956 Matching Annotations
  1. Last 7 days
    1. It requires but a moment's reflection to perceivethat even the vertical files with the correspondence binders arebut an imitation of a set of cards, on a larger scale. The set ofcards can fairly be regarded as the basis of the entire system,hence it is properly called the card system.

      He notes the general equivalency of cards and papers in vertical files.

      One of the primary affordances that individual atomic cards have is the ability to more easily re-arrange and reuse them for various purposes in comparison with larger sheets with greater amounts of data on them.

    2. The charging cabinet, which provides a system, by whichmaterials withdrawn from their places can be debitedto the person having possession of them for the timebeing, that is : each article is charged out to whoevercalls for it and is charged off when returned.
    1. waste people

      waste people seems to already be emerging as her catch-all term for the variety of euphemisms for the poor/lower classes

      see also the list at: https://hypothes.is/a/qmesAuoyEe6tq8NIATUmYQ

    2. It starts withthe rich and potent meaning that came with the different names given theAmerican underclass. Long before they were today’s “trailer trash” and“rednecks,” they were called “lubbers” and “rubbish” and “clay-eaters” and“crackers”—and that’s just scratching the surface.

      An interesting broad array of names for the "lower classes" in United States history.

    3. economic stratification createdby wealth and privilege.

      basic definition of class

      could probably do with some distinction of education as well....

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  2. Mar 2024
    1. . Positivism asserted that allcultures move through progressive stages of development: first the-ological, then metaphysical, and finally “positive.”
  3. Feb 2024
    1. HASDAY: The joke about criminal conversation is that it's not criminal, and it's not conversation. That's how you can remember it.BERAS: That's good.HASDAY: It's not criminal. It's not conversation.BERAS: It's sex. That's what it is - just sex. Essentially, you had sex with my wife. It was often the husband suing.
    1. Because “open” may face a similar fate as befell “design” and “innovation,” terms that are alternatively inspiring and incomprehensible, both motivation and muddled jargon.

      "Information" is another word that might fit into this group of over-saddled words.

    2. Because “open” may face a similar fate as befell “design” and “innovation,” terms that are alternatively inspiring and incomprehensible, both motivation and muddled jargon.

      "Information" is another word that might fit into this group of over-saddled words.

    1. Together, over the years, they achieved what one of their earlymasters, Charles Ammi Cutter, called a “syndetic” structure—that is,a system of referential links—of remarkable coherency andresolution.

      reference for this?


      definition: syndetic structure is one of coherency and resolution made up by referential links.

      Why is no one using this word in the zettelkasten space?


      The adjective "syndetic" means "serving to connect" or "to be connected by a conjunction". (A conjunction being a word used to connect words, phrases and clauses, for example: and, but, if). The antonym is "asyndetic" (connections made without conjoins)

    2. “Library hand” was a special kind ofbackward-slanting penmanship meant specically for card catalogs,and taught in library school through the 1920s.
    1. One of Murray’s most helpful advisers on American words was aGerman living in Boston, Carl Wilhelm Ernst. Ernst was a journalist, theeditor of the Beacon newspaper, and a former Lutheran minister who hadmoved to America when he was eighteen years old. Murray wrote to thejournalist in a panic when completing the entry for public school. ‘In workingat this, I overlooked the fact that we had nothing for the US use, and findmyself now almost stranded, and unable to complete the article.’ He wrote toErnst asking for illustrative quotations and for clarification on the Americansense of the word: ‘It is said to be synonymous with Common School. I donot know which of these is the official appellation, and which the popular, orwhether they are both so used. We should like to know this. The designationin England has a long and rather complicated history coming down from theL. publican schola, which is already used by Jerome of Quintilian.’Murray started the entry by defining the use of public school in Englandas ‘originally a grammar-school founded or endowed for the use or benefit ofthe public’ but more recently, in the nineteenth century, as ‘the old endowedgrammar-schools as have developed into large boarding-schools, drawingfrom the well-to-do classes of all parts of the country or of the empire’. Henoted that ‘the ancient endowed grammar-schools or colleges of Eton,Winchester, Westminster, Harrow, Rugby, Charterhouse, Shrewsbury’ aresometimes referred to as ‘the Seven Public Schools’. He contrasted this senseof public school with that in Scotland, the British colonies and the UnitedStates of America, as a school provided at the public expense, usually free.Above six American quotations spanning from 1644 to 1903, Murray added alengthy note, thanks to Ernst’s advice, ‘The term has been used in NewEngland and Pennsylvania from the 17th c., and has been adopted in all Statesof the American Union. An early synonym was “free school”, and a later onein some States, “common school” which is now however generally confined toa school of the lowest grade or “public elementary school”.’

      I recently heard someone talking about the differences in public vs. private schools in Britain and America as having opposite definitions.

    1. The experiences of the atomic scientists clearly show the need to takepersonal responsibility, the danger that things will move too fast, andthe way in which a process can take on a life of its own. We can, as theydid, create insurmountable problems in almost no time flat. We mustdo more thinking up front if we are not to be similarly surprised andshocked by the consequences of our inventions.

      Bill Joy's mention that insurmountable problems can "take on a life of [their] own" is a spectacular reason for having a solid definition of what "life" is, so that we might have better means of subverting it in specific and potentially catastrophic situations.

    2. The only realistic alternative I see is relinquishment: to limit de-velopment of the technologies that are too dangerous, by limiting ourpursuit of certain kinds of knowledge.
    3. Among the cognoscenti of nanotechnology, this threat has becomeknown as the “gray goo problem.” Though masses of uncon-trolled replicators need not be gray or gooey, the term “gray goo”emphasizes that replicators able to obliterate life might be less in-spiring than a single species of crabgrass. They might be superiorin an evolutionary sense, but this need not make them valuable.

      quote in Bill Joy originally from the book Engines of Creation.

  4. Jan 2024
    1. Definitions. The central sliding part of the rule is called theslide, the other part the body. The glass runner is called the indi-cator and the line on the indicator is referred to as the hairline.

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    1. The Charging This consists in its interior arrangement ofCabinet rows of pigeon-holes constructed on an inclineupwards so that the base of each horizontalrow of pigeon-holes is higher than its predecessor. Into thesepigeon-holes the charging shps are placed and there is a guidecard to each pigeon-hole marking the divisions of the charging slipsby giving the number of the slip which is to be filed immediatelybehind it.

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

      Which came first?

    1. Top-down approaches work in the opposite direction. Instead of allowing the materials to inform the whole, a perception of what the whole should be determines which materials are allowed to be used. It's "having an overarching concept before working out the details."5

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

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

    2. working "bottom-up" pertains to the manner in which a sense of wholeness and coherence emerges from the information collected from the individual components that constitute or contribute to the whole.
    1. Curly Cruene Cahall has a practice of "scouting and excavating" books. His first read sounds closest to Adler's inspectional read, though Cahall says his first run through is for "entertainment". Follow this he reads in a more targeted manner which he calls "excavating", which ostensibly entails excerpting the most salient and interesting points for use in his own work.

    1. ( 1) The rearranging of the file, as I have already said, isone way. One simply dumps out heretofore disconnectedfolders, mixing up their contents, and then re-sorts themmany times. How often and how extensively one does thiswill of course vary with different problems and the devel-opment of their solutions. But in general the mechanics ofit are as simple as that.

      The first part of "sociological imagination" for Mills is what I term combinatorial creativity. In his instance, at varying intervals he dumps out disconnected ideas, files and resorts them to find interesting potential solutions.

    1. ll this raises the question of what “capitalism” is to begin with, aquestion on which there is no consensus at all. The word wasoriginally invented by socialists, who saw capitalism as that systemwhereby those who own capital command the labor of those who donot.

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    1. It has been said that “it is possible to write endlessly on elliptic curves.” 2We heartily agree with this sentiment, but have attempted to resist succumb-ing to its blandishments.

      : blandishments ; a flattering or pleasing statement or action used to persuade someone gently to do something.

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    1. The Evaporative Cooling Effect describes the phenomenon that high value contributors leave a community because they cannot gain something from it, which leads to the decrease of the quality of the community. Since the people most likely to join a community are those whose quality is below the average quality of the community, these newcomers are very likely to harm the quality of the community. With the expansion of community, it is very hard to maintain the quality of the community.

      via ref to Xianhang Zhang in Social Software Sundays #2 – The Evaporative Cooling Effect « Bumblebee Labs Blog [archived] who saw it

      via [[Eliezer Yudkowsky]] in Evaporative Cooling of Group Beliefs

    1. Venkatesh Rao thinks that the Nazi bar analogy is “an example of a bad metaphor contagion effect” and points to a 2010 post of his about warren vs plaza architectures. He believes that Twitter, for example, is a plaza, whereas Substack is a warren: A warren is a social environment where no participant can see beyond their little corner of a larger maze. Warrens emerge through people personalizing and customizing their individual environments with some degree of emergent collaboration. A plaza is an environment where you can easily get to a global/big picture view of the whole thing. Plazas are created by central planners who believe they know what’s best for everyone.
  5. Dec 2023
    1. And now I will introduce a phrase,New Encyclopedism. I want to suggestthat something which for a time I shallcall World Encyclopedia is the meanswhereby we can solve the problem ofthat jigsaw puzzle and bring all the scat-tered and ineffective mental wealth ofour world into something like a commonunderstanding and into effective reac-tion upon our political, social, and eco-nomic life.

      Is it the dramatically increased complexity of a polity so organized that prevents it from being organized in the first place? If some who believe in conspiracies or who can't come to terms with the complexity of evolution and prefer to rely on God as a motivating factor similarly can't come to terms with such a complex society, could it be formed? Many today have issues with the complexity of international trade much less more complex forms of organization.

      Might there be a way to leverage "God" sociologically to improve upon this as the motivating force instead? Could that or something similar be a solution?

    2. I dislike isolated events anddisconnected details. I really hate state-ments, views, prejudices, and beliefsthat jump at you suddenly out of mid-air.

      Wells would really hate social media, which he seems to have perfectly defined with this statement.

    1. bluebooks

      : a register especially of socially prominent persons

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  6. Nov 2023
    1. Ashby came up with the concept of variety as a measurement of the number of possible states of a system. His "Law" of Requisite Variety stated that for a system to be stable, the number of states that its control mechanism is capable of attaining (its variety) must be greater than or equal to the number of states in the system being controlled.
    1. he also demonstrated unfailing empathy andgenuine commitment to their progress.

      this is a good start at a definition of teaching

    2. The humanities are intrinsically creative andinnovative. They are about originality and invention, notdiscovery. This is precisely Eco’s testimony; even more thana technical manual, this book is an invitation to ingenuity, atribute to imagination.
    1. The role of stylistic indicators of temporal andspatial location and orientation—those “pointing words”that linguists refer to as deictics—is essential to thecreation of this general effect.

      Deixis is the use of words and phrases to refer to a specific time, place, or person in context. Usually their semantic meaning is fixed but their denoted meaning varies depending on contextual cues of time and/or place.

      Examples include the do-, ko-, so-, a- progression (dore, kore, sore, are; docchi, kocchi, socchi, acchi, etc.) serve this function of distance from the speaker.

    1. Good tools for thought should be more than just substitutions for tools or methods one had before.

      In fact, any tool or technology, if valuable, should allow for the leverage of extension and transformation, otherwise is it really a tool?

  7. Oct 2023
    1. Zettlekasten is an index card method of storing notes for future use. Popularized by Ryan Holiday, author of The Obstacle is The Way, the Zettlekasten system has gained a lot of traction in recent years. YouTuber Greg Wheeler, in this short but very detailed video, shares how he integrates the Zettlekasten system with Tiago Forte’s second brain methodology in a complete walkthrough:

      We have now reached peak zettelkasten-I-just-don't-know-what-the-definition-even-is-anymore. And this is a Substack focused on productivity.

      The definition of zettelkasten here is the lowest possible version.

      It's (falsely, I think) described as "popularized by Ryan Holiday" who has a form of practice, but doesn't describe it as zettelkasten. (Has he ever used the word on his blog? There's one throw away mention to it and Luhmann #, Google doesn't find any others.)

      Then as a cherry on top, he presents a mélange of methods as a Hybrid PKM system.

    1. The special quality that a syntopical analysis tries to achievecan, indeed, be summarized in the two words "dialecticalobjectivity."The syntopical reader, in short, tries to look at aU sidesand to take no sides. Of course, he will fail in this exactingideal. Absolute objectivity is not humanly possible. He maysucceed in taking no sides, presenting the issues without prejudice to any partisan point of view, and treating opposing viewsimpartially. But it is easier to take no sides than to look at allsides. In this latter respect, the syntopical reader will undoubtedly fail. All possible sides of an issue cannot be exhaustively enumerated. Nevertheless, he must try.

      compare with historical objectivity, scientific objectivity, other definitions of objectivity in general.

    2. If it requires too many words, you have not seen theunity but a multiplicity.

      How are they defining "multiplicity" here? There seems to be a tacit definition with respect to being in opposition to "unity" (of a work), but not an explicit one. It also seems to be a shaded meaning with respect to the more common one.

      unity: essence, core, coherence, oneness

      They use the word "multiplicity" in the usual sense of large number or multitude on p55: "The multiplicity of the rules indicates the complexity of the one habit to be formed, not a plurality of distinct habits."

      They also revisit it in the upcoming section: "Mastering the Multiplicity: The Art of Outlining a Book" on p88

      Perhaps its just me but there's a linguistic "softness" of the uses of unity and multiplicity here with respect to 2023. Though these two opposites fit the dictionary definitions of their words, is it possible that this softness is the result of a sort of historical linguistic shift I'm feeling in these words? I can't quite put my finger on it, but perhaps it's the relationship of unity to religion? Neither seem to be frequently used these days.

      The Ngram Viewer shows peaks for the use of unity in 1660 and 1960 of almost 75% higher usage compared to a broader historical average. It is generally waning since. Multiplicity has about 1/4 the use of unity and has remained flat over time. What caused the peaks in the use of "unity" during these periods? This 1972 use was on the downslope of the 1960s peak. Was it used in the 1940 version?

      The 20th century increase in the use of unity begins around 1914 and may have been related to political shades of meaning going into WWI with another marked rise in the lead up to WW2.

    3. Analytical reading is preeminently for thesake of understanding.
    4. The unity of a novel is not the sameas the unity of a treatise on politics; nor are the parts of thesame sort, or ordered in the same way. But every book without exception that is worth reading at all has a unity and anorganization of parts.

      first appearance of "unity" in the book (outside of community and opportunity).

    5. Natural Philosophy

      early phrase for "science"

    6. Since titles and subject-matter names are not likely to helpus determine whether a book is philosophical or scientific, howcan we tell? There is one criterion that we think always works,although you may have to read a certain amount of the bookbefore you can apply it. If a theoretical book emphasizesthings that lie outside the scope of your normal, routine, dailyexperience, it is a scientific work. If not, it is philosophical.
    7. story is chronotopic. Chronos is the Greek word fortime, topos the Greek word for place.
    8. books of normative philosophy concern themselvesprimarily with the goals all men ought to seek-goals such asleading a good life or instituting a good society-and, unlikecookbooks and driving manuals, they go no further than prescribing in the most universal terms the means that ought tobe employed in order to achieve these goals.
    9. This book is practical, not theoretical. Any guidebook isa practical book. Any book that tells you either what youshould do or how to do it is practical. Thus you see that theclass of practical books includes all expositions of arts to belearned, all manuals of practice in any field, such as engineering or medicine or cooking, and all treatises that are conveniently classified as moral, such as books on economic,ethical, or political problems. We will later explain why thislast group of books, properly called "normative," constitutes avery special category of practical books.
    1. He proposes that an expert is an individual who has a great number of stories relevant to a given area and has these stories indexed so that he/she can tell a useful story at the right time.

      Roger Shank's definition of an expert

    1. Fagles opts for midriff, which once meant “diaphragm” in English but today makes it sound like Sarpedon was speared somewhere between his low-rise jean shorts and his crop top.

      phrenes - a word connected in ancient Greece to the idea of respiration and of the soul

    1. phosphenes

      A ring or spot of light produced by pressure on the eyeball or direct stimulation of the visual system other than by light.

    2. Klüver form-constants

      Geometric patterns observed during altered states of consciousness which resemble tunnels, spirals, honeycombs, gratings, and cobwebs.

    3. qualia

      Instances of subjective, conscious experience.

  8. Sep 2023
    1. problem of defining social science
    2. We use the term"canonical" to refer to such books; in an older tradition wemight have called them "sacred" or "holy," but those wordsno longer apply to all such works, though they still apply tosome of them.

      they provide a broader definition of sacred/holy texts that extend to books which form the basis of a groups' identity and often involve orthodoxy.

      relation to politics, gender identity, cults, etc.

    3. What does active reading entail? We will return to this question many times in this book. For the moment, it suffices to say that, given the sam<' thing to read, one person reads it better than another, first, by reading it more actively, and second, by performing each of the acts involved more skill­fully.

      Initial stab at a definition of "active reading"

    4. The first is a commonplace.

      Interesting use of the word commonplace here. Used in the philosophical sense rather than the meanings of "everyday" or "commonplace book".

    1. civil peace the kind of peace that 00:29:37 exists in the United States in California in Illinois in Chicago and New York where people are living under government where they can settle their differences by recourse to law by request to government rather than to 00:29:49 fighting

      Based on Hobbes' definition of war, the left and the right in America are currently either at war or on the brink, because we are slowly coming to the point at which our differences can't or won't be decided by our recourse to law, which is actively moving against the will of the larger majority of Americans.

    1. I mean, just what I said. If you adapt the zettelkasten to meet knowledge management needs, that’s great. But it does need adapting (as your examples, none of which are conversation-partner zettelkästen but, as syntopicon implies, a collection of information gathered into categories) and is not the best way to do it. (Edit: Ryan Holiday’s system is, by his own admission, not a zettelkästen despite being a bunch of cards with notes on them categorized in a box). Even the source you use about Goitein admits that he was more in the commonplace book tradition, and that other people’s use of his cards is not common to the point of being remarked on here. He doesn’t even call it a zettelkästen, and shouldn’t. There’s not even links or reference numbers, which are integral to the ZK system.It’s not an argument. But as with everything ymmv.(For what it’s worth, my ZK is extremely specific to my individual projects and readings. But I imagine that yes, with time and heavy adaptations, you can make it into little more than a record of my knowledge into broad topics. That you can use it that way does not mean that’s what it is for.)

      reply to u/glugolly at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/16njtfx/comment/k1l8lyk/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

      How is it that you're defining knowledge management or knowledge management system?

      I would argue that any zettelkasten of any stripe is taking knowledge/ideas from either content or one's own brain and transferring them into some sort of media by which they are managed or structured in some way for later linking, combination, or other reuse. By base definition this is clearly knowledge management. I don't know how one defines it otherwise except by pure denial.

      Your view of zettelkasten seems remarkably narrow. As a small sample the original Maschinen der Phantasie Marbach exhibition in 2013, which broadly prefigured the popularization of zettelkasten (and in particular the launch of zettelkasten.de) which we see today featured six zettelkasten of which Luhmann's was the only one with reference numbers or what we might now consider explicit HTML-like links. Most of the others contained either explicit groupings or implied links, but that doesn't diminish the value they held for their creators for creating a conversation of ideas for them. Incidentally most of the zettelkasten featured there prefigured Luhmann's and only two were roughly contemporaneous with his.

      If you look more closely at Adler, et al. you'll notice that the entire purpose of their enterprise was to create and nurture a conversation between themselves and their readers with texts and authors spanning over 2,500 years, a point which is underlined by the introductory volume which preceded the two volumes of the Syntopicon. Not coincidentally, that first volume of the 54 book series was entitled "The Great Conversation."

      Specifically from Adler's "How to Read a Book", the first edition of which predated the Great Books of the Western World:

      Reading a book should be a conversation between you and the author.

      This is a process which is effectuated by

      Marking a book is literally an expression of your differences or your agreements with the author. It is the highest respect you can pay him.

      and later,

      That is to make notes about the shape of the discussion-the discussion that is engaged in by all of the authors, even if unbeknownst to them. For reasons that will become clear in Part Four, we prefer to call such notes dialectical.

      (As an aside, why aren't more people talking about the nature of dialectical notes, which seem far more important and useful than either fleeting notes and permanent notes?)

      In your link to Holiday, he doesn't say his system isn't a zettelkasten, a word which an English speaker was highly unlikely to have used in 2013 in any case, even when referencing Manfred Kuehn from 2007. It simply indicates that "[Luhmann's] discipline seems to exceed mine because I am a lot less ordered".

      The Goitein source (which I wrote) may use commonplace book as a descriptor but that doesn't mitigate the fact that the entirety of the zettelkasten tradition arises from it (the primary difference being things written (usually) on bound pages versus slips of paper). Before these there was the closely related idea of florilegia stemming from the earlier locus communis (Latin) and tópos koinós (Greek).

    1. Characteristic path length (CPL)

      Broadly refers to how efficiently information is transferred within a neural network of the brain. Important for measuring and analyzing brain connectivity patterns.

    2. transitivity

      Broadly refers to how interconnected or organized a neural network of the brain is. Important for understanding the structure and function of neural networks.

    3. delta (1–4 Hz) frequency band

      A range of frequencies which appear on EEG recordings and which denote the occurrence of NREM sleep (deep, dreamless sleep).

    4. negative EEG peak amplitude

      EEG recording of the brain exhibiting a downward deflection/decrease in electrical activity when compared to baseline.

    5. coordinated bistability

      The ability of neuronal networks to coordinate activity between two stable states, e.g., between high activity (high rate of depolarization) and low activity (high rate of hyperpolarization).

    6. spectral power

      The intensity/magnitude of electrical activity at specific frequencies (in this case, the delta band) within a neural signal measured using EEG.

  9. www.ingeniousink.co.uk www.ingeniousink.co.uk
    1. https://www.ingeniousink.co.uk/frog

      “Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.” - Mark Twain

      Frogs are tasks that you’ve been putting off for a long time which somehow never get around to.

      Is the Twain attribution true?

  10. Aug 2023
    1. As Catherine Cronin (2017, p. 2) has explained,“Open educational practices (OEP) is a broad descriptor ofpractices that include the creation, use, and reuse of openeducational resources (OER) as well as open pedagogies andopen sharing of teaching practices.”
    1. I doubtthat, if it were possible to arouse real interest in cowmanshipand its various contexts "and to train up a generation of ac-complished cowboys through the educational system, itwould be in the public interest to dedicate the educationalsystem to this purpose.

      note use of "train up" which now seems more like British English usage in 2023

    2. Inthe educational system generally the actual conditions ofpractice cannot be successfully imitated; and the pupil is notcommitted to the occupation.Since the pupil is not committed to the occupation, theproposition that the occupations that are to be studied arethose which are indicated by the needs and interests of thepupil at the time is alarming.

      There is a subtle definition of the word "committed" here.

    3. He believed in his own conception ofliberal education for all and looked upon any kind of trainingdirected to learning a trade, solely to make a living at it, asnarrowing and illiberal.

      definitions: illiberal

    4. Dewey's chief reason for this recommendation is found inhis psychology of learning. "An occupation is a continuousactivity having a purpose. Education through occupations con-sequently combines within itself more of the factors condu-cive to learning than any other method. It calls instincts andhabits into play; it is a foe to passive receptivity. It has anend in view; results are to be accomplished. Hence it appealsto thought; it demands that an idea of an end be steadilymaintained, so that activity must be progressive, leadingfrom one stage to another; observation and ingenuity are re-quired at each stage to overcome obstacles and to discoverand readjust means of execution.

      Purpose for the work involved or purpose for the worker? Does it show a shift to living to work or working to live here?

    1. "in his youth he was full of vim and vigor"

      Do calcified words eventually cease to have any definition over time? That is they have a stand alone definition, then a definition within their calcified phrase, then they cease to have any stand alone definition at all though they continue existence only in those calcified phrases.

    1. In a workist culture that believes dignity is grounded in accomplishment, simply reclaiming this alternative form of dignity becomes a radical act.

      Workist cultures are built on the principle that identity, worth, and dignity are grounded in an individual's accomplishments.

    1. "But there's a very famous theorem in topology called the Jordan curve theorem. You have a plane and on it a simple curve that doesn't intersect and closes—in other words, a loop. There's an inside and an outside to the loop." As Riehl draws this, it seems obvious enough, but here's the problem: No matter how much your intuition tells you that there must be an inside and an outside, it's very hard to prove mathematically that this holds true for any loop that can be drawn.

      How does one concretely define "inside" and "outside"? This definition is part of the missing space between the intuition and the mathematical proof.

  11. Jul 2023
    1. Chesterton's fence (uncountable) (public policy) The principle that reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood.

      A notion mentioned by [[Daniel Schmachtenberger]] during his interview with [[Curt Jaimungal]].

    1. Prohibited wildlife species in private possession, or distributed intrastate, are fungible commodities that cannot be differentiated, in terms of control, from prohibited wildlife species possessed or distributed interstate.

      Fungible: items that are equivalent or consist of many identical parts such that, for practical purposes, they are interchangeable.

      Commodity: an economic good, usually a resource, that has full or substantial fungibility: that is, the market treats instances of the good as equivalent or nearly so with no regard to who produced them.

  12. Jun 2023
    1. The progressives say that the only kind ofmeaningful motivation comes through interest and absorption in the task orsubject itself: it’s called ‘intrinsic motivation’ in the jargon.
    1. a novel concept called Controlled Digital Lending (CDL).CDL, developed as a legal theory a bit more than a decade ago by the Georgetown University professor and law librarian Michelle Wu, asserts that libraries have a right to create digital surrogates for their collections, enabling each library to loan out either the digital version or the hard copy of any material it owns (but not both at the same time).
    1. Rütiner’s manuscripts, known as the Commentationes – a term meaning ‘studies’ or ‘treatise’ – were long dismissed by historians as a gossipy record that had none of the gravitas of the more publicly oriented chronicles of urban life kept by his more scholarly and respected peers.
  13. May 2023
    1. @chrisaldrich, I appreciate your feedback. Indeed there is magic in making notes which comes not only from finding connections in the ZK but also from making connections in mind. Maybe I'm confused. A mindset that makes note-making fun is one way to recruit the body's dopamine mechanism. This creates a positive feedback loop. More mote-making turns to more dopamine which turns to more note-making. Maybe even some notes on dopamine. (I have 11 already!) My sense of Luhmann's phrase "second memory" is a rehashing of an idea—a continued exploration. Using the ZK method is one way of formalizing the continued review of ideas. Without a formal process, it is too easy to fall into old bad habits and not work towards "the serendipity of combinatorial creativity. "

      Reply to Will Simpson at https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/comment/17939/#Comment_17939

      There should be more conversation about zettelkasten as both a "ratchet" as well as a "flywheeel". Sometimes I feel like it's hard to speak of these things for either lack of appropriate words/naming and/or having a shared vocabulary for them.

      Even Luhmann's "second memory" has a mushiness to it, but I certainly see your sense of it as a thing which moves forward. I have the same sort of sense with the Aboriginal cultural idea of a "songline" which acts as both a noun as well as having an internal sense of being a verb to me. The word "google" has physically and specifically undergone the transition from noun to verb in a way which "second memory" and "songline" haven't, though perhaps they should? The difference is that the word google is much more concrete and simple while second memory and songline have a lot more cultural material and meaning sitting with them if you know them and their fuller attendant practices.

    1. Citing the work of a number of prominent scholars on the style of kwela she states, “Academics who have written about kwela have been no more precise, or more in agreement with one another, about the boundaries of this musical style” (Allen 1993, 58).
    1. Jared Henderson defines commonplace books as only containing the thoughts of others collected while reading. In the following breath, he then says he writes summaries of his own ideas and then creates links between the ideas...

    1. Apophenia (/æpoʊˈfiːniə/) is the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things.[1] The term (German: Apophänie from the Greek verb ἀποφαίνειν (apophaínein)) was coined by psychiatrist Klaus Conrad in his 1958 publication on the beginning stages of schizophrenia.[2] He defined it as "unmotivated seeing of connections [accompanied by] a specific feeling of abnormal meaningfulness".[3][4] He described the early stages of delusional thought as self-referential over-interpretations of actual sensory perceptions, as opposed to hallucinations.[1][5]

      link to: - https://boffosocko.com/2022/05/14/55804938/ - Aby Warburg's coinage of Verknüpfungszwang

    1. Not everyone values marginalia, said Paul Ruxin, a member of the Caxton Club. “If you think about the traditional view that the book is only about the text,” he said, “then this is kind of foolish, I suppose.”

      A book can't only be about the text, it has to be about the reader's interaction with it and thoughts about it. Without these, the object has no value.

      Annotations are the traces left behind of how one valued a book as they read and interacted with it.

    2. association copies — books once owned or annotated by the authors

      An association copy is a copy of a book which belonged to the author or someone connected to them or a copy of a book that once belonged to someone particularly associated with its contents, often annotated.


      I've got association copies of some information theory texts...

  14. Apr 2023
    1. A writer collective is a set of editorial and financial structures designed to give writers the autonomy and upside that they get from writing alone, and the support and security they get from working for a media company. 

      If the "whole is greater than the sum of its parts" who benefits from the excess value and how is that economically broken up in a fair manner?

    1. cogitations

      A serious thought; a carefully considered reflection.

    2. squalid,

      Dirty or deteriorated, especially from poverty or lack of care.

    3. quadrangles

      In modern college parlance - a quad - a courtyard surrounded on all four sides by buildings.

    1. If there is a core theme to the formal position it is that education isabout passing on information; for formalists, culture and civilization represent astore of ideas and wisdom which have to be handed on to new generations.Teaching is at the heart of this transmission; and the process of transmission iseducation.
    2. best reading, latest school start age—is sometimes called the‘Finnish paradox’

      The Finnish paradox stems from the fact that despite Finland having one of the latest school start ages in the world (at the age of 7), they also have one of the highest literacy achievements as well.

      The paradox is only perceived by those who may feel that hammering knowledge into children's heads from a young age is the best method of education.

    1. The result of working with this technique for a long time is a kind of second memory, an alter ego with which you can always communicate. It has, similar to our own memory, no pre-planned comprehensive order, no hierarchy, and surely no linear structure like a book. And by that very fact, it is alive independently of its author. The entire note collection can only be described as a mess, but at least it is a mess with a non-arbitrary internal structure.

      Luhmann attributes (an independent) life to his zettelkasten. It is effectuated by internal branching, opportunities for links or connections, and a register as well as lack of pre-planned comprehensive order, lack of hierarchy, and lack of linear structure.

      Which of these is necessary for other types of "life"? Can any be removed? Compare with other systems.

    2. A content-based system (like a book’s table of contents) would mean that you would have to adhere to a single structure forever (decades in advance!).

      Potential definition of a table of contents: A table of contents is a linear ordering or traversal of of specific material which could potentially be found within an index.

    3. It is an obligatory condition for communication that both partners can surprise each other. Only in that way can information be created in the respective other. Information is an event that happens inside the system. Information is created when a message, an entry [of a note], is compared with other possibilities. Therefore, information is only created in systems that possess a comparison schema (even when this schema is merely: “this or something else”).
    1. In Notes, writers will be able to post short-form content and share ideas with each other and their readers. Like our Recommendations feature, Notes is designed to drive discovery across Substack. But while Recommendations lets writers promote publications, Notes will give them the ability to recommend almost anything—including posts, quotes, comments, images, and links.

      Substack slowly adding features and functionality to make them a full stack blogging/social platform... first long form, then short note features...

      Also pushing in on Twitter's lunch as Twitter is having issues.

    1. How do I store when coming across an actual FACT? .t3_12bvcmn._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; } questionLet's say I am trying to absorb a 30min documentary about the importance of sleep and the term human body cells is being mentioned, I want to remember what a "Cell" is so I make a note "What is a Cell in a Human Body?", search the google, find the definition and paste it into this note, my concern is, what is this note considered, a fleeting, literature, or permanent? how do I tag it...

      reply to u/iamharunjonuzi at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/12bvcmn/how_do_i_store_when_coming_across_an_actual_fact/

      How central is the fact to what you're working at potentially developing? Often for what may seem like basic facts that are broadly useful, but not specific to things I'm actively developing, I'll leave basic facts like that as short notes on the source/reference cards (some may say literature notes) where I found them rather than writing them out in full as their own cards.

      If I were a future biologist, as a student I might consider that I would soon know really well what a cell was and not bother to have a primary zettel on something so commonplace unless I was collecting various definitions to compare and contrast for something specific. Alternately as a non-biologist or someone that doesn't use the idea frequently, then perhaps it may merit more space for connecting to others?

      Of course you can always have it written along with the original source and "promote" it to its own card later if you feel it's necessary, so you're covered either way. I tend to put the most interesting and surprising ideas into my main box to try to maximize what comes back out of it. If there were 2 more interesting ideas than the definition of cell in that documentary, then I would probably leave the definition with the source and focus on the more important ideas as their own zettels.

      As a rule of thumb, for those familiar with Bloom's taxonomy in education, I tend to leave the lower level learning-based notes relating to remembering and understanding as shorter (literature) notes on the source's reference card and use the main cards for the higher levels (apply, analyze, evaluate, create).

      Ultimately, time, practice, and experience will help you determine for yourself what is most useful and where. Until you've developed a feel for what works best for you, just write it down somewhere and you can't really go too far wrong.

  15. Mar 2023
    1. Ein Zettel, auf den kein anderer Zettel verweist, ist kein Zettel

      —Detlef Stern, 2023-03-21, https://mastodon.social/@t73fde/110062851811483123

      A note not referenced by another note is not a note. (translation mine)

    1. Based on the history and usage of horreum here in this first episode of the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae podcast, a project featuring a 10+ million slip zettelkasten at its core, I can't help but think that not only is the word ever so apropos for an introduction, but it does quite make an excellent word for translating the idea of card index in English or Zettelkasten from German into Latin.

      My horreum is a storehouse for my thoughts and ideas which nourishes my desire to discover and build upon my knowledge.

      This seems to be just the sort of thing that Jeremy Cherfas might appreciate on multiple levels.

      https://mcdn.podbean.com/mf/download/nxm28u/Horreum.mp3

    1. Oxford English Dictionary first attests 'commonplace' (from the Latin 'locus communis') asnoun in 1531 and a verb in 1656; 'excerpt' (from the Latin 'excerpere') as a verb in 1536 and anoun in 1656.

      The split between the ideas of commonplace book and zettelkasten may stem from the time period of the Anglicization of the first. If Gessner was just forming the tenets of a zettelkasten practice in 1548 and the name following(?) [what was the first use of zettelkasten?] while the word commonplace was entering English in 1531 using a book format, then the two traditions would likely have been splitting from that point forward in their different areas.

    1. the Content Index Card is a combination type of index card that includes direct quotations, draft notes and ideas, conceptual diagrams, etc. that are all associated with the main article, book chapter or book discussed in the index card. I use larger (5″ x 8″) index cards for those cases.

      Pacheco-Vega defines a "combined" or "content index card" or one might say a content note as a one with "direct quotations, draft notes and ideas, conceptual diagrams, etc. that are associated with" the work in question. These seem similar to Ahrens' fleeting notes, though seem a bit more fleshed out.

    1. I guess a collection of notes is now a zettelkasten.

      Don't be blinded by availability bias. It was historically almost always thus! Especially in Germany. (The French have traditionally called it a fichier boîte and in English it's the card index.) It's only been since the rise in popularity of the use of the German word in English (beginning in late 2013 with zettelkasten.de) where it has almost always been associated with Niklas Luhmann that has has most people now associating Luhmann's method with the word Zettelkasten.

      If you look back at the 2013 exhibition "Zettelkästen. Machines of Fantasy" at the Museum of Modern Literature, Marbach am Neckar, you'll notice that there were six zettelkasten featured there including those of Arno Schmidt, Walter Kempowski, Friedrich Kittler, Aby Warburg, Paul, Blumenberg, and Luhmann. Of those, the structure of Luhmann's was the exception which wasn't primarily organized broadly by subject heading. You'll also find some historians and sociologists organizing theirs by date or geographic regions as well as other custom arrangements as their needs and work might dictate.

      The preponderance of books talking about these note taking methods suggest a topic heading arrangement for filing, including the book by Johnannes Erich Heyde from which Luhmann's son has indicated he learned an old technique from which he evolved his own practice.

      See also:

      Rarely does a week go by that I don't run across another new/significant example of a zettelkasten. Thanks u/atomicnotes for keeping up the pace with James Peter Zollinger. (Though this week may be a twofer given my notes on Ludwig Wittgenstein's over the last few days.)

    1. Nachlass

      Nachlass<br /> : a German word, used in academia to describe the collection of manuscripts, notes, correspondence, and so on left behind when a scholar dies.

      compounding of nach as "after", and the verb lassen meaning "to leave".

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    1. A “Collaboration Artist” knows how to bring people together,enroll them in a common mission, create idea flow, and translateideas into new solutions to solve problems and drive achievement ofimportant goals.

      compare this with tummeling

      What is the overlap? How do they differ?

    1. Why "Verity"?<br /> by Richard Rhodes

      Richard Rhodes uses the word verity rather than non-fiction as a means of defining his writing work in a more positive framing rather than defining it as the opposite of fiction (i.e. non-fiction).

    1. The Hipster PDA (Parietal Disgorgement Aid) is a fully extensible system for coordinating incoming and outgoing data for any aspect of your life and work.

      definition of hipster PDA, a backronym for Personal Digital Assistant (PDA).

    1. Nor does the cycles thesis have much to say about what social scientists call policy entrenchment—the way new policies outlast the coalition that created them.

      Policy entrenchment is when policies outlast the people, movements, or coalitions that created those policies.

    1. A Zettelkasten is a system of notes that fit the criteria of being a system. Being alive vs. being a machine is a good metaphor to understand the difference. A Zettelkasten is alive, a conventional note taking system is a machine.

      I'm not the only one to think of zettelkasten as "living"...

    2. Luhmann’s Zettelkasten does not show the Zettelkasten Method

      what is the meaning of "the" here (which is italicized for emphasis)?!?

  16. Feb 2023
    1. Stop Procrastinating With Note-Taking Apps Like Obsidian, Roam, Logseq https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baKCC2uTbRc by Sam Matla

      sophisticated procrastination - tweaking one's system(s) or workflow with the anticipation it will help them in the long run when it is generally almost always make-work which helps them feel smart and/or productive. Having measurable results which can be used against specific goals will help weed this problem out.

    2. "Personal knowledge management is an aid to your work, not the work itself." —Sam Matla #

      This is entirely dependent on what and how you're doing it. If you're actively reading and annotating, and placing it somewhere, then that is the work, just in small progressive steps.

      He needs to be more specific about what he means by "personal knowledge management" as a definition of something.

    1. Part 1: What Do We Need? Denote as a Zettelkasten, 2023. https://share.tube/w/mu7fMr5RWMqetcZRXutSGF.

      It starts and ends with Denote, but has an excellent overview of the folgezettel debate (or should one use Luhmann-esque identifiers within their digital zettelkasten system?)


      Some of the tension within the folgezettel debate comes down to those who might prefer more refined evergreen (reusable) notes in many contexts, or those who have potentially shorter notes that fit within a train of thought (folgezettel) which helps to add some of the added context.

      The difference is putting in additional up-front work to more heavily decontextualize excerpts and make them reusable in more contexts, which has an uncertain future payoff versus doing a bit less contextualization as the note will speak to it's neighbors as a means of providing some of this context. With respect to reusing a note in a written work, one is likely to remove their notes and their neighbors to provide this context when needed for writing.


      (apparently I didn't save this note when I watched it prior to number 2, blech....)

    1. Odds ratios (ORs)

      A statistic that quantifies the strength of association between two events, A and B. It is the ratio of the odds of A in the presence of B, the odds of A in the absence of B, the odds of B in the presence of A, or the odds of B in the absence of A.

    2. probands

      A person that serves as the starting point for a genetic familial study.

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    1. The core of the system is a collection of shorter notes with links between them.

      anecdotal definition/summary of zettelkasten.

      I like the "shorter notes" idea here which would have arisen before the "atomic notes" or "evergreen notes" ideas.

    1. “I only dowhat is easy. I only write when I immediately know how to do it. If Ifalter for a moment, I put the matter aside and do something else.”(Luhmann et al., 1987, 154f.)[4]

      By "easy" here, I think he also includes the ideas of fun, interesting, pleasurable, and (Csikszentmihalyi's) flow.

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    1. The humanities are the process of pres-ervation and appropriation of that pastness, a process thatrequires specific skills acquired through practice, as all skillsare.
    1. Aesopian language is a means of communication with the intent to convey a concealed meaning to informed members of a conspiracy or underground movement, whilst simultaneously maintaining the guise of an innocent meaning to outsiders.

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

      Parents often use variations of double entendre to communicate between each other with out children understanding while present.

      It's also likely that Indigenous elders may use this sort of communication with uninitiated members nearby.

    1. a permanent note (according to Ahrens) is actually the name for both "zettels" (what Ahrens calls "the main notes in the slip box," or what many are now calling "zettels") and literature notes.

      a subtle catch about Ahrens' terminology

    1. Wer sich also solch einen hölzernen Lebenspartner aufzieht, wird nach einigen Jahren immer interessantere Antworten auf seine Fragen bekommen …

      google translate:

      So if you raise such a wooden life partner, you will get more and more interesting answers to your questions after a few years...

      I love the idea of rearing a zettelkasten as a "wooden life partner".

    1. “multiple storage”

      Within the history of personal knowledge management, one was often faced with where to store their notes so that it would be easy to find and use them again. Often this was done using slip methods by means of "multiple storage" by making multiple copies and filing them under various headings. This copying process was onerous and breaks the modern database principle "don't repeat yourself" (DRY).

      Alternate means of doing this include storing it in one place and then linking that location to multiple subject headings in an index, though this may cause issues of remembering which subject heading when there are many appropriate potential synonyms.

      Modern digital methods allow one to store a note in one location and refer to it in multiple ways electronically as well as with aliases.

    1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incremental_reading

      Incremental reading is spaced parallel reading of multiple sources with note taking and spaced repetition.


      It's not far from how I read and take notes myself, though I place less emphasis on the spaced repetition piece as I tend to run across things naturally within my note collection anyway.


      One of the major potential benefits of incremental reading (not mentioned in the Wikipedia article; is it in Wozniak's work?) is the increase of combinatorial creativity created by mixing a variety of topics simultaneously.

      There is also likely a useful diffuse thinking effect happening between reading sessions.

    1. careen

      careen<br /> turn (a ship) on its side for cleaning, caulking, or repair.

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    Annotators

    1. According to Shulman, "Cargo-cult is a belief that mock airplanes made of manure and straw-bale may summon the real airplanes who bring canned beef. Reverse cargo-cult is used by the political elites in countries lagging behind who proclaim that, in the developed world, airplanes are also made of manure and straw-bale, and there is also a shortage of canned beef."[29]

      "Екатерина Шульман: Практический Нострадамус, или 12 умственных привычек, которые мешают нам предвидеть будущее". vedomosti/ (in Russian). Retrieved 24 June 2021.


      A Note on the Cargo Cult of Zettelkasten

      Modern cargo cults can be seen in many technology and productivity spaces where people are pulled in by exaggerated (or sometimes even real claims) of productivity or the general "magic" of a technology or method.

      An example is Niklas Luhmann's use of his zettelkasten which has created a cargo cult of zettelkasten aspirants and users who read one or more of the short one page blog posts about his unreasonable productivity and try to mimic it without understanding the system, how it works, or how to make it work for them. They often spend several months collecting notes, and following the motions, but don't realize the promised gains and may eventually give up, sometimes in shame (or as so-called "rubbish men") while watching others still touting its use.

      To prevent one's indoctrination into the zettelkasten cult, I'll make a few recommendations:

      Distance yourself from the one or two page blog posts or the breathless YouTube delineations. Ask yourself very pointedly: what you hope to get out of such a process? What's your goal? Does that goal align with others' prior uses and their outcomes?

      Be careful of the productivity gurus who are selling expensive courses and whose focus may not necessarily be on your particular goals. Some are selling very pointed courses, which is good, while others are selling products which may be so broad that they'll be sure to have some success stories, but their hodge-podge mixture of methods won't suit your particular purpose, or worse, you'll have to experiment with pieces of their courses to discover what may suit your modes of working and hope they'll suffice in the long run. Some are selling other productivity solutions for task management like getting things done (GTD) or bullet journals, which can be a whole other cargo cults in and of themselves. Don't conflate these![^1] The only thing worse than being in a cargo cult is being in multiple at the same time.

      If you go the digital route, be extremely wary of shiny object syndrome. Everyone has a favorite tool and will advocate that it's the one you should be using. (Often their method of use will dictate how much they love it potentially over and above the affordances of the tool itself.) All of these tools can be endlessly configured, tweaked, or extended with plugins or third party services. Everyone wants to show you their workflow and set up, lots of which is based on large amounts of work and experimentation. Ignore 99.999% of this. Most tools are converging to a similar feature set, so pick a reasonable one that seems like it'll be around in 5 years (and which has export, just in case). Try out the very basic features for several months before you change anything. Don't add endless plugins and widgets. You're ultimately using a digital tool to recreate the functionality of index cards, a pencil, and a box. How complicated should this really be? Do you need to spend hundreds of hours tweaking your system to save yourself a few minutes a year? Be aware that far too many people touting the system and marketers talking about the tools are missing several thousands of years of uses of some of these basic literacy-based technologies. Don't join their island cult, but instead figure out how the visiting culture has been doing this for ages.[^2] Recall Will Hunting's admonition against cargo cults in education: “You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library.”[^3]

      Most people ultimately realize that the output of their own thinking is only as good as the inputs they're consuming. Leverage this from the moment you begin and ignore the short bite-sized advice for longer form or older advice from those with experience. You're much more likely to get more long term value out of reading Umberto Eco or Mortimer J. Adler & Charles van Doren[^4] than you are an equivalent amount of time reading blog posts, watching YouTube videos, or trolling social media like Reddit and Twitter.

      Realize that reaching your goal is going to take honest-to-goodness actual work, though there is potential for fun. No matter how shiny or optimized your system, you've still got to do the daily work of reading, watching, listening and using it to create anything. Focus on this daily work and don't get sidetracked by the minutiae of trying to shave off just a few more seconds.[^5] In short, don't get caught up in the "productivity porn" of it all. Even the high priest at whose altar they worship once wrote on a slip he filed:

      "A ghost in the note card index? Spectators visit [my office to see my notes] and they get to see everything and nothing all at once. Ultimately, like having watched a porn movie, their disappointment is correspondingly high." —Niklas Luhmann. <small>“Geist im Kasten?” ZKII 9/8,3. Niklas Luhmann-Archiv. Accessed December 10, 2021. https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/bestand/zettelkasten/zettel/ZK_2_NB_9-8-3_V. (Personal translation from German with context added.)</small>


      [^1] Aldrich, Chris. “Zettelkasten Overreach.” BoffoSocko (blog), February 5, 2022. https://boffosocko.com/2022/02/05/zettelkasten-overreach/.

      [^2]: Blair, Ann M. Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age. Yale University Press, 2010. https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300165395/too-much-know.

      [^3]: Good Will Hunting. Miramax, Lawrence Bender Productions, 1998.

      [^4]: Adler, Mortimer J., and Charles Van Doren. How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading. Revised and Updated edition. 1940. Reprint, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972.

      [^5]: Munroe, Randall. “Is It Worth the Time?” Web comic. xkcd, April 29, 2013. https://xkcd.com/1205/.


      Recommended resources

      Choose only one of the following and remember you may not need to read the entire work:

      Ahrens, Sönke. How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers. Create Space, 2017.

      Allosso, Dan, and S. F. Allosso. How to Make Notes and Write. Minnesota State Pressbooks, 2022. https://minnstate.pressbooks.pub/write/.

      Bernstein, Mark. Tinderbox: The Tinderbox Way. 3rd ed. Watertown, MA: Eastgate Systems, Inc., 2017. http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/TinderboxWay/index.html.

      Dow, Earle Wilbur. Principles of a Note-System for Historical Studies. New York: Century Company, 1924.

      Eco, Umberto. How to Write a Thesis. Translated by Caterina Mongiat Farina and Geoff Farina. 1977. Reprint, Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press, 2015. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/how-write-thesis.

      Gessner, Konrad. Pandectarum Sive Partitionum Universalium. 1st Edition. Zurich: Christoph Froschauer, 1548.

      Goutor, Jacques. The Card-File System of Note-Taking. Approaching Ontario’s Past 3. Toronto: Ontario Historical Society, 1980. http://archive.org/details/cardfilesystemof0000gout.

      Sertillanges, Antonin Gilbert, and Mary Ryan. The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods. First English Edition, Fifth printing. 1921. Reprint, Westminster, MD: The Newman Press, 1960. http://archive.org/details/a.d.sertillangestheintellectuallife.

      Webb, Sidney, and Beatrice Webb. Methods of Social Study. London; New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1932. http://archive.org/details/b31357891.

      Weinberg, Gerald M. Weinberg on Writing: The Fieldstone Method. New York, N.Y: Dorset House, 2005.

    1. ~ is a dimensional constant, called Planck’s constant, the value of whichdepends on what units one uses for time and for energy. It has the dimensions[energy] · [time] and its experimental values are1.054571726(47) × 10−34Joule · seconds = 6.58211928(15) × 10−16eV · seconds(eV is the unit of “electron-Volt”, the energy acquired by an electron movingthrough a one-Volt electric potential). The most natural units to use for quan-tum mechanical problems would be energy and time units chosen so that ~ = 1.
  17. Jan 2023
    1. Hermeneutic circle   In traditional humanities scholarship, the hermeneutic circle refers to the way in which we understand some part of a text in terms of our ideas about its overall structure and meaning -- but that we also, in a cyclic fashion, update our beliefs about the overall structure and meaning of a text in response to particular moments.
    2. Operationalization   Turning ideas into something we can measure off a data set.
    3. Signal  When a fact X is a signal of a fact Y, we mean simply that knowing X tells us something, or reduces our uncertainty about, Y. This usage contrasts a little with the standard use, where a signal often indicates some kind of intentionality (X is about Y), or agency (a person uses X deliberately to inform you about Y), or causality (X signals Y only if, for example, X preceeds Y in time).

      A reframing of the idea of a signal within a probability setting.

    1. We all know the eventual answer, which the discovery of genes made possible. Animals were simply trying to maximize the propagation of their own genetic codes. Curiously, this view—which eventually came to be referred to as neo-Darwinian—was developed largely by figures who considered themselves radicals of one sort or another.

      Neo-Darwinism: a modern version of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, incorporating the findings of genetics.

    1. One common definition of ‘writing’ is that it is written language, i.e. not only acts as a notational system but one which has a connection to the phonetic form of the language spoken by the writer (Van de Mieroop Reference Van de Mieroop1999).
    2. We also demonstrate that the <Y> sign, one of the most frequently occurring signs in Palaeolithic non-figurative art, has the meaning <To Give Birth>. The position of the <Y> within a sequence of marks denotes month of parturition, an ordinal representation of number in contrast to the cardinal representation used in tallies.

      parturition<br /> the action of giving birth to young

      <Y> potentially one of the first written "words"

    1. CALL

      Computer Assisted Language Learning : An approach to teach and learn language through the support of computers. (IGI Global)

    2. (TBLT

      According to Richards and Rogers, Task-Based Language Learning strategy focuses on communication through task completion. Students get engaged with a task they are truly interested in, and they aim to carry it out only using the target language and its taught elements.

      On: https://sanako.com/introduction-to-task-based-language-teaching-and-learning-method

    1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fonds

      In archival science, a fonds is a group of documents that share the same origin and that have occurred naturally as an outgrowth of the daily workings of an agency, individual, or organization. An example of a fonds could be the writings of a poet that were never published or the records of an institution during a specific period.

    1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leiden_Conventions

      Classical scholars met in 1931 to establish a set of convention and sigla (symbols, brackets, etc.) for indicating the conditions of texts, editorial corrections, and restorations in inscriptions, papyri, manuscripts and other writing contexts.

    1. The first book I’m processing is Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy, which seemed appropriate.

      https://dice.camp/@brennenreece/109622279965144935

      example of someone "processing" a book and doing so in the context of having read Ahrens

  18. Dec 2022
    1. Verstehen (German pronunciation: [fɛɐˈʃteːən], lit. transl. "to understand"), in the context of German philosophy and social sciences in general, has been used since the late 19th century – in English as in German – with the particular sense of the "interpretive or participatory" examination of social phenomena.[1] The term is closely associated with the work of the German sociologist Max Weber, whose antipositivism established an alternative to prior sociological positivism and economic determinism, rooted in the analysis of social action.[2] In anthropology, Verstehen has come to mean a systematic interpretive process in which an outside observer of a culture attempts to relate to it and understand others.
    1. Aleatoric music (also aleatory music or chance music; from the Latin word alea, meaning "dice") is music in which some element of the composition is left to chance, and/or some primary element of a composed work's realization is left to the determination of its performer(s). The term is most often associated with procedures in which the chance element involves a relatively limited number of possibilities.
    1. I came here after recalling a critique by Bessel van der Kolk's "The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma" regarding the disease model and it's negative impact on adequately helping people with trauma. van der Kolk's critique was similar to Marc Lewis' critique of the disease model as it applies to addiction from "The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease". This made me wonder what the term "disease" actually means and whether or not some general consensus existed within the medical community. This article suggests there is no such consensus.

      This article is by Jackie Leach Scully who holds a "PhD in cellular pathology, University of Cambridge; BA (Hons) in biochemistry, University of Oxford; MA in psychoanalytic studies, Sheffield University".

      Scully does several insightful things in this paper the following are the ones that were most salient to me upon the first read: - distinguishes "disease" from "disability" - contrasts the "social model" and "medical model" perspectives on "disability" - The "medical model" referred to here is probably what Lewis & van der Kolk are critiquing as the "disease model".<br /> - Are the "medical" and "disease" model different? - the social model seems to have arisen as a response to the inadequacy of the medical model

          - "The social model's fundamental criticism of the medical model is that it wrongly locates 'the problem' of disability in biological constraints, considering it only from the point of view of the individual and neglecting the social and systemic frameworks that contribute to it. The social model distinguishes between impairment (the biological substrate, such as impaired hearing) and the disabled experience. In this view the presence of impaired hearing is one thing, while the absence of subtitling on TV is quite another, and it is the refusal of society to make the necessary accommodations that is the real site of disability. A social model does not ignore biology, but contends that societal, economic and environmental factors are at least as important in producing disability."
      
      • brings up a subtle point that there are two jumps "from gene to phenotype, and from phenotype to experience" and that some of the arguments mentioned "suggest that the 'harm' of the impairment is not straightforwardly related to phenotype. What ought to concern us about disease and disability is the disadvantage, pain or suffering involved, and in a sense the impairment is always a kind of surrogate marker for this experience."
    1. I hope I wouldn’t call it a wiki!

      There's some flawed logic here in that Ward Cunningham outlined his version of a wiki and others who created versions thereafter modified and potentially expanded on that original "definition". We now have a general consensus of a wiki, but it's not necessarily the same for everyone. Scheper doesn't leave any fungible room in the semantics of his argument here and thereby forces one into a practicing the "one true way", which doesn't exist as even Luhmann's own practice varied over time.

    2. fundamental truth

      Harnessing the dictionary into fronting for his zettelkasten religion?

    3. Zettelkasten, which in American English means notebox, and in Euro-pean English translates to slip box.

      What really supports this distinction? The closest historical American English translation is probably "card index" from the early 1900s while the broader academic historical translation is "slip box".

    4. you’ll spend the beginning phases learning by readingbooks in brand new fields and noting down brand new ideas. You’ll mostlybe writing reformulation notes in this phase.

      Yet another new name for a sub-type of notes, here he uses reformulation notes as a shorthand for the old advice to rewrite ideas you find in your own words. This advice is often suggested to accomplish two things: - avoid plagiarism - restatement of ideas in your own words is related to the Feynman Technique and assists one in learning and ensuring they understand the concepts

    1. Skills visibility is about making the skills a (l)earner hasacquired open, transparent, and accessible to the(l)earner, providing agency to showcase their curated skillsand competencies to employers in the marketplace
    2. Equity: When we close economic, resource, and opportunity gaps acrossthe learn-to-work ecosystem, and in turn, outcomes are not predictablebased on someone’s identities

      Context-specific definition of "equity"

    1. In the liner notes of “Ambient 1: Music for Airports” (1978), Eno wrote, “Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.”
    2. Eno heard about No Wave, then the dominant style for downtown bands who were taking punk to its logical extremes—abandoning song form, playing entirely outside of formal tunings, and foregrounding noise over signal.
    1. Human capital consists of those skills and resources that eachof us brings into the labor market. They include the quantity and quality ofeducation we have attained, job training received, acquired skills and experi-ence, aptitudes and abilities, and so on.
    1. The Gish gallop /ˈɡɪʃ ˈɡæləp/ is a rhetorical technique in which a person in a debate attempts to overwhelm their opponent by providing an excessive number of arguments with no regard for the accuracy or strength of those arguments. In essence, it is prioritizing quantity of one's arguments at the expense of quality of said arguments. The term was coined in 1994 by anthropologist Eugenie Scott, who named it after American creationist Duane Gish and argued that Gish used the technique frequently when challenging the scientific fact of evolution.[1][2] It is similar to another debating method called spreading, in which one person speaks extremely fast in an attempt to cause their opponent to fail to respond to all the arguments that have been raised.

      I'd always known this was a thing, but didn't have a word for it.

    1. The History of Zettelkasten The Zettelkasten method is a note-taking system developed by German sociologist and philosopher Niklas Luhmann. It involves creating a network of interconnected notes on index cards or in a digital database, allowing for flexible organization and easy access to information. The method has been widely used in academia and can help individuals better organize their thoughts and ideas.

      https://meso.tzyl.nl/2022/12/05/the-history-of-zettelkasten/

      If generated, it almost perfect reflects the public consensus, but does a miserable job of reflecting deeper realities.

    1. It’s a community effort with no figureheads (and certainly no “benevolent dictators for life”), and it’s all about interoperability and learning from each other with humility and respect.

      A pretty solid definition of IndieWeb here.

  19. Nov 2022
    1. “pattern language” to describe the show’s plot formulas, which they and ultimately other users would then apply to a variety of programs.

      Tropes are shorthand storytelling methods that rely on a common storytelling grammar or pattern language to quickly relay information to the viewer or listener.

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

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

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

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

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

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

    1. The theory of capital as a mode of production isone thing. The theory of capitalism as a social formation is quite another.
      • What is a "mode of production"?
      • What is a "social formation"?

      "In the Marxist theory of historical materialism, a mode of production (German: Produktionsweise, "the way of producing") is a specific combination of the:

      • Productive forces: these include human labour power and means of production (tools, machinery, factory buildings, infrastructure, technical knowledge, raw materials, plants, animals, exploitable land).
      • Social and technical relations of production: these include the property, power and control relations (legal code) governing the means of production of society, cooperative work associations, relations between people and the objects of their work, and the relations among the social classes, [JC -- in this case, "social classes" exist]

      ref. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_of_production

  20. view.connect.americanpublicmedia.org view.connect.americanpublicmedia.org
    1. The word “kafala” in Arabic has traditionally been used to describe a social and moral “responsibility to another.”  Researchers Ray Jureidini and Said Fares Hassan write, “kafala contracts were used to protect the weak and vulnerable by instituting the patronage of a prominent local who provided whatever protection was required.” Think of raising an orphaned child, for example. In business, kafala originally referred to contracts where a guarantor assumes liability for another person (e.g. a cosigner for a loan).    Kafala nowadays is often used to describe the legal relationship between businesses and migrant workers. Employers, typically citizens, act as sponsors for workers and assume legal responsibility for their movement and actions in exchange for their right to work in a geographic area. 

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

    1. ‘‘Personality is conceived as (a) an individual’sunique variation on the general evolutionary design for humannature, expressed as a developing pattern of (b) dispositional traits,(c) characteristic adaptations, and (d) self-defining life narratives,complexly and differentially situated (e) in culture and social con-text’’

      Definition of personality

    1. That is to make notes about the shape of the discussion-the discussion that is engaged in by all of the authors,even if unbeknownst to them. For reasons that will becomeclear in Part Four, we prefer to call such notes dialectical.

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

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

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

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

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

    1. This reminded me of Robert Greene’s definition of creativity, which is that creativity is a function of putting in lots of tedious work. “If you put a lot of hours into thinking and researching and reading,” Robert says, “hour after hour—a very tedious process—creativity will come to you.” 

      Robert Green's definition of creativity sounds like it's related to diffuse thinking processes. read: https://billyoppenheimer.com/august-14-2022/

      Often note taking, and reviewing over those notes is more explicit in form for creating new ideas.

      Come back to explore these.

    1. fulgence LANGUAGE FAMILY: indo-european > italic > latinORIGIN: latin NAME ROOT: FULGĕO > FULGENS / FULGēRE > FULGENTIUSMEANING: This name derives from the Latin “fulgĕo > fulgens / fulgēre > Fulgentius”, meaning “illustrious, beautiful, famous, shine brightly, glitter, sparkle”. Fabius Planciades Fulgentius was a Latin writer of late antiquity. Four extant works are commonly attributed to him, as well as a possible fifth which some scholars include in compilations with much reservation. His mytho-graphic work was greatly admired and highly influential throughout much of the medieval period, but is viewed with little favor today.

      in relation to the character in the satire Penguin Island by Anatole France who dies by zettelkasten

      Naturally a tapir is the nocturnal hoofed mammal with a stout body, sturdy limbs, and a short flexible proboscis, native to the forests of tropical America and Malaysia.

      So the name Fulgence Tapir is essentially "a sparkling foraging pig".

  21. Oct 2022
    1. elaboration n. 1. the process of interpreting or embellishing information to be remembered or of relating it to other material already known and in memory. The levels-of-processing model of memory holds that the level of elaboration applied to information as it is processed affects both the length of time that it can be retained in memory and the ease with which it can be retrieved.
    1. Another help to the memory is the pocketbook in which to enter stray thoughts and observations: what the Elizabethans called ‘tablets’.

      Elizabethans called pocketbooks or small notebooks "tablets."

    1. The Greeks had elementary schools for the teaching of reading and arithmetic,and they had ephebic colleges—secondary schools to us—with end-of-termexaminations in geometry, grammar, music, and rhetoric.

      ephebic • \ih-FEE-bik\ • adjective. : of, relating to, or characteristic of a youth of ancient Greece or a young man.

    Tags

    Annotators

    1. Cuauhtémoc,

      I did not know this word, and looked it up to discover it was the name of the last Aztec Emperor. He surrendered his Empire to Cortés.

    1. Deutsch’s focus on facts was commonplace among professional US historians atthis time, as was his conception of the ‘fact’ as a small item that could fit onto the sizeof an index card (Daston, 2002).

      Find this quote and context!

    2. Walter Benjamin termed the book ‘an outdated mediationbetween two filing systems’

      reference for this quote? date?

      Walter Benjamin's fantastic re-definition of a book presaged the invention of the internet, though his instantiation was as a paper based machine.

    1. here are several ways I havefound useful to invite the sociological imagination:

      C. Wright Mills delineates a rough definition of "sociological imagination" which could be thought of as a framework within tools for thought: 1. Combinatorial creativity<br /> 2. Diffuse thinking, flâneur<br /> 3. Changing perspective (how would x see this?) Writing dialogues is a useful method to accomplish this. (He doesn't state it, but acting as a devil's advocate is a useful technique here as well.)<br /> 4. Collecting and lay out all the multiple viewpoints and arguments on a topic. (This might presume the method of devil's advocate I mentioned above 😀)<br /> 5. Play and exploration with words and terms<br /> 6. Watching levels of generality and breaking things down into smaller constituent parts or building blocks. (This also might benefit of abstracting ideas from one space to another.)<br /> 7. Categorization or casting ideas into types 8. Cross-tabulating and creation of charts, tables, and diagrams or other visualizations 9. Comparative cases and examples - finding examples of an idea in other contexts and time settings for comparison and contrast 10. Extreme types and opposites (or polar types) - coming up with the most extreme examples of comparative cases or opposites of one's idea. (cross reference: Compass Points https://hypothes.is/a/Di4hzvftEeyY9EOsxaOg7w and thinking routines). This includes creating dimensions of study on an object - what axes define it? What indices can one find data or statistics on? 11. Create historical depth - examples may be limited in number, so what might exist in the historical record to provide depth.

    2. whether he knows it or not, the intellec-tual workman forms his own self as he works towards theperfection of his craft.

      Here Mills seems to be defining (in 1952) an "intellectual workman" as an academic, but he doesn't go as broad as a more modern "knowledge worker" (2022) which includes those who broadly do thinking in industry as well as in academia. His older phrase also has a more gendered flavor to it that knowledge worker doesn't have now.

    3. And yet that is not " r e a l l y " how the project arose.What really happened is that the idea and the plan cameout o f my files; for all projects with me begin and end withthem, and books are simply organized releases from thecontinuous work that goes into them.

      Surely by "files" he means his written notes and ideas which he has filed away?

      Thus articles and books are agglomerations of ideas within notes (or perhaps one's retained memory, as best as that might be done) which are then broken off from them and released to a wider readership.

  22. Sep 2022
    1. High-poverty neighborhoods arefrequently defined as census tracts in which 40 percent or more of the residentsare living below the poverty line.6
    2. three-fourths of Americans will encounterpoverty or near- poverty (150 percent below the official poverty line).4

      Open question:<br /> Why is the word "below" used with numbers like "150 percent below the poverty line" when in fact this number indicates near, but above, poverty based on my reading?

    3. in discussing economic mobility across generations, we refer to theintergenerational elasticity statistic. Again, this ranges between 0 and 1 andindicates how strong the relationship is between parents’ income and theirchildren’s income.10
    4. With respect tomeasuring the amount of economic inequality in a country, we make use ofwhat is known as the Gini coefficient or index.9 This is an overall measure ofhow unequal the income distribution is, and it ranges from 0 (complete equality)to 1 (complete inequality).

      see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient

      It can apparently apply to either income inequality or wealth inequality, so it may have slightly different meanings based on this underlying context.

      Delve into this question of definition.

    5. Welfare programs are generally considered those in whichan individual has to be below a certain income and asset level and fall into aparticular population group in order to be eligible. These are also known asmeans- tested programs, with individuals only able to participate if their incomeand assets are low enough to qualify.7