173 Matching Annotations
  1. Last 7 days
    1. I went to a rethinking economics conference in London and Jack Reardon gave a talk

      for - Fairshare Commons book - origin story - Graham Boyd

  2. Jun 2024
  3. May 2024
    1. “When I was 9 or 10,” he told The Times in 2017, “my grandmother gave me a six-volume collection of books by Robert Louis Stevenson, which inspired me to start writing stories that began with scintillating sentences like this one: ‘In the year of our Lord 1751, I found myself staggering around blindly in a raging snowstorm, trying to make my way back to my ancestral home.’”
  4. Apr 2024
    1. 00:26 Zettelkasten wasn't conceived by Niklas Luhmann; this is a myth (which the person in the video puts forward). Zettelkasten has a long history, and, Niklas Luhmann had a specific taste and version of it.

  5. Feb 2024
    1. The experiences of the atomic scientists clearly show the need to takepersonal responsibility, the danger that things will move too fast, andthe way in which a process can take on a life of its own. We can, as theydid, create insurmountable problems in almost no time flat. We mustdo more thinking up front if we are not to be similarly surprised andshocked by the consequences of our inventions.

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

  6. Dec 2023
    1. I started my academic career as a specialist in medieval military history 00:39:49 I wrote about things like the Crusades the 100 Years War Logistics in the 100 Years War it's still like I think the the the the field that I understand best um and I wrote sapiens out of an 00:40:02 experience of teaching an introductory course in history to students in the Hebrew University it was originally written in Hebrew and I didn't think it will have much of a of a suc
      • for: book - Sapiens - origin story
  7. Nov 2023
    1. taking in sociological investigation

      The simplest and most direct way of bringing home to the reader the truth of this dogmatic assertion of the scientific value of note-taking in sociological investigation...

      Beatrice Webb indicates that it is an incontrovertible truth that sociologists should use a card index (zettelkasten) as a primary tool in their research.

      We ought to closely notice that she wrote this truism about the field of sociology in a book published in 1926, the year prior to Niklas Luhmann's <s>death</s> birth.


      How popular was her book with respect to the remainder of the field of sociology subsequently? What other sociology texts may have had similar ideas? Webb obviously quotes some of this technique in the late 1800s as being popular within the area of history. How evenly was it spread across the humanities in general?


      Is Beatrice Webb's card index amongst her papers? Where might they be stored today?

  8. Oct 2023
    1. In the main psychological and philosophical dictionaries, textbooks, and leading world encyclopaedias there are for the most part three different opinions of the origin of this term which, as the word denoting scientific or philosophic dealing with the phenomena of psychic (subjective, conscious) life, has now come into very wide use. All the three names connected with the formation of the term "psychology" are the names of the people of German origin from the 16th century. Two of them are of little significance: Rudolf Göckel and Otto Casmann, while the third is very famous and generally known: Filip Melanchton

      It is important to state that these three names are important for the origin of psychology. Though the original philosopher may be unclear, the names listed in the paragraph were the first to document using the term "psychology".

  9. Sep 2023
    1. according to Husserl, Galileo was the one who performed the trick. Who suddenly was hiding the origin of knowledge.
      • for: quote, quote - Galileo, quote - hiding the origin of knowledge, physical theory - hiding origin of knowledge

      • quote

        • According to Husserl, Galileo was the one who performed the trick. Who suddenly was hiding the origin of knowledge.
      • author: Michel Bitbol
    1. religious ideas contend that a non-physical Consciousness called God was in a good mood at one point so he and it usually is a he created 01:27:18 physicality the material world around us thank you so in those viewpoints Frameworks you're not allowed to ask who or what created God because the answer will be well he 01:27:35 just is and always was so have faith my child and stop asking questions like that [Music] religion or Mythos of materialism philosophy you are not allowed to ask 01:27:46 what created physical energy if you do the answer will be the big bang just happened it was this energy in a point that just was and always will be so have faith my child and don't ask questions 01:28:00 that can't be answered
      • for: adjacency: adjacency - monotheistic religions and maerialism
      • adjacency between
        • monotheistic religion
        • materialist / physicalist scientific theories
      • adjacency statement:
        • Good observation of an adjacency, although not all religions hold those views, and even in those religions, those are those views are held by less critical thinkers.
          • In the more contemplative branches of major world religions, there is a lot of deep, critical thinking that is not so naive.
  10. Mar 2023
  11. Feb 2023
    1. During my journey of developing the Zettelkasten Method,

      Seems like he's saying he developed the Zettelkasten Method... perhaps his version of the method based on Luhmann's? Commodifying the version "created" by Luhmann?

      Credit here for native German speaker writing in English....

    1. It may be necessary to kill half of the Filipinos in order that the remaining half of the population may be advanced to a higher plane of life than their present semi-barbarous state affords.

      Filipinos and their way of life were perceived as less people. I think this is why today, Asian-American are more likely to experience discrimination than their European counterpart.

      What is your opinion about this?

    1. I recently was invited by the Niklas-Luhmann-Archiv research group, to give an overview of my Zettelkasten and discuss aspects of the technical implementation of Luhmann’s Zettelkasten method.

      So nice to see a blog post specifically talk about "Luhmann's Zettelkasten method" rather than a more generic zettelkasten method as being Luhmann's. Notice the 2015 date before the "fame" had caught on in the blogosphere's productivity porn space closer to 2018.

    1. Whewell was one of the Cambridge dons whom Charles Darwin met during his education there, and when Darwin returned from the Beagle voyage he was directly influenced by Whewell, who persuaded Darwin to become secretary of the Geological Society of London. The title pages of On the Origin of Species open with a quotation from Whewell's Bridgewater Treatise about science founded on a natural theology of a creator establishing laws:[33] But with regard to the material world, we can at least go so far as this—we can perceive that events are brought about not by insulated interpositions of Divine power, exerted in each particular case, but by the establishment of general laws.
    1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2zY7l2tzoQ

      Ugh... another short mediocre introduction. Repeats the origin myth.

      Seems to take a very Ahrens' based framing, but screws up a few pieces. More focus on "hub notes" and completely misses the idea of an index somehow?!?

      The last section of 2+ minutes really goes off the rails and recommends converting notes from other places and muddles about "Favorite problems" (ostensibly a reference to Feynman's 12 Favorite Problems, but isn't direct about it?).

      Also encourages the "Feynman technique"...

  12. Jan 2023
    1. In the super-nerdy space where the fine details of digital note-taking are discussed, you’ll hear a lot about the Zettelkasten Method (ZK Method), popularized by a German professor called Niklas Luhmann who was incredibly prolific and famously wrote over 90,000 notes on index cards that were linked together.

      Not so much origin myth here, but popularization myth…

    1. As British philosopher Galen Strawson recently put it, to imagine that one can travel from insensate matter to a being capable of discussing the existence of insensate matter in a mere two jumps is simply to make emergence do too much work.
    2. emergentism. The argument here is that once a certain level of complexity is reached, there is a kind of qualitative leap where completely new sorts of physical laws can “emerge”—ones that are premised on, but cannot be reduced to, what came before.
    3. To exercise one’s capacities to their fullest extent is to take pleasure in one’s own existence, and with sociable creatures, such pleasures are proportionally magnified when performed in company. From the Russian perspective, this does not need to be explained. It is simply what life is. We don’t have to explain why creatures desire to be alive. Life is an end in itself. And if what being alive actually consists of is having powers—to run, jump, fight, fly through the air—then surely the exercise of such powers as an end in itself does not have to be explained either. It’s just an extension of the same principle.

      I'm not sure I like that Graeber waves away the question "why play?" here. I don't think there's an equivalency to the "why life?" question.

      It will take some additional thinking to build something up to refute this idea however.

    1. he [Luhmann] popularized method of expanding your memory called the zettelkasten method (04:49)

      At least he doesn't go with the invention myth, but it's also false that he was the one who popularized it... others online popularized it.

  13. Dec 2022
    1. A pesar de que la administración sistemática del conocimiento no tiene orígenes recientes, el referente más común es el tema es el sociólogo alemán Niklas Luhmann, creador del Zettelkasten.

      Translation:

      Although the systematic administration of knowledge does not have recent origins, the most common referent on the subject is the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, creator of the Zettelkasten.

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

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

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

  14. Nov 2022
    1. https://medium.com/@ben_fry/tracing-the-origin-65011dc20877

      Could be interesting to apply this sort of process to a variety of texts over time. A draft of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein comes to mind.


      How to view this through the lens of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions? particularly as this was the evolution of an idea by the same author over time...

    2. The only diagram or image in The Origin of Species, a tree depicting divergence (source)

      Darwin's On the Origin of Species only contains one diagram, a branching tree diagram which shows divergence of species.

    3. he was working on the same theme with Stefanie Posavec. They completed their piece some time later, depicting the changes as lovely branching trees — a kind of homage to Darwin’s lone diagram in the book.

      Greg McInerny of Microsoft Research and Stefanie Posavek created a version of Darwin's On the Origin of Species that displayed variations between the editions as a branching tree diagram, a nod to the only diagram which appeared in Darwin's original work. .

    4. 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. 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.

  15. Oct 2022
    1. Does anyone else work in project-based systems instead? .t3_y2pzuu._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; }

      reply to u/m_t_rv_s__n https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/y2pzuu/does_anyone_else_work_in_projectbased_systems/

      Historically, many had zettelkasten which were commonplace books kept on note cards, usually categorized by subject (read: "folders" or "tags"), so you're not far from that original tradition.

      Similar to your work pattern, you may find the idea of a "Pile of Index Cards" (PoIC) interesting. See https://lifehacker.com/the-pile-of-index-cards-system-efficiently-organizes-ta-1599093089 and https://www.flickr.com/photos/hawkexpress/albums/72157594200490122 (read the descriptions of the photos for more details; there was also a related, but now defunct wiki, which you can find copies of on Archive.org with more detail). This pattern was often seen implemented in the TiddlyWiki space, but can now be implemented in many note taking apps that have to do functionality along with search and tags. Similarly you may find those under Tiago Forte's banner "Building a Second Brain" to be closer to your project-based/productivity framing if you need additional examples or like-minded community. You may find that some of Nick Milo's Linking Your Thinking (LYT) is in this productivity spectrum as well. (Caveat emptor: these last two are selling products/services, but there's a lot of their material freely available online.)

      Luhmann changed the internal structure of his particular zettelkasten that created a new variation on the older traditions. It is this Luhmann-based tradition that many in r/Zettelkasten follow. Since many who used the prior (commonplace-based) tradition were also highly productive, attributing output to a particular practice is wrongly placed. Each user approaches these traditions idiosyncratically to get them to work for themselves, so ignore naysayers and those with purist tendencies, particularly when they're new to these practices or aren't aware of their richer history. As the sub-reddit rules indicate: "There is no [universal or orthodox] 'right' way", but you'll find a way that is right for you.

    1. Out of our cleverness has emerged something almost more importantthan the cleverness itself. Out of it has come learning about how to share ideasand pass down skills and knowledge. Out of it has come education.

      Gary Thomas posits that it's our cleverness which birthed education. Isn't it more likely our extreme ability to mimic others which is more likely from a cognitive and evolutionary perspective?

      Were early peoples really "teaching" each other how to make primitive hand axes? Or did we first start out by closely mimicking our neighbors?

    1. https://youtu.be/ILuSxUYYjMs

      Luhmann zettelkasten origin myth at 165 second mark

      A short outline of several numbering schemes (essentially all decimal in nature) for zettelkasten including: - Luhmann's numbering - Bob Doto - Scott Scheper - Dan Allosso - Forrest Perry

      A little light on the "why", though it does get location as a primary focus. Misses the idea of density and branching. Touches on but broadly misses the arbitrariness of using the comma, period, or slash which functions primarily for readability.

  16. Sep 2022
    1. nicholas lumen the german sociologist who appears to be the one to have invented the zettelkostn method or at least popularized

      Earlier he uses the phrase "old school" to describe the zettelkasten (presumably Luhmann's version), and not the much older old school ones from Gessner on....

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

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

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

  17. Aug 2022
    1. Someone posted the video above about the Zettelkasten method of taking notes pioneered by the 20th century German sociologist Niklas Luhmann.

      Pioneered is a dreadful word instead of something having a connotation of putting a cherry on top of a pre-existing practice.

  18. Jul 2022
    1. In the United States, Luhmann is best known for anote-taking method he developed called Zettelkasten,which you’ll read more about very shortly.

      Perhaps better to indicate that he made some modifications to a pre-existing method as it's disingenuous historically to say he developed the broader idea which goes back at least as early as Konrad Gessner in 1548.

      Academics, writers, and thinkers have been using variations on the general ideas of note taking, commonplacing, and slip boxing for centuries, which may also help to motivate students.

    1. Well, this was a true early morning treat!You reeeeally botched that one. Like 180 degrees misinterpreted it.That thread is about how Luhmann developed a personal approach that worked for him (as we all do and should), and that there is no one way to work/do a zettelkasten. Ie. We all must (and inevitably will) interpret Luhmann's take on zettelkasten method (and any other tools/method/etc we encounter) in light of what our needs are.What's super dope, is that my whole jam in this ZK world is about showing the thread/lineage of these techniques and helping people specifically wrestle with some of the principles and practices Luhmann employed so that in the end they can apply them in whatever way they see fit. And yet, somehow....you actually miss that?Also, this.... (you)"We approach these methods from such a top down manner, in part, because our culture has broadly lost the thread of how these note taking practices were done historically. Instead of working with something that has always existed and been taught in our culture, and then using it to suit our needs, we're looking at it like a new shiny toy or app and then trying to modify it to make it suit our needs."... Is this....(me)"We're coming at [zettelkasten] top-down. We're appropriating something and trying to retrofit it in a desire to "be better." In doing so, we're trying "clean it up a bit."I'm critiquing this approach 😂 I'm saying we come at it top-down bc we see it as a reified object (which is incorrect) that is set in stone, when in fact those who present the "one true way" are actually presenting a "cleaned up version" of Luhmann's very personal approach and calling it "official." Again, I'm critiquing that! I am, by design and punk ethos, kinda against "official."Silly, dude. The whole thread is about not looking at it as a "shiny new toy" and seeing it as a more fluid aspect of note-taking and personal practice. It's about recognizing that the way to recreate Luhmann is to be flexible, interpret these methods for yourself. Why? Bc that's exactly what Luhmann did."Let the principles and practices guide your zettelkasten work. Throw them in a box with your defined workflow issues. Let them hash it out. Shake the box and let them tell you the "kind" of zk you should be working with." (thread the day before the above mentioned)Also, and you're gonna love this....Here's you above...."People have been using zettelkasten, commonplace books, florilegium, and other similar methods for centuries, and no one version is the "correct" one."And here's me....."The most well-known slip-boxes in the world have been employed by writers in service of their writing. Variations of the system date back to the 17th c., [3] and modern writers such as, Umberto Eco, Arno Schmidt, and Hans Blumenberg are all known for employing some version of the slip-box to capture, collect, organize, and transform notes into published work. Of course, today, the most famous zettelkasten is the one used...."Sound familiar? It's me citing you, ya dum dum 😂 Footnote numero tres....https://writing.bobdoto.computer/zettelkasten-linking-your-thinking-and-nick-milos-search-for-ground/Such a funny thing to see this fine Friday morning! ☀

      Sadly I think we're talking past each other somehow; I broadly agree with all of your original thread. Perhaps there's also some context collapse amidst our conversations across multiple platforms which doesn't help.

      Maybe my error was in placing my comment on your original thread rather than a sub branch on one of the top several comments? I didn't want to target anyone in particular as the "invented by Luhmann myth" is incredibly wide spread and is unlikely to ever go away. It's obvious by some of the responses I've seen from your thread here in r/antinet that folks without the explicit context of the history default to the misconception that Luhmann invented it. This misconception tends to reinforce the idea that there's "one true way" (the often canonically presented "perfect" Luhmann zettelkasten, rather than the messier method that he obviously practiced in reality) when, instead, there are lots of methods, many of which share some general principles or building blocks, but which can have dramatically different uses and outcomes. My hope in highlighting the history was specifically to give your point more power, not take the opposite stance. Not having the direct evidence to the contrary, you'll noticed I hedged my statement with the word "seems" in the opening sentence. I apologize to you that I apparently wasn't more clear.

      I love your comparison of LYT and zettelkasten by the way. It's reminiscent of the sort of comparison I'm hoping to bring forth in an upcoming review of Tiago Forte's recent book. His method—ostensibly a folder based digital commonplace book, which is similar to Milo's LYT—can be useful, but he doesn't seem to have the broader experience of history or the various use cases to be able to advise a general audience which method(s) they may want to try or for which ends. I worry that while he's got a useful method for potentially many people, too many may see it and his platform as a recipe they need to follow rather than having a set of choices for various outcomes they may wish to have. Too many "thought leaders" are trying to "own" portions of the space rather than presenting choices or comparisons the way you have. Elizabeth Butler is one of the few others I've seen taking a broader approach. A lot of these explorations also means there are multiple different words to describe each system's functionality, which I think only serves to muddy things up for potential users rather than make them clearer. (And doing this across multiple languages across time is even more confusing: is it zettelkasten, card index, or fichier boîte? Already the idea of zettelkasten (in English speaking areas) has taken on the semantic meaning "Luhmann's specific method of keeping a zettelkasten" rather than just a box with slips.)

  19. Jun 2022
    1. The term comes from Niklaus Luhmann, a German autodidact and famously prolific academic sociologist. Similar techniques were developed independently by Nabokov and Prisig, among others.

      https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/b566a4/what_is_a_zettelkasten/

      Wow. Even in the pinned post on r/Zettelkasten, they propagate the myth by implication that Luhmann invented the Zettelkasten.

      They also suggest that Nabokov and Pirsig independently developed similar techniques rather than that it was a commonplace (excuse the pun) pattern in the broader culture.

    1. The zettelkästen creator, Niklas Luhmann, produced 70 books and over 550 publications in a short amount of time.
    1. Before we begin, please note that this piece assumes intermediate familiarity with Zettelkasten and its original creator, the social scientist Niklas Luhmann (1927–1998).

      Even the long running (2013) zettelkasten.de website credits Niklas Luhmann as being the "original creator" of the zettelkasten.

      sigh

      We really need to track down the origin of linking one idea to another. Obviously writers, and especially novelists, would have had some sort of at least linear order in their writing due to narrative needs in using such a system. What does this tradition look like on the non-fiction side?

      Certainly some of the puzzle stems from the commonplace book tradition, but this is more likely to have relied on natural memory as well as searching and finding via index methods.

      Perhaps looking more closely at Hans Blumenberg's instantiation would be more helpful. Similarly looking at the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss and his predecessors like Marcel Mauss may provide at least an attack on this problem.

      My working hypothesis is that given the history of the Viennese numbering system, it may have stemmed from the late 1700s and this certainly wasn't an innovation by Luhmann.

      link to: https://hyp.is/hLy7NNtqEeuWQIP1UDkM6g/web.archive.org/web/20130916081433/https://christiantietze.de/posts/2013/06/zettelkasten-improves-thinking-writing/ for evidence of start of zettelkasten.de

    1. The Bugzilla issues don't seem to rule-out the possibility of using CORS for cross-origin download attribute support in the future, but right now using CORS headers does not do anything for the download attribute. It's possible that if other browsers start supporting the attribute, a consensus may yet be reached.

      .

    1. This actually is possible with JavaScript, though browser support would be spotty. You can use XHR2 to download the file from the server to the browser as a Blob, create a URL to the Blob, create an anchor with its href property and set it to that URL, set the download property to whatever filename you want it to be, and then click the link. This works in Google Chrome, but I haven't verified support in other browsers. window.URL = window.URL || window.webkitURL; var xhr = new XMLHttpRequest(), a = document.createElement('a'), file; xhr.open('GET', 'someFile', true); xhr.responseType = 'blob'; xhr.onload = function () { file = new Blob([xhr.response], { type : 'application/octet-stream' }); a.href = window.URL.createObjectURL(file); a.download = 'someName.gif'; // Set to whatever file name you want // Now just click the link you created // Note that you may have to append the a element to the body somewhere // for this to work in Firefox a.click(); }; xhr.send();
    1. settle custon which a philosopher named nicholas lumen created

      Another example of an unsourced reference to Niklas Luhmann creating the zettelkasten.

  20. May 2022
    1. name means a slit box in german as in like a slip of paper a box containing such slips of paper it was invented or at least the modern form was described by a sociologist 00:02:32 named nicholas lumon

      Another example of someone misattributing the invention of the zettelkasten to Niklas Luhmann. At least Soren Bjornstad modifies the attribution to say modern form, but I suspect that this is more of a verbal hedge more than being backed up with actual evidence, though perhaps the video will bear out more detail?

      The availability heuristic is so strong in Luhmann's case, that he is attributed the invention. I find that few people can point to or ever mention any others who used the method.

    1. Luhmann realised his note-taking was not leadinganywhere. So he turned note-taking on its head.

      Here Ahrens doesn't say that Luhmann invented the zettelkasten, but he comes pretty close and is heavily implying it rather than delving into the ways which Luhmann may have been taught this practice.

    1. This is all too correct. Sadly the older methods for writing, note taking, thinking, and memory have fallen by the wayside, so most literate moderns don't have the tradition most of (elite educated) Western culture has had for the past 2000+ years. The long tradition of commonplace books and their related versions including waste books, florilegium, sudelbücher, scholia, glossae, notebooks, anthologies, sylvae, table books, vade mecum, memoranda books, diaries, miscellanies, pocket books, thesauruses, etc. underlines your thesis well. The Zettelkasten, exactly like almost all of these others, is simply an iteration of the commonplace book instantiated into index card form. One of the reasons that Umberto Eco's advice on writing seems so similar to the zettelkasten method is that he was a medievalist scholar who was aware of these long traditions of writing, note taking, and memory and leveraged these for himself, though likely in a slightly different manner. Would anyone suggest that he didn't have a voluminous output or an outsized impact on society and culture? If one really wants to go crazy on the idea of backlinks and the ideas of creativity and invention, perhaps they ought to brush up on their Catalan and read some Ramon Llull? He was an 11th century philosopher and polymath who spent a lot of time not only memorizing much of his personal knowledge, but who invented combinatorial creative methods for juxtaposing his volumes of information to actively create new ideas. I guarantee no backlinking system held a match to his associative methods. Now if someone wanted to mix some mysticism into the fray, then perhaps there might be a competition... Many who are now writing so positively about Zettelkasten or backlinks are doing so in much the same way that humanist scholars like Desiderius Erasmus, Rodolphus Agricola, and Philip Melanchthon did when writing about and re-popularizing commonplace books in the 1500s. The primary difference being that the chance that they leave as lasting a legacy is much smaller. Worse many of them are crediting Luhmann for the actual invention of the Zettelkasten when his is but one instantiation on a long evolution of many note taking devices over literal millennia. I'm still waiting for folks to spend more time talking about Carl Linnaeus' revolutionary invention and use of the index card. Or John Locke's system for creating a new indexing system for commonplace books. Generally we don't talk about these innovations because their users spent more of their time using their systems to get other more important things done for their legacies. In the end, the message seems clear, anyone can be incredibly productive; most of it boils down to having some sort of system of reading, thinking, note taking, and new production and sticking with it for a while. Have a system; use your system; evolve it slowly to work well for you and the way you think and work.

    1. notes that when you don't tend to your digital garden, people come along, think your work is weeds, and pull it from existence.

      Oldest reference to digital garden on Twitter

      notes that when you don't tend to your digital garden, people come along, think your work is weeds, and pull it from existence.

      — Matthew Oliphant (@matto) February 19, 2007
      <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
    1. tending to the digital garden.

      Second earliest reference to digital garden on Twitter

      tending to the digital garden.

      — seansalmon.ugh 🤷‍♂️ (@seanaes) October 1, 2007
      <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
    1. Other popular terms for such a system include Zettelkasten (meaning “slipbox” in German, coined by influential sociologist Niklas Luhmann), Memex (aword invented by American inventor Vannevar Bush), and digital garden(named by popular online creator Anne-Laure Le Cunff)

      Zettelkasten existed prior to Niklas Luhmann, who neither invented them nor coined their name.

      The earliest concept of a digital garden stems from Mark Bernstein's essay Hypertext Gardens: Delightful Vistas in 1998.

      Anne-Laure Le Cunff's first mention of "digital garden" was on April 21, 2020

      Progress on my digital garden / evergreen notebook inspired by @andy_matuschak🌱<br><br>Super grateful for @alyssaxuu who's been literally handholding me through the whole thing — thank you! pic.twitter.com/ErzvEsdAUj

      — Anne-Laure Le Cunff (@anthilemoon) April 22, 2020
      <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

      Which occurred after Maggie Appleton's mention on 2020-04-15 https://twitter.com/Mappletons/status/1250532315459194880

      Nerding hard on digital gardens, personal wikis, and experimental knowledge systems with @_jonesian today.<br><br>We have an epic collection going, check these out...<br><br>1. @tomcritchlow's Wikifolders: https://t.co/QnXw0vzbMG pic.twitter.com/9ri6g9hD93

      — Maggie Appleton 🧭 (@Mappletons) April 15, 2020
      <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

      And several days after Justin Tadlock on 2020-04-17 https://wptavern.com/on- digital-gardens-blogs-personal-spaces-and-the-future

      Before this there was Joel Hooks by at least 2020-02-04 https://web.archive.org/web/20200204180025/https://joelhooks.com/digital-garden, though he had been thinking about it in late 2019: https://github.com/joelhooks/joelhooks-com/blob/36c21b34f02ade14d4e67915ff412462030282cd/content/blog/2019-12-08--on-writing-more~~qG38AKqxq/index.mdx

      He was predated by Tom Critchlow on 2018-10-18 https://tomcritchlow.com/blogchains/digital-gardens/ who quotes Mike Caulfield's article from 2015-10-17 as an influence https://hapgood.us/2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-technopastoral/amp/

      Archive.org has versions going back into the early 2000's: https://web.archive.org/web/*/%22digital%20garden%22

  21. Apr 2022
  22. Mar 2022
    1. i knew that that this is that might be different but no i of course you you don't connect it 00:27:44 that much with your own book it's more about that you see the idea and the idea is lumens idea and you're trying to describe it as good as possible

      Even Sönke Ahrens has indirectly attributed the idea of the zettelkasten directly to Niklas Luhmann.

      2022-03-24

    1. it is called the zettelkasten method and this was originally used by nicholas lumen in the 1960s

      They don't say outright that Luhmann invented the zettelkasten, but it's implied with the words "originally used".

  23. Feb 2022
    1. You may remember from school the difference between an exergonicand an endergonic reaction. In the first case, you constantly need toadd energy to keep the process going. In the second case, thereaction, once triggered, continues by itself and even releasesenergy.

      The build up of complexity which results in the creation of life with increasing complexity must certainly be endergonic if the process is to last for any extensive length of time. Once the process becomes exergonic or reaches homeostasis, then the building of complexity and even life itself will cease to exist.

      Must this always be true? Proof? Counter examples?

    1. Ahren’s book and ideas are not his original creation, but based on the method of Niklas Luhman referred to as the Zettelkasten. I see various references to Luhman’s ideas lately and predict this will become “a thing” in education.

      Another example of how much we've forgotten of our commonplacing and note taking traditions in rhetoric, and this from someone who's actively used note cards in the past.

      Luhmann did not invent the zettelkasten. (I should make bumper stickers...)

      Oops: https://www.zazzle.com/niklas_luhmann_bumper_sticker-128462770354241554

  24. Jan 2022
    1. Autopoiesis has been proposed as a potential mechanism of abiogenesis, by which primitive cells evolved into more complex molecules that could support the development of life.
    2. Until recently[30][31][32] there have been almost no attempts to compare the different theories and discuss them together.
      1. Letelier, J C; Cárdenas, M L; Cornish-Bowden, A (2011). "From L'Homme Machine to metabolic closure: steps towards understanding life". J. Theor. Biol. 286 (1): 100–113. Bibcode:2011JThBi.286..100L. doi:10.1016/j.jtbi.2011.06.033. PMID 21763318.
      2. Igamberdiev, A.U. (2014). "Time rescaling and pattern formation in biological evolution". BioSystems. 123: 19–26. doi:10.1016/j.biosystems.2014.03.002. PMID 24690545.
      3. Cornish-Bowden, A; Cárdenas, M L (2020). "Contrasting theories of life: historical context, current theories. In search of an ideal theory". BioSystems. 188: 104063. doi:10.1016/j.biosystems.2019.104063. PMID 31715221. S2CID 207946798.

      Relationship to the broader idea in Loewenstein as well...

    3. Autopoiesis is just one of several current theories of life, including the chemoton[20] of Tibor Gánti, the hypercycle of Manfred Eigen and Peter Schuster,[21] [22] [23] the (M,R) systems[24][25] of Robert Rosen, and the autocatalytic sets[26] of Stuart Kauffman, similar to an earlier proposal by Freeman Dyson.[27] All of these (including autopoiesis) found their original inspiration in Erwin Schrödinger's book What is Life?[28] but at first they appear to have little in common with one another, largely because the authors did not communicate with one another, and none of them made any reference in their principal publications to any of the other theories.
  25. Dec 2021
    1. A plumber was a man who used lead for many reasons. Since lead was very malleable and had a low melting temperature it was employed quite a great deal to seal and repair.Pipes used to be connected and secured just as they are at present, although now we use plastics or ceramics.
    2. One may think that the pipes leading to the sink, and the job of installing or maintaining them is described as plumbing since pipes were previously made with lead and the Latin word for lead was plumbum (consequently the elemental letters Pb).While this fact is absolutely valid, it is additionally true that plumbers were once employed in additional ways than installing pipes when the phrase plumber originally became popular in French then English within a century around the 14th Century A.D.
    3. Furthermore, lead is very weighty and so it was often used in the role of a weight. At the end of a twine hung to be certain of a perpendicular line it is described as a plumb bob. Persons in charge of water workings earlier than the era of dependable pressure systems had to fall back on on gravity defined methods and so accurate lines and levels were essential.
    1. The New York Times continues to cite him as one of its primary sources on the question of COVID's origins.

      Peter Daszak is still cited by respectable media, and that is insulting, given his record on truthiness.

  26. Nov 2021
    1. On one side of the world were people whose relationship with the liv-ing world was shaped by Skywoman, who created a garden for the

      well-being of all. On the other side was another woman with a garden and a tree. But for tasting its fruit, she was banished from the garden and the gates clanged shut behind her. That mother of men was made to wander in the wilderness and earn her bread by the sweat of her brow, not by filling her mouth with the sweet juicy fruits that bend the branches low. In order to eat, she was instructed to subdue the wilder-ness into which she was cast.

      Its amazing how two origin stories with such similarities lead us to such different cultures and civilizations. The founder effects can be incredibly powerful.

    1. For if I wait out the uncomfortable night by the river,I fear that the female dew and the evil frost togetherwill be too much for my damaged strength, I am so exhausted, and in themorning a chilly wind will blow from the river; 470 but if I go up the slopeand into the shadowy forest,and lie down to sleep among the dense bushes, even if the chill andweariness let me be, and a sweet sleep comes upon me,I fear I may become spoil and prey to the wild animals.’

      There's something about the description here that reminds me of the closing paragraph of Charles Darwin's On The Origin of the Species (p 489):

      It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, [...]

      Both authors are writing about riverbanks, life, and uncertainty.

  27. Oct 2021
  28. Sep 2021
    1. When you are using postman they are not restricted by this policy. Quoted from Cross-Origin XMLHttpRequest: Regular web pages can use the XMLHttpRequest object to send and receive data from remote servers, but they're limited by the same origin policy. Extensions aren't so limited. An extension can talk to remote servers outside of its origin, as long as it first requests cross-origin permissions.
  29. Aug 2021
    1. In this cosmic parallel, that depicts these theological concepts as celestial bodies, see his Heart is truly the Earth… simply by moving one letter from the end to the beginning.  It’s probably not a coincidence that this same letter is the astrological sign of Saturn, and there’s a significant amount of interesting information packed into these ancient symbols.  

      yesterday i named my laptop minix; or miniten ... kind of like austin powers would have said "do you wanna noshag bb?"

      it's already too cheesy, I'm not sure how to say this is "some of the most original and earliest writing I committed to the virtual paper tablet of "stone" we call the internet.

      Here I'm unsmashing it.

    1. I joined Caldera in November of 1995, and we certainly used "open source" broadly at that time. We were building software. I can't imagine a world where we did not use the specific phrase "open source software". And we were not alone. The term "Open Source" was used broadly by Linus Torvalds (who at the time was a student...I had dinner with Linus and his then-girlfriend Ute in Germany while he was still a student)

      From Linus Torvalds Remembers the Days Before ‘Open Source’:

      Torvalds counters that “I wouldn’t trust Lyle Ball’s recollection 100% about me… since my girlfriend-at-the-time (now wife) name was Tove, not Ute.”

  30. Jul 2021
    1. Every text in computer format is encoded with tags, whether this is apparent to the user or not

      I had never really wondered about the origins of tags and hashtags, even though I knew they were a somewhat recent phenomenon in terms of use by the general population. But this made me wonder if it happened as a result of the already common practice of tagging in code, or if it developed on its own. Turns out, we owe it all to programmers and wildfires!

    1. Complexity: your partner needs to be sufficiently autonomous. Autonomy is promoted by growing inner complexity of the system. Its inner complexity depends on both the number of notes and their relationships with each other.

      The complexity of a system promotes autonomy.

      How do we define autonomy here? Is this statement really true? Useful? How might this related to the origin of life?

  31. Jun 2021
  32. May 2021
  33. Apr 2021
    1. Unfortunately, there is some urgency to this effort. As Shashi Tharoor writes in his book Inglorious Empire (2018), over the past 30 years, there has been a tremendous bout of collective amnesia, espeically in the UK, about the history of empire and its consequences. Into this vacuum, revisionist historians of the worst kind like Niall Ferguson have capitalized on historical blind spots of people living today to make an absurd case for the benefits of empire. This cannot be allowed to happen. Tharoor believes that one of the best bulwarks against this erasure is to do the work of inquiry and to make the history of empire accessible and apparent to the widest audience. It is into this effort that I submit my work. John Company is an unsparing portrait that hopefully will give its players a sense of the nature of empire and the long half-life of its cultural production. It is certainly not the only way to make a game about empire, but I hope that it does its part in adding to our understanding of that subject and its continued legacy.
    1. As a result of all this in a couple of weeks I had a working version of empty (http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/empty) which allows to start interactive programs and communicate with them using FIFO-files
    1. Around &Bigger the box is bigger: 75mm high instead of 45mm or so.That was the main reason for the name &Bigger. The first edition does fit in its box but very tight. Because the first factory used bigger cardboard than planned. They told me about this "upgrade" after they produced the game. The thicker tiles (about 2.5mm) did feel good for the game so the &Bigger edition has the same
    1. Enter 2020: Matt and Jordan managed to scrape together some illustrations for playtesting, but they weren’t up to the bar of a production game. Fortunately, we connected through friends with Jaehee, and she cautiously listened to the pitch for the game. Once she decided to join the team, the artwork and designs quality improved by orders of magnitude, to the point where we had an experience we felt was worthwhile sharing publicly.
  34. Mar 2021
    1. Originally he had used the terms usage scenarios and usage case – the latter a direct translation of his Swedish term användningsfall – but found that neither of these terms sounded natural in English, and eventually he settled on use case.
    1. One day last August 2018, I stumbled upon an online petition that sparked my curiosity - We Want Serverless Ruby. At that time, none of the major cloud providers had first-class support for Ruby in their serverless products. There were ~1400 devs signing that petition, and I wondered if there was something about Ruby that made it unsuitable for FaaS. I decided to roll the sleeves and start building what would be the first PoC of faastRuby.
  35. Feb 2021
    1. Good intentions, but I doubt there's any relation of the origin of the terms blacklist/whitelist to race. There are many idioms and phrases in the English language that make use of colours without any racial backstories. I haven't met any black person (myself included) who was ever offended by the use of "blacklist".