I find it hard to believe that equality is "the very cornerstone of our democracy".

u/tylermangelson named his zettelkasten J.A.K.O.B.

https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/1aecx27/naming_my_baby_antinet/

reply to u/modspyder at https://www.reddit.com/r/commonplacebook/comments/18fbwqx/comment/ko8bksm/

The small plastic binder I use comfortably holds 50 pages, but has room for maybe 25 more (though not 50). You could use several of them for binding together groups of pages like that. Searching around might reveal larger ring binders here if you want larger books.

For larger quantities:

You can use book rings (sold in various sizes) or even binder clips to hold these sheets together in batches, but with the ability to remove them or add sheets later.

File folders might be a useful option too for holding things together in categories.

With some inexpensive book binder's glue and cardboard you could bind together much larger numbers of sheets into custom books for yourself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nivNPCoAHcM is a good basic primer, but you could also do more complicated bindings and covers or have pages bound at FedEx/Kinkos or other higher end professional binders depending on your need and ultimate budget. For this the sky may be the limit, though anything over 1000 pages may be getting awfully bulky.

https://www.mccoys-kecatalogs.com/SpecialSubjects/Zlotnian_Calculator/zlotnian.htm

https://www.mccoys-kecatalogs.com/SpecialSubjects/Fingers_Calculator/fingers_calculator.htm

Presuming my 1956 dating for my 4181-3 (SN 004365) slide rule is correct, the 1956 price list has the 10 inch ivorite 4181-3 model for $15.00.

https://www.mccoys-kecatalogs.com/KECatalogs/1954/1956Price/1956kecatprice43.htm

see: https://hypothes.is/a/SmzszMBcEe6Ug29KK3b93A

https://www.mccoys-kecatalogs.com/KEManuals/manuals.htm

https://www.mccoys-kecatalogs.com/SLCleaning/SLcleaning.htm

My 4181-3 slide rule was likely manufactured in 1956 as it has the SRT scale initiated in 1955 and has a serial number 004365 which is in the series 3 segment which reset in 1956 and ran from 0 to 88,500 that year.

https://www.mccoys-kecatalogs.com/keserialnumbers/Dating-2.htm

https://www.mccoys-kecatalogs.com/index.htm

https://www.mccoys-kecatalogs.com/KECollection/4081-3/ke4181-3_s5.htm

My 4181-3 was likely made in 1955 or after as it has the SRT and not the ST scale. (It has a 1947 copyright mark on it.)

These are the scale sets on my K+E 4181-3 slide Rule

The Keuffel & Esser 4181-3 was part of the 4081-3 family and was described in their catalogs as a 10 inch Log Log Duplex Decitrig Plastic slide rule.

via https://www.mccoys-kecatalogs.com/KEModels/kexrefmain.htm

https://www.ebay.com/itm/126307745144

78 drawer library card catalog cabinet offered for sale for $850 with local pick up only from Bennington, VT on 2024-01-31.

Solid single cabinet likely in maple. Missing all rods, water spots, stain missing, lots of scratches and scrapes. Not in great condition. No manufacturer listed.

Cost per drawer: $10.90

(one of the lowest per drawer, but also in bad shape.)

https://www.ebay.com/itm/325982555744

15 drawer card catalog offered 2024-01-31 for $2995.00 with freight shipping (extra) from South Bend, IN. Looks to be in walnut and chrome.

Unknown manufacturer and doesn't look familiar. Odd drawer pulls, but looks in good shape and has all rods. Bottom base in chrome.

Cost per drawer: 200.00

https://www.ebay.com/itm/325982715454

35 drawer modular card catalog in light mid century modern design. Table with stick legs a 5x6 section including two pull out writing drawers, a 5x1 section and a top. Likely maple, in great shape. All wood and metal, includes all rods.

Listed in 2024-01-29 for $3995.00 with freight shipping extra from South Bend, IN

Labeled as a Centura 400 (model?)

Cost per drawer: $114.00

This is the first time I've seen a catalog from Sjöström on the market though on searching there are a handful floating around.

re: open question about Luhmann's index at https://hypothes.is/a/NSo4ArxzEe6ElC-Cg7ex8g

Per personal communication with Bob Doto, the reference here about 4 references at most comes from:

Schmidt "serendipity":

"the file’s keyword index makes no claim to providing a complete list of all cards in the collection that refer to a specific term. Rather, Luhmann typically listed only one to four places where the term could be found in the file, the idea being that all other relevant entries in the collection could be quickly identified via the internal system of references described above."

Doto, Bob. “What Do We Mean When We Say ‘Bottom-Up?’” Writing by Bob Doto (blog), January 25, 2024. https://writing.bobdoto.computer/what-do-we-mean-when-we-say-bottom-up/.

Source for the claim of "at most four references"?

I could believe this on first blush, but has his archive done this work?

Not mentioned here is that with a top-down approach, if a card had related topics on it, then it would have to either be copied to those areas separately, or would need to be carefully cross-indexed to those areas to be able to be found again when needed.

When the number of topics, n, begins to exceed 2 the amount of additional work and cards can grow quite a bit, though generally only linearly with respect to n. (Don't discount the work on the back side of searching for and finding these easily at later dates.)

One of the more notable adopters of this approach to design and architecture was the Bauhaus in the early 20th century. See: Owen, C. (2009). "Bottom-up, Top-down." https://id.iit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Bottom-up-top-down-updown09.pdf↩

It's a question of teleology. Is there a goal or a purpose in mind? (teleology: the explanation of phenomena in terms of the purpose they serve rather than of the cause by which they arise.)

According to Schmidt, Luhmann's index typically had "only one to four places where [a] term could be found in the file" indicating among a total of 3,450 indexed topics just how sparse his index was for 90,000 cards.

Niklas Luhmann's ZKI had 1,250 entries in the index and ZKII had 3,200 entries.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/176211857378

All wood and metal 12 drawer Brodart card index offered for auction on 2024-01-28 for $500.00 or best offer. Good condition despite missing a rod and having mixed silver and brass fittings on the unit. (3 silver drawer pulls/plackards and 5 silver rods with the remainder in brass.)

Local pick up only from Lock Haven, PA.

Cost per drawer: 41.66

https://www.ebay.com/itm/305374515970

12 drawer (3 x 4) card index from Library Bureau in generally good looking shape from January 2024-01-28 listed for $385.00 (+ a ridiculous $203.77 shipping fee from North Canton, OH to Los Angeles).

Looks to be ex-library from Colgate University, in all wood and metal and in excellent shape. Missing all the catalog rods however.

I'm doing the cost per drawer based only on the opening bid price despite the gouging of the shipping price. Many sellers seem to be tacking on an above average shipping charge to pad their sale prices and potentially shift commissions from ebay.

Cost per drawer: $32.00

https://www.ebay.com/itm/335219376880

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mwichary/shift-happens/posts/4015386

Last Bookstore sold set of 11 + extras of The Story of Civilization by Will and Ariel Durant for $227.50 on 2024-01-31. Stunning condition, clean jackets including plastic protectors.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/335219387276

If the numbers to be multiplied result in the hairline not being able to be used because the reading is off one side of the slide rule, then use the second index (the number 1) on the D scale.

Kells, Lyman M., Willis F. Kern, and James R. Bland. K+E Slide Rules: A Self Instruction Manual. New York: Keuffel & Esser Co., 1955.

The accuracy of most 10 inch slide rules is approximately 1 in 1000 or one tenth of one percent.

Because the error in approximating distance is inversely proportion to the length of a slide rule, longer slide rules will have proportionally smaller errors, so while a 10 inch slide rule has an error of 1 in 1000, a 20 inch will have an error of 1 in 2000 and larger rules can be accurate to within 1 in 10,000 or better.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/276296844684

https://lionsberg.wiki/lionsberg_wiki_books/lionsberg_wiki_books

Jordan Nicholas Sukut's Lionsberg Wiki has approximately 1.3M words which could be turned into a NeoBook. He calls it a "wiki book".

https://lionsberg.wiki/

https://wiki.openglobalmind.com/projects/jerry's_nuggets/neobooks_introduction

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

Could be used as the germ in the production of a fictional neobook...

quote from Martin <br /> https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/comment/19435#Comment_19435 on 2024-01-28

Lima, Manuel. The Power of Networks. RSA ANIMATE, 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJmGrNdJ5Gw.

10:57 reference to Weaver, Warren. “Science and Complexity.” American Scientist 36, no. 4 (1948): 536–44. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27826254

https://lifelonglearn.substack.com/p/my-student-kates-obsidian-demo

Though referring to catalogs and office literature, in 1908 it was known that using decimals would allow one to distinguish between slightly different versions of indexable items without running out of "space" for new additions.

differentiation in terminology here between Britain and the US: future reminders vs. ticklers

Interesting to see a mix of numbers and letters in the indexing system here from 1908.

Numbers for companies and dates and letters as tags for a variety of business purposes as well as for month indicators.

While slightly different in its physical configuration, the office charging cabinet (with a bleacher-like set up) is very similar to the similarly named library card charging tray.

Which came first?

I've sketched it out elsewhere but let's memorialize the broad strokes here because we're inspired at the moment... come back later and add in quotes from Luhmann and other sources (@Heyde1931).

Luhmann was balancing the differences between topically arranged commonplaces and the topical nature of the Dewey Decimal System (a standardized version across thousands of collections) and building neighborhoods of related ideas.

One of the issues with commonplace books, is planning them out in advance. How might you split up a notebook for long term use to create easy categories when you don't know how much room to give each in advance? (If you don't believe me, stop by r/commonplacebooks where you're likely to see this question pop up several times this year.) This issue is remedied when John Locke suggests keeping commonplaces in chronological order of their appearance and cross-indexing them.

This creates a new problem of a lot of indexing and increased searching over time as the commonplace book scales. Translating to index cards complicates things because they're unattached and can potentially move about, so they don't have the anchor effectuated by their being bound up in a notebook. But being on slips allows them to be more easily shuffled, rearranged, and even put into outlines, which are all fantastic affordances when looking for creativity or scaffolding things out into an article or book for creation.

As a result, numbering slips creates a solid anchor by which the cards can be placed and always returned for later finding and use. But how should we number them? Should it be with integers and done chronologically? (1, 2, 3, ..., n) This is nice, but makes a mish-mash of things and doesn't assist much in indexing or finding.

Why not go back to Dewey, which has been so popular? But not Dewey in the broadest sense of using numbers to tie ideas to concrete categories. An individual's notes are idiosyncratic and it would be increasingly rare for people to have the same note, much less need a standardized number for it (and if they were standardized, who does that work and how is it distributed so everyone could use it?) No, instead, let's just borrow the decimal structure of Dewey's system. One of the benefits of his decimal structure is that an infinity of new books can be placed on ever-expanding bookshelves without needing to restructure the numbering system. Just keep adding decimal places onto the end when necessary. This allows for immense density when necessary. But, importantly, it also provides some fantastic level of serendipity.

Let's say you go to learn about geometry, so you look up the topic in your trusty library card catalog. Do you really need to look at the hundreds of records returned? Probably not. You only need the the Dewey Decimal Number 516. Once you're at the shelves, you can browse through that section to see what's there and interesting in the space. You might also find things on the shelves above or below 516 and find the delights of topology and number theory or abstract algebra and real analysis. Subjects you might not necessarily have had in mind will suddenly present themselves for your consideration. Even if your initial interest may have been in Zhongmin Shen's Lectures on Finsler geometry (516.375), you might also profitably walk away with James E. Humphreys' Introduction to Lie Algebras and Representation Theory (512.55).

So what happens if we use these decimal numbers for our notes? First we will have the ability to file things between and amongst each other to infinity. By filing things closest to things which seem related to each other, we'll create neighborhoods of ideas which can easily grow over time. Related ideas will stay together while seemingly related ideas on first blush may slowly grow away from each other over time as even more closely related ideas move into the neighborhood between them. With time and careful work, you'll have not only a breadth of ideas, but a massive depth of them too.

The use of decimal numbering provides us with a few additional affordances:

1 (Neighborhoods of ideas) 1.1 combinatorial creativity Neighborhoods of ideas can help to fuel combinatorial creativity and forge new connections as well as insight over time. 1.2 writing One might take advantage of these growing neighborhoods to create new things. Perhaps you've been working for a while and you see you have a large number of cards in a particular area. You can, to some extent, put your hand into your box and grab a tranche of notes. By force of filing, these notes are going to be reasonably related, which means you should be able to use them to write a blog post, an article, a magazine piece, a chapter, or even an entire book (which may require a few fistfuls, as necessary.)

2 (Sparse indexing) We don't need to index each and every single topic or concept into our index. Because we've filed things nearby, if a new card about Finsler geometry relates to another and we've already indexed the first under that topic, then we don't need to index the second, because our future selves can easily rely on the fact that if we're interested in Finsler geometry in the future, we can look that up in the index, and go to that number where we're likely to see other cards related to the topic as well as additional serendipitous ideas related to them in that same neighborhood.

You may have heard that as Luhmann progressed on his decades long project, broadly on society and within the area of sociology, he managed to amass 90,000 index cards. How many do you suppose he indexed under the topic of sociology? Certainly he had 10s of thousands relating to his favorite subject, no? Of course he did, but what would happen over time as a collection grows? Having 20,000 indexed entries about sociology doesn't scale well for your search needs. Even 10 indexed entries may be a bit overwhelming as once you find a top level card, hundreds to thousands around it are going to be related. 10 x 100 = 1,000 cards to flip through. So if you're indexing, be conservative. In the roughly 45 years of creating 90,000 slips, Luhmann only indexed two cards with the topic of "sociology". If you look through his index, you'll find that most of his topical entries only have pointers to one or two cards, which provide an entryway into those topics which are backed up with dozens to hundreds of cards on related topics. In rarer, instances you might find three or four, but it's incredibly rare to find more than that.

Over time, one will find that, for the topics one is most interested in, the number of ideas and cards will grown without bound. Here it makes sense to use more and more specific topics (tags, categories, taxonomies) all of which are each also sparsely indexed. Ultimately one finds that in the limit, the categories get so fractionalized that the closest category one idea has with another is the fact that they're juxtaposed closely by number. The of the decimal expansion might say something about the depth or breadth of the relationship between ideas.

Something else arises here. At first one may have the tendency to associate their numbers with topical categories. This is only natural as it's a function at which humans all excel. But are those numbers really categories after a few weeks? Probably not. Treat them only as address numbers or GPS coordinates to be able to find your way. Your sociology section may quickly find itself with invasive species of ideas from anthropology and archaeology as well as history. If you treat all your ideas only at the topical level, they'll be miles away from where you need them to be as the smallest level atomic ideas collide with each other to generate new ideas for you. Naturally you can place them further away if you wish and attempt to bridge the distance with links to numbers in other locations, but I suspect you'll find this becomes pretty tedious over time and antithetical when it comes time to pull out a handful and write something. It's fantastically easier to pull out a several dozen and begin than it is to go through and need to pull out linked cards in a onesy-twosies manner or double check with your index to make sure you've gotten the most interesting bits. This becomes even more important as your collection scales.

Richard @ Writing Slowly. “Even the Index Is Just Another Note.” Personal website. Writing Slowly (blog), January 26, 2024. https://writingslowly.com/2024/01/26/even-the-index.html.

or as Vannevar Bush might have said, everyone will have their own idiosyncratic associative trails...

This analogy is kind of hilarious from the perspective of Luhmann's Zettelkasten.

Curious that he quotes Luhmann from Manfred Kuehn's translation, but links to a separate translation

https://www.ebay.com/itm/166557166547

https://zettelkasten.de/posts/use-real-notebook/

https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/2809/brainstorming-the-benefits-of-the-zettelkasten-and-the-zettelkasten-method#latest

Watching this thread for ideas.

https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/2804/journal-q-a-ama-writing-a-book-with-my-zettelkasten#latest

Sounds like Sascha Fast is doing a syntopical piece on the topic of Habit.

https://quantumgardener.blog/notes/quartz-4

customizations for Quartz 4

The goal of Quartz is to make hosting your own public digital garden free and simple. You don’t even need your own website. Quartz does all of that for you and gives your own little corner of the internet. https://github.com/jackyzha0/quartz

Quartz runs on top of Hugo so all notes are written in Markdown .

https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web

https://www.wired.com/gallery/best-smart-notebooks-and-smart-pens/

This underlies the ideas of songlines and oral mnemonic practices and is related to Vannevar Bush's "associative trails" in As We May Think.

Luhmann, Niklas. “ZK II Zettel 9/8b.” Niklas Luhmann-Archiv, undated. https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/bestand/zettelkasten/zettel/ZK_2_NB_9-8b_V.

https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/106e5v1/eli5_what_is_topdown_and_bottomup_thinking/

In this example both versions have a specific goal in mind: "to diminish hunger". What does this look like when we have no specific goal in mind, but are exploring a space without purpose, but only for cause?

exploring with relationship to: ᔥ[[Bob Doto]] in What Do We Mean When We Say "Bottom-Up?"

https://www.vulture.com/2024/01/in-the-know-animation-zach-woods-mike-judge-stop-motion.html

reply to u/chasemac_ at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/19ep9rc/comment/kjempeu/

I'm curious from where you draw your "original purpose" claim? This presupposes having identified a zettelkasten progenitor who has clearly made such a statement. (If you're thinking Luhmann, you're missing the mark by centuries. And even if you're thinking Luhmann, where did he say this specifically?) While Konrad Gessner seems to have been an early progenitor in 1548, the broader idea goes much further back. Even in the early days of the commonplace book, the primary analogy was using them as "storehouses" for collecting treasure (thesaurus) aka knowledge or wisdom.

Even Luhmann's framing of his zettelkasten as his "second memory" was old by the time he wrote it:

In a short academic dissertation on the art of excerpts, Andreas Stübel described the card index as a ‘secondary and subsidiary memory’ (‘memoria secundaria and subsidiaria’), summing up in just three words the dilemma scholars had been struggling with for two centuries with respect to the use of commonplace books. As far as I know, Stübel was the first among contemporaries to speak of secondary memory. —Alberto Cevolini in “Where Does Niklas Luhmann’s Card Index Come From?” Erudition and the Republic of Letters 3, no. 4 (October 24, 2018): 390–420. https://doi.org/10.1163/24055069-00304002.

If we look even further back we read Seneca the Younger in Epistulae morales, writing positively about collecting with respect to classic rhetoric:

"We should follow, men say, the example of the bees, who flit about and cull the flowers that are suitable for producing honey, and then arrange and assort in their cells all that they have brought in;

Without a clear originator, I might suggest that historically the first purpose was for memory followed closely by learning and then accumulating wisdom and knowledge (sententiae). Using them for output only came much later.

Why is there so much bad ink in the zettelkasten space about about "collecting"? (a la the "collector's fallacy") If you collect nothing, you'll have nothing. You have to start somewhere. Collecting happens first before anything useful comes out of the enterprise. Where are all these "people [who] do nothing but boast about the amount of cards in their box"? I'm not seeing lots of evidence of them in fora or online certainly. Show us your collection of examples of those to back up the claim. Are there index card hoarders out there who honestly have tens of thousands of notes with absolutely no purpose? I suspect it's rare.

If you're a collector, collect away! Take solace in the words of historian Keith Thomas:

Unfortunately, such diverse topics as literacy, numeracy, gestures, jokes, sexual morality, personal cleanliness or the treatment of animals, though central to my concerns, are hard to pursue systematically. They can’t be investigated in a single archive or repository of information. Progress depends on building up a picture from a mass of casual and unpredictable references accumulated over a long period. That makes them unsuitable subjects for a doctoral thesis, which has to be completed in a few years. But they are just the thing for a lifetime’s reading. So when I read, I am looking out for material relating to several hundred different topics.

reply to Karen Hume at https://jillianhess.substack.com/p/martin-luther-king-jrs-organizational/comment/47959537

It is incredibly unlikely that King was aware of Luhmann's organizational structure as their practices were contemporaneous right down to their starting years. Luhmann's ZK1 comprises 7 sections with about 23,000 notes written from about 1952 to 1961 while the Morehouse Collection indicates that concerning King's research notes archive "The bulk of the notes were taken as reference material for King’s coursework while a doctoral student at Boston University (1952-1955), including notes taken specifically as reference material for King’s dissertation..." I've been actively searching for several years now, and have yet to find anyone following Luhmann's structure until after the Marbach Exhibition "Zettelkästen. Machines of Fantasy" in 2013. Broadly most have historically followed a variation of a subject heading organization, with or without indexing, similar to that found in the commonplace book tradition and described in Johannes Erich Heyde's book Technik des wissenschaftlichen Arbeitens; eine Anleitung, besonders für Studierende (multiple editions including 1931 & 1951), which was a work Luhmann read when devising his own system.

Incidentally it looks like MLK was using Weis No. 35 boxes, a version of which is still available, now from Globe-Weis: https://amzn.to/3vVcO3c. Perhaps some enterprising teachers will help students create their own versions now?

https://cultpens.com/products/exacompta-white-5-x-3-125-x-75-record-cards-pack-of-100

These are surprisingly inexpensive here at CultPens.com! They don't seem to have the larger 100x150s though.

https://findingaids.auctr.edu/repositories/2/resources/159/collection_organization

Morehouse College Martin Luther King, Jr. Collection: Series 4: Research Notes<br /> Collection Identifier: 0000-0000-0000-0131i

This seems to be the bulk of where MLK's zettelkasten is maintained, in particular: - The General Subject file: https://findingaids.auctr.edu/repositories/2/archival_objects/176973 - The Theologian's Debate Box https://findingaids.auctr.edu/repositories/2/archival_objects/176974 - The Subject Index File: https://findingaids.auctr.edu/repositories/2/archival_objects/176975 - The Author Index File: https://findingaids.auctr.edu/repositories/2/archival_objects/176976

https://morehouse.edu/life/campus/martin-luther-king-jr-collection/overview/

Pictured here are three card index files, one specifically labeled as "Subject Index File" and visibly labeled on the back wall as a "Weiss No. 35". One of the individual tabs in the rear of the subject index file behind the A-Z tabs is labeled "Salvation".

Morehouse College Martin Luther King, Jr. Collection: Series 4: Research Notes Collection Identifier: 0000-0000-0000-0131i

https://findingaids.auctr.edu/repositories/2/resources/159

https://findingaids.auctr.edu/repositories/2/resources/125

https://morehouse.edu/life/campus/martin-luther-king-jr-collection/reference-and-contact/

Hess, Jillian. “Martin Luther King Jr.’s Organizational Systems.” Substack newsletter. Noted (blog), January 22, 2024. https://jillianhess.substack.com/p/martin-luther-king-jrs-organizational.

In addition to his card index, Martin Luther King, Jr. compiled a collection of 166 folders organized around various topics which he used to organize outlines, clippings, pages from books, and other source materials as well as drafts of sermons or speeches on those topics.

To some extent these folders are just larger format repositories mirroring the topical arrangements of his card index.

Jillian Hess' guess for the origin of King's plagiarism.

It's also possible that he came from a much more oral facing cultural upbringing rather than a dyed-in-the-wool academic one which focused on attribution.

example of a note from King's zettelkasten

Some of King's note cards later figured in his speeches including his "I Have a Dream" speech.

Martin Luther King, Jr. maintained a card index during his Ph.D. studies while he was at Boston University working in the area of systematic theology.

He created over a thousand notecards with respect to the Old Testament, many containing a mixture of biblical quotations as well as his own thoughts.

Here would be a good place to give a solid definition of humanity? What makes it special beyond the "self"?

We are genetically very closely related to great apes and chimpanzees and less closely to dogs, cats, and even rats. Do we miss our dogicity? Or ratanity?

What if the robot/human mix is somehow even more interesting and transcendent than humanity? His negativity doesn't leave any space for this possible eventuality.

reminiscent of the quote:

Life imitates art. We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us.<br /> —John M. Culkin, “A Schoolman’s Guide to Marshall McLuhan” (The Saturday Review, March 1967) (Culkin was a friend and colleague of Marshall McLuhan)<br /> (see: https://hypothes.is/a/6Znx6MiMEeu3ljcVBsKNOw)

or the earlier version:

But lo! men have become the tools of their tools. The man who independently plucked the fruits when he was hungry is become a farmer; and he who stood under a tree for shelter, a housekeeper.<br /> —Henry David Thoreau, Walden, p41 <br /> (see: https://hypothes.is/a/vooPrPkwEe2r_4MIb6tlFw)

In 2000, Bill Joy predicted that advances in computing would allow an intelligent robot to be built by 2030.

some of Bill Joy's intellectual history here mirrors much of my own...

A second remove perhaps, but nominative determinism at play here?

coinage of the phrase knowledge-enabled mass destruction here?

As a case in point, the self-replication of misinformation on social media networks has become a substantial physical risk in the early 21st century causing not only swings in elections, but riots, take overs, swings in the stock market (GameStop short squeeze January 2021), and mob killings. It is incredibly difficult to create risk assessments for these sorts of future harms.

In biology, we see major damage to a wide variety of species as the result of uncontrolled self-replication. We call it cancer.

We also see programmed processes in biological settings including apoptosis and necrosis as means of avoiding major harms. What might these look like with respect to artificial intelligence?

gradual change is always the way with evolution...

I always recommend people to read: Hillis, W. Daniel. The Pattern on the Stone. Revised edition. Science Masters. 1998. Reprint, Basic Books, 2015.

Joy contends that one of Hans Moravec's views in his book Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind is that robots will push the human species into extinction in much the same way that early North American placental species eliminated the South American marsupials.

Perhaps the evolution to solve AI-resistance (mentioned in https://hypothes.is/a/-JjZurr3Ee6EtG8G_Sbt8Q) won't be done at the level of the individual human genome, but will be done at the human society level genome.

Political groups of people have an internal memetic genome which can evolve and change over time much more quickly than the individual human's genes would work.

Just as mosquitoes can "acquire" (evolve) DDT resistance or bacteria might evolve antiobiotic-resistance, might not humans evolve AI resistance? How fast might we do this? On what timeline? Will the pressure be slowly built up over time, or will the onset be so quick that extinction is the only outcome?

I didn't see this coming! I thought it was Kurzweil...

https://vimeo.com/905326134/0a2a7388eb

While ostensibly about apps for note taking, Dan Allosso gives a good thumbnail sketch of his background.

Fascinatingly he feels he needs to justify doing videos on note taking process as a historian, which is a platform from which many note taking and research process (and historiography) related books have stemmed. (ie, historically, Dan has a better platform for doing this than most in the tools for thought space.)

Nice to see that Bob Doto has joined the list of moderators at r/zettelkasten.

Watched [[Dan Allosso]] on teaching Note-taking at https://vimeo.com/905323967/90544a580f

Solid overview!

read [[Dan Allosso]] in Actual Books

Sometimes a physical copy of a book gives one information not contained in digital scans. Allosso provides the example of Charles Knowlton's book The Fruits of Philosophy which touched on abortion and was published as a tiny hand-held book which would have made it easy to pass from person to person more discretely for its time period.

K-E Keuffel & Esser Slide Rule Model 4181-3 & Leather Case

https://www.ebay.com/itm/156006789042

Citation Key: <your citekey>

Some of Newton's notes come from a 1654 edition of: Gregory, Francis. Ονομαστικὸν βραχύ; sive, Nomenclatura brevis, Anglo-Latino-Græca, in usum Scholæ Westmonasteriensis. Per F. G. [i.e. Francis Gregory.] Editio vigesima secunda, etc. John Meredith, in trust for Royston and Elizabeth Meredith, 1710.

Sir Isaac Newton's Pocket Knowledge: A Virtual Tour of a Morgan Library Notebook<br /> The Morgan Library & Museum<br /> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uE9DYP1PfhQ

Newton's notebook was done in a tête-bêche (French for "head-to-toe") style in which he flipped the notebook over and began using it from the back to the front as a means of starting a second notebook within to separate the contents.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Gregory_(divine)

https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/newton/1

Some of Newton's other papers are held by The Morgan Library & Museum.

4.92 x 3.07 inches

Collection in Focus: Sir Isaac Newton's Pocket Memorandum Book<br /> by The Morgan Library & Museum

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0Zpo5yla7w

More details and a digitized version of this memorandum book at https://www.themorgan.org/collection/isaac-newton/memorandum-book

I Screwed Up but I Learned A Lot About the Zettelkasten<br /> by Curly Gruene Cahall<br /> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFxZTq8oZhI

Without seeming to realize the split between the two ideas, Cahall seems to have organically discovered the basic difference between a topically oriented commonplace book method (on index cards) and a Luhmann-artig method of numbering cards as folgezettel.

He recommends picking one or the other, or potentially doing both and not worrying.

It would seem like a zettelkasten joke, but Cahall has an index entry on "singular focus", yet it has two entries in disparate places in his zk. [14:02]

🤣

Cahall has a practice of using Luhmann-artig numbering, but having tabbed cards which section his box into broad categories. Yet in an example relating to the Eisenhower Matrix, which he would naturally categorize as "productivity", he instead places it next to a card in "creativity" about dealing with tasks.

Generally I would advise people specifically not to practice this way, but presumably it works for him....

He says he never understood branching and as a result of his practice, he needs to spend much more time indexing.

Curly Gurene Cahall calls his zettelkasten "Sherlock".

Curly Cruene Cahall has a practice of "scouting and excavating" books. His first read sounds closest to Adler's inspectional read, though Cahall says his first run through is for "entertainment". Follow this he reads in a more targeted manner which he calls "excavating", which ostensibly entails excerpting the most salient and interesting points for use in his own work.

https://www.cygnoir.net/2024/01/20/how-i-pocket.html

Reply to Couscous at https://discord.com/channels/686053708261228577/722584061087842365/1197392837952684052

A quick survey of currently active academics, teachers, and researchers who are blogging about note taking practices and zettelkasten-based methods.

Individuals

Dan Allosso is a history professor at Bemidji State University who has used Obsidian in his courses in the past. He frequently writes about related topics on his Substack channels. One can also find related videos about reading, writing, and research process as well as zettelkasten on his YouTube channel. In addition to this, Dan has a book on note taking and writing which focuses on using a card index or zettelkasten centric process.

Shawn Graham has both a blog as well as a prior course on the history of the internet using Obsidian. In the course materials he has compiled significant details and suggestions for setting up an Obsidian vault for students interested in using the tool.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick has a significant blog which covers a variety of topics centered around her work and research. Her current course Peculiar Genres of Academic Writing (2024) focuses on writing, note taking (including Zettelkasten) and encourages students to try out Obsidian, which she's been using herself. A syllabus for an earlier version of the course includes some big name bloggers in academia whose sites might serve as examples of academic writing in the public. The syllabus also includes a section on being an academic blogger and creating platform as a public intellectual.

Morganeua is a Ph.D. candidate who has a fairly popular YouTube channel on note taking within the academic setting (broadly using Obsidian, though she does touch on other tools from time to time).

Chris Aldrich is independent research who does work at the intersection of intellectual history and note taking methods and practices. He's got an active website along with a large collection of note taking, zettelkasten, commonplace books, and sense-making related articles. His practice is a hybrid one using both analog and digital methods including Obsidian and Hypothes.is.

Bob Doto is a teacher and independent researcher who focuses on Luhmann-artig zettelkasten practice and writing. He uses Obsidian and also operates a private Discord server focused on general Zettelkasten practice.

Manfred Kuehn, a professor of philosophy at Boston University, had an influential blog on note taking practices and culture from 2007 to 2018 on Blogspot. While he's taken the site down, the majority of his work there can be found on the Internet Archive.

Andy Matuschak is an independent researcher who is working at the intersection of learning, knowledge management, reading and related topics. He's got a Patreon, YouTube Channel and a public wiki.

Broader community-based efforts

Here are some tool-specific as well as tool-agnostic web-based fora, chat rooms, etc. which are focused on academic-related note taking and will have a variety of people to follow and interact with.

Obsidian runs a large and diverse Discord server. In addition to many others, they have channels for #Academia and #Academic-tools as well as #Knowledge-management and #zettelkasten.

Tinderbox hosts regular meetups (see their forum for details on upcoming events and how to join). While their events are often product-focused (ways to use it, Q&A, etc.), frequently they've got invited speakers who talk about their work, processes, and methods of working. Past recorded sessions can be found on YouTube. While this is tool-specific, much of what is discussed in their meetups can broadly be applied to any tool set. Because Tinderbox has been around since the early 00s and heavily focused on academic use, the majority of participants in the community are highly tech literate academics whose age skews to the over 40 set.

A variety of Zettelkasten practitioners including several current and retired academicians using a variety of platforms can be found at https://forum.zettelkasten.de/.

Boris Mann and others held Tools for Thought meetups which had been regularly held through 2023. They may have some interesting archived material for perusal on both theory, practice, and a wide variety of tools.

Others?

I've tried to quickly tip out my own zettelkasten on this topic with a focus on larger repositories of active publicly available web-based material. Surely there is a much wider variety of people and resources not listed here, but it should be a reasonable primer for beginners. Feel free to reply with additional suggestions and resources of which you may be aware.

https://lu.ma/toolsforthought

Software and applications for creating visualizations of zettelkasten contents: - Tinderbox (Mac) - Apple's Freeform (app) - Obsidian Canvas - Excalidraw (plugin for Obsidian) - Scrintal - Heptabase - Card Buddy (Mac) - AFFiNE (https://github.com/toeverything/AFFiNE)

https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/2797/an-app-to-represent-a-zettelkasten-or-parts-of-it-visually

https://blogarchive.org/

Reply to @Denny @richnewman @patrickrhone at https://beardystarstuff.net/2024/01/16/i-finished-reading.html

I started reading Parable of the Sower exactly one year to the date mentioned at the start of the book at the public library in Pasadena where she grew up. As a 49 year old father of a 12 year old daughter, it was a much more visceral and eerie experience than I could ever have expected. She has forever changed the perspective I have driving down the streets of our shared neighborhood.

I'm not sure if they'll have open remote registrations for it or if it will only be broadcast locally, but the local Octavia Butler Book Club has an upcoming zoom session on Feb 24 which can be found in the Pasadena Public Library's newsletter (.pdf). It will feature Dr. Kendra Parker via Zoom from Georgia to present her lecture: "Walking a Mile in Her Shoes: Exploring Octavia Butler's Archives."

The nearby Huntington Library houses her papers and some of her materials there may be accessible online.

read [[Dan Allosso]] in Peer to Peer?

Not sure if you've seen/found it before, but as academia has been having bigger problems with granting tenure over the past 20 years, there's been a rise of discussion of alternate academia pathways, often under the term #AltAc in social media and other locations. Careers in writing in other spaces have certainly abounded here.

https://www.derrekchow.com/

Collaborating with Andy Matuschak on future of book/reading project BookBridge

2023-12-21 BookBridge Talk, 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3M-nfWI93nY. Andy Matuschak and Derrek Chow

The linking between physical book and digital book is somewhat reminiscent to me to Livescribe.com's use of Anoto digital paper and direct linking of handwriting on the page with recorded audio. Perhaps the physical book and digital book could use such a substrate to effectuate some of the work seen here, but also do it in a way that is easily (digitally) recordable as well as replayable. They've also done some of the handwriting to text work one might want in this space.

[[Dan Allosso]] in How to Read, part 2

Dan Allosso uses the abbreviation KW (key word) after which he ascribes categories or tags to his notes.

Nice start on a list of goals for reading

others?

Choosing an external system for knowledge keeping and production forces the learner into a deliberate practice and confronts them with their lack of understanding. This is a large part of the underlying value not only of the zettelkasten, but of the use of a commonplace book which Benjamin Franklin was getting at when recommending that one "read with a pen in your hand". The external system also creates a modality shift from reading to writing by way of thinking which further underlines the value.

What other building blocks are present in addition to: - modality shift - deliberate practice - confrontation of lack of understanding

Are there other systems that do all of these as well as others simultaneously?

link to Franklin quote: https://hypothes.is/a/HZeDKI3YEeyj9GcNWKX4iA

original source?

it's Benjamin Franklin letter to Miss Stevenson, Wanstead. Craven-street, May 16, 1760.<br /> see: https://hyp.is/HZeDKI3YEeyj9GcNWKX4iA/www.gutenberg.org/files/40236/40236-h/40236-h.htm

read [[Dan Allosso]] in Weekly Review, 1-15

https://www.ebay.com/itm/404745139607

2024-01-16 60 drawer card catalog offered for bid at $2100 and buy it now at $4,400. Solid cabinet in good shape, missing one rod. All wood. Has three writing drawers. Shippable from Huffman, TX for $92.83.

Cost per drawer: - bid offer: $35.00 - buy now: 73.33

Not the best source here, but...

https://www.tastingtable.com/1490534/rusty-nail-two-ingredient-cocktail-frank-sinatra/

https://web.archive.org/web/20180227134526/http://pileofindexcards.org/blog/2006/12/22/writing-format-of-fieldnote/

Hawk Sugano uses a wastebook-like process to take contemporaneous notes in a pocket notebook and later transfers the ideas to index cards for follow up and filing.

Hawk Sugano was introduced to index cards circa 2001 by means of Watanabe Shoichi's book “知的生活の方法” (A Method of Intellectual Life".

https://web.archive.org/web/20170530033313/http://pileofindexcards.org/blog/2006/08/20/me-and-indexcard/

https://web.archive.org/web/20180227134635/http://pileofindexcards.org/blog/2007/01/27/pile-of-fieldnotes/

I certainly didn't see this coming as part of the Pile of Index Cards... pocketnotebooks! Ostensibly for quick note (idea) capture on the move with transfer later.

https://web.archive.org/web/20180227130424/http://pileofindexcards.org/blog/2006/12/25/start-indexcard-provider-service/

Hawk Sugano apparently offered the Pile of Index Cards as a physical product offering by combining Correct's index card dock and Kokuyo's fieldnotes in late December 2006.