Oral history questions for Richard Polt on typewriter collecting:

Over the years Joe Van Cleave has done a handful of videos on selectivity and downsizing of one's typewriter collection including: <br /> - The Minimal Complete Typewriter Collection https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ej6kd1FsnE <br /> - Culling the Herd https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_ueHE3Whjk <br /> - Downsizing Your Typewriter Collection https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eic4lNE0l3Y

And Sarah Everett has one "what's your deserted island typewriter?" (if I had to pick 5 typewriters....) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFqJa9kD-v0

All this to ask Richard: what your downsizing experience has been? What were the criteria by which you chose what to keep? Did you more closely focus your collection into an area, era, style, other? Are you primarily keeping the things you tend to use more frequently? Things in better condition? You started out with how many to end up with how many? If you could start your collecting over from scratch what would you change? Are there things you wouldn't get the second time around? Things you would have spent more time focusing on? What will you continue to collect and at what rate? Naturally, collecting is a very personal thing with respect to individual's specific tastes and experiences (and frequently space!), but I suspect answers to some of these may help others, especially those who are just starting into collecting, or who have a dozen or two machines but who might find value on where and how to potentially focus their efforts. It may also help other collectors and their families who are dealing with appropriately disposing of significant collections, especially in cases where a deceased collector was very passionate and the family just wants to be rid of them quickly (i.e. ideas like Swedish death cleaning and related).

I'm sure reflections on these would be an interesting typecast, but if it's easier to do something like an oral history interview, I'm happy to collect these and a few dozen more questions into an interview format if you've got 30-60 minutes in the coming months to devote to a remote audio/video interviews/mini-podcast or YouTube episode or something similar?

Differentiating between an Underwood SS and the Underwood Rhythm Touch:

comment to James Grooms at https://typewriterdatabase.com/show.23202.typewriter

James, perhaps it's hiding somewhere else in the comments on the database, but I'm curious if you've come across definitive differences between the Underwood SS and the Underwood Rhythm Touch models which have separate pages within the database:<br /> - SS https://typewriterdatabase.com/Underwood.SS.4.bmys - Rhythm Touch https://typewriterdatabase.com/Underwood.Rhythm+Touch.4.bmys

Most of my Google searches don't return anything definitive or with actual sourcing of any sort.

The main page has the SS starting in May 1946 and the Rhythm Touch beginning in July of that year, but doesn't seem to specify between the two in any substantive way. Neither of the two models seems to have had a name printed on it.

Your description here uses both designators, but knowing your penchant for newspaper and magazine advertisements, I would suspect you may have seen specific differentiators.

This Facebook post has some handwaving differentiators: https://www.facebook.com/groups/TypewriterCollectors/posts/10161712887224678/ but none seem definitive or sourced. It also uses the phrase carriage shift, though presumably with these models Underwood had moved to a segment/basket shift on their standards.

Other than the chrome side detailing moving from 3 strips to 5 as you've noted, one of the few differentiators I can see in this era is the shift from the shorter carriage return lever to the longer armed version around 1948 which Robert Messenger notes in https://oztypewriter.blogspot.com/2012/11/on-this-day-in-typewriter-history_25.html. However that same page also has an advertisement on it with the words Rhythm Touch featuring a short armed (older style) carriage return.

Is there really a difference between the SS and the Rhythm Touch or are they the same model with the phrase "Rhythm Touch" used as a marketing tag to compete potentially with Smith-Corona's "Floating Shift"?

Thanks!

https://www.facebook.com/groups/olympiasg1/posts/1506621080656301/

also:

Greg Riutzel:<br /> That's how I see it. I measured it once. I put the ribbon in stencil, typed a lower case "h" and marked approx where the top of the type slug was on the paper. Then repeated with an upper case "H". The marks were just a tad over 7.5 mm apart checking with a rule. No precision of course but close.

The number printed on the ring in the basket of Olympia typewriters, just above and to the left of the word "De Luxe" is the distance from the baseline of the bottom slug character to the baseline of the top slug character.

In many instances it will be 7.6. I'm curious what other typefaces show and if this thesis holds?

are they really innate?

Some of my question is a tad rhetoric as I suspect that this current book is making an argument that there is a genetic basis for why/how it all works the way it does. It's also a question I know that Kelly has had buzzing around for a while.

Large swaths of these practices have been taught and handed down from one person to another and from one group to another for millennia as well, but the other question is if they've been independently re-discovered across time or if they've changed/evolved the way in which languages have shifted over these same time frames.

Is there stronger evidence that this form of permanent writing to an audience of gods was being done? Sources?

What is the general history of oval-shaped architecture? Is there an explicit link between the Oval shape of the complex at Ibgal, the temple (or house) of Inanna in Lagash and the oval office at the White House?

Keep in mind that modern knowledge of large portions of the Ancient Near East only surfaced after the 1800s, so the tradition would have required intermediaries from the ANE into other cultures to be passed down to the building of the White House in 1792.

Can one discern specific colonialist policies that the Uruk had as their culture spread in the Ancient Near East?

Potentially an early historic form of a receipt?

This statement belies the power of orality and the size of built communities without literacy. It's more a question of understanding how it was done and how communities either trusted (or didn't) those who memorized the materials.

Another factor is how long one needed to remember various facts, especially if for commerce and over what spaces?

Were there stratifications of society based on the power of memory here? Compare the anthropology and archaeology with the studies by Lynne Kelly.

Find archaeological papers which described how Mesopotamians in the ANE organized their documents.

Mention via @Podany2013

Martin reports having used Porstmanns Karteikunde in his youth circa 1975 when it was widely used in offices.

Open question: Did Luhmann teach zettelkasten practices while at Speyer?

(via https://forum.zettelkasten.de/profile/chrisaldrich)

Presumably (is there a way to check), Luhmann gave this lecture while he was teaching from 1965-68 in his position at the Sozialforschungsstelle an der Universität Münster (Social Research Centre of the University of Münster).

https://udel.edu/~mcdonald/mythptc.html

Was this the white substance mentioned in Erwin Schrodinger's Mind and Matter (Schrodinger1992b) chapter 6?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democritus

Was the epithet "laughing philosopher" used as a mnemonic device for Democritus?

Somewhat curious of the dates/times of the creation of these tabbed cards. Surely made in the 20th century, but since Warburg was likely creating notes in the late 1800s, where does this sit with respect to the invention of the tab card in 1894 claimed by Progressive Indexing and Filing (Remington Rand, 1950, p205)?

[6] Fritz Saxl, The History of Warburg’s Library (1886-1944) cited in Gombrich 1970, p. 329; Marchand 2023, p. 186; Steiner 2013, p. 155; Wedepohl 2014, p. 389.

It's only in a physical card system one might worry a bit about "best place" for a card. Some of it is down to one's future self being able to find it, but cross-references could have been placed or an amanuensis might have created an exact copy for multiple copies in many locations.

What does Ernst Bernheim have to say on the topic of filing?

Did Robert C. Russell and Margaret King Odell specifically use the Major System as the model for their Soundex phonetic algorithm for indexing?

Inspired by this section, though not specifically suggested:

In Greek, Roman, and even Christian (saint) traditions, most gods (saints), were closely associated with one or potentially a few attributes which made it easier to give them short hand identifications and also to use them in mnemonic traditions. It would seem that in Celtic traditions, that the gods (or heroes) were better delineated people with broader and fuller characters which didn't play into this sort of mnemonic/oral piece in the same way.

Donn in Irish traditions seems to fit this mold. What other evidences could be brought to bear to back this up?

https://www.reddit.com/r/typewriters/comments/1ov02h8/backing_material_2/

Experiments with different backing sheets in typewriters.

A Shore A 60 silicone backing sheet wasn't a great improvement. A 0.3mm TPU sheet with 75A to 80A may prove better results?

Was "fancy thinking" used in a pejorative sense prior to this article? Are subsequent uses of it poking fun of the parallelism (to fancy bookplates) which Adler sets up here?

The making of a personal index is a first step in building a mesh of knowledge. In just a few years, Vannevar Bush will speak of "associative trails" a phrase he uses twice in "As We May Think" (The Atlantic, July 1945), but of potentially more import is his phrase "associative indexing" which lays way to either juxtaposing or linking two ideas (either similar or disjoint) together. It bears asking the question of of whether it's more valuable to index and juxtapose similar ideas or disjoint ideas which may more frequently lead to better, more useful, and more relevant and rich future ideas.

It affords an immediate step, however, to associative indexing, the basic idea of which is a provision whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another. This is the essential feature of the memex. The process of tying two items together is the important thing. Bush, Vannevar. 1945. “As We May Think.” The Atlantic 176: 101–8. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/ (October 22, 2022). #

Someone who indicates that they use both "commonplace book" and "zettelkasten" systems. I'm curious how they differentiate the two, particularly because they seem to both be done on index cards.

Sort of sounds like zettles are her own ideas vs. commonplace for the ideas of others.

At 4:40 she seems to use linear numbering on her zettels and not Luhmann-artig numbering.

from where does he draw the idea "code-script"? Is it from the developing information theory of the time? Somewhere else?

There is definitely the idea of a code running in the sense of programming, which was likely not a common conceptualization at the time.

On p. 22 he uses the phrase "law-code" which is likely the closer meaning of code he's using and not the sense of genetic code as understood much later when DNA and the underlying protein coding sequences were unraveled.

Morse code may also be a tangential underlying meaning of his sense of "code" as something unknown but potentially revealable.

How might we apply ontogeny vs. phylogeny in the political sphere within @Lanier2013s framing Who Owns the Future or in the personbyte/firmbyte framing of @Hidalgo2015?

the question on which he'll be focusing the book

Come back when we're done to see how well he may have answered it.

are we seeing patterns? who/what are the big influencers?

Alternately, where is the value in a slip box?

is this true in all cases?

Could Ultra One's rust solution be used on typewriters?

via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dryden

John Dryden apparently coined the English word 'biography' in his 1683 edition of Plutarch's Lives.

Does the OED bear this out?

Compare the various organizational structures of Otlet, Kaiser, and Luhmann.

Seemingly their structures were dictated by the number of users and to some extent the memory of those users with respect to where to find various things.

Otlet as a multi-user system with no single control mechanism or person, other than the decimal organizing standard (in his case a preference for UDC), was easily flexible for larger groups. Kaiser's system was generally designed, built and managed by one person but intended for use by potentially larger numbers of people. He also advised a conservative number of indexing levels geared toward particular use-cases (that is a limited number of heading types or columns/rows from a database perspective.) Finally, Luhmann's was designed and built for use by a single person who would have a more intimate memory of a more idiosyncratic system.

How does this speak to (or not) the idea of coherence in quantum mechanics?

Is this a possible reason why reading great books in youth is so useful?

Gregor von Feinaigle by [[Art of Memory]] wiki

Origin of finagle? Long-standing question for me, but only bookmarking now.

the title of the book implies an ownership of poverty (by America)... there's also an implication of authorial voice as if America is a "creator", but specifically a creator of poverty as much as it is a creator of wealth

In the framing of toxic capitalism, it's almost as if one of the things America is good at manufacturing is poverty.

If we've outsourced most of our manufacturing sector, why not also include poverty?!?

motivating question in the book

... why there is so much hardship in this land of abundance.

What is the ultimate goal for AI4Communities? What is it supposed to do? Is it to build knowledge (only)? What space does it have for phatic communication, and why? What does it create at the end of the day? Where is it going to?

Why was marijuana so popular and mainstream in the past???

What is non-attachment?

What is he attempting to say here?

What work exactly does Miles include in his description of preparation of a 30,000 word book in two hours?

He specifically excludes dictation. He does include selection of ideas and arrangement. He also says it includes "collection", but I'm supposing that he's taking a larger tranche of cards from a possibly massive collection and collecting only those he needs right now? Certainly the reading, thinking, and collecting work can't be included in this two hours of work.

Does he have a better definition of what he means by collection?

How is he using pegs on a table exactly? Is this something like the Brothers Grimm, but table-based rather than wall based?

Miles, 1905 uses an arrow symbol with a hash on it to indicate a "connecting link between two Sentences or Paragraphs, etc."

It's certainly an early example of what we would now consider a hyperlink. It actively uses a "pointer" in it's incarnation.

Are there earlier examples of these sorts of idea links in the historical record? Surely there were circles and arrows on a contiguous page, but what about links from one place to separate places (possibly using page numbers?) Indexing methods from 11/12C certainly acted as explicit sorts of pointers.

When was the use of the caret first made for indicating the insertion of material?

Eustace Miles has an example from 1905.

Miles lists the following objections: - expense - inconvenience - unusual (new, novel)

Notice that he starts not with benefits or affordances, but with the objections.

What would a 2024 list of objections look like? - anachronism - harder than digital methods - lack of easier search - complexity - ... others?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrett_Wendell

Eustace Miles suggested that Wendell used the card system in writing, so perhaps one of his textbooks suggests the method as well?

Julius Reizen in reviewing over Umberto Eco's index card system in How to Write a Thesis, defines his own "insurance card" as one which contains "hard-to-classify thoughts, questions, and areas for further inquiry". These he would keep together so that they don't otherwise get lost in the variety of other locations one might keep them

These might be akin to Ahrens' "fleeting notes" but are ones which may not easily or even immediately be converted in to "permanent notes" for one's zettelkasten. However, given their mission critical importance, they may be some of the most important cards in one's repository.

link this to - idea of centralizing one's note taking practice to a single location

Is this idea in Eco's book and Reizen is the one that gives it a name since some of the other categories have names? (examples: bibliographic index cards, reading index cards (aka literature notes), cards for themes, author index cards, quote index cards, idea index cards, connection cards). Were these "officially" named and categorized by Eco?

May be worthwhile to create a grid of these naming systems and uses amongst some of the broader note taking methods. Where are they similar, where do they differ?

Multi-search tools that have full access to multiple trusted data stores (ostensibly personal ones across notebooks, hard drives, social media services, etc.) could potentially solve the problem of needing to remember where you noted something.

Currently, in the social media space especially, this is not a realized service.

A winter arc edit. A search on YouTube has dozens of these (AI probably makes it even worse).

I have nothing against them. They do seem to present a new worldview of sorts. Is it really grounded and substantial though? What are the people that they look up to? Andrew Tate and David Goggins?

https://new.reddit.com/r/typewriters/comments/1f29hxm/how_many_pages_on_average_does_a_nylon_ink_ribbon/

How long will a typewriter ribbon last?

Can it be calculated? <br /> How many letters per spool at 16 yards?

Examples over time like https://new.reddit.com/r/typewriters/comments/rx9rmd/les_stewart_has_the_record_for_typing_1_to_1m_it/

Long time lurker, first time poster...

I picked up a British branded Orga Privat 5 (circa 1931) this past week. I've repaired enough of it now that I'm sure I can get it fully functioning again. It's going to take some serious cleaning and polishing to bring it back to its original glory. It was missing the original metal spools which I'd like to try to replace with period metal ones. I'd also like to replace the spool nuts and find one missing spool cover.

The spools (my Olympia machines' spools work) and nuts may be easiest to track down if folks have suggestions for sourcing. The tougher part will be finding an original or replica black enamel ribbon cover unless someone has an Orga they're parting out. It appears that almost all of the Orgas used the same spool set up and covers (2.25 inches / 5.8mm O.D.) through most of their manufacture so the Orga Privat 1-7 and Modell 8-Modell 10 will probably work. My German is almost non-existent, or I'd start by calling shops in Europe.

Its also missing its wooden base and metal cover, but I have less hope of finding replacements for these, particularly British rebranded ones from the Durable Trading Company. I've added my example to the Typewriter Database and it appears to be the only English branded model there across multiple examplars of 10 different models of the machine from the company.

For the curious collectors, I've documented some details and photos of the machine here: https://boffosocko.com/.../acquisition-1928-1933-new.../

Post to Antique Typewriter Maintenance Group

One must wonder if the early use of typewriters to teach reading and writing research matches that of modern day use of computers and tablets in the same classrooms?

(~2:10)

Fascinating. Rob Pierri mentions that there had been a shift in education from the development of the soul to the development of monetizable skills... Keep society manageable.

The question that remains for me is, what will ultimately leave society better and advance it? In the end, what matters more, the material or the immaterial? Why?

(~3:50)

Rob argues that a decline of consensus on morality makes liberty vanish. A society is not a society if they do not adhere to moral law.

What role does formal education play in the development of morality?

(~5:40)

It appears she put some sticky notes at important points/structure references while reading inspectionally...

Does this not take too much effort/time for an inspectional read a la Adler?

What besides work in behavioral economics has focused on the humanist side of the sciences as a means of helping humanity beyond the basic black and white?

How to create a "religion of science" which helps to displace the psychological problems, theological hate, etc?

https://oztypewriter.blogspot.com/2012/06/carl-sundbergs-dutch-made-remington.html?showComment=1719213225119#c7928255599520034988

I dug around in this for a bit, but didn't see the referenced patent.

• https://patents.google.com/?q=(typewriter);+(remington+model+26)&oq=(typewriter);+(remington+model+26)&sort=old
• https://patents.google.com/patent/USD144164
• https://patents.google.com/?q=(typewriter)&inventor=Henry+Dreyfuss);&oq=inventor:(Henry+Dreyfuss);+(typewriter)&sort=old
• https://patents.google.com/?q=(typewriter)&inventor=Carl+W.+Sundberg);&oq=inventor:(Carl+W.+Sundberg);+(typewriter)&sort=new

Theatres of Memory (1994) sounds like it's taking lots of examples from a zettelkasten and tying them together.

It's also interesting to note that he published several books posthumously. Was this accomplished in part due to his zettelkasten notes the way others like Ludwig Wittgenstein?

also, what impact did these programs in the late 40s and early 50s have on subsequent events in the 60s and 70s as these cohorts continued to age?

Contact Schreyer about existence of archived version of Syntopicon...

Are the commons (common good, common sense, and common culture) anathema in an uber-capitalist society where everyone is generally out for themselves and often only "covering" when their needs align with societies' needs?

did the tension inherent in the cultural evolution of the great books idea versus vocational and other forms of education set up the culture wars of the late 1900s/early 2000s?

Was Icarus punished by the gods because he thought himself greater than them (Helios)?

Open questions:

Is education and/or critical thought actually required for a strong democracy?

Is Ulysses a heroic poem? Or, is it selfishness?

Can religious experiences be made scientific? That which is beyond thought (and is wholly subjective)?

See Steven Kotler referencing flow science as making the supernatural ("A gift from gods") into science.

Naturalism was prevalent in the time of Rilke (circa 1900s). Rilke, however, had a mystical experience in Russia? (did he literally have an experience of unity and bliss?) He combined this mysticism with the objectivity that he learned from Auguste Rodin.

As a result, his writing had a mystical and objective bent to it. How exactly? Was this also present in his Apollo poems (1907)?

Is Prometheus (Goethe) published in 1773 or 1774? (Sebastiaan van Bommel making a mistake?)

Why is it that so many of Americans' gut reactions is to "kick the can down the road" rather than to solve the underlying problems?

I'm surprised to see this stance from Gavin Newsom... though California probably faces a higher level of homelessness than most states as a result of its weather.

Does it though? What are the rates of homelessness as a percentage of population per state? What do the overall numbers look like for CA as a percentage of the total?

Europe's last hunter-gatherers avoided inbreeding by [[Dario Radley]]

Any evidence of moieties in these groups? How would one test this compared to modern instantiations in indigenous peoples?

reply to https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1c4kaps/giving_you_notes_a_unique_id_the_debate_continues/kzop2yh/

I'm with you on some of this, but let me play devil's advocate for a moment, so that we might hew closer to the question u/atomicnotes has posed:

If a Dewey Decimal Number is equivalent to a topic heading or subject, then what is the difference between using these subject/category/tag headings and forgoing the work of translating into a DC number (a task which is far less straightforward for those without a library science). If there is a onto to one and onto correspondence there should mathematically be no difference.

And how does one treat insightful material on geometry (516), for example, which comes from a book classified about political science (320-329)?

In a similar vein, why not use Otlet's Universal Decimal Classification which more easily allows for the admixture of topics as well as time periods?

Separately, I'll echo your valuable statement:

"I think everyone stumbles into a system of their own. I suspect the best practice here is the one that works for you!"

https://www.amazon.com/Smart-Obsidian-Beginner-Advance-Techniques-ebook/dp/B0BZ11C7KY

What is their specific definition of a digital zettelkasten? (Is it more Luhmann-artig or commonplace book?)

https://www.amazon.com/dp/8120601076/

Edward Lane's Arabic English Lexicon sounds like it was compiled by means of card index. Worth looking into the scholarly method behind compiling it.

Great Books tend to arise in the presence of great audiences. by [[Naomi Kanakia]]

Kanakia looks at what may have made 19th C. Russian literature great. This has potential pieces to say about how other cultures had higher than usual rates of creativity in art, literature, etc.

What commonalities did these sorts of societies have? Were they all similar or were there broad ranges of multiple factors which genetically created these sorts of great outputs?

Could it have been just statistical anomaly?

Catchwords (broad or even narrow topics) can be useful, but one should expand beyond these short words to full phrases or even sentences/paragraphs which contain atomic (or perhaps molecular) ideas that can be linked.

We could reframe the atomic as simple catchwords, and make molecular ideas combinations of these smaller atoms which form larger and fuller thoughts which can be linked and remixed with others.

Dennis Duncan (2022) touches on this in his book on Indexing when he looks at indexes which contained portions of their fuller text which were later removed and thereby collapsing context. Having these pieces added back in gave a fuller picture of ideas within an index. Connect this idea with his historical examples.

Great indexes go beyond the catchword to incorporate full ideas with additional context. To some extent this is what Luhmann was doing at larger scale compared to his commonplacing brethren who were operating far more closely to the catchword (tag) level. (Fortunately they held the context in their heads and were thus able to overcome some of the otherwise inherent problems.)

The development of all of this historically seems to follow the principle of small pieces loosely joined.

When were bookmark-like "flags" introduced in America? (Certainly prior to 1908, based on this reference.)

We need a better catch-all term for the ills perpetrated on humanity and society by technology companies' extractive practices and general blindness to their own effects while they become rich. It should have a terrifically pejorative tone.

Something which subsumes the crazy bound up in some of the following: - social media machine guns - toxic technology - mass produced toxicity - attention economy - bad technology - surveillance capitalism - technology and the military - weapons of math destruction

It should be the polar opposite of: - techno-utopianism

Is some of the "backlash" against diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in 2020s America a manifestation of attempting to prevent a shift in the status quo of class structure in America?

How is the history of the space potentially useful in easing the potential transition to something better?

Where did the concept of planned obsolescence originate? Was it really IBM as Alex Wright suggests here?

How does planned obsolescence drive capitalism? And as a result of that is there a balance between future innovation and waste? Is there a mechanism within capitalism that can fix this waste (or dramatically mitigate it)?

How much different things may have been if the state, and not the Church, had been the progenitor and supporter of the early university?

How might education have been different if it came out of itself (or something like curiosity or even society in general) without the influences on either church or state?

quoted section from:<br /> [au moyen âge, on lit généralement en pronançant avec les lèvres, au moins à voix basse, par conséquent en entendant les phrases que les yeux voient.] Jean Leclercq, Initiation aux auteurs monastiques du Moyen Âge, 2nd edn (Paris: Cerf, 1963), p. 72.

What connection, if any, is there to the muscle memory of movement while speaking/reading along with sound/hearing to remembering what we read? Is there research on this? Implications for orality and memory?

relationship of this area of law with respect to debt and David Graeber's Debt theses?

Presumably this dictionary also used a card index for collection? (check...)

By the second year into his editing work on the OED, John Murray estimated that he had sent out 817,625 slips to readers.

At the average price of $0.025 for bulk index cards in 2023, this would have cost $20,440, so one must wonder at the cost of having done it. How much would this have been in March 1879 when Murray tool over editorship?

How many went out in total? Who cut them all? Surely mass manufacture didn't exist at the time for them?

Sending them out would have helped to ensure a reasonable facsimile of having cards of equal size coming back.

https://forum.the-big-bang-theory.com/topic/357-card-catalog/

Likely just decoration, but did Leonard or Sheldon ever interact with the card catalog in their apartment? A zettelkasten perhaps?

While slightly different in its physical configuration, the office charging cabinet (with a bleacher-like set up) is very similar to the similarly named library card charging tray.

Which came first?

Source for the claim of "at most four references"?

I could believe this on first blush, but has his archive done this work?

https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/106e5v1/eli5_what_is_topdown_and_bottomup_thinking/

In this example both versions have a specific goal in mind: "to diminish hunger". What does this look like when we have no specific goal in mind, but are exploring a space without purpose, but only for cause?

exploring with relationship to: ᔥ[[Bob Doto]] in What Do We Mean When We Say "Bottom-Up?"

Here would be a good place to give a solid definition of humanity? What makes it special beyond the "self"?

We are genetically very closely related to great apes and chimpanzees and less closely to dogs, cats, and even rats. Do we miss our dogicity? Or ratanity?

What if the robot/human mix is somehow even more interesting and transcendent than humanity? His negativity doesn't leave any space for this possible eventuality.

Nice start on a list of goals for reading

others?

https://mastodon.social/@christianp@mathstodon.xyz/111759984202211741

Is there a way to mathematically encode colors, similar to RGB perhaps, such that the colors in nearby neighborhoods all have values close to each other?

I've come across Porstmann a few times as the "intellectual father of the A-Series", the "creator of the DIN formats", and the creator of A4 in various contexts. I saw that he wrote an interesting looking handbook in the mid-1920s and was curious if anyone has come across or even read it? It looks like it went into three editions up to the 1950s. I'm not seeing any English translations at present. I suspect it has material on using card indexes as databases and may be focused on business use, but may also have some connections to note taking practices of the time. I've also found several references to Porstmann's work and that of George Christoph Lichtenberg which makes me even more curious about the potential note taking connections.

Porstmann, Walter. Kartei - Kunde: das Handbuch der Karteitechnik. Stuttgart: Verlag für Wirtschaft und Verkehr, 1928. https://search.worldcat.org/formats-editions/58666432?limit=50&offset=1&orderBy=publicationDateAsc

Syndication link: https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/2785/anyone-read-porstmanns-kartei-kunde-das-handbuch-der-karteitechnik/p1?new=1

https://www.flickr.com/photos/hawkexpress/192480328/in/album-72157594200490122/

The PoIC system allows linking of cards using date/timestamps for indexing/finding. Interestingly they were all kept in chronological order rather than in idea order as in Luhmann's zettelkasten.

What are the pros/cons of this?<br /> - more searching and hunting through cards certainly is a drawback for lack of "threaded" ideas - others...

hawkexpress apparently learned this technique on the 2-channel.

(Edited 2022-10-13, 2023-12-27)

https://www.chess.com/forum/view/chesstv/amanpour-interview-whats-on-young-judit-polgars-index-cards

https://twitter.com/bstephen2/status/1290562798616031235

How might this equate to the time at which Rome extended its citizen franchise to larger swaths of people and the attendant results which came about? particularly the shift towards an empire versus a republic?

These seem to have been happening in the case of America with Donald Trump attempting to become a modern day Julius Caesar. To whom is Trump indebted?

When did Gaylord move from the smaller plates to the larger ones with two sections (small square and larger rectangle)?

machine translation:

The remarkable thing about this statement is that it clearly expresses what we might call, in systems theory terms, the production of complexity by selection. The basic idea is that the Zettelkasten, when set up correctly, must be able to generate much more complexity than was introduced into the Zettelkasten. This is precisely the case if its internal structure, as Luhmann (1992a, p. 66) put it, enables “independent combinatorial performances”, so that what the Zettelkasten has to communicate with each query is always much more than that user himself had in mind.

Perhaps a usable quote to support my own theory, but certainly nothing new to me.

Perhaps some interesting overlap with Ashby's law of requisite variety here? Perhaps an inverse version for creating variety and complexity?

Machine translation:

This aspect was not lost on the educated people of the early modern period. At the end of the 18th century, Christoph Meiners (1791, p. 91) had pointed out that “even the union of as many facts and ideas as have been brought together in complete excerpts [causes] a multitude of combinations and prospects that otherwise never made or received would have".

Find the Meiners reference and look more closely at his version of combinatorial creativity with respect to excerpts.

See: Meiners, Christoph. 1791. Anweisungen für Jünglinge zum eigenen Arbeiten besonders zum Lesen, Excerpiren, und Schreiben. Hannover: In der Helwingschen Hofbuchhandlung.

How to fold and cut a Christmas star<br /> Christian Lawson-Perfect https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S90WPkgxvas

What a great simple example with some interesting complexity.

For teachers trying this with students, when one is done making some five pointed stars, the next questions a curious mathematician might ask are: how might I generalize this new knowledge to make a 6 pointed star? A 7 pointed star? a 1,729 pointed star? Is there a maximum number of points possible? Is there a minimum? Can any star be made without a cut? What happens if we make more than one cut? Are there certain numbers for which a star can't be made? Is there a relationship between the number of folds made and the number of points? What does all this have to do with our basic definition of what a paper star might look like? What other questions might we ask to extend this little idea of cutting paper stars?

Recalling some results from my third grade origami days, based on the thickness of most standard office paper, a typical sheet of paper can only be folded in half at most 7 times. This number can go up a bit if the thickness of the paper is reduced, but having a maximum number of potential folds suggests there is an upper bound for how many points a star might have using this method of construction.

It would seem that people who spend too much time online experience more anxiety. Could it be that we've evolved to only be able to manage so many inputs and amounts of variety of those inputs? The experiencing of too much variety in our environments and the resultant anxiety may be a result of the limits of Ross Ashby's law of requisite variety within human systems.

This may also be why chaos machines like Donald Trump are effective at creating anxiety in a populace whose social systems are not designed to handle so many crazy ideas at once.

Implications for measurements of resilience?

Barbara Tuchman took her notes on four-by-six inch index cards.

She repeated the oft-advised mantra to only write on one side of a sheet.

What manual did she read this in? She specifically puts quotes on "Never write on the back of anything." so perhaps it might be something that could be tracked down?

Who was the earliest version of this quote? And was it always towards the idea of cutting up slips or pages and not wanting to lose material on the back? or did it also (later? when?) include ease-of-use and user interface features even when not cutting things up?

At what point did double sided become a thing for personal printed materials? Certainly out of a duty to minimize materials, but it also needed the ability to duplex print pages or photocopy them that way.

Were any of Arendt's Adolf Eichmann file notes done on index cards? Their arrangement, if any?

Did Karl Jaspers have a zettelkasten practice? Did he specifically pass it along to students, like Arendt?

The example of maps he shows here discusses a social interaction component which allows for an interdisciplinary approach to the knowledge scaffolding (especially if students shared their work with each other).

Are there other non-social affordances in this system? Affordances that would let an individual go further/faster by themselves?

are there specific numbers?

Presumably compiled by zettelkasten as well?

Relationship to the first two commandments against worshiping other gods and the use of idols?

How does this relate to the standing stone found in the room at Khirbet Qeiyafa from the time of David?

Dates of this text with respect to Khirbet Keiyafa?

Do languages change the way we think?

There always seems to be a duality of "rules" and "art" I see in almost every representation of the idea of art.

Thesis: To practice an art, there are always rules which one is following. Often the rules may be unwritten or hidden, but they are being followed on some level.

Is there art which doesn't have any rules?

Presenter says that Coppola divided the book into 50 scenes. Source for this?

Link to Frank Daniel's advice for 70 scenes.

What is the average number of scenes in a film? (Measured by slug lines.) Average over time? (5 year or 10 year increments?)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_Dynamics

related to ideas I've had with respect to Werner R. Loewenstein?