In the name of God, I ask the technology giants to stop exploiting human weakness, people’s vulnerability, for the sake of profits without caring about the spread of hate speech, grooming, fake news, conspiracy theories, and political manipulation.

Image made with the help of BibleMunger 2.0

We are taught not to point. Pointing with your finger is rude, even though it is often extremely convenient and efficient. Medieval readers do not seem to have been hindered by this convention: in …

As I’m thinking about this, I can’t help but think that Hypothes.is, if only for fun, ought to add a manicule functionality to their annotation product.

I totally want to be able to highlight portions of my reading with an octopus manicule!

I can see their new tagline now:

Helping hands on the digital page.

I’m off to draw some octopi…

Eminem shows Anderson Cooper his form of commonplace book in a 60 Minutes interview. It’s a large box with stiff sides containing a menagerie of papers including several yellow legal pads, loose sheets of paper, scrap papers, stationery from hotels, etc. upon which he’s written words, phrases, songs, poetry, etc.

Instead of using the historic word “commonplacing”, Eminem uses the fantastic euphemism “stacking ammo”. Given his use of his words and lyrics collection in battle rap, this seems very apropos.

Cooper analogizes the collection as the scrawlings of a crazy person. In some sense, this may be because there is no traditional order, head words, or indexing system with what otherwise looks like a box of random pages and ideas. One might argue that the multitude of notebooks, papers, colors, sizes, etc. provides a sort of context which Eminem could use as a method of loci for remembering where to find particular ideas, thus making the need for an indexing system feel superfluous to him. This is even more likely if he’s regularly using, maintaining, and mining his material for daily work.

❧

ᔥ u/sorrybabyxo in Eminem has his own version of commonplace system containing words that rhyme. : commonplacebook (08/10/2021 09:45:39)

Annotated Tools for Reordering: Commonplacing and the Space of Words in Linnaeus's Philosophia Botanica by Matthew Daniel Eddy (Intellectual History Review Volume 20, Issue 2, Pages 227-252)

Müller-Wille and Scharf ‘Indexing Nature’, also points out that Linnaeus interleaved blanksheets into his texts so that he could take notes. Cooper points out that this had been a common practice in natural historysince at least the late seventeenth century (Cooper, Inventing the Indigenous, 74–5). ❧

Apparently interleaving blank sheets into texts was a more common practice than I had known! I’ve seen it in the context of Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) using the practice to take notes in his Bible, but not in others.

Jonathan Edwards’s so-called “Blank Bible.” JE received as a gift from Benjamin Pierpoint, his brother in law, a unique book. Structurally, it is a strange animal. It is a small, double-column King James, unstitched and then spliced back together again inside a large blank journal. The result is a one-of-a-kind Bible that has an empty sheet between every page of Scripture text.❧

If one is serious about annotating a text, then consider making a “blank Bible” version of it.

Interleaving a copy of your favorite text can leave massive amounts of space for marginalia!

Copies of print and digital editions of Jonathan Edwards’ blank Bible are available.

• Amazon:
• Online:

Apparently one can buy modern copies of interleaved bibles as well:

Video review of an interleaved bible:

Annotated a post by Kyle Shevli (kyleshevlin.com)

Liked the post? Click the beard a few times. ❧

Dispo is an invite-only social photo app with a twist: you can’t see any photos you take with the app until 24 hours after you take them. (The app sends you a push notification to open them every day at 9AM local time: among other things, a nice hack to boost daily usage.) Founded by David Dobrik, one of the world’s most popular YouTubers, Dispo has been around as a basic utility for a year. ❧

This is the first reference to Dispo I’ve come across.

Annotated The Glass Box And The Commonplace Book by Steven Berlin Johnson (stevenberlinjohnson.com)

...the frozen nature of the text seem more like a feature than a bug, something they’ve deliberated chosen, rather than a flaw that they didn’t have time to correct. ❧

The thoughtfulness and design of of Hypothes.is is incredibly valuable to me specifically because it dramatically increases my textual productivity in combination with my digital commonplace book.

How can I also connect this to the Jeremy Dean‘s idea of it helping to facilitate a conversation with texts. Nate Angell had a specific quote/annotation of it somewhere, but it might also reside in this document: Web Annotation as Conversation and Interruption.

Annotated Transclusion by Aquiles Carattino (aquiles.me)

Should transclusion work both ways, embedding content and letting the source know that I did so? ❧

If one is worried about link rot for transclusion, why not just have a blockquote of the original in excerpt form along with a reference link to the original. Then you’ve got a permanent copy of the original and the link can send a webmention to it as a means of notification?

If the original quoted page changes, it could potentially send a webmention (technically a salmention in function) to all the pages that had previously mentioned it to create updates.

Automatic transclusion can also be more problematic in terms of original useful data being used as a vector of spam, graffiti, or other abuses.

As an example, I can “transclude” a portion of your page onto my own website as a reply context for my comment and syndicate a copy to Hypothes.is. If you’ve got Webmentions on your site, you’ll get a notification.

For several years now I’ve been considering why digital gardens/zettelkasten/commonplace books don’t implement webmention as a means of creating backlinks between wikis as a means of sites having conversations?

Note: I’ve also gone in and annotated a copy of Maggie Appleton’s article with some additional thoughts that Aquiles Carattino and others may appreciate.

Ergodic theory is a forbiddingly technical branch of mathematics. ❧

The modern practice of the committee questioning nominees on their judicial views began with the nomination of John Marshall Harlan II in 1955; the nomination came shortly after the Supreme Court handed down its landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, and several southern senators attempted to block Harlan's confirmation, hence the decision to testify.[1][8] ❧

Interesting that this practice stems from the imposition of what looks like racist policies.

I wonder if it could really be used in reverse to help break down racist policies on the next nomination?

A longtime libertarian who dabbled in eccentric ideas like seasteading — artificial island communities in international waters far from governmental jurisdiction — and life extension, Thiel had made occasional forays into mainstream politics. ❧

***Update as of 9/9/2020 @ 4:51 PM***Voluntary evacuations lifted for residents north of Foothill Blvd. and east of Santa Anita Ave. The Bobcat Fire has generally progressed away from the City of Arcadia.  The current weather forecast suggests that Santa Ana winds will dissipate this evening and the Red Flag Warning will be removed after 8:00 p.m.Based on these factors, the City of Arcadia is removing the recommendation for residents to evacuate.  However, residents are advised to remain on alert for any changes to weather conditions that may affect the fire.  Evacuations may be necessary for your safety if conditions change. ❧

However, if Welsh does not yet possess a spoken standard, it does possess a literary standard which can be traced back to the translation of the Bible by Bishop WIlliam Morgan in 1588, which in turn is based on the language of the medieval court poets who were the heirs of the Cynfeirdd, the earl poets Aneirin and Taliesin. These lived in the sixth century AD and described battles which took place in today's Scotland and Northern England [...] ❧

Sioned Davies is Chair of Welsh at Cardiff University. Her special interest is the interplay between orality and literacy, together with the performance aspects of medieval Welsh narrative. ❧

Circe by Madeline Miller
This magnificent story of the famous witch goddess from Homer’s Odyssey was shortlisted for the 2019 Women’s prize for fiction. It is both hugely enjoyable, showing the very male classical epic from a female point of view, and profoundly affecting in its depictions of the trials of immortality. This book is the closest you can get to experiencing what it might really be like to be a goddess, with all its benefits and sacrifices. ❧

This book keeps popping up with positive reviews of an intriguing sort. I’ll add it to my list of books to read.

This is my digital garden, so you might something you didn’t expect from time to time. ❧

I don’t think the right answer is to use something like the Mnemonic medium to memorize a cookbook’s contents. I think a likelier model is: each time you see a recipe, there’s some chance it’ll trigger an actionable “ooh, I want to make this!”, dependent on seasonality, weather, what else you’ve been cooking recently, etc. A more effective cookbook might simply resurface recipes intermittently over time, creating more opportunities for a good match: e.g. a weekly email with 5-10 cooking ideas, perhaps with some accompanying narrative. Ideally, the cookbook would surface seasonally-appropriate recipes. Seasonality would make the experience of “reading” a cookbook extend over the course of a year—a Timeful text. ❧

Indigenous peoples not only used holidays and other time-based traditions as a means of spaced repetition, but they also did them for just this purpose of time-based need. Winter’s here and the harvest changes? Your inter-tribal rituals went over your memory palace for just those changes. Songs and dances recalled older dishes and recipes that hadn’t been made in months and brought them into a new rotation.

Anthropologists have collected examples of this specific to hunting seasons and preparations of the hunt in which people would prepare for the types of game they would encounter. Certainly they did this for feast times and seasonal diets as well. Indians in the Americas are documenting having done things like this for planting corn and keeping their corn varieties pure over hundreds of years.

In a Friday edition of her White House briefing, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany declared that children's activities are being policed as a result of "cancel culture."

“Inviting people to laugh with you while you are laughing at yourself is a good thing to do. You may be a fool but you’re the fool in charge.” ❧

Honestly, if a real platform existed where I could just communicate with my friends, make new friends, and read blogs by real people with no corporations or ads, I would love to be a part of that. I just don't even know if it's possible anymore. I don't know if any centralized platform can do that in 2020. Fortunately, we have our decentralized websites, and we can connect with each other this way. ❧

wp_nav_menu( array( 'theme_location' => 'footer-menu' ) ); ❧

Annotated An Open Letter to Marc Andreessen and Rap Genius by dwhly (Hypothesis)

The lessons of Twitter and Facebook, other Internet-scale basic service layers that most of us use, are instructive here. After the honeymoon period is over, and disruptive returns need to be generated to pay off limited partners or satisfy public shareholders, the tensions that these monetization efforts create ultimately seem to separate the motivations of management from those of users and the broader ecosystem. How will Rap Genius–and Marc Andreessen–navigate these questions? ❧

Annotated Tuesday 19 May, 2020 by John Naughton (Memex 1.1)

Interestingly, I’ve found that Kindle is useful in this respect. I buy Kindle versions of books that I need for work, and highlight passages and bookmark pages as I go. And when I’ve finished the software obligingly has a collection of all the passages I’ve highlighted. ❧

John, you should spend a minute or two to learn about Hypothes.is as an online tool for doing this. It’s a free account or you can self-host the software yourself if you like. There are also functionalities to have public, private, or group annotations.

I often pull my own annotations to my personal website similar to your own Memex and publish them there (example:

Incidentally you can also annotate documents stored locally on your computer, but viewed through a browser as well as collaboratively annotating with others.

An edit (AKA diff, change) is a special type of reply that indicates a set of suggested changes to the post it is replying to. A collection of (presumably related) suggested edits in open source is often called a patch or pull request.

In part out of laziness and lack of an easy way to implement a workflow and mark up, I will post content (bookmarks or notes) to my website and (pseudo-)syndicate all or portions of it to the IndieWeb wiki as either edits or as links to See Also sections of pages. “Pseudo” because the content isn’t always a 1 to 1 match.

To document the change, I’ll include a syndication link on my website to the permalink for the edit on the wiki. Having subscribed to feeds of wiki changes/edits before the user interfaces are far less than useful/ideal, so having a better contextual bookmark on my website makes more sense for readers while somewhat reformatting things for the readers of the wiki (a related but somewhat different context) works better for that, but still provides bi-directional links and references.

Perhaps I’ll create an edit post kind in the future? For the moment I’ll just post some (like this one) as an annotation? Small steps…

Example bookmark of a commonplace book: /> with a syndication link to the diff of the addition to the example on the IndieWeb wiki: ]]> https://boffosocko.com/2020/03/23/edit-indieweb-org/feed/ 3 55769557 https://boffosocko.com/2020/03/21/55769505/ https://boffosocko.com/2020/03/21/55769505/#comments Sat, 21 Mar 2020 17:47:04 +0000 https://boffosocko.com/?p=55769505

“Where have you been, you young monkey?” ❧

Annotated Reinventing my blog by Brett Kosinski (The “B” Ark)

But as I thought more about what I wanted for my blog, and read more about the IndieWeb movement, I realized my idea of what a blog could be was incredibly limited. ❧

IndieWeb quote of the day!

I learned long ago in my career that shorter is harder. When I started Entertainment Weekly, I decreed that long reviews usually waste readers' time with critics showing off. Shorter can be smarter.

One doesn't measure comprehensiveness with a clock or a ruler. Longer is not deeper. ❧

I was particularly struck by two quotes in the comments which are very similar to a popular saying by Blaise Pascal.

Are these truisms proven out on a daily basis by Twitter?

ITBio – Chris Aldrich (feed) ❧

Hey, wait! He’s not only following me, but a very distinct subset of my posts!

This is the first time I’ve ever seen someone indicate that they’ve done this in the wild.

I’ll also admit that this is a really great looking blogroll too! I’m going to have to mine it for the bunch of feeds that I’m not already following. 

Annotated The Dan MacKinlay family of variably-well-considered enterprises by Dan MacKinlay (danmackinlay.name)

A statistician is the exact same thing as a data scientist or machine learning researcher with the differences that there are qualifications needed to be a statistician, and that we are snarkier. ❧

Screenshots are disposable, but highlights are forever. ❧

Highlighting this sentence on the Highly blog (on Medium) ironically using Hypothes.is. I’m syndicating a copy over to my own website because I know that most social services are not long for this world. The only highlights that live forever are the ones you keep on your own website or another location that you own and control.

RIP Highly.
Viva IndieWeb!

"Some inequality of income and wealth is inevitable, if not necessary. If an economy is to function well, people need incentives to work hard and innovate.The pertinent question is not whether income and wealth inequality is good or bad. It is at what point do these inequalities become so great as to pose a serious threat to our economy, our ideal of equal opportunity and our democracy."
—Robert Reich ❧

An important observation. What might create such a tipping point? Is there a way to look back at these things historically to determine the most common factors that would create such tipping points?

Economy, Society and Public Policy (an open textbook) ❧

David Brancaccio and the kind folks at Marketplace are doing a public virtual bookclub with this book as their text for twelve weeks through the Spring of 2020.

Given the complexity of the subject and the public nature, I might suggest that they consider using the opensource and free Hypothes.is platform as an academic discussion tool for allowing everyone to highlight, annotate, and respond to the text and conversations?

I suspect the Hypothesis team would be happy to do a quick run through of their platform as well as potentially creating a private group if they preferred.

This link is an example of an annotation on the text.

Christian Nestell Bovee often receives credit for the quote. “Kindness: a language which the dumb can speak and the deaf can understand,” he wrote in his 1857 book “Thoughts, Feelings, and Fancies.” ❧

Annotated An Outline for Using Hypothesis for Owning your Annotations and Highlights by Chris Aldrich (boffosocko.com)

Create an IFTTT.com recipe to port your Hypothesis RSS feed into WordPress posts. Generally chose an “If RSS, then WordPress” setup and use the following data to build the recipe:

Input feed: https://hypothes.is/stream.atom?user=username (change username to your user name)
Optional title: {{EntryTitle}}
Body: {{EntryContent}} from {{EntryUrl}}
{{EntryPublished}}
Categories: Highlight (use whatever categories you prefer, but be aware they’ll apply to all your future posts from this feed)
Tags: hypothes.is
Post status (optional): I set mine to “Draft” so I have the option to keep it privately or to publish it publicly at a later date. ❧

Posting this solely to compare my Hypothes.is highlights and annotations on my website with Will’s version.

I’m still tinkering with mine and should have a Micropub based version using IFTTT and Webhooks done soon.

IN THE NAME OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST

I thought this was important all on its own. Did they put this before everything? Was he just really religious?–Tmoon95 annotation on September 9, 2015

This statement also has a lot to do with the culture of the time: The Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition (Spanish: Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición), commonly known as the Spanish Inquisition (Inquisición española), was established in 1478 by Catholic Monarchs Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile. It was intended to maintain Catholic orthodoxy in their kingdoms and to replace the Medieval Inquisition, which was under Papal control.

Recall that Ferdinand and Isabella were the reigning monarchs who funded Columbus’ voyages.

Tip: One of the Discover curation guidelines is the Buddy Bench principle. If you want to find someone who shares a particular interest, write a micropost asking “Hey, are there any fans of ___ out there?” We add posts like that to Discover.  ❧

Another useful tip on this front is to post a Micro Monday following recommendation aggregating a few people you know are interested in a particular topic. As an example, I posted one about a few educators and researchers I knew on micro.blog in July 2018 and it quickly blew up with lots of additional recommendations from others following me within the community.

Over time I’ve kept up with adding to it, and even within the last month that post is still helping to benefit others on the service:

blair says: “@c this made me very happy, thanks for tagging me, I’ve now got a bunch more interesting folks to follow!”
May 30, 2019 at 4:28 pm