The principles I’m presenting are mapped onto Luhmann’s four principles;however, in my perfectly biased opinion, they are more simple and usefulin understanding the Zettelkasten.

Luhmann’s system is built entirely of physical, not digital,parts. With those parts of Luhmann’s system stripped away, deleted, andmorphed from physical form to metaphysical form, the critical essence ofthe Zettelkasten system has been demoted.

beliefs

I hope I wouldn’t call it a wiki!

I’m not against progress; however, it becomes confusing when a new concept(i.e. digital notetaking apps with linking capabilities) ensconces itself in aterm used by an entirely different concept (i.e. Niklas Luhmann’sZettelkasten).

Even thoughsuch apps are thought of as a Zettelkasten, the magic that Luhmann builtinto his system is lost.

fundamental truth

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

DanAllosso · 36 min. agoThanks, Scott! I'll have a Scrintal "board" with photographed analog notes to show soon, too. Solved the fire and flood problem.

ephemeral sources .t3_znbvw3._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; }

However, this has been the case for centuries, such as Chris has demonstrated several times here.

Life is too short to spend it on personal knowledge management.Tl;dr: I think personal knowledge management, in many cases, is a fruitless effort and there are generally only very few cases (see above) in which note taking actually makes sense.

However, most of the stuff I read about personal knowledge management is about systems, apps, setups or plugins, and never really about its purpose. Why bother doing all this?

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.

There are different kinds of information, some of which don't make sense being recorded at all. I was struggling with what to record and what not to record for a long time. For example, I took notes on programming syntax that are just useless (most of these things can be googled in seconds and they are usually decently documented already).

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.

Writing permanent notes was time consuming as f***. On one side writing them helped me grasp the concepts they described on a deep level. One the other side I think this would have been possible without putting an emphasis on referencing, atomicity, deep linking, etc.

Funnily enough the ROI on these notes was a lot higher than all the permanent/evergreen/zettel notes I had written.

But then life went on and nothing really happened.

Although some of them took a lot of time to create (I literally wrote whole book summaries for a while), their value was negligible in hindsight.

I barely, if ever, looked at or refered back to the bulk of notes I had created.

IMO ZK has always been a tool for writers - who are writing complex things for other people to read - to gather and organize information for that expressed purpose. They could be book writers, essay writers, academic paper/thesis writers, speech writers, bloggers, etc, but they've gotta be output-focused.

Presumed to have been written in the fifth century Stobaeus compiled an extensive two volume manuscript commonly known as The Anthologies of excerpts containing 1,430 poetry and prose quotations of works of which only 315 are still extant in the 21st century.[10]

M. A. Friedman’s publication of Goitein’s India(link is external) book

The Princeton Geniza Project(link is external) is a database of more than 30,000 records and 4,600 transcriptions of documentary geniza texts. Since 1986, the PGP has been dedicated to discovering and describing unpublished documents; maintaining a full-text retrieval database of geniza documents; and creating new transcriptions and translations.

Keeping track of research materials used to require an excellent memory, exceptional bookkeeping skills or blind luck; now we have databases.

But a 1901 article(link is external) by Solomon Schechter hinted at the cache’s potential for social history. 

To Zotero or not to Zotero?

new genres of religious literature were created, like hagiography (thestories of saints’ lives)

He filled the library at Vivarium with texts onthese subjects and transformed the production of manuscripts in hisscriptorium by developing proper standards and methods forcopying. As one of the few notable scholars of his period,Cassiodorus played a vital role in the survival of classical culture inItaly, saving books from the smoking ruins of Roman libraries,preserving and reproducing them

Montecassino became famous for its library and scriptorium

In 529, two crucial events tipped the balance even further infavour of Christianity.

The Emperor Justinian closed the Academy inAthens, the centre of Neoplatonist philosophy and pagan resistance.

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.

Theonly surviving manuscripts that were actually made in the ancientworld (before around AD 500) are small fragments of papyri found ona rubbish tip in Egypt and some scrolls from the Villa of the Papyri atHerculaneum.*1

important works like Galen’s On Demonstration, Theophrastus’ OnMines and Aristarchus’ treatise on heliocentric theory (which mighthave changed the course of astronomy dramatically if it hadsurvived) all slipped through the cracks of time.

In the latefifth century, a man called Stobaeus compiled a huge anthology of1,430 poetry and prose quotations. Just 315 of them are from worksthat still exist—the rest are lost.

By AD 500, the Christian Church had drawn most of the talented men of theage into its service, in either missionary, organizational, doctrinal, or purelycontemplative activity.—Edward Grant, Physical Science in the Middle Ages

Three editions were published by Conrad Gessner (Zurich, 1543; Basle, 1549; Zurich; 1559),

You know, I haven’t been to the movies in over three years, and at this point I’m not sure what would bring me back.

Because I am as interested in the attitudes and assumptions which are implicit in the evidence as in those which were explicitly articulated at the time, I have got into the habit of reading against the grain. Whether it is a play or a sermon or a legal treatise, I read it not so much for what the author meant to say as for what the text incidentally or unintentionally reveals.

The cult objects included five standing stones, two basalt altars, two pottery libation vessels and two portable shrines.

I'm finding that IndieBlocks may be the way to go since most of the indieweb plugins that are out there are lacking block editor compatibility and most of them state you need classic editor enabled which isn't helpful if you are trying to move forward with the way in which WordPress is going with the block editor. Maybe some of these devs haven't "learn javascript deeply" like Matt Mullenweg suggested and are still stuck in PHP land like many of the people like me are, sadly.

On my own website(s) I'm looking to write more content and share more of my experiences. I'm at a time in my life that documenting what is going on so I can recall things easier would be helpful, a place to publicly share my notes in hopes that it will help someone else.

“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?”

In the liner notes of “Ambient 1: Music for Airports” (1978), Eno wrote, “Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.”

In 1978, he started to use the term “ambient music”: the concept stretched back to describe “Discreet Music” and the work of earlier composers, like Satie, who coined the term “furniture music,” for compositions that would be more functional than expressive.

But taste is not an act—it’s an opinion.

Eno heard about No Wave, then the dominant style for downtown bands who were taking punk to its logical extremes—abandoning song form, playing entirely outside of formal tunings, and foregrounding noise over signal.

Eno’s strategies don’t always appeal to the musicians he works with. In Geeta Dayal’s book about the album, also titled “Another Green World,” the bassist Percy Jones recalls, “There was this one time when he gave everybody a piece of paper, and he said write down 1 to 100 or something like that, and then he gave us notes to play against specific numbers.” Phil Collins, who played drums on the album, reacted to these instructions by throwing beer cans across the room. “I think we got up to about 24 and then we gave up and did something else,” Jones said.

Eno was moving toward a music that changed your perception of the space around you. Geography could be as memorable as melody.

Both albums are perverse, slightly agitated, and playful, with many of the lyrics generated randomly and cut together from various sources (mostly Eno’s own notebooks).

The band began rehearsing in Eno’s house, with Eno acting as “sound manipulator,” a cross between a live-sound engineer and a band member.

“I thought that art schools should just be places where you thought about creative behavior, whereas they thought an art school was a place where you made painters,” he said later.

At Ipswich, he studied under the unorthodox artist and theorist Roy Ascott, who taught him the power of what Ascott called “process not product.”

Behind Eno stand John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, and Erik Satie, but those guys didn’t make pop records.

As he told Keyboard, in 1981, “Any constraint is part of the skeleton that you build the composition on—including your own incompetence.”

Eno is widely known for coining the term “ambient music,”

Censorship and Information Control During Information RevolutionsExploring how new information technologies from the printing press to the digital age have stimulated new forms of censorship and information control.

Published in the journal, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the paper also shows that the mice share similarities in mitochondrial DNA with Scandinavia and northern Germany, but not with mice found in Portugal.

The “Book of Roads and Kingdoms”, an eleventh-century geography text by Abu Abdullah al-Bakri, describes the Vikings as “Majus”, a term for heathens and fire-worshipers.

ourobo-ros · 2 days agoOk great! Do you have an example you could illustrate of new ideas you've managed to extrapolate?

His note taking technique has a high distraction potential and is time consuming.

Should I use a Zettelkasten if I’m just intending to use it to learn about a few topics (no intention of publication/paper-writing, ever)?

Alas, lawmakers are way behind the curve on this, demanding new "online safety" rules that require firms to break E2E and block third-party de-enshittification tools: https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/online-safety-made-dangerous/ The online free speech debate is stupid because it has all the wrong focuses: Focusing on improving algorithms, not whether you can even get a feed of things you asked to see; Focusing on whether unsolicited messages are delivered, not whether solicited messages reach their readers; Focusing on algorithmic transparency, not whether you can opt out of the behavioral tracking that produces training data for algorithms; Focusing on whether platforms are policing their users well enough, not whether we can leave a platform without losing our important social, professional and personal ties; Focusing on whether the limits on our speech violate the First Amendment, rather than whether they are unfair: https://doctorow.medium.com/yes-its-censorship-2026c9edc0fd

The enshittification of Amazon – where you search for a specific product and get six screens of ads for different, worse ones – is the natural end-state of chokepoint capitalism: https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola

That same enshittification is on every platform, and "freedom of speech is not freedom of reach" is just a way of saying, "Now that you're stuck here, we're going to enshittify your experience."

But there's another side to this playlistification of feeds: playlists and other recommendation algorithms are chokepoints: they are a way to durably interpose a company between a creator and their audience. Where you have chokepoints, you get chokepoint capitalism: https://chokepointcapitalism.com/

The modern internet was born out of an epic struggled between "Bellheads" (who believed centralized powers should decide how you used networks) and "Netheads" (who believed that services should be provided and consumed "at the edge"): https://www.wired.com/1996/10/atm-3/

They didn't block new features for shits and giggles, though – the method to this madness was rent-extraction. The iron-clad rule of the Bell System was that anything that improved on the basic service had to have a price-tag attached. Every phone "feature" was a recurring source of monthly revenue for the phone company – even the phone itself, which you couldn't buy, and had to rent, month after month, year after year, until you'd paid for it hundreds of times over. This is an early and important example of "predatory inclusion": the monopoly carriers delivered universal service to all of us, but that was a prelude to an ugly, parasitic, rent-seeking way of doing business:

By making an investmentup front to alleviate poverty, the evidence suggests that we will be repaid manytimes over in the lower costs associated with a host of social problems.

As has been demonstrated, it is not a question of paying ornot paying. Rather, it is a question of how we want to pay, which then affectsthe amount we end up spending.

There is, however, an argument often made with respect to not fully addressingpoverty and inequality. It is based on the assumption that there is a necessarytrade- off between having a strong economy and having a robust social welfarestate. The recent origins of this argument can be traced back to an influen-tial book entitled, Equality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff by the economistArthur Okun.

However, there is a second way of estimating the difference between the priceof ending poverty and what it is costing us. It is through a measure known asthe poverty gap or the poverty income deficit. This measures what it would costto lift all poor households with children younger than 18 years to the level ofthe poverty line. In other words, how much total income is needed to pull everyAmerican child out of poverty? According to the U.S. Census Bureau, thatfigure for 2015 was $86.9 billion.12 For $86.9 billion, every American householdwith younger than 18 years in poverty could be raised out of poverty.We can then compare this figure to our overall estimate of the costs of child-hood poverty, which is $1.03 trillion. Combining these two figures results in aratio of savings to cost of approximately 12:1.

By summing together these costs, the overall estimate is that in 2015, child-hood poverty in the United States was costing the nation $1.03 trillion a year.This number represented 5.4 percent of the U.S. annual GDP.The bottom line is that child poverty represents a significant economicburden to the United States.

to lowered economic productivity through reduced earnings. In addition,increased health costs amount to $192 billion, whereas costs associated withincreased crime and incarceration (increased victimization costs of street crime;increased corrections and crime deterrence; increased social costs of incarcer-ation) total $406 billion.

For most Americans, poverty is seen as an individualized conditionthat exclusively affects those individuals, their families, and perhaps theirneighborhoods. Rarely do we conceptualize a stranger’s poverty as having adirect or indirect effect on our own well-being.

Alexis de Tocqueville referred to this in his 1840 treatise on America as self-interest properly understood. In fact, the full title of the chapter from his book,Democracy in America, is, “How the Americans Combat Individualism by theDoctrine of Self-Interest Properly Understood.” His basic premise was that“one sees that by serving his fellows, man serves himself and that doing good isto his private advantage.”6

To a large extent, we have failed to recognize that poverty places enormouseconomic, social, and psychological costs on the nonpoor as well as the poor.These costs affect us both individually and as a nation, although we have beenslow to recognize them. Too often, the attitude has been, “I don’t see how I’maffected, so why worry about it?”

The 1960s were a period of time when poverty in theUnited States was cut in half. This should be seen as a major economic ac-complishment. The War on Poverty played an important role in this decline.It demonstrated that the nation’s poverty is not immovable and that genuineprogress is possible with a concerted effort by the government and a growingeconomy.

One dominant way that people think about poverty, both in scholarship and in publicdiscourse, is to focus on demographic characteristics. This explanation assumes thatthere is something wrong with poor people’s individual characteristics: that they aremore likely to be single parents, they are not working enough, they are too young, orthey are not well-educated. So, the way to attack poverty, from this perspective, wouldbe to reduce single-parenthood or reduce the number of people with low education. Thisexplanation concentrates on the individual characteristics of the poor people themselvesand how they are different from nonpoor people.The problem with this explanation is that it does not adequately explain thebig differences in poverty between countries. For example, think about the big fourindividual risks of poverty—single parenthood, becoming a head of household at anearly age, low- education, and unemployment. These are indisputably the four bigcharacteristics that predict your risk of poverty. If the demographic explanation iscorrect, then the United States should have very high levels of single-parenthood, youngheadship, low educational attainment, and unemployment. That would explain why wehave high poverty: We have a large number of people with those four characteristics.The reality, however, is that the United States is actually below average in these areascompared with other rich democracies.

Accordingly, poverty acts to reduce overall available bandwidth. It does thisthrough creating greater stress and worries, reduced nutrition, exposure to toxicenvironments, and so on. For example, the constant worry of how to survive ona day-to- day basis acts to reduce bandwidth:Being poor means having less money to buy things, but it also means havingto spend more of one’s bandwidth managing that money. The poor mustmanage sporadic income, juggle expenses, and make difficult trade-offs.Even when the poor are not actually making financial decisions, thesepreoccupations can be distracting. Thinking and fretting about money caneffectively tax bandwidth.23This body of research has demonstrated that it is important to understanddecision- making not only within the socioeconomic context of individuals’lives, but within the psychological context as well.

The magic bullet of education and skillseliminating poverty is an alluring one, but without a substantial increase in thenumber and quality of opportunities available, it is only a mirage.

However, there is fatal flaw to this argument—as an overall macro strategyfor reducing poverty, it will be ineffective unless we also increase the overallquantity and quality of opportunities, particularly job opportunities, in society.In other words, by providing an individual with greater education, we havemade them more competitive in the job market, but only at the expense ofsomeone else. In this sense, the strategy is played as a zero-sum game.

The critical mistake that has been made in the past is that we have equatedthe question of who loses the game with the question of why the game produceslosers in the first place. They are, in fact, distinct and separate questions.

Musical Chairs

What greater education and skills allow an individual to do is to move fur-ther up in the overall queue of people looking to find a well-paying and re-warding job. However, because of the limited number of such jobs, only a setamount of people will be able to land such jobs. Consequently, one’s positionin the queue can change as a result of human capital, but the same amount ofpeople will still be stuck at the end of the line if the overall opportunities re-main the same.

Human capital consists of those skills and resources that eachof us brings into the labor market. They include the quantity and quality ofeducation we have attained, job training received, acquired skills and experi-ence, aptitudes and abilities, and so on.

One of the most enduring poverty myths across the political and ideologicalspectrum is that if we were able to provide individuals with enough educationand skills, poverty could be eliminated.

One of the clear signs that the bottleneck to low-income adults working moreresults from their lack of opportunities is provided by looking at their hours of workover the business cycle. When the economy is strong and jobs are plentiful, low-incomeworkers are more likely to find work, find work with higher pay, and be able to securemore hours of work than when the economy is weak. In 2000, when the economy wasclose to genuine full employment, the unemployment rate averaged 4.0 percent and thepoverty rate was 11.3 percent; but in 2010, in the aftermath of the Great Recession, theunemployment rate averaged 9.6 percent and the poverty rate was almost 15.1 percent.What changed in those years was not poor families’ attitudes toward work but simplythe availability of jobs. Among the bottom one-fifth of nonelderly households, hoursworked per household were about 40 percent higher in the tight labor market of 2000than in recession- plagued 2010.Given the opportunity for work or additional work hours, low-income Americanswork more. A full-employment agenda that increases opportunities in the labor market,alongside stronger labor standards such as a higher minimum wage, reduces poverty.

research finds that minimum wage increases are associatedwith significant reductions in poverty.

A final point regarding the myth of hard work and poverty is that this mythis particularly powerful because it implies a sense of justice and fairness. Thosewho do well in life through their hard work are seen as deserving, and thosewho do not do well in life through their lack of hard work are also seen as de-serving of their fate.14 There is something comforting about the idea that peopleget their just rewards. Unfortunately, neither the world nor poverty is fair. AsMichael Harrington wrote in his 1963 book, The Other America:The real explanation of why the poor are where they are is that they madethe mistake of being born to the wrong parents, in the wrong section of thecountry, in the wrong industry, or in the wrong racial or ethnic group. Oncethat mistake has been made, they could have been paragons of will and mo-rality, but most of them would never even have had a chance to get out ofthe other America.15

Then there were the three lots of blank notebooks, tied with twine. They went for $9,000, $11,000, and $11,000 each. They were empty, some still wrapped in plastic, yet they were totally talismanic. I wondered: Would you write in these notebooks, having paid that price? Perhaps that’s the whole appeal—to write in a blank space that Didion might once have intended to use herself. Maybe the buyer had a hidden wish that somehow her intent might infiltrate their own work—that in owning these notebooks they might crack some secret code to making sentences like hers. There are sillier superstitions. But more likely, I think, you would have paid too much for these notebooks to ever touch them, and they would sit in a drawer or on a desk, unused and empty, just as they sat on hers.

People like sets, neat collections that have some coherence; that’s what all these items taken together had, anyway, because nothing makes for a complete collection quite like somebody dying and leaving things behind.

I'd love it to be normal and everyday to not assume that when you post a message on your social network, every person is reading it in a similar UI, either to the one you posted from, or to the one everyone else is reading it in.

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.