The myth of the writer sitting down before a completely blankpage, or the artist at a completely blank canvas, is just that—a myth.

“The greater your ignorance the more verifiably accurate must beyour facts,” she once remarked.

Verum ipsum factum (“We only know what we make”)—Giambattista Vico, Italian philosopher

“As I was reading the book and makingthese notes and then putting them on the margins obviously themore pens I was using and the more rulers, and the more squigglylines, sort of implied the excitement of the book was higher andhigher, so that the sheer amount of ink on the page would tell melater on this is one of the most important scenes.”

We know from neuroscientific research that “emotions organize—rather than disrupt—rational thinking.”8

He showed his famous sense of humor in a 2006 commentary for NPR's "This I Believe" series, writing: "I admire enormously the candidate able to face defeat with humor and grace. Nobody ever conceded defeat better than Dick Tuck who, upon losing a California state senate primary, said simply, 'The people have spoken ... the bastards.' "

Some of his happiest moments, he said, were when he worked on political campaigns: “You think you are going to make a difference that’s going to be better for the country, and especially for widows and orphans and people who don’t even know your name and never will know your name. Boy, that’s probably as good as it gets.”

“In my Irish American Massachusetts family, you were born a Democrat and baptized a Catholic,” Mr. Shields wrote in 2009. “If your luck held out, you were also brought up to be a Boston Red Sox fan.”

Politics, he maintained, was “a contact sport, a question of accepting an elbow or two,” and losing was “the original American sin.”

Asked in a 2013 C-SPAN interview which presidents he admired, he cited Gerald R. Ford, a Republican who took office in 1974 in the wake of the Watergate scandal. Ford, he said, was “the most emotionally healthy.”“Not that the others were basket cases,” he said, but “they get that bug, and as the late and very great Mo Udall, who sought that office, once put it, the only known cure for the presidential virus is embalming fluid.”

For college professors, I think the critical contribution of How Humans Learn is that good teaching is constructed, not ordained.

Mixup Method of Synthetic Idea Generation: Write out 3 sentences from past notes. Write a new sentence made of the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd part of each respective sentence. Repeat total of 3 times. Now look at the 3 synthesized lines & ask if wrong or right and why. Clarifies a lot.

This touched a nerve this week: “thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production-oriented culture, and doing nothing is hard to do” (Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust)

Think about the last time you were the only person in aroom who remembered a salient fact. What did that do for your credibility at thatprecise moment? Memory has that power.

d. She puts the ideas together and tries to broker a deal for theconglomerate to acquire a radio network. At the end, she’s challenged to describehow she came up with the plan for the acquisition. It’s a telling scene. She has justbeen fired. On her way out of the building, with all her files and personal itemspacked in a box (a box just like mine!), she gets a chance to explain her thoughtprocess to the mogul:See? This is Forbes. It’s just your basic article about how you were lookingto expand into broadcasting. Right? Okay now. The same day—I’ll never forgetthis—I’m reading Page Six of the New York Post and there’s this item on BobbyStein, the radio talk show guy who does all those gross jokes about Ethiopiaand the Betty Ford Center. Well, anyway, he’s hosting this charity auction thatnight. Real bluebloods and won’t that be funny? Now I turn the page to Suzywho does the society stuff and there’s this picture of your daughter—see, nicepicture—and she’s helping to organize the charity ball. So I started to think:Trask, Radio, Trask, Radio.... So now here we are.He’s impressed and hires her on the spot. Forget the fairy-tale plot; as ademonstration of how to link A to B and come up with C, Working Girl is a primerin the art of scratching.

the true value of the box: It contains your inspirations without confiningyour creativity.

No matter what system you use, I recommend having a goal and putting it inwriting. I read once that people who write down their New Year’s resolutions have agreater chance of achieving them than people who don’t. This is the sort of factoidthat is probably apocryphal but, like many urban legends, sounds as though it shouldbe true.

“My family is Jewish, I grew up inan Italian neighborhood, and every girl who broke my heart was Irish.”

you should never save for two meetingswhat you can accomplish in one.

The box makes me feel connected to a project. It is my soil. I feel this evenwhen I’ve back-burnered a project: I may have put the box away on a shelf, but Iknow it’s there. The project name on the box in bold black lettering is a constantreminder that I had an idea once and may come back to it very soon.

There are separate boxes for everything I’ve ever done. If you want a glimpseinto how I think and work, you could do worse than to start with my boxes.

Everyone hashis or her own organizational system. Mine is a box, the kind you can buy at OfficeDepot for transferring files.I start every dance with a box. I write the project name on the box, and as thepiece progresses I fill it up with every item that went into the making of the dance.This means notebooks, news clippings, CDs, videotapes of me working alone in mystudio, videos of the dancers rehearsing, books and photographs and pieces of artthat may have inspired me.

Of making many books there is no end, and much study is weariness to the flesh. -Ecc. 12:12

The four principles Niklas Luhmann used to build his notebox system are: Analog Numeric-alpha Tree Index The first letters of those four principles (A, N, T, I) are what comprise an Antinet. An Antinet Zettelkasten is a network of these four principles.

I strongly recommend writingahead full tilt, not stopping to correct. Cross out no more thanthe few words that will permit you to go on when you foreseea blind alley. Leave some words in blank, some sentences notcomplete: Keep going!

As SherlockHolmes says to Watson on a famous occasion: "If page 534 findsus only in Chapter Two, the length of the first one must have beenreally intolerable."

The old cookbook said: " Take enough butter." I say: "Do nottake too many notes." Both recommendations are hard to inter-pret except by trial and error.

The first is: always take notes inyour own words-I mean, of course, facts an1 ideas garneredfrom elsewhere, not statements to be quoted verbatim. The titleof a book, an important phrase or remark, you will copy as theystand. But everything else you reword, for two reasons: in thateffort the fact or idea passes through your mind, instead of goingfrom the page to your eye and thence to your note while you remainin a trance. Again, by rewording you mix something of yourthought with the acquired datum, and the admixture is the be-ginning of your own thought-and-writing about the whole topic.Naturally you take care not to distort. But you will find that notestaken under this safeguard are much closer to you than meretranscripts from other books; they are warm and speak to youlike old friends, becau se by your act of thought they have be-come pieces of your mind.

William James’s self-assessment: “I am no lover of disorder, but fear to lose truth by the pretension to possess it entirely.”

Ahmed teaches us how much we can learn from complaints. “The path of a complaint… teaches us something about how institutions work,” what she calls institutional mechanics.

“No matter how it was collected, where it was collected, when it was collected, our language belongs to us. Our stories belong to us. Our songs belong to us,” Taken Alive, who teaches Lakota to elementary school students, told the tribal council in April. 

On examination, you will find this very judiciary oppressively constructed; your jury trial destroyed, and the judges dependent on Congress.

A bare majority in these four small states may hinder the adoption of amendments; so that we may fairly and justly conclude that one twentieth part of the American people may prevent the removal of the most grievous inconveniences and oppression, by refusing to accede to amendments. A trifling minority may reject the most salutary amendments. Is this an easy mode of securing the public liberty It is, sir, a most fearful situation, when the most contemptible minority can prevent the alteration of the most oppressive government; for it may, in many respects, prove to be such. Is this the spirit of republicanism?

Gall's Law is a rule of thumb for systems design from Gall's book Systemantics: How Systems Really Work and How They Fail. It states: .mw-parser-output .templatequote{overflow:hidden;margin:1em 0;padding:0 40px}.mw-parser-output .templatequote .templatequotecite{line-height:1.5em;text-align:left;padding-left:1.6em;margin-top:0}A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex. It takes a touch of genius and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction. EF Schumacher

Wayne LaPierre, the current executive vice president, warned members in 1995 that anyone who wears a badge has “the government’s go-ahead to harass, intimidate, even murder law-abiding citizens.”

Governor Ronald Reagan, who was coincidentally present on the capitol lawn when the protesters arrived, later commented that he saw "no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons" and that guns were a "ridiculous way to solve problems that have to be solved among people of good will." In a later press conference, Reagan added that the Mulford Act "would work no hardship on the honest citizen."

Those who are born today are not individu-ally responsible for this burdensome heritage, but we are all respon-sible for the way in which we choose or fail to take it into account inanalyzing the world economic system, its injustices, and the needfor change.

new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to seewhether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, andpeople will say, “How did he do it? He must be a genius!”

American journalist, author, and filmmaker Sebastian Junger oncewrote on the subject of “writer’s block”: “It’s not that I’m blocked. It’sthat I don’t have enough research to write with power and knowledgeabout that topic. It always means, not that I can’t find the right words,[but rather] that I don’t have the ammunition.”7

It is in the power of remembering that the self’s ultimate freedomconsists. I am free because I remember.—Abhinavagupta, tenth-century Kashmiri philosopher and mystic

Writer and photographer Craig Mod wrote, “There is a gapingopportunity to consolidate our myriad marginalia* into an even morerobust commonplace book. One searchable, always accessible,easily shared and embedded amongst the digital text we consume.”6

Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them.—David Allen, author of Getting Things Done

Why is the title of the book “The medium is the massage” and not “The medium is the message”? Actually, the title was a mistake. When the book came back from the typesetter’s, it had on the cover “Massage” as it still does. The title was supposed to have read “The Medium is the Message” but the typesetter had made an error. When Marshall saw the typo he exclaimed, “Leave it alone! It’s great, and right on target!” Now there are four possible readings for the last word of the title, all of them accurate: “Message” and “Mess Age,” “Massage” and “Mass Age.”

Thus, the sensitive seismographer of avant-garde develop-ments, Walter Benjamin, logically conceived of this scenario in 1928, of communicationwith card indices rather than books: “And even today, as the current scientific methodteaches us, the book is an archaic intermediate between two different card indexsystems. For everything substantial is found in the slip box of the researcher who wroteit and the scholar who studies in it, assimilated into its own card index.” 47

a constellation already described in 1805 by Heinrich von Kleist in his fascinat-ing analysis of the “Midwifery of Thought”: “If you want to know something and cannotfind it through meditation, I advise you, my dear, clever friend, to speak about it withthe next acquaintance who bumps into you.” 43 The positive tension that such a conversa-tion immediately elicits through the expectations of the Other obliges one to producenew thought in the conversation. The idea develops during speech. There, the sheeravailability of such a counterpart, who must do nothing further (i.e., offer additionalstimulus through keen contradiction of the speaker) is already enough; “There is a specialsource of excitement, for him who speaks, in the human face across from him; and agaze which already announces a half-expressed thought to be understood often givesexpression to the entire other half.”44

“ Communication is . . . autopoietic insofar as it can only beproduced in a recursive relationship to other communications, that is to say, only in anetwork, to the reproduction of which each individual communication contributes.”42

Communication “is the smallest possible unit of a social system,namely that unit to which communication can still react through communication.”40

“This technique alsoexplains why I don’t think at all linearly and have trouble finding the right sequence ofchapters when writing a book, because indeed every chapter must reappear in everyother.”22

He excerpted continually, and everything that he read went from one book next to his head and into another.— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Sudelbü cher , Book G 181, 1779

Hegel ’s absolute spirit is a hidden slip box.— Friedrich Kittler

Card indexes can do anything!—Das System, Zeitschrift für Organisation , Book 1, January 1928

“Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it. When we enquire into any subject, the first thing we have to do is to know what books have treated of it. This leads us to look at catalogues, and at the backs of books in libraries.” ― Samuel Johnson, The Life of Samuel Johnson Including a Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, Vol 2

“A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it.” ― Samuel Johnson, Works of Samuel Johnson

“By the way,” she wrote, “in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember all men would be tyrants if they could.” She went on, “If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.”

Indeed, as David Haskell, a biologist and writer, notes, a tree is “a community of cells” from many species: “fungus, bacteria, protist, alga, nematode and plant.” And often “the smallest viable genetic unit [is] … the networked community.”

“Combinatory play,” said Einstein, “seems to be the essential feature in productive thought.”

Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page. But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler , Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”

Studying, done properly, is research,because it is about gaining insight that cannot be anticipated and willbe shared within the scientific community under public scrutiny.

No piece of information is superior to any other. Power lies in having them all on file and then finding the connections. There are always connections; you have only to want to find them. -- Umberto Eco. Foucault's Pendulum p. 190.

The most important thing about writing is discovering novel and non-trivial truths, and determining which of your truths is most important—then imposing order, hierarchy, and linearity—through judgment, decisiveness, and will.

For example, Campbell talks about personal cyberinfrastructures when he suggests providing students with hosting space and their own domain as soon as they start their studies: Suppose that when students matriculate, they are assigned their own web servers […] As part of the first-year orientation, each student would pick a domain name […] students would build out their digital presences in an environment made of the medium of the web itself. […] In short, students would build a personal cyberinfrastructure— one they would continue to modify and extend throughout their college career—and beyond. (Campbell, 2013, p. 101–102)

Curve: The loveliest distance between two points. Mae West

+#@##9'&2$H1*$1&$1)+Y$1$9#).-)C1&0#Y$+"1+$+--@$9810#$-&Y$1)-=&4Y$1&4$10)-**$919#)V

And when you publish HTML to a server that you control; that's fucking powerful.

So basically you rap battle a demonic horse thing so that it doesn’t bust into your house

Twitter is for shitposting, blogs are for thinking.

Why public? There is something about making your posts available to the rest of the world that holds your feet to the fire and makes you commit. I’ve tried dozens of times to keep a private ongoing digital notebook in Evernote, Devonthink, Roam, and Obsidian, but they never stick. But making my notes available to the world in my digital garden keeps me coming back and updating it daily.

INTERVIEWER: Could you say something of your work habits?Do you write to a preplanned chart? Do you jump from onesection to another, or do you move from the beginning throughto the end?NABOKOV: The pattern of the thing precedes the thing. I fill inthe gaps of the crossword at any spot I happen to choose. Thesebits I write on index cards until the novel is done. My schedule

An old Rolls Royce is not always preferable toa plain jeep.

A first-rate college library with a comfortable cam-pus around it is a fine milieu for a writer.

Oh, they are welcome to my work. As a matter offact, the Editions Victor are bringing out my Jnvitation to aBeheading in a reprint of the original Russian of 1935, and a NewYork publisher (Phaedra) is printing my Russian translation ofLolita. 1 am sure the Soviet Government will be happy to admitofficially a novel that seems to contain a prophecy of Hitler’sregime, and a novel that condemns bitterly the American systemof motels.

I note incidentally thatprofessors of literature still assign these two poets to differentschools. There is only one school: that of talent.

NABOKOV: By “editor” I suppose you mean_proofreader.Among these I have known limpid creatures of limitless tact andtenderness who would discuss with me a semicolon as if it werea point of honor—which, indeed, a point of art often is. But Ihave also come across a few pompous avuncular brutes who wouldattempt to “make suggestions” which I countered with a thunder-ous “‘stet!”’

Derivative writers seem versa-tile because they imitate many others, past and present. Artisticoriginality has only its own self to copy.

My characters are galley slaves.

I think we are obsessed with speed to our own detriment, and there is a lot of joy and meaning in learning to appreciate slowness, or phenomenon that may not be clearly measurable.

I need the noise-cancelling earbuds because the chickens like to tell me they need feeding. At volume. With furious energy.

Measuring the health of an online community by librarian:libertarian ratio

Il est encore plus facile de juger de l'esprit d'un homme par ses questions que par ses réponses. (It is easier to judge the mind of a man by his questions rather than his answers) — Pierre-Marc-Gaston, duc de Lévis (1764-1830), Maximes et réflexions sur différents sujets de morale et de politique (Paris, 1808): Maxim xviii

Joan Didion on Keeping a Notebook “We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.”

In the margins of books, in the margins of life as commonly conceived by our culture’s inherited parameters of permission and possibility, I have worked out and continue working out who I am and who I wish to be — a private inquiry irradiated by the ultimate question, the great quickening of thought, feeling, and wonder that binds us all: What is all this?

But amid our slender repertoire of agency are the labels we choose for our labors of love — the works of thought and tenderness we make with the whole of who we are.

the development of intelligent thinking is fundamentally a social process

In his illuminated bookJerusalem, Los—Blake’s alter ego—voiced a sentiment that might have servedas the Romantics’ motto. “I must create a system,” Blake’s character declared, orelse “be enslav’d by another man’s.”

My "map of content" for Java Collection Framework. Obsidian & Excalidraw make learning programming language full of joy! Great thanks to @obsdmd @zsviczian

A filing system is indefinitely expandable, rhizomatic (at any point of timeor space, one can always insert a new card); in contradistinction with the sequen-tial irreversibility of the pages of the notebook and of the book, its interiormobility allows for permanent reordering (for, even if there is no narrative conclu-sion of a diary, there is a last page of the notebook on which it is written: its pagesare numbered, like days on a calendar).

As Derrida writes ofthe computer, ‘I don’t feel the interposition of the machine as a sortof progress in transparency, univocity, or easiness. Rather, we areparticipating in a partly new plot’ (2005: 21). H

Furthermore,combinatorial logic dictates that the card index is also the wellspringof creativity insofar as it permits expansive possibilities for futureintellectual endeavours (see Hollier, 2005: 40; cf. Krapp, 2006:367).

published under the title‘An Almost Obsessive Relation to Writing Instruments’, which firstappeared in Le Monde in 1973, Barthes describes the method thatguides his use of index cards:I’m content to read the text in question, in a ratherfetishistic way: writing down certain passages,moments, even words which have the power tomove me. As I go along, I use my cards to writedown quotations, or ideas which come to me, asthey do so, curiously, already in the rhythm of asentence, so that from that moment on, things arealready taking on an existence as writing. (1991:181)

, as a key historical technology ofinvention. I intend this last term in the precise sense in which Derrida(1989) understands it, that is, as an oscillation between theperformative and the constative, with the former working to disruptitself (the performative) and the latter (the constative) – or whatmight be termed the unsettling operation of invention.

What Iam alluding to here is well drawn out in Walter Benjamin’s reflectionin his Moscow Diary on how we ‘grasp’ a visual image. ‘One does notin any way enter into its space’, he writes. Rather, ‘It opens up to usin corners and angles in which we believe we can localise crucialexperiences of the past; there is something inexplicably familiarabout these spots’ (Benjamin, 1985: 42).

nother factor militating against completeadvice was the notion that methods should be kept secret to be most effective.One author of a university thesis on the topic noted that most scholars were un-willing to share their secrets on note-taking with others. A few advice givers rec-ommended “keeping the secrets of your studies to yourself ” on the grounds thatpeople would be most impressed by achievements that they did not understand.39

“Note-taking” is a general term that covers various kinds of writing in responseto listening, reading, or thinking, often in more or less direct preparation for theproduction of a composition or report (oral or written).

Conrad Gesner, for example, observed in his editionof Stobaeus: “I ask you, who of the learned doesn’t either take commonplacenotes or wish they did from their daily reading on moral matters?”1

James Boswell (1740–95) defended the state of learning in his day: “It has been maintained that this superfoetation, this teeming of the press in modern times, is prejudicial to good literature, because it obliges us to read so much of what is of inferiour value, in order to be in the fashion; so that better works are neglected for want of time, because a man will have more gratification of his vanity in conversation, from having read modern books, than from having read the best works of antiquity. But it must be con-sidered that we now have more knowledge generally diffuse; all our ladies read now, which is a great extension.”

n the first vernacular bibliography Anton Fran-cesco Doni lauded the happiness of the illiterate who were spared the “maledic-tion of books”

A complaint more specific to the quantity of books was articulated in 1522 by the jurist Giovanni Nevizzano of Asti (d. 1540) who observed that the great number of available books made it hard to find the books one needed. Proper selection among the many books available was crucial because “if a scholar does not have the books required for his subject, he does not enjoy the privi-leges of a scholar.”20

Even if the Speculum was copied only in parts, Vincent of Beauvais exposed the reader to multiple opinions on any topic he discussed. Neither the concordance nor the encyclo-pedic compendium resolved the textual difficulties or contradictions that they helped bring to light. Vincent explicitly left to the reader the task of reaching a final conclusion amid the diversity of authoritative opinions that might exist on a question: “I am not unaware of the fact that philosophers have said many contradictory things, especially about the nature of things. . . . I warn the reader, lest he perhaps be horrified, if he finds some contradictions of this kind among the names of diverse authors in many places of this work, especially since I have acted in this work not as an author, but as an excerptor, that I did not try to reduce the sayings of the philosophers to agreement but report what each said or wrote on each thing; leaving to the judgment of the reader to decide which opinion to prefer.”161

“hold no learning in contempt, for all learning is good.”

As a general rule, if your call is to dismantle institutions without a plan for what is supposed to take their place, you can safely assume the default setting is “the market will take care of it.”

The book was reviewed in all major magazines and newspapers, sparking what historian Ronald Kline has termed a “cybernetics craze,” becoming “a staple of science fiction and a fad among artists, musicians, and intellectuals in the 1950s and 1960s.”

As James Clear said in Atomic Habits: ​

for tens of thousands of years Aboriginal people and tourists Islander people have paid incredibly close attention to the world around them and still do today have developed knowledge 00:09:51 systems that are more complex than we could ever imagine or as intellectually capable as anybody else if not much more and that their traditions have a very detailed scientific component that we can learn from if we just shut up and 00:10:04 listen

Gramsci famously said "I am a pessimist because of intelligence but an optimist because of will."

"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past," as Rage Against the Machine sang in their 1999 song "Testify." OK, actually it's a quote from George Orwell's 1984, but hey.

I mean there’s no single answer that will solve all of our future problems. There’s no magic bullet. Instead there are thousands of answers — at least. You can be one of them if you choose to be.'

"The best way to predict the future is to build it," computer scientist Alan Kay famously said.

"Memory produces hope in the same way that amnesia produces despair," the theologian Walter Brueggeman wrote.

Nicholson Baker on commonplace books: “My own bristling brain-urchins of worry melt in the strong solvent of other people’s grammar.”

Mary Karr on memorization as Eucharist: “It rewires your head and keeps you in company with gods.”

As Professor Rangi Mātāmua, a Māoriastronomy scholar, explains:Look at what our ancestors did to navigate here—you don’t do that onmyths and legends, you do that on science. I think there is empiricalscience embedded within traditional Māori knowledge ... but what they didto make it meaningful and have purpose is they encompassed it withincultural narratives and spirituality and belief systems, so it wasn’t just seenas this clinical part of society that was devoid of any other connection toour world, it was included into everything. To me, that cultural elementgives our science a completely new and deep and rich layer of meaning

Mostof the knowledge shared in this book is what might be consideredthe ‘lower levels’, meaning it is equivalent to primary school intraditional cultures. Star knowledge is far more complex and in-depththan we discuss in this book, but even this is a lot to absorb.

Creativity occurs when a person, using the symbols of a given domain ... has a new idea or sees a new pattern, and when this novelty is selected by the appropriate field for inclusion in the relevant domain. The next generation will encounter that novelty as part of the domain they are exposed to, and if they are creative, they in turn will change it further.

people are more likely to gesturewhen they have something to gesture at.

Gesture encourages experimentation.”

“One man’s dirty trickster is another man’s freedom fighter,” he wrote in his 2018 book “Stone’s Rules,” a collection of career lessons including how voters will believe a “big lie” if it is kept simple and repeated often enough.

“Noteson paper, or on a computer screen [...] do not make contemporaryphysics or other kinds of intellectual endeavour easier, they make itpossible” is one of the key takeaways in a contemporary handbookof neuroscientists (Levy 2011, 290) Concluding the discussions inthis book, Levy writes: “In any case, no matter how internalprocesses are implemented, insofar as thinkers are genuinelyconcerned with what enables human beings to perform the

RichardFeynman once had a visitor in his office, a historian who wanted tointerview him. When he spotted Feynman’s notebooks, he said howdelighted he was to see such “wonderful records of Feynman’sthinking.”“No, no!” Feynman protested. “They aren’t a record of my thinkingprocess. They are my thinking process. I actually did the work on thepaper.”“Well,” the historian said, “the work was done in your head, but therecord of it is still here.”“No, it’s not a record, not really. It’s working. You have to work onpaper, and this is the paper.”[33]

"To have another language is to possess a second soul." Charlemagne

The mere fact that there’s still a community with values that are just about sharing, learning, and getting to know each other, who want something like this, should be a happy sign for everyone involved.

The thing about IndieWeb is that it’s still a place where people and ideas matter.

Pretending we were all the same never worked, because it ignored the fact that we’re not all given the same opportunities to succeed or fail on our merits; some are privileged, others are oppressed. Refusing to recognize that only prolonged difficult conversations and much-needed soul-searching, dooming more generations to repeat the cycle.

My preservation solution is to federate the content. It is only through proliferation that things really last. Much of our genome, for example, is more stable than the earth's continents. That's something. The internet is speedy but life is tenacious.

I have only one firm belief about the American political system, and that is this: God is a Republican and Santa Claus is a Democrat.”

“Good manners can replace intellect by providing a set of memorized responses to almost every situation in life,” he wrote. “Memorized responses eliminate the need for thought. Thought is not a very worthwhile pastime anyway. Thinking allows the brain, an inert and mushy organ, to exert unfair domination over more sturdy and active body parts.”

“The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer and remove the crab grass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work and then get elected and prove it.”

As Terry Doyleand Todd Zakrajsek put it: “If learning is your goal, cramming is anirrational act” (Doyle and Zakrajsek 2013).

When we try to answer a question before we know how to, we willlater remember the answer better, even if our attempt failed (Arnoldand McDermott 2013)

“Manipulations such as variation, spacing, introducing contextualinterference, and using tests, rather than presentations, as learningevents, all share the property that they appear during the learningprocess to impede learning, but they then often enhance learning asmeasured by post-training tests of retention and transfer. Conversely,manipulations such as keeping conditions constant and predictable andmassing trials on a given task often appear to enhance the rate oflearning during instruction or training, but then typically fail to supportlong-term retention and transfer” (Bjork, 2011, 8).

“If you can’t say it clearly, you don’t understand it yourself.” (JohnSearle)

“I had [...]during many years followed a golden rule, namely, that whenever apublished fact, a new observation or thought came across me, whichwas opposed to my general results, to make a memorandum of itwithout fail and at once; for I had found by experience that such factsand thoughts were far more apt to escape from the memory thanfavorable ones. Owing to this habit, very few objections were raisedagainst my views, which I had not at least noticed and attempted toanswer.” (Darwin 1958, 123)

you can’t force insight into a preconceiveddirection

no underlinedsentence will ever present itself when you need it in the developmentof an argument.

But, as Wilhelm von Humboldt, founder of theHumboldt University of Berlin and brother to the great explorerAlexander von Humboldt, put it, the professor is not there for thestudent and the student not for the professor. Both are only there forthe truth. And truth is always a public matter.

Be extra selective withquotes – don’t copy them to skip the step of really understanding

When he was asked if he missed anything in his life, he famouslyanswered: “If I want something, it’s more time. The only thing thatreally is a nuisance is the lack of time.” (Luhmann, Baecker, andStanitzek, 1987, 139)

a new conviction structured the next decade of my life: The un-annotated life was not worth living.

website redesign is now a synonym for bare-knuckle boxing

You may say that it isn ’ t necessary to read every last book. Well, it ’ s also true that in war you don ’ t have to kill every last soldier, but we still need every one of them. — General Stumm von Bordwehr, in Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities

That ‘taste’ is a very personal thing, and I don’t think I can really explain it. But I’m pretty sure it means that, for me, note-taking is a very long-term, gradual process of finding my way towards something; I just can’t quite articulate what that something is.

Most writing is chasing clout, rather than insight

So it was with somewhat mixed feelings that I learned some American high school teachers assign “The Sympathizer” as required reading in their classes. For the most part, I’m delighted. But then I worry: I don’t want to be anyone’s homework. I don’t want my book to be broccoli.

Books can indeed be dangerous. Until “Close Quarters,” I believed stories had the power to save me. That novel taught me that stories also had the power to destroy me. I was driven to become a writer because of the complex power of stories. They are not inert tools of pedagogy. They are mind-changing, world-changing.