19,855 Matching Annotations
  1. Nov 2022
    1. The erupting volcano represents Productive ambiguity. This is where the real work is done at scale. Concepts can be productively ambiguous through straight metaphor, or by mass (media) convergence on a particular term. It resonates with many people.

      New, relatively well-formed ideas may have lost much of their ambiguity to their creators, but they're solid enough to be communicated at scale to others. The newness of the concepts as they're accepted and used by others provides a tremendous level of productive ambiguity as the ideas spread and further solidify and are combined with a broader field of pre-existing ideas.

    2. Creative ambiguity. This is where one part of an idea is fixed, but the other part has a lot of freedom of movement. A good example of this would be appending ‘digital’ or ‘e-‘ to existing ideas – such as ‘e-books’ or ‘digital literacy’. Others can begin to see what the person is getting at.

      As portions of ideas begin to become clear and crystalize, they still maintain some creative ambiguity while the remaining portions aren't necessarily clearly defined. Creatively ambiguous ideas are better defined than generatively ambiguous ones.

    3. The lowest strata represents Generative ambiguity. Here, words are used as symbols for ideas that are very hard to express; an individual gives a name to a nebulous collection of ideas or thoughts. They struggle to make this approach make sense to others.

      Generative ambiguity is the process of giving names, potentially tentative, to a nebulous collection of nascent and unclear ideas in an effort to help make sense of them both to themselves as well as others.

    4. https://dougbelshaw.com/blog/2015/01/22/volcanoes-and-ambiguity/

      <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>Aaron Davis </span> in 📑 The Two Definitions of Zettelkasten | Read Write Collect (<time class='dt-published'>11/18/2022 19:54:00</time>)</cite></small>

    1. JohnPhilpin I have read a number of questions from people in different communities I am part of, asking for Podcast recommendations. I don’t think it is an easy question to answer. 1) There are millions of these puppies 2) Because I like something doesn’t mean you will 3) My recommendations this week might be different next - because 'moods' 4) and and and I wrote this post as a starting point. Happy to share my current OPML with anyone who wants it - add a comment below - or email me. Happy to offer my thoughts on what you might like if I know more about what you like. I won't typically offer BIG NAME podcasts.

      https://micro.blog/JohnPhilpin/14165886

      @JohnPhilpin Recommendations can often come cheap, particularly on iTunes where everyone begs for reviews. I prefer hearing about what people actually listened to. What did you invest your time in/on? This is why I sporadically maintain what I call a faux-cast or a feed of podcasts and audio I've actually listened to: https://boffosocko.com/2018/03/08/podcasts-of-things-ive-listened-to-or-want-to-listen-to/

    1. https://medium.com/@ben_fry/tracing-the-origin-65011dc20877

      Could be interesting to apply this sort of process to a variety of texts over time. A draft of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein comes to mind.


      How to view this through the lens of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions? particularly as this was the evolution of an idea by the same author over time...

    2. The only diagram or image in The Origin of Species, a tree depicting divergence (source)

      Darwin's On the Origin of Species only contains one diagram, a branching tree diagram which shows divergence of species.

    3. he was working on the same theme with Stefanie Posavec. They completed their piece some time later, depicting the changes as lovely branching trees — a kind of homage to Darwin’s lone diagram in the book.

      Greg McInerny of Microsoft Research and Stefanie Posavek created a version of Darwin's On the Origin of Species that displayed variations between the editions as a branching tree diagram, a nod to the only diagram which appeared in Darwin's original work. .

    4. Fifty years ago, coinciding with the centennial of the release of Darwin’s manuscript, author Morse Peckham collected all six editions into a single “variorum” text. Peckham painstakingly created a reference system that denotes the modifications and changes between editions. The text was created by Peckham’s careful enumeration of every sentence from every edition, copied onto index cards; from these cards, he carefully assembled them into a final text.
    1. The final thing I will say is, we have the 2016 model in our mind that, if there's a normie Republican, they get crushed by Donald Trump. Why should a Mike DeWine, not that he's going to run, but why — normie Republicans did way better than the performative Republicans.

      https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/brooks-and-capehart-on-the-midterm-results-and-what-it-means-trumps-role-in-the-gop#transcript

      video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8Km_Vyhvww

      David Brooks here (coins?) uses the phrase "normie Republican" to describe Republicans who tend to center rather than to the far right, Christian right, or who are Trump Republicans. Some of those people might describe these normie Republicans as Rhinos (Republicans in name only.)

      Typically I've only seen "normie" used by those who identify as ADHD, Aspergers, or otherwise on the (neurodiverse) spectrum to describe average people who don't display those behaviors.


      Judy Woodruff: So, I just want to be clear. We're using the word normie, as in — this is a David Brooks word, right? (LAUGHTER)

      David Brooks: No, this — I did not invent this. I think two generations below me invented that word. (LAUGHTER)

      Brooks admits he learned the word from others, but he's also using it with a different meaning and context than the original "normie" unadorned.

    1. https://blog.mahabali.me/pedagogy/pedagogical-snacking-transforming-classroom-dynamics/

      Providing a snack break during classes can dramatically improve the participants' participation and cohesion.

    2. And so I’m blogging this to reflect on and record this dynamic, so I never forget this idea of trying the snack break ahead of a “peer feedback” session.

      Providing a snack break before a peer feedback classroom session can dramatically improve the interactions during it.

      This is not dissimilar to conferences providing socializing and snacking time/spaces both at the start of the event and throughout the day.

    3. Building community alone has value.
    1. Dr. Johnathan Flowers @shengokai@zirk.usThis is a good one. My response? These platforms host publics, but are not publics themselves. Publics form through using the affordances of the platforms to give rise to a community of shared interests which enable members to cooperate for mutual flourishing.https://sci

      https://mastodon.social/@shengokai@zirk.us/109352048879045130

      https://sciences.social/@Chanders/109352022415374012

  2. tinysubversions.com tinysubversions.com
    1. A tool that turns Twitter threads into blog posts, by Darius Kazemi.

      https://tinysubversions.com/spooler/

      <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>Darius Kazemi</span> in Darius Kazemi: "thread unroller apps" - Friend Camp (<time class='dt-published'>11/16/2022 08:27:44</time>)</cite></small>

    1. manton Interesting post by @simon@simonwillison.net that Mastodon is just blogs. Except Mastodon’s design runs counter to blog features like domain names and custom designs. I’d say Mastodon is more Twitter-like than blog-like… Which is fine, but not the same as a blog-first platform.

      https://micro.blog/manton/14045523

      @manton When I was looking at Fediverse instances the other day I noticed that one of the biggest platforms within it was Write.as, which are more blog centric. Is there a better/easier way for m.b. to federate/interact or serve as a reader for that part of the ecosystem? Perhaps worth exploring?

    1. danielsantos @chrisaldrich thanks for sharing… personally, I tend to associate ZK with Luhman. But I’ll read your shared article later to broaden my perspective :)

      @danielsantos Almost everyone in the space exclusively associates ZK with Luhmann, in part because of the use of the foreign (unfamiliar) German word and the lost cultural memory of the use of card indexes as note taking tools or as commonplace books in index card form. Hopefully we can change this misperception which also opens up these practices to a lot more people with a lot less confusion.

    1. Germany was able to memorialize the Holocaust more easily because there were almost no Jews left to deal with or confront in daily life as the memorialization was done. This is not the case with the descendants of slaves in America who are a sizeable portion of the population in the United States.

      <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>Morning Edition </span> in What the U.S. can learn from Germany on grappling with sins of the past : NPR (<time class='dt-published'>11/15/2022 08:31:18</time>)</cite></small>

    1. Hancock's pseudoarchaeological theories are the basis of the Netflix series Ancient Apocalypse, which was released on 10 November 2022. At Netflix, Hancock's son Sean is "senior manager of unscripted originals".[31]
    1. Robert Amsler is a retired computational lexicology, computational linguist, information scientist. His P.D. was from UT-Austin in 1980. His primary work was in the area of understanding how machine-readable dictionaries could be used to create a taxonomy of dictionary word senses (which served as the motivation for the creation of WordNet) and in understanding how lexicon can be extracted from text corpora. He also invented a new technique in citation analysis that bears his name. His work is mentioned in Wikipedia articles on Machine-Readable dictionary, Computational lexicology, Bibliographic coupling, and Text mining. He currently lives in Vienna, VA and reads email at robert.amsler at utexas. edu. He is currenly interested in chronological studies of vocabulary, esp. computer terms.

      https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Robert-Amsler

      Apparently follow my blog. :)

      Makes me wonder how we might better process and semantically parse peoples' personal notes, particularly when they're atomic and cross-linked?

    1. jessekelber @collin oooh, so many great options! My 2 personal favorites would be the LAMY Al-Star and the TWSBI Diamond 580. I'm sure others will offer up other great options, but that's my proverbial $0.02.

      @jessekelber @collin I'll second the Diamond 580, though if they're completely new, the ECO T may be a useful choice as the grip design helps to nudge a better grip for beginners. It's also a little less expensive (if they have fear of breaking or losing their nice new pen), and gives them space to dream upwards without breaking their own bank when you've turned them into a lifelong collector.

    1. danielsantos @chrisaldrich @jean I second this. It would be very nice to have a tagmoji for PKM and it’s apps… I instantly thought about a brain 🧠, though.

      @danielsantos @jean I almost included the brain emoji, but I feel like it's far too closely associated with Tiago Forte's commercial/paid Second Brain courses and book, and doesn't have the feel of written (or even typed/digital) representation of note taking the way the card file box 🗃️ does historically. I've seen many in the zettelkasten space use the card file box emoji regularly and it generally doesn't have any negative connotations that I've seen or am aware of. I've also seen some in the digital gardening spaces make use of some of the plant-related emoji for their notes, but those generally have a more clear cut gardening use case on the web and might otherwise cause confusion. Some of the other logical choices of pens, pencils, and journals are already either in use for those topics or ought to be kept for them if necessary.

    1. https://zettelkasten.social/about

      Someone has registered the domain and it is hosted by masto.host, but not yet active as of 2022-11-13

  3. tantek.com tantek.com
    #TwitterMigration, first time? Have posted notes to https://tantek.com/ since 2010, POSSEd tweets & #AtomFeed. Added one .htaccess line today, and thanks to #BridgyFed, #Mastodon users can follow my #IndieWeb site @tantek.com@tantek.com No Mastodon install or account needed. Just one line in .htaccess: RewriteRule ^.well-known/(host-meta|webfinger).* https://fed.brid.gy/$0 [redirect=302,last] is enough for Mastodon users to search for and follow that @tantek.com@tantek.com username. Took a little more work to setup Bridgy Fed to push new posts to followers. Note by the way both the redundancy & awkwardness (it’s not a clickable URL) of such @-@ (AT-AT) usernames when you’re already using your own domain. Why can’t Mastodon follow a username of “@tantek.com”? Or just “tantek.com”? And either way expanding it internally if need be to the AT-AT syntax. Why this regression from what we had with classic feed readers where a domain was enough to discover & follow a feed? Also, why does following show a blank result? Contrast that with classic feed readers which immediately show you the most recent items in a feed you subscribed to. Lastly (for now), I asked around and no one knew of a simple public way to “preview” or “validate” that @tantek.com@tantek.com actually “worked”. You have to be *logged-in* to a Mastodon instance and search for a username to check to see if it works. Contrast that with https://validator.w3.org/feed/ which you can use without any log-in to validate your classic feed file. Why these regressions from the days of feed readers? - Tantek
    1
  4. view.connect.americanpublicmedia.org view.connect.americanpublicmedia.org
    1. The word “kafala” in Arabic has traditionally been used to describe a social and moral “responsibility to another.”  Researchers Ray Jureidini and Said Fares Hassan write, “kafala contracts were used to protect the weak and vulnerable by instituting the patronage of a prominent local who provided whatever protection was required.” Think of raising an orphaned child, for example. In business, kafala originally referred to contracts where a guarantor assumes liability for another person (e.g. a cosigner for a loan).    Kafala nowadays is often used to describe the legal relationship between businesses and migrant workers. Employers, typically citizens, act as sponsors for workers and assume legal responsibility for their movement and actions in exchange for their right to work in a geographic area. 

      The use of kafala shows a shift from a meaning of social responsibility into a meaning co-opted by capitalism and social contract.

    2. Most of the tourist and sporting infrastructure had to be built at enormous expense — estimates range anywhere from$200 billion to $300 billion. Yet the return on investment for huge events like this is rarely positive. The Olympics are infamously pricey  to put on, and the economic benefits for residents of the host city are questionable.  So, with the big price tag and not much to show in return, why do countries like Qatar, Russia and Brazil offer up billions of dollars to host global sporting events? According to Victor Matheson, a professor of economics at the College of the Holy Cross and a former Major League Soccer referee, they may be seeking to burnish their reputations through international media coverage.   “If you’re putting any sort of significant money into infrastructure like Qatar obviously is doing, there’s just no way you can make that back on ticket sales, on media rights, [or] on the amount of money you make from tourists coming to visit your country,” Matheson said in an interview with Marketplace’s David Brancaccio. “So obviously, you’re hoping for some sort of long-run benefits, some sort of legacy, and often that is an improvement in your reputation, either as a tourist destination or as a world player in some ways.” 

      Alternate thesis for why countries and cities vie to host money-losing events like the World Cup and the Olympics: grift.

      With the necessary need for building infrastructure, there's easy and ample opportunity for cooking the books and pushing cash flow into the pockets of contractors and political figures as well as into the pockets of the governing bodies and their officials.

      Cross reference FIFA bribery

      Some of the money may go into the local economy and workers which is good, but who's really benefitting here? Where is the money going? Who is footing the loss? It can't all be written off to goodwill.

    1. Empiricism was thenew intellectual trend. Before this, just about any difficult question on anysubject at all could find a perfectly acceptable answer in authority of one kind oranother—in ‘It is God’s will’, rather than ‘Let’s find out’.
    2. two streams of thought which run through the history of education—they areusually called the progressive and the formal.
    3. social historian G. M. Trevelyan (1978) put theissue some time ago, ‘Education...has produced a vast population able to readbut unable to distinguish what is worth reading.’
    4. It’s a basic question—what are children and young people in school for?
    5. As the British prime minister WilliamGladstone put it at the time in the Edinburgh Review, speaking of the remarkablePrussian success in the Franco-Prussian War: ‘Undoubtedly, the conduct of thecampaign, on the German side, has given a marked triumph to the cause ofsystematic popular education.’
    6. it was clear that the European and US competitors werebenefiting from these changes to the curriculum in advances in commerce, inindustry, and even on the battlefield.

      Compulsory education and changes in curriculum in the United States and some of it's competitors in the late 19th century clearly benefitted advances in commerce, industry, and became a factor in national security.

    7. Forster’sAct in 1870, which mandated education for all children up to the age of 10 inBritain.
    8. Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis intheir classic Schooling in Capitalist America

      Bowles and Gintis apparently make an argument in Schooling in Capitalist America that changes in education in the late 1800s/early 1900s served the ends of capitalists rather than the people.

    9. Although Rousseau had an influence on a handful of European educators, itwould be misleading to imply that the impact on education of these new ideasabout learning through discovery was, at the time, profound.

      Did Rousseau have an influence on Maria Montessori? Where was the origin of her philosophy?

    1. Those sticking with Musk must be prepared to work “maniacally,” he says, to support whatever move he makes next, creating an ongoing environment where employees can’t easily predict their day to day, which experts say makes it even more likely that turnover will remain high.

      A billionaire following a $44 billion dollar company purchase pushing employees to work "maniacally"? As if they weren't working hard before?

      What value did he possibly see here?

    2. “If you have a compelling product, people will buy it,” Musk told staff. “That has been my experience at SpaceX and Tesla.”

      Alternately, if you have toxic leadership, employees will leave and the company will collapse.

    1. Athens Research is winding down their note taking application.

      Potentially the first of more to come?

      Athens the OSS project is winding down. The company is still operating, but taking time to reset and explore new ideas. Open to chats and convos. Thanks all ❤️ https://t.co/Y7ROM86WSy

      — Jeff Tang 🏛 (Ohio) (@tangjeff0) November 11, 2022
      <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
    1. https://commoncog.com/

      If you're:<br><br>- An independent consultant<br>- A systems thinker<br>- Trying to change organizations<br>- Interested in theory & practice<br><br>Then you'll love CommonCog

      — Tom Critchlow (@tomcritchlow) November 9, 2022
      <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
    1. Kirschner, Paul, and Carl Hendrick. How Learning Happens: Seminal Works in Educational Psychology and What They Mean in Practice. 1st ed. Routledge, 2020. https://www.routledge.com/How-Learning-Happens-Seminal-Works-in-Educational-Psychology-and-What-They/Kirschner-Hendrick/p/book/9780367184575.

      The Ten Deadly Sins of Education by @P_A_Kirschner & @C_Hendrick <br><br>Multitasking was v interesting to read about in their book! Learning pyramid & styles still hang around, sometimes students find out about learning styles & believe it to be true so it's important to bust myths! pic.twitter.com/Kx5GpsehGm

      — Kate Jones (@KateJones_teach) November 10, 2022
      <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
    1. Dave Lane at OERu where they have been running an instance for a few years at https://mastodon.oeru.org/ – he has some Docker stuff written - he is super generous / helpful

      <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>cogdog</span> in How About A Fediverse Space? - Feature Requests - Reclaim Hosting Community Forums (<time class='dt-published'>11/11/2022 11:32:46</time>)</cite></small>

    1. To create accurate animations, we generate the speech, run it through our in-house speech recognition and pronunciation models, and get the timing for each word and phoneme (speech sound). Each sound is mapped onto a visual representation, or viseme, in a set we designed based on linguistic features.

      viseme, an atomic speech visualization of a particular phoneme

    1. Nostalgia, a sentimental longing for one's past, predicts or augments psychological wellbeing (PWB).

      Could this, in part, be behind some of the bump for slogans like "Make America Great Again" by looking back to an imagined past?


      Kelley, Nicholas J., William E. Davis, Jianning Dang, Li Liu, Tim Wildschut, and Constantine Sedikides. “Nostalgia Confers Psychological Wellbeing by Increasing Authenticity.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 102 (September 1, 2022): 104379. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2022.104379.

    1. He outspent Bass by very wide margins, largely using his own money (see below).

      https://laist.com/news/politics/2022-election-california-general-live-results-los-angeles-city-mayor-bass-caruso

      What the hell is Rick Caruso doing spending over $100M!! to defeat Karen Bass? He put in $101,477,500 of his own money along with $3.4M from a group opposing Bass compared to Bass's roughly $18M raise.

      So many better things he could have done with that money, if in fact, people really think that he's got ideas that will actively make the city better.

      Caruso outspent Bass 5 to 1.

      Caruso spent $400 per vote for the 252,476 votes he got (as of 2022-11-09 9:24 AM).

    1. https://web.archive.org/web/20061012215828/http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~klausner/part.html

      Check-list of common particles

      GMW=D. Simon Evans Grammar of Middle Welsh (Dublin, 1964)

      Y

      • definite article (yr before vowels and h), GMW 24.
      • unstressed possessive pronoun, masc. or fem., sing. or pl., GMW 53.
      • preposition 'to' (inflected forms, GMW 60; can take infixed pronoun).
      • oblique relative particle, used when relative stands in genitival relationship, or is governed by a preposition, adverb, or nominal predicate. GMW 64ff.
      • conjunction 'that' (yd before vowels), GMW 171.
      • y (4) + y (2 or 5) = y.
      • affirmative preverbal particle (also appears as yd, ydd, ytt), GMW 171.

      A

      • affirmative preverbal particle, especially to support infixed pronoun, GMW 171.
      • relative pronoun/particle, GMW 172.
      • preposition 'with' (can take infixed pronoun), GMW 181.
      • conjunction 'and' (can take infixed pronoun), GMW 230.
      • variant of 'o', preposition 'of, from', GMW 205.
      • interrogative particle, GMW 174.
      • vocative particle (interjection), GMW 245.
      • 3 sing. pres. ind. of 'mynet', GMW 132.

      O

      • preposition 'of, from' (inflected forms, GMW 59); can take infixed pronoun.
      • conjunction 'if', GMW 240.
      • interjection 'alas', GMW 245.
      • in composite prepositions, GMW 205-6.
    1. brief review:

      Some interesting material that one doesn't hear in the broader media. I had wished there would have been more solutions in the end, but honestly simply debunking the broadly held myths by itself is a tall enough order to shift the conversation.

      More of the material here should be commonly known and discussed. American can definitely do a better job than sticking to the myths of our past.

      I've been reading David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs at the same time as this and the two make interesting companions.

    Tags

    Annotators

    1. There are student editions of the poems of Dafyd ap Gwilym, and of Y Gododdin, the strange, and rather difficult medieval Welsh epic poem about the battle of the men of the north at Catraeth, part of the Welsh contribution to Celtic Arthurian literature.
    2. Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru The Really Big Welsh dictionary, the Welsh equivalent of the OED
    3. Rachel Bromwich and Simon Evans have recently re-edited Culwch ac Olswen, this time including the text in Welsh and the notes in English, and a glossary.
    4. the Pedeir Keinc y Mabinogi edited by Ifor Williams from the White Book manuscript is still the standard edition of the four branches; it includes lengthy notes as well as the edited text, all in Welsh.
    5. There’s a printed facsimile of the White Book, (Llyfr Gwyn Rhydderch) one of the two central medieval Welsh manuscripts of the Mabinogi and the other tales, all in Welsh.
    6. Checklist of Middle Welsh Particles by Professor David Klausner at the University of Toronto.
    7. If you are at all serious about Welsh mythology, you will want Rachel Bromwich’s Triodd Ynys Prydein. Bromwich has a super introduction, all the triads, in English and Welsh, and extensive notes on names. Her notes alone are worth the money.
    1. I am not particularly strict about how I organize these. The point is to be able to find them again, which I can whether it's noted in the source or as a more detailed claim.

      Konik cites Raccoon Nation on PBS which indicates that a racoon's most heightened sense is it's sense of touch, a sense which is increased when the hands are wet or under water.

      Is this tied into the popular stories of raccoons which presumably like to "wash their food?" Is it really their sense of touch and affordances which come from that that presses this impression?

    2. https://www.obsidianroundup.org/the-konik-method-for-making-notes/

      Eleanor Konik explores, in reasonable depth, how she makes notes and uses Obsidian to manage them. She doesn't talk much about the philosophy of her method in a prescriptive manner so much as she looks directly at her process.

      This isn't so much a "rules" set, but takes some pre-existing rules (unstated) and shows how she bends them to her particular needs for outputs primarily in non-academic settings.

    3. Since this can involve a lot of repetitive actions on a long file, I use this javascript code along with the QuickAdd plugin, to do it for me.
      • [ ] May be worth coming back to explore this part of the Obsidian workflow at some point for some automation. (@2022-11-08)
    4. Not every highlight needs to become a "card" — and having things in my notes that are highlighted but don't need to be turned into further notes does not mean that I have failed by "over-highlighting." Useful notes are messy, and time is valuable. A sense of completionism is nice for some things but mostly just gets in the way when it comes to learning. I read about 10% of the articles that show up in my feed. I take highlight about 50% of those, and affirmatively take notes on about 10% of those. This doesn't mean I wasted my time reading, or that I failed at notetaking because I should have done a better job of taking comprehensive notes. It means I used judgment, and used my time wisely, and focused on things that were worthwhile from a return on investment perspective.

      While there are rules and processes for taking notes, it's small personal tidbits like this that are harder fought knowledge for the beginner who generally only learns these bits through work and experience.

    5. For example, if I've left myself a note like #pkm/xref this reminds me of something the Carthage expert I like said, but I can't remember her name I will search my notes to figure out the name of the Carthage expert I like, cross-reference the highlight with things she said, and add links and update notes as appropriate. If I said something like This reminds me of the article about the guy a crane is in love with when I was taking notes on something without access to my notes, I will go find the article and link to my notes about it so that my backlinks and graph are updated.

      I'm not sure how frequent this pattern is within fleeting notes, but it's something I do myself to create at least a temporary shorthand context of how things interrelate and which can easily be cleaned up later in the longer form permanent notes.

      The tougher thing is to always capture these sorts of things which one won't remember, but which quite often create better and stronger insights down the road.

    6. My highlights are littered with notes to self and action items - it's not all pure knowledge.

      this is a good example of the personal side of note taking that isn't always outwardly seen

      each person's notes will be personal to them

    7. Inevitably, I read and highlight more articles than I have time to fully process in Obsidian. There are currently 483 files in the Readwise/Articles folder and 527 files marked as needing to be processed. I have, depending on how you count, between 3 and 5 jobs right now. I am not going to neatly format all of those files. I am going to focus on the important ones, when I have time.

      I suspect that this example of Eleanor Konik's is incredibly common among note takers. They may have vast repositories of collected material which they can reference or use, but typically don't.

      In digital contexts it's probably much more common that one will have a larger commonplace book-style collection of notes (either in folders or with tags), and a smaller subsection of more highly processed notes (a la Luhmann's practice perhaps) which are more tightly worked and interlinked.

      To a great extent this mirrors much of my own practice as well.

    8. I never want to be one of those people who who write extensively about note-writing but rarely have a serious context of use.

      She's probably right that too many" influencers" in the space don't have actual context for use.

      Love that she links to Andy Matuschak's admonishment about this...

    9. I am not an academic and don't have to worry about that, so at the individual level, I focus on the stuff I actually care about – the content of the quote.

      Even though she's very explicitly taken a pro-citation stance earlier in the essay on moral and ethical grounds, Eleanor Konik takes a less hands-on approach to her collection of citations here preferring to focus on the content of a quote rather than where it came from.


      Interesting anecdote about personal approach to citations to compare academics and non-academics.

    10. Nobody ever says rubber ducky debugging involves writing memos to your preferred duck, after all.

      Seemingly both rubber duck debugging and casual conversations with acquaintances would seem to be soft forms of diffuse thinking which may help one come to a heuristic-based decision or realization.

      These may be useful, but should also be used in combination with more logical, system two forms of decision making. (At least not in the quick, notice the problem sort of issues in which one may be debugging.)

    1. Abrams, Douglas. “Historian Barbara W. Tuchman on the ‘Art of Writing’ (Part II).” Precedent 9, no. 1 (January 1, 2015): 18–21. http://ssrn.com/abstract=2581159

      Interesting view of writing and a short collection of reasonable writing advice. Perhaps a bit too much focus on other writers given the title of the piece. Not sure it was all brought together in the nice bow it may have otherwise had, but interesting nonetheless.

    2. Justice Louis D.Brandeis instructedlawyers that “there is nosuch thing as good writ-ing. There is only goodrewriting.”23
    3. “Broadly speaking, the shortwords are the best, and the old wordswhen short are best of all,” attestedformer British Prime Minister WinstonChurchill,
    4. “Usethe smallest word that does the job,”advised essayist and journalist E. B.White.20
    5. “[T]here is always a short word for it,”Rogers said. “‘I love words but I don’tlike strange ones. You don’t under-stand them, and they don’t understandyou. Old words is like old friends– you know ‘em the minute you see‘em.”17

      17 betty roGerS, wiLL roGerS 294 (1941; new ed. 1979) (quoting Rogers).

    6. Novelists Ernest Hemingway and Wil-liam Faulkner, for example, went backand forth about the virtues of simplic-ity in writing. Faulkner once criticizedHemingway, who he said “had nocourage, never been known to use aword that might send the reader to thedictionary.” “Poor Faulkner,” Heming-way responded, “Does he really thinkbig emotions come from big words?He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollarwords. I know them all right. But thereare older and simpler and better words,and those are the ones I use.”15

      15 A.E. Hotchner , PAPA heminGwAy 69-70 (1966) (quoting Hemingway).

    7. Justice Felix Frankfurter,a prolific writer as a Harvard lawprofessor before joining the SupremeCourt, was right that “[a]nything thatis written may present a problem ofmeaning” because words “seldomattain[] more than approximate preci-sion.”12

      12 Felix Frankfurter, Some Reflections On the Reading of Statutes, 47 CoLUm . L. rev. 527, 528 (1947), reprinting Felix Frankfurter, Sixth Annual Benjamin N. Cardozo Lecture, 2 Rec. Bar Ass'n City of N.Y. (No. 6, 1947).

    8. Guy de Maupassant, was no lawyer,but his advice can help guide lawyerswho seek precision in their writing.“Whatever you want to say,” he assert-ed, “there is only one word to expressit, only one verb to give it movement,only one adjective to qualify it. Youmust search for that word, that verb,that adjective, and never be contentwith an approximation, never resortto tricks, even clever ones, and neverhave recourse to verbal sleight-of-hand to avoid a difficulty.”11

      11 Guy de Maupassant, Selected Short Sto- ries 10-11 (Roger Colet ed., 1971) (Maupassant quoting French writer Gustave Flaubert).

    1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ueMHkGljK0

      Robert Greene's method goes back to junior high school when he was practicing something similar. He doesn't say he invented it, and it may be likely that teachers modeled some of the system for him. He revised the system over time to make it work for himself.


      • [x] Revisit this for some pull quotes and fine details of his method. (Done on 2022-11-08)
    2. Origin of Robert Greene's (May 14, 1959 - ) note taking system using index cards:<br /> Greene didn't recall a specific origin of his practices, but did mention that his mom found some index cards at his house from a junior high school class. (Presuming a 12 year old 7th grader, this would be roughly from 1971.) Ultimately when he wrote 48 Laws of Power, he was worried about being overwhelmed with his notes and ideas in notebooks. He naturally navigated to note cards as a solution.

      Uses about 50 cards per chapter.

      His method starts by annotating his books as he reads them. A few weeks later, he revisits these books and notes to transfer his ideas to index cards. He places a theme on the top of each card along with a page number of the original reference.

      He has kept much the same system as he started with though it has changed a bit over time.

      You're either a prisoner of your material or a master of your material.

      This might not be the best system ever created, but it works for me.

      When looking through a corpus of cards for a project, Robert Greene is able to make note of the need to potentially reuse a card within a particular work if necessary. The fact that index cards are inherently mobile within his projects make them easy to move and reuse.

      I haven't heard in either Robert Greene or Ryan Holiday's practices evidence that they reuse notes or note cards from one specific project to the next. Based on all the evidence I've seen, they maintain individual collections for each book project for which they're developing.

      [...] like a chameleon [the index card system is] constantly changing colors or [like] something that's able to change its shape at will. This whole system can change its shape as I direct it.

    3. Robert Green appears to use a Globe-Weis/Pendaflex Fiberboard Index Card Storage Box, 4 x 6 Inches, Black Agate (94 BLA) to store his index card-based notes.

      How I Write My Books: Robert Greene Reveals His Research Methods When Writing His Latest Work, 2020. timestamp 0:00:30.

      syndication link

    4. Robert Greene: (pruriently) "You want to see my index cards?"<br /> Brian Rose: (curiously) Yeah. Can we?? ... This is epic! timestamp

    1. https://hypothes.is/search?q=tag%3A%27etc556+etcnau%27

      Randomly ran across a great tag full of education resources...

      Seems to be related to this class:<br /> ETC 556 - Contexts And Methods Of Technology In Adult Education

      Description: This course is designed for adult educators in the various contexts, including: higher education, military, non-profit, health and business settings. Through research, readings and collaborative activities, students will gain an understanding of various adult learning methods that include, but are not limited to, training, professional development, performance improvement, online and mobile learning. Letter grade only.

      https://catalog.nau.edu/Courses/course?courseId=011553&catalogYear=2223

    1. https://forum.obsidian.md/t/alternative-checkboxes-icon-bullets-copy-and-paste/35962

      A list of alternative checkboxes or icon bullets for Obsidian (and potentially other platforms). Potentially useful for search and filtering as well.


      • [ ] to-do
      • [/] incomplete
      • [x] done
      • [-] canceled
      • [>] forwarded
      • [<] scheduling
      • [?] question
      • [!] important
      • [*] star
      • ["] quote
      • [l] location
      • [b] bookmark
      • [i] information
      • [S] savings
      • [I] idea
      • [p] pros
      • [c] cons
      • [f] fire
      • [k] key
      • [w] win
      • [u] up
      • [d] down
    1. https://www.cold-takes.com/learning-by-writing/

      Meh... generic process. Nothing broadly new here. The extended example is flawed because it's a broad thesis by a top level aggregator who doesn't have their own expert level experience (seemingly). Better to start from there, but delving more deeply into the primary literature of people who may have that experience.

    1. Originally blogs were called weblogs: a log of activity that you wrote to the web. Peter Merholz jokingly split the term into two words to make it an activity: we blog. Ev Williams started to use it as a verb and a noun: to blog. And the rest is history.
    2. https://getblogging.org/

      A Ben Werdmuller joint

    1. See also Dan Hon’s excellent suggestion for news organizations— or universities, companies, or any organization or institution — to set up their own Mastodon servers to verify and control their users.

      Small town newspapers and libraries could set up Fediverse servers for their constituents as well.

      See also: Hometown by Darius Kazemi

    1. https://pinafore.social/

      Pinafore is a web client for Mastodon, designed for speed and simplicity.

      <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>Jessica Smith</span> in Small Web - Jayeless.net (<time class='dt-published'>07/03/2021 23:34:42</time>)</cite></small>

    1. Any migration is likely to face many of the challenges previous platform migrations have faced: content loss, fragmented communities, broken social networks and shifted community norms.
    2. By asking participants about their experiences moving across these platforms – why they left, why they joined and the challenges they faced in doing so – we gained insights into factors that might drive the success and failure of platforms, as well as what negative consequences are likely to occur for a community when it relocates.
    1. And this is the art-the skill or craftthat we are talking about here.

      We don't talk about the art of reading or the art of note making often enough as a goal to which students might aspire. It's too often framed as a set of rules and an mechanical process rather than a road to producing interesting, inspiring, or insightful content that can change humanity.

    2. You cannot followrules you do not know. Nor can you acquire an artistic habitany craft or skill-without following rules. The art as something that can be taught consists of rules to be followed inoperation. The art as something learned and possessed consists of the habit that results from operating according to therules.

      This is why one has some broad general rules for keeping and maintaining a zettelkasten. It helps to have some rules to practice and make a habit.

      Unmentioned here is that true artists known all the rules and can then more profitably break those rules for expanding and improving upon their own practice. This is dramatically different from what is seen by some of those who want to have a commonplace or zettelkasten practice, but begin without any clear rules. They often begin breaking the rules to their detriment without having the benefit of long practice to see and know the affordances of such systems before going out of their way to break those rules.

      By breaking the rules before they've even practiced them, many get confused or lost and quit their practice before they see any of the benefits or affordances of them.

      Of course one should have some clear cut end reasons which answer the "why" question for having such practices, or else they'll also lose the motivation to stick with the practice, particularly when they don't see any light at the end of the tunnel. Pure hope may not be enough for most.

    3. Knowing the rules of an art is not the same as having thehabit.
    4. That is to make notes about the shape of the discussion-the discussion that is engaged in by all of the authors,even if unbeknownst to them. For reasons that will becomeclear in Part Four, we prefer to call such notes dialectical.

      Dialectical notes are made at the level of syntopical reading and entail creating a conversation not only between the reader and the author, but create a conversation of questions and answers between and among many texts and the reader.

    5. during an analytical reading, you will need to give answers to questions about the truthand significance of the book. The notes you make at this levelof reading are, therefore, not structural but conceptual.

      Conceptual notes are made during the analytical reading of a book and "give answers to questions about the truth and significance of the book."

    6. The point to recognize is that these notes primarily concern the structure of the book, and not its substance-at leastnot in detail. We therefore call this kind of note-making structural.

      Adler and Van Doren define structural note making as the sorts of questions one might ask at the level of inspectional reading including: - what kind of book is it? - what is it about? - what is the overall structure with respect to the argument the author intends to make?

    7. The Three Kinds of N o te-making