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…
The iOS platform has been hurting for a good address book app and now with Cardhop it finally has one. I’ve posted before about the lack of usable contact management apps for iOS. To some extent you were stuck between Apple’s underwhelming Contacts app or FullContact. FullContact is a very nice contact management app with…
The orthopedist who diagnosed my osteoarthritis told me that he couldn’t recommend a physical therapy treatment because, in his experience, it was just as likely to make my condition worse. I got an opinion from a second orthopedist who didn’t have the same hesitation. This week two studies provide more evidence that vigorous exercise can…
I want to write faster. I want to write better. But I struggle with research in a way that’s more like hoarding than sense-making. The zettelkasten method of note-taking has given me a simple way to organize my research and bring a lot more clarity to the information I’ve collected. But I still get bogged…
I’ve never been very disciplined about tagging notes or documents. But as I’m working on improving my zettelkasten knowledge base I decided to give tagging another go. So I quickly came up with a list of logical keywords and added an octothorp (#) to make them into hashtags because…why not? Every major social media platform…
Photo by Pete Birkinshaw from Manchester, UK – Data Storage Device, CC BY 2.0, Link I stumbled across the zettelkasten note taking process while watching Beck Tench’s helpful Tinderbox series. Beck uses Tinderbox software to create a hyper-organized system of notes for her Ph.D. studies in contemplative practice and information science. Her method of managing these…
