55 Matching Annotations
  1. Last 7 days
  2. Jan 2025
    1. Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Did any of it? Why do I keep a notebook at all? The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself.—Joan Didion, “On Keeping a Notebook”
  3. Nov 2024
  4. Jul 2024
  5. Jun 2024
  6. Mar 2024
    1. The hallowed American dream is thegold standard by which politicians and voters alike are meant to measurequality of life as each generation pursues its own definition of happinessunfettered by the restraints of birth (who your parents are) or station (theposition you start out from in the class system).

      Did it help that America was broadly formed during the start of the Industrial Revolution and at a time in which social mobility was dramatically different than the period of history which proceeded it?

      And how much of this difference is split with the idea of the rise of (toxic) capitalism and the switch to "keeping up with the Jonses" which also tends to drive class distinctions?

  7. Jun 2023
  8. May 2023
  9. Jan 2023
    1. Record keeping using small clay ‘tokens’ was present in the Near Eastern Neolithic in the tenth millennium bc, these objects widespread and abundant by the sixth millennium bc, and by the fourth millennium bc it is clear they were functioning, perhaps as generalized elements for simple counting tasks recording time, resources and the like, albeit among other functions that did not have a mnemonic function (Bennison-Chapman Reference Bennison-Chapman2018, 240).
  10. Dec 2022
    1. The sudden awareness of something that calls for an explanation, once the fog of habit has lifted, seems to be the real stuff revolutions’ sparkles are made of

      !- revolutionary learning comes from : questioning basic assumptions - the art of asking questions about the simplest things - is the art of recognizing complexity in the obvious - is the art of not just taking things for granted - is the art of articulating wonder at the way things are

    1. My day to day notebook is a soft 5 inch by 3.5 inch pocket notebook as shown below. I use a mechanical pencil when out and about (no breakage or sharpening) and take a small eraser (in this case an eraser shaped like Lego). This book is good for notes and ideas. Notice I cross them out when I have acted on them in some way (done the work, or given up on the idea). The goal of the daily notebook is to eventually throw it away (not save it). So all work needs to move out and I need to be able to know it has been moved.
  11. Sep 2022
    1. It turns out that a much more accurate picture is that povertyspells tend to be short but frequent.

      Is it possible that the general American need to always be keeping up appearances confounds the facts that most poverty spells are short?

      This is the second time I've noted a possible link to this effect. Is there a way to help unbundle it both perceptually and politically to better allow people to face their problems and fix the broader societal problem here?

    2. One reason for this is that poverty is not something that people wish to ac-knowledge or draw attention to. Rather, it is something that individuals andfamilies would like to go away. As a result, many Americans attempt to concealtheir economic difficulties as much as possible.22 This often involves keeping upappearances and trying to maintain a “normal” lifestyle. Such poverty downthe block may at first appear invisible. Nevertheless, the reach of poverty iswidespread, touching nearly all communities across America.

      Middle Americans, and particularly those in suburbia and rural parts of America that account for the majority of poverty in the country, tend to make their poverty invisible because of the toxic effects of extreme capitalism and keeping up appearances.

      Has this effect risen with the rise of social media platforms like Instagram and the idea of "living one's best life"? How about the social effects of television with shows like "Keeping up with the Kardashians" which encourage conspicuous consumption?


      More interesting is the fact that most of these suburban and rural poverty stricken portions of the country are in predominantly Republican held strongholds.

      Is there a feedback mechanism that is not only hollowing these areas out, but keeping them in poverty?

  12. Jun 2022
    1. It’s as if we need the gravitational pull of both worlds to keep us on track, locked on a good and righteous path. Without both worlds pulling on us, we would crash into one, or simply lose our way, hurtling through the universe on our own, intersecting nothing, helping no one.

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

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

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

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

  13. May 2022
  14. Sep 2021
  15. Jul 2021
    1. ‘Don’t get fooled by those mangled teeth she sports on camera!’ says the ABC News host introducing the woman who plays Pennsatucky. ‘Taryn Manning is one beautiful and talented actress.’ This suggestion that bad teeth and talent, in particular, are mutually exclusive betrays our broad, unexamined bigotry toward those long known, tellingly, as ‘white trash.’ It’s become less acceptable in recent decades to make racist or sexist statements, but blatant classism generally goes unchecked. See the hugely successful blog People of Walmart that, through submitted photographs, viciously ridicules people who look like contemporary US poverty: the elastic waistbands and jutting stomachs of diabetic obesity, the wheelchairs and oxygen tanks of gout and emphysema. Upper-class supremacy is nothing new. A hundred years ago, the US Eugenics Records Office not only targeted racial minorities but ‘sought to demonstrate scientifically that large numbers of rural poor whites were genetic defectives,’ as the sociologist Matt Wray explains in his book Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness (2006). The historian and civil rights activist W E B du Bois, an African American, wrote in his autobiography Dusk of Dawn (1940) that, growing up in Massachusetts in the 1870s, ‘the racial angle was more clearly defined against the Irish than against me. It was a matter of income and ancestry more than colour.’ Martin Luther King, Jr made similar observations and was organising a poor-people’s march on Washington at the time of his murder in 1968.

      examples of upper-class supremacy

      This seems an interesting sociological issue. What is the root cause? Is it the economic sense of "keeping up with the Jonses"? Is it a zero-sum game? really?

  16. Jun 2021
    1. I noticed all my friends getting jobs and having new shoes and this and that. And I would ask him like, "What are you doing?" And he was like, "I just got a job. I got a car. I got this."Mike: I could see them--that they were advancing in life, and I was still in the same spot. So I asked my mom if I could get a job, and that's when she broke it down to me that I wasn't even from here. And that was right there like a slap in the face.

      Time in the US, Jobs/ Employment/ Work, Documents

    1. Luisa: J___, who was a friend of mine, was undocumented and she said, "I am undocumented. I am a Mexican citizen. I am not an American." She was put into a little room and she was not allowed to go in. She was just caged in there and that was very … that marked me like, no, I can't tell anyone. I'm seeing what's happening to these people. I can't tell anyone, so nobody ever knew.

      Leaving the US, Detention, Juvenile

    2. Luisa: Her mother, I remember one time she's driving me home, and she asks extremely aggressively if I am illegal or not. And I remember being scared like a deer in the headlights. “No, I'm not. I'm not.” I was so scared of this mostly because one of my uncles saw somebody—an ex-girlfriend, I think it was, pretty much accused him of being illegal. He was deported and we had this huge thing in our heads that if somebody knew we were illegal, we were going to be deported and ripped away from everything that we knew. So I was not allowed to tell anyone.Luisa: To this day, none of my friends know that I had no papers. None of them. That's saying a lot because [Chuckles]—

      Time in the US, Homelife, Keeping Secrets; Time in the US, Discrimination/ Stigmatization

    3. Was there any domestic abuse in your family?Luisa: With my parents? My mother, yes. She doesn't like to talk about it. The older I get, the more she opens up, but it's not something that she likes to talk about. It was never in front of us, it was behind closed doors. I thank my father. He's a piece of shit, but I thank him for at least having the thought of not wanting to traumatize us. So yes, it was behind closed doors, but the more I get out of my mom, it was a lot of emotional abuse as well, a lot. I think there was some physical abuse. My mom's never touched upon it, but that's what happened.

      Time in the US, Migration from Mexico, Reasons, Domestic Violence

  17. May 2021
    1. We still do not understand how information practices from the worlds of learning, finance, industry, and administration cross-pollinated. From the fourteenth century onward, accountants developed complex instructions for note-taking to describe holdings and transactions, as well for the recording of numbers and calculations. By the seventeenth century, merchants, and indeed ship captains, engineers, and state administrators, were known to travel with trunks of memoranda, massive inventories, scrap books, and various ledgers and log books that mixed descriptive notes and numbers. By the eighteenth century, tables and printed forms cut down on the need for notes and required less description and more systematic numerical notes. Notaries also were master information handlers, creating archives for their legal and financial documents and cross-referencing catalogue systems.

      I'm noticing no mention here of double entry book keeping or the accountant's idea of waste books.

      There's also no mention of orality or memory methods either.

  18. Mar 2021
  19. Feb 2021
    1. Personally, I'm starting to think that the feature where it automatically adds xray.js to the document is more trouble than it's worth. I propose that we remove that automatic feature and just make it part of the install instructions that you need to add this line to your template/layout: <%= javascript_include_tag 'xray', nonce: true if Rails.env.development? %>
  20. Dec 2020
  21. Nov 2020
    1. This is Sass based, and therefore doesn't require Svelte components

      Just because we could make Svelte wrapper components for each Material typography [thing], doesn't mean we should.

      Compare:

      • material-ui [react] did make wrapper components for typography.

        • But why did they? Is there a technical reason why they couldn't just do what svelte-material-ui did (as in, something technical that Svelte empowers/allows?), or did they just not consider it?
      • svelte-material-ui did not.

        • And they were probably wise to not do so. Just reuse the existing work from the Material team so that there's less work for you to keep in sync and less chance of divergence.
  22. Oct 2020
  23. Sep 2020
  24. Jul 2020
  25. May 2020
    1. With that guidance in mind, and from a practical standpoint, consider keeping records of the following: The name or other identifier of the data subject that consented; The dated document, a timestamp, or note of when an oral consent was made; The version of the consent request and privacy policy existing at the time of the consent; and, The document or data capture form by which the data subject submitted his or her data.
    1. Full and extensive records of processing are expressly required in cases where your data processing activities are not occasional, where they could result in a risk to the rights and freedoms of others, where they involve the handling of “special categories of data” or where your organization has more than 250 employees — this effectively covers almost all data controllers and processors.
  26. Mar 2020
  27. Sep 2015