Please share with us what ideas you're grappling with. July 16, 2023

Will

Another installment of the What Are You Working On? thread.
Here's your chance to join the community and enlighten us about your knowledge path trajectory. I do this for selfish reasons. It helps clarify my goals and visualize my thinking.

What I'm reading:

• Faulkner, Grant. The art of brevity: crafting the very short story, Prometheus Books. 2023. Scribd (Slow progress.)
• Velitchkov, Ivo and Anadiotis, George. Personal Knowledge Graphs: Connected thinking to boost productivity, creativity, and discovery, C. Scribner's Sons. 2023. Scribd (Too theoretical for me at times.)
• Abbey, Edward. A Voice Crying in the Wilderness Vox Clamantis in Deserto: Notes from a Secret Journal, RosettaBooks. 2018. Scribd (I just finished.)
• Cage, John. Diary: how to improve the world ; (you will only make matters worse). 2015. Physical (Crazy)

What I am programming:

Learning Pyside6 and QT for app development.
Zettelkasten word count distribution graph.
Following Arjan's code reviews.

What I'm listening to:

• Esther Abrami
• Hania Rani

What I'm thinking about:

• The Economics of Reading.
  Words have meanings. Meanings shape ideas. Ideas lead to passions. Be careful how you "spend" time reading.

• Optimum Foraging Models.
  These models are classically applied to 'animals' and only implicitly applied to the human 'animal'. These models help explain habit, motivation, and distraction.

• The nuances of note linking.
  Rather than being dependent on its relevance or randomness, the energy of a link is relative to its current usefulness. Link saturation causes messiness, often blurring meaning. This blurring is sometimes just noise and sometimes it can lead to serendipity.

• John Cage
  He was an avant-garde music composer. I can't listen to his music. His lectures and writing about music composition are so fascinating. He writes about his friend and my childhood hero, Buckminster Fuller. He studied my favorite philosopher, Huang Po. This new book I'm reading is from his personal diaries.

• Block Universe Physics
  How linking ideas to past ideas changes the future as well as the past idea. The past is changeable, not fixed.

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

My ten-day zettel production.

Andy

@Will said:

What I'm reading: [...]

• Cage, John. Diary: how to improve the world ; (you will only make matters worse). 2015. Physical (Crazy)

There is a recording of this on UbuWeb (I haven't listened to it—what a chore):

• Diary: How To Improve The World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse) (1991) (8 tracks, total 323 mins.)

My favorite John Cage spoken-word piece that I've heard is:

• Lecture on Nothing, performed by Frances-Marie Uitti (1991) (41 min.)

Another one that I liked but not as much as Lecture on Nothing:

• Mureau (1972), based on writings of Thoreau (4 tracks, total 67 mins.)

I heard this last one on the radio 11 years ago and liked it so much that I still have it on rotation in my music (have played it ten times in as many years):

• John Cage At 100: Remembering A Revolutionary Composer (13 min.)

Will

Thank you @Andy, for the audio links. I look forward to listening to Frances-Marie Uitti's performance.

I have 36 direct links and 141 second-order links to Cage's book - Silence: lectures and writings which contains his Lecture on Nothing and his follow-up Lecture on Something.

The book "Diary: How To Improve The World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)" is a challenging read. I almost gave up after only three pages. Then it struck me to read it out loud, and suddenly I was 'getting' it. Parts seemed clear and interesting. I'm only up to page 30, and I still might abandon the book.

What are you working on?