14 Matching Annotations
  1. Feb 2023
  2. Jan 2023
    1. i spend a lot of time thinking about time—how we conceptualize it, how we experience it, how it expands and contracts beneath different lenses. focus is about the ability to direct attention for a duration of time. boredom is about the discomfort that comes from a perceived slowness of time. having less mental space might be the outcome of consuming all this content, but wanting less time is the more explicit reason we do it.

      Time is becoming the theme of 2023 -- everyone writing about it rn

    1. Definitely the mate is the most fundamental intellectual aim, I was wandering from the beginning if that was a mate hahah. How is it that you are drinking mate? I’m guessing you are not from Argentina since you speak and write in english and for english-speaking students… Also, I really like this series about the zettelkasten, you explain things clearly and with great humor. I like videos like this one where you show the actual process.

      Process is important and I suspect we need more concrete examples for people to see. I'm reminded of Andy Matuschak's note taking live stream a while back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGcs4tyey18 though some editing, time compression, and inserted images can make it a bit more interesting than watching paint dry.

      Anecdotally, I feel like mate has become at least marginally more popular in the United States in the last few years, or at least enough to enter the consciousness of the cultural zeitgeist at a liminal level.

  3. Nov 2022
    1. In 1971, Eno co-formed the glam and art rock band Roxy Music. He had a chance meeting with saxophonist Andy Mackay at a train station, which led to him joining the band. Eno later said: "If I'd walked ten yards further on the platform, or missed that train, or been in the next carriage, I probably would have been an art teacher now".[24]

      How does idea density influence the rate of creativity?

      What are the thermodynamics of creativity? I've probably got enough material for a significant book chapter if not perhaps a book on this topic.

      May need a more public friendly name. Burning Creativity?

    2. Whilst at school, Eno used a tape recorder as a musical instrument[17]

      I personally did something akin to this when I was a child sometime between 9 and 12 with our family tape recorder. Did I do so because it was simply a creativity tool, which is generally how I used it, in my environment, or had Brian Eno and others' influences seeped into the culture encouraging this? Where does zeitgeist start and stop?

    1. I think that there’s also the kind of what Brian Eno called scenius, that there are times like Xerox PARC in the 1970s or Florence during the Renaissance when there are just a number of people in contact with each other, and their ideas spark each other. And again, it’s a matter of building on what has been done before.

      Definition of scenius, a portmanteau of scene and genius, meaning roughly the output of combining the ideas of zeitgeist with combinatorial creativity to create sustained output which might be considered genius level work.

      Generally it gives more credit to the people and time than is generally seen in other instances which are often frame as lone genius.

      My definition may be more complex and nuanced than that of the version coined (?) by Brian Eno.

  4. Apr 2022
    1. By the early 1970s, Barthes’ long-standing use of index cards wasrevealed through reproduction of sample cards in Roland Barthes byRoland Barthes (see Barthes, 1977b: 75). These reproductions,Hollier (2005: 43) argues, have little to do with their content andare included primarily for reality-effect value, as evidence of anexpanding taste for historical documents

      While the three index cards of Barthes that were reproduced in the 1977 edition of Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes may have been "primarily for reality-effect value as evidence of an expanding taste for historical documents" as argued by Hollier, it does indicate the value of the collection to Barthes himself as part of an autobiographical work.

      I've noticed that one of the cards is very visibly about homosexuality in a time where public discussion of the term was still largely taboo. It would be interesting to have a full translation of the three cards to verify Hollier's claim, as at least this one does indicate the public consumption of the beginning of changing attitudes on previously taboo subject matter, even for a primarily English speaking audience which may not have been able to read or understand them, but would have at least been able to guess the topic.

      At least some small subset of the general public might have grown up with an index-card-based note taking practice and guessed at what their value may have been though largely at that point index card note systems were generally on their way out.

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

      This same sort of craze also happened with Claude Shannon's The Mathematical Theory of Information which helped to bolster Weiner's take.

  5. Dec 2021
    1. Intellectual historians have never really abandoned the GreatMan theory of history. They often write as if all important ideas in agiven age can be traced back to one or other extraordinary individual– whether Plato, Confucius, Adam Smith or Karl Marx – rather thanseeing such authors’ writings as particularly brilliant interventions indebates that were already going on in taverns or dinner parties orpublic gardens (or, for that matter, lecture rooms), but whichotherwise might never have been written down

      The Great Man theory of history is the misconception that all the most important ideas can be traced back to a single great individual—usually a man—and ignoring the fact that they had likely been brewing in the social milieu of their time before being encapsulated, like a bug in ember, by a particular writer who then gets an outsized amount of credit for "inventing" the idea.


      I wonder if the effect of social media and ubiquity of communication will dampen this effect?

  6. Dec 2020
    1. Princeton professor Robert P. George, a specialist in moral and political philosophy and the theory of conscience, uses the example of slavery to demonstrate that every serious moral dilemma reveals two categories of people: the majority, who go along with the popular zeitgeist no matter how atrocious it is; and the minority, who risk their very existence to fight it.

      Does the majority always goes along with the popular zeitgeist?

  7. Aug 2016
    1. We were all about authenticity, but we were also brilliant fabulists. We were the first generation to really be born into the internet. Everybody had sixteen fake accounts on every website. It used to be so easy to lie — all you had to do was log onto the Neoboards and post a message that said “hi im hilary duff” and voila, you were Hilary Duff, at least for the next three hours. I had a sock account that was supposedly my French friend Lucie. I would have two-way “conversations” with myself that I just ran through Google Translate, and nobody ever busted me. We were kids; we were catfishing before catfishing was a thing. Nobody knew how to investigate anything.
  8. Jul 2016
    1. But this was before Facebook. It was before we all started merging our online and offline lives. The internet hadn’t gone corporate; websites were ephemeral things. Your friendships on a site existed only within the space of that site; if you lost one, you lost the other.
  9. Jan 2016