Replied to Introducing a Microformats API for Books: books-mf2.herokuapp.com by Jamie TannaJamie Tanna (Jamie Tanna | Software Engineer)
Announcing the Microformats translation layer for book data.
This is awesomeness!

h-book 

h-book is an experimental microformat at best.

I might recommend for minimizing the vocabulary that one might use the existing h-product instead and allow parsers to find an ISBN, Library of Congress book number, ASIN, UPC, or other product code to determine “bookness”.
Annotated on August 01, 2021 at 09:13AM

Social Media, Fast and Slow

I like the differentiation that Jared has made here on his homepage with categories for “fast” and “slow” posts.

It’s reminiscent of the system 1 (fast) and system2 (slow) ideas behind Kahneman and Tversky’s work in behavioral economics. (See Thinking, Fast and Slow)

It’s also interesting in light of this tweet which came up recently:

Because the Tweet was shared out of context several years later, someone (accidentally?) replied to it as if it were contemporaneous. When called out for not watching the date of the post, their reply was “you do slow web your way…”#

This gets one thinking. Perhaps it would help more people’s contextual thinking if more sites specifically labeled their posts as fast and slow (or gave a 1-10 rating)? Sometimes the length of a response is an indicator of the thought put into it, thought not always as there’s also the oft-quoted aphorism: “If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter”.

The ease of use of the UI on Twitter seems to broadly make it a platform for “fast” posting which can too often cause ruffled feathers, sour feelings, anger, and poor communication.

What if there were posting UIs (or micropub clients) that would hold onto your responses for a few hours, days, or even a week and then remind you about them after that time had past to see if they were still worth posting? This is a feature based on Abraham Lincoln’s idea of a “hot letter” or angry letter, which he advised people to write often, but never send.

Where is the social media service for hot posts that save all your vituperation, but don’t show them to anyone? Or which maybe posts them anonymously?

The opposite of some of this are the partially baked or even fully thought out posts that one hears about anecdotally, but which the authors say they felt weren’t finish and thus didn’t publish them. Wouldn’t it be better to hit publish on these than those nasty quick replies? How can we create better UI to solve for this?

I saw a sitcom a few years ago where a girl admonished her friend (an oblivious boy) for liking really old Instagram posts of a girl he was interested in. She said that deep-liking old photos was an obvious and overt sign of flirting.

If this is the case then there’s obviously a social standard of sorts for this, so why not hold your tongue in the meanwhile, and come up with something more thought out to send your digital love to someone instead of providing a (knee-)jerk reaction?

Of course now I can’t help but think of the annotations I’ve been making in my copy of Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things. Do you suppose that Lucretius knows I’m in love?

Replied to a tweet by Tudor Girba (Twitter)
Mostly for want of the mention of a single idea in Vannevar Bush’s As We May Think: commonplace books. He got so dewy-eyed about the technology that he forgot about the 2000+ years of prior tradition. Many are now re-discovering what we’ve lost.
Watched "Designated Survivor" The Interrogation from Netflix
Directed by Michael Katleman. With Kiefer Sutherland, Natascha McElhone, Adan Canto, Italia Ricci. A shooting at the White House during a Governors' Summit throws President Kirkman's plans to elect a new Congress into turmoil. Hannah makes a shocking discovery in her investigation of the capitol bombing.
Annotated Tools for Reordering: Commonplacing and the Space of Words in Linnaeus's Philosophia Botanica by Matthew Daniel EddyMatthew Daniel Eddy (Intellectual History Review Volume 20, Issue 2, Pages 227-252)
Müller-Wille and Scharf ‘Indexing Nature’, also points out that Linnaeus interleaved blanksheets into his texts so that he could take notes. Cooper points out that this had been a common practice in natural historysince at least the late seventeenth century (Cooper, Inventing the Indigenous, 74–5). 
Apparently interleaving blank sheets into texts was a more common practice than I had known! I’ve seen it in the context of Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) using the practice to take notes in his Bible, but not in others.
I take a lot of notes, the majority of them in public using Hypothes.is. I follow a handful of others’ public notes myself, but until today I didn’t think anyone was following back or reading.

I wish this were a more common practice.

https://diggingthedigital.com/abonneren-op-aantekeningen/

I the beginning of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, there’s the short exchange:

Horace Slughorn: These are trying times!
Dumbledore: Indeed.

Had I directed the movie, I would have had Dumbledore look down and acknowledge his borrowed knitting patterns magazine as he delivered his line.

Who else keeps a waste book

I carry around a small notebook (usually a 48 page Field Notes) for short fleeting notes. Later I copy them into my commonplace book/zettelkasten/digital garden and expand upon them. 

Waste books were used in the tradition of the commonplace book. A well known example is Isaac Newton’s Waste Book (MS Add. 4004) in which he did much of the development of the calculus. Another example is that of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, who called his waste books sudelbücher, and which were known to have influenced Leo Tolstoy, Albert Einstein, Andre Breton, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph (2000). The Waste Books. New York: New York Review of Books Classics. ISBN 978-0940322509.

Replied to a tweet by Matthew Daniel Eddy (Twitter)
Don’t think we’re just sitting here holding our breath and waiting…

Sometimes we turn blue and fall off our chair. 🪑🥶

Any update on publication?

Gardens and Streams II: An IndieWebCamp Pop-up Session on Wikis, Digital Gardens, Online Commonplace Books, Zettelkasten and Note Taking

Event Details

Date: Saturday, September 25, 2021
Time: 9:00 AM – 1:00 PM Pacific
Event page: https://events.indieweb.org/2021/09/gardens-and-streams-ii-pPUbyYME33V4

We’ll discuss and brainstorm ideas related to wikis, commonplace books, digital gardens, zettelkasten, and note taking on personal websites and how they might interoperate or communicate with each other. This can include IndieWeb building blocks, user interfaces, functionalities, and everyones’ ideas surrounding these. Bring your thoughts, ideas, and let’s discuss (and build).

This will be a continuation of the ideas from the Garden and Stream pop up session in 2020. Everyone is welcome and need not have attended prior sessions.

Format

We’ll try to do something between a traditional all day IndieWebCamp and a single session pop-up over the span of several hours so that we can accommodate a brief introduction and three BarCamp topic related sessions. Feel free to brainstorm session ideas in advance of the mini-camp, but we’ll choose session topics the morning of the event.

Tentative Schedule

All times Pacific.

  • 9:00 AM 30 minute introduction & IndieWeb building blocks
  • 9:30 AM 20 minute session pitches and scheduling
  • 9:50 AM 10 minute break
  • 10:00 AM 60 minute Session 1 (including 10 minute break)
  • 11:00 AM 60 minute Session 2 (including 10 minute break)
  • 12:00 PM 50 minute Session 3
  • 12:50 PM 10 minute closing remarks
  • 1:00 PM pop up finished

Hack day? Yes, we’ll all gather the following day for 3 hours at roughly the same time with a short demo session to follow for folks to show off what they’ve been working on. Details for this will be forthcoming.

Everyone is welcome to attend.

Resources

RSVP (optional)

And if none of the above methods means anything to you or you can’t log in to use them, don’t worry about it; just show up on the day!

Questions? Concerns? Volunteers?

Feel free to ask in the IndieWeb chat: https://chat.indieweb.org/indieweb/ or post a question below or on the call for volunteers post.

Eminem and “stacking ammo” in the commonplace book tradition

Annotated Why We Love Eminem by Anderson Cooper (60 Minutes (YouTube))
Eminem shows Anderson Cooper his form of commonplace book in a 60 Minutes interview. It’s a large box with stiff sides containing a menagerie of papers including several yellow legal pads, loose sheets of paper, scrap papers, stationery from hotels, etc. upon which he’s written words, phrases, songs, poetry, etc.

Instead of using the historic word “commonplacing”, Eminem uses the fantastic euphemism “stacking ammo”. Given his use of his words and lyrics collection in battle rap, this seems very apropos.

Cooper analogizes the collection as the scrawlings of a crazy person. In some sense, this may be because there is no traditional order, head words, or indexing system with what otherwise looks like a box of random pages and ideas. One might argue that the multitude of notebooks, papers, colors, sizes, etc. provides a sort of context which Eminem could use as a method of loci for remembering where to find particular ideas, thus making the need for an indexing system feel superfluous to him. This is even more likely if he’s regularly using, maintaining, and mining his material for daily work.

u/sorrybabyxo in Eminem has his own version of commonplace system containing words that rhyme. : commonplacebook ()