In the Gospel of Matthew Jesus tells a story about the Kingdom of Heaven. The Kingdom is like a tiny seed. It starts small and then grows into a tree, spreading its branches to give shelter to the birds. I’ve been thinking about this parable a lot recently. Kingdoms typically spread by force and conquest.…
Here’s a hack that helps get your mind moving when it’s stuck on a problem. Start making a list. For some reason breaking a difficult or unclear situation into smaller pieces helps you work through the issue. Say you are thinking about having friends over for a barbecue. You have to do a lot of…
Starting a design with a sketch risks starting with too much information – and information that is likely not a good fit with the project. There becomes a risk of working on and strengthening irrelevant parts of the structure at the expense of latent centers that are essential to the project. Christopher Alexander proposes starting…
A digital garden is a collection of online entries that are on public display and grow over time, not simply in number but also in complexity. So how does one go about setting up a digital garden? Is it simply a matter of setting up a bunch of notes and tending them, enriching them, expanding…
“Working with the garage door up,” brings to mind a garage workshop where neighbors can drop in, watch your progress, use your tools, and learn something in the process. You may learn something as well. Andy Matushack gets the idea from Robin Sloan, who talks about biking past the open door of a woodworking shop…
Andy Matushack’s Evergreen Notes are notes that grow and improve over time. They become valuable building blocks for thinking and writing. Most people take notes as a way to remember key facts and details. These are jotted down in a notebook and reviewed just before a test or a project. Evergreen notes, on the other…
Garden of Infinite Possibilities Jorge Luis Borges’ story the “Garden of Forking Paths” is set in an elaborate garden, but the real garden is a book that is structured in such a way as to allow infinite possibilities. The connection between the metaphor of a garden and an early form of hypertext is uncanny. It…
Some cities are like stories. Others are more like poems. But every city has a kind of narrative structure that people experience as they move along the streets and past the buildings, first with anticipation, followed by the fulfillment of arrival and then a summary of the story upon departure. The building blocks of these…
When I was working my way through college I had a part-time gig delivering phone books. In that line of work you got paid by the pound so it made the most sense to deliver to as many apartment buildings as you could. A lot of apartment buildings are dreary places – long corridors of…
The Chumash people, so the legend goes, were created when the earth goddess Hutash planted seeds on Santa Cruz Island. The seeds became men and women. Over time the people prospered and filled the island. Hutash built a bridge using a rainbow and they crossed to the mainland, populating the area. Cities grow like seeds.…
OK publishing from Ulysses to Substack is probably too easy to be worth a complete blog post. And yet I managed to mess it up on my first try – meaning that I had to go back and re-format all my text and re-do all my hyperlinks. I really wish that someone had written a…
DEVONthink is great MacOS app for warehousing massive amounts of information and yet giving you easy access when you need it. This “bestness” comes at a price however – a user interface that is a little hard to figure out at first. Groups are most obvious way to organize documents in DEVONthink. Groups appear in…
DevonThink 3.0 is available right now as a free public beta. This is a great opportunity to give this Mac-based knowledge base an extended test-drive, seeing that you won’t have to pay a penny until the beta period ends some time this summer. Here’s the use-case for DevonThink: you write, study, or otherwise manage a…
We spent an afternoon at the cathedral of Notre Dame, Paris, in 2014 and it was delightful and amazing as you might expect. My favorite memory is the little girl in the picture above, so happy to feed the sparrows that gather in the courtyard. It will probably be a while before we know what…
Science Daily reports that just two servings a week of mushrooms can reduce the chance of cognitive decline in your senior years. The magic ingredient, found in all types of mushrooms that you’d find in the grocery store, is likely to be ergothioneine, an anti-inflammatory antioxidant that humans can’t synthesize. Low levels of ergothioneine have…
