Category: Read

Read Building a personal knowledge base by Kirill Maltsev (kirillmaltsev.net)
I try to unload all information that has any meaning to me from my brain to external storage because I don’t like to rely on my memory nor do I trust it. In this blog post, I’m going to describe my current approach of working with a personal knowledge base.
He’s got a solid listing of tools here, many I’ve either tried or am currently using myself. Looks like he hasn’t come across Roam yet which I like for it’s ability to change tags across many linked pages. I wish other tools had that one killer feature.
Read Fraidycat, a most unusual feedreader by Jason McIntoshJason McIntosh (Fogknife)
Fraidycat lets you "follow at a distance" blogs, social media accounts, and other web sources. I find it much more attention-respectful than a typical feedreader.
Fraidycat is one of my favorite tools as well. I particularly like it for it’s time-related functionality in comparison to other feed readers which don’t have this kind of categorization/sorting. Reminds me a bit of the sort of reader that Ton Zijlstra was always looking for.
Read a thread by Venkatesh RaoVenkatesh Rao (Twitter)
My lifestyle could reasonably be called stochastic semi-retirement, trading money for time in a very unpredictable way to make room for doing things for which there is absolutely no economic demand. That, or it’s a very poorly tuned freemium hustle.
A short, but useful essay (in the guise of a Tweetstorm) about “solving for life”.

While this is focused on how one could/should help others, it can easily be applied to one’s own life. This is a fantastic reframing for how we should treat others not only with compassion, but with some additional pragmatism.

Read Please (Don't) Tag the Author by Matthew Graybosch (matthewgraybosch.com)
Today's tempest in a toilet comes courtesy of the Hellsite. An award-winning author had the effrontery to suggest that fans aren't necessarily doing authors a favor by tagging them when they share a review of their work on social media. Their opinion seems to be that it's safest from a professional standpoint to not engage with reviews at all, whether they praise a work or excoriate it, so they'd rather not hear about them in the first place.
An interesting debate…
Read Required Reading by Hrag Vartanian (Hyperallergic)
Banksy got into the Valentine’s Day spirit and released an image of his newest piece in Bristol on Friday (Valentine’s Day). He posted about the new wall piece on his Instagram account (via @banksy)The Oscar-winning short animation flick is available on YouTube. Called “Hair Love,” it’s by...
Read Mary Ellen Pleasant, one of the first black self-made millionaires, used an ingenious trick to build her fortune by Tom Huddleston Jr. (CNBC)
Born in 1814, Mary Ellen Pleasant became one of America's first black female self-made millionaires by using the fact that she was often overlooked by wealthy elites to her advantage. Here's her story.
Read The future of local newspapers just got bleaker. Here’s why we can’t let them die. by Margaret SullivanMargaret Sullivan (The Washington Post)

It’s been a particularly rough couple of months for those who care about local journalism — which should be every American citizen.

Warren Buffett sold his 31 newspapers in January, a powerful vote of no confidence in their financial future. A rapacious hedge fund got its claws deeper into the Chicago Tribune chain in December, which includes the New York Daily News and the Baltimore Sun. Gannett and GateHouse, the two biggest newspaper chains, continued merging — a development almost certain to mean more staff cutbacks in already shrunken newsrooms.

And then on Thursday came more devastating news. Weighed down under enormous debt, the McClatchy newspaper chain — one of the nation’s largest newspaper publishers and owner of the Miami Herald among many others — was filing for bankruptcy protection.

Read The Strange Quest to Crack the Voynich Code (Undark Magazine)
It’s an approximately 600-year-old mystery that continues to stump scholars, cryptographers, physicists, and computer scientists: a roughly 240-page medieval codex written in an indecipherable language, brimming with bizarre drawings of esoteric plants, naked women, and astrological symbols. Known...

a roughly 240-page medieval codex written in an indecipherable language, brimming with bizarre drawings of esoteric plants, naked women, and astrological symbols. Known as the Voynich manuscript, it defies classification, much less comprehension. ❧

Something I hadn’t thought of before, but which could be highly likely given the contents: What if the manuscript is a personal memory palace? Without supporting materials, it’s entirely likely that what’s left on the page is a substrate to which the author attached the actual content and not having the other half, the entire enterprise is now worthless?
Annotated on February 16, 2020 at 08:51PM

All we know for certain, through forensic testing, is that the manuscript likely dates to the 15th century, when books were handmade and rare. ❧

This may provide some additional proof that it’s a memory aid in the potential form of a notebook or commonplace book. What were the likelihoods of these being more common that other books/texts? What other codes were used at the time? Was the major system or a variant in use at the time?
Annotated on February 16, 2020 at 08:54PM

Read - Finished Reading: How Saint George’s Dragon Got Its Wings (JSTOR Daily)
The lack of living dragons has never stopped people from drawing them. The trends for dragon design tend to organize along East-West lines: dragons in Asia are snakelike, wingless and benevolent, while European dragons are menacing winged lizards. When an artist situated right between Asia and Europ...