Ideas I'm Grappling With March 2, 2023

Will

Dear Zettelnauts,
My week has been hectic, and the coming week will be even busier. I'm relishing these few minutes of reflection.
Last week, my zettelkasting sputtered along in time with my wandering attention until Tuesday. Something happened, probably an investment in 2 hours of focus, and I created six new notes and refactored a dozen older notes. I realize you have a different luxury of time than I do. When working full-time, it was hard for me to carve out time for anything, let alone the time to make notes about things that may have little future value.

I started a new book Weinberg On Writing: The Fieldstone Method and it is terrific. Funny, and it contains many insights. Weinberg's 'fieldstone method dovetails nicely with the zettelkasten method.' Before my time here on the forums, @ctietze mentioned Weinberg back in Feb of 2018 - Writing with the Zettelkasten is like building a fieldstone wall and Gerald Weinberg was brought up again by @chrisaldrich back in October - Review of “On Intellectual Craftsmanship” (1952) by C. Wright Mills, I'm slow on the uptake. Still, if you keep pounding away, I'll finally get it.

Please tell me about your past week and what you are working on.

My seven day zettel production

Edmund

@Will said:

I started a new book Weinberg On Writing: The Fieldstone Method and it is terrific.
…
I'm slow on the uptake.

It’s the same with me. Please tell us a bit about your insights when reading.

Please tell me about your past week and what you are working on.

I’m still working on my book “TAKE USEFUL NOTES. A simple guide to a complex skill by using Sketchnotes, Obsidian and Zettelkasten.“ But also my Zettelkasten needed some input:

And I created some automated charts to inspect my Zettelkasten and it’s invisible progress:

ctietze

@Will I'm curious what's in 20230228 ("The More I Learn About Breast Milk")

prometheanhindsight

My notes have been slow going. I have only added two

[202303011308] Whispering-gallery modes
[202302271050] Mechanisms of resistance are additive

The "Whispering-gallery modes" note is more of a definition than an actual note. I have run into this term a million times and never remember what it means, so I wrote it down. If it becomes more important to my research (which it's looking like it might) then this will probably be converted into a structure note.

Part of the benefit and challenge of ZK is that it is hard to make a proper note without fully understanding what you are writing about. I'm tackling a couple topics that require a deeper understanding of the underlying physics than I have currently, so it's taking time to read and piece together what I need to understand to start writing notes.

One of the topics is molecular vibrational coupling. This is a weird case where I can actually do work in this area without fully understanding what I'm doing. I have simulations set up that are properly capturing the expected behavior, but I don't fully understand how they are able to describe the expected behavior. I'm working on making this less of a black box.

The other topic is what I mentioned a little while ago--the scattering of light off of particles. I'm still trying to get a handle on how to calculate this behavior for the materials that I'm interested in. What parameters do I need to know? What parameters are already known?

Hopefully I can make a breakthrough and have more notes worth talking about soon.

Will

@ctietze said:
@Will I'm curious what's in 20230228 ("The More I Learn About Breast Milk")

Thanks for the opportunity to reflect a bit more deeply on this note. I might not have explored this as closely if you had not asked about it—another benefit of participating in this thread.

This note is still metaphorically in my proofing oven. It is the processing of the article The More I Learn About Breast Milk, the More Amazed I Am. Reviewing this note below shows how I process and factor into my ZK articles I read.
Here are the steps.
1. Mark up the PDF
2. Export the Highlights and Notes
3. Import into The Archive with a template
4. Attach PDF to the note
5. The template has prompts for the actions necessary to allow the note to escape the proofing oven and mingle fully in my ZK.

This note is only partially processed. The prompts have not been answered, there are a couple of sections that haven't yet been processed, and I may do some refactoring to atomize some ideas. I usually process the note before answering the prompts.

Breast milk is a surprising topic of interest to a childless male. I don't remember breastfeeding, but I do remember my sister's breastfeeding because of a photograph of me watching my sister suckling my mom's breast.

My university, the University of Idaho, is at the forefront of breast milk research on antibody transfer between mothers and babies. I got exposed to this research in a journalism class, JAMM328.

I got exposed to this article, which is unrelated to the University of Idaho, via a graduate seminar on food writing.

Besides Angela Garbes' writing being slathered in fabulous, one of the interesting takeaways is, are you ready for it, once you hear it, you can't unheard it - "… when a baby suckles at its mother's breast, a vacuum is created. Within that vacuum, the infant's saliva is sucked back into the mother's nipple, where receptors in her mammary gland read its signals. This "baby spit backwash," as she delightfully describes it, contains information about the baby's immune status. Everything scientists know about physiology indicates that baby spit backwash is one of the ways that breast milk adjusts its immunological composition."

A-The More I Learn About Breast Milk 202302281714

Ideation is serendipitous. Being tackled by ideas and wrestling with them is a privilege. This can take a mighty effort, but the energy spent is priceless. I am the lucky one.