MUST send a WWW-Authenticate header field containing at least one challenge.") that simply don't make sense or cannot be fulfilled if using a non-HTTP authentication scheme.

      403 Forbidden, on the other hand, is defined by the broader HTTP standard, in RFC7231: Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP/1.1): Semantics and Content and RFC7235: Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP/1.1): Authentication.

      In conclusion, if you have your own roll-your-own login process and never use HTTP Authentication, 403 is always the proper response and 401 should never be used.

      Couldn't a custom auth system use WWW-Authenticate header?

      The question was asked:

      Doesn't RFC7235 provide for "roll-your-own" or alternate auth challenges? Why can't my app's login flow present its challenge in the form of a WWW-Authenticate header? Even if a browser doesn't support it, my React app can...

      And I would say sure, if you want (and if the browser doesn't automatically show a Basic auth modal in this case and thwart your plans).

      They might be on to something here with that question!

      But that should probably be the test of whether you can/should use 401: are you actually using WWW-Authenticate header?

      Indeed I found an example where it is used for OAuth2.

    1. Authentication by schemes outside of RFC2617 is not supported in HTTP status codes and are not considered when deciding whether to use 401 or 403.

      What does "are not considered when deciding whether to use 401 or 403" mean exactly? What exactly should not be considered, and what exactly should be considered instead? In other words, how did someone arrive at the conclusion that "if you have your own roll-your-own login process and never use HTTP Authentication, 403 is always the proper response and 401 should never be used."? Why is 403 okay to use for non-HTTP authentication, but not 401?

      Oh, I think I understand the difference now.

      They should have said:

      Authentication by schemes outside of (not defined by) RFC7235: Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP/1.1): Authentication should not use HTTP status 401, because 401 Unauthorized is only defined (by current RFCs) by RFC7235: Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP/1.1): Authentication, and has semantics and requirements (such as the requirement that "A server generating a 401 (Unauthorized) response MUST send a WWW-Authenticate header field containing at least one challenge.") that simply don't make sense or cannot be fulfilled if using a non-HTTP authentication scheme.

      403 Forbidden, on the other hand, is defined by the broader HTTP standard, in RFC7231: Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP/1.1): Semantics and Content and RFC7235: Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP/1.1): Authentication.

      In conclusion, if you have your own roll-your-own login process and never use HTTP Authentication, 403 is always the proper response and 401 should never be used.

      See also my comments in https://hyp.is/p1iCnnowEeyUPl9PxO8BuQ/www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7235

    2. Meaning if you have your own roll-your-own login process and never use HTTP Authentication, 403 is always the proper response and 401 should never be used.
    3. If HTTP authentication is not in use and the service has a cookie-based authentication scheme as is the norm nowadays, then a 403 or a 404 should be returned.
    1. If we follow the caper star clockwise, starting with “checklist” and signifying just the facts as they are presented, we have ready at hand a way to begin rethinking the types of inquiry proper to certain areas of thought [FIGURE 7]. On the first of the five points then, “checklist,” let us hang journalism, objective accounts, and the raw data of scientific research. On the second, concerning “characters” and their relations, let us place psychology, sociology, anthropology, and politics. The third, at the bottom left, concerning “words,” let us imagine linguistics, philology, rhetoric, and dialectic. The fourth point, “questions,” accommodates philosophy broadly speaking, and the generating of topics and concepts, as well as modes of inquiry, whether inductive or deductive, proper to law and medical research. And finally, the top point, concerning “U” (a tag which stands for “you” as well as the first letter of “universal”), let us place ethics, religion, theology, and practices conducive to reflection and self realization—any means of understanding your place in the world and your stake in the matter under consideration. As the crossing lines of the five-pointed star indicate, all points are interrelated. As for the center, whatever one wants to place there can be illuminated by the five categories broadly conceived as just outlined.
    2. This five-fold approach covers the most fundamental and time-honored categories of thought. Corresponding to the five points on the caper star, they are: (1) the rational process of cause and effect (“x” happened which led to “y” and then “z”); (2) the often irrational nature of human interactions (as Socrates put it: “knowing the better, but doing the worse”); (3) taking stock of the extent to which language is a medium for conveying both sense and transmitting the values of a given culture, (4) the various faces of interrogation (the truism that every news-story must consider and seek to answer: “who? what? where? when? how? and, if possible, why”); and (5) the self-conscious reflection on one’s own point of view (“what we believe to be true is what keeps us from discovering the truth”).
    3. Since spirited leaps of imagination are required for these interactive projects conducing to the gathering of information that can help students make connections they might not otherwise consider, they have been dubbed “capers.”

      Engel calls his system the Caper Star because the "spirited leaps of imagination" are required to help the student on their quest.

    1. One of these tools was the so-called Indice Categorico designed by Emanu-ele Tesauro. Tesauro displayed it as a ‘secret truly secret’ (‘secreto veramente secreto’), that is, as a truly valuable invention. According to Tesauro,72 the matter was to discover topics that were hidden behind several different cat-egories and to compare them to each other (‘penetrar gli obietti altamente ap-piattati sotto diverse Categorie, e di riscontrarli tra loro’) to discover analogies and similarities that would have otherwise been overlooked if everything had been preserved under its own category (‘scovare analogie e somiglianze che sarebbero passate inosservate se ogni cosa fosse rimasta classificata sotto la propria Categoria’). The cognitive device used to achieve this purpose was the metaphor. By listing topics in a jumbled manner under a certain category ac-cording to some similarity in meaning among them, it was possible to produce unexpected results. In short, it was possible to discover something new.

      72 Emanuele Tesauro, Il Cannocchiale aristotelico, 5th ed. (Venice, 1669), 83. On this inven-tion, see also Umberto Eco, Dall’albero al labirinto. Studi storici sul segno e l’interpretazione (Milan, 2007), 45–7.

      Emanuele Tesaurio's Indice Categorico was a tool for thought which aimed to discover new information by using metaphors and analogies with respect to the categories or taxonomies so as to draw links between them.

    2. Here, the card index func-tions as a ‘thinking machine’,67 and becomes the best communication partner for learned men.68

      From a computer science perspective, isn't the index card functioning like an external memory, albeit one with somewhat pre-arranged linked paths? It's the movement through the machine's various paths that is doing the "thinking". Or the user's (active) choices that create the paths creates the impression of thinking.

      Perhaps it's the pre-arranged links where the thinking has already happened (based on "work" put into the system) and then traversing the paths gives the appearance of "new" thinking?

      How does this relate to other systems which can be thought of as thinking from a complexity perspective? Bacteria perhaps? Groups of cells acting in concert? Groups of people acting in concert? Cells seeing out food using random walks? etc?

      From this perspective, how can we break out the constituent parts of thought and thinking? Consciousness? With enough nodes and edges and choices of paths between them (or a "correct" subset of paths) could anything look like thinking or computing?

    1. Wendat society was not ‘economically egalitarian’ in that sense.However, there was a difference between what we’d considereconomic resources – like land, which was owned by families,worked by women, and whose products were largely disposed of bywomen’s collectives – and the kind of ‘wealth’ being referred to here,such as wampum (a word applied to strings and belts of beads,manufactured from the shells of Long Island’s quahog clam) or othertreasures, which largely existed for political purposes.

      Example in literature of wampum being described as wealth existing for political purposes.

    1. https://www.goedel.io/p/tools-for-thought-but-not-for-search

      Searching for two ingredients in an effort to find a recipe that will allow their use should be de rigueur in a personal knowledge manager, sadly it doesn't appear to be the case.


      This sort of simple search not working in these tools is just silly.

      They should be able to search across blocks, pages, and even provide graph views to help in this process. Where are all the overlaps of these words within one's database?

    1. Because there’s no need for context/app switching.

      Rebuilding one's earlier context and switching between apps are tremendous sinks of time and energy when writing, thinking, and creating.

      It's better to get as much done as possible in the present so as not to need to do all the work over again later.

    1. Markoff, a long-time chronicler of computing, sees Engelbart as one pole in a decades-long competition "between artificial intelligence and intelligence augmentation -- A.I. versus I.A."

      There is an interesting difference between artificial intelligence and intelligence automation. Index cards were already doing the second by the early 1940s.

    1. The ticket which tracks issues using Gmail with Thunderbird (Bug 402793)

      Notice how it was created >= 14 years ago and is still open.

      Notice how they just keep updating it by adding "Depends on:" "No longer depends on:" (cleaner than adding the details of those related/sub issues directly here)

    1. He breaks off, looking anxious. “But I didn’t tell their stories, because I thought they were a better way of persuading people of an argument. It’s a book of stories about people, because I think stories are a fundamentally better way of thinking about the world.”

      Stories are an important way of thinking about and explaining the world. They may also be a potential brain hack.

      Note their use here just after Hari has mentioned that connecting with people (often by way of their stories) is a basic human condition and need. Also note that Hari was previously a columnist with a slant, has he realized that this is the better way to convince people of plausible sounding things? Particularly without source, attribution, research, and potentially cherry picking data.

      Are we blinding ourselves by telling stories? Particularly without comparison or actual testing?

      I saw a book about this topic months ago and need to find it and dig it up.

  3. Dec 2021
    1. It is impossible to think without writing; at least it is impossible in any sophisticated or networked (anschlußfähig) fashion.

      The sentiment that it is impossible to think without writing is patently wrong. While it's an excellent tool, it takes an overly textual perspective and completely ignores the value of orality an memory in prehistory.

      Modern culture has lost so many of our valuable cultural resources that we have completely forgotten that they even existed.

      Oral cultures certainly had networked thought, Luhmann and others simply can't imagine how it may have worked. We're also blinded by the imagined size of societies in pre-agricultural contexts. The size and scope of cities and city networks makes the history of writing have an outsized appearance.

      Further, we don't have solid records of these older netowrks, a major drawback of oral cultures which aren't properly maintained, but this doesn't mean that they didn not exist.

    1. Web3 promises rewards — maybe even a kind of justice — for “users”, but Ethereum doesn’t know anything about users, only wallets. One user can control many wallets; one bot can con­trol many wallets; Ethereum can’t tell the difference, doesn’t par­tic­u­larly care. Therefore, Web3’s gov­er­nance tools are appro­pri­ate for decision-making processes that approx­i­mate those of an LLC, but not for anything truly democratic, which is to say, any­thing that respects the uniform, unearned — unearned!—value of per­son­hood.
    1. When we simply guess as to whathumans in other times and places might be up to, we almostinvariably make guesses that are far less interesting, far less quirky– in a word, far less human than what was likely going on.

      Definitely worth keeping in mind, even for my own work. Providing an evidential structure for claims will be paramount.

      Is there a well-named cognitive bias for the human tendency to see everything as nails when one has a hammer in their hand?

    2. Women’s gambling: women in many indigenous NorthAmerican societies were inveterate gamblers; the women ofadjacent villages would often meet to play dice or a gameplayed with a bowl and plum stone, and would typically bet theirshell beads or other objects of personal adornment as thestakes. One archaeologist versed in the ethnographic literature,Warren DeBoer, estimates that many of the shells and otherexotica discovered in sites halfway across the continent had gotthere by being endlessly wagered, and lost, in inter-villagegames of this sort, over very long periods of time.36
      1. DeBoer 2001

      Warren R DeBoer. 2001. ‘Of dice and women: gambling and exchange in Native North America.’ Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 8 (3): 215–68.

      Might it be possible that these women were actually gambling information relating to their "gathering" or other cultural practices? By playing games with each other and with nearby groups of people, they would have been regularly practicing their knowledge through repetition.

      How might we provide evidence for this? Read the DeBoer reference for potential clues.

    3. Dreams or vision quests: among Iroquoian-speaking peoplesin the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it was consideredextremely important literally to realize one’s dreams. ManyEuropean observers marvelled at how Indians would be willingto travel for days to bring back some object, trophy, crystal oreven an animal like a dog that they had dreamed of acquiring.Anyone who dreamed about a neighbour or relative’spossession (a kettle, ornament, mask and so on) couldnormally demand it; as a result, such objects would oftengradually travel some way from town to town. On the GreatPlains, decisions to travel long distances in search of rare orexotic items could form part of vision quests.34
      1. On ‘dream economies’ among the Iroquois see Graeber 2001: 145–9. David Graeber. 2001. Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams. New York: Palgrave.

      These dreams and vision quests sound suspiciously familiar to Australian indigenous peoples' "dreaming" and could be incredibly similar to much larger and longer songlines in North American cultures.

    4. Most contemporaryarchaeologists are well aware of this literature, but tend to getcaught up in debates over the difference between ‘trade’ and‘gift exchange’, while assuming that the ultimate point of both isto enhance somebody’s status, either by profit, or by prestige,or both. Most will also acknowledge that there is somethinginherently valuable, even cosmologically significant, in thephenomenon of travel, the experience of remote places or theacquisition of exotic materials; but in the last resort, much ofthis too seems to come down to questions of status or prestige,as if no other possible motivation might exist for peopleinteracting over long distances; for some further discussion ofthe issues see Wengrow 2010b.

      David Wengrow 2010b. ‘The voyages of Europa: ritual and trade in the Eastern Mediterranean, c.2300–1850 .’ In William A. Parkinson and Michael L. Galaty (eds), Archaic State Interaction: The Eastern Mediterranean in the Bronze Age. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press, pp. 141–60.

      Read this for potential evidence for the mnemonic devices for information trade theory.

    5. But we often find such regional networks developinglargely for the sake of creating friendly mutual relations, or having anexcuse to visit one another from time to time;33 and there are plentyof other possibilities that in no way resemble ‘trade’.

      There is certainly social lubrication of visiting people from time to time which can help and advance societies, but this regular visiting can also be seen as a means of reinforcing one's oral cultural history through spaced repetition.

      It can be seen as "trade" but in a way that anthropologists have generally ignored for lack of imagination for what may have been actually happening.

    6. The founding text of twentieth-century ethnography, BronisławMalinowski’s 1922 Argonauts of the Western Pacific, describes howin the ‘kula chain’ of the Massim Islands off Papua New Guinea, menwould undertake daring expeditions across dangerous seas inoutrigger canoes, just in order to exchange precious heirloom arm-shells and necklaces for each other (each of the most importantones has its own name, and history of former owners) – only to holdit briefly, then pass it on again to a different expedition from anotherisland. Heirloom treasures circle the island chain eternally, crossing

      hundreds of miles of ocean, arm-shells and necklaces in opposite directions. To an outsider, it seems senseless. To the men of the Massim it was the ultimate adventure, and nothing could be more important than to spread one’s name, in this fashion, to places one had never seen.

      Not to negate the underlying mechanism discussed here, but there's also a high likelihood that this "trade" was in information attached to these objects being used as mnemonic devices.

      Read further into the anthropology of these items, their names and histories.

    1. there's an exception ah yes indeed there is an exception to that which is largely 00:08:28 when you're talking to someone else so in conversation and in dialogue you're actually can maintain consciousness for very long periods of time well which is why you need to imagine you're talking 00:08:41 to someone else to really be able to think out a problem

      Humans in general have a seven second window of self-consciousness. (What is the reference for this? Double check it.) The exception is when one is in conversation with someone else, and then people have much longer spans of self-consciousness.

      I'm left to wonder if this is a useful fact for writing in the margins in books or into one's notebook, commonplace book, or zettelkasten? By having a conversation with yourself, or more specifically with the imaginary author you're annotating or if you prefer to frame it as a conversation with your zettelkasten, one expands their self-consciousness for much longer periods of time? What benefit does this have for the individual? What benefit for humanity in aggregate?

      Is it this fact or just coincidence that much early philosophy was done as dialectic?

      From an orality perspective, this makes it much more useful to talk to one's surroundings or objects like rocks. Did mnemonic techniques help give rise to our ability to be more self-conscious as a species? Is it like a muscle that we've been slowly and evolutionarily exercising for 250,000 years?

    1. The “agricultural revolution,” so the mainstream argument goes, was a double-edged sword – it triggered the big leap in human civilisation which brought us writing, culture, history all things that make humans “special;” but it also led to hierarchy, organised power, bureaucracy, and inequality. Graeber and Wengrow had been suspicious about this narrative for a long time – they did not believe in this evolutionary, progressive, and deterministic parable.

      Focusing on literacy as one of the features that makes humanity special is a major flaw. In fact, it is likely our earlier orality and the attendant portions that come with that which made us unique within the animal kingdom. While transmission of knowledge and information may be quicker with literacy and even with computer technology, our ability to cope with it stems first from our orality.

    1. When the user stores his thoughts in his own filing cabinet, these thoughts are no longer his own but those of his filing cabinet.

      The definition of ownership here is at odds. The person invented the thought, they're just storing it somewhere else that isn't their own brain. This doesn't release ownership necessarily.

    1. Cryospheric and hydrological changes in combination with socioeconomic changes are threatening downstream water security (Drenkhan et al., 2019; IPCC, 2019). Glacial melting impacts river discharge and the availability of water in areas downstream and change in runoff pattern of rivers draining from the glaciated catchments (Table 4). Hydroelectric power generation depends completely on water availability, and any variability in flow pattern of rivers can have far-reaching consequences for energy security of the country. Available hydrological simulations indicate reduced rainfall and shrinkage of glacier, thereby leading to shortage of water supply for power generation and irrigation particularly in highly glaciated basins (Gautam et al., 2013). The increasing drought frequency combined with other environmental degradation has already affected the livelihoods particularly of smallholder farmers.

      YEs!

    1. The story is linear (the stages are followed in order, with no going back), uniform (they are followed the same way everywhere), progressive (the stages are “stages” in the first place, leading from lower to higher, more primitive to more sophisticated), deterministic (development is driven by technology, not human choice), and teleological (the process culminates in us).

      This might be the case if the tools drove the people, but isn't it more likely the way in which different people use the tools?

      Which direction gives rise to more complexity?

  4. worrydream.com worrydream.com
    1. Bret Victor: email (9/3/04) Interface matters to me more than anything else, and it always has. I just never realized that. I've spent a lot of time over the years desperately trying to think of a "thing" to change the world. I now know why the search was fruitless -- things don't change the world. People change the world by using things. The focus must be on the "using", not the "thing". Now that I'm looking through the right end of the binoculars, I can see a lot more clearly, and there are projects and possibilities that genuinely interest me deeply.

      Specifically highlighting that the "focus must be on the 'using', not the 'thing'".

      This quote is very reminiscent of John M. Culkin's quote (often misattributed to McLuhan) "We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us."

      <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>Linus Lee</span> in Towards a research community for better thinking tools | thesephist.com (<time class='dt-published'>12/01/2021 08:23:07</time>)</cite></small>

    1. https://thesephist.com/

      <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'> Frank McPherson</span> in Frankly... (<time class='dt-published'>12/03/2021 12:49:46</time>)</cite></small>

    1. appropriate metaphors open our eyes to more than denotation: they produce a surplus of meaning that stimulates thought.
    2. What differs here from other data storage (as in the medium of the codex book) is a simple and obvious principle: information is available on separate, uniform, and mobile carriers and can be further arranged and processed according to strict systems of order.

      The primary value of the card catalogue and index cards as tools for thought is that it is a self-contained, uniform and mobile carrier that can be arranged and processed based on strict systems of order. Books have many of these properties, but the information isn't as atomic or as easily re-ordered.

    1. 10 Cultivating Change for Inclusive Practice: Creating a Community of Learners By Lisa Mauro-Bracken, Head of Department Health and Well-being; School of Allied Health and Community This case study illustrates an innovative, department-wide approach to learning and professional development of staff. Higher Education encounters increasing numbers of students from diverse linguistic, cultural and ethnic backgrounds requiring personalised learning (V1; V2). To cultivate a ‘new’ inclusive culture within the Department of Health and Well-being, I organised a workshop introducing Universal Design for Learning (UDL) as part of a team away day (K5). UDL is a framework to improve and optimize teaching and learning for all people based on scientific insights into how humans learn (CAST, 2019). The UDL framework supports inclusive practice and relies on multiple means of: ‘engagement,’ ‘representation’ and ‘action and expression.’ In other words, a focus on personalised learning and meaningful choice to ensure all students can access the curriculum in a way that develops their strengths. To embed this approach within the department, I delivered workshops on implementing University of Worcester’s Inclusive Assessment Policy. This was implemented using Technology Enhanced Learning and Blackboard in an inclusive way and auditing module resources using de Montfort University’s UDL self-assessment checklist. This proved to be an effective reflective tool to further inform learning, teaching and assessment (Bracken, 2019; Moriarty and Scarffe, 2019). The values underpinning our department are student-focused and this was reflected in our approach of implementing new ideas, as it required staff and student involvement and regular consultation with students about inclusive design for learning. Staff enthusiasm for the innovative approach was balanced against accepting a response of hesitancy and fear of change (Dasborough, Lamb and Suseno, 2015). However, one colleague stated ‘UDL allows me... [to] reflect, listen, change my pedagogical approach...getting input from colleagues and feel safe[ty] in questioning

      Current practice in UK on UDL- updated references and useful publication linked to HEA accreditation

  5. Nov 2021
    1. Suddenly we’d come full circle. The fastest way to launch programs was to type their name into a box, only a box that looked a bit more stylish than the terminal of old.
    1. In Bound to Read, Jeffrey Todd Knight excavates this culture of compilation—of binding and mixing texts, authors, and genres into single volumes—and sheds light on a practice that not only was pervasive but also defined the period's very ways of writing and thinking.
    1. Finally, I think Actions are great for animations, because you will definitely need to apply the same logic to many different elements. One of my favorite examples are FLIP animations, where a change in DOM position can be animated. For example shuffling a list of items. I will not dive deep into the topic in this article: I've written about some techniques in this article about FLIP animations in React and in this article about how to create spring animations with Web Animation API. Although they are not about Svelte, at the end of the day it all boils down to manipulating the HTML element directly. And Svelte Actions are a great place to do it.
    1. rofessional development was designed using the Adaptation of Blended Learning framework to meet the new requirements of online schooling. Twenty-six teachers participated in the intervention of professional development, spanning six months.

      rofessional development was designed using the Adaptation of Blended Learning framework to meet the new requirements of online schooling. Twenty-six teachers participated in the intervention of professional development, spanning six months.

    1. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1459547762517688327.html

      Anthony Baker experimenting with ideas from Necromant and Eleanor Konik to cross link digital notes with physical paper notes.

      I've thought about doing something similar to this with my physical notebooks in the past, though hadn't done block level linking as a means of potentially pulling in and linking pieces in the future.

      Often for more important linked things, I'll simply import the physical version into my digital copy at the time of first use/reference, but this could be interesting for large bodies of notes which aren't digital.

    1. A fluorescence of note taking tools

      What is missing in this train of thought is search. The real challenge is recalling of information easily, whether that is traditional search or something more AI-ish that can uncover connections between items that I don't see myself. What I want is a tool that can search across all my repositories, and that requires either APIs for communication or standard data storage formats. I prefer APis.

    1. I know I know with the Paris is it is a stone. And people used to write on stone in Egypt. And that’s where they would create their hieroglyphic alphabet.

    2. The job of the scribe is write down anything and everything that The Priest clergyman and king I had to say. They were basically secretaries.

    1. If and when you need some kind of behaviour that waits for things, wait_until is a giant big sledgehammer. There are more fine grained, sophisticated tools built into Capybara, and I want you to learn about them, because those are some of the best features of the library. And when the built in tools aren’t enough, there are more sophisticated tools available than that clunky hammer. So hopefully the removal of wait_until encourages you to write better tests.
    2. so let me explain why this decision was reached and what your options are for the future.
    3. wait_until was removed for several reasons:
    1. The Center for Hellenic Studies at Harvard University publishes the Homer Multitext, a collaborative research project that presents images and texts of papyri, Byzantine manuscripts, and scholarship relating to the transmission of the Homeric texts through time.
    1. "The Zettelkasten takes more of my time than the writing of books." —Niklas Luhmann (via vimeo.com/173128404)

      Some people complain about the amount of time that working in their zettelkasten or notes may take, and it may take a while, but it is exactly the actual work of creation that takes the longest. The rest of the process is just the copying over and editing.

  6. Oct 2021
    1. sometimes you de- yelop a whole passage, not with the intention of completing it, but because it comes of itself and because inspiration is like grace, which passes by and does not come back.

      So very few modern sources describe annotation or note taking in these terms.

      I find often in my annotations, the most recent one just above is such a one, where I start with a tiny kernel of an idea and then my brain begins warming up and I put down some additional thoughts. These can sometimes build and turn into multiple sentences or paragraphs, other times they sit and need further work. But either way, with some work they may turn into something altogether different than what the original author intended or discussed.

      These are the things I want to keep, expand upon, and integrate into larger works or juxtapose with other broader ideas and themes in the things I am writing about.

      Sadly, we're just not teaching students or writers these tidbits or habits anymore.

      Sönke Ahrens mentions this idea in his book about Smart Notes. When one is asked to write an essay or a paper it is immensely difficult to have a perch on which to begin. But if one has been taking notes about their reading which is of direct interest to them and which can be highly personal, then it is incredibly easy to have a starting block against which to push to begin what can be either a short sprint or a terrific marathon.

      This pattern can be seen by many bloggers who surf a bit of the web, read what others have written, and use those ideas and spaces as a place to write or create their own comments.

      Certainly this can involve some work, but it's always nicer when the muses visit and the words begin to flow.

      I've now written so much here in this annotation that this note here, is another example of this phenomenon.

      With some hope, by moving this annotation into my commonplace book (or if you prefer the words notebook, blog, zettelkasten, digital garden, wiki, etc.) I will have it to reflect and expand upon later, but it'll also be a significant piece of text which I might move into a longer essay and edit a bit to make a piece of my own.

      With luck, I may be able to remedy some of the modern note taking treatises and restore some of what we've lost from older traditions to reframe them in an more logical light for modern students.

      I recall being lucky enough to work around teachers insisting I use note cards and references in my sixth grade classes, but it was never explained to me exactly what this exercise was meant to engender. It was as if they were providing the ingredients for a recipe, but had somehow managed to leave off the narrative about what to do with those ingredients, how things were supposed to be washed, handled, prepared, mixed, chopped, etc. I always felt that I was baking blind with no directions as to temperature or time. Fortunately my memory for reading on shorter time scales was better than my peers and it was only that which saved my dishes from ruin.

      I've come to see note taking as beginning expanded conversations with the text on the page and the other texts in my notebooks. Annotations in the the margins slowly build to become something else of my own making.

      We might compare this with the more recent movement of social annotation in the digital pedagogy space. This serves a related master, but seems a bit more tangent to it. The goal of social annotation seems to be to help engage students in their texts as a group. Reading for many of these students may be more foreign than it is to me and many other academics who make trade with it. Thus social annotation helps turn that reading into a conversation between peers and their text. By engaging with the text and each other, they get something more out of it than they might have if left to their own devices. The piece I feel is missing here is the modeling of the next several steps to the broader commonplacing tradition. Once a student has begun the path of allowing their ideas to have sex with the ideas they find on the page or with their colleagues, what do they do next? Are they being taught to revisit their notes and ideas? Sift them? Expand upon them. Place them in a storehouse of their best materials where they can later be used to write those longer essays, chapters, or books which may benefit them later?

      How might we build these next pieces into these curricula of social annotation to continue building on these ideas and principles?

    1. For academics, annotation is also essential to scholarly communication and knowledge production. With Annotation, we eagerly accepted a social and scholarly responsibility to spark, curate, and facilitate discussion about annotation.

      The tools for thought crowd should all be reading Kalir and Garcia's book Annotation.

    1. The research is addressed to students of Hotel and Tourism Management programme at Fundación Universitaria para el Desarrollo Humano - UNINPAHU, who currently study three levels of English (which are given to all the study programmes of the university and that provides the contents of a general English class for all the students—regardless the major they are taking).

      A

    1. Students should already know the meaning of these expressions from pre-reading activity when we went through all questions in questionnaire together. If they do not remember it I do not translate them before. It will be too easy so in that occasion they are supposed to guess the right meaning on their own.

      ESP

    1. What I'm interested in is doing this with visual artefacts as source material. What does visual pkm look like? Journaling, scrapbooking, collecting and the like. The most obvious tool is the sketchbook. How does a sketchbook work?

      It builds on many of these traditions, but there is a rather sizeable movement in the physical world as well as lots online of sketchnotes which might fit the bill for you Roy.

      The canonical book/textbook for the space seems to be Sketchnote Handbook, The: the illustrated guide to visual note taking by Mike Rohde.

      For a solid overview of the idea in about 30 minutes, I found this to be a useful video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evLCAYlx4Kw

    1. Design for Resilience is not a podcast just for professional designers. This a podcast for human beings, who may have forgotten that they are creative. We build our personal resilience by first remembering that we are all designers.

      I just published my first podcast episode.

  7. builderscollective.com builderscollective.com
    1. A podcast about resilience inspired Caleb Chan to compose this theme music, incorporating a heartbeat and a world music influence.

      Design for Resilience

      Exploring how we imagine, design, and build the future together.

    1. Victor Papanek’s Design Problem, 1975.

      The Design Problem

      Three diagrams will explain the lack of social engagement in design. If (in Figure 1) we equate the triangle with a design problem, we readily see that industry and its designers are concerned only with the tiny top portion, without addressing themselves to real needs.

      Figure 1: The Design Problem

      (Design for the Real World, 2019. Page 57.)

      The other two figures merely change the caption for the figure.

      • Figure 1: The Design Problem
      • Figure 2: A Country
      • Figure 3: The World
    1. Jamstack

      The legacy version of the Run for Water site designed by Stephen Bau. Featured on Behance.

      This version is built with Jamstack, using Harp and DatoCMS.

      A similar approach could be used for the Co-Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth.

      A Modest Proposal

      Since the Buckminster Fuller Institute is using Airtable, it would be possible to follow the CSS-Tricks article on Going Jamstack with React, Serverless, and Airtable.

    1. Website by Stephen Bau

      I used a UIkit theme (Trek) for the redesign of the Run for Water site. I transitioned away from Jamstack, because the organization is centred around volunteers, and it was important to empower them to easily make changes to the marketing front end of their organization.

      The WordPress theme has a beautiful interface for managing content. However, it goes against the philosophy of COPE, recommended by Karen McGrane in her presentations on Content in a Zombie Apocalypse.

    1. In ecology, edge effects are changes in population or community structures that occur at the boundary of two or more habitats.[1] Areas with small habitat fragments exhibit especially pronounced edge effects that may extend throughout the range. As the edge effects increase, the boundary habitat allows for greater biodiversity.

      Edge Effects

      It was in the Design Science Studio that I learned about edge effects.

      Yesterday, I was thinking about how my life embodies the concept of edge effects. That same day, a book was delivered to our door, Design for the Real World by Victor Papanek.

      Today, I was reading these words:

      Design for the Real World

      Design for Survival and Survival through Design: A Summation

      Integrated, comprehensive, anticipatory design is the act of planning and shaping carried on across the various disciplines, an act continuously carried on at interfaces between them.

      Victor Papanek goes on to say:

      It is at the border of different techniques or disciplines that most new discoveries are made and most action is inaugurated. It is when two differing areas of knowledge are brought into contact with one another that… a new science may come into being.

      (Page 323)


      Exiles and Emigrés

      The Bauhaus spread its ideas because it existed at the boundaries, the avant-garde, the edges of what was thought to be possible, especially as a socialist utopian idea found its way to a capitalist industrial-military complex, where the concept of modernism was co-opted and colonized by globalizing economic forces beyond the control of the individual. Design was the virus that propagated around the world through the vehicle of corporate globalization.

      That same design ethic is infecting corporations with a conscience, with empathy, with a process that begins with listening to people. Design is the virus that can spread the values of unconditional love throughout the body of neoliberal capitalism.

    1. Design for the Real World

      You have to make up your mind either to make sense or to make money, if you want to be a designer.

      — R. Buckminster Fuller

      (Page 86)

    2. Design for the Real World

      by Victor Papanek

      Papanek on the Bauhaus

      Many of the “sane design” or “design reform” movements of the time, such as those engendered by the writings and teachings of William Morris in England and Elbert Hubbard in the United States, were rooted in a sort of Luddite antimachine philosophy. By contrast Frank Llloyd Wright said as early as 1894 that “the machine is here to stay” and that the designer should “use this normal tool of civilization to best advantage instead of prostituting it as he has hitherto done in reproducing with murderous ubiquity forms born of other times and other conditions which it can only serve to destroy.” Yet designers of the last century were either perpetrators of voluptuous Victorian-Baroque or members of an artsy-craftsy clique who were dismayed by machine technology. The work of the Kunstgewerbeschule in Austria and the German Werkbund anticipated things to come, but it was not until Walter Gropius founded the German Bauhaus in 1919 that an uneasy marriage between art and machine was achieved.

      No design school in history had greater influence in shaping taste and design than the Bauhaus. It was the first school to consider design a vital part of the production process rather than “applied art” or “industrial arts.” It became the first international forum on design because it drew its faculty and students from all over the world, and its influence traveled as these people later founded design offices and schools in many countries. Almost every major design school in the United States today still uses the basic foundation course developed by the Bauhaus. It made good sense in 1919 to let a German 19-year-old experiment with drill press and circular saw, welding torch and lathe, so that he might “experience the interaction between tool and material.” Today the same method is an anachronism, for an American teenager has spent much of his life in a machine-dominated society (and cumulatively probably a great deal of time lying under various automobiles, souping them up). For a student whose American design school slavishly imitates teaching patterns developed by the Bauhaus, computer sciences and electronics and plastics technology and cybernetics and bionics simply do not exist. The courses the Bauhaus developed were excellent for their time and place (telesis), but American schools following this pattern in the eighties are perpetuating design infantilism.

      The Bauhaus was in a sense a nonadaptive mutation in design, for the genes contributing to its convergence characteristics were badly chosen. In boldface type, it announced its manifesto: “Architects, sculptors, painters, we must all turn to the crafts.… Let us create a new guild of craftsmen!” The heavy emphasis on interaction between crafts, art, and design turned out to be a blind alley. The inherent nihilism of the pictorial arts of the post-World War I period had little to contribute that would be useful to the average, or even to the discriminating, consumer. The paintings of Kandinsky, Klee, Feininger, et al., on the other hand, had no connection whatsoever with the anemic elegance some designers imposed on products.

      (Pages 30-31)

    1. Victor Papanek’s book includes an introduction written by R. Buckminster Fuller, Carbondale, Illinois. (Sadly, the Thames & Hudson 2019 Third Edition does not include this introduction. Monoskop has preserved this text as a PDF file of images. I have transcribed a portion here.)

    1. Synthesis is about describing a clear idea that can be represented in a (atomic) succinct note, with supporting evidence as applicable.

      At the moment, I guess I’m currently doing this in Drafts, but without any real rigour. What I’ve intended to do is host my atomic notes in iThoughts. But maybe this is part of my system that needs closer attention. Maybe there’s legitimate cause for another tool in the stack? Or maybe this just calls for another workspace? I think this is the space I wanted Project Meta to fill…

    1. rguments for a lot of prior instrumentation.

      If research specificity exists, prep accordingly Focused interview schedules keep focus tight Comparative case studies? Use the same instrumentation (helps build theory) Validated instruments keep researcher bias out.

    2. Arguments for little prior instrumentation.

      too much structure can blind researcher (risk, overlook/misrepresent) Prior prep is usually without a real context ( Single case...

    3. ult to provide workable guidelines here.

      In Grounded Study - decide where to start and what tools will be used to collect information.

    1. Time Well Spent

      Tristan Harris’ first big idea for the tech industry, the Time Well Spent movement, was an outsized success.

    2. He gave a TED talk about how tech companies could protect us from distractions, and formed the Center for Humane Technology with some friends to lobby them to do better.
  8. Sep 2021
    1. Best demonstration: glue PVC inside an ABS hub or vice-versa. Cut through the two with a mitre saw and make a nice, clean cut. Look at all the voids where the plastics didn't glue together.
    1. By power, I mean the ability to do things to people without their consent or even awareness.

      Avoid using a patronizing tone!

    1. https://via.hypothes.is/https://finiteeyes.net/pedagogy/extending-the-mind/

      A well written review of Annie Murphy Paul's The Extended Mind. Matthew Cheney has distilled a lot out of the book from his notes with particular application to improving pedagogy.

      I definitely want to read this with relation to not only using it to improve teaching, but with respect to mnemotechniques and the methods oral and indigenous societies may have either had things right or wrong and what Western culture may have lost as a result. I'm also particularly interested in it for its applications to the use of commonplace books and zettelkasten as methods of extending the mind and tools for thought.

    2. How to Use These Ideas

      I love that he's not only externalized his thoughts from the book as annotations/notes and then synthesized them into a longer essay, but he's further expanded and externalized them by thinking about how to put them to use!

    3. Paul likes to quote the philosopher who first came up with the idea of the extended mind, Andy Clark, when he says that humans are “intrinsically loopy creatures”.
    1. Analytics modules that run in the background, monitor user interaction, and send the data to a server.
    2. Many jQuery plugins attach themselves to the global jQuery object.
    3. A polyfill for example, might not do anything, because it finds that the feature that it enables is already supported by the browser.
    4. A module with side-effects is one that changes the scope in other ways then returning something, and it's effects are not always predictable, and can be affected by outside forces (non pure function).
  9. developer.mozilla.org developer.mozilla.org
    1. Import a module for its side effects only Import an entire module for side effects only, without importing anything. This runs the module's global code, but doesn't actually import any values.
    1. have a philosophy that if someone can provide any more meaningful information to a problem even if it indirectly solves the problem, I think that should also be rewarded.
    2. The question is similar but its in a Rails context. The solutions would answer my question, but I'm almost certain that he could probably leverage Arel to solve his problem. The question I posted was designed purely as a Ruby question so that it was easier to search for. You might want to suggest an edit of the title of his question because it didn't show up when I searched for a solution to my problem.
  10. Aug 2021
    1. COGNITIVE CONSEQUENCES OF FORCED COMPLIANCE

      The title of the article immediately made me think of the world we are living in now. For example it is becoming more and more evident that the country has mixed opinions on the vaccine. The government, state agencies and other public entities are requiring proof of a vaccine to even enter the premises. Some companies are offering incentives across the country to incentivize the vaccine by offering free products and discounts. To an extent from a medical perspective you want everyone as healthy as possible, but from a freedom perspective it is on the verge of violating an individual's freedom of choice through forced compliance.

  11. developer.mozilla.org developer.mozilla.org
    1. If you forget to define x in the object you pass as the second argument, or if there's some similar bug or confusion, you won't get an error -- just unexpected results.
    1. The idea here is to clear the decks so to speak. Getting all the negative worrisome shit out of your head and onto the page is an easy form of catharsis that can provide sharp relief from all the niggling little issues stopping you from blasting pure awesome out into the universe.

      Example of clearing the mental clutter by writing using Julia Cameron's Morning Pages concept.

    1. " Havens' inclusive approach and argument for a broad definition of the commonplace book responds to previous scholarship whose scope has been restricted to documents that fit classical theories of the commonplace. In Havens' view, this exclusivity obscures much of the actual history and personal practices of compilers of commonplaces, particularly because it focuses on Renaissance humanist compilations that were made for print.

      I take this more inclusive approach to note taking as well.

    1. U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, Innovation, and the Internet, "Optimizing for Engagement: Understanding the Use of Persuasive Technology on Internet Platforms," 25 June 2019, www.commerce.senate.gov/2019/6/optimizing-for-engagement-understanding-the-use-of-persuasive-technology-on-internet-platforms.

      Perhaps we need plurality in the areas for which social data are aggregated?

      What if we didn't optimize for engagement, but optimized for privacy, security, or other axes in the space?

  12. Jul 2021
    1. Coding is a problem-solving skill, and few of theproblems that beset young people today, or are likely to in thefuture, can be solved by writing scripts or programs for computersto execute. I suggest a less ambitious enterprise with broaderapplications, and I’ll begin by listing the primary elements of thatenterprise. I think every young person who regularly uses acomputer should learn the following:

      Alan Jacobs eschews the admonishment that everyone should learn to code and posits a more basic early literacy stepping-stone to coding: learning some basic preliminaries of self-hosting. This is likely much easier for most people and could build a better runway for those who would like to learn to code later on.

    1. the idea is to render very clear the connections between ideas with as little friction as possible.

      The goal of note taking and tools for it is to make capturing ideas and creating connections between them as easy and friction free as possible. This allows note taking come closer to actual thinking with better long term retention.

    2. Carr’s argument is something I resisted for a long time, but his main assertion — that the tools we use to think shape how we think — is hard to ignore.

      While this may be Nicholas Carr's statement, it's actually pre-dated significantly by Marshall McLuhann

    1. How can writers bridge the gap between what they want to say and what someone else understands? Eleven months later, a line from Anne Helen Petersen’s announcement of her Substack newsletter haunts me still: Writing a newsletter, Petersen wrote, meant she could publish “pieces that take ten paragraphs to get to the nut graf, if there’s one at all.”

      There's something in this quote that sounds more like old school blogging to me. Putting ideas out there and allowing the community to react and respond as a means of honing an idea can be useful and powerful. However, are writers actually doing this meaningfully over time? Are they objectively doing this and providing thoughtful updates over time?

    1. Our members are technically self-pay; however, 100 percent of our members pay their bills. All we—and they—ask is that healthcare providers not penalize them for this technical designation. Please give our members the same consideration in terms of discounts that insurance companies receive for negotiated contracts.
    1. For user-contributed data that's freeform and unstructured, use jsonb. It should perform as well as hstore, but it's more flexible and easier to work with.
    1. Rodolfo: I'm a victim of sexual abuse in the United States and there was a police report made and everything. And I've also been a victim of gang violence. I was never, you can check my background and everything. I was never into gangs or anything, but around the area I lived in there was a bunch of gangs and... I was beat up two or three times bad just by walking home. And it was all documented, I had police reports and everything. And because of that I was in therapy for while. My mother sought out a help from a psychiatrist because of the sexual abuse I had as a child in California, as a matter of fact.Rodolfo: I took Risperdal and a Ritalin, Risperdal for the anxiety and the Ritalin and for the ADHD. So, we tried everything. The mental health side, the mental health asylum, everything. But it was just going to take longer and longer and longer and I was tired of it. I didn't want to be locked up anymore. So, finally I just told my mom, “You know what man, that's it, I'm done. I don't want to do this anymore.” She asked me, “Is this what you want to do?” And I told her, “Yeah.”Rodolfo: She told me, “You know what? I'd much rather see you over there and be free then not being able to see you here at all.” Because there was a lot of people that went to go visit their loved ones and they used to get picked up. Sometimes they wouldn't even let you see your loved ones and right away ask you for your identification, your social security card, your nationality and everything and they would get picked up.Rodolfo: And I always told my mom, “Don't ever come visit me. Don't ever come visit me because if you do, chances are they're going to take you too.” And you know, that would always break my heart because I would want to see my mom. I'd want to see my dad and everything, but I wasn't able to. So, that experience was just horrible.Sergio: When you were in the detention center what were the conditions? Did you have access the medicine you needed? Did you have access to food and water?Rodolfo: The company that made the jail was called GEO Corp and they were actually, I'm not going to lie to you, they actually were pretty good, health-wise, not so much security-wise. A lot of things would happen in there that definitely shouldn't have ever happened. But with the food and everything, it was good. In my opinion it was because of the company. I feel as though if it was up to the government... Thank God it was an independent company that was hired by DHS as opposed to if DHS were to make their own jail, I feel they would be completely different.Rodolfo: It was [Pause] a pleasantly... there's no way to describe it, it was bad. It was bad, but for what it was I guess it was okay. I don't see there being an in-between or any pretty way to paint that picture as to how good or bad it was in there. Because at the end of the day you're deprived of your freedom. You can't just pick up the phone whenever you want and call your loved ones because you've got to pay for that too. You got pay for that. And if you want to take a shower, you have to buy your soap, right? You've got to buy it yourself, you've got to buy everything. And now you're becoming a liability for your family, you're becoming another bill.Rodolfo: You're becoming another bill and that's what I didn't want. So, that's why I started working. And now, older, I'm becoming another bill. So, I don't get it. You're taking us away from the jobs that we have and everything. You know? So, take us back to our country. And I'm not sure if it this is a fact or not, but I was reading when I first got in here, there was a time where there wasn't enough field workers for, I think, avocado—or, not avocado, I think it was oranges or something like that.Rodolfo: And I remember me saying, “Well, there goes all the deportees. There goes all the people you guys deported. Where are the people that were so outraged because we took your jobs? Go ahead, there you go. There are a lot of vacancies, making these open for those jobs, go ahead, man. All yours buddy, knock yourself out.”Rodolfo: But nobody wants to work those jobs, right? You see what I'm saying though, right?

      Leaving the US, Reason for Return, Deportation, Voluntary departure, Family decision, No hope for a future in the US, Detention, Treatment by; Time in the US, Violence, Sexual Abuse, Gangs, Bullying, Fear of, Jobs/employment/work

  13. test-prof.evilmartians.io test-prof.evilmartians.io
    1. That's it! Just replace let! with let_it_be. That's equal to the before_all approach but requires less refactoring.
    2. That technique works pretty good but requires us to use instance variables and define everything at once. Thus it's not easy to refactor existing tests which use let/let! instead.
    1. Not all the ancients are ancestors.

      I'll definitely grant this and admit that there may be independent invention or re-discovery of ideas.

      However, I'll also mention that it's far, far less likely that any of these people truly invented very much novel along the way, particularly since Western culture has been swimming in the proverbial waters of writing, rhetoric, and the commonplace book tradition for so long that we too often forget that we're actually swimming in water.

      It's incredibly easy to reinvent the wheel when everything around you is made of circles, hubs, and axles.