Congratulations (I guess?) on finding my semi-secret Substack: a place away from my main site to discuss my journey from technologist (a pompous term that really just means I do computers) to writer (a pompous term that really just means I do computers but now it’s art).

Creating a ZK Don't Break the Chain Calendar in Obsidian

Periodically, I file them away in old envelopes, devoting a separate envelope to each topic.

another long forgotten manual for students, History and Historical Research (1928) by C.G. Crump of the Public Record Office: ‘Never make a note for future use in such a form ... that even you yourself will not know what it means, when you come across it some months later.’

Filing is a tedious activity and bundles of unsorted notes accumulate. Some of them get loose and blow around the house, turning up months later under a carpet or a cushion. A few of my most valued envelopes have disappeared altogether. I strongly suspect that they fell into the large basket at the side of my desk full of the waste paper with which they are only too easily confused.

When I go to libraries or archives, I make notes in a continuous form on sheets of paper, entering the page number and abbreviated title of the source opposite each excerpted passage. When I get home, I copy the bibliographical details of the works I have consulted into an alphabeticised index book, so that I can cite them in my footnotes. I then cut up each sheet with a pair of scissors. The resulting fragments are of varying size, depending on the length of the passage transcribed. These sliced-up pieces of paper pile up on the floor. Periodically, I file them away in old envelopes, devoting a separate envelope to each topic. Along with them go newspaper cuttings, lists of relevant books and articles yet to be read, and notes on anything else which might be helpful when it comes to thinking about the topic more analytically. If the notes on a particular topic are especially voluminous, I put them in a box file or a cardboard container or a drawer in a desk. I also keep an index of the topics on which I have an envelope or a file. The envelopes run into thousands.

Since Anatole France’s description in Penguin Island of the scholar drowned by an avalanche of his own index cards, it has been hard to take them seriously.

When I did, though, I was reassured to see that, in a slipshod sort of way, I had arrived at something vaguely approximating to their prescriptions. En route I had made all the obvious beginner’s mistakes.

In his delightful autobiography, Memories Migrating, the late John Burrow records his perplexities when this injunction was conveyed to him by his graduate supervisor, George Kitson Clark: ‘I brooded on this. What was a fact? And what made it one fact? Surely most facts were compound. How would I know when I had reached bedrock, the ultimate, unsplittable atomic fact?’

Before the Xerox machine, this was a labour-intensive counsel of perfection; and it is no wonder that many of the great 19th-century historians employed professional copyists.

If a passage is interesting from several different points of view, then it should be copied out several times on different slips.

In his book on The Footnote, Anthony Grafton quotes a letter by the great Swiss historian of the Renaissance Jacob Burckhardt, reporting that he had just cut up his notes on Vasari’s Lives into 700 little slips and rearranged them to be glued into a book, organised by topic.

As the historian Thomas Fuller remarked, ‘A commonplace book contains many notions in garrison, whence the owner may draw out an army into the field on competent warning.’

I have always been impressed by those academics who can sit impassively through a complex lecture by some visiting luminary without finding it necessary to make a single note, even a furtive one on the back of an envelope. They’d lose face, no doubt, if they were seen copying it all down, like a first-year undergraduate.

John Aubrey tells us that Hobbes ‘always carried a note booke in his pocket, and as soon as a thought darted, he presently entred it into his booke, or otherwise he might have lost it. He had drawn the designe of the book into chapters, etc., so he knew whereabout it would come in.’

Another help to the memory is the pocketbook in which to enter stray thoughts and observations: what the Elizabethans called ‘tablets’.

The pencilled dots in the margin of many books in the Codrington Library at All Souls are certain evidence that A.L. Rowse was there before you.

But historians still make newspaper cuttings. At breakfast, I often take a pair of scissors to the LRB, the TLS or the New York Review of Books.

Christopher Hill, used to pencil on the back endpaper of his books a list of the pages and topics which had caught his attention. He rubbed out his notes if he sold the book, but not always very thoroughly, so one can usually recognise a volume which belonged to him.

J.H. Plumb once showed me a set of Swift’s works given him by G.M. Trevelyan; it had originally belonged to Macaulay, who had drawn a line all the way down the margin of every page as he read it, no doubt committing the whole to memory.

Newton used to turn down the corners of the pages of his books so that they pointed to the exact passage he wished to recall.

According to the Jacobean educational writer John Brinsley, ‘the choycest books of most great learned men, and the notablest students’ were marked through, ‘with little lines under or above’ or ‘by some prickes, or whatsoever letter or mark may best help to call the knowledge of the thing to remembrance’.

Macaulay claimed that his memory was good enough to enable him to write out the whole of Paradise Lost. But when preparing his History of England, he made extensive notes in a multitude of pocketbooks of every shape and colour.

In his splendid recent autobiography, History of a History Man, Patrick Collinson reveals that when as a young man he was asked by the medievalist Geoffrey Barraclough at a job interview what his research method was, all he could say was that he tried to look at everything which was remotely relevant to his subject: ‘I had no “method”, only an omnium gatherum of materials culled from more or less everywhere.’

It never helps historians to say too much about their working methods. For just as the conjuror’s magic disappears if the audience knows how the trick is done, so the credibility of scholars can be sharply diminished if readers learn everything about how exactly their books came to be written.

Today, the people in politics who most often invoke the name of Jesus for their political causes tend to be the most merciless and judgmental, the most consumed by rage and fear and vengeance. They hate their enemies, and they seem to want to make more of them. They claim allegiance to the truth and yet they have embraced, even unwittingly, lies. They have inverted biblical ethics in the name of biblical ethics.

Samuel Perry, a sociology professor at the University of Oklahoma, a scholar of Christian nationalism, and himself a person of the Christian faith

Workflow for capturing and processing online content for use in a Zettlekasten

Handwriting + Zettelkasten

I have been using Apple notes, but began to wonder if I could find an app that supports zettelkasten in digital handwritten form. The closest thing I found is CardNotes however it is underdeveloped imo, and maybe dead?

Very nice to differentiate between core notes (notes that we have worked a lot on) and peripheral notes.

CardNotes - Zettelkasten Notes 4+ Linkable Handwritten Notes HANG FONG TSE

For everything there is a season, and atime for every matter under heaven:² a time to be born, and a time to die;a time to plant, and a time to pluck upwhat is planted;³ a time to kill, and a time to heal;a time to break down, and a time to buildup;⁴ a time to weep, and a time to laugh;a time to mourn, and a time to dance;⁵ a time to throw away stones, and a timeto gather stones together;

New in Reader: Share your annotated documents publicly .t3_xrc7b7._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; } AnnouncementsWe just shipped a v1 of a sharing feature inside Reader that enables you to make a public version of an article you read and annotated.

TweetSee new TweetsConversationSamuele Onelia @SamueleOneliaI added a new note to my #Zettelkasten after a month of inactivity. It still remains my favorite kind of mental therapy.

For Tim, the practice is managed by routine.“My quota for writing is two crappy pages a day,” he explains. Those two pages help him get started, matter what other commitments he is meeting that day. And even if they’re bad, they’re at least done.The idea is to set goals that are “easily winnable” so you don’t panic when one day passes and you don’t make that goal, because you always know you can easily pick back up the next day.“If I don’t write my two pages I don’t panic and go into the spiral.”

One of W.G. Sebald’s masterpieces, The Rings of Saturn, an indescribable blend of fact and fiction, contains a section about one of his academic colleagues whose office was piled high with notes about Gustav Flaubert.

What would you suggest instead if my goal is taking notes on various topics in order to remember them? (no output needed)

Les murs du cabinet de travail, le plancher, le plafond même portaient des liasses débordantes, des cartons démesurément gonflés, des boîtes où se pressait une multitude innombrable de fiches, et je contemplai avec une admiration mêlée de terreur les cataractes de l'érudition prêtes à se rompre. —Maître, fis-je d'une voix émue, j'ai recours à votre bonté et à votre savoir, tous deux inépuisables. Ne consentiriez-vous pas à me guider dans mes recherches ardues sur les origines de l'art pingouin? —Monsieur, me répondit le maître, je possède tout l'art, vous m'entendez, tout l'art sur fiches classées alphabétiquement et par ordre de matières. Je me fais un devoir de mettre à votre disposition ce qui s'y rapporte aux Pingouins. Montez à cette échelle et tirez cette boîte que vous voyez là-haut. Vous y trouverez tout ce dont vous avez besoin. J'obéis en tremblant. Mais à peine avais-je ouvert la fatale boîte que des fiches bleues s'en échappèrent et, glissant entre mes doigts, commencèrent à pleuvoir. Presque aussitôt, par sympathie, les boîtes voisines s'ouvrirent et il en coula des ruisseaux de fiches roses, vertes et blanches, et de proche en proche, de toutes les boîtes les fiches diversement colorées se répandirent en murmurant comme, en avril, les cascades sur le flanc des montagnes. En une minute elles couvrirent le plancher d'une couche épaisse de papier. Jaillissant de leurs inépuisables réservoirs avec un mugissement sans cesse grossi, elles précipitaient de seconde en seconde leur chute torrentielle. Baigné jusqu'aux genoux, Fulgence Tapir, d'un nez attentif, observait le cataclysme; il en reconnut la cause et pâlit d'épouvante. —Que d'art! s'écria-t-il. Je l'appelai, je me penchai pour l'aider à gravir l'échelle qui pliait sous l'averse. Il était trop tard. Maintenant, accablé, désespéré, lamentable, ayant perdu sa calotte de velours et ses lunettes d'or, il opposait en vain ses bras courts au flot qui lui montait jusqu'aux aisselles. Soudain une trombe effroyable de fiches s'éleva, l'enveloppant d'un tourbillon gigantesque. Je vis durant l'espace d'une seconde dans le gouffre le crâne poli du savant et ses petites mains grasses, puis l'abîme se referma, et le déluge se répandit sur le silence et l'immobilité. Menacé moi-même d'être englouti avec mon échelle, je m'enfuis à travers le plus haut carreau de la croisée.

Bryan Caplan has made a spirited defense of school as signaling in his book, The Case Against Education. He argues that what is taught in school isn’t particularly useful on the job. Instead, schooling provides a mechanism for figuring out who has the talent, ambition and obedience to learn on the job successfully.

Having an MIT degree is probably more valuable than having an MIT education.

As an example, in The Crown season 1 episode 4 “Act of God” (Netflix, 2016) there is a scene portraying former British Prime Minister Clement Atlee in his office in which he is prominently bookended in the background by two four drawer card indexes: one 3 x 5″ and the other 4 x 6″.

If you give a title to your notes, "claim notes" are simply notes with a verb. They invite you to say: "Prove it!" - "The positive impact of PKM" (not a claim) - "PKM has a positive impact in improving writer's block" (claim) A small change with positive mindset consequences

Zettelkasten in the office of Clement Atlee, former Prime Minister of UK, in The Crown S1E4 "Act of God" (Netflix, 2016)

I'm sure fedwiki influenced me, but for whatever reason it wasn't top of mind—I was really thinking about the 2011-era Tweetie for iPad.

TiddlyWiki's philosophy now is that the purpose of recording and organising information is so that it can be used again. To maximise the possibilities for reuse, write or slice information into the smallest semantically meaningful units, and weave them together into narratives.

The first demo of TidlyWiki from 2004 took the ideas of wiki and applied them to fragments rather than entire pages. The hypothesis was that it would be easier to write in small interlinked chunks that could be gradually massaged into a linear narrative

TiddlyWiki was inspired by @WardCunningham's glorious idea of wiki – more than anything by the way that wiki makes linking be part of the punctuation of writing.

best that deep study invites you to gather in like a harvest, and to store up as the wealth of life.

Be ready, as soon as you have read or heard the thing, to repeat it exactly in as far as you want to fix it in your memory. If it is a book, do not leave it without being able to sum it up and to estimate its value. Ta

I can't quite grasp this concept, although it seems interesting for my specific case. Isn't the index box supposed to be organized by alphabetical order? How can personal notes be placed right in such an order?

Memorization is not about a language, rather about a feeling you have about information. In other words, how deep it resonates with your life. In this sense, I was also exploring the idea that having an Antinet Zettelkasten is almost like having a "diary", not for your personal feelings or emotions, rather for exploring the way in which your entire mind and heart work together over the years in which we discover the world. For me, exploring subjects and studying is an internal discovery.

Bilingual Antinet?

G.I. Bill, which was theoretically open to everyone, including to women, but that very few Black people could take advantage of because most colleges wouldn't admit them.

You are all computer scientists. You know what FINITE AUTOMATA can do. You know what TURING MACHINES can do. For example, Finite Automata can add but not multiply. Turing Machines can compute any computable function. Turing machines are incredibly more powerful than Finite Automata. Yet the only difference between a FA and a TM is that the TM, unlike the FA, has paper and pencil. Think about it. It tells you something about the power of writing. Without writing, you are reduced to a finite automaton. With writing you have the extraordinary power of a Turing machine.

It wasn’t zealous in that we were told exactly what to read and what to think about the books, but it was conveyed to us that certain books really did matter and that you were involved in some rearguard action for the profound human values in these books. This was conveyed very powerfully—that the way to learn how to live and to live properly was to read English literature—and it worked for me. I was taught close, attentive reading, and to ironize the ambitions of grand theory. I was educated to believe that A.E. Housman was more interesting than Hegel, and I do.

I don’t know what that knowing was a knowing about.

He also reads between consultations, whenever he can. As he puts it, “I need to hear other voices.”

Anybody who writes knows you don’t simply write what you believe. You write to find out what you believe, or what you can afford to believe. So when I write something and it sounds good, I leave it in, usually, to see what it sounds like to someone else. To somebody else it might sound awful or brash, but I want to be able to have the courage of my brashness. I don’t leave things in that I know to be terrible, or that I don’t, as it were, find interesting—I don’t do that—but if there’s a doubt about it and it sounds interesting, I’ll leave it in. And I want to be free to do that, because that’s why I write. When I write, things occur to me. It’s a way of thinking. But you can perform your thinking instead of just thinking it.

if you're thinking without 00:03:26 writing chances are you're fooling yourself we're only

In the words of the cartoonist Dick Guindon:Writing is nature's way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is.

I am less worried about natural disaster than my own negligence. I take the cards with me too much. I am not stationary in my office and so to use the cards I am taking them. I am afraid they will lost or destroyed. I have started to scan into apple notes. I will see how that goes. It is easy and might be a great overall solution.

Worried about paper cards being lost or destroyed .t3_y77414._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; } I am loving using paper index cards. I am, however, worried that something could happen to the cards and I could lose years of work. I did not have this work when my notes were all online. are there any apps that you are using to make a digital copy of the notes? Ideally, I would love to have a digital mirror, but I am not willing to do 2x the work.

For the sole true end of educationis simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whateverinstruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.

We have lostthe tools of learning—the axe and the wedge, the hammer and the saw, thechisel and the plane—that were so adaptable to all tasks. Instead of them, wehave merely a set of complicated jigs, each of which will do but one task andno more, and in using which eye and hand receive no training, so that no manever sees the work as a whole or “looks to the end of the work.”

disport itself happily in its new and extended Quadrivium withoutpassing through the Trivium. But the scholastic tradition, though broken andmaimed, still lingered in the public schools and universities:

For the tools of learning are the same, in any and everysubject; and the person who knows how to use them will, at any age, get themastery of a new subject in half the time and with a quarter of the effortexpended by the person who has not the tools at his command.

Rhetoric should be taken at aboutfourteen, the first category of pupil should study Grammar from about nineto eleven, and Dialectic from twelve to fourteen;

for as Dialectic will have shown all branches oflearning to be inter-related, so Rhetoric will tend to show that all knowledgeis one.

hildren sit in judgment on their masters;

It will doubtless be objected that to encourage young persons at the Pert Ageto browbeat, correct, and argue with their elders will render them perfectlyintolerable. My answer is that children of that age are intolerable anyhow;and that their natural argumentativeness may just as well be canalised togood purpose as allowed to run away into the sands.

At this stage, it does not matter nearly so muchthat these things should be fully understood as that they should be knownand remembered. Remember, it is material that we are collecting.

The modern tendency is totry and force rational explanations on a child’s mind at too early an age

The grammar of History should consist, I think, of dates, events, anecdotes,and personalities. A set of dates to which one can peg all later historicalknowledge is of enormous help later on in establishing the perspective ofhistory. It does not greatly matter which dates: those of the Kings of Englandwill do very nicely, provided they are accompanied by pictures of costume,architecture, and all “every-day things,” so that the mere mention of a datecalls up a strong visual presentment of the whole period.

Trivium adapts itself with a singularappropriateness to these three ages: Grammar to the Poll-parrot, Dialectic tothe Pert, and Rhetoric to the Poetic Age.

We dole out lip-service to the importance of education—lip-service and, just occasionally, a little grant of money; we postpone theschool leaving-age, and plan to build bigger and better schools; the teachersslave conscientiously in and out of school-hours, till responsibility becomes aburden and a nightmare; and yet, as I believe, all this devoted effort is largelyfrustrated, because we have lost the tools of learning, and in their absencecan only make a botched and piecemeal job of it.

We will endow them with exceptionally docile parents;

the idea of playing Shakespeare’splays as he wrote them, and not in the “modernised” versions of Cibber andGarrick, which once seemed to be the latest thing in theatrical progress.

Distinguo

By teaching them all to read, we have left them atthe mercy of the printed word.

The proper subject of theargument is thus seen to be the distinction between location and extensionin space; the matter on which the argument is exercised happens to be thenature of angels

A glib speaker in the Brains Trust onceentertained his audience (and reduced the late Charles Williams to helplessrage) by asserting that in the Middle Ages it was a matter of faith to knowhow many archangels could dance on the point of a needle. I need not say, Ihope, that it never was a “matter of faith”; it was simply a debating exercise,whose set subject was the nature of angelic substance: were angels material,and if so, did they occupy space?

Whether they were in themselves any more hackneyed and trivialthan the usual subjects set nowadays for “essay-writing” I should not like tosay: we may ourselves grow a little weary of “A Day in My Holidays,” “WhatI should Like to Do when I Leave School,” and all the rest of it.

modern education concentrates onteaching subjects, leaving the method of thinking, arguing, and expressingone’s conclusions to be picked up by the scholar as he goes along;

Dialectic, that is to say, embraced Logic andDisputation.

If not, his teacher and his fellow-pupils, trained alongthe same lines, would be quick to point out where he was wrong; for it wasthey whom he had to seek to persuade.

Thewhole of the Trivium was in fact intended to teach the pupil the proper use ofthe tools of learning, before he began to apply them to “subjects” at all

Is it not the great defect of our education to-day (—a defect traceablethrough all the disquieting symptoms of trouble that I have mentioned—)that although we often succeed in teaching our pupils “subjects,” we faillamentably on the whole in teaching them how to think? They learneverything, except the art of learning.

Have you ever followed a discussion in the newspapers or elsewhere andnoticed how frequently writers fail to define the terms they use? Or howoften, if one man does define his terms, another will assume in his reply thathe was using the terms in precisely the opposite sense to that in which he hasalready defined them?

Or who, when faced with a book of reference, betray a curiousinability to extract from it the passages relevant to the particular questionwhich interests them?

laudator temporis acti

Laudator Temporis Acti

[T.S.] Eliot stood—as he once famously said of himself—for conservatism in politics, classicism in literature, and Catholicism, or rather Anglo-Catholicism, in religion. He looked back into the past, the mediaeval past, as a confirmed laudator temporis acti and in the mediaeval past he looked back not only to John Donne among the metaphysical poets, nor only to William Shakespeare among the Elizabethan dramatists, but before them to the great Dante among Italian poets and behind Dante, though not so obviously, to St. Thomas Aquinas among the scholastic theologians. (From "T.S. Eliot's Metaphysics" by Peter Milward, Culture and Civilization 2009.)

Ida JosefiinaInfopunk. Into pdfs, information systems that support intentional thinking, cyborgs, and the future of humanity. This thought space is an introduction to me and my work.

Émile flew offthe shelves in 18th-century Paris. In fact, booksellers found it more profitable torent it out by the hour than to sell it. Ultimately the excitement got too much forthe authorities and Émile was banned in Paris and burned in Geneva

Rousseau’sheretical view was that anything which was outside children’s experience wouldbe meaningless to them, much as Plato, Comenius, and others had warned. Hisinsights had condensed principally out of the prevailing intellectual atmosphereat the time—empiricism, explicated by philosophers such as John Locke. We’lllook at Locke and Rousseau in more detail in Chapter 2.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who shockedthe world with Émile: or On Education ([1762] 1993).

Czech teacherComenius (1592–1670). He championed universal education, which hepromoted in his Didactica magna, arguing for the commonality of education—itwas for everyone, including, shockingly, females.

‘Nothing should be taught to theyoung...unless it is not only permitted, but actually demanded by their age andmental strength.’

William Petty, a doctor in Cromwell’s army in 1647, noted that ‘...we seechildren do delight in drums, pipes, fiddles, guns made of elder sticks, andbellowes noses, piped keys, etc., painting flags and ensigns with elder-berriesand corn poppy, making ships with paper, and setting even nut-shells aswimming, handling the tools of workmen as soon as they turn their backs, andtrying to work themselves’ (reported in the Harleian Miscellany, 1810).

Elizabeth I’s tutor, Roger Ascham (1515–68), promotedlearning-by-doing in The Scholemaster: ‘Bring not up your children in learningby compulsion and feare,’ he said, ‘but by playing and pleasure.’

A friend of mine, well versed in all sorts of PKM and stuff, was convinced the ZK was beneficial, but took a long time before you started seeing benefits. My experience was completely different. I think I had about 5 permanent cards established when I made my first jump to a new idea... I don't know if the idea is any good at this moment, but I got a chill up my spine when I did it. I have more cards now, and have had a few more "new thoughts" that I would not have had otherwise. Don't put it off.

"In the event of a fire, the black-bound excerpts are to be saved first," instructed the poet Jean Paul to his wife before setting off on a trip in 1812.

»Bei Feuer sind die schwarzeingebundnen Exzerpten zuerst zu retten«, wies der Dichter Jean Paul seine Frau vor Antritt einer Reise im Jahr 1812 an.

What if something happened to your box? My house recently got robbed and I was so fucking terrified that someone took it, you have no idea. Thankfully they didn’t. I am actually thinking of using TaskRabbit to have someone create a digital backup. In the meantime, these boxes are what I’m running back into a fire for to pull out (in fact, I sometimes keep them in a fireproof safe).