9,372 Matching Annotations
  1. Oct 2022
    1. For the second time Goutor mentions using different size cards for different note types, but doesn't specifically advise for it or provide a reason. Perhaps his advice for consistency and card size applies only to cards of particular types? (p28)

      link to: https://hypothes.is/a/XPphjkNZEe2s3i9VV4qt1g


      Incidentally he also specifically mentions 7x9" cards here too. How frequently used were these as a standard?

    2. The design of Goutor's note taking method is such that each note should have "a life of its own, so that it can stand independently of every other one in the file." (p28) This concept is broadly similar to the ideas of both atomic notes and evergreen notes in related contexts.

      Goutor says that a note's life stems from its identity by means of its bibliographic source, its unique content, and its ultimate purpose. Here he uses the singular "purpose" and doesn't explicitly use "purposes" thereby indicating that an individual note can have multiple potential lives in different places within one's lifetime of work. It seems most likely that he may not have thought of using ideas in multiple different locations, but again, his particular audience (see: https://hypothes.is/a/8jKcTkNPEe2sCntTfNWf2Q) may have also dictated this choice. One could argue that it would have been quite easy for him to have used the plural to suggest the idea simply and tangentially, but that his use of the singular here is specifically because the idea wasn't part of his note taking worldview.

    3. While he previously recommended using note cards of the same size, the examples in Goutor (1980) have 3x5" cards for bibliographic notes and 5x7" or larger cards for content notes. (p19, 21)


      Is there a reason stated anywhere here for this discrepancy or change? One would ostensibly keep them in different places/sections of one's card index, but does the size difference help to differentiate the two to aid in sorting? Is the larger card intended to hold more long form writing?

      Goutor is in Canada, so were 5x7" cards more common or standardized there in the late 1970s and early 80s?

      A5 measures 148 × 210 millimeters or 5.83 × 8.27 inches, so is a bit larger than 5x7".

      5x7" is a more standard photo size, so was this chosen as the result of storage options from the photography space?

      5x7" is scantly available in America in 2022, but only from Hamilco. A few others make cardstock in that size but not specifically as index cards.

    4. Jacques Goutor defines content notes as those that "are drawn in one way or another from the actual contents of the sources." He considers them the most important part of note taking as "they will eventually constitute the pieces of the mosaic." (p20)

      He further breaks this type down into generally self-explanatory "quote notes" and "summary notes". (p20) He does advise that one writes out careful summaries so that one needn't do additional future work of writing notes on one's own notes. While he doesn't state it directly, the presumption in his presentation is that a well written summary can be directly used in one's future written project.


      Compare this type of note to others like evergreen or permanent notes.

    5. Goutor comments, like many before him, that it is common to take notes on notebook paper in longer form, but that this is inadvisable as it is much harder to impose a useful order or classification on such work. He does mention scissors as a means of cutting up such notes, but comments that "a mass of slips of paper of varying sizes [can be] difficult to arrange and potentially useless unless care has been taken to note the source of each separate entry."

      He also repeats the frequent admonitions that one should take notes only on one side and to use cards of a uniform size.

      (p6)

    1. level 1tristanjuricek · 4 hr. agoI’m not sure I see these products as anything more than a way for middle management to put some structure behind meetings, presentations, etc in a novel format. I’m not really sure this is what I’d consider a zettlecasten because there’s really no “net” here; no linking of information between cards. Just some different exercises.If you actually look at some of the cards, they read more like little cues to drive various processes forward: https://pipdecks.com/products/workshop-tactics?variant=39770920321113I’m pretty sure if you had 10 other people read those books and analyze them, they’d come up with 10 different observations on these topics of team management, presentation building, etc.

      Historically the vast majority of zettelkasten didn't have the sort of structure and design of Luhmann's, though with indexing they certainly create a network of notes and excerpts. These examples are just subsets or excerpts of someone's reading of these books and surely anyone else reading any book is going to have a unique set of notes on them. These sets were specifically honed and curated for a particular purpose.

      The interesting pattern here is that someone is selling a subset of their work/notes as a set of cards rather than as a book. Doing this allows different sorts of reading and uses than a "traditional" book would.

      I'm curious what other sort of experimental things people might come up with? The "novel" Cain's Jawbone, for example, could be considered a "Zettelkasten mystery" or "Zettelkasten puzzle". There's also the subset of cards from Roland Barthes' fichier boîte (French for zettelkasten), which was published posthumously as Mourning Diary.

    1. On this point, for instance, thebook on John Dewey's technique of thought by Bogos-lovsky, The Logic of Controversy, and C.E. Ayers' essayon the gospel of technology in Philosophy Today andTomorrow, edited by Hook and Kallen.

      The Technique of Controversy: Principles of Dynamic Logic by Boris B. Bogoslovsky https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Technique_of_Controversy/P-rgAwAAQBAJ?hl=en

      What was Dewey's contribution here?


      The Gospel of Technology by C. E. Ayers https://archive.org/details/americanphilosop00kall/page/24/mode/2up

    2. nd the way in which these cate-gories changed, some being dropped out and others beingadded, was an index of my own intellectual progress andbreadth. Eventually, the file came to be arranged accord-ing to several larger projects, having many subprojects,which changed from year to year.

      In his section on "Arrangement of File", C. Wright Mills describes some of the evolution of his "file". Knowing that the form and function of one's notes may change over time (Luhmann's certainly changed over time too, a fact which is underlined by his having created a separate ZK II) one should take some comfort and solace that theirs certainly will as well.

      The system designer might also consider the variety of shapes and forms to potentially create a better long term design of their (or others') system(s) for their ultimate needs and use cases. How can one avoid constant change, constant rearrangement, which takes work? How can one minimize the amount of work that goes into creating their system?

      The individual knowledge worker or researcher should have some idea about the various user interfaces and potential arrangements that are available to them before choosing a tool or system for maintaining their work. What are the affordances they might be looking for? What will minimize their overall work, particularly on a lifetime project?

    1. so big companies, like Apple, saw new restrictions coming in at the same time as more aggressive enforcement, and said "well shit, we want to base our software on these handy convenient tools like GCC but we can't use GPLv3 software while keeping our hardware and software as locked together as we'd like." so they started pouring money into a new C compiler, LLVM, that was instead open source.

      THis is new for me, and a fascinating case of how open source ecosystems work today. This is no longer about alternatives to dominant, corporate code, but about a standard for creating dominant code.

  2. Sep 2022
    1. Results indicate that between the ages of 20 and75 years, nearly 60 percent of Americans will experience living for at least 1 yearbelow the official poverty line, while three-fourths of Americans will encounterpoverty or near- poverty (150 percent below the official poverty line).4

      Mark Rank and Thomas Hirschl's research based on the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) using risk assessments using life tables show that nearly 60 percent of Americans between 20 and 75 will live for at least 1 year below the poverty line and 75% of Americans will encounter poverty or near-poverty (defined as 150 percent below the official poverty line).

      Cross reference:<br /> Mark R. Rank and Thomas A. Hirschl, “The Likelihood of Experiencing Relative Poverty Across the Life Course,” PLoS One 10 (2015): E01333513.

    2. The underlying theme tyingthese myths together is that poverty is often perceived to be an issue of“them” rather than an issue of “us”—that those who experience povertyare viewed as strangers to mainstream America, falling outside accept-able behavior, and as such, are to be scorned and stigmatized.

      One of the underlying commonalities about the various myths of poverty is that we tend to "other" those that it effects. The "them" we stigmatize with the ills of poverty really look more like "us", and in fact, they are.

      Rather than victim shame and blame those in poverty, we ought to spend more of our time fixing the underlying disease instead of spending the time, effort, energy, and money on attempting to remedy the symptoms (eg. excessive policing, et al.) Not only is it more beneficial, but cheaper in the long run.


      Related:<br /> Gladwell, Malcolm. “Million-Dollar Murray.” The New Yorker, February 5, 2006. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/02/13/million-dollar-murray (.pdf copy available at https://housingmatterssc.org/million-dollar-murray/)

    3. Theidealized image of American society is one of abundant opportunities, withhard work being rewarded by economic prosperity. Consequently, those whofail to get ahead have only themselves to blame according to this argument. Itis within this context that America thinks of itself as a fair and meritocraticsociety in which people get what they deserve in life.

      There is a variety of confounding myths in America which tend to hold us down. These include economic mobility, meritocracy, poverty, and the land of opportunity.

      With respect to the "land of opportunity", does positive press of a small number of cases from an earlier generation outweigh the actual experience of the majority?


      There was a study on The Blitz in London and England in general in World War II which showed that despite high losses in general, enough people knew one or more who'd lost someone or something to the extreme but that the losses weren't debilitating from a loss perspective and generally served to boost overall morale. Higher losses may have been more demoralizing and harmful, but didn't happen. (Find this source: possibly Malcolm Gladwell??)

      Is this sort of psychological effect at play socially and politically in America and thereby confounding our progress?

    4. Heather E. Bullock

      https://psychology.ucsc.edu/about/people/faculty.php?uid=hbullock

      Heather E. Bullock is an American social psychologist. She is Professor of Psychology and Director of the Blum Center on Poverty, Social Enterprise, and Participatory Governance at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Bullock is known for her research on people's beliefs about economic disparities and the consequences of stereotypical beliefs about the poor on public policy. This includes work examining attributions about poverty made by news media, and how such attributions influence public support of welfare policies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heather_E._Bullock

    1. maintenance rehearsal repeating items over and over to maintain them in short-term memory, as in repeating a telephone number until it has been dialed (see rehearsal). According to the levels-of-processing model of memory, maintenance rehearsal does not effectively promote long-term retention because it involves little elaboration of the information to be remembered. Also called rote rehearsal. See also phonological loop.

      The practice of repeating items as a means of attempting to place them into short-term memory is called maintenance rehearsal. Examples of this practice include repeating a new acquaintance's name or perhaps their phone number multiple times as a means of helping to remember it either for the short term or potentially the long term.

      Research on the levels-of processing model of memory indicates that maintenance rehearsal is not as effective at promoting long term memory as methods like elaborative rehearsal.

    1. Maria Kozhevnikov, a neuroscientist at the National University of Singapore and Massachusetts General Hospital

      !- reference : Maria Kozhevnikov - neuroscientist at National University of Singapore, Massachusetts General Hospital - Nangchen tow, Amdo region of Tibet - testing if g-tummo vase breathing technique could raise core body temperature. One monk raised body temp to that normally associated with a fever - published results in PLOS One

    1. In the article, "The New Normative: Queer Politics in The Outs," author John Sherman, a freelance writer from Brooklyn, implores reader's to give credit to show's casually- revolutionary representation of queer characters. Sherman indicates to reader's that this is a rarely great representation for its time (2012) because it gives gay characters a non-stereotypical story line. It allows it's characters to be people who just happen to be gay. In just the pilot episode, it's not hard to see this truth. With the first four queer male characters being introduced, they all have different characteristics, priorities, and dynamics with eachother that don't center around their gayness. This gives a depth to the queer character being represented without relying on the fact that their gay to do so. I think that the positive reaction to this show bodes very well for the style of queer representation being presented and will hopefully inspire more writing and content making of this kind which non-chalently gives a voice gay to story lines in a relatable- human way instead of a stereotypical and tokenising way.

      I believe that Shitt's Creek also does this fairly well. Although I've only seen a couple episodes myself- I saw the character of David as a complete person and story line not defined by his gayness or partner choices although it is an obvious part of his identity.

    1. Fail to stay competitive and you will lose out in ‘the global race’.9And the threat works. Competition and competitiveness have becomeas unquestionable in the modern world as God, His angels and the Devilwere in the medieval. Fear of damnation in the future is ubiquitous. Todaygovernment leaders universally see it as their duty to pursue their nation’sinternational competiveness as unrelentingly as the defence of the realmand far more enthusiastically than regulating business or collecting taxes.But if competition is really so beneficial, why do global problems seemto be getting worse rather than better? If the markets in which we’re allembedded are competitions, and if competition only produces benefits, asneoliberal ideology insists, you’d have thought that its ‘staggering powerto make things better’ would, by now, have caused many of our problemsto disappear.Clearly, something doesn’t quite stack up.

      !- relationship : competition and fear of the other - the other is unknown but is in competition with you - everyone is driven by the same fear of the other

    2. Our difficult journey ends in acceptance. Not an acceptance of hope-lessness but an acceptance that our familiar nationcentric way of thinking nolonger serves us and we can let it go. Acceptance, then, is not a capitulationbut a new liberation: we learn to see ourselves and the world with freshworldcentric eyes.

      !- similiar to : Ascent of Humanity - Birthing process - Birth to a new worldview - Cannot stay where we are or risk being stillborn - must go through the dangerous journey of birth - what once nurtured us can now destroy us if we stay

    3. The problem is that adopting new thinking means first loosening andletting go of our existing way, and this involves a terrifying transition.Rather like the mythological bird the phoenix that first had to die andturn to ashes before being reborn, new life can only arise when somethinghas been let go. We have to go through a grieving process for what we arelosing, similar to the one we might experience if someone close to us dies.It can be thought of as a difficult journey – painful but necessary

      !- similiar to : Charles Eisenstein - Ascent of Humanity has same theme - http://ascentofhumanity.com/text/

    4. tighter regulations and highercorporate taxes increase costs and make firms and nations less competitive.

      !- tragedy of the commons : DSG example - A Deep Humanity analysis can add insight to unpack the problem - When I read this sentence, it triggers the following words to emerge from my salience landscape: - self / other dualism - different levels of othering - at each level, the self is competing to maximize sales - the other is alien, nebulous, unknown and this helps reinforce competition and not caring for the other, dominating the other - in ALL cases, each self-centered business entity views regulations as reducing competitive price advantage - this view is myopic because it does not consider the bigger picture of how the production is impacting nature and people - the normal view is habitually NOT a circular WEconomy view - manufacturing products that create environmental externalities present in the manufacturing process, in its usage and end of life is based on an assumption of negligible impact on nature. Total net impacts were far from planetary boundaries. - however, due to the exponential increase in the scale of production due to population pressures, this assumption has become obsolete a long time ago - Producers of products that continue environmental damage are enabled by current policies so will not change on their own because they all need the short term benefits the jobs provide - as an example, the fossil fuel industry and its millions of direct employees are knowingly destroying the life support system of the planet - when externalization exists, it is a policy reflecting collective disconnection from nature because it we are deeply connected to nature and externalization on this scale destroys our life support system - regulations are constraints that are needed for our own good. Instead of seeing it as anti-competition, the bigger picture is that it is pro-civilization - when each business looks out for itself for its own wellbeing and competing against others within an externalizing economic system, a tragedy of the commons occurs

    1. Ever tried to look up some news from 12 years ago? Back in library days you were able to do that. On news portals, most articles are deleted after a year, and on newspaper web sites you hardly ever get access to the archives – even with a subscription.

      This is a massive failure of infrastructure (and education/"professionalism"—by and large, most people whose careers are in operating or maintaining Web infrastructure don't haven't been inculcated into or adopted the sort of "code of ethics" that sees this as a failure).

      The thing might just be for something like the Internet Archive to get into training or selling professional services for handling companies' "Web presence, done the right way". (This is def. take some organizational restructuring, however.) I'd like to see, for example, IA-certified partner organizations that uphold the principles described here and the original vision for the Web, and professional associations that work hard at making sure the status quo improves a lot over what's common today (and doesn't slide back).

    1. we never 00:32:28 we never say all that we mean and we never mean all that we say you wouldn't be speaking human language if you did so when politicians tell you I say what I mean and I mean what they're lying already because language doesn't work 00:32:41 that way we we leave a lot of things unspecified and we let the cultural context fill it in so if I say she sat down Who am I talking about you only know who she is if you saw her 00:32:53 come in or I've referred to her earlier and you can follow it so actually why do divorces happen in modern societies because language doesn't really work 00:33:06 well I mean that's a you can tell that language of all because it doesn't work very well there just doesn't communicate as well as we would like it my wife and I have conversations sometimes and we 00:33:19 realized that we didn't know what the other one was talking about we clearly didn't know what the other was talking about we have different cultural assumptions and although if I do figure out what she's talking about then I pretended that's what I was talking 00:33:31 about

      !- for : incompleteness of language - much is not said outside of what is said - context is required to fill it in

    1. However, while URLs allow you to locate a resource, a URI simply identifies a resource. This means that a URI is not necessarily intended as an address to get a resource. It is meant just as an identifier.

      However, while URLs allow you to locate a resource, a URI simply identifies a resource.

      Very untrue/misleading! It doesn't simply (only) identify it. It includes URLs, so a URI may be a locator, a name, or both!

      https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3986 states it better and perfectly:

      A URI can be further classified as a locator, a name, or both. The term "Uniform Resource Locator" (URL) refers to the subset of URIs that, in addition to identifying a resource, provide a means of locating the resource by describing its primary access mechanism (e.g., its network "location").

      This means that a URI is not necessarily intended as an address to get a resource. It is meant just as an identifier.

      The "is not necessarily" part is correct. The "is meant" part is incorrect; shoudl be "may only be meant as".

    1. Many know from their own experience how uncontrollable and irretrievable the oftenvaluable notes and chains of thought are in note books and in the cabinets they are stored in

      Heyde indicates how "valuable notes and chains of thought are" but also points out "how uncontrollable and irretrievable" they are.

      This statement is strong evidence along with others in this chapter which may have inspired Niklas Luhmann to invent his iteration of the zettelkasten method of excerpting and making notes.

      (link to: Clemens /Heyde and Luhmann timeline: https://hypothes.is/a/4wxHdDqeEe2OKGMHXDKezA)

      Presumably he may have either heard or seen others talking about or using these general methods either during his undergraduate or law school experiences. Even with some scant experience, this line may have struck him significantly as an organization barrier of earlier methods.

      Why have notes strewn about in a box or notebook as Heyde says? Why spend the time indexing everything and then needing to search for it later? Why not take the time to actively place new ideas into one's box as close as possibly to ideas they directly relate to?

      But how do we manage this in a findable way? Since we can't index ideas based on tabs in a notebook or even notebook page numbers, we need to have some sort of handle on where ideas are in slips within our box. The development of European card catalog systems had started in the late 1700s, and further refinements of Melvil Dewey as well as standardization had come about by the early to mid 1900s. One could have used the Dewey Decimal System to index their notes using smaller decimals to infinitely intersperse cards on a growing basis.

      But Niklas Luhmann had gone to law school and spent time in civil administration. He would have been aware of aktenzeichen file numbers used in German law/court settings and public administration. He seems to have used a simplified version of this sort of filing system as the base of his numbering system. And why not? He would have likely been intimately familiar with its use and application, so why not adopt it or a simplified version of it for his use? Because it's extensible in a a branching tree fashion, one can add an infinite number of cards or files into the midst of a preexisting collection. And isn't this just the function aktenzeichen file numbers served within the German court system? Incidentally these file numbers began use around 1932, but were likely heavily influenced by the Austrian conscription numbers and house numbers of the late 1770s which also influenced library card cataloging numbers, so the whole system comes right back around. (Ref Krajewski here).

      (Cross reference/ see: https://hypothes.is/a/CqGhGvchEey6heekrEJ9WA

      Other pieces he may have been attempting to get around include the excessive work of additional copying involved in this piece as well as a lot of the additional work of indexing.

      One will note that Luhmann's index was much more sparse than without his methods. Often in books, a reader will find a reference or two in an index and then go right to the spot they need and read around it. Luhmann did exactly this in his sequence of cards. An index entry or two would send him to the general local and sifting through a handful of cards would place him in the correct vicinity. This results in a slight increase in time for some searches, but it pays off in massive savings of time of not needing to cross index everything onto cards as one goes, and it also dramatically increases the probability that one will serendipitously review over related cards and potentially generate new insights and links for new ideas going into one's slip box.

    1. Do’s 1. Write twenty minutes a day over a period of four days. Do this periodically. This way you wont feel overwhelmed. 2. Write in a private, safe, comfortable environment. 3. Write about issues you're currently living with, something youre thinking or dreaming about constantly, a trauma you've never disclosed or discussed or resolved. 4. Write about joys and pleasures, too. 5. Write about what happened. Write, too, about feelings about what happened. What do you feel? Why do you feel this way? Link events with feelings. 6. ‘Try to write an extremely detailed, organized, coherent, vivid, emotionally compelling narrative. Don’t worry about correctness, about grammar or punctuation. 7. Beneficial effects will occur even if no one reads your writing. If you choose to keep your writing and not discard it, you must safeguard it. 8. Expect, initially, that in writing in this way you will have complex and appropriately difficult feelings. Make sure you get support if you need it.

      On the other side of my notecard, I wrote a set of warnings I'd gleaned from Pennebaker: Don’ts 1. Don’t use writing as a substitute for taking action. 2. Don't become overly intellectual. 3. Don’t use writing as a way of complaining. Use it, instead, to discover how and why you feel as you do. Simply complaining or venting will probably make you feel worse. 4. Don’t use your writing to become overly self-absorbed. Over- analyzing everything is counterproductive. 5. Don't use writing as a substitute for therapy or medical care.

  3. www.justine-haupt.com www.justine-haupt.com
    1. The question "what is the meaning of life" doesn't seem to me to be an important one, although I think Sagan's "we are a way for the universe to know itself" is about as good an answer as can be found.

      While I agree with Sagan, that's not the meaning of life.

      The meaning of life is to project ones self into the future. There might be other ways to do this, but the easiest way is to have and raise children.

    1. imagine a future where educators are able to trace the impact they have had on learners' journeys. Educators can identify which teaching methods worked best for which learners and which approaches were most effective at enabling the learners to translate that learning into practice

      There is some transformative potential here for these insights to be valuable for Educators as well as to serve as data points that help Learners. be more informed consumers (especially when the data allows for "twinning" that allows for Learners to approximate anticipated outcomes based on historical outcomes for people who share characteristics with them). At the same time, a clear hurdle separating the aspirations from the reality is the priority of the ownership. It seems that for all the exciting potential, getting there necessarily triggers a dynamic of multiple stakeholders having legitimate assertions of ownership over the data, meaning that compromises must be made, and that we may quickly begin to see qualifications to the notion of learner ownership that are a far cry from any absolute, binary interpretation. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but if it is in fact a thing, it's something to be acknowledged and centered so as to avoid appearing (or being) disingenuous brokers of the conversation.

    1. Conclusion The role of a learning designer has continued to evolve to make room for emergent technologies and frameworks. Always the goal has been to design the most effective learning using all theories, processes, or technologies at our disposal. In the modern version of the field, there are simply more of these theories, processes, and increasingly advanced technologies to assist us.

      I wonder how much Artificial intelligence and virtual reality enhancements will affect the role of the learner designer. I know we will have to learn the platform, its technology but at what level. Will we have to learn how to code to be able to do an effective learning environment.

    1. we can kind of make an assumption that 00:04:22 complex brains and by extension complex intelligence should also be somewhat common in terms of evolutionary success and assuming that it's evolutionary preferential or basically that evolves many times throughout the history of the 00:04:35 planet we can then make a conjecture that it should exist somewhere out there where life exists on other planets okay just to rephrase this if we truly believe that extraterrestrial intelligence exists out there and that 00:04:48 it kind of evolved in the same way that it evolved here on planet earth it's pretty safe to assume that it might have evolved several times on the planet because we're making an assumption here that this is an evolutionary advantage 00:05:00 that all planets that potentially have life on them are going to end up with some kind of a species that's going to become super intelligent and that's going to be self-aware able to use technology and essentially kind of communicate in the same way that we 00:05:13 communicate using for example radio waves

      !- in other words : there should be signs of complex intelligence like ours in the paleontological records

    1. you can think about the invention of powerful representations and the invention of powerful media to host powerful 00:11:27 representations as being one of the big drivers of last 2,000 years of the intellectual progress of humanity because each representation allows us to think thoughts that we couldn't think before we kind of 00:11:39 continuously expand our think about territory so you can think of this as tied to you know the grand meta-narrative of the scent of humanity moving away from myth and superstition 00:11:51 and ignorance and towards a deeper understanding of ourselves in the world around us I bring this up explicitly because I think it's good for people to acknowledge the motivation for their 00:12:02 work and this is this story of the intellectual progress of humanity is something that I find very motivating inspiring and is something that I feel like I want to contribute to but I think 00:12:16 that if this if you take this as your motivation you kind of have to be honest with yourself that that there definitely has been ascent we have improved in many 00:12:27 ways but there are also other ways in which our history has not been ascent so we invent technology we media technology 00:12:39 to kind of help us make this this climb but every technology is a double-edged sword every technology enables us has a potential de navels in certain ways while debilitating us in other ways and 00:12:51 that's especially true for representations because the way the reputations work is they draw on certain capabilities that we have so if we go all in in a particular medium like we 00:13:03 did with print so the capabilities that are not well supported in that medium they get neglected in they atrophy and we atrophy I wish I knew who drew the picture 00:13:20 because it's it's a wonderful depiction of what I'm trying to express here and even a little misleading because the person the last stage they're kind of hunched over is tiny rectangle we reach 00:13:31 that stage accomplish that stage with the printing press and cheap paper book based knowledge the invention of paper-based bureaucracy paper-based 00:13:44 working we invented this lifestyle this way of working where to do knowledge work meant to sit at a desk and stare at your little tiny rectangle make a little motions of your hand you know started 00:13:56 out as sitting at a desk staring at papers or books and making little motions with a pen and now it's sitting at a desk staring at a computer screen making a little motions with your on a keyboard but it's basically the same 00:14:08 thing we've this is what it means to do knowledge work nowadays this is what it means to be a thinker it means to be sitting and working with symbols on a little tiny rectangle to the extent that 00:14:20 again it almost seems inseparable you can't separate the representation for what it actually is and and this is basically just an accident of history this is just the way that our media 00:14:32 technology happen to evolve and then we kind of designed a way of knowledge work for that media that we happen to have and I think so I'm going to make the claim that this style of knowledge work 00:14:47 this lifestyle is inhumane

      !- for : symbolic representation - language - the representation is closely tied to the media - a knowledge worker sits at a desk and plays with symbols in a small area all day! - This is actually inhumane when you think about it

    1. This issue is for discussing the use case given in the next section, and the unevaluatedProperties proposal to solve it. If you want to discuss a different use case or a different proposal, you MUST file your own issue to do so. Any comments attempting to revive other lines of discussion from #515, introduce new problems or solutions, or otherwise derail this discussion will be deleted to keep the focus clear. Please file a new issue and link back to this one instead.
    1. https://mleddy.blogspot.com/2005/05/tools-for-serious-readers.html

      Interesting (now discontinued) reading list product from Levenger that in previous generations may have been covered by a commonplace book but was quickly replaced by digital social products (bookmark applications or things like Goodreads.com or LibraryThing.com).

      Presently I keep a lot of this sort of data digitally myself using either/both: Calibre or Zotero.

    1. The order of the games in our own day, which places the sacrifices to the god for the pentathlum and chariot-races second, and those for the other competitions first, was fixed at the seventy-seventh Festival.

      altar of zeus

    2. The temple and the image were made for Zeus from spoils, when Pisa was crushed in war by the Eleans,20 and with Pisa such of the subject peoples as conspired together with her. The image itself was wrought by Pheidias, as is testified by an inscription written under the feet of Zeus:–

      Materials used to construct the temple of Zeus

    3. [5.15.1] XV. Outside the Altis there is a building called the workshop of Pheidias, where he wrought the image of Zeus piece by piece. In the building is an altar to all the gods in common. Now return back again to the Altis opposite the Leonidaeum.

      It is crazy how people can assemble things like this

    4. I know that the height and breadth of the Olympic Zeus have been measured and recorded; but I shall not praise those who made the measurements, for even their records fall far short of the impression made by a sight of the image.

      Zeus is much more powerful than what everyone thinks he is.

    5. On the outside of the frieze that runs round the temple at Olympia, above the columns, are gilt shields one and twenty in number, an offering made by the Roman general Mummius when he had conquered the Achaeans in war, captured Corinth, and driven out its Dorian inhabitants.

      Mummius gave 20 shields to the temple at Olympia after he won the war against the Achaeans.

    1. culture is gradually replacing genetics as the primary human system of inheritance. This hypothesis helps clarify the human ETI.

      !- conclusion : GCC - very important finding - nobody knows the implications of such a profound shift - it means we are profoundly dependent on culture, on artificial human-created adaptations for our survival !- in other words : GCC - we no longer genetically evolve to adapt, but rather cognitive create solutions to adapt!

    1. On most of the figures on the chest there are inscriptions, written in the ancient characters. In some cases the letters read straight on, but in others the form of the writing is what the Greeks call bustrophedon

      There are secret writings on most on the figures in a chest and the writings are called bustrophedon.

    1. Fossil fuel combustion and growth in industrial and military power have gone hand with colonial conquest and control.In the 1990s, the idea of ‘contraction and convergence’, developed by the UK-based Global Commons Institute, gained a lot of traction in climate negotiations: ‘the Contraction and Convergence strategy consists of reducing overall emissions of greenhouse gases to a safe level (contraction), resulting from every country bringing its emissions per capita to a level which is equal for all countries (convergence)’.https://lnkd.in/eKq4vKep

      !- for : futures - very appropriate description of what appears to be the most sensible futures for civilization

    1. Why is this important in this history of psychology?

      "The present work will, I venture to think, prove that I both saw at the time the value and scope of the law which I had discovered, and have since been able to apply it to some purpose in a few original lines of investigation. But here my claims cease. I have felt all my life, and I still feel, the most sincere satisfaction that Mr. Darwin had been at work long before me, and that it was not left for me to attempt to write 'The Origin of Species.' I have long since measured my own strength, and know well that it would be quite unequal to that task. Far abler men than myself may confess that they have not that untiring patience in accumulating and that wonderful skill in using large masses of facts of the most varied kinds, -- that wide and accurate physiological knowledge, -- that acuteness in devising, and skill in carrying out, experiments, and that admirable style of composition, at once clear, persuasive, and judicial, -- qualities which, in their harmonious combination, mark out Mr. Darwin as the man, perhaps of all men now living, best fitted for the great work he has undertaken and accomplished." This comes from the Classics in the History of Psychology Limits of Natural Selection By Chauncey Wright (1870). This shows us the importamce of the limits including in theories like this one. Natural selection indicates that the strongest will be the ones that will survive and there for will be the ones that will be able to have offsprings and make their generation endure. But thjis has a limit due to the sexual selection because it shows that the natural selection can not be impossed to people in any way or form. I see this working in psychology in a very big way because now that we are in a generation that is so ruled out by the social media this concept wants to persist and endure no matter what. I can see natural selecetion slowly decreasing amd really another type of selection evolving with the next future generations.

      Angela Cruz Cubero (Christian Cruz Cubero)

    1. In fact, every timeone combines and recordsfacts in accordance withestablished logical process-es, the creative aspect ofthinking is concerned onlywith the selection of thedata and the process to beemployed, and the manip-ulation thereafter is repeti-tive in nature and hence afit matter to be relegatedto the machines

      I am not sure if I agree with this statement, since for every discipline, the details of manipulating the data, refining, and creatively thinking may be vastly different. Can one really confidently declare that after the selection of data, the manner of thinking and manipulation of specific data can be generalized?

    1. So this is one of these things where the idea that you could make an internet is 100%, just from biology being so much more complex and working so well for decades.DEVON: And why is the decentralization of biological systems and of the internet so important for scalability?

      !- relationship : internet to biology - internet was designed to biomimic biological systems for redundancy, resiliency, decentralized

    2. the thing is about vision, same with the ear, you can only see a few at a time in detail, but you can be aware of 100 things at once. So one of the things we're really bad about is, because of our eyes, you can't get the visual point of view we want. Our eyes have a visual point of view of like 160 degrees. But what I've got here is about 25, and on a cellphone it's pathetic. So this is completely wrong. 100% wrong. Wrong in a really big way. If you look at the first description that Engelbart ever wrote about what he wanted, it was a display that was three feet on its side, built into a desk, because what is it that you design on? If anybody's ever looked at a drafting table, which they may not have for a long time, you need room to design, because there's all this bullshit that you do wrong, right?

      !- insight for : user interface design - 3 feet field of view is critical - 160 degrees - VR and AR is able to meet this requirement

    3. The ARPA community was about, "Hey, we're in deep trouble and we're getting in deeper trouble. We need to get more enlightened and we need to do what Doug Engelbart called... we need to not just augment human beings, augment human intellect, but we have to augment the collective IQ of groups." Because most important things are done by groups of people. And so we have to think about what it means to have a group that's smarter than any member rather than a group that is less than the stupidest members.

      !- salient : collaboration - the key point of the internet, or what was then called the "intergalactic network" was collaboration at scale to solve global challenges - The Most Important things are done by groups of people

    4. Right? You said... No, no, bullshit. Let's write it all down and we can go check it. Let's not argue about what was said. We've got this thing called writing. And once we do that, that means we can make an argument out of a much larger body of evidence than you can ever do in an oral society. It starts killing off stories, because stories don't refer back that much. And so anyway, a key book for people who are wary of McLuhan, to understand this, or one of the key books is by Elizabeth Eisenstein. It's a mighty tome. It's a two volume tome, called the "Printing Press as an Agent of Change." And this is kind of the way to think about it as a kind of catalyst. Because it happened. The printing press did not make the Renaissance happen. The Renaissance was already starting to happen, but it was a huge accelerant for what had already started happening and what Kenneth Clark called Big Thaw.

      !- for : difference between oral and written tradition - writing is an external memory, much larger than the small one humans are endowed with. Hence, it allowed for orders of magnitude more reasoning.

    1. one of the things that's worked the best the last three or 00:10:05 four hundred years is you get simplicity by finding a slightly more sophisticated building block to build your theories out of its when you go for a simple building block that anybody can 00:10:18 understand through common sense that is when you start screwing yourself right and left because it just might not be able to ramify through the degrees of freedom and scaling you have to go through and it's this 00:10:31 inability to fix the building blocks that is one of the largest problems that computing has today in large organizations people just won't do it

      !- example : simplicity - astronomy example is perfect - paradigm shift to go to slightly more complex fundamental building block that CAN scale

    1. I have a long list of ideas I want to pursue in cosmology, quantum mechanics, complexity, statistical mechanics, emergence, information, democracy, origin of life, and elsewhere. Maybe we’ll start up a seminar series in Complexity and Emergence that brings different people together. Maybe it will grow into a Center of some kind.

      https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2022/03/06/johns-hopkins/

      Somehow I missed that Sean Carroll had moved to Johns Hopkins? Realized today when his next book showed up on my doorstep with his new affiliation.

    1. The book's controversial assertions that the life of Jesus should be written like the life of any historic person, and that the Bible could and should be subject to the same critical scrutiny as other historical documents caused controversy[19] and enraged many Christians,[20][21][22][23] and Jews because of its depiction of Judaism as foolish and absurdly illogical and for its insistence that Jesus and Christianity were superior.[17]

      Ernest Renan argued in Life of Jesus that Jesus should be studied and written about like any other historic person or process. His life and the history and writings around it should be open to critical scrutiny just like any other biography or autobiography.

    1. The idea that Earth’s environment might be different in the future predates understanding of modern human impacts. H.G. Wells was already dreaming up future Earth environments by the time he wrote The Time Machine in 1895.

      .

    1. tions will not always fit without inconvenience intotheir proper place ; and the scheme of classification,once adopted, is rigid, and can only be modifiedwith difficulty. Many librarians used to draw uptheir catalogues on this plan, which is now uni-versally condemned.

      Others, well understanding the advantages of systematic classification, have proposed to fit their materials, as fast as collected, into their appropriate places in a prearranged scheme. For this purpose they use notebooks of which every page has first been provided with a heading. Thus all the entries of the same kind are close to one another. This system leaves something to be desired; for addi

      The use of a commonplace method for historical research is marked as a poor choice because:<br /> The topics with similar headings may be close together, but ideas may not ultimately fit into their pre-allotted spaces.<br /> The classification system may be too rigid as ideas change and get modified over time.

      They mention that librarians used to catalog books in this method, but that they realized that their system would be out of date almost immediately. (I've got some notes on this particular idea to which this could be directly linked as evidence.)

    2. There is a still more barbarous method, whichneed not receive more than passing mention. Thisis simply to register documents in the memorywithout taking written notes. This method hasbeen used. Historians endowed with excellentmemories, and lazy to boot, have indulged thiswhim, with the result that their quotations andreferences are mostly inexact. The human memoryis a delicate piece of registering apparatus, but it isso little an instrument of precision that such pre-sumption is inexcusable.
    1. you cannot discover lands already inhabited

      Fatal flaw in the Doctrine of Discovery

      Papal Bulls written from 1450 to 1493 that gave permission to European Christian explorers to claim land that was not already claimed and ruled over by European explorers. It assumes the dehumanization of the existing inhabitants.

    1. https://twitter.com/inkasrain/status/1566410516721016833

      Does anyone know what exactly this is? A friend gave it to me years ago when they visited Jerusalem. I don't read Hebrew. Is it something harmless or should it be shamshed(jew magic)? (attached photo of a mezuzah)

      The idea of "magic" here within a modern religious context is interesting in that it shows the divergence of religion and magic as concepts with respect to cultural practices.

      The phrasing also has a sense of othering the unknown culture with a sense of fear in the idea that the object should be smashed. There's also a lack of basic science knowledge and tinge of superstition implied by the fact that they think that smashing will somehow dissipate the unknown magic.

      So many different cultural indicators of various things going on here...

    1. In short, the questions about Google’s behavior are not about free speech; they do, though, touch on other Amendments in the Bill of Rights. For example: The Fourth Amendment bars “unreasonable searches and seizures”; while you can make the case that search warrants were justified once the photos in question were discovered, said photos were only discovered because Mark’s photo library was indiscriminately searched in the first place. The Fifth Amendment says no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; Mark lost all of his data, email account, phone number, and everything else Google touched forever with no due process at all. The Sixth Amendment is about the rights to a trial; Mark was not accused of any crime in the real world, but when it came to his digital life Google was, as I noted, “judge, jury, and executioner” (the Seventh Amendment is, relatedly, about the right to a jury trial for all controversies exceeding $20).

      Ben Thompson argues that questions about Google's behavior towards a false positive case of CSAM does not pertain to free speech or to the First Amendment. But it does pertain to other Amendments in the Bill of Rights.

    1. Taking carbon steel as an example, as shown in Picture 1, using a 1000w fiber laser cutting machine, for carbon steel materials thickness below 10mm, when the thickness of carbon steel is less than 2mm, the cutting speed per minute can be up to 8 meters. When the thickness is 6mm, the cutting speed is about 1.6 meters per minute, and when the thickness of the carbon steel is 10 mm, the cutting speed is about 0.6 to 0.7 meters per minute.

      Taking carbon steel as an example, as shown in Picture 1, using a 1000w fiber laser cutting machine, for carbon steel materials thickness below 10mm, when the thickness of carbon steel is less than 2mm, the cutting speed per minute can be up to 8 meters. When the thickness is 6mm, the cutting speed is about 1.6 meters per minute, and when the thickness of the carbon steel is 10 mm, the cutting speed is about 0.6 to 0.7 meters per minute.

      • Taking carbon steel as an example, as shown in Picture 1, using a 1000w fiber laser cutting machine, for carbon steel materials thickness below 10mm, when the thickness of carbon steel is less than 2mm, the cutting speed per minute can be up to 8 meters. When the thickness is 6mm, the cutting speed is about 1.6 meters per minute, and when the thickness of the carbon steel is 10 mm, the cutting speed is about 0.6 to 0.7 meters per minute.

      It can be seen that when the thickness of carbon steel material is less than 2mm, customers who attach great importance to cutting speed can consider using 2000W fiber laser cutting machine, but the 2000W machine is much higher than 1000W in equipment price and operating cost. When the carbon steel material is larger than 2mm, the 2000W machine is not much faster than the 1000W cutting speed. Therefore, the 1000W fiber laser cutting machine is more cost-effective than the 2000W fiber laser cutting machine.

      The cutting speed can directly reflect the efficiency of the fiber laser cutting machine. For cutting different materials with different thickness, the cutting speed will also change greatly. The thicker the thickness, the slower the speed!

    1. translate those notions into stuff that I can tackle in my own sphere of influence. And to me those then make up the stuff that matters.

      Things that matter are a combination of things of interest plus sphere of influence/action radius. This can bring macro issues into a place where they can be addressed by micro actions that have meaning locally and contribute to the issue at scale. Contributes to the invisible hand of networks. Vgl [[Invisible hand of networks 20180616115141]]

  4. Aug 2022
    1. https://occidental.substack.com/p/the-adlernet-guide-part-ii?sd=pf

      Description of a note taking method for reading the Great Books: part commonplace, part zettelkasten.

      I'm curious where she's ultimately placing the cards to know if the color coding means anything in the end other than simply differentiating the card "types" up front? (i.e. does it help to distinguish cards once potentially mixed up?)

    1. When Vladimir Nabokov died in 1977, he left instructions for his heirs to burn the 138 handwritten index cards that made up the rough draft of his final and unfinished novel, The Original of Laura. But Nabokov’s wife, Vera, could not bear to destroy her husband’s last work, and when she died, the fate of the manuscript fell to her son. Dmitri Nabokov, now seventy-five—the Russian novelist’s only surviving heir, and translator of many of his books—has wrestled for three decades with the decision of whether to honor his father’s wish or preserve for posterity the last piece of writing of one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century.

      Nabokov's wishes were that his heirs burn the index cards on which he had handwritten the beginning of his unfinished novel The Original of Laura. His wife Vera, not able to destroy her husband's work, couldn't do it, so the decision fell to their son Dimitri. Having translated many of his father's works previously, Dimitri Nabokov ultimately allowed Penguin the right to publish the unfinished novel.

    1. Indeed, judging from the accounts of the many employees who have now gone on record about this issue, the “debates” that have been happening at Basecamp are precisely the kinds of conversations that happen when you have a diverse workforce. Different issues affect different people differently, and being able to speak freely about those differences is the hallmark of a healthy culture. But by framing these discussions as “acrimonious debates” rather than “challenging conversations,” Hansson has positioned himself not as a peacemaker, but as a tyrant hell-bent on taking his toys and going home; shutting down discussions rather than holding space for growth and discovery.
    1. theGerman library handwriting style invented by E. Ackerknecht is recommended in order toensure equal handwriting style.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwin_Ackerknecht<br /> Influential historian of medicine

      <ins datetime="2022-08-24T15:44:48+00:00"> Erwin Heinz Ackerknecht (1 June 1906, in Stettin – 18 November 1988, in Zurich), the historian of medicine, did some library related work, but didn't invent this handwriting style, his father Erwin Julius Ackerknecht did. see: https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Erwin_Ackerknecht</ins>


      What does this handwriting style look like?

    2. Apart from a higher probability to retrieve particular note sheets, that advantage lies in thecircumstance that notes having a similar keyword will, as the box grows, find themselves atthe same location because of the alphabetical structure. That means not only an automaticcollection of content, but also a comparative review of those related note sheets, which inturn leads to new thoughts basd on the relation between the note sheets with identicalkeywords
    3. Many know from their own experience how uncontrollable and irretrievable the oftenvaluable notes and chains of thought are in note books and in the cabinets they are stored in

      Look at this lovely explicit phrase "chain of thought" here!

      This is not a well attested viewpoint from my research, but obviously happens, and Heyde calls out personal experience to underline his point.

      Where is he going to place the work of creating this chain of thought? Will it be at the "traditional" writing (arranging) part of the process, or will the chain be created as one goes a la Luhmann's ultimate practice?!

    1. While Heyde outlines using keywords/subject headings and dates on the bottom of cards with multiple copies using carbon paper, we're left with the question of where Luhmann pulled his particular non-topical ordering as well as his numbering scheme.

      While it's highly likely that Luhmann would have been familiar with the German practice of Aktenzeichen ("file numbers") and may have gotten some interesting ideas about organization from the closing sections of the "Die Kartei" section 1.2 of the book, which discusses library organization and the Dewey Decimal system, we're still left with the bigger question of organization.

      It's obvious that Luhmann didn't follow the heavy use of subject headings nor the advice about multiple copies of cards in various portions of an alphabetical index.

      While the Dewey Decimal System set up described is indicative of some of the numbering practices, it doesn't get us the entirety of his numbering system and practice.

      One need only take a look at the Inhalt (table of contents) of Heyde's book! The outline portion of the contents displays a very traditional branching tree structure of ideas. Further, the outline is very specifically and similarly numbered to that of Luhmann's zettelkasten. This structure and numbering system is highly suggestive of branching ideas where each branch builds on the ideas immediately above it or on the ideas at the next section above that level.

      Just as one can add an infinite number of books into the Dewey Decimal system in a way that similar ideas are relatively close together to provide serendipity for both search and idea development, one can continue adding ideas to this branching structure so they're near their colleagues.

      Thus it's highly possible that the confluence of descriptions with the book and the outline of the table of contents itself suggested a better method of note keeping to Luhmann. Doing this solves the issue of needing to create multiple copies of note cards as well as trying to find cards in various places throughout the overall collection, not to mention slimming down the collection immensely. Searching for and finding a place to put new cards ensures not only that one places one's ideas into a growing logical structure, but it also ensures that one doesn't duplicate information that may already exist within one's over-arching outline. From an indexing perspective, it also solves the problem of cross referencing information along the axes of the source author, source title, and a large variety of potential subject headings.

      And of course if we add even a soupcon of domain expertise in systems theory to the mix...


      While thinking about Aktenzeichen, keep in mind that it was used in German public administration since at least 1934, only a few years following Heyde's first edition, but would have been more heavily used by the late 1940's when Luhmann would have begun his law studies.

      https://hypothes.is/a/CqGhGvchEey6heekrEJ9WA


      When thinking about taking notes for creating output, one can follow one thought with another logically both within one's card index not only to write an actual paper, but the collection and development happens the same way one is filling in an invisible outline which builds itself over time.

      Linking different ideas to other ideas separate from one chain of thought also provides the ability to create multiple of these invisible, but organically growing outlines.

    1. Louis Menand had an interesting article on great books courses recently: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/20/whats-so-great-about-great-books-courses-roosevelt-montas-rescuing-socrates.

      If you look closely at those photos of Adler, you'll notice that one is in context and the other is the same image of him cut and pasted onto a set of books.

      Those who are into this broader topic may also appreciate Alex Beam's book "A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books". A while back I remember going though Lawrence Principe's Great Courses lecture series on the History of Science to 1700 which I suspect might help contextualize a tour through the great courses.

      I'm curious if you're adding any other books that Adler et al left off their list?

    1. In an academic article published in the Journal of Consumer Research, leading experts define inclusion as follows: “Inclusion refers to creating a culture that fosters belonging and incorporation of diverse groups and is usually operationalized as opposition to exclusion or marginalization.”2 This definition is chock-full of great terms to unpack, but one of the most essential is belonging.
    1. We might learn something new, if we understood both sides.

      Allosso is using "both sides" in a broadly journalistic fashion the way it had traditionally meant in the mid to late 21st century until Donald J. Trump's overtly racist comment on Aug. 15, 2017 "you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides." following the Charlottesville, VA protests.

      Perhaps it might be useful if people quit using the "both sides" as if there were only two perspectives on an issue (for or against), when in reality there is often a spectrum of thoughts and feelings, not all mutually exclusive, about issues?

    1. https://github.com/sajjad2881/NewSyntopicon

      Someone's creating a new digitally linked version of the Syntopicon as text files for Obsidian (and potentially other platforms). Looks like it's partial at best and will need a lot of editing work to become whole.

      found by way of

      Has anyone made a hypermedia rendition of the Syntopicon, i.e. with transcluded windows or "parallel pages" into the indexed texts?<br><br>Many of Adler's Great Books are public domain, so it wouldn't require *so* titanic a copyright issue… pic.twitter.com/UmWiyn5aBC

      — Andy Matuschak (@andy_matuschak) August 17, 2022
      <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
    1. The instructor may require the submission of the notesas an evidence of pro ress before the writing of the essayis begun, or he may as! for their presentation with the com-pleted essay.

      It's nice to have some evidence of progress, but I know very few students who appreciated this sort of grading practice. I know I hated it as a kid, so it's particularly pernicious and almost triggering to see it in print going back to 1908, 1911, and subsequently up to 1931.

    2. The special considerations which enter into the determina-tlon of the credibility of historical statements are discussed,with considerable fullness, in Hereford B. George, Histori-aal evidence, Oxford, 1909; Allen Johnson, Hhtorian andhistorical evidence, New York, 1926; and Charles G. Crump,Hwtory and historical reeearch, London, 1928. The studentwill receive some aid in handltng the roblems of conflictingauthorities by using Frederic Doncalf and August C. Krey,Parallel source p r o b l e m in medieval history, New York andLondon, 1912 [Harper‘s parallel aource problems], or one ofthe other volumes in the same series.

      These look fascinating, but alas for another day.

    1. Malachy Walsh23 hr agoI'm 75 years old. Unfortunately I rejected the notecard method when it was taught in high school, instead choosing cumbersome notebooks all the way through graduate school...until Richard McKeon at University of Chicago recommended using notecards not only as a record of my reading and other experiences but also as a source of creative and rhetorical invention. This was a mind opening, life changing perspective. His only rule: each card or slip should pose and answer a single question. He recommended organizing all journal entries by one of the following topics: 1. By the so called great ideas in the Syntopticon. 2. By work or business projects, activities and events(I spent my life as an advertising man, juggling many assignments over 30 years, from Frosted Flakes to The Marines to Ford). 3. By great books worthy of Adler's analytical readings. 4. By everyday living topics like family, friends, health, wealth, politics, business, car, house, occasions, etc. This way of working has served me well. I believe a proper book case is half full of books and half full of boxes of notes about those books. Notice that McKeon's advice is not limited to writing and reflecting about the books we read. McKeown also encourages reflection on all areas of experience that are important to us. I guess I have an Aristotelian view that our lives consist of thinking, doing, making, and interacting and that writing offers us a way of connecting our thinking with these other activities. So, the nature, scope, and shape our "note system" should be designed to help us engage successfully in our day to day activities and long term enterprises. How should follow What and Why, connect with Who, and fit with When and Where. Any success I have had in business or personal life I attribute to McKeon's advice.

      Richard McKeon's advice, as relayed by a student, on how to take notes using an index card based practice.

      Does he have a written handbook or advice on his particular method?

    1. I can't get behind the call to anger here, even if I don't approve of Apple's stance on being the gatekeeper for the software that runs on your phone.

      Elsewhere (in the comments by the author on HN), he or she writes:

      The biggest problem I try to convey is that you have no way of knowing you'll get the rejection

      No, I think there were pretty good odds that before even submitting the first iteration it would have been rejected, based purely on the concept alone. This is not an app. It's a set of pages—only implemented with the iOS SDK (and without any of the affordances, therefore, that you'd get if you were visiting in a Web browser. For whatever reason, the author both thought this was a good idea and didn't review the App Store guidelines and decided to proceed anyway.

      Then comes the part where Apple sends the rejection and tells the author that it's no different from a Web page and doesn't belong on the App Store.

      Here's where the problem lies: at the point where you're - getting rejections, and then - trying to add arbitrary complexity to the non-app for no reason other than to try to get around the rejection

      ... that's the point where you know you're wasting your time, if it wasn't already clear before—and, once again, it should have been. This is a series of Web pages. It belongs on the Web. (Or dumped into a ZIP and passed around via email.) It is not an app.

      The author in the same HN comment says to another user:

      So you, like me, wasted probably days (if not weeks) to create a fully functional app, spent much of that time on user-facing functions that you would have probably not needed

      In other words, the author is solely responsible for wasting his or her own time.

      To top it off, they finish their HN comment with this lament:

      It's not like on Android where you can just share an APK with your friends.

      Yeah. Know what else allows you to "just" share your work...? (No APK required, even!)

      Suppose you were taking classes and wanted to know the rubric and midterm schedule. Only rather than pointing you to the appropriate course Web page or sharing a PDF or Word document with that information, the professor tells you to download an executable which you are expected to run on your computer and which will paint that information on the screen. You (and everyone else) would hate them—and you wouldn't be wrong to.

      I'm actually baffled why an experienced iOS developer is surprised by any of the events that unfolded here.