19,855 Matching Annotations
  1. Dec 2022
    1. Published in the journal, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the paper also shows that the mice share similarities in mitochondrial DNA with Scandinavia and northern Germany, but not with mice found in Portugal.

      Use of DNA on rodents to indicate ancient trade and travel.

    2. The “Book of Roads and Kingdoms”, an eleventh-century geography text by Abu Abdullah al-Bakri, describes the Vikings as “Majus”, a term for heathens and fire-worshipers.

      Majus cognate with magi, magic?

    1. Good teachers need to have the context of the student to know what level of explanation they need to give to satisfy the curiosity of the learner. (Also a potential reason that online programmatic learning is difficult as having the appropriate context to skip portions is incredibly hard to do with computers.)

      General rule of thumb: The levels of the depth of explanations provided are generally proportional to the levels of understanding achieved.

      Further understanding requires additional questions, research, and work.

    2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8Xaw72ESdA

      According to researcher Danny Hatcher, the "Feynman Technique" was coined by Scott H. Young in the August 22, 2011 YouTube video Learn Faster with The Feynman Technique and the subsequent 2022-09-01 article Learn Faster with Feynman Technique, ostensibly in a summarization of Gleick, James (1992). Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman. Pantheon Books. ISBN 0-679-40836-3. OCLC 243743850.

      The frequently quoted Einstein that accompanies many instances of the Feynman Technique is also wrong and not said by Einstein.

      The root Einstein quote, is apparently as follows:

      that all physical theories, their mathematical expressions apart ought to lend themselves to so simple a description 'that even a child could understand them.' —Ronald W. Clark, p418 of Einstein: His Life and Times (1972)

    1. ourobo-ros · 2 days agoOk great! Do you have an example you could illustrate of new ideas you've managed to extrapolate?

      reply to: https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/zhyu5i/comment/izuew08/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

      Often the context to properly illustrate these new insights can be more than they're worth. However this self-contained one linked here, may be useful: https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/zhyu5i/comment/j02niq3/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

    2. Reply to:

      Who is Zettelkasten note-taking system for? <br /> u/Beens__<br /> https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/zhyu5i/who_is_zettelkasten_notetaking_system_for/

      Perhaps your use case may benefit from knowing the longer term outcomes of such processes, particularly as they relate to idea generation and innovation within your areas of interest? Keeping notes which you review over periodically and between which you create potential links will help to foster more productive long term combinatorial creativity, which will help you create new and potentially useful ideas much more quickly than blank page-based brainstorming.

      Her method was much more ad hoc than the more highly refined methods of Luhmann which allowed him to write, but perhaps there's something you might appreciate from the example of the character Tess McGill in the movie Working Girl. Even more base in practice is that of Eminem, which shows far less structure, but could still have interesting long term creativity effects, though again, it bears repeating that one should occasionally revisit their notes (even if they're only in "headline form") in attempts to refresh their memory and link old ideas to new to generate completely new ideas.

    1. His note taking technique has a high distraction potential and is time consuming.

      highlight from https://www.reddit.com/user/ManuelRodriguez331/ <br /> https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/zigwo3

      Anecdotal evidence of how some might view zettelkasten note-taking practices, particularly when they have no end goal or needs in mind.

      Form follows function

      /comment/izs0u3b/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

    1. Alas, lawmakers are way behind the curve on this, demanding new "online safety" rules that require firms to break E2E and block third-party de-enshittification tools: https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/online-safety-made-dangerous/ The online free speech debate is stupid because it has all the wrong focuses: Focusing on improving algorithms, not whether you can even get a feed of things you asked to see; Focusing on whether unsolicited messages are delivered, not whether solicited messages reach their readers; Focusing on algorithmic transparency, not whether you can opt out of the behavioral tracking that produces training data for algorithms; Focusing on whether platforms are policing their users well enough, not whether we can leave a platform without losing our important social, professional and personal ties; Focusing on whether the limits on our speech violate the First Amendment, rather than whether they are unfair: https://doctorow.medium.com/yes-its-censorship-2026c9edc0fd

      This list is particularly good.


      Proper regulation of end to end services would encourage the creation of filtering and other tools which would tend to benefit users rather than benefit the rent seeking of the corporations which own the pipes.

    2. The enshittification of Amazon – where you search for a specific product and get six screens of ads for different, worse ones – is the natural end-state of chokepoint capitalism: https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola
    3. That same enshittification is on every platform, and "freedom of speech is not freedom of reach" is just a way of saying, "Now that you're stuck here, we're going to enshittify your experience."
    4. But there's another side to this playlistification of feeds: playlists and other recommendation algorithms are chokepoints: they are a way to durably interpose a company between a creator and their audience. Where you have chokepoints, you get chokepoint capitalism: https://chokepointcapitalism.com/

      Massive social media networks using algorithmic feeds and other programmatic and centralizing methods to interpose themselves between people trying to reach each other, often in ways which allow them to extract additional value from the participants. They become necessary platforms which create chokepoints for flows of information which Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin call "chokepoint capitalism".

    5. The modern internet was born out of an epic struggled between "Bellheads" (who believed centralized powers should decide how you used networks) and "Netheads" (who believed that services should be provided and consumed "at the edge"): https://www.wired.com/1996/10/atm-3/
    6. They didn't block new features for shits and giggles, though – the method to this madness was rent-extraction. The iron-clad rule of the Bell System was that anything that improved on the basic service had to have a price-tag attached. Every phone "feature" was a recurring source of monthly revenue for the phone company – even the phone itself, which you couldn't buy, and had to rent, month after month, year after year, until you'd paid for it hundreds of times over. This is an early and important example of "predatory inclusion": the monopoly carriers delivered universal service to all of us, but that was a prelude to an ugly, parasitic, rent-seeking way of doing business:

      Predatory inclusion is a form of rent-seeking in which one preys on customers using monopoly power to extract excessive value for small add-on services.

    1. https://www.movetodon.org/

      What a lovely looking UI.

      The data returned will also give one a strong idea of how many of their acquaintances have made the jump as well as how active they may be, particularly for those who moved weeks ago and are still active within the last couple of days. For me the numbers are reasonably large. 860 of 4942 have accounts presently and in scrolling through it appears that 80% or so have been active within a day or so regardless of account age.

    1. https://www.goodreads.com/notes/59660671-building-a-second-brain/7458926-tiago

      And as if I requested it this morning, here's an example of an author using annotations to create engagement/start a conversation/start an informal book club discussion using Goodreads and annotations on their own work.

      cc: @remikalir

    1. Not a hard silo quit of Twitter, but shows heavy preparation.

      Just surpassed 130 thousand followers on Mastodon (link in bio). Would be thrilled for you to join us there.

      — Robert Reich (@RBReich) December 5, 2022
      <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
    1. https://www.goodreads.com/notes/57643476-annotation/3524158-markgrabe-grabe

      I rarely see notifications from Goodreads about annotations (typically via Kindle) unless they're from the author of the book posting them, ostensibly to generate engagement with their readers. Interesting to see Mark Grabe sharing his annotations on @remikalir and @anterobot's book on annotation though. :)

    1. By making an investmentup front to alleviate poverty, the evidence suggests that we will be repaid manytimes over in the lower costs associated with a host of social problems.

      From a "business perspective", the US Government would be better off by minimizing the cost of poverty.

      (Original highlight on 2022-10-18)

    2. As has been demonstrated, it is not a question of paying ornot paying. Rather, it is a question of how we want to pay, which then affectsthe amount we end up spending.
    3. There is, however, an argument often made with respect to not fully addressingpoverty and inequality. It is based on the assumption that there is a necessarytrade- off between having a strong economy and having a robust social welfarestate. The recent origins of this argument can be traced back to an influen-tial book entitled, Equality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff by the economistArthur Okun.
    4. However, there is a second way of estimating the difference between the priceof ending poverty and what it is costing us. It is through a measure known asthe poverty gap or the poverty income deficit. This measures what it would costto lift all poor households with children younger than 18 years to the level ofthe poverty line. In other words, how much total income is needed to pull everyAmerican child out of poverty? According to the U.S. Census Bureau, thatfigure for 2015 was $86.9 billion.12 For $86.9 billion, every American householdwith younger than 18 years in poverty could be raised out of poverty.We can then compare this figure to our overall estimate of the costs of child-hood poverty, which is $1.03 trillion. Combining these two figures results in aratio of savings to cost of approximately 12:1.
    5. By summing together these costs, the overall estimate is that in 2015, child-hood poverty in the United States was costing the nation $1.03 trillion a year.This number represented 5.4 percent of the U.S. annual GDP.The bottom line is that child poverty represents a significant economicburden to the United States.
    6. to lowered economic productivity through reduced earnings. In addition,increased health costs amount to $192 billion, whereas costs associated withincreased crime and incarceration (increased victimization costs of street crime;increased corrections and crime deterrence; increased social costs of incarcer-ation) total $406 billion.

      Childhood poverty results in an annual loss of $294 billion due...

    7. For most Americans, poverty is seen as an individualized conditionthat exclusively affects those individuals, their families, and perhaps theirneighborhoods. Rarely do we conceptualize a stranger’s poverty as having adirect or indirect effect on our own well-being.

      The Golden Rule not only benefits your neighbor, but you as well.

    8. Alexis de Tocqueville referred to this in his 1840 treatise on America as self-interest properly understood. In fact, the full title of the chapter from his book,Democracy in America, is, “How the Americans Combat Individualism by theDoctrine of Self-Interest Properly Understood.” His basic premise was that“one sees that by serving his fellows, man serves himself and that doing good isto his private advantage.”6
    9. To a large extent, we have failed to recognize that poverty places enormouseconomic, social, and psychological costs on the nonpoor as well as the poor.These costs affect us both individually and as a nation, although we have beenslow to recognize them. Too often, the attitude has been, “I don’t see how I’maffected, so why worry about it?”
    10. The 1960s were a period of time when poverty in theUnited States was cut in half. This should be seen as a major economic ac-complishment. The War on Poverty played an important role in this decline.It demonstrated that the nation’s poverty is not immovable and that genuineprogress is possible with a concerted effort by the government and a growingeconomy.
    11. One dominant way that people think about poverty, both in scholarship and in publicdiscourse, is to focus on demographic characteristics. This explanation assumes thatthere is something wrong with poor people’s individual characteristics: that they aremore likely to be single parents, they are not working enough, they are too young, orthey are not well-educated. So, the way to attack poverty, from this perspective, wouldbe to reduce single-parenthood or reduce the number of people with low education. Thisexplanation concentrates on the individual characteristics of the poor people themselvesand how they are different from nonpoor people.The problem with this explanation is that it does not adequately explain thebig differences in poverty between countries. For example, think about the big fourindividual risks of poverty—single parenthood, becoming a head of household at anearly age, low- education, and unemployment. These are indisputably the four bigcharacteristics that predict your risk of poverty. If the demographic explanation iscorrect, then the United States should have very high levels of single-parenthood, youngheadship, low educational attainment, and unemployment. That would explain why wehave high poverty: We have a large number of people with those four characteristics.The reality, however, is that the United States is actually below average in these areascompared with other rich democracies.
    12. Accordingly, poverty acts to reduce overall available bandwidth. It does thisthrough creating greater stress and worries, reduced nutrition, exposure to toxicenvironments, and so on. For example, the constant worry of how to survive ona day-to- day basis acts to reduce bandwidth:Being poor means having less money to buy things, but it also means havingto spend more of one’s bandwidth managing that money. The poor mustmanage sporadic income, juggle expenses, and make difficult trade-offs.Even when the poor are not actually making financial decisions, thesepreoccupations can be distracting. Thinking and fretting about money caneffectively tax bandwidth.23This body of research has demonstrated that it is important to understanddecision- making not only within the socioeconomic context of individuals’lives, but within the psychological context as well.
    13. The magic bullet of education and skillseliminating poverty is an alluring one, but without a substantial increase in thenumber and quality of opportunities available, it is only a mirage.
    14. However, there is fatal flaw to this argument—as an overall macro strategyfor reducing poverty, it will be ineffective unless we also increase the overallquantity and quality of opportunities, particularly job opportunities, in society.In other words, by providing an individual with greater education, we havemade them more competitive in the job market, but only at the expense ofsomeone else. In this sense, the strategy is played as a zero-sum game.

      initally creaded: 2022-10-10

    15. The critical mistake that has been made in the past is that we have equatedthe question of who loses the game with the question of why the game produceslosers in the first place. They are, in fact, distinct and separate questions.

      Rather than focusing on education as the magic bullet for improving poverty, we should be focusing on the structural problems of the economy itself. It shouldn't be a zero sum game as that will always result in losers and thus poverty. The choices we make with that fallacy simply decide who will face poverty and will never fix the root issues.

    16. Musical Chairs

      The authors analogize educational levels and unemployment rates to playing musical chairs to underline the zero sum game being played in the labor market.

      This becomes a useful argument for why a universal basic income ought to be implemented, not to mention the bullshit job thesis which pairs with it.

    17. What greater education and skills allow an individual to do is to move fur-ther up in the overall queue of people looking to find a well-paying and re-warding job. However, because of the limited number of such jobs, only a setamount of people will be able to land such jobs. Consequently, one’s positionin the queue can change as a result of human capital, but the same amount ofpeople will still be stuck at the end of the line if the overall opportunities re-main the same.

      There is a direct analogy to statistical mechanics and thermodynamics to be drawn here.

    18. Human capital consists of those skills and resources that eachof us brings into the labor market. They include the quantity and quality ofeducation we have attained, job training received, acquired skills and experi-ence, aptitudes and abilities, and so on.
    19. One of the most enduring poverty myths across the political and ideologicalspectrum is that if we were able to provide individuals with enough educationand skills, poverty could be eliminated.
    20. One of the clear signs that the bottleneck to low-income adults working moreresults from their lack of opportunities is provided by looking at their hours of workover the business cycle. When the economy is strong and jobs are plentiful, low-incomeworkers are more likely to find work, find work with higher pay, and be able to securemore hours of work than when the economy is weak. In 2000, when the economy wasclose to genuine full employment, the unemployment rate averaged 4.0 percent and thepoverty rate was 11.3 percent; but in 2010, in the aftermath of the Great Recession, theunemployment rate averaged 9.6 percent and the poverty rate was almost 15.1 percent.What changed in those years was not poor families’ attitudes toward work but simplythe availability of jobs. Among the bottom one-fifth of nonelderly households, hoursworked per household were about 40 percent higher in the tight labor market of 2000than in recession- plagued 2010.Given the opportunity for work or additional work hours, low-income Americanswork more. A full-employment agenda that increases opportunities in the labor market,alongside stronger labor standards such as a higher minimum wage, reduces poverty.

      How can we frame the science of poverty with respect to the model of statistical mechanics?

      Unemployment numbers have very little to do with levels of poverty. They definitely don't seem to be correlated with poverty levels, in fact perhaps inversely so. Many would say that people are lazy and don't want to work when the general reality is that they do want to work (for a variety of reasons including identity and self-esteem), but the amount of work they can find and the pay they receive for it are the bigger problems.

    21. research finds that minimum wage increases are associatedwith significant reductions in poverty.
    22. A final point regarding the myth of hard work and poverty is that this mythis particularly powerful because it implies a sense of justice and fairness. Thosewho do well in life through their hard work are seen as deserving, and thosewho do not do well in life through their lack of hard work are also seen as de-serving of their fate.14 There is something comforting about the idea that peopleget their just rewards. Unfortunately, neither the world nor poverty is fair. AsMichael Harrington wrote in his 1963 book, The Other America:The real explanation of why the poor are where they are is that they madethe mistake of being born to the wrong parents, in the wrong section of thecountry, in the wrong industry, or in the wrong racial or ethnic group. Oncethat mistake has been made, they could have been paragons of will and mo-rality, but most of them would never even have had a chance to get out ofthe other America.15
    1. https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2022/11/17/at-the-joan-didion-estate-sale/

      The API says there are 51 annotations on this page!! (none visible but mine at the moment)

    2. Then there were the three lots of blank notebooks, tied with twine. They went for $9,000, $11,000, and $11,000 each. They were empty, some still wrapped in plastic, yet they were totally talismanic. I wondered: Would you write in these notebooks, having paid that price? Perhaps that’s the whole appeal—to write in a blank space that Didion might once have intended to use herself. Maybe the buyer had a hidden wish that somehow her intent might infiltrate their own work—that in owning these notebooks they might crack some secret code to making sentences like hers. There are sillier superstitions. But more likely, I think, you would have paid too much for these notebooks to ever touch them, and they would sit in a drawer or on a desk, unused and empty, just as they sat on hers.
    3. People like sets, neat collections that have some coherence; that’s what all these items taken together had, anyway, because nothing makes for a complete collection quite like somebody dying and leaving things behind.
    1. I'd love it to be normal and everyday to not assume that when you post a message on your social network, every person is reading it in a similar UI, either to the one you posted from, or to the one everyone else is reading it in.

      🤗

    2. Thinking about the circular relationship between UX and human behaviour - how they shape each other. The affordances of the system determine certain usage patterns, but people subvert those affordances, turn them to unexpected ends, and the system is often changed (if not directly by the designers, then indirectly through reinterpretation by the users) as a result.

      We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us....

    1. https://hypercardadventures.com/

      <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>Jag Talon</span> in Still Going: A zine on using old technology – Jag Talon (<time class='dt-published'>12/09/2022 15:42:17</time>)</cite></small>

    1. I also know that I have um effectively eclectomania in terms of I can click and capture stuff or clip it clip out stuff 01:26:48 faster than I can really as a minimum process it's such that oh that's an interesting link right I've read the abstract or I've read this 01:27:00 intro paragraph Yes I want that so I capture it with its URL as a minimum and I know I captured it today kleptomania that is great yeah

      Quote timestamp 01:26:36 from Obsidian Book Club checkin on 2022-12-04

      Context: talking about note taking methods; note that the autogenerated transcription actually misses the word as eclectoamania which is interesting in itself as a potential word.

      cliptomania<br /> definition: an excessive enthusiasm or desire to clip interesting material into one's notes. It often manifests itself in online settings where digital tools allow one to easily highlight and keep information including a URL or permalink to revisit that information in the future; a portmanteau of "clip" and "mania"

      Examples of tools that allow or encourage this collection of material include Evernote and Hypothes.is.

      a phenomenon which is related to the so-called "collector's fallacy"

    1. Started reading: Edge of Cymru by Julie Brominicks 📚

      https://microblog.onemanandhisblog.com/2022/12/09/started-reading-edge.html

      This looks fantastic. I had just bookmarked @richardcarter's On the Moor: Science, History and Nature on a Country Walk earlier this week. Apparently serendipity is pulling this genre of books to me this week.

    1. I published an article about the Zettelkasten Method in my blog .t3_zgx3pv._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; }

      reply to u/I_saw_the_Aleph<br /> https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/zgx3pv/i_published_an_article_about_the_zettelkasten/

      Thanks for adding to the tradition in another language. This is great.

      I'm obviously not a fan of the commonly held Luhmann "zettelkasten origin myth", but since you don't cite a source for "otros métodos de tomar notas similares se originan en el siglo XVII" (translation: other similar note taking methods in the 17th century), I'm curious what and potentially who you're referring to here? I've seen a handful of online sources nebulously mention this same 17th century time period without any specific evidence, so I'm curious if you're following that crowd, or if there's something more specific you have in mind or could point to from a historical standpoint?

    1. https://facundomaciasescritor.wordpress.com/2022/12/09/el-metodo-zettelkasten-usos-historia-y-funcionamento/

      A nice overview of Zettelkasten space written in Spanish. A few quirks to be found, but generally sound.

    2. el bocho

      New Spanish to me, but ostensibly, the brain, cerebrum, or perhaps the slang I saw of "brainbox".

      Perhaps "brainbox" could be an interesting alternate English translation of zettelkasten?

    3. No es magia.

      I love that he points this out explicitly.

      Some don't see the underlying processes of complexity within note taking methods and as a result ascribe magical properties to what are emergent properties or combinatorial creativity.

      See also: The Ghost in the Machine zettel from Luhmann

      Somehow there's an odd dichotomy between the boredom of such a simple method and people seeing magic within it at the same time. This is very similar to those who feel that life must be divinely created despite the evidence brought by evolutionary and complexity theory. In this arena, there is a lot more evolved complexity which makes the system harder to see compared to the simpler zettelkasten process.

    4. Después de esta historia superficialmente narrada por mí, usted se preguntará, "Y entonces, a cual debo seguir?" A ninguno. Hay un problema en nuestra sociedad, que también se extiende hasta el Zettelkasten: nos hemos fanatizado. Hemos hecho nuestras decisiones políticas, sociales, sexuales, etc., como la esencia de nuestra persona. Me gustaría expandir en ese tema en un futuro artículo, pero por ahora nos importa como eso se relaciona con la elección del zettelkasten: hay peleas y discusiones violentas entre los seguidores de Scheper, los de Ahrens, los digitales, etc. Hay una gran radicalización y tribalismo, evitando la discusión crítica y el discordar intelectual. Y no podemos ser así. Personalmente, el zettelkasten que uso actualmente es más basado en el de Scheper, pero aún así veo a los otros, leo a Ahrens, etc., todo para tener una visión completa y variada de lo que es el Zettelkasten.

      Facundo Macías notices, as have I, a semblance of internecine almost religious/fanatical war between various note taking camps.

      To get away from these we should instead on specific processes, their affordances, and their potential emergent outcomes in individual use. Most people begin these entrenched thoughts based on complete lack of knowledge. Few have practiced some of the broader methods for long enough to get to potential emergent properties.

    5. La gente se enfocó mas en el brillo que en la substancia.

      People focused more on the shine than the substance.

      This is an excellent summary of the space since broadly 2018ish, especially from my observations of those online.

    6. A pesar de que la variante moderna fue creada por Luhmann, las "máquinas de pensamiento" y otros métodos de tomar notas similares se originan en el siglo XVII.

      I've now seen a handful of (all online) sources quote a 17th Century origin for similar note taking methods. What exactly are they referring to specifically? What are these sources? None seem to be footnoted.

    7. La efectividad de este sistema no se basa en la ética de trabajo enfermiza de su creador, y si en su similitud con el funcionamiento de nuestro cerebro.

      Though to a great extent, his work ethic was really key to his output, something which was facilitated by his method.

      Another example of building the myth of the method while sidelining the ethic which could be paired with it.

    8. A pesar de que la administración sistemática del conocimiento no tiene orígenes recientes, el referente más común es el tema es el sociólogo alemán Niklas Luhmann, creador del Zettelkasten.

      Translation:

      Although the systematic administration of knowledge does not have recent origins, the most common referent on the subject is the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, creator of the Zettelkasten.

    1. Happy Publication day! .t3_zgvcqh._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; } I’m honestly so happy for Scott. It’s so exciting to know his book will finally be published and available today. Looking forward to securing my copy. ☺️ I’ve been quietly following Scott’s YouTube page and delighted to see it thriving. Best wishes Tim

      reply to: https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/zgvcqh/happy_publication_day/

      I already have an advanced digital copy, but honestly can't wait for the analog (and therefore "true copy") to be available for order and on my doorstep.

      When are we going to see the link to order it?!? Don't think I'm just sitting around here holding my breath waiting to order this... sometimes I turn blue and fall off my chair 😰

      Seriously though. Congratulations Scott!

      Hopefully I'll see everyone at the start of the book club tomorrow: https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/zbibue/book_club_reading_scotts_book/

    1. Thank you - I'm impressed, once again.I still find it baffling that the evolutionary tree of zettelkasten practices doesn't seem to show some sort of Cambrian explosion starting directly with Luhmann. There are people around him, eyewitnessing a productivity of barbaracartlandian proportions, and no one seems to make relevant attempts at imitating and adapting his specific methods? - I would like to understand the reasons for this.PS: Do you know the interview (five short parts, in German) the Suhrkamp publishing house has conducted with Andre Kieserling, Luhmann's successor at Bielefeld University, and Johannes Schmidt, the zettelkasten curator? https://youtu.be/q0LdmKMbJCw - I haven't found it in your hypothes.is annotations.Btw, I'm living in Stuttgart near Marbach, and after visiting the 2013 exhibition with its perenially inspiring title "Zettelkästen. Maschinen der Phantasie" and reading its catalogue, I've sent my copy to Professor Kuehn. I miss his Taking Note blog.

      reply to https://www.reddit.com/user/thomasteepe/

      Luhmann's method is certainly an evolution on prior methods, but only has a few differences. Sadly there aren't a broader array of other options that are open in the solution space to create an actual Cambrian explosion here. At the end of the day, one still has to do actual reading, note taking, thinking, and work to make the system go. It this hurdle of work that most often dampens people's spirits and despite it's ability to be more easily sustainable, it's really not very sexy, so people move on to the next shiny, new thing.

      I'm aware of that series of videos and a few others, though my German is almost non-existent which makes them a slow slog. I suppose I should use Google's auto-transcription/translation, but that often muddies things further. I've had a few people translate pieces of things like that for me, but it becomes cost prohibitive after a while.

      I wish Manfred Kuehn had left his site up, but I understand why he did it. I still delve back into Archive.org every now and then to find new things. If I had some extra time, I'd contact him to see if he'd be willing to publish archived versions of his blog as a book and do the collation/editing to get it out, but it's a lot of work, even with large portions automated.

      One of these days I'll find a copy of the Marbach catalog to read...

    2. Based on Luhmann's ZKII 9,8.3 (aka The Ghost in the Machine) and various other video and anecdotal sources, his colleagues saw his system and generally didn't care. His influence has primarily only been influential after-the-fact beginning online with mentions by Manfred Kuehn after 2007 with more interest following the Marbach zettelkasten exhibition in 2013 and the launch of zettelkasten.de. You're living amidst his greatest influence on the space, particularly asking this question just two days before Scott Scheper's book Antinet Zettelkasten, focusing on the specifics of Luhmann's method, is set to be released.

      With respect to zettelkasten, I would posit that it was Luhmann himself who was actually standing on the shoulders of other giants which preceded him in these broader traditions including Desiderius Erasmus, Rudolph Agricola, Phillip Melanchthon, Konrad Gessner, John Locke, Ernst Bernheim, Charles Langlois, Charles Seignobos, Antoine Sertillanges, Beatrice Webb, Johannes Heyde, and C. Wright Mills, etc. See: https://boffosocko.com/2022/10/22/the-two-definitions-of-zettelkasten/ for more on the history here.

      While I'm thinking about influence, has anyone named their children after the method yet? Is there a baby named Slip, Zeke, or Luhmann in honor yet? Perhaps this is the week that may have happened? 😉

    1. https://austinkleon.com/2018/03/04/card-games/

      I'm reminded of early French use of playing cards for note taking here...

    2. Then I remembered a little card game I came up with to make jam sessions more interesting: Have each band member list 10 musical acts they’d like to play in Write each musical act on an index card Shuffle the cards, and, without revealing the cars, deal one to each band member. Keep the cards secret — the game is no fun if you can see the cards before you play. Just like any other jam session, it helps to pick a key and start with the rhythm. Everyone has to pretend like they’re playing in the act written on their card. Jam until it gets boring. At the end, everybody gets to guess which card each person was dealt. Repeat until you’re out of cards

      A game by Austin Kleon for making jam sessions less boring using cards.

      Inspired by Oblique Strategies and The Creative Tarot.

    1. The Gish gallop /ˈɡɪʃ ˈɡæləp/ is a rhetorical technique in which a person in a debate attempts to overwhelm their opponent by providing an excessive number of arguments with no regard for the accuracy or strength of those arguments. In essence, it is prioritizing quantity of one's arguments at the expense of quality of said arguments. The term was coined in 1994 by anthropologist Eugenie Scott, who named it after American creationist Duane Gish and argued that Gish used the technique frequently when challenging the scientific fact of evolution.[1][2] It is similar to another debating method called spreading, in which one person speaks extremely fast in an attempt to cause their opponent to fail to respond to all the arguments that have been raised.

      I'd always known this was a thing, but didn't have a word for it.

    1. https://maya.land/blogroll.opml

      Maya has an awesome OPML-based blogroll with some excellent buttons/banners.

    1. Xememex is a tool for building tools for collecting, curating and composing fragments of information.

      https://xememex.com/

      Appears to be a TiddlyWiki farm, possibly for collaborative work?

  2. www.sanduskycabinets.com www.sanduskycabinets.com
    1. http://www.sanduskycabinets.com/flipbook/?page=2

      According to Sandusky customer service, most of the Buddy Products line was discontinued in 2019 and remaining portions were sold to https://www.metalcabinetstore.com/ which may or may not have them.

    2. http://www.sanduskycabinets.com/flipbook/?page=2

      Page 2 of the Sandusky Lee / Sandusky Buddy catalog indicates that page 52 has File Card Storage Boxes, but the page doesn't exist in this version of the 2020 catalog.

    1. I was pretty skeptical of the #zettelkasten method at first as it felt like yet another data hoarding hobby during the first weeks; but with a relatively large base of notes available, it’s in fact really useful and “works as intended” (or at least works as Luhmanns essay described how it should work).

      https://emacs.ch/@thees/109474759959223870

      Anecdotal evidence of time to usefulness.

    1. Forks that do have a custom limit usually expose it as the max_toot_chars field in /api/v1/instance

      https://discourse.joinmastodon.org/t/get-character-limit-from-instance/3643/2

      Appending /api/v1/instance to a Mastodon instance will return a lot of interesting data about it and how it's set up.

    1. Katherine Harvey’s book The Fires of Lust: Sex in the Middle Ages
    2. Defloration was a critical moment. Women were subject to virginity tests, and women devised ingenious methods to bypass them, such as putting leeches in their vagina the day before the wedding to deceive their husbands with the flow of blood that night.
    3. It seems that interfemoral intercourse – sex with the penis between the woman’s legs but without penetration – was very popular. That method, however, was frowned upon in homosexual male sex: in 1357, Nicletus Marmanga and Johannes Braganza were sentenced to death at the stake for engaging in the practice.
    1. Zettelkasten, which in American English means notebox, and in Euro-pean English translates to slip box.

      What really supports this distinction? The closest historical American English translation is probably "card index" from the early 1900s while the broader academic historical translation is "slip box".

    1. Duolingo or whatever French and I had this idea well basically what it reminds me of is Stefan's Vig the Austrian

      https://youtu.be/r9idbh-U2kM?t=3544

      Stefan Zweig (reference? his memoir?) apparently suggested that students translate authors as a means of becoming more intimately acquainted with their work. This is similar to restating an author in one's own words as a means of improving one's understanding. It's a lower level of processing that osculates on the idea of having a conversation with a text.

      tk: track this reference down. appropriate context?

    1. For those of you wondering if hcommons on mastodon has taken measures to ward against the sort of meltdown the server had a few weeks ago, there's a update from one of the admins: https://hcommons.social/@kfitz/1094609

      https://hcommons.social/@amisamileanded/109466986626984098

      Apparently sometime within it's first month of existence hcommons.social had a server meltdown of some sort. The admins addressed and hardened their set up.

    1. I couldn’t help noticing that RSS kept turning out to be a great way to move data between cooperating systems. That’s always been true, and I love how this example reminds us that it’s still true.
    2. certain classes of Mastodon page have corresponding RSS feeds, and wondered if the tag pages are members of one such class. Sure enough they are, and https://mastodon.social/tags/introduction.rss is a thing.

      Mastodon has RSS feeds available for tags!

    1. “Goblin mode” has been chosen by the public as the 2022 Oxford word of the year. The term, which refers to “a type of behaviour which is unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly, or greedy, typically in a way that rejects social norms or expectations”, has become the first word of the year to have been decided by public vote.
    1. This document is a companion to the IIIF Content Search API Specification, Version 2.0. It describes the changes to the API specification made in this major release, including ones that are backwards incompatible with version 1.0, the previous version.
    1. The History of Zettelkasten The Zettelkasten method is a note-taking system developed by German sociologist and philosopher Niklas Luhmann. It involves creating a network of interconnected notes on index cards or in a digital database, allowing for flexible organization and easy access to information. The method has been widely used in academia and can help individuals better organize their thoughts and ideas.

      https://meso.tzyl.nl/2022/12/05/the-history-of-zettelkasten/

      If generated, it almost perfect reflects the public consensus, but does a miserable job of reflecting deeper realities.

    1. [https://a.gup.pe/ Guppe Groups] a group of bot accounts that can be used to aggregate social groups within the [[fediverse]] around a variety of topics like [[crafts]], books, history, philosophy, etc.

    1. https://schopie1.commons.msu.edu/2022/12/05/microblogging_with_mastodon/

      OMG! There is so much to love here about these processes and to see people in the wild experimenting with them and figuring them out.

      Scott, you are not alone! There are lots of us out here doing these things, not only with WordPress but a huge variety of other platforms. There are many ways to syndicate your content depending on where it starts its life.

      In addition to Jim Groom and a huge group of others' work on A Domain of One's Own, there's also a broader coalition of designers, developers, professionals, hobbyists, and people of all strips working on these problems under the name of IndieWeb.

      For some of their specific work you might appreciate the following:<br /> - https://indieweb.org/Indieweb_for_Education - https://indieweb.org/A_Domain_of_One%27s_Own - https://indieweb.org/academic_samizdat - https://indieweb.org/WordPress - https://indieweb.org/Category:syndication

      Incidentally, I wrote this for our friend Kathleen Fitzpatrick last week and I can't wait to see what she's come up with over the weekend and the coming weeks. Within the IndieWeb community you'll find people like Ben Werdmuller who created large portions of both WithKnown and Elgg and Aram Zucker-Scharff who helped to create PressForward.

      I'm thrilled to see the work and huge strides that Humanities Commons is making some of these practices come to fruition.

      If you're game, perhaps we ought to plan an upcoming education-related popup event as an IndieWebCamp event to invite more people into this broader conversation?

      If you have questions or need any help in these areas, I'm around, but so are hundreds of friends in the IndieWeb chat: https://chat.indieweb.org.

      I hope we can bring more of these technologies to the masses in better and easier-to-use manners to lower the technical hurdles.

    1. transitions are hard and require a well-thought through strategy to prevent failure, especially if the goal is to be whole ethically.
    2. The myth that this was caused by Craigslist or Google drives me bonkers. Throughout the 80s and 90s, private equity firms and hedge funds gobbled up local news enterprises to extract their real estate. They didn’t give a shit about journalism; they just wanted prime real estate that they could develop. And news organizations had it in the form of buildings in the middle of town. So financiers squeezed the news orgs until there was no money to be squeezed and then they hung them out to dry. There was no configuration in which local news was going to survive, no magical upwards trajectory of revenue based on advertising alone. If it weren’t for Craigslist and Google, the financiers would’ve squeezed these enterprises for a few more years, but the end state was always failure.

      danah boyd posits that journalism in the United States didn't fail as the result of Craigslist or Google, but because of hedge funds and investors acquiring them to strip out their valuable real estate.

    3. Perception of failure can bring about failure, but it doesn’t always.
    4. Musk appears to be betting that the spectacle is worth it. He’s probably correct in thinking that large swaths of the world will not deem his leadership a failure either because they are ideologically aligned with him or they simply don’t care and aren’t seeing any changes to their corner of the Twitterverse.

      How is this sort of bloodsport similar/different to the news media coverage of Donald J. Trump in 2015/2016?

      The similarities over creating engagement within a capitalistic framing along with the need to only garner at least a minimum amount of audience to support the enterprise seem to be at play.

      Compare/contrast this with the NBAs conundrum with the politics of entering the market in China.

    5. Perceptions of failure don’t always lead to shared ideas of how to learn from these lessons.
    6. A lot has changed about our news media ecosystem since 2007. In the United States, it’s hard to overstate how the media is entangled with contemporary partisan politics and ideology. This means that information tends not to flow across partisan divides in coherent ways that enable debate.

      Our media and social media systems have been structured along with the people who use them such that debate is stifled because information doesn't flow coherently across the political partisan divide.

    7. I often think back to MySpace’s downfall. In 2007, I penned a controversial blog post noting a division that was forming as teenagers self-segregated based on race and class in the US, splitting themselves between Facebook and MySpace. A few years later, I noted the role of the news media in this division, highlighting how media coverage about MySpace as scary, dangerous, and full of pedophiles (regardless of empirical evidence) helped make this division possible. The news media played a role in delegitimizing MySpace (aided and abetted by a team at Facebook, which was directly benefiting from this delegitimization work).

      danah boyd argued in two separate pieces that teenagers self-segregated between MySpace and Facebook based on race and class and that the news media coverage of social media created fear, uncertainty, and doubt which fueled the split.

      http://www.danah.org/papers/essays/ClassDivisions.html

    8. There are failures that everyone can agree are failures (e.g. the explosion of the Challenger), but most failures are a matter of perception.
    9. engineers will get tired, mistakes will happen, and maintenance will get kicked down the road. Teams need buffer as much as systems do.
    10. Perrow argued that “normal accidents” were nearly inevitable in a complex, tightly coupled system. To resist such an outcome, systems designers needed to have backups and redundancy, safety checks and maintenance.
    11. One interesting concept in organizational sociology is “normal accidents theory.” Studying Three Mile Island, Charles Perrow created a 2x2 grid
    1. Aby Warburg and his son Max Adolph in Warburg's study in Hamburg, 1917. © Warburg Institute, London.

      http://www.engramma.it/eOS/index.php?id_articolo=3986

      Appears to be a row of slip boxes behind Aby Warburg in this photo of his study in Hamburg from 1917.

    1. Dr James Ravenscroft @jamesravey@fosstodon.orgFollowing on from my first week with hypothes.is I decided to integrate my annotations into #Joplin so that I have tighter integration of my literature + permanent notes. I've built a VERY alpha Joplin plugin that auto-imports hypothes.is annotations + tags to joplin by following your user atom feed https://brainsteam.co.uk/2022/12/04/joplin-hypothesis/ #PKM #ToolsForThought #hypothesis
    1. Today my Zettelkasten is 8 month old. When I started note-taking in March 2022, I didn‘t expect a number of nearly 1000 notes in such a short time.

      https://hessen.social/@groepl/109456367157130265

    1. I have 17K followers

      People talk about their huge follower counts on Twitter, but seem to discount the number of bots, inactive accounts, and other cruft that make up that number.

      Most people moving to Mastodon are reporting much more honest, human, and warm engagement on the platform over their experiences on Twitter.

    1. https://micro.blog/posts/search?q=indieweb

      an alternate form for micro.blog search functionality

    1. https://micro.blog/discover/search?q=indieweb

      Micro.blog search functionality uses a url query (example https://micro.blog/discover/search?q=indieweb), but it only includes posts which have been added to the "discovery" section and isn't a site wide search

    1. https://dolphin.town/about/more

      A social media service for dolphins where you can only send messages with the letter "e".

      compare with https://oulipo.social/about which elides the letter e

    1. This generally fits my criteria for submission as an example to https://boffosocko.com/2022/07/12/call-for-model-examples-of-zettelkasten-output-processes/

    2. I no longer remember the name of the 7th grade English teacher (Toms River Intermediate School West, c. 1980–1981) who taught me this method, but if she is out there: thanks!
    3. https://edward-slingerland.medium.com/there-is-only-one-way-to-write-a-book-637535ef5bde

      Example of someone's research, note taking, and writing process using index cards.

      Broadly, this is very similar to the process used by Ryan Holiday, Robert Green, and Victor Margolin.

      While he can't recall the name of the teacher, he credits his 7th grade English teacher (1980-1981) for teaching him the method.


      Edward Slingerland is represented by Brockman Inc.

    4. That sounds challenging, of course, but I find that the writing, at this stage, is actually relatively easy: the card organization has already done most of the work. The cards tell the story, you now just need to (skillfully!) weave them together.

      Anecdotal evidence that the final "writing" portion of a card index process is "relatively easy" as the majority of the work has already been done.

    5. This is the absolute hardest part of the writing process, in my mind. The most exciting, too, because you’re never quite sure where it’s going to end up.

      Anecdotal evidence that categorizing and arranging index cards/ideas for a writing project for subsequent writing is one of the most difficult portions of the process.

      Niklas Luhmann subverted portions of this by pre-linking his ideas together either in threads or an outline form as he went.

    6. Children, who in our post-agricultural age are otherwise pretty useless economically, can actually be usefully employed at this stage. They love cutting things with scissors, and precision is not crucial.

      a nod to having "cards of equal size", but that precision isn't necessarily as crucial as we might suppose.

    7. I’ve also got a vague sense in my head of how they should be organized — that is, what the structure of the book is going to be. This is generally when I write the formal book proposal. I know enough about the topic, now, that I have a good idea of what my central arguments are going to be and how I am going to organize the chapters.

      At what point in the process does one have a conceptualization for the overall outline of what they're writing?

      In cases where it's earlier than others, then heavy linking and organization may not be as necessary.

    8. As my research methods became more and more digital, the ease of pasting quotations and references in this way (instead of copying them by hand) has really speeded things up.

      Example of someone who felt that speeding up their note taking by using digital tools rather than analog ones.

    9. I continued to use this analog method right up through my Ph.D. dissertation and first monograph. After a scare in the early stages of researching my second monograph, when I thought all of my index cards had been lost in a flood, I switched to an electronic version: a Word doc containing a table with four cells that I can type or paste information into (and easily back up).
    10. I have a very specific method for organizing my research and thoughts whenever I’m writing anything longer than a short article. I learned this method from a teacher in middle school, and I cannot imagine how a human being could write a book any other way.

      Example of someone who learned an index card based commonplace book method for note taking and writing.

    1. Edward Slingerland (born May 25, 1968) is a Canadian-American sinologist and philosopher. He is Distinguished University Scholar and Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia, where he also holds appointments in the Departments of Psychology and Asian Studies. His research interests include early Chinese thought, comparative religion and cognitive science of religion, big data approaches to cultural analysis, cognitive linguistics, digital humanities, and humanities-science integration.
    1. Last night I posted a message to both Mastodon and Twitter saying how great M's support for RSS is. Apparently a lot of people on Masto didn't know about it and the response has been resounding. And the numbers are very lopsided. The piece has been "boosted" (the Masto equiv of RT) 1.1K times, yet I only have 3.7K followers there. Meanwhile on Twitter, where I have 69K followers, it has been RTd just 17 times. My feeling was previously that Mastodon was more alive, it's good to have a number to put behind that.

      http://scripting.com/2022/12/03.html#a152558

      Anecdotal evidence for the slow death of Twitter and higher engagement on Mastodon.

    1. I'm enamored of this idea as well and this is a fascinating example.

      It seems similar to the related (and also difficult-to-name) concept which I've called combinatorial creativity. One of the earliest versions I've seen is that of Raymond Llullus' work with respect to combinatorial mnemonics described in Frances Yates' The Art of Memory (1966). Farnam Street's post is a good start https://fs.blog/networked-knowledge-and-combinatorial-creativity/, but I've been collecting other examples: https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=tag%3A%22combinatorial+creativity%22 and other names for it over time.

      I can't help but wonder what Ericsson's role of deliberate practice would look like with arts as the subject? What motivates long term deliberate practice?

      Yates, Frances A. The Art of Memory. 1966. Reprint, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001. https://www.amazon.com/Art-Memory-Frances-Yates/dp/0226950018.

      Ericsson, K. Anders, Ralf Th. Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Romer. The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance. Psychological Review, 1993.

    2. https://www.dalekeiger.net/untitled/

      Dale Keiger is tap dancing his way into a definition for the underlying traits for encouraging and expanding on creativity. There's definitely something here worth pursuing further and giving a specific name to.

      Some it is very akin to the ideas behind combinatorial creativity of working (dancing in Kelly's case) on the mundane with precision and drive and perhaps at least a soupçon of obsessiveness, but openness to the new.

      How can we sharpen this set of ideas to settle on the right list of "ingredients"? Is there a way to hone in on this sort of creation of flow within a certain creative area while simultaneously not getting bored? Is it the small string of creative breakthroughs in the process of practice which open up new avenues and help create the flow to prevent boredom?

      How might relate to Anders Ericsson's work on on deliberate practice or plateau principle coming into play, particularly to prevent boredom to encourage one to continue on with their practice?

      I haven't put my finger on it but there were hints in it from a Yo-Yo Ma ad for Masterclass I saw the other day (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbjgHkj-syM)..

    3. “Dr Essai has observed time and again how the finest artists are the ones whose idea of fun is spending hour after hour, day after day doing the same thing over and over and over and over. And then some more. … The essential personality quirk could be described as nothing more than being endlessly fascinated and pleased by the repetitive tasks that make art.”

      This same sort of repetition is seen in the success of salespeople. Can they repetitively make the same (or slowly improving) pitches day after day without getting tired of hearing "no" to eventually the appropriate number of yeses they need to make a living.

    1. https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2022/12/the-ethics-of-syndicating-comments-using-webmentions/

      Not an answer to the dilemma, though I generally take the position of keeping everything unless someone asks me to take it down or that I might know that it's been otherwise deleted. Often I choose not to delete my copy, but simply make it private and only viewable to me.

      On the deadnaming and related issues, it would be interesting to create a webmention mechanism for the h-card portions so that users might update these across networks. To some extent Automattic's Gravatar system does this in a centralized manner, but it would be interesting to see it separately. Certainly not as big an issue as deadnaming, but there's a similar problem on some platforms like Twitter where people will change their display name regularly for either holidays, or lately because they're indicating they'd rather be found on Mastodon or other websites.

      The webmention spec does contain details for both editing/deleting content and resending webmentions to edit and/or remove the original. Ideally this would be more broadly adopted and used in the future to eliminate the need for making these choices by leaving the choice up to the original publisher.

      Beyond this, often on platforms that don't have character limits (Reddit for example), I'll post at the bottom of my syndicated copy of content that it was originally published on my site (along with the permalink) and explicitly state that I aggregate the replies from various locations which also helps to let people know that they might find addition context or conversation at the original post should they be interested. Doing this on Twitter, Mastodon, et al is much harder due to space requirements obviously.

      While most responses I send would fall under fair use for copying, I also have a Creative Commons license on my text in an effort to help others feel more comfortable with having copies of my content on their sites.

      Another ethical layer to this is interactions between sites which both have webmentions enabled. To some extent this creates an implicit bi-directional relationship which says, I'm aware that this sort of communication exists and approve of your parsing and displaying my responses.

      The public norms and ethics in this area will undoubtedly evolve over time, so it's also worth revisiting and re-evaluating the issue over time.

    1. https://werd.io/2022/the-fediverse-and-the-indieweb

      The idea behind this is great, but the hurdles for supporting dozens of publishing specifications can be awfully daunting. Where do we draw the line?

    2. So instead of Publishing on my Own Site and Syndicating Elsewhere, I plan to just Publish and Participate.

      The easiest publishing (syndication) workflow of all.