https://www.wwhardware.com/catalog/product/view/_ignore_category/1/id/3588/s/kv-index-follower-and-track-kv047/

https://www.leevalley.com/en-us/shop/hardware/storage-and-organization/files/69118-index-followers

Listed as an "Index Follower". Looks to be the same model as https://www.wwhardware.com/catalog/product/view/_ignore_category/1/id/3588/s/kv-index-follower-and-track-kv047/

• for: SONEC - building blocks

• building blocks - SONEC

  • Indian neighborhood parliaments - neighbourocracy
  • Sociocratic Circul Organization method (SCN - Sociocracy
    • Operationalizing Elinor Ostro's ideas of managing common resources
  • Design principles of the Commons

https://www.ebay.com/itm/204539906243

According to the card on a Shaw-Walker desktop card index, the follower block was patented on October 10, 1902.

suggestion of recombination of individual notes using cards to create something new

(have I remarked on this in krajewski?) ᔥ Johann Jacob Moser commented on the ability to breakdown bodies of information into smaller pieces that might be reshuffled into new configurations as one might in a 'game of cards'.

https://indieweb-bingo.jalcine.dev/

Imagine a group of people using a digital currency like Bitcoin. In this group, some individuals have a special role called "miners." These miners are responsible for taking all the transactions (when people send or receive the digital money) that the group wants to do, and putting them together into groups called "blocks."

Think of these transactions like a bunch of letters, and the miners are like mail sorters. They collect all the letters (transactions) and arrange them into envelopes (blocks). These envelopes are important because they help keep the transactions organized and secure.

So, in simple terms, miners are like the organizers in a digital money system. They take the transactions and put them into blocks to make sure everything works smoothly and safely.

Purple is a suite of tools from 2001 that allow one to create numbered addresses/anchors at the paragraph level of a digital document.

Link: Dave Winer's site still has support for purple numbers.

A statement of the common "one idea per card" (or per note). He doesn't state it, but links to an article whose title is "One Thought Per Note".

Who else has use this or similar phrasing in the historical record? - Beatrice Webb certainly came pretty close. - Others?

continuing from https://hypothes.is/a/ddn4qs8mEe2gkq_1T7i3_Q

Potential assignments:

Students could be tasked with finding new material or working off of a pre-existing list.

They could individually be responsible for indexing each individual sub-text within a corpus by: - providing a full bibliography; - identifying free areas of access for various versions (websites, Archive.org, Gutenberg, other OER corpora, etc.); Which is best, why? If not already digitized, then find a copy and create a digital version for inclusion into an appropriate repository. - summarizing the source in general and providing links to how it fits into the broader potential corpus for the class. - tagging it with relevant taxonomies to make it more easily searchable/selectable within its area of study - editing a definitive version of the text or providing better (digital/sharable) versions for archiving into OER repositories, Project Gutenberg, Archive.org, https://standardebooks.org/, etc. - identifying interesting/appropriate tangential texts which either support/refute their current text - annotating their specific text and providing links and cross references to other related texts either within their classes' choices or exterior to them for potential future uses by both students and teachers.

Some of this is already with DeRosa's framework, but emphasis could be on building additional runway and framing for helping professors and students to do this sort of work in the future. How might we create repositories that allow one a smörgåsbord of indexed data to relatively easily/quickly allow a classroom to pick and choose texts to make up their textbook in a first meeting and be able to modify it as they go? Or perhaps a teacher could create an outline of topics to cover along with a handful of required ones and then allow students to pick and choose from options in between along the way. This might also help students have options within a course to make the class more interesting and relevant to their own interests, lives, and futures.

Don't allow students to just "build their own major", but allow them to build their own textbooks and syllabi with some appropriate and reasonable scaffolding.

Shaw-Walker. Flexowriter File-Desks. Accessed March 24, 2023. http://archive.org/details/TNM_Flexowriter_File-Desks_-_Shaw-Walker_20171021_0001.

An interesting in-desk filing system for punched cards. Interesting I've not seen anything like this prior for a mini card index maintained in an office desk drawer.

Perhaps such a system wouldn't have been as easily accessible for use on a daily basis versus potentially more portable small systems that could have been transferred from desk to desk (person to person).

Wallmakers updates ancient building techniques for the 21st century, building beautiful architectural buildings using mud, waste and creativity as the main components

Michel Thomas Method Review

Michel Thomas method also includes: - atomic pieces built up as building blocks into larger pieces - lots of encouragement to prevent the feeling of failure

Downsides: - there is no failure mode which can nudge people into a false sense of performance when using their language with actual native speakers

This reviewer indicates that there is some base level of directed mnemonic work going on, but the repetition level isn't such that long term retention (at least in the space repetition sort of way) is a specific goal. We'll need to look into this piece more closely to firm this up, however.

Linearity of ideas and arguments is a means of building toward something.

Because reading, annotating/note taking, and occasional outlining and writing can be broken down into small, concrete building blocks, each part of the process can be done separately and discretely with relatively easy ability to shift from one part of the process to another.

Importantly, one can be working on multiple different high level projects (content production: writing, audio, video, etc.) simultaneously in a way which doesn't break the flow of one's immediate reading. While a particular note within a piece may not come to fruition within a current imagined project, it may spark an idea for a future as yet unimagined project.

Aside: It would seem that Ryan Holiday's descriptions of his process are discrete with respect to each individual project. He's never mentioned using or reusing notes from past projects for current or future projects. He's even gone to the level that he creates custom note cards for his current project which have a title pre-printed on them.

Does this pre-titling help to provide him with more singular focus for his specific workflow? Some who may be prone to being side-tracked or with specific ADHD issues may need or be helped by these visual and workflow cues to stay on task, and as a result be helped by them. For others it may hinder their workflows and creativity.

This process may be different for beginning students or single project writers versus career writers (academics, journalists, fiction and non-fiction writers).

As a concrete example of the above, I personally made a note here about Darwin and Lamarck for a separate interest in evolution which falls outside of my immediate area of interest with respect to note taking and writing output.

Fear not the images related to this word your memories have brought. Recall what author said in introduction: removing blocks to love is Course's one concern. You're not in need of adding content to your mind. A sculptor's masterpiece is ready, when everything unnecessary is removed. Let all illusions be dispelled off you and there is nothing left but love.

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all of the barriers within yourself that you have built against it. T-16.4.6

You are only love, but when you deny this, you make what you are something you must learn to remember. T-6.3.2

Healing is not creating; it is reparation. T-5.2.1

The miracle does nothing. All it does is to undo ... It does not add, but merely takes away. T-28.1.1

The Atonement does not make holy. You were created holy. It merely brings unholiness to holiness; or what you made to what you are. Bringing illusion to truth, or the ego to God, is the Holy Spirit's only function. T-14.9.1

All your past except its beauty is gone, and nothing is left but a blessing. T-5.4.8

https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/zl2hwh/is_the_concept_of_personal_knowledge_management/

This essay seems to be more about shiny object syndrome. The writer doesn't seem to realize any problems they've created. Way too much digging into tools and processes. Note the switching and trying out dozens of applications. (Dear god, why??!!) Also looks like a lot of collecting digitally for no clear goal. As a result of this sort of process it appears that many of the usual affordances were completely blocked, unrealized, and thus useless.

No clear goal in mind for anything other than a nebulous being "better".

One goal was to "retain what I read", but nothing was actively used toward this stated goal. Notes can help a little, but one would need mnemonic methods and possibly spaced repetition neither of which was mentioned.

A list of specific building blocks within the methods and expected outcomes would have helped this person (and likely others), but to my knowledge this doesn't exist as a thing yet though bits and pieces are obviously floating around.<br /> TK: building blocks of note taking

Evidence here for what we'll call the "perfect system fallacy", an illness which often goes hand in hand with "shiny object syndrome".

Too many systems bound together will create so much immediate complexity that there isn't any chance for future complexity or emergence as the proximal system is doomed to failure. One should instead strive for immediate and excessive simplicity which might then build with time, use, and practice into something more rich and complex. This idea seems to be either completely missed or lost in the online literature and especially the blogosphere and social media.

people had come up with solutions Sadly, despite thousands of variations on some patterns, people don't seem to be able to settle on either "one solution" or their "own solution" and in trying to do everything all at once they become lost, set adrift, and lose focus on any particular thing they've got as their own goal.

In this particular instance, "retaining what they read" was totally ignored. Worse, they didn't seem to ever review over their notes of what they read.

I was pondering about different note types, fleeting, permanent, different organisational systems, hierarchical, non-hierarchical, you know the deal.

Why worry about all the types of notes?! This is the problem with these multi-various definitions and types. They end up confusing people without giving them clear cut use cases and methods by which to use them. They get lost in definitional overload and aren't connecting the names with actual use cases and affordances.

I often felt lost about what to takes notes on and what not to take notes on.

Why? Most sources seem to have reasonable guidance on this. Make notes on things that interest you, things which surprise you.

They seem to have gotten lost in all the other moving pieces. Perhaps advice on this should come first, again in the middle, and a third time at the end of these processes.

I'm curious how deeply they read sources and which sources they read to come to these conclusions? Did they read a lot of one page blog posts with summarizations or did they read book length works by Ahrens, Forte, Allosso, Scheper, et al? Or did they read all of these and watch lots of crazy videos as well. Doing it "all" will likely lead into the shiny object syndrome as well.

This seems to outline a list of specifically what not to do and how not to approach these systems and "popular" blog posts that are an inch deep and a mile wide rather than some which have more depth.

Worst of all, I spent so much time taking notes and figuring out a personal knowledge management system that I neglected the things I actually wanted to learn about. And even though I kind of always knew this, I kept falling into the same trap.

Definitely a symptom of shiny object syndrome!

Features include: - follow block (to bunch cards to the front of the drawer and hold them upright without falling over - bail stop - a mechanism to keep the drawer from being accidentally pulled completely out of the case.

https://readwriterespond.com/2022/11/commonplace-book-a-verb-or-a-noun/

Sometimes the root question is "what to I want to do this for?" Having an underlying reason can be hugely motivating.

Are you collecting examples of things for students? (seeing examples can be incredibly powerful, especially for defining spaces) for yourself? Are you using them for exploring a particular space? To clarify your thinking/thought process? To think more critically? To write an article, blog, or book? To make videos or other content?

Your own website is a version of many of these things in itself. You read, you collect, you write, you interlink ideas and expand on them. You're doing it much more naturally than you think.

I find that having an idea of the broader space, what various practices look like, and use cases for them provides me a lot more flexibility for what may work or not work for my particular use case. I can then pick and choose for what suits me best, knowing that I don't have to spend as much time and effort experimenting to invent a system from scratch but can evolve something pre-existing to suit my current needs best.

It's like learning to cook. There are thousands of methods (not even counting cuisine specific portions) for cooking a variety of meals. Knowing what these are and their outcomes can be incredibly helpful for creatively coming up with new meals. By analogy students are often only learning to heat water to boil an egg, but with some additional techniques they can bake complicated French pâtissier. Often if you know a handful of cooking methods you can go much further and farther using combinations of techniques and ingredients.

What I'm looking for in the reading, note taking, and creation space is a baseline version of Peter Hertzmann's 50 Ways to Cook a Carrot combined with Michael Ruhlman's Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking. Generally cooking is seen as an overly complex and difficult topic, something that is emphasized on most aspirational cooking shows. But cooking schools break the material down into small pieces which makes the processes much easier and more broadly applicable. Once you've got these building blocks mastered, you can be much more creative with what you can create.

How can we combine these small building blocks of reading and note taking practices for students in the 4th - 8th grades so that they can begin to leverage them in high school and certainly by college? Is there a way to frame them within teaching rhetoric and critical thinking to improve not only learning outcomes, but to improve lifelong learning and thinking?

https://mastodon.social/@tbeseda@indieweb.social/109368520955574335

At a base level, the Fediverse is a subset within the bigger IndieWeb. Parts of the Fediverse, have and support some of the IndieWeb building blocks, but none that I'm aware of support them all. Example: Mastodon has microformats markup, but doesn't support sending webmentions or have micropub support. Currently it's easier for the IndieWeb to communicate into and read the Fediverse, but the Fediverse doesn't do a good job of seeing or interacting with things outside it.

https://www.loom.com/share/a05f636661cb41628b9cb7061bd749ae

Synopsis: Maggie Delano looks at some of the affordances supplied by Tana (compared to Roam Research) in terms of providing better block-based user interface for note type creation, search, and filtering.

These sorts of tools and programmable note implementations remind me of Beatrice Webb's idea of scientific note taking or using her note cards like a database to sort and search for data to analyze it and create new results and insight.

It would seem that many of these note taking tools like Roam and Tana are using blocks and sub blocks as a means of defining atomic notes or database-like data in a way in which sub-blocks are linked to or "filed underneath" their parent blocks. In reality it would seem that they're still using a broadly defined index card type system as used in the late 1800s/early 1900s to implement a set up that otherwise would be a traditional database in the Microsoft Excel or MySQL sort of fashion, the major difference being that the user interface is cognitively easier to understand for most people.

These allow people to take a form of structured textual notes to which might be attached other smaller data or meta data chunks that can be easily searched, sorted, and filtered to allow for quicker or easier use.

Ostensibly from a mathematical (or set theoretic and even topological) point of view there should be a variety of one-to-one and onto relationships (some might even extend these to "links") between these sorts of notes and database representations such that one should be able to implement their note taking system in Excel or MySQL and do all of these sorts of things.

Cascading Idea Sheets or Cascading Idea Relationships

One might analogize these sorts of note taking interfaces to Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). While there is the perennial question about whether or not CSS is a programming language, if we presume that it is (and it is), then we can apply the same sorts of class, id, and inheritance structures to our notes and their meta data. Thus one could have an incredibly atomic word, phrase, or even number(s) which inherits a set of semantic relationships to those ideas which it sits below. These links and relationships then more clearly define and contextualize them with respect to other similar ideas that may be situated outside of or adjacent to them. Once one has done this then there is a variety of Boolean operations which might be applied to various similar sets and classes of ideas.

If one wanted to go an additional level of abstraction further, then one could apply the ideas of category theory to one's notes to generate new ideas and structures. This may allow using abstractions in one field of academic research to others much further afield.

The user interface then becomes the key differentiator when bringing these ideas to the masses. Developers and designers should be endeavoring to allow the power of complex searches, sorts, and filtering while minimizing the sorts of advanced search queries that an average person would be expected to execute for themselves while also allowing some reasonable flexibility in the sorts of ways that users might (most easily for them) add data and meta data to their ideas.

Jupyter programmable notebooks are of this sort, but do they have the same sort of hierarchical "card" type (or atomic note type) implementation?

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.

What are the simple building blocks of thought and speech that make it so complex in aggregate?

building blocks and arising complexity

a building block approach?

Gall's law

What are the atomic building blocks that would allow stimulus-response psychology to show complex behaviors?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32341607

Didn't read it all, but the total number of notes, many likely repetitive or repetitive of things elsewhere makes me think that there is a huge diversity of thought within this space and different things work for different people in terms of work and even attention.

The missing piece is that all of this sits here instead of being better curated and researched to help some forms of quicker consensus. I'm sure there are hundreds of other posts just like this on HN with all the same thoughts over and over again with very little movement forward.

How can we help to aggregate and refine this sort of knowledge to push the borders for everyone broadly rather than a few here and there?

Similar to Beatrice Webb's definition of synthetic notes in My Apprentice (1926), thought this also includes movement into actually drafting writing.

What year was this written?

The idea here seems to be less discrete in the steps of the writing process and subsumes multiple things instead of breaking them into discrete conceptual parts. Has this been some of what has caused issues in the note taking to creation process in the last century?

Are some of the classic texts better than more advanced digested texts because they form the building blocks of our thought and society?

Are we training thinkers or doers?

This feels like an underlying and underpinning principle of how the IndieWeb which focuses on working real world examples which are able to build up more complex systems instead of theoretical architecture astronomy which goes no where.

Reference: John Gall (1975) Systemantics: How Systems Really Work and How They Fail p. 71

Many university presidents site the value of basic research to fuel the more specialized research spaces.

Example: we didn't have any application for x-rays when their basic science was researched, but now they're integral to a number of areas of engineering, physics, and health care.

What causes this effect? Is it the increased number of potential building blocks that provide increased flexibility and complexity to accelerate the later specializations?

Link this to: https://hyp.is/-oEI3OF5EeybM_POWlI9WQ/www.maggiedelano.com/garden/helpful-books

An easy way of creating new music is to take a short length of music and break it down into smaller constitutive parts and then loop them and potentially then build them back up into longer pieces.

As permanently identified paragraph level locations, purple numbers might allow one to combinatorically rearrange sets of notes or facts in a variety of different ways.

This pattern might be seen in earlier instantiations of note taking tools like the German zettelkasten.

Documents might be generated by creating playlists of purple numbers in particular (useful) orders.

Documents with paragraph structures are similar to albums with songs or perhaps digital playlists with individual songs that can be in a variety of different orders.

https://twitter.com/swardley/status/1490344071126294528

maps != graphs

what are the building blocks at operation with respect to these?

what pieces of context are built up and how do they add information to become more complex?

What are the constituent parts of writing and how do they differ based on their functions with respect to attention?

• note taking
• composing
• invention
• creativity
• thinking
• editing
• structuring
• outlining
• proofreading
• etc.

Where do each of these sit with respect to the zettelkasten? How can one create flow with respect to each of these or with respect to one or two which may necessarily need to be bound together to accomplish them?

Ahrens provides a quick overview of some research on distraction, attention, and multi-tasking to make the point that:

The simple structure and design of the zettelkasten forces one's focus and attention on small individual tasks that cumulatively build into better thinking and writing.

(Summary of Section 9.2)

By crosslinking one's notes in a hypertext-like manner one is able to give them many different contexts. This linking and context shifting is a solid method for helping one's ideas to have sex with each other as a means of generating new ideas.

Is there a relationship between this idea of context shifting and modality shifting? Are these just examples of building blocks for tools of thought? Are they sifts on different axes? When might they be though of as the same? Compare and contrast this further.

https://www.goedel.io/p/tools-for-thought-but-not-for-search

Searching for two ingredients in an effort to find a recipe that will allow their use should be de rigueur in a personal knowledge manager, sadly it doesn't appear to be the case.

This sort of simple search not working in these tools is just silly.

They should be able to search across blocks, pages, and even provide graph views to help in this process. Where are all the overlaps of these words within one's database?

Atomizing projects and research ideas is very similar to the idea of the atomic note.

If useful things can be turned into re-usable building blocks, then it can be easier to build and design larger and more complex systems out of them.

Luhmann used the idea of "one card, one fact" as the first step of "reduction for the sake of [building] complexity."

Historically reducing things to their smallest essential form or building blocks makes it much easier to build up new complex things from them.

Examples of this include:

• Reducing numbers to binary 1 and 0
• tk

footnote:

See Luhmann, Niklas (2000) Short Cuts. Edited by Peter Gente, Heidi Paris, Martin Weinmann. Frankfurt/Main: Zweitausendeins), p. 33.

The IndieWeb isn't a checklist, it's a smörgåsbord from which you can take (only) what you need.

I think Nat touches on an important use case here, but I wouldn't call it "moving laterally while retaining vertical references."

He's referring to a link to the book Emergency, not some content of the book itself. So each page can link to the book, that's not novel.

What is novel is that when entering in the book into your Roam database you can tag it with Prepping and Neil Strauss and it will show up under those pages automatically.

Nat says that tags are everything and nothing, but I don't agree with that.

Pages consist of blocks.

A reference to a page is treated in the exact same way as a tag.

A block is not treated in the same way. A block is not a tag.

Two top-down approaches to note taking.

In evernote your notes live in Stacks, notebooks or notes.

In Notion and Workflowy you've got blocks than can be infinitely nested.

There is danger afoot.

I remember when I used to think that achieving equality under the law was like playing Jenga. Legal precedents were things that were stacked--one on top of another--like a tower of Jenga blocks, intricately connected. To fight for equality was to strategically go after specific precedents (blocks) that would eventually cause the tower to fall and allow for new, pro-equality precedents to be made (stacked), creating a new tower. But then I realized that Jenga can't be played if the initial blocks aren't placed on top of something else -- a particular surface/foundation -- and the same goes for legal precedents. There's always something lurking below (or beyond). We are still prejudging when it comes to the law -- but not in a way that works with or for everyone.

Hands on approach in classroom to web literacy