Thoughts and musings longer than notes.
A traditional story or novel is made up of crises or decision points where one or more characters determine the eventual outcome. In Jose Luis Borges’ 1941 story “The Garden of Forking Paths” the main character travels to a small village with winding streets which promise to take him to a labyrinth. This labyrinth is…
For some time now I’ve been trying to understand how architect Christopher Alexander’s idea of 15 structure preserving transformations might apply to systems outside of physical architecture. Alexander himself noted that his overarching theory about form and life would apply to all kinds of structures. You can strengthen the whole by systematically strengthening its component…
There’s a ripple going through software development right now around “second brain” type note taking apps. Wikis and other personal knowledge management apps have been around for a long time. But suddenly new apps are popping up all over the place. Here’s a round-up of PKM tools that I largely stole from Reddit and added…
It seems like you can’t go an entire week without hearing about a new PKM tool…Notion, Roam, Craft, Logseq, Obsidian…and now there is Tana on the horizon. But what exactly is PKM? Personal Knowledge Management is an offshoot of Knowledge Management, a business initiative launched in the 1990s to curate essential information and deliver it…
I have one last thought about the parable of the mustard seed in Matthew 13. As I said in a previous post, I get stuck on the part of the parable where Jesus says that the tiny mustard seed grows so large that it becomes a tree, so that the birds of the sky come…
I’ve been thinking a lot about the mustard seed growing into a tree that I wrote about recently. I was reviewing my schedule, looking for small actions that might have big results. Then suddenly a light bulb went on. What if Jesus parable isn’t about small things becoming big? What if the point of the…
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…
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…
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…
