2,650 Matching Annotations
  1. Jan 2023
    1. it really all does 00:06:53 trace back to the start of our what we call civilization our civilization meaning Agriculture and then settlements and cities so prior to that we lived in approximate equilibrium with ecosystems

      !- Original source of : polycrisis - According to Prof. Tom Murphy, the original source of our current polycrisis is our collective, human need for control and mastery of our environment starting with civilization building itself, - and has its roots over 10,000 years ago in the beginnings of agriculture

      !- Tom Murphy : Comment His thesis is aligned with the work of: - Glenn Albrecht & Gavin Van Horn: Replacing the Anthropocene with the Symbiocene https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fhumansandnature.org%2Fexiting-the-anthropocene-and-entering-the-symbiocene%2F&group=world - Buddhist scholar David Loy: On the Emptiness at the heart of the human being that cannot be filled by consumerism & materialism https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2F1Gq4HhUIDDk%2F&group=world - Korean / German philosopher Byung-Chul Han: The Burnout Society https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2FbNkDeUApreo%2F&group=world - Cognitive Scientist, Buddhist scholar Jay Garfield: Losing the Self: https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2FE5lW5XedNGU%2F&group=world

    1. Over time, they have been expanded and organized: it is the scaffolding of our conversation, left behind as a structure to think in. 

      "they" = "notes"

    1. After Ahrens' book I see an awful lot of people talking about "processing" books. There are too many assumptions about what this can mean and this hides many levels of inherent work involved in analyzing and synthesizing knowledge. I would suggest that we're better off talking about reading them, annotating, excerpting, and thinking about them, or maybe writing about and combining them with other knowledge than "processing" them.

    1. Much of what they do can be done without eliciting the ire of nation-states. Bike shares, pedestrian zones, insulated buildings, renovated port facilities, congestion fees, car emission limits, furnace specifications, fuel upgrades (from oil to gas to alternative energy) and white paint roofs, for example, are only some of the innovations city officials can promote to effect significant reductions in emissions and pollutants.

      !- cities actions : can be done without eliciting ire of nation state - bike shares - pedestrian zones - insulated buildings - renovated ports - congestion fees - car emission limits - furnace specifications - fuel upgrades - white paint roofs - cities are the right level for focusing on effective global climate action

    2. here states have grown dysfunctional and sovereignty has become an obstacle to global democratic action—as when the United States (or China, France, or Canada) refuses to compromise its sovereignty by permitting the international monitoring of carbon emissions on its soil—cities have increasingly proven themselves capable of deliberative democratic action on behalf of sustainability, as they have actually done in intercity associations like the C-40 or ICLEI. If presidents and prime ministers cannot summon the will to work for a sustainable planet, mayors can. If citizens of the province and nation think ideologically and divisively, neighbors and citizens of the towns and cities think publicly and cooperatively.

      !- claim : cities can mitigate corrupted democracy and foster global cooperation - ie. C40 or ICLEI (also Covenant of Mayors) - cities are not plagued by the problems of state actors who cannot reach any meaningful agreement at COP conferences

  2. Dec 2022
    1. https://mochi.cards

      <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>Fernando Borretti</span> in Unbundling Tools for Thought (<time class='dt-published'>12/29/2022 15:59:17</time>)</cite></small>

    1. https://borretti.me/article/unbundling-tools-for-thought

      He covers much of what I observe in the zettelkasten overreach article.

      Missing is any discussion of exactly what problem he's trying to solve other than perhaps, I want to solve them all and have a personal log of everything I've ever done.

      Perhaps worth reviewing again to pull out specifics, but I just don't have the bandwidth today.

    1. I’m a screenwriter. One of the reasons I use Obsidian is the ability to hashtag. It sounds so simple, but being able to tag notes with #theme or #sceneideas helps create linkages between notes that would not otherwise be linked. My ZK literally tells me what the movie is really about.

      via u/The_Bee_Sneeze

      Example of someone using Obsidian with a zettelkasten focus to write screenplays.

      Thought the example appears in r/Zettelkasten, one must wonder at how Luhmann-esque such a practice really appears?

    1. I'm a multi-media artist, so I have many ideas about fashion pieces, artworks, music, etc. that i'd want to make. Would I plug in these ideas as 'fleeting notes' until they're more cemented? would you recommend I keep separate my 'original' ideas and the ZK note-taking system?

      I gave some examples of uses in arts/media a while back that you might find interesting for your use case: https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/xdrb0k/comment/iofo5vv/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

      In particular, a more commonplace book approach or something along the lines of Chapter 6 of Twyla Tharpe's book may be more useful or productive for your use case.

    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. https://adjacentpossible.substack.com/p/designing-a-workflow-for-thinking

      Quick preface of Steven Johnson's forthcoming series of essays on thinking strategies.

    2. So I’ve started a routine where every few years, I block out a couple of days to sit down and review all my idea tools—and other rituals of how I structure my creative thinking— to see if there's something that can be improved upon.

      As a strategy for avoiding shiny object syndrome, one can make a routine of making a "creative inventory" of one's tools.

      There is generally a high switching cost, so tools need to be an order of magnitude more useful, beneficial, or even fun to make it worthwhile.

    1. I think one of the the things that 00:00:27 really separates us from the high primates is that we're tool builders and I read a a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet the Condor used 00:00:41 the least energy to move a kilometer and humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing about a third of the way down the list it was not not too proud of a showing for the crown of 00:00:53 creation so that didn't look so good but then somebody at Scientific American had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle and a man on a bicycle or human on a bicycle 00:01:07 blew the Condor away completely off the top of the charts and that's what a computer is to me what a computer is to me is it's the most remarkable tool that we've ever come up with and it's the 00:01:19 equivalent of a bicycle for our minds

      Cleaned up quote:

      I think one of the [the] things that really separates us from the high primates is that [uh] we're tool builders. And I read a [uh] study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. The Condor used the least energy to move a kilometer and [uh] humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing about a third of the way down the list. It was not [not] too proud of a showing for the crown of creation. So [uh] that didn't look so good, but then somebody at Scientific American had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle. And a man on a bicycle or human on a bicycle blew the Condor away—completely off the top of the charts and that's what a computer is to me. [uh] What a computer is to me is: it's the most remarkable tool that we've ever come up with and it's the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.<br /> —Steve Jobs in Memory & Imagination: New Pathways to the Library of Congress. Documentary. Krainin Productions, 1990.

      Snippet from full documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob_GX50Za6c

    1. But Thamus replied, " Most ingenious Theuth, oneman has the ability to beget arts, but the ability tojudge of their usefulness or harmfulness to their usersbelongs to another ; and now you, who are the fatherof letters, have been led by your affection to ascribeto them a power the opposite of that which theyreally possess. For this invention will produce for-getfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it,because they will not practise their memory. Theirtrust in writing, produced by external characterswhich are no part of themselves, will discourage theuse of their own memory within them. You haveinvented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding ;and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom,not true wisdom, for they will read many thingswithout instruction and will therefore seem to knowmany things, when they are for the most part ignorant

      and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise." pp 563-564

    1. Fact-based disciplines such as natural sciences have less potential for deeply linked, atomic zettel notes than arts and humanities. There is not much to discuss about or 'generate insight' on photosynthesis, algebra or network protocols if you are not a scientist.

      Again note taking is the wrong tool for fact-based acquisition. Apparently this is not advice given in most sources. Spaced repetition and mnemonic methods are far better suited for memorizing and remembering basic facts.

      Take notes on the surprising and unique. Take notes as writing you'll reuse later. Take notes to understand.

    2. For example I had a few notes on principles of modern cryptography that came in handy when I had to write a paper about a related topic for my studies. But these cases were rare at best, most of these notes were never looked at again.

      The one shining moment in the whole essay and they don't seem to realize where the benefit or use actually was. They finally had a reason to have taken notes and the ideas shone here. But they've written off the tools because they didn't understand when to use them.

      Hammers are cool, but unless you're a professional carpenter, you don't carry it around all the time and use it constantly to hammer things. The same is true of note taking as a tool. You might use it regularly if you're a writer or an academic perhaps, but for hourly use in your day-to-day? Almost definitely not.

    1. Goitein accumulated more than 27,000 index cards in his research work over the span of 35 years. (Approximately 2.1 cards per day.)

      His collection can broadly be broken up into two broad categories: 1. Approximately 20,000 cards are notes covering individual topics generally making of the form of a commonplace book using index cards rather than books or notebooks. 2. Over 7,000 cards which contain descriptions of a single fragment from the Cairo Geniza.

      A large number of cards in the commonplace book section were used in the production of his magnum opus, a six volume series about aspects of Jewish life in the Middle Ages, which were published as A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza (1967–1993).

    1. to the success of Christianity’s victory over paganism, which hadtraditionally championed the pursuit of happiness and denouncedpain as evil. The triumph of suffering over pleasure had its mostextreme expression in the early monasteries.

      People clung to the promise of salvation. The idea that the more you suffered here on earth, the better your time would be in the afterlife was a potent shield against the desperate realities of everyday life in the fifth and sixth centuries. This doctrine was central

      Relationship to Eric Hoffer's thesis in The True Believer and mass movements' "hope for the future" even if the hope is for one's afterlife? This sort of hope can be seen in both Islam and Christianity

    1. “I have a trick that I used in my studio, because I have these twenty-eight-hundred-odd pieces of unreleased music, and I have them all stored in iTunes,” Eno said during his talk at Red Bull. “When I’m cleaning up the studio, which I do quite often—and it’s quite a big studio—I just have it playing on random shuffle. And so, suddenly, I hear something and often I can’t even remember doing it. Or I have a very vague memory of it, because a lot of these pieces, they’re just something I started at half past eight one evening and then finished at quarter past ten, gave some kind of funny name to that doesn’t describe anything, and then completely forgot about, and then, years later, on the random shuffle, this thing comes up, and I think, Wow, I didn’t hear it when I was doing it. And I think that often happens—we don’t actually hear what we’re doing. . . . I often find pieces and I think, This is genius. Which me did that? Who was the me that did that?”

      Example of Brian Eno using ITunes as a digital music zettelkasten. He's got 2,800 pieces of unreleased music which he plays on random shuffle for serendipity, memory, and potential creativity. The experience seems to be a musical one which parallels Luhmann's ideas of serendipity and discovery with the ghost in the machine or the conversation partner he describes in his zettelkasten practice.

    1. I'm actually talking to a group in Hawaii where they want to do the same thing that I did in Finland, as in what were six scenarios to phase it fossil fuels in Finland. Do the same thing in Hawaii. And that's actually now in progress. And the purpose of that work is to be a book in for Iceland, because when we approach Iceland. 01:16:11 How do we do that for Iceland? And so they become two sides to the planet, but you've got an isolated island, they both have geothermal. How would they approach that, and what are their respective problems? So this is the purpose of the global community. We could transfer information from one end of the world to the other. How did we do this? What were the problems? 01:16:35 What were the things that worked? How do we navigate our way out of this? What are the lon-term problems? That's the transfer that's actually happening. So I believe we are looking at the evolution of the human species, like you just said. But if the human species was modeled as a single individual, it'd be like an obese crack 01:17:00 addict that's been told to kick the habit and lose some weight. And it's going to be painful, but this is what we have to do for our survival. And on the other side of that, we're going to be much healthier. This happening at humanity at all scales.

      !- Prototypes : Cosmolocal between Finland, Hawaii and Iceland - Michaux is helping a group in Hawaii learn from Finland's experiences and then both of those can be used to demonstrate to Iceland - knowledge transfer between different communities of practice - this could benefit from an interpersonal, open, cosmolocal knowledge network such as Indyweb

    2. you've got groups like Norway that have oil and gas. Even though it's declining, it's some oil and gas. So they could keep the local region going while we're actually constructing this system. But they've also got a lot of hydro, right? Hydro power, a lot. So all right, so we could actually attach industries, sectors to that. Sweden and Finland has a combination of nuclear but also combined heat and power from biomass, 01:13:50 which also is linked to industry. So how do we organize around that? So we are seeing an ordering across for example, several local nation states at the moment. So the size of the circular economy could span say Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Iceland. And you'll have a circular economy-like structure going between them. 01:14:18 But it's actually the energy sources that will organize the industry, and the industry will organize everything else.

      !- Futures Thinking : Maslow's Hierarchy framing for Manufacturing - More examples: Norway - Oil & Gas, while constructing the future systems, Hydro. Sweden and Finland: nuclear and heat/power from biomass - circular economies between them

    3. I put forward the idea that what might work in the future is alliance between industrial clusters. Not between political nations, industrial clusters. 01:12:58 And you might have a cluster around for example, in Iceland, they've got a lot of geothermal. So much that they can make aluminum, which is almost pure electricity, right? So geothermal makes heavy industries, things like aluminum. They could also make lots of ammonia or hydrogen using the heat. So that's a hub.

      !- Futures Thinking : Maslow's Hierarchy framing for Manufacturing - industrial hubs will emerge where it makes sense - example: Iceland's plentiful geothermal will spawn industrial hub for smelting, or ammonia or hydrogen using the heat

    4. Current manufacturing at the moment is dependent on a very complex, six continent, just in 01:10:00 time supply grid. And when we build something like a computer, it's tough. Pulling stuff from all over the world, and it is like the transport of material goods is irrelevant. It's based on that assumption. I think it will become more regional. Now the current manufacturing system will start to fragment I believe, and we will see the components part of the value chain crash. 01:10:24 Like for example, microchips to go into cars are becoming a problem. Therefore cars are not being produced as much anymore. That's the example. But we'll start seeing that in other sectors. So I can see a situation where the value chain around the components will break down, but then before that, there'll be the ability for smelters to produce metals will start 01:10:49 to become difficult, because concentrate getting to them is no longer what they need to produce effectively. So the part on the end, the car on the showroom floor is the very end of the value chain. And they will become less available and less accessible because the value chain before them is starting to fragment. So when it fragments, we will develop a new technology that is more primitive, is more 01:11:18 robust, can be subject to change, and is more adaptable. And will be sourced within say a 500 kilometer radius around from where the final product winds up. Nate Hagens: So when you say we in this case, do you mean all of humanity, or do you mean those communities and 500 kilometer regions that are thinking 01:11:42 or working ahead? Or how did this come about? Because my challenge with all this is it all generally makes sense. And of course I have a probabilistic view of the future. So we could kick the can another decade maybe, or this could all be upon us by next summer. I don't know. But there will be these parallel things. There's a lot of people that are chomping at the bit to work on the future that you're 01:12:09 describing. But those people are still a tiny fraction of those riding shotgun on the super organism where we need growth, and economies and jobs are going to be the thing that dictate our elections and everything else. And energy security will trump lower carbon, etc. And so we will be pedal to the metal until we hit a wall. 01:12:34 What you're talking about is once we hit a wall, these are the things that need to be in motion.

      !- Futures Thinking : Maslow's Hierarchy framing for Manufacturing - global supply chains are very fragile and not resilient - such systems will begin to fragment as different parts become more scarce, more expensive, it affects anything downstream of the value chain - cars and computers will be produced less if microchips or the minerals that make them up become more scarce - more primitive, available, less energy dense minerals and technologies available within short distance (ie. 500 km) will come to dominate

    5. Well, we're first going to have a frank discussion of what minerals we think we need versus what we've got. And then we're going to realize what we've got won't work with the existing plan. And we'll start doing things like making batteries out of sodium, or sand, silica, or fluoride, or zinc, or lead. Nate Hagens: Lower tech, scalable things that don't give us the dopamine return on investment, but they are cheap and functional. 01:07:52 Simon Michaux: And can be recycled. So we're going to first scale back our expectations and our requirements for complex technology. We'll develop a technology that is simpler, more robust, and can deal with poorer quality material inputs, and require less energy to produce. Nate Hagens: How much of this is happening now in this domain? Simon Michaux: So there's a lot of talk at the moment that 01:08:18 the current mining industry is driven by demand and it's driven by money and by profit. So at the moment, there is just a bit of talk. And we're starting to talk about alternatives, like batteries made of fluoride for example. But at the moment, it's not taken seriously. And the future is seen as lithium iron based chemistry, like LFP batteries for example. And that is the focus, 100% of the time. 01:08:44 And so they're giving it lip service now, whereas five, 10 years ago, they wouldn't concede it existed at all. So it is progress. So first of all, we're going to change what we are going think we're going to do. Then we're going to start sourcing our minerals from our waste products because it's all around us.

      !- Futures Thinking : Maslow's Hierarchy framing for Minerals - need frank discussion about what we need for which futures trajectory, how much actually exists - from that, the truth will emerge that our current plans are unrealistic and we will have to change trajectories to adapt

    6. One of the things that concern me is copper. So we need about 4.3 billion tons of copper for the first generation of electrical, non-renewable technology systems. Including everything's stitched together. So 4.3 billion tons. 01:04:25 Nate Hagens: And if we relax your assumption of four weeks of buffer and that we have some hybrid system of depleting fossil fuels with some renewables, that 4.3 billion tons could be relaxed to 3.3 or 2.2 billion tons? Simon Michaux: I think it's 2.2 billion tons. It substantially does reduce. However, we are producing for copper say 24 million tons a year now. 01:04:53 So we've got to run at 180 years to hit that point. So existing at- Nate Hagens: It's not going to happen. It's not going to happen. And here's the other thing, and I'm sorry to interrupt. But Olivia Lazard is going to be on this show in a few weeks and her work is the countries where this stuff comes from. 01:05:17 And not only are they war-torn and have inequality issues, but there are also many of the countries that are going to be influenced dramatically in the near term from higher wet bulb risk to humans climate impacts. And we won't even be able to extract in these countries because of social and environmental 01:05:45 reasons. I can send you some info on that. Simon Michaux: Yes, please. But these are the things we need to get our arms around. So our copper reserves at the moment are at 880 million tons. Now existing growth, that's according to the USGS, US Geological Survey. So prior to 2020, humanity mined 700 million tons of copper back to 4,000 BC. 01:06:10 And that sounds like a lot. But to keep up with copper growth, copper demand growth, just the way we are now without electrifying, we will do the same in the next 22 years. So the last 4,000 years will be compressed into 22 years to keep up with the economic growth as it's increasing. And so the first generation, let's say the 4.3 billion tons is correct. 01:06:33 That is 6.2 times the historical mining rate back to 4,000 BC. So if we are right and we can shrink that buffer down, we are still three times the historical rate. Nate Hagens: Not the historical rate. The historical total cumulative

      !- Futures Thinking : Maslow's Hierarchy framing for Minerals - There just isn't enough copper to meet the target of full electrification - We would need 6.2x the copper we've mined since 4000 BC. - At current mining extraction rates, it would take 180 years to mine all this material, if it existed in the first place!

    7. this is part of the problem that we're having at the moment, where one part of society is not connected to other parts of society, and they just don't actually know what they're missing. So first of all, most of the non fossil fuel system has not been constructed yet. Less than 1% of vehicles are EV now, for example. 01:03:11 As as it has to be constructed, we can't recycle it. So the first generation at least must come from mining. But if it was all manufactured tomorrow or next year say, it's not for about 10 years that we've actually, when they all wear out the first generation of materials to come in, that's enough for recycling. And so recycling, if it is going to work... And I believe it will, but that's many years into the future.

      !- Futures Thinking : Maslow's Hierarchy framing for Minerals - Effective recycling won't have impact until many years into the future because most of the non-fossil fuel systems have not yet been built. There will be a 10 year lag time before we have major amounts to recycle

    8. Minerals are a thing at the moment where they're sort of seen as a side issue. And in fact in Europe in particular, we don't like the idea of mining at all. It's seen as dirty. And what's interesting is if the environmental movement not make friends with the mining industry, then its green transition will not happen. Right? That's the brutal truth. So I can see a situation where the environmental movement and the mining industry will join 01:01:21 hands, and both groups will evolve their practice to meet the other side halfway. And for example, every mine site will be rehabilitated when it's finished to the point where it can now be a natural biodiversity hub. All toxins are removed completely from the environment. That is possible.

      !- Futures Thinking : Maslow's Hierarchy framing for Minerals - environmentalists and mining industry will need to work together

    9. Sewage sanitation. 00:54:26 Now again, this is not a very fashionable thing to talk about. But in the past, especially when a hurricane hits and devastates a town, if you don't get the ability for people to go to the toilet and wash their hands and sanitation disease starts rippling through the area and cripples everything. And it can corrupt food, it can corrupt water. And so it's a system that allows humans to live in dense population areas together safely 00:54:55 and healthily. Now at the moment we have these systems which are citywide, and they use electrical power to push things along. And the problem here is maintenance. This is talking to the complexity issue. How can we maintain such a complex system in a low energy world where we won't have the ease to go out and maintain such things easily? So we have whole sections of the network breaking down, and they'll be really hard to keep going. 00:55:23 So we're going to go from a big system, to a series of localized systems that can connect to each other if they chose, or disconnect if they need to, while one system goes down for maintenance. And again, we're going to have to use technology that may not necessarily use power. What if we used gravity again to try and push all these systems through? And instead of actually using chemicals to treat the water plant, what if we had these 00:55:50 big ponds that used different plants and animals to process human sewage and the bacteria out? In permaculture, there's a lot of discussion about gray water systems and black water systems. Start thinking in those terms, but on a larger scale.

      !- Futures Thinking : Maslow's Hierarchy framing for Sanitation - if sanitation doesn't work, it can lead to breakdown and corruption of water system, food system, habitation and disease. - again, like water, too centralized and energy intensive - migrate to decentralized, relocalized, autonomous networks using natural treatment such as plants, wetlands, etc

    10. A water potable water supply that is say for three or four suburbs in a city together, and there'll be a standalone system. So if that system needs maintenance and goes down for a bit, the systems around it keep going. Whereas at the moment, if you have one problem in a water plant, the whole city goes down.

      !- Futures Thinking : Maslow's Hierarchy framing for Water - decentralized water plant that supplies a few suberbs is far more resilient

    11. So it's not just water. We need water that's not polluted. And so that there are drinking water standards that need to be adhered to. So traditionally we just get that out of a stream or a pond. But now we've got so much population in areas which the climate doesn't lend itself to supplying such a lot of water for so many people. So we need to seriously think about how do we actually provide clean drinking water. 00:52:16 And if we don't, and this is the problem with the next one, which is sanitation. If we don't have proper drinking water, we start having disease rippling through our society, which will cripple us, our ability to do certain things. And so we have to have the ability to filter water. And so we might move into a society where water will have to be filtered through, you can make a filter with things like charcoal and rock and gravel. 00:52:42 And water might have to go through that to remove its bacteria load. See at the moment, our water is purified in water purification plants, but they're done centrally and their water's pushed out along all these pipes all over the city. So what if that is no longer practical? For example, we can't maintain such a large network of pipes anymore easily. So we might have to go to a more localized way of managing water.

      !- Futures Thinking : Maslow's Hierarchy framing for Water - future may see us going to decentralized water systems due to energy intensity of operating current system of long networks of pipelines and pumps - sanitation and water closely linked, poor potable water leads to poor sanitation, and to increased disease burden

    12. in food, what it means is local communities will start to grow their own food. So all the food you eat will be grown completely in say a 50 kilometer radius radius or 100 kilometer radius.

      !- Futures Thinking : Maslow's Hierarchy framing for Food - food production will be relocaized - most food produced within 50 km radius, 100 km maximum - as per commons cosmolocal production, knowledge can be shared between production centers for greater efficacy (Gien)

    13. f we can't get food services to them, it becomes easier to break those large cities up into smaller communities that are more decentralized.

      !- Futures Thinking : Maslow's Hierarchy framing for Food - may need to break up large cities to a network of smaller, decentralized communities, each responsible for their own food production

    14. So food will be re-engineered where a lot of our fertilizers and will be developed organically or partially organically, locally. Now we could use industry to do that, but it'll be done locally. And so what we call food will have to actually more mirror and work with the environment, not against it. Current industrial agriculture works against the environment. Our new systems will have to use biomimicry in a greater scale, and work with the local 00:50:38 environment. And so will we.

      !- Futures Thinking : Maslow's Hierarchy framing for Food - fully or partially organic - can have industrial automation, but at local scale - biomimicry to work with nature instead of against it

    15. So food at the moment, five, 600 years ago, everyone grew their own food and they grew 00:46:07 it locally. And then we invented industrial agriculture, which is supported by petrochemicals. At the moment, our food is created in vast quantities causing enormous problems very far away. I can see a problem with petrochemicals because it's causing land degradation and it's overloading the nitrogen and phosphorous cycles on a global scale. So the food system's going to have to be radically engineered, and it will have to become more 00:46:32 local, and almost certainly have to become organic in some form. And so what that means is- Nate Hagens: Why? Simon Michaux: Okay, so at the moment we're using petrochemicals. And those petrochemicals, for every bushel of wheat that we send to the market, 0.8 cubic meters of soil is being sterilized. And you could argue it's improper use of those petrochemicals is making that happen. 00:46:55 But the reality is because there's a money profit to it, that's exactly what people are doing. And so it's not just the fact that it's made on things like phosphate rock and gas, which are non-renewable resources, but how we're actually applying it is interacting with the environment in a destructive fashion. And it's not just destructive in one sector. Multiple sectors across the environment are getting hammered by this. 00:47:20 And we are required to withdraw from those sectors, let those sectors heal naturally, and help that along, but then re-engineer our food systems. Now at the moment, the old school plans for this is GMO technology connected to more petrochemicals managed by AI systems, and most of the farming will be done by robots. 00:47:43 That's the vision for the future by groups like say BASF. I think that will be work in a short term, but it'll be disastrous in the long term. We actually create a worse problem. Nate Hagens: BASF doesn't make our food, they make the food- Simon Michaux: Chemical. They make the chemicals for the fertilizers and the petrochemicals, but this is their vision of the future. I attended one of their meetings. 00:48:07 Nate Hagens: So the future of food then, a conclusion echoed by many other of my podcast guests is we're going to have to have more human labor inputs relative to today. Simon Michaux: So every more people will have to be involved in the actual production of food. One thing we have lots of is humans. Now humans are an amazingly adaptive unit that can do work, and we have energy. 00:48:35 And so more people will be involved in more things. We have to work harder for a smaller outcome. At all levels, we're going to have less actions taken of higher quality. So we're going to go from quantity plus dopamine hit is going to transfer to quality plus much less of.

      !- Futures Thinking : Maslow's Hierarchy framing of food - will have to greatly relocalize - autonomous of any destructive petrochemicals that result in soil sterilization/death - Green growth solution, exemplified by BASF is to use GMO technology that uses more petrochemicals, AI and robots - this is not sustainable in the long term, in fact disasterous -

    16. how would the energy systems be different in the new system under your Maslow hierarchy framing? 00:43:15 Simon Michaux: I've been giving some thought about what energy actually is and how does it serve us. At the moment, energy is used for transport a lot. So our energy systems will have to empower transport somehow differently. And so this is the whole electric vehicles and buses. So I think the electric system will happen, but at least substantially smaller. 00:43:42 Excuse me. So for example, we would see more buses, more communal transport, and less individual cars. We might have the idea of car sharing where instead of owning a car, we might book a car in. This is the idea of the self-driving car. That might happen in a small scale. It won't be enough to replace our existing systems. 00:44:05 So the form of energy comes when it comes. It will be different to what we have now. And everything around it, including our technology, will have to evolve. And part of that I can see for example, instead of one big giant seamless power grid that delivers sinusoidally pure power all the time, and our electronics cannot cope with anything else, I can see a situation where we will evolve an engineering electronics that can 00:44:29 cope with variable power. So if a power grid goes up or down, if we get power blackouts, it doesn't cook the electronics. So instead of seamless, we now have a non-linear production of power and its outcomes. So that means- Nate Hagens: There would be no demand for such a product now. Simon Michaux: No, no. Because no one thinks it's necessary. So if instead of one big grid, we had lots of micro grids that are connected together. 00:44:54 And they sometimes transfer power between them. And sometimes when things get difficult, they could shut down one or all of them without actually damaging themselves and they could start up at any time. And each of those micro power grids will be around an industrial activity of value. For example, a power grid will be around a hospital. And that hospital will then also be surrounded by a community of people who operate that 00:45:18 hospital. And the food systems for that hospital, but all comes off that one power grid. It's reason to be is that hospital. And we might attach schools to it, that sort of thing. And so our energy will be organized very differently. And so it may well be things like solar panels, wind turbines. But we should also consider unconventional stuff, like some of the really weird ones, like the kinetic kites are an unusual energy system. 00:45:43 I don't know if they're viable in the current environment. But if things get more difficult, we might try such things. All unconventional and unorthodox ideas must be looked at and taken seriously, and the alternative is we go without. That's how I sort of see energy going.

      !- Futures Thinking : Maslow's Hierarchy framing of Energy - substantially lower energy than currently available - many autonomous, mesh-networked micro-grids around which appropriate human functions will be simultaneously served by

    1. Reply to:

      Who is Zettelkasten note-taking system for? <br /> u/Beens__<br /> https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/zhyu5i/who_is_zettelkasten_notetaking_system_for/

      Perhaps your use case may benefit from knowing the longer term outcomes of such processes, particularly as they relate to idea generation and innovation within your areas of interest? Keeping notes which you review over periodically and between which you create potential links will help to foster more productive long term combinatorial creativity, which will help you create new and potentially useful ideas much more quickly than blank page-based brainstorming.

      Her method was much more ad hoc than the more highly refined methods of Luhmann which allowed him to write, but perhaps there's something you might appreciate from the example of the character Tess McGill in the movie Working Girl. Even more base in practice is that of Eminem, which shows far less structure, but could still have interesting long term creativity effects, though again, it bears repeating that one should occasionally revisit their notes (even if they're only in "headline form") in attempts to refresh their memory and link old ideas to new to generate completely new ideas.

    1. The scientific community is, thus, increasingly using technological tools including drones, recorders, robots and AI to study the calls of a range of species, from chickens and rodents, to cats and lemurs.
    1. Thinking about the circular relationship between UX and human behaviour - how they shape each other. The affordances of the system determine certain usage patterns, but people subvert those affordances, turn them to unexpected ends, and the system is often changed (if not directly by the designers, then indirectly through reinterpretation by the users) as a result.

      We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us....

    1. Duolingo or whatever French and I had this idea well basically what it reminds me of is Stefan's Vig the Austrian

      https://youtu.be/r9idbh-U2kM?t=3544

      Stefan Zweig (reference? his memoir?) apparently suggested that students translate authors as a means of becoming more intimately acquainted with their work. This is similar to restating an author in one's own words as a means of improving one's understanding. It's a lower level of processing that osculates on the idea of having a conversation with a text.

      tk: track this reference down. appropriate context?

    1. It’s always worth gathering information, nurturing other projects, and putting together some backup plans. You’ll need to define what success means to you for each of them, because you won’t make overnight progress; instead, you’re best served picking projects that you can learn critical lessons from, even if you fail

      It's interesting because this way of thinking is eminently compatible with the zettelkasten way of thinking e.g. don't necessarily set out with a hypothesis in mind that you're trying to prove but rather explore until something interesting emerges.

    1. https://edward-slingerland.medium.com/there-is-only-one-way-to-write-a-book-637535ef5bde

      Example of someone's research, note taking, and writing process using index cards.

      Broadly, this is very similar to the process used by Ryan Holiday, Robert Green, and Victor Margolin.

      While he can't recall the name of the teacher, he credits his 7th grade English teacher (1980-1981) for teaching him the method.


      Edward Slingerland is represented by Brockman Inc.

    2. That sounds challenging, of course, but I find that the writing, at this stage, is actually relatively easy: the card organization has already done most of the work. The cards tell the story, you now just need to (skillfully!) weave them together.

      Anecdotal evidence that the final "writing" portion of a card index process is "relatively easy" as the majority of the work has already been done.

    3. This is the absolute hardest part of the writing process, in my mind. The most exciting, too, because you’re never quite sure where it’s going to end up.

      Anecdotal evidence that categorizing and arranging index cards/ideas for a writing project for subsequent writing is one of the most difficult portions of the process.

      Niklas Luhmann subverted portions of this by pre-linking his ideas together either in threads or an outline form as he went.

    4. I’ve also got a vague sense in my head of how they should be organized — that is, what the structure of the book is going to be. This is generally when I write the formal book proposal. I know enough about the topic, now, that I have a good idea of what my central arguments are going to be and how I am going to organize the chapters.

      At what point in the process does one have a conceptualization for the overall outline of what they're writing?

      In cases where it's earlier than others, then heavy linking and organization may not be as necessary.

    5. I have a very specific method for organizing my research and thoughts whenever I’m writing anything longer than a short article. I learned this method from a teacher in middle school, and I cannot imagine how a human being could write a book any other way.

      Example of someone who learned an index card based commonplace book method for note taking and writing.

    1. 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

    2. the Antinet can serve both states. It can assist someone who’s in thegrowth state (without a clear end goal), and it can also assist someone who’sin the contribution state (with a clearly defined book or project).

      This could be clearer and "growth state" and "contribution state" feel like jargon which muddles:

      two of the broad benefits/affordances of having a zettelkasten: - learning and scaffolding knowledge (writing for understanding) - collecting and arranging material for general output

      see also: https://boffosocko.com/2022/04/01/the-zettelkasten-method-of-note-taking-mirrors-most-of-the-levels-of-blooms-taxonomy/

  3. Nov 2022
    1. Aram Saroyam and, I believe, Jackson Maclow produced something similar. MacLow's The Pronouns was super important to me back in grad school.

      reply to Bob Doto on https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/z3f8kb/comment/ixlocl7/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

      Do you have something particular on Saroyam for this? I found The Pronouns by Jackson Mac Low, but only tangential hits on Saroyam.

      Similar useful efforts, though not in as clear-cut card format are: * Project Zero's thinking routines: https://pz.harvard.edu/thinking-routines * Untools: https://untools.co/

    1. https://untools.co/

      Tools for better thinking Collection of thinking tools and frameworks to help you solve problems, make decisions and understand systems.

      <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>Howard Rheingold</span> in Howard Rheingold: "Y'all know about "Tools for …" - Mastodon (<time class='dt-published'>11/13/2022 17:33:07</time>)</cite></small>


      Looks similar to Project Zero https://pz.harvard.edu/thinking-routines

    1. 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?

    2. In the mid-1970s, he co-developed Oblique Strategies, a deck of cards featuring aphorisms intended to spur creative thinking.
    1. Until now, we had a lot of code. Although we were using a plugin to help with boilerplate code, ready endpoints, and webpages for sign in/sign up management, a lot of adaptations were necessary. This is when Doorkeeper comes to the rescue. It is not only an OAuth 2 provider for Rails but also a full OAuth 2 suite for Ruby and related frameworks (Sinatra, Devise, MongoDB, support for JWT, and more).
    1. Fifty years ago, coinciding with the centennial of the release of Darwin’s manuscript, author Morse Peckham collected all six editions into a single “variorum” text. Peckham painstakingly created a reference system that denotes the modifications and changes between editions. The text was created by Peckham’s careful enumeration of every sentence from every edition, copied onto index cards; from these cards, he carefully assembled them into a final text.
    1. Athens Research is winding down their note taking application.

      Potentially the first of more to come?

      Athens the OSS project is winding down. The company is still operating, but taking time to reset and explore new ideas. Open to chats and convos. Thanks all ❤️ https://t.co/Y7ROM86WSy

      — Jeff Tang 🏛 (Ohio) (@tangjeff0) November 11, 2022
      <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
    1. They are 100% identical; just different names. From podman-build: “Builds an image using instructions from one or more Containerfiles or Dockerfiles and a specified build context directory. A Containerfile uses the same syntax as a Dockerfile internally. For this document, a file referred to as a Containerfile can be a file named either ‘Containerfile’ or ‘Dockerfile’.”
    1. “[T]here is always a short word for it,”Rogers said. “‘I love words but I don’tlike strange ones. You don’t under-stand them, and they don’t understandyou. Old words is like old friends– you know ‘em the minute you see‘em.”17

      17 betty roGerS, wiLL roGerS 294 (1941; new ed. 1979) (quoting Rogers).

    1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ueMHkGljK0

      Robert Greene's method goes back to junior high school when he was practicing something similar. He doesn't say he invented it, and it may be likely that teachers modeled some of the system for him. He revised the system over time to make it work for himself.


      • [x] Revisit this for some pull quotes and fine details of his method. (Done on 2022-11-08)
    2. Origin of Robert Greene's (May 14, 1959 - ) note taking system using index cards:<br /> Greene didn't recall a specific origin of his practices, but did mention that his mom found some index cards at his house from a junior high school class. (Presuming a 12 year old 7th grader, this would be roughly from 1971.) Ultimately when he wrote 48 Laws of Power, he was worried about being overwhelmed with his notes and ideas in notebooks. He naturally navigated to note cards as a solution.

      Uses about 50 cards per chapter.

      His method starts by annotating his books as he reads them. A few weeks later, he revisits these books and notes to transfer his ideas to index cards. He places a theme on the top of each card along with a page number of the original reference.

      He has kept much the same system as he started with though it has changed a bit over time.

      You're either a prisoner of your material or a master of your material.

      This might not be the best system ever created, but it works for me.

      When looking through a corpus of cards for a project, Robert Greene is able to make note of the need to potentially reuse a card within a particular work if necessary. The fact that index cards are inherently mobile within his projects make them easy to move and reuse.

      I haven't heard in either Robert Greene or Ryan Holiday's practices evidence that they reuse notes or note cards from one specific project to the next. Based on all the evidence I've seen, they maintain individual collections for each book project for which they're developing.

      [...] like a chameleon [the index card system is] constantly changing colors or [like] something that's able to change its shape at will. This whole system can change its shape as I direct it.

    1. https://www.cold-takes.com/learning-by-writing/

      Meh... generic process. Nothing broadly new here. The extended example is flawed because it's a broad thesis by a top level aggregator who doesn't have their own expert level experience (seemingly). Better to start from there, but delving more deeply into the primary literature of people who may have that experience.

    1. the front endpapers are oftenthe most important. Some people reserve them for a fancybookplate.

      Adler and Van Doren indicate that outlining the arguments and structure of a book on its endpapers is a better and higher measurement of one's ownership of a text compared to a bookplate which only indicates the lower level of "financial" ownership.

    2. writing your reactions downhelps you to remember the thoughts of the author.
    3. Second, reading, if it is active, is thinking, and thinking tendsto express itself in words, spoken or written. The person whosays he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually doesnot know what he thinks.

      Active reading is thinking, and thinking requires expression which can come in many forms including both spoken and written ones.


      I like that he acknowledges that expression (and thus thinking) can be done in both oral or written forms.

    4. The tremendous pleasure that can come from readingShakespeare, for instance, was spoiled for generations of highschool students who were forced to go through Julius Caesar,As You Like It, or Hamlet, scene by scene, looking up all thestrange words in a glossary and studying all the scholarly footnotes. As a result, they never really read a Shakespearean play.
    5. The answer lies in an important and helpful rule of reading that is generally overlooked.That rule is simply this: In tackling a difficult book for the firsttime, read it through without ever stopping to look up orponder the things you do not understand right away.
    1. I'm pretty much done thinking about "tools for thought". It quickly becomes an infinity of navel gazing and a complete waste of time. It's an easy topic for budding "influencers" because you don't actually need to know anything. All they need is to spend some time with a new bit of software and tell people how they should use it and the next thing you know they're selling an online course via their budding YouTube channel.

      scathing, but broadly true...

    1. From the beginning I found myself deeply challenged and stuck — freaked out by the blank page. So I started to use my skills as a filmmaker. I note-carded it. I had the notes above my computer, and I got to do a little “X” when I finished the draft of a chapter; it was this really satisfying moment.

      Erin Lee Carr talks about using index cards to write a book about her father, but her practice sounds more like index cards with headings as a means of structuring a story and not actually writing the entire work out on cards.

    2. <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>Billy Oppenheimer</span> in The Notecard System: Capture, Organize, and Use Everything You Read, Watch, and Listen To (<time class='dt-published'>11/03/2022 16:53:44</time>)</cite></small>

    1. David Brooks talks about what he calls the “theory of maximum taste.” It’s similar to what Murphy is saying. “Exposure to genius has the power to expand your consciousness,” Brooks writes. “If you spend a lot of time with genius, your mind will end up bigger and broader than if you [don’t].”
    2. 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.

    3. He has a warehouse of notecards with ideas and stories and quotes and facts and bits of research, which get pulled and pieced together then proofread and revised and trimmed and inspected and packaged and then shipped.

      While the ancients thought of the commonplace as a storehouse of value or a treasury, modern knowledge workers and content creators might analogize it to a factory where one stores up ideas in a warehouse space where they can be easily accessed, put into a production line where those ideas can be assembled, revised, proofread, and then package and distributed to consumers (readers).

      (summary)

    1. Mono doesn't have that glyph, so what you're seeing is that that symbol is being used from another font to be able to show something
    1. To check whether the music symbol ♫ is being displayed in a string (if it is not being displayed on some devices), you can try measuring the string width; if width == 0 then the symbol is absent.
    2. I want to check if the String I am about to display can be displayed by my custom font.
    3. I can't find a method to check if my Typeface can display a particular String though.
    1. No, there is no “glyph not found” character. Different programs use different graphic presentations. An empty narrow rectangle is a common rendering, but not the only one. It could also be a rectangle with a question mark in it or with the code number of the character, in hexadecimal, in it.
    2. The glyph-not-found character is specified by the font engine and by the font; there is no fixed character for it.
    3. missing glyph
    4. There is no standardized look/glyph, it’s up to the implementation
    1. https://dainty-sable-264aa3.netlify.app/project/measuring_thinking_tools.html

      Openness should be broken out into smaller subsections to highlight the importance of supporting standards as a primary item by itself. Many of these axes are easier, low-hanging fruit that developers will iterate on anyway. Focusing on the harder and more subtle features like standards is a better way to go for the audience that can really use this now.

      Many of these axes are better for a commercial market.

    1. I just spent a day dismantling a model, trying to find the cause of the silent rollback - taking out every association, every validation, every callback, whittling down all the code in the transaction, only to finally discover that it was return true that was the cause of it all. Or yes, an exception!
    1. e. T. F. T.

      What is this editor's actual name?

      My first guess is "Tools for Thought", but that can't be right. 🤣

    Tags

    Annotators

    1. Zettelkasten with the complicated digestive system of a ruminant. All arbitrary ideas, all coincidences of readings, can be brought in. The internal connectivity then decides.

      another in a long line of using analogizing thinking to food digestion.... I saw another just earlier today.

    2. The Zettelkasten Method is based on this experience: One cannot think without writing - at least not in demanding contexts that anticipate selective access to memory. This also means: without notching differences one cannot think.

      Sönke Ahrens roughly quoted this passage or one like it (check the reference), but I criticized it for not being inclusive of indigenous people or oral methods. Luhmann, however, went further and was at least passively more inclusive by saying that one needs to be able to "notch differences" to be able to think, and this is a much better framing.

  4. Oct 2022
    1. he also put the scraps to-gether into patterns that fascinated his students.
    2. November 7, 1916: "I expect to vote for Woodrow Wilson

      I wonder if others use the sense making features of a note card system to think through their voting decisions? This seems an interesting and useful exercise which Paxson has done.

    3. None of these notes wasever used in his writing; probably they were taken with no thoughtof specific use, but out of absorption in the American scene.

      It's quite likely that one will take a large number of notes with no immediate goal or plan for use and this is completely acceptable. Often these notes go towards the more immediate goal of forming one's own understanding and setting of a broader tableau for material one will write in the future.

    4. the author must not merely articulate his sources; he mustdigest them. A long passage quoted or closely followed "remainsan undigested bit of foreign matter." "Over quotation may meanunder thought."
    1. ‘What tho’ his head be empty, provided his common-place book be full?’ sneered Jonathan Swift.
    2. For without a clear conceptual plan, an accumulation of excerpts, what Milton called ‘a paroxysm of citations’, can rapidly become a substitute for thought.
    3. I feel sympathy for Robert Southey, whose excerpts from his voracious reading were posthumously published in four volumes as Southey’s Common-Place Book. He confessed in 1822 that,Like those persons who frequent sales, and fill their houses with useless purchases, because they may want them some time or other; so am I for ever making collections, and storing up materials which may not come into use till the Greek Calends. And this I have been doing for five-and-twenty years! It is true that I draw daily upon my hoards, and should be poor without them; but in prudence I ought now to be working up these materials rather than adding to so much dead stock.
    1. Though I recommend using YUMI exFAT instead for more multiboot options and better ISO support.

      28102022 205419 6-301 R15. SL<br /> o Pointer for READ

    2. NOTE: If you are looking to add multiple Live Linux distributions, System Diagnostic Tools, Antivirus Utilities, and Windows Installers, you should use YUMI Multiboot Software, instead

      281022 193603 6-301 R15. SL<br /> o Point for READ

  5. www.indxd.ink www.indxd.ink
    1. https://www.indxd.ink/

      A digital, web-based index tool for your analog notebooks. Ostensibly allows one to digitally index their paper notebooks (page numbers optional).

      It emails you weekly text updates, so you've got a back up of your data if the site/service disappears.

      This could potentially be used by those who have analog zettelkasten practices, but want the digital search and some back up of their system.


      <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>sgtstretch </span> in @Gaby @pimoore so a good friend of mine makes [INDXD](https://www.indxd.ink/) which is for indexing analog notebooks and being able to find things. I don't personally use it, but I know @patrickrhone has written about it before. (<time class='dt-published'>10/27/2022 17:59:32</time>)</cite></small>

    1. https://www.explainpaper.com/

      Another in a growing line of research tools for processing and making sense of research literature including Research Rabbit, Connected Papers, Semantic Scholar, etc.

      Functionality includes the ability to highlight sections of research papers with natural language processing to explain what those sections mean. There's also a "chat" that allows you to ask questions about the paper which will attempt to return reasonable answers, which is an artificial intelligence sort of means of having an artificial "conversation with the text".

      cc: @dwhly @remikalir @jeremydean

    1. Les murs du cabinet de travail, le plancher, le plafond même portaient des liasses débordantes, des cartons démesurément gonflés, des boîtes où se pressait une multitude innombrable de fiches, et je contemplai avec une admiration mêlée de terreur les cataractes de l'érudition prêtes à se rompre. —Maître, fis-je d'une voix émue, j'ai recours à votre bonté et à votre savoir, tous deux inépuisables. Ne consentiriez-vous pas à me guider dans mes recherches ardues sur les origines de l'art pingouin? —Monsieur, me répondit le maître, je possède tout l'art, vous m'entendez, tout l'art sur fiches classées alphabétiquement et par ordre de matières. Je me fais un devoir de mettre à votre disposition ce qui s'y rapporte aux Pingouins. Montez à cette échelle et tirez cette boîte que vous voyez là-haut. Vous y trouverez tout ce dont vous avez besoin. J'obéis en tremblant. Mais à peine avais-je ouvert la fatale boîte que des fiches bleues s'en échappèrent et, glissant entre mes doigts, commencèrent à pleuvoir. Presque aussitôt, par sympathie, les boîtes voisines s'ouvrirent et il en coula des ruisseaux de fiches roses, vertes et blanches, et de proche en proche, de toutes les boîtes les fiches diversement colorées se répandirent en murmurant comme, en avril, les cascades sur le flanc des montagnes. En une minute elles couvrirent le plancher d'une couche épaisse de papier. Jaillissant de leurs inépuisables réservoirs avec un mugissement sans cesse grossi, elles précipitaient de seconde en seconde leur chute torrentielle. Baigné jusqu'aux genoux, Fulgence Tapir, d'un nez attentif, observait le cataclysme; il en reconnut la cause et pâlit d'épouvante. —Que d'art! s'écria-t-il. Je l'appelai, je me penchai pour l'aider à gravir l'échelle qui pliait sous l'averse. Il était trop tard. Maintenant, accablé, désespéré, lamentable, ayant perdu sa calotte de velours et ses lunettes d'or, il opposait en vain ses bras courts au flot qui lui montait jusqu'aux aisselles. Soudain une trombe effroyable de fiches s'éleva, l'enveloppant d'un tourbillon gigantesque. Je vis durant l'espace d'une seconde dans le gouffre le crâne poli du savant et ses petites mains grasses, puis l'abîme se referma, et le déluge se répandit sur le silence et l'immobilité. Menacé moi-même d'être englouti avec mon échelle, je m'enfuis à travers le plus haut carreau de la croisée.

      France, Anatole. L’Île Des Pingouins. Project Gutenberg 8524. 1908. Reprint, Project Gutenberg, 2005. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/8524/pg8524.html

      Death by Zettelkasten!!

      (Coming soon to a theater near you...)

      In the preface to the novel Penguin Island (L'Île des Pingouins. Calmann-Lévy, 1908) by Nobel prize laureate Anatole France, a scholar is drowned by an avalanche of index cards which formed a gigantic whirlpool streaming out of his card index (Zettelkasten).

      Link to: Historian Keith Thomas has indicated that he finds it hard to take using index cards for excerpting and research seriously as a result of reading this passage in the satire Penguin Island.<br /> https://hypothes.is/a/rKAvtlQCEe2jtzP3LmPlsA


      Translation via: France, Anatole. Penguin Island. Translated by Arthur William Evans. 8th ed. 1908. Reprint, New York, NY, USA: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1922. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Penguin_Island/6UpWAvkPQaEC?hl=en&gbpv=0

      Small changes in the translation by me, comprising only adding the word "index" in front of the occurrences of card to better represent the historical idea of fiches used by scholars in the late 1800s and early 1900s, are indicated in brackets.

      The walls of the study, the floor, and even the ceiling were loaded with overflowing bundles, paste board boxes swollen beyond measure, boxes in which were compressed an innumerable multitude of small [index] cards covered with writing. I beheld in admiration mingled with terror the cataracts of erudition that threatened to burst forth.

      “Master,” said I in feeling tones, “I throw myself upon your kindness and your knowledge, both of which are inexhaustible. Would you consent to guide me in my arduous researches into the origins of Penguin art?"

      “Sir," answered the Master, “I possess all art, you understand me, all art, on [index] cards classed alphabetically and in order of subjects. I consider it my duty to place at your disposal all that relates to the Penguins. Get on that ladder and take out that box you see above. You will find in it everything you require.”

      I tremblingly obeyed. But scarcely had I opened the fatal box than some blue [index] cards escaped from it, and slipping through my fingers, began to rain down.

      Almost immediately, acting in sympathy, the neighbouring boxes opened, and there flowed streams of pink, green, and white [index] cards, and by degrees, from all the boxes, differently coloured [index] cards were poured out murmuring like a waterfall on a mountain-side in April. In a minute they covered the floor with a thick layer of paper. Issuing from their in exhaustible reservoirs with a roar that continually grew in force, each second increased the vehemence of their torrential fall. Swamped up to the knees in cards, Fulgence Tapir observed the cataclysm with attentive nose. He recognised its cause and grew pale with fright.

      “ What a mass of art! ” he exclaimed.

      I called to him and leaned forward to help him mount the ladder which bent under the shower. It was too late. Overwhelmed, desperate, pitiable, his velvet smoking-cap and his gold-mounted spectacles having fallen from him, he vainly opposed his short arms to the flood which had now mounted to his arm-pits . Suddenly a terrible spurt of [index] cards arose and enveloped him in a gigantic whirlpool. During the space of a second I could see in the gulf the shining skull and little fat hands of the scholar; then it closed up and the deluge kept on pouring over what was silence and immobility. In dread lest I in my turn should be swallowed up ladder and all I made my escape through the topmost pane of the window.

    1. As an example, in The Crown season 1 episode 4 “Act of God” (Netflix, 2016) there is a scene portraying former British Prime Minister Clement Atlee in his office in which he is prominently bookended in the background by two four drawer card indexes: one 3 x 5″ and the other 4 x 6″.

      This example comes directly from my notes: https://hypothes.is/a/Cz7e_lHKEe2Qv79IbEgmNw

    1. Be ready, as soon as you have read or heard the thing, to repeat it exactly in as far as you want to fix it in your memory. If it is a book, do not leave it without being able to sum it up and to estimate its value. Ta

      Sounds much like the Feynman technique and is quite similar to the advice of Sonke Ahrens.

    1. Anybody who writes knows you don’t simply write what you believe. You write to find out what you believe, or what you can afford to believe. So when I write something and it sounds good, I leave it in, usually, to see what it sounds like to someone else. To somebody else it might sound awful or brash, but I want to be able to have the courage of my brashness. I don’t leave things in that I know to be terrible, or that I don’t, as it were, find interesting—I don’t do that—but if there’s a doubt about it and it sounds interesting, I’ll leave it in. And I want to be free to do that, because that’s why I write. When I write, things occur to me. It’s a way of thinking. But you can perform your thinking instead of just thinking it.
    1. if you're thinking without 00:03:26 writing chances are you're fooling yourself we're only

      If you're thinking without writing, you only think you're thinking. —Leslie Lamport.“Thinking Above the Code.” Lecture presented at the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit, Microsoft Research, July 15, 2014. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/video/leslie-lamport-thinking-code/. Timestamp: 03:26

      Link to:<br /> https://hypothes.is/a/rvisgFDXEe2s-SuJJGw3cA<br /> https://hypothes.is/a/yEFMHoCkEeyl34fItJe__w

      Note that the spoken quote is different from the written quote.

    1. https://www.denizcemonduygu.com/philo/browse/

      History of Philosophy: Summarized & Visualized

      This could be thought of as a form of digital, single-project zettelkasten dedicated to philosophy. It's got people, sources, and ideas which are cross linked in a Luhmann-sense (without numbering) though not in a topical index-sense. Interestingly it has not only a spatial interface and shows spatial relationships between people and ideas over time using a timeline, but it also indicates—using colored links—the ideas of disagreement/contrast/refutation and agreement/similarity/expansion.

      What other (digital) tools of thought provide these sorts of visualization affordances?

    1. For the sole true end of educationis simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whateverinstruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.
    2. We have lostthe tools of learning—the axe and the wedge, the hammer and the saw, thechisel and the plane—that were so adaptable to all tasks. Instead of them, wehave merely a set of complicated jigs, each of which will do but one task andno more, and in using which eye and hand receive no training, so that no manever sees the work as a whole or “looks to the end of the work.”
    3. For the tools of learning are the same, in any and everysubject; and the person who knows how to use them will, at any age, get themastery of a new subject in half the time and with a quarter of the effortexpended by the person who has not the tools at his command.
    4. Thewhole of the Trivium was in fact intended to teach the pupil the proper use ofthe tools of learning, before he began to apply them to “subjects” at all

      The point of putting the Trivium in front of the Quadrivium is that the student is first taught the use of the "tools of learning" before they are then taught how to apply them to broad subjects as a means of learning how to learn.

  6. app.sane.fyi app.sane.fyi
    1. Ida JosefiinaInfopunk. Into pdfs, information systems that support intentional thinking, cyborgs, and the future of humanity. This thought space is an introduction to me and my work.

      https://app.sane.fyi/space/ida-ida-josefiina-75044

    1. @1:10:20

      With HTML you have, broadly speaking, an experience and you have content and CSS and a browser and a server and it all comes together at a particular moment in time, and the end user sitting at a desktop or holding their phone they get to see something. That includes dynamic content, or an ad was served, or whatever it is—it's an experience. PDF on the otherhand is a record. It persists, and I can share it with you. I can deliver it to you [...]

      NB: I agree with the distinction being made here, but I disagree that the former description is inherent to HTML. It's not inherent to anything, really, so much as it is emergent—the result of people acting as if they're dealing in live systems when they shouldn't.

    1. Doch ganz gleich, ob der Zettelkasten auf ein Buch, ein Werk oder auf eine Gedankenwolke mit wechselnder Niederschlagsneigung hinauslief - er ist stets mehr als das Ganze, dessen Teile er gesammelt hat. Denn es stecken stets noch andere Texte in ihm als diejenigen, die aus ihm hervorgegangen sind. Insofern wäre die Digitalisierung des einen oder anderen Zettelkastens ein Geschenk an die Wissenschaft.

      machine translation (Google):

      But regardless of whether the Zettelkasten resulted in a book, a work, or a thought cloud with varying degrees of precipitation - it is always more than the whole whose parts it has collected. Because there are always other texts in it than those that emerged from it.

      There's something romantic about the analogy of a zettelkasten with a thought cloud which may have varying degrees of precipitation.

      Link to other analogies: - ruminant machines - the disappointment of porn - others?

    2. Andere Sammlungen sind ihrem Verwendungszweck nie zugeführt worden. Der Germanist Friedrich Kittler etwa legte Karteikarten zu allen Farben an, die dem Mond in der Lyrik zugeschrieben worden sind. Das Buch dazu könnte jemand mit Hilfe dieser Zettel schreiben.

      machine translation (Google):

      Other collections have never been used for their intended purpose. The Germanist Friedrich Kittler, for example, created index cards for all the colors that were ascribed to the moon in poetry. Someone could write the book about it with the help of these slips of paper.

      Germanist Friedrich Kittler collected index cards with all the colors that were ascribed to the moon in poetry. He never did anything with his collection, but it has been suggested that one could write a book with his research collection.

    1. Sein Nachlass umfasst u. a. Notizen zu allen wichtigen naturphilosophischen Fragen seiner Zeit und Briefwechsel mit seinen Schülern, die sich an den verschiedenen Universitäten des protestantischen Deutschlands und der Niederlande aufhielten. Er schrieb Literaturauszüge, Beobachtungsmitschriften, Vorlesungsvorbereitungen und anderes mehr auf kleine Zettel, von denen heute noch knapp 42.000 in der Stabi erhalten sind.

      machine translation (Google):

      His estate includes i.a. Notes on all important natural-philosophical questions of his time and correspondence with his students who stayed at the various universities in Protestant Germany and the Netherlands. He wrote excerpts from literature, observation notes, lecture preparations and other things on small pieces of paper, of which almost 42,000 are still preserved in the Stabi today.

      Die Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg Carl von Ossietzky (Stabi) houses the almost 42,000 slips of paper from Joachim Jungius' lifetime collection of notes which include excerpts from his reading, observational notes, his lecture preparations, and other miscellaneous notes.

    1. there might be a miscellaneous division, which wouldserve as a "tickler" and which might even be equipped with a set ofcalendar guides so that the "follow-up" system may be used.

      An example of a ticker file in the vein of getting things done (GTD) documented using index cards and a card file from 1917. Sounds very familiar to the Pile of Index Cards (PoIC) from the early 2000s.

    1. . The goal a reader seeks-be itentertainment, information or understanding-determines theway he reads.

      There are three goals of most reading: education, information, and understanding.


      Are there others we're missing here?

  7. cosma.graphlab.fr cosma.graphlab.fr
    1. https://cosma.graphlab.fr/<br /> https://cosma.graphlab.fr/en/

      When did this come out?

      Appears to be a visualization tool for knowledge work. They recommend it for use with Zettlr, but it looks like it would work with other text based tools. Point it at markdown files to create graphs apparently.

      This looks like the sort of standards based tool that would allow greater flexibility when using various data stores that we talk about in Friends of the Link.

      <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>Arthur Perret </span> in And you, what are you doing? (<time class='dt-published'>08/31/2022 02:40:03</time>)</cite></small>

      @flancian

    1. Sincecopying is a chore and a bore, use of the cards, the smaller thebetter, forces one to extract the strictly relevant, to distill from thevery beginning, to pass the material through the grinder of one’s ownmind, so to speak.

      Barbara Tuchman recommended using the smallest sized index cards possible to force one only to "extract the strictly relevant" because copying by hand can be both "a chore and a bore".

      In the same address in 1963, she encourages "distill[ing] from the very beginning, to pass the material through the grinder of one's own mind, so to speak." This practice is similar to modern day pedagogues who encourage this practice, but with the benefit of psychology research to back up the practice.

      This advice is two-fold in terms of filtering out the useless material for an author, but the grinder metaphor indicates placing multiple types of material in to to a processor to see what new combinations of products come out the other end. This touches more subtly on the idea of combinatorial creativity encouraged by Raymond Llull, Matt Ridley, et al. or the serendipity described by Niklas Luhmann and others.


      When did the writing for understanding idea begin within the tradition? Was it through experience in part and then underlined with psychology research? Visit Ahrens' references on this for particular papers to read.

      Link to modality shift research.