See Inside the First Museum Retrospective Dedicated to John Waters’s Unparalleled Contributions to Cinema—and Bad Taste<br /> "Pope of Trash" at the Academy Museum documents the director's films, obsessions, and creative processes.<br /> by Min Chen, October 14, 2023<br /> https://news.artnet.com/art-world/john-waters-pope-of-trash-academy-museum-2366964

May have to crash this to claim my spot....

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

During shmita, the land is left to lie fallow and all agricultural activity, including plowing, planting, pruning and harvesting, is forbidden by halakha (Jewish law).

The sabbath year (shmita; Hebrew: שמיטה, literally "release"), also called the sabbatical year or shǝvi'it (שביעית‎, literally "seventh"), or "Sabbath of The Land", is the seventh year of the seven-year agricultural cycle mandated by the Torah in the Land of Israel and is observed in Judaism.

Google is free, do not pay to learn about anything...

This quote is a feature of toxic capitalism, which should be efficient enough to allow a person to quickly obtain another job to thereby make the issue moot.

Part of it is tied into identity as well.

Kemp, Angie, Lee Skallerup Bessette, and Kris Shaffer. “What Do You Do with 11,000 Blogs? Preserving, Archiving, and Maintaining UMW Blogs—A Case Study.” The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, May 16, 2019. https://jitp.commons.gc.cuny.edu/what-do-you-do-with-11000-blogs-preserving-archiving-and-maintaining-umw-blogs-a-case-study/.

https://www.archives.gov/citizen-archivist

https://www.digitalpreservation.gov/personalarchiving/

Ian MacKaye and Citizen Archiving by Butch Lazorchak<br /> May 8, 2013 https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2013/05/ian-mackaye-and-citizen-archiving/

The flip side of the collector's fallacy....

this!

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

Domain of One's Own as a form of digital nachlass.

Preserving Harvard’s Blogging History by Matt Mullenweg<br /> October 2, 2023 https://ma.tt/2023/10/preserving-harvards-blogging-history/

https://gdz.sub.uni-goettingen.de/suche?filter%5B0%5D%5Bfacet_creator_personal%5D=Lichtenberg%2C%20Georg%20Christoph

Digitized and available, though not part of a larger project toward Georg Christoph Lichtenberg's notes specifically.

https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2023/09/the-dawn-of-everything/

https://www.libraryhistorybuff.org/cardcatalog-evolution.htm

reply to u/Flubber78769 at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/17ajd34/ive_been_struggling_with_duplicate_notes_within/

This is the value of actually indexing your content. You can do a quick search around the index entries which provides a natural check against duplication, but importantly it'll let you think about those ideas again and spend your time more profitably by expanding upon them instead.

Occasionally I'll find duplication from one source to the next which provides some support about an idea's value or spread over time, especially when I'm tracking usage of a thing, so it's not always the case that duplication is automatically a bad thing.

source: 1900, Moltkes Militärische Werke: II. Die Thätigkeit als Chef des Generalstabes der Armee im Frieden. (Moltke’s Military Works: II. Activity as Chief of the Army General Staff in Peacetime) Zweiter Theil (Second Part), Aufsatz vom Jahre 1871 Ueber Strategie (Article from 1871 on strategy), Start Page 287, Quote Page 291, Publisher: Ernst Siegfried Mittler und Sohn, Berlin, Germany. (Google Books Full View) link

compare with: https://hypothes.is/a/GWE5OG2EEe6kL6Ni1VcN9g

source: 1984, The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower, Volume XI: Columbia University, Editor Louis Galambos et al, Letter from: Dwight Eisenhower, Letter to: Hamilton Fish Armstrong, Date: December 31, 1950, Start Page 1516, Quote Page 1516, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Maryland.

via https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/18/planning/

similar to plan your work and work your plan

Plan Your Work and Work Your Plan. <br /> —Memindex price list booklet circa 1913 https://www.ebay.com/itm/166293242710

Surely this was in use prior to this version...

Three Questions About Note-Taking Systems by ANDREI SUKHOVSKII<br /> OCT 11, 2023<br /> https://qnnnp.substack.com/p/three-questions-about-note-taking

very low level....

https://qnnnp.substack.com/p/a-joker-in-zettelkasten

meh...

Annotations at https://docdrop.org/video/qRSCKSPMuDc/

Zettelkasten section at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRSCKSPMuDc&t=2246s

Hans Blumenberg and his Zettelkasten by Andrei Shukhovskii https://qnnnp.substack.com/p/hans-blumenberg-and-his-zettelkasten

nothing new to me...

https://danallosso.substack.com/p/our-journey-day-68

https://joonhyeokahn.substack.com/p/demystify-zettelkasten

If you've not already spent some time with the idea, this short one pager is unlikely to "demystify" anything. Yet another zk one-pager, and not one of the better ones.

Jacob's use of a stone as a massebah wasn't forbidden because it was dedicated to Yahweh.

Massebah for pagan worship: - Exodus 23:24 (https://hypothes.is/a/r3m5QmyDEe6SC8eLYcJE1Q) - Hosea 10:1 (https://hypothes.is/a/4PK2GGyDEe6wZg_r2YpVCA ) - 2 Kings 18:4 - 2 Kings 23:14

Massebah for worship of Yahweh: - Genesis 28:18 Jacob's pillow (https://hypothes.is/a/NF5p8Gx6Ee65Rg_J4tfaMQ)<br /> - Genesis 31:44-45 Jacob and Laban's covenant - Exodus 24:4 - Joshua 24:25-27

Link to https://hypothes.is/a/r3m5QmyDEe6SC8eLYcJE1Q

In neighboring cultures in which both have oral practices relating to massebah, one is not just destroying "sacred stones" to stamp out their religion, but it's also destroying their culture and cultural memory as well as likely their laws and other valuable memories for the function of their society.

View this in light also of the people of Israel keeping their own sacred stones (Hosea 10:1) as well as the destruction of pillars dedicated to Baal in 2 Kings 18:4 and 2 Kings 23:14.

(Link and) Compare this to the British fencing off the land in Australia and thereby destroying Songlines and access to them and the impact this had on Indigenous Australians.

It's also somewhat similar to the colonialization activity of stamping out of Indigenous Americans and First Nations' language in North America, though the decimation of their language wasn't viewed in as reciprocal way as it might be viewed now. (Did colonizers of the time know about the tremendous damage of language destruction, or was it just a power over function?)

Use of massebah for remembrance of a name...

Potentially used for other factors? translation? context?

See also: https://hypothes.is/a/oqgH4mx9Ee68_dMgihgD0A (Rachel's massebah in Genesis 35:19-20)

Use of a standing stone or massebah (pillar) to mark a grave in Genesis 35:19-20.

Certainly could have been other than to simply mark a location and may have been used to mark and remember the knowledge of Rachel as well as the family's experiences with Rachel, a practice which is still commonplace when visiting burial locations.

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?

connect this to:

The helps whereof by this art memorative, they would prove to be as effectual, by these conceived fictions in the eye of the mind,12 as those we remember by the visible eye of the body, for example whereof say they, concerning the latter we read in the holy Scriptures of 12 stones, that were erected in the river Jordan in memory of the wonderful transpassage of the Israelites, Josh. 24.27.—The Memory Arts in Renaissance England by William E. Engel, Rory Loughnane, and Grant Williams

Description of the arrangement? Circle? Further or suggested usage?

Link to Genesis 28:18: https://hypothes.is/a/NF5p8Gx6Ee65Rg_J4tfaMQ

Mariottini, Claude. “Standing Stones in the Old Testament.” Dr. Claude Mariottini - Professor of Old Testament (blog), September 20, 2021. https://claudemariottini.com/2021/09/20/standing-stones-in-the-old-testament/.

Commonplaces: standing stones in the Old Testament!

A quote to further @amandamull's excellent research on groupings of three and beverages at work that I saw on the Atlantic archive today: "One [martini] is all right, two is too many, three is not enough."—James Thurber via https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,939759,00.html

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/08/the-correct-number-of-desk-beverages/595927/

Syndication link: https://twitter.com/ChrisAldrich/status/1714054816715153757

Mull, Amanda. “Always Have Three Beverages.” The Atlantic, August 12, 2019. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/08/the-correct-number-of-desk-beverages/595927/.

Syse, Glenna. “People, Aug. 15, 1960.” Time, August 15, 1960. https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,939759,00.html.

https://www.pbssocal.org/shows/little-bird/preview/trailer-xqovtl

reply to u/6_squids at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/178nr6j/simple_problem/

Functional groups are certainly a top down categorization of these structures that some have found useful over time. But what if you wrote about them in other ways from a bottom up perspective? Perhaps you might discover other useful and intriguing ways of categorizing them? While your textbook is trying to present an organized method, you might find some interesting insight by looking at them in other ways. Be willing to play around and experiment—not coincidentally, this is what a good organic chemist should be trained to do.

https://www.ted.com/talks/robin_buckley_why_i_gave_my_teenage_daughter_a_vibrator?language=en

https://fez-o-rama.com/blogs/fez-o-blog/the-elder-sign-on-tweed

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0896Q51QM?binding=kindle_edition&searchxofy=true&ref_=dbs_s_bs_series_rwt_tkin&qid=1697421707&sr=1-3

https://www.r-m.de/en-us/bikes/

http://www.philsoc.eu/turban.html

https://web.archive.org/web/20150526000343/http://www.philsoc.eu/turban.html

https://udenver.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZcuceuspzkuE9VomnEaGva1HH1ra_iS4Eua?ref=jessestommel.com#/registration

Some related ideas that are suggesting some sort of thesis for improving the idea of ungrading: - We measure the things we care about. - In Education, we care about learning and understanding, but measuring these outside of testing and evaluation is difficult at best (therefor ungrading). - No one cares about your GPA six months after you graduate. - Somehow we've tied up evaluations and grades into the toxic capitalism and competition within US culture. Some of this is tied into educational movements related to Frederick Winslow Taylor and Harvards Eliot. - Hierarchies instituted by the Great Chain of Being have confounded our educational process.

Adler and Van Doren's minimal bar of a college education is that it produce competent syntopical readers.

One could argue that Adler and Van Doren would lump social media into the sources of amusement category.

compare with historical objectivity, scientific objectivity, other definitions of objectivity in general.

Every book, while holding the same words, will be different based on the context and needs of the individual reader.

Aristotle on the unity of a work.

source?

This is also an art of putting notes together to make an article or book.

How are they defining "multiplicity" here? There seems to be a tacit definition with respect to being in opposition to "unity" (of a work), but not an explicit one. It also seems to be a shaded meaning with respect to the more common one.

unity: essence, core, coherence, oneness

They use the word "multiplicity" in the usual sense of large number or multitude on p55: "The multiplicity of the rules indicates the complexity of the one habit to be formed, not a plurality of distinct habits."

They also revisit it in the upcoming section: "Mastering the Multiplicity: The Art of Outlining a Book" on p88

Perhaps its just me but there's a linguistic "softness" of the uses of unity and multiplicity here with respect to 2023. Though these two opposites fit the dictionary definitions of their words, is it possible that this softness is the result of a sort of historical linguistic shift I'm feeling in these words? I can't quite put my finger on it, but perhaps it's the relationship of unity to religion? Neither seem to be frequently used these days.

The Ngram Viewer shows peaks for the use of unity in 1660 and 1960 of almost 75% higher usage compared to a broader historical average. It is generally waning since. Multiplicity has about 1/4 the use of unity and has remained flat over time. What caused the peaks in the use of "unity" during these periods? This 1972 use was on the downslope of the 1960s peak. Was it used in the 1940 version?

The 20th century increase in the use of unity begins around 1914 and may have been related to political shades of meaning going into WWI with another marked rise in the lead up to WW2.

Adler/Van Doren use the statement of unity of a work as an example of testing one's understanding of a work and its contents.

(Again, did this exist in the 1940 edition?)

Who do McDaniel and Donnelly 1996 cite in their work as predecessors of their idea as certainly it existed?

Examples in the literature of this same idea/method after this: - https://hypothes.is/a/TclhyMfqEeyTkQdZl43ZyA (Feynman Technique in ZK; relationship to Ahrens) - explain it to me like I'm a 5th grader - https://hypothes.is/a/BKhfvuIyEeyZj_v7eMiYcg ("People talk" in Algebra Project) - https://hypothes.is/a/m0KQSDlZEeyYFLulG9z0vw (Intellectual Life version) - https://hypothes.is/a/OyAAflm5Ee6GStMjUMCKbw (earlier version of statement in this same work) - https://hypothes.is/a/iV5MwjivEe23zyebtBagfw (Ahrens' version of elaboration citing McDaniel and Donnelly 1996, this uses both restatement and application to a situation as a means of testing understanding) - https://hypothes.is/a/B3sDhlm5Ee6wF0fRYO0OQg (Adler's version for testing understanding from his video) - https://hypothes.is/a/rh1M5vdEEeut4pOOF7OYNA (Manfred Kuenh and Luhmann's reformulating writing)

The first several rules of reading a book analytically follow the same process of writing a book as suggested in the snowflake method.

Analogy of reading (and learning) to teaching.

Outlines will show similarities to fractals because of their building block simplicity which can grow to show emergent complexity.

SINGLE SENTENCE, OR AT MOST A FEW SENTENCES ( A SHORT PARAGRAPH )

p. 75-76

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?

first appearance of "unity" in the book (outside of community and opportunity).

This definition common "to all" presupposes an audience here, thus different cultures with different viewpoints are very likely to have radically different philosophies.

early phrase for "science"

that

In Re: to folgezettel or not? in an unlogged chat:

Zettelkasten (slips) or not (commonplaces, notebooks, paper, files, other), you're going to have a variety of related ideas which you'll juxtapose, especially if you're regularly writing. Those who practice folgezettel are putting in some of the work/heavy lifting from the start versus those who don't and are leaving the work until some later point closer to composition. Folgezettel also helps to encourage the emergence of ideas, but requires work to do so. This doesn't mean that this emergence or new ideas may not arrive without Folgezettel and/or Zettelkasten, but one needs to have some process or affordances which help to foster them. Victor Margolin's process put more of his work on the back end in comparison to Luhmann, but his version obviously works all the same. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kxyy0THLfuI

Machine translation:

No. I started the Zettelkasten out of the simple thought that I have a bad memory. First of all, I put pieces of paper in books on which I wrote notes, so the covers of the books got ruined. Then I helped myself with folders, but when they got thicker I couldn't find anything in them. In 1952 or 1953, I started my Zettelkasten because I realized that I had to plan for a life and not for a book.

There's some missing interstitial space here about how precisely he came to it outside of the general motivation for the thing in general.

52/53 would have been after law school and in his administrative days and before his trip to Harvard in 61.

sofort weiß, wie es geht. Wenn ich einen Moment stocke, lege ich die Sache beiseite und mache etwas anderes.

Was machen Sie dann'?

Na, andere Bücher schreiben. Ich arbeite immer gleichzeitig an mehreren verschiedenen Texten. Mit dieser Methode, immer an mehreren Dingen zu arbeiten, habe ich nie Blockierungen.

Rough translation:

— I have to tell you: I never force anything, I only do what comes easy to me. I only write when I immediately know how to do it. If I falter for a moment, I put the matter aside and do something else.

(Interviewer): What do you do then?

Well, write other books. I always work on several different texts at the same time. With this method of always working on multiple things, I never have any blockages.

waren. Diese Technik, so glaube ich, erklärt auch, warum ich überhaupt nicht linear denke und beim Bücherschreiben Mühe habe, die richtige Kapitelfolge zu finden, weil eigentlich ja jedes Kapitel in jedem anderen Kapitel wieder vorkommen müßte

Niklas Luhmann's process for writing from his box

Machine translation:

Q: When you start writing an essay, how do you put your note box to work?

I first make a plan for what I want to write and then take out what I can use from the note box.

Q: In contrast to a builder who only assembles prefabricated parts, a scientist must also have new ideas that are not already contained in the individual parts. Ideas like these don't come from a note box?

But. For example, I have a large set of notes on the term "functional differentiation", I also have a set of notes on "self-referential systems", and I have a large set of notes on "binarity". At the moment I am giving a lecture on ecological problems in modern societies, and my work consists of sifting through pieces of paper from the three conceptual areas outlined and combining them so that I can say something substantive on this topic. The new ideas then arise from the different possible combinations of the pieces of paper for the individual terms. Without the notes, just by thinking about it, I wouldn't come up with ideas like that. Of course my mind is required to record the ideas, but it cannot be held solely responsible for them. In this respect, I work like a computer, which can also be creative in the sense that by combining input data it produces new results that could not have been predicted. I think this technique also explains why I don't think linearly at all and why I have trouble finding the right sequence of chapters when writing books, because every chapter should actually appear in every other chapter.

An interviewer asked Luhmann if every thought that went through his head was saved into his zettelkasten, and Luhmann replied yes. This is obviously a level of conversational hyperbole.

Luhmann indicates that most of his zettelkasten notes are his own thoughts, but some are quotes, which he uses rarely.

Ha! Even university committee meetings in the late XX C were apparently as bad as they still are today.

In this interview, Lumnann indicates that he learned a number of organizational tricks while studying law.

What specifically were these? Relation to his ZK?

Any relation to Bruno First's memory work which grew out of his legal studies in the early 1900s?

With heavy early interest in anthropology, sociology and philosophy including Malinowski, it's more likely that Luhmann would have been trained in historical methods which included the traditions of note taking using card indices of that time.

In the early 1950s, Luhmann spent a year at the Lüneburg Higher Administrative Court organizing a reference system for the administrative court decisions to enable researchers to see what decisions had been made in the higher courts.

Though he had begun his zettelkasten during his studies, this referencing system may have influenced the structure of his own note taking system.

Can we pin the dates on these practices down more closely?

"Biography, Attitudes, Zettelkasten" was published under the title "The Zettelkasten costs me more time than writing books" in the Frankfurter Rundschau on Saturday, April 27, 1985, p. ZB 3, abridged.

To some extent, Luhmann felt that his books wrote themselves. He spent an inordinate amount of time writing out notes and filing them into his zettelkasten. The writing portion consisted primarily of typing out the manuscript and after writing it, he usually didn't revise it.

Link to https://hypothes.is/a/LG--lGpmEe6yvy8lp7nfPw

Luhmann felt that he spent more time working with his zettelkasten than the amount of time it took him to write his papers or books.

Luhmann attributed his productivity to the use of his zettelkasten.

During his studies Niklas Luhmann began using his zettelkasten in the early 1950s.

Luhmann, Niklas. Archimedes und wir: Interviews. Berlin: Merve Verlag, 1987.

Bump, Philip. “Analysis | The Terrorizing Style in American Politics.” Washington Post, September 14, 2023. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/09/14/romney-political-violence-republicans/.

The threat of physical violence is silencing those in power even on the right. We're already at war except for the bullets.

https://frankenlog.com/how-it-works/

https://frankenlog.com/

https://www.ebay.com/itm/204498240406

Offered for $1,200 on 2023-10-13 for local pick up from Scranton, PA. A Barrister/stackable card index/filing cabinet with a two drawer card index section, a letter filing section and a cabinet section with a lower section with legs.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B087JDPY7F?binding=paperback

https://www.ebay.com/itm/385498338372

30 drawer card catalog in 2 parts with two writing drawers in the middle and a matching table stand. In mediocre shape and has two replaced drawers (metal and/or plastic, not wood). Drawers are maed in all wood

Listed at $1,5000 for over 3 months. $50 per drawer.

2023-10-12: Still listed for sale. Local pick up only from Brentwood, CA

cost per drawer: $50

Listed in late summer/early fall 2023.

Art Metal Company card catalog (drawer sizes maybe 6x9" index cards? with 32 3/4 W x 38 3/4" H x 18 1/2" D). Possibly sectional with top and short leg sections, two sections of 3x2 drawers and a storage section with two doors. Nice patina.

Listed originally at $1,200 and put on sale in early October 2023 for $960. Local pick up in Savannah, GA.

Cost per drawer: $85.71 ($68.57 on sale)

https://www.ebay.com/itm/325827924222

18 drawer library card catalog listed for sale at $1,800 and local pick up in Cabot, AR. Fairly standard looking early century mounted onto a small stand that looks like a repurposed table carriage with legs. (Wood on the two parts is different. Missing 7 drawer pulls, no card catalog rods.

Cost per drawer: $100

https://newrepublic.com/article/176138/twitter-went-evil-musk-misinformation

https://wildrye.com/your-blog-as-a-commonplace-book/

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

https://www.ebay.com/itm/186111284362

I love this old two drawer card index which has a custom label set into the top that reads, "Index to Plans". The label is done in large lettering across the top, almost the way old school stores would do gold lettering with a nice thick black drop shadow.

https://wordpress.com/blog/2023/10/11/activitypub/

Good job Matthias!

Grabe, Mark. “Tags and Stories in My First and Second Brains.” Substack newsletter. Mark’s Substack (blog), October 11, 2023. https://markgrabe.substack.com/p/tags-and-stories-in-my-first-and.

Mark Grabe's synopsis of Roger Shank on storytelling.

Roger Shank's definition of an expert

quote from Christoph Adami at https://twitter.com/ChristophAdami/status/1711583362647814485

Re: George Ellis https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03061-y

Physicists and quantum mechanics as solution to consciousness.

See also: Physics in Mind: A Quantum View of the Brain by Werner R. Loewenstein

reply to u/Wooden-School-4091 at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/172ujnk/should_i_use_zettelkasten/

This comes up fairly frequently. See https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=tag%3A%27zettelkasten+for+studying%27 and related links for other variations and advice on this theme.

https://zeti.space/

A zettelkasten tool with potential AI functionality for linking. Cloud and local storage available.

heard about via: https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/173ryxu/we_built_a_novel_tool_just_for_zetelkasten_with/

reply to u/dotinvoke at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/175a6tr/are_links_still_better_than_search_in_the_age_of/

The value in the process is making a ratchet of ideas which is highly customized to building your own lines of thought or "associative trails" if you prefer Vannevar Bush's framing.

If your idea worked, then one could "simply" rely on Google's database and a variety of associated tools to act as your zettelkasten—Bob's your uncle and you're done! In practice, you'll find that this doesn't work well. You can experiment, but I think you'll find that your own limited choices of links will work far better than the infinite number of adjacent possible links that a digital system may create on your behalf. If you're already fighting information overload, you don't want to add link overload to your list of problems.

Put in a different light, it can be interesting to randomly flip a coin and go left on heads and right on tails to see where you might end up, particularly if you're unsure. But if you actively make your own choices, you're more likely to be happier with what you see along the way and where you end up.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/235238777043

Uncommon Shaw-Walker 4 drawer card cabinet/side table in a 2x2 configuration with leg-based stand. Listed around 2023-10-04 for $1,375.00.

Possibly modular and made of 3-4 individual stackable pieces.

Free pick up or shipment from DeKalb, IL

cost per drawer: 343.75

(This may be one of the most expensive per drawer I've ever seen.)

2023-10-11 The seller made me an offer to purchase for $950.00 bring down the per drawer cost to $237.50.

Excerpt of the original Dutch:

Vader heeft voor Margot en mij een kartotheekdoos leeggemaakt en er kaarjtes in gedaan. Dit wort de boekenkartotheek, we schrijven namelikj alle twee op welke boeken we gelezen hebben, ...

In the original Dutch Anne Frank uses the word "kartotheekdoos" which the translator then uses "card file".

—Anne Frank (1929-1945), diary entry dated Saturday, February 27, 1943 (age 13)

Anne Frank was given an empty card file by her father who filled it with index cards that were blank on one side. They were intended to use it as a "reading file" in which she and Margot were "supposed to note down the books we've read, the author and the date."

In the same entry she mentioned that she'd bought a separate notebook for writing down new words she encountered. Recent words she mentions encountering were "brothel" and "coquette".

Anne Frank (June 12, 1929-1945)<br /> Niklas Luhmann (December 8, 1927-1998)

Niklas Luhmann was a year and a half older than Anne Frank who received her first card index file in February 1943 (likely between the 27th, the date of her diary entry mentioning it and the prior diary entry on February 5th), from her father at the age of 13. She was intended to use it as a "reading file" to note down the books she'd read along with the author and the date.

One can only wonder at how many entries she would have made over the span of her life had it not come to such an abrupt end.

In a diary entry dated Monday, November 2, 1942, Anne Frank in an entry in which she includes a post script about the "important news that [she's] probably going to get [her] period soon." she mentions spending some time sorting out an index card file. Presumably it had been used for business purposes as she mentions that she got it from the office. Given that it had "fallen over and gotten all mixed up", it presumably didn't use a card rod to hold the cards in. It must have been a fairly big task as she asked for help from two people and not getting it, she abandoned the task because, as she wrote: "I'm not crazy enough to do it all by myself!"

Frank, Anne. The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition. Edited by Otto H. Frank and Mirjam Pressler. Translated by Susan Massotty. 1947. Reprint, New York: Bantam, 1997.

https://danallosso.substack.com/p/how-to-read-a-book-chapter-5

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

See also: https://hypothes.is/a/n5FUgGcgEe6O5nctin8I7Q

Boroditsky, Lera. How Language Shapes the Way We Think. Streaming Video. TED | TEDWomen 2017, 2017. https://www.ted.com/talks/lera_boroditsky_how_language_shapes_the_way_we_think.

See also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKK7wGAYP6k

Kuuk Thaayorre language (Australia) orients everything with respect to cardinal directions or is mapped onto their terrain/land. Even their perception of time (chronology) is mapped onto the land with respect to their bodies.

Perception of events can differ dramatically in different languages based on their constructions and what those constructions dictate.

Example: Accidents in different languages are seen differently. In English, focus is on the actor who receives blame while in Spanish, there is more focus on the action and intention rather than what English would view as "perpetrator". Spanish eyewitness are less likely to remember the actor for testimony versus in English.

Do languages change the way we think?

To have a second language is to have a second soul. —Charlemagne

Original source? Original language?

https://www.latimes.com/recipe/claras-oatmeal-cookies

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biophilia_(album)

links between nature and technology

Are we stretching too far by saying that AI are currently emergent? Isn't this like saying that card indexes of the early 20th century are computers. In reality they were data storage and the "computing" took place when humans did the actual data processing/thinking to come up with new results.

Emergence would seem to actually be the point which comes about when the AI takes its own output and continues processing (successfully) on it.

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

The increased efficiency in the use of a resource doesn't imply a decrease in the usage of that resource, but rather may cause in incommensurate increase in use because of decrease in cost.

The increased efficiency of the use of a resource may act as a catalyst for increasing usage.

https://claude.ai/

Mark Corbett Wilson mentioned Remi Kalir's work with Claude.ai

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

Reference in Descendants 2 (Disney Channel, 2017, movie)

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

Kirsch, Adam. “The Smartest Man Who Ever Lived: A Novelist Transforms the Physicist John von Neumann into a Scientific Demon.” The Atlantic, October 3, 2023. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/11/maniac-book-benjamin-labatut-john-von-neumann/675443/.

Benjamín Labatut also falls into this genre.

Someone complaining of Scott Scheper's teaching/pedagogy/"system".

One needs to read a bit between the lines with only the initial context, but they circled around later to say:

I am talking about that A**net guy

Zettelkasten courses and teachers

Having someone who is experienced, cares, and knows the entirety of their space can be invaluable to speed you on your way to having at least an idea of the space in general and then give you pointers on your particular practice and needs. There is tremendous amount of ink spilled on the idea of zettelkasten, some of it good, some of it remarkably bad, and most of it painfully generic and useless.

Most of those I know who have serious practices have spent an inordinate amount of time reading and refining to come to where they are. They, and I, would all probably think that a good teacher and class on the subject could have saved them hundreds (thousands?) of hours of time and in exchange for a couple of hundred dollars. How much is your time worth in the balance? Can you read a cheap book or two on the topic? A few blog posts? Certainly, and many have, yet there are still lots of very basic questions which pop up here and elsewhere. Buying a book isn't the end-all either as you've still got to spend the time reading and distilling what's in it. A good instructor can boil down Ahrens' work into twenty minutes and get you up and working a lot more quickly, not to mention distilling down even a fraction of all the other potentially relevant sources.

Most of the questions in this sub-reddit are people asking for pointers either about where to start or examples of specific things they're having trouble with. Of course in the majority of the cases they could simply search this or one or two other sources to find almost exactly what they need, yet here they are posting one of the same 10 questions over and over. (I also generally get the impression that they're only thinking about the system in a theoretical fashion and aren't actually practicing it for themselves.) It's nice to have pointers like the one that u/WM2D2 provides, but how is someone new to the space supposed to find this or other specific sources without the prior knowledge? Simple search is unlikely to uncover the best sources. In my experience, a lot of the best material on zettelkasten practice doesn't even contain the word "zettelkasten" to allow one to find it via search. And what to do if or when it doesn't answer all their questions? Instructors are usually good at distilling down the particulars into a more coherent whole. This is what you're paying for.

Of those who are well-practiced, even fewer have expanded on their own individual practice to look at how others have practiced for a variety of very disparate use cases. Where is this experience to be found? Having looked at and read many sources over the years, it's definitely hard won knowledge. And what about taking the theory and turning it into actual practice? This is where a good teacher will come in handy to help you actually do the work to become better much more rapidly than any book ever could. The rules are easy, it's the practice to turn those rules into a practicable art that is the tougher road.

This being said, there is definitely a spectrum of experience and teaching ability. There are certainly only one or two people I can imagine recommending as a teacher in this specific area. Because this may be some of the most hard won knowledge to come across, I'll mention that u/taurusnoises is one of those I would recommend if you're looking to save your time and come to a useful practice for yourself without spending lots of time floundering around.

written in response to u/IamOkei at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1728f1n/why_are_people_paying_thousand_of_dollars_on/

https://github.com/flengyel/Zettel

An interesting looking and complete template example.

https://aboard.com/

A card-based collaboration tool that leverages information visualization. Pinterest for collaborative teams with expandable data.

Looks interesting and I've got a beta invite, but not sure if it fits any of my needs, particularly with an eye toward note taking.