3,750 Matching Annotations
  1. Apr 2021
    1. "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins" (Spanish: "El idioma analítico de John Wilkins") is a short essay by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges originally published in Otras Inquisiciones (1937–1952).[1][2] It is a critique of the English natural philosopher and writer John Wilkins's proposal for a universal language and of the representational capacity of language generally. In it, Borges imagines a bizarre and whimsical (and fictional) Chinese taxonomy later quoted by Michel Foucault, David Byrne, and others.
    1. He is particularly known for An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (1668) in which, amongst other things, he proposed a universal language and an integrated system of measurement, similar to the metric system.

      This may be well worth reading with respect to my research on memory, stenography, shorthand, etc.

    1. Sorry to hear this Dan, but I might be able to help in terms of providing some perspective for moving forward.

      These days the idea of bestseller means selling in the range of 10,000 books. The average book released these days sells only 250 copies, so if you're over that, you're doing well.

      It's also incredibly uncommon for any publishers to put any serious money behind promoting their titles unless PR opportunities are falling off the trees for them. (This means that unless you've been selling a million copies of everything you write, they probably don't care.) Many publishers will assign you a pro-forma publicist to help when they can, but don't expect much from them. Most publishers will tell you to hire your own book publicist (usually for about $1,500-3,000 a month).

      My guess is that the first run of your book was probably 1,000 to 2,000 books, which will bring the cost of raw printing down to $2 a copy. If you need copies of your book and they're remaindering them, you might offer the publisher $1-2 a copy plus shipping to get 50 or 100 copies for yourself for hand sales over the next decade (for speaking engagements, etc.) or selling a few copies from your own stash on platforms like Amazon, Abebooks, Alibris, etc. The cost of keeping a book in print these days is usually around $12 a year and then they print them on demand.

      Some of the methods you mentioned, talks, online readings, etc. can be useful marketing for both you and your book(s). Look around your local community/state for book events, fairs, bookstores that invite authors, etc to supplement this.

      Depending on your next title, it might be worth hiring a publicist if you're going the route of a text accessible to a broader public.Often this can be a reasonable risk but getting copies into reviewers' hands can be helpful, as can radio or print appearances. Another option is to pay for adds in appropriate print magazine outlets related to your material.

      It's an uphill slog, but getting a publisher to take most of the risk and offering you all the free amenities of editing, proofreading, typesetting and distribution can be worth it in the end to get your material out.

      When choosing your next publisher/editor, have a bit of this conversation with them at the outset to see what expectations they have for themselves. Don't tip your hand though by letting them know prior sales numbers.

      Since you've got your own website/newsletter/social media presence, you should also look into affiliate accounts with the bigger online platforms. Chances are you're actually selling most of your own copies, you may as well get a 4% or larger cut of the referrals you're giving. Your link on this page alone could give you a reasonable little return on top of the boilerplate 7% you're probably getting from the publisher.

    1. In the coming months and years, we’ll be working to further enable choice for creators, including giving them the power to choose not only how someone wants to create or monetize audio, but also where specific content is able to be consumed, ensuring creators have an opportunity to decide if they are aligned with the platforms distributing their content.

      So this means you're going to use simple, open standards and tooling so that not only Anchor and Spotify will benefit? Or are you going to build closed systems that require the use of proprietary software and thus force subscriptions? Are you going to Balkanize the audio space to force consumers into your product and only your product? Or will producers be able to have a broad selection of platforms to which they could distribute their content?

    1. Article synopsis of paper that looks at hypoxia with relation to artistic asphyxia in pre-historic cave art. The use of torches, lamps, or fire in small enclosed spaces may have influenced early cave art.

    1. In 2019, an unusually dry summer caused the waters of the Valdecañas Reservoir to recede, revealing a monument that has come to be referred to as the “Spanish Stonehenge.” NASA satellites captured images of the exposed stones known as the Dolmen of Guadalperal, which experts suspect may have been built sometime in the second or third millennium BCE.

      Might be worth looking this up to see how it might or might not relate to pre-Celtic migration patterns as they relate to other standing stones in the Celtic and Celtic fringe areas.

      Sad that the markings are wearing away in addition to making studying the area much more difficult.

    1. I have a feeling some of the money framing in the newsletter space is overblown. Some bigger names with pre-existing platforms (and by this I mean exposure, popularity, voices, and other possible media outlets already) have some serious upside to creating paid newsletters. Many of these platforms are trying to not only capture a slice of these pies, they're trying to leverage those same big names to actively make it seem to the average person that they too could have a paid newsletter (see how easy it is...). The reality is that many of these others are going to spend a lot of time and effort to try to garner pennies on the dollar or ultimately fail. This sort of game works much better in the YouTube space where self-hosting the video and doing distribution is a much higher bar. The VC space for newsletters is going to have a dreadful crash when folks realize that there's more competition in the space than they bargained for.

    1. “Digital technology allows us to be far more adventurous in the ways we read and view and live in our texts,” she said. “Why aren’t we doing more to explore that?”

      Some of the future of the book may be taking new technologies and looking back at books.

      I wonder if the technology that was employed here could be productized and turned into an app or platform to allow this sort of visual display for more (all?) books?

    1. I totally get where Jacy is coming from.

      It's difficult to try to be all things to all people, particularly when they have so many diverse needs/wants and there are so many options for various levels of technical expertise.

      It's like teaching algebra to a 4th grader, an 8th grader and an advanced graduate student. They all need dramatically different textbooks for their different levels of sophistication.

    1. I love the idea of Webmention becoming part of core.

      One of the benefits I've seen with it is that to comment on my site, you need to post it on your own site first to send me the notification. People are much less likely to publicly spam me when they have to host the spam for themselves and associate it with their identity directly. (I'll admit that this doesn't get rid of all spam, but it does help to significantly cut back on it. To date, I don't believe there's been any Webmention spam seen in the wild.) If anything I've actually seen more civil and substantive conversations from those using Webmention. It'd be interesting to see WP Tavern support it.

      Reframing the design, UI, prevention of abuse, and set up of how comments are done on the web is certainly a laudable goal and one which could use some rebuilding from the ground up.

      (syndicated to https://wptavern.com/yes-comments-are-still-relevant-but-we-need-a-better-system?unapproved=373040&moderation-hash=b55adb70109112d26a7bff2e87c00aa9#comment-373040)

    1. I've never been able to recommend people to use Wix simply for the export issue. This should have been one of their first features. Matt does a good job of indicating other reasons not to support them.

      I was also a bit surprised to see him actively recommending other projects and platforms. :)

    1. There's some really great titles hiding in here. If they're as solid as Annotation is, then this is definitely worth mining for some additional titles.

    1. In Australia, we are so fortunate to be able to learn from a continuous culture dating back over 60,000 years. We have ample evidence from our Aboriginal cultures of robust knowledge of landscape and skyscape events dating back 17,000 years. (See Patrick Nunn’s amazing book, The Edge of Memory). That is how powerful these methods can be and why they have developed in so many disparate cultures.

      bookmarking Patrick Nunn's The Edge of Memory for future reading

    1. I know I've read this before, but worth a revisit. I'll also note that I recall Michael Nielsen has a Twitter thread about the idea and people's reactions to the idea.

      https://twitter.com/michael_nielsen/status/1144377697985892352

    1. Read chapter 11 "Memorizing Number" to see what Gardner says about available techniques. He only covers the phoenetic major system and some basic associative techniques.

      No mention of the method of loci. Some interesting references listed for the chapter however.

    2. Bibliography of Memory. Dr. Morris Young. Chilton, 1961. More than6,000 references are cited in this bibliography by a Manhattan oph-thalmologist and collector of books on memory systems.

      This looks fascinating and I don't think I've seen a reference to it before.

    1. <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>Martin Gardner </span> in Hexaflexagons, Probability Paradoxes & the Tower of Hanoi in Chapter 11 Memorizing Numbers (<time class='dt-published'>04/02/2021 14:31:10</time>)</cite></small>

    1. A lot of this resonates with me. On links, it is often the reason I was interested in it in the first place that's the most important.

      The nostalgia factor is very valuable to me, but it also means you need an easy means for not only looking back, but regular reminders to do so.

      Owning your stuff: hopefully my stance on this is obvious.

      I'm not sure I agree so much with the taxonomy stance. I find it helpful to have it for search and review, the tougher part is doing it consistently with terms that are important to you.

  2. Mar 2021
    1. I love the ideas hiding in some of these design elements. The pieces are very atomic, but can be built up into some fascinating bigger designs.

      I'm curious if there are any mnemonics attached to these that add additional levels of meaning in the art in which they're embedded?

      The attached video was incredibly helpful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kc3K-MyH3xg

    1. A great little outline for how to do class retrospectives. While there's a lot of subtlety and a huge gradient between individual learners many of the methods and pro/con lists help to show the differences between them. I'd be curious to see one try all (or as many as possibly) to cover as many of the eventualities as possible.

      Too often teachers don't bother with these, but they can be incredibly useful, particularly for helping to attempt to improve future incarnations, as well as to guard against the curse of knowledge.

      I like that hyperlink.academy is doing some of the necessary work to expose their teachers to this sort of material. Too often it is only done in the academy in perfunctory ways which aren't designed to improve anything. Additionally the academy provides little, if any, training in the areas of pedagogy. Hyperlink.academy is making strides to provide some of this material and doing a reasonable job of exposing their teachers to it.

    1. There's a reasonably good overview of some ideas about fixing the harms social media is doing to democracy here and it's well framed by history.

      Much of it appears to be a synopsis from the perspective of one who's only managed to attend Pariser and Stround's recent Civic Signals/New_Public Festival.

      There could have been some touches of other research in the social space including those in the Activity Streams and IndieWeb spaces to provide some alternate viewpoints.

    1. This curse of knowledge also explains the danger behind thinking about student learning based on what appears best to faculty members, as opposed to what has been verified with students.

      Are there other axes or criteria that might be used other than these two? One seems better than the other, but what appears best to teachers is potentially better than nothing. (Though in cases it could be so bad that nothing may be preferable to a teacher's viewpoint.)

    1. A nice list of replacement words to make one's writing seem warmer and more human.

      It would be cool if tools like Grammar.ly or Hemmingway.app had pieces like this built in.

    1. Tatiana Mac talks about some broad web accessibility tips, but from the perspective of adding them for potential learners who may appreciate the alternate modalities to improve their learning and comprehension.

    1. Svelte looks pretty similar, but has two small changes that personally make the Svelte code easier to read, in my opinion:
    1. My eye doctor just recommended me to buy a handful of these as my sight isn't (yet) bad enough to warrant something stronger and more expensive. I would have probably done the same as you, but now I know better. Thanks!

    1. <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>Craig Mod</span> in Oh God, It's Raining Newsletters (<time class='dt-published'>03/26/2021 11:11:49</time>)</cite></small>

    1. BIBLIOGRAPHY. - A large number of the works referred to in the text contain historical material. Among histories of the subject, see C. F. von Aretin, Systesnatische Anleitung zur Theorie and Praxis der Mnemonik (Sulzberg, 1810); A. E. Middleton, Memory Systems, Old and New (espec. 3rd rev. ed., New York, 1888), with bibliography of works from 1325 to 1888 by G. S. Fellows and account of the Loisette litigation; F. W. Colegrove, Memory (1901), with bibliography, pp. 353-3 6 1. (J. M. M.)

      This is likely worth checking out for its history.

    2. About the end of the 15th century Petrus de Ravenna (b. 1448) awakened such astonishment in Italy by his mnemonic feats that he was believed by many to be a necromancer. His Phoenix artis memoriae (Venice, 1491, 4 vols.) went through as many as nine editions, the seventh appearing at Cologne in 1608. An impression equally great was produced about the end of the 16th century by Lambert Schenkel (Gazophylacium, 1610), who taught mnemonics in France, Italy, and Germany, and, although he was denounced as a sorcerer by the university of Louvain, published in 1593 his tractate De memoria at Douai with the sanction of that celebrated theological faculty. The most complete account of his system is given in two works by his pupil Martin Sommer, published at Venice in 1619. In 1618 John Willis (d. 1628?) published Mnemonica; sive ars reminiscendi (Eng. version by Leonard Sowersby, 1661; extracts in Feinaigle's New Art of Memory, 3rd ed., 1813), containing a clear statement of the principles of topical or local mnemonics. Giordano Bruno, in connexion with his exposition of the ars generalis of Lull, included a memoria technica in his treatise De umbris idearum. Other writers of this period are the Florentine Publicius (1482); Johann Romberch (1533); Hieronimo Morafiot, Ars memoriae (1602); B. Porta, Ars reminiscendi (1602).

      Hunt down copies of all these.

    1. seems a interesting talk on k8s

      听了一半,这里的 Builders and Operators 指的是运维而非 k8s controller 里的 operator,以后有机会再看看吧


      配合自己用 kubeadm 部署一个 cluster 可能不错

    1. A lot of similarity to Caitlin Flanagan's article after the Oprah interview. Almost as if this was much the same, just shortened and the Oprah pieces fitted in. Still some excellent writing about the cultural changes of the people and their time.

    1. I really like this and want to figure out way to do it on my own website. It could be fun to tuck it in with the weather and location data I'm already collecting.

    1. Summary of moving from in person to online events a year ago.

      I like her admonition to consider welcoming new people to a community in an online only space.

      Try to avoid in-jokes. Make space for more phatic communication. Make considerations for parents, particularly around mealtimes and bedtimes.

    1. <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>hyperlink.academy</span> in The Future of Textbooks (<time class='dt-published'>03/18/2021 23:54:19</time>)</cite></small>

    1. I've come across about 20 reference for Ivan Illitch over the past month. Not sure what is driving it. Some mentions are coming out of educator circles, others from programmers, some from what I might describe as "knowledge workers" (digital gardeners/Roam Cult/Obsidian crowds). One tangential one was from someone in the hyperlink.academy crowd.

      Here's a recent one from today that popped up within a thread shared in IndieWeb chat:

      Ivan Illich continues to be even more more relevant than he was at the height of his New Left popularity. Conviviality in the digital tools we use has continued to wither https://t.co/D88V6KL7Ez pic.twitter.com/OFDYTjXyCn

      — Count Bla (@123456789blaaa) March 15, 2021
      <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

      Deschooling Society and Tools for Conviviality look very interesting. Perhaps they've distilled enough that their ideas are having a resurgence?

    1. A fun little site from fluffy with a great domain name.

    1. <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>Remi Kalir & Jeremy Dean</span> in Web Annotation as Conversation and Interruption (<time class='dt-published'>03/15/2021 00:21:05</time>)</cite></small>