Share with us what is happening in your ZK this week. August 21, 2024

Will

This week's ZK report

Swimming with Ideas

This is yet another opportunity to share what you are working on with your friends here on the forum. Add to this discussion by telling us about your zettelkasten journey. Share with us what you're learning. Sharing helps us clarify our goals and visualize our thinking. And sometimes, a conversation sparks a magical moment where we can dive into an idea worth exploring. I'd love to hear more from you. 🫵🏼

Here is my report on why I'm here and my current ZK work themes and ideas:

• Exploring feminism as a man.
• Working on the concept of creating thinking canvases.
• I'm thinking a lot about automation.
• I'm back in university for the semester and taking a journalism writing class with a bunch of young people.
• Thinking about the "Theory of Maximum Taste" and how to apply it to note-taking.
• My reading is very much related to reading and writing.

Books I'm reading or read this week:

• Adler, Mortimer Jerome and Van Doren, Charles Lincoln. How to read a book. 2014.[[202407311603]]
• Fadiman, Anne. Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader. Unabridged, Recorded Books, 1999. Audiobook Everand
• Blundell, William E. The Art and Craft of Feature Writing: Based on the Wall Street Journal Guide. New American Library, 1988.
• Strunk, William, and E. B. White. The Elements of Style. 4th ed, Allyn and Bacon, 1999.
• Froke, Paula, et al., editors. The Associated Press Stylebook, 2022-2024. 56th edition, Basic Books, 2022.

Zettelkasting Soundtrack:

• Rhiannon Bannenberg
• Lofi Girl
• Eydís Evensen

★★★★★

The "My rolling twelve-day zettel production" is produced by a script for attachment to my daily journaling template. I do my journaling in Bear to keep personal journaling separate from my knowledge work.

Let me know if you would like to see, discuss, or critique any of these notes.

My twelve-day zettel production

I hope my contribution is helpful, and I hope someone has even better ideas.

Edmund

@Will said:

• Working on the concept of creating thinking canvases.
• I'm back in university for the semester and taking a journalism writing class with a bunch of young people.
• Thinking about the "Theory of Maximum Taste" and how to apply it to note-taking.

Books I'm reading or read this week:

• Adler, Mortimer Jerome and Van Doren, Charles Lincoln. How to read a book. 2014.
• Blundell, William E. The Art and Craft of Feature Writing: Based on the Wall Street Journal Guide. New American Library, 1988.

Many exciting topics that attract my attention. :-)

• "The concept of creating thinking canvases" - A book with 1.200 pages ;-)

• "Taking a journalism writing class" - Writing is number one on my wish list.

• "Theory of Maximum Taste" - A reason to talk to AI: "Just as taste can signal social status, certain note-taking practices can signal intellectual status. Adopting complex systems or tools might become a way to distinguish oneself within the knowledge management or productivity community. The pursuit of an optimized Zettelkasten might lead some to prioritize the appearance of intellectual sophistication over practical utility." - A start for a new discussion in this forum?

• "How to read a book" - It changes my reading within days.

• "The Art and Craft of Feature Writing" - I put it on my reading list. Thank you.

zettelsan

Last couple of weeks, I've continued to consume from the backlog of Zettelkasten.de videos. Being relatively long, I didn’t watch them all sitting in front of the computer, but instead listened to them while I did other things. They are mostly @Sascha working on his Zettels and responding to viewers’ questions. Many of them I’ll come back to later; I’d like to watch real Zettelkasten sessions by others to gain insights into how others deal with realistic issues.

In this heyday of live streaming, I’d think more people would stream their live PKM/Zettelkasten sessions. Some programmers do live coding, so why not with note-taking sessions? I guess that the community isn’t that large to make things like that profitable, or it’s just not an appealing video content. I’m curious, though, to know if there are any live streamers who share useful live PKM/Zettelkasten sessions.

I also started reading the Zettelkasten.de articles more thoroughly, starting from the ones linked in Getting Started. Some are dated almost a decade ago, realizing how long the site has been running. I’m in the back-to-basics phase, and good materials help me tweak and improve my current process.

In my own Zettelkasten, I’ve spent some time revisiting and migrating my old web browser bookmarks into my current Zettelkasten. They have accumulated over the years and survived a few iterations of browser switching and the bookmarking services (remember del.icio.us?). Those come from the days when I was clueless about how best to organize them for later use. But sure enough, I’ve never found time to come back to them! Even if I did have such time, they were not easy to re-discover, with the context already lost as to why they were bookmarked to begin with. (For some, I did remember; it’s strange how memory works).

Fitting them back into my current system was tedious but also fun to revisit what I used to find interesting. In the process, I’ve also “archived” the snapshots of web pages that might be gone at any time. It’s fun to discover some old sites from a decade or two ago are still alive. Most are actually gone.

I don’t have time to make them into notes, so for now I just placed the URLs in relevant notes or my reference system. I wonder how much I had gained had I started making them into Zettels diligently instead of just bookmarking.

ctietze

Streaming

That's super hard! The way I see it (derived from talking to streamers and my own feeble experiments):

Either you have no audience, then it's quite boring and also a bit weird to be watched; or you do have an audience, which means you interact with people, which means distraction and less focus on getting actual stuff done.

So the observation changes the process.

Some genres of gaming and reaction videos ("we watch this together on stream and discuss") work better than, say, particle physics

zettelsan

@ctietze said:

Either you have no audience, then it's quite boring and also a bit weird to be watched; or you do have an audience, which means you interact with people, which means distraction and less focus on getting actual stuff done.

Some genres of gaming and reaction videos ("we watch this together on stream and discuss") work better than, say, particle physics

This may be true. Still, given that imitation is an essential mode of learning, live streaming of realistic Zettelkasten sessions should be useful for beginners. I do find useful the earlier Zettelkasten.de videos on YouTube showing (nearly) live sessions that are as close to real-life as they could be.

For example, Ahrens’s How to Take Smart Notes is a good book for gleaning armchair concepts, but watching demonstrations like the Zettelkasten.de videos help make things “click” faster. That’s conducive to creating the Zettelkasten workflow that each of us feels effective and comfortable, helping us getting there faster.

What could work better as a live streaming content could be Zettelkasten critique sessions, maybe like the one @Will was advertising a few weeks ago in one of these weekly update threads. Programmers’ live streaming of coding works likely because the environment is closer to pair programming sessions. You exchange feedback on the code/Zettelkasten. Those not on par with participants can still peek at what people with more experience do to get inspirations.

It’s still not likely to be catchy enough to make anyone in this forum a million-dollar live streamer, but that may be a blue ocean that hasn’t been explored much yet.

This is not to pressure anyone to make such contents, though. Just my observation through consuming contents to make my own note-taking workflow more effective.

ZettelDistraction

I seem to have contributed to the August 9 weekly thread instead of the later August 21 weekly thread. With any luck, no one will read the misplaced entry. On the topic of monetization, I have nothing to say. However, concerning what one might produce with a Zettelkasten, I have a pseudonymous, non-monetizable "quotient" (not a product): The Manifesto of Erel Dogg.

KillerWhale

I'm back to study Obsidian. Please send your prayers, I will receive them as I'm buried beneath a mountain of plugins and CSS hacks.

ctietze

@zettelsan said:
This is not to pressure anyone to make such contents, though. Just my observation through consuming contents to make my own note-taking workflow more effective.

6 months ago, I recorded myself taking notes watching a lecture about programming. I was half way into the video when I figured: might as well talk about the rest. It turned into a 90min recording. Watching me watch a video for a minute here and there, then take notes, also sounds very boring on paper. Then again, people watch reaction videos on stream and YouTube. So maybe I should get around to add an intro, upload it, and see. Doesn't get more "look behind the curtains" than that.

zettelsan

@ctietze said: > > … Watching me watch a video for a minute here and there, then take notes, also sounds very boring on paper. Then again, people watch reaction videos on stream and YouTube. So maybe I should get around to add an intro, upload it, and see. Doesn't get more "look behind the curtains" than that.

I think that the benefit of a video like that, first and foremost, is that it’s very useful for those who are at the “shu” stage of “shuhari”¹. With the Zettelkasten method, there is a wide range of possible tools and workflows that one could build around its core principles. That makes the beginners baffled, not knowing where to begin. Even for those who have already established their somewhat effective routine, being able to see how others instantiate the methodology can inspire ways to improve their approach. I don’t think it’s a matter of gaining viewership (which would most likely fail). It’s more about building a better ecosystem.

¹The Zettelkasten Method for Fiction Writing

ZettelDistraction

@KillerWhale said:
I'm back to study Obsidian. Please send your prayers.

O KillerWhale:
I send my solemn oath Obsidian
The plugins you install and uninstall
The Orca's head--the ice floe tenant slips
The fluke that bats and spins the baby seal

Edit: the possessive "floe's" was unnecessary. The word "floe" flows more gracefully. The baby seal is, of course, the upended occupant.

andang76

Today I've developed my thoughts about confirmation bias

KillerWhale

@ZettelDistraction I stand honored (and laughing out loud) by your words!

Je te remercie bien, Distracteur des Zettel,
Tu ne me distrais point, et me concentre plutôt ;
De rester efficace, je fais le vœu solennel,
Bricoler Obsidian, c'est une excuse bateau.

ZettelDistraction

@KillerWhale

Cue Serge Gainsbourg speaking over a lush, cheesy orchestral background, smoking a cigarette.

Quant à moi
je n'ai pas
le droit d'exister
à côté
de ces mots
qui secouent les campagnes.

Vos vers improvisés
feraient cesser de fumer
Michel Houellebecq
et sa cigarette.

-- Distracteur des Zettel

Distracteur des Zettel is the French alter ego of Erel Dogg, one of my alter egos. Erel Dogg is an anagram of Doggerel. My French is nowhere good enough to write formal poetry, as you have.

Martin

Did Shakespeare use paper slips?

Ode to Obsidian

O mighty KillerWhale, whose form doth glide,
Upon the icy seas where secrets bide,
I pledge my vow to thee, Obsidian fair,
Where thoughts and dreams, like webs, are laid bare.

Thy plugins rise and fall with each new day,
As fleeting as the tides that shape the bay.
The Orca's head, proud tenant of the floe,
Guides me through the depths where ideas grow.

With fluke that sweeps the seal from icy brink,
So shall I delve, and deep in knowledge sink.
In Obsidian’s embrace, my mind shall soar,
Pray, bless my quest to learn forevermore.

Martin

Ode to the Return

In the vast expanse of the human mind, where thoughts cascade like the Seine through the heart of Paris, I return, weary yet resolute, to the solemn sanctuary of Obsidian. Here, within these digital walls, where memory and idea intertwine like the gothic arches of Notre-Dame, I seek the light of knowledge once more.

O KillerWhale, majestic denizen of the deep, you who dance upon the frozen waves of the Arctic, I invoke your spirit. As you navigate the treacherous waters with grace, so too shall I navigate the labyrinth of my thoughts, guided by the luminous plugins that rise and fall, like stars in the firmament of a cold winter’s night.

The Orca, tenant of the ice floe, slips silently beneath the moonlit veil, its mighty fluke striking against the currents of time. With each beat, it sends ripples through the darkened sea, much as my mind, stirred by the power of Obsidian, sends ripples through the vast ocean of knowledge. The baby seal, innocent and unknowing, is swept into the whirlpool of fate, just as my fledgling ideas are caught in the currents of inspiration and creation.

In this return, I seek not merely the mundane, but the sublime. I seek to carve my thoughts into the stone of eternity, to let them stand as monuments to the pursuit of understanding. Pray for me, my friends, as I once more embark on this journey, for in Obsidian, I shall find the soul's deepest echoes and the mind's highest flights.

GeoEng51

@Martin Well said, in verse and prose

Someone should write a modern version of the ode to Ozymandias here, though, so we don't get too carried away in praising the results of all our hard work.

ZettelDistraction

Methinks AI had a hand in this. Incidentally, the baby seal was the tenant of the upended floe--not the orca, responsible for the upending. ChatGPT and Claude are known for such errors of interpretation--not to cast doubt on the authorship of poetry rivaling that of Erel Dogg. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Ironically, in a forum where cross-linking and citing references in the rigorous German academic tradition is sacrosanct, I drop the Anvil of Interpretation to say: ya heard it here first, folx.

GeoEng51

@ZettelDistraction said:
Methinks AI had a hand in this.

Haha! I thought so, too. I was kind of hoping the Ode to Obsidian was original and the Ode to the Return was the AI derivative.

ZettelDistraction

@GeoEng51 said:
Haha! I thought so, too. I was kind of hoping the Ode to Obsidian was original and the Ode to the Return was the AI derivative.

As for original poetry, it is not lost on me that @KillerWhale's line, "Tu ne me distrais point, et me concentre plutôt," could be interpreted to mean that I, my (hilariously accurate) name Distracteur des Zettel, or both remind @KillerWhale that he must focus on his work, or at least on something--anything--other than whatever I contribute here. This is a businesslike attitude for a published author with deadlines and responsibilities. As for me--I have none. I will not mention my original quatrain--pardon the paralipsis.

KillerWhale

@ZettelDistraction I indeed long for the days when I had no deadlines nor obligations of any kind and was free to play and experiment as I saw fit. Well, I was not making a living, but who cares eh? 😆

That wish is however not a reflexion on the craft nor the career but on how I manage myself, which can, and will bear some improvement.

Thanks for your amazing pieces all, what fun – now that's a use of AI I can get behind!

Mais je ne peux certes pas promouvoir l'IA
Basée sur le vol, cette discipline est
Claude ne voit pas plus loin que son bout de nez
Si j'en dis du bien, gare à moi aïe aïe ah.

(The fact that these verses are horrendous are living proof than LLMs cannot hope to compete with bad humans. 😁)

Martin

Apologies for any misinterpretation! In my poetry, the ice floe symbolizes the notecard, and the seal represents the freezing, immobile idea fixed on it. The killer whale’s action flips the seal from the card (or floe), symbolizing the shift or activation of thought. Afterward, the orca—relying, resting, or perhaps contemplating once more—returns to the card. It’s a metaphor for the dynamic interaction between ideas and the process of reshaping them, not a literal depiction of a nature documentary. I thought this process was the intention of @KillerWhale.

I am sorry, @Will, for diverting attention from your effort to keep us focused on our weekly progress. I just looked up the header of this discussion.

ctietze

Then again, when was anyone ever focused on a weekly progress report here @Martin

ZettelDistraction

If a human wrote that, the human has much work to do.

ZettelDistraction

@Martin said:
Apologies for any misinterpretation! In my poetry, the ice floe symbolizes the notecard, and the seal represents the freezing, immobile idea fixed on it.

The apparently AI-generated Ode appears after my human-written quatrian and copies its imagery, following the well-established Internet practice, amplified by AI, that takes CC BY-SA to mean "no attribution." The interpretation seems ex-post. I guess we've been trolled.

KillerWhale

All in good fun @Martin ! I really appreciated your take.

Also, baby seals are so crunchy.

(Fun fact: in the slang of French polar bases, elephant seal pups are called "bonbons", "candies" as they are… killer whale candy. 😁)

Loni

@KillerWhale said

(Fun fact: in the slang of French polar bases, elephant seal pups are called "bonbons", "candies" as they are… killer whale candy. 😁)

I will call them "bonbons" with a snarky smiles from now on.

Poetry is not my cup of tea, but… @Martin when you said :

It’s a metaphor for the dynamic interaction between ideas and the process of reshaping them, not a literal depiction of a nature documentary

You mean that the user Killerwhale doesn't really dance with baby seal? I'm so sad

Well, for this week, I added some entries thanks to an app made by German University! It's called "Flora Incognita" and it uses IA to recognize grass, trees, flowers species thanks to user's photo. I learnt a lot of things thanks to it, especialy about the plants around my home and my vacation spots. My son and I spent some fun times to identify species.

I am testing a workflow where I connect my PC and my Android phone. I had to stop using Logseq because of sync problems, so I found another solution with separate folders on my phone, using ZettelNotes, importing the whole thanks to Syncthing and open the folders as the same vault on Obsidian. I keep the same link syntax and some flexibility with files on Android. I've written ~40 notes last month with this system while I was sick as hell the first week and always on the go, so… Seems to work.

Since some weeks now, I use interstitial journaling. It seems to help me to stay focus as I declare with writting what I have done and what I am about to do. I can add some observations about what worked to accomplish a task, what distracted me and what I would like to improve. I jot down any ideas too. I feel more clarity through my day, even if I have to recall myself to write it, it is not an habit yet.

GeoEng51

@Loni said:
Since some weeks now, I use interstitial journaling. It seems to help me to stay focus as I declare with writting what I have done and what I am about to do. I can add some observations about what worked to accomplish a task, what distracted me and what I would like to improve. I jot down any ideas too. I feel more clarity through my day, even if I have to recall myself to write it, it is not an habit yet.

Interesting idea, particularly if it helps you to change work habits!

ZettelDistraction

@Loni said:
Since some weeks now, I use interstitial journaling. It seems to help me to stay focus > > @GeoEng51 said: Interesting idea, particularly if it helps you to change work habits!

Yes, it is interesting. I'll try first-order interstitial journaling to prevent the infinite regress from iterated interstitial journaling.

Infinite Interstitial Journaling

In collaboration with Sextus Empiricus

No one will want to read this: anyone who can follow will find it trivial and obvious, and those who cannot follow will not try. That I could do it at all suggests an ascent to near-overthought. Instead of succumbing to the harmful effects of long COVID-19, the wholesale destruction of neurons in its wake has pared my brain down to something more capable, like the fabulous accidental savants of TED Talks.

I refer to those presentations in which the speaker recounts to a rapt audience how they cracked their head in precisely the right way in an accident—by diving into the wrong end of a swimming pool or surviving a car wreck—that unleashed latent savant-like powers that TED suggests we, too, would possess if we could bash our skulls with the requisite precision.

In my case, I’ve only bumped my head on a doorknob and a sink, but this was more than a decade before I contracted COVID-19. Despite what feels like heightened cognition--granting the infallible reliability of phenomenological experience and the impossibility of self-deception in personal narrative (not that I have one)--I still believe those powers were latent in the sensational TED-talk prodigies and not in humankind generally—but that’s just an autobiographical comment without scientific support.

The Regress

An endless regress can occur if one cannot distinguish an interstitial journal entry from ordinary writing. Suppose I have written $(W_n)$ and I plan to write $(W_{n+1})$. An interstitial journal entry $(I_n)$ reflecting on $(W_n)$ and what I plan to write, $(W_{n+1})$ must be written, following the practice of interstitial journaling. But now I know that $(I_n)$ is writing I plan to write before $(W_{n+1})$, which means I must to write the interstitial entry $(I_{n_1})$. This takes care of only one infinite branch since I know I must write something between $(I_{n_1})$ and $(I_n)$, and the former must be written before I could begin writing the latter, which means I need to write $(I_{n_2})$, assuming I have written $(I_n)$, which is not certain--all I know is that $(I_{n_1})$ must be written before $(I_n)$, an unfortunate circumstance that forces $(I_{n_2})$...

Loni

@ZettelDistraction said:

@Loni said:
Since some weeks now, I use interstitial journaling. It seems to help me to stay focus > > @GeoEng51 said: Interesting idea, particularly if it helps you to change work habits!

Yes, it is interesting. I'll try first-order interstitial journaling to prevent the infinite regress from iterated interstitial journaling.

The Regress

An endless regress can occur if one cannot distinguish an interstitial journal entry from ordinary writing. Suppose I have written $(W_n)$ and I plan to write $(W_{n+1})$. An interstitial journal entry $(I_n)$ reflecting on $(W_n)$ and what I plan to write, $(W_{n+1})$ must be written, following the practice of interstitial journaling. But now I know that $(I_n)$ is writing I plan to write before $(W_{n+1})$, which means I must to write the interstitial entry $(I_{n_1})$. This takes care of only one infinite branch since I know I must write something between $(I_{n_1})$ and $(I_n)$, and the former must be written before I could begin writing the latter, which means I need to write $(I_{n_2})$, assuming I have written $(I_n)$, which is not certain--all I know is that $(I_{n_1})$ must be written before $(I_n)$, an unfortunate circumstance that forces $(I_{n_2})$...

Oh, I recognize that! It's the plot of the next Nolan's film : "Interstiception"

Of course, you have to stay pragmatical. As myself, I don't document everything I do, I think or I poop, I'm not a TedTalk prodigy after all. But it has a good potential for self trolling and procrastination as well.

I think one should concentrate on one or two aspects to study with this journaling habit. My priority is focusing and productivity : I keep track of my focus hability, my way of working and I put down in a unique place anythings which lead me in any other places. I can't make up excuses to delay work : if an idea or an interesting piece of information comes to my mind, I jot it down and I'll review it later.

ZettelDistraction

@Loni said:
Oh, I recognize that! It's the plot of the next Nolan's film : "Interstiception"

Of course, you have to stay pragmatical. As myself, I don't document everything I do, I think or I poop, I'm not a TedTalk prodigy after all. But it has a good potential for self trolling and procrastination as well.

I wasn't going to blow my cover, but the Zettelkasten.de forum serves as my interstitial journal and an unsuspecting and unwitting writers' workshop. Prospective authors submitting to the Erel Dogg Substack are encouraged to engage in "guerilla workshopping" by finding inappropriate online and offline spaces for substantive engagement with their work.