What is the value of memorizing state capitals? I had to do this when I was in grade school. And yet I can’t recall a single instance–beyond trivia–when I needed to pull that information from my brain. I can see the point of knowing the capital of one’s own state. But all fifty? Decades later, I have the fifty state capitals available from memory whenever one is required, but I can’t recall if I already shampooed my hair while in the shower. I’m not proud of having memorized the state capitals. Indeed, I am amused when a state capital trivia question comes up and someone answers almost instantly. I pretend not to know.
We memorized the U.S. Presidents, too, in order of their terms in office. We not only had to memorize the names, but the numbers. For some reason, teachers always wanted to know who the 16th president was. When has it ever been important to know that Lincoln was our 16th President? It seems to me there is far more important information about Lincoln that students should be learning. It could have been worse. We could have had to memorize the vice presidents. There is an old story about a woman who lost her two sons in a war. One went off to battle, the other became vice president. Neither were ever heard from again.
State capitals and U.S. Presidents are just two examples of facts that have been relegated to the land of trivia. Given how useless memorizing the state capitals has been for me, I’d rather give some back and use the freed-up memory space for more practical matters.
I have the increasingly cyncial suspicion that this kind of trivia has become a substitute for learning, not the least because it is something that is very easy to measure. I find it interesting that I never had to memorize the periodic table of elements, something that would have been far more useful than the state capitals. Why is that?
More practical than memorizing state capitals is learning how to read a map. Someone who can read a map, can readily identify capitals should the need arise. Plus, there is a pleasure to dead-reckoning navigation that turn-by-turn GPS navigation lacks. (Back when I was learning how to fly, GPSs were just coming into use. My flight instructor wouldn’t allow me to use one, insisting I navigate by chart. “Charts,” he said, “never run out of battery life.”)
Memorizing multiplication tables is also a more powerful use of brain power than memorizing state capitals or the order of presidents. I was astonished when I discovered that my kids’ school didn’t require students to memorize multiplication tables. It had a notable impact. They struggled with math involving multiplication and division until Kelly took it upon herself to help them memorize the multiplication tables.
If students are going to learn about U.S. Presidents, it seems to me that biographies of the presidents are a much better tool than memorization. As I have written before, biographies are a great tool for learning, far beyond the subject of the book alone. Reading biographies of various U.S. presidents provides a continuity of history that doesn’t come from memorizing a list.
State capitals make for good trivia questions, but that is about the only value memorizing them offers. Knowing that the state capital of New York is Albany without knowing why the state capital is Albany (because that was the part of the state where the wealthiest citizens had their country estates) misses huge opportunities to teach something useful, rather than memorize something trivial.
Written on March 10, 2022.
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Not long ago, I wrote a post on my desert island bookshelf. The idea came to me while I sat in my office and happened to glance over at the shelf containing all of my Will Durant books: a complete shelf of books. Those, I thought, were the books I’d want with me on a desert island. In the course of writing the post, I discovered that I’d already written on that very subject threeothertimes.
That is a side-effect of having a blog that spans 17 years and 7,100 posts. I am bound to write about the same thing more than once. For a while this stressed me out. I would get a good idea for a post, and then immediately search the blog to see if I had written about it before. The better the idea, the more likely it was that I had already written about it. So I’d beg off and find somethign else to write about.
In the last two years, however, I’ve tried to set aside these worries. Why not revisit the same topics from time-to-time? After all, my opinions change, I learn new things, I have experiences that alter how I think about the world. Not writing about them because I’ve done so before misses an opportunity to show how my thoughts about a subject evolve over time.
This, of course, is an extreme example. In other cases, I’ve found that I’ve written on similar subjects (with almost identical post titles) but years apart. For instance, I’ve written about one of my favorite moveies, L.A. Story, a couple of times. I wrote about it in 2011, and more recently a little over a year ago.
Also, while I have a core of readers who’ve been with me for a long time (and for whom some of these posts may seem repetitive), readers come and go. There are always new ones and the new readers are more likely to encounter the newer posts. In other words, what seems repetitive to me may not seem so repetitive to readers. Then, too, not every reader reads every post.
If you have gotten this far, you may be asking if I have previously written about previously writing about posts. Or, as the title asks, didn’t I write about this already?
The answer is yes, of course I did. A little over two years ago, in a post called “Repeat After Me” I wrote about posts I’ve already written about. You really can’t get much more meta than that.
Written on March 9, 2022.
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Remember thatnotebook I lost a few weeks back? Today, I found it. I had just finished writing the first blog post of the day and was trying to decide what to write for the next one. I got up to go into the kitchen, returned to the office, and sat in my office chair. I swiveled toward my right and something on the floor caught my eye. There was a notebook there. It hadn’t been there a minute ago. I picked it up and it was my little lost notebook!
I was delighted to find it, but also puzzled. How did it get on the floor next to my desk chair when it hadn’t been there just a minute earlier? It occurred to me that maybe my kids had been playing a joke on me, but I quickly dismissed that idea. Something else had to be going on.
When I first realized the notebook was missing, I retraced my steps. I looked on my desk, I looked on the floor of my desk, I looked on my chair. Nothing. I checked other places in the house that I had been. Nothing. I finally concluded that the notebook must have slipped from my pocket on my morning walk. I figured it was gone for good.
Kelly suggested that maybe my notebook had gotten sucked into a time vortex and was returned safely this very evening, possibly from the future. I checked, but if it was lost into the future, no one bothered to write anything useful.
I sat here pondering what might have happened, and I finally came up with a plausible solution.
I keep my notebooks in my back left pocket. I am frequently seated at my desk doing work. I suspect that while seated, the slipped out of my pocket and fell behind the seat of my chair. There is a curved piece the goes under the seat of the chair, and there is plenty of space under there for the notebook to have hidden. I have reproduced this situation in the image below:
Now, because the piece of metal is curved, the notebook would have slid towards the center. That would explain why, when I first lost the notebook and looked at the chair, I didn’t see it. It was hidden beneath the mesh of the seat. What makes this all the more plausible is a little bit of physics. My chair sits within a U-shape surrounded by my desk and other surfaces on three sides. I frequently pivot this way or that through out the day. Moreover, I frequently spin to face the opposite way to get out of my chair. All of this spinning and pivoting gradually forced the notebook closer and closer to and edge. When I got up earlier this evening, that was the final straw. The notebook fell from its hiding place to land on the floor beside my chair.
I’m glad I found my notebook. Now I need to figure out what to do, continue with the once I started in its absence, or switch back to the lost one. Decisions, decisions. At least one decision was eliminated by this discovery: I now know what to write about for my second blog post today.
Written on March 8, 2022.
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A couple of months ago, in Episode 15, I wrote about how I use daily notes as an index to my life. I was impressed by a post I’d read on someone who kept all of his daily notes in a single file, and I aimed to try to reproduce that in Obsidian. Since writing that post, I’ve tweaked things somewhat–enough that I felt it was worth reporting back on. Since this series is an ongoing experiment in going practically paperless, it isn’t unusual for me to change the way I do things when I find ways and methods that work better.
Two competing requirements
In the case of daily notes, I found myself pinned in by two competing requirements:
I want the ability to see more than just “today’s” note. I like to be able to easily scroll through past daily notes. This is a quick and easy way to review things without having to search through a bunch of files, or open a bushel of notes windows to reference something I am looking for. This is what attracted me to the single daily notes file in the first place.
I want to use the native daily notes functionality that comes with Obsidian. This functionality, however, is based on a single-note-per-day, and I’ve found it just doesn’t work nearly as well when all daily notes are in a single file. The main problem was that if I linked to another note from my daily note file, the backlink referred to the daily note file, but not the date in the file under which the link was listed.
So: I want to use a single file for all of my daily notes, but I want the daily notes functionality that is based on one note per day. What to do?
First solution
In order to address this conundrum, I decided to go back to the single-note-per-day. That immediately gained me the native daily note functionality in Obsidian. In a single-note-per-day model, if I link to another note, the backlink shows the date of because it is the name of the daily note file itself. For instance, I list out the blog posts I write on a given day within my daily notes file. In the case of this post, the backlink shows what day I wrote the post:
This is much more useful than when I used a single note for all my daily notes. In that situation, the backlink would show up as follows:
and “Daily” doesn’t tell me the date. That is a big drawback of the single-file model. As I pointed out in Episode 15, one thing that would help would be if the section path that the link was under was displayed as part of the backlink — that at least would pick up the date. I even submitted a feature request for this. But it doesn’t exist now and I have to work with what I’ve got.
One thing I did to attempt to get the best of both worlds was to setup my workspace so that the previous day’s note always appeared in a window above the current day’s note. That way I could easily scroll through the previous day’s note if I needed to reference something there. I pin the current day’s note, but leave the previous day’s note unpinned so I can quickly switch to another day using the calendar.
I played around with this model and it worked okay, but it just wasn’t as useful as being able to scroll through all of my daily notes in a single file. It did, however, get me the benefit of the native daily note functionality in Obsidian, so that was a partial win.
Second solution
After giving it some thought, I came up with another solution that works even better: a single daily notes file made up of transcluded links (embeds) to individual daily notes. This is achieved as follows:
Daily notes are created normally, one-file-per-day, using native daily note functionality in Obsidian.
At the end of each day, I add a transcluded link to the current day’s daily note to the top of a note file called “Daily”
The “Daily” note file looks like this in source mode:
When viewed in Live Preview mode, however (which is my default), this same file looks as follows:
This allows me to scroll through all of my individual daily notes as if they are in a single file, even though the daily notes themselves are each in a separate file. It allows me to work in a workspace where I keep the Daily file pinned at all times, even while having today’s daily note open in a separate window, like this:
In this setup, I can easily scroll through all of my daily notes going back to when I started intending to keep them in a single file (December 28, 2021). What’s more, as I add new items to my current daily note (the window on the lower-right), they appear instantly in the file on the left.
One change I made in the “Daily” file from my previous attempt at a single file is that I reverse sort the entries so that the most recent day appears at the top of the file. I found that I was constantly scrolling to the bottom of the single file to add new notes, and while I like the strict chronology, it was more practical to reverse sort it. Several readers pointed out to me that this is what they did, and it made a lot of sense to me.
While the embedded text within the file is not searchable in source mode or Live Preview mode, it is searchable in Read mode. And I can leave the file in read mode because I only have to made an update to it once a day, to add the current embedded daily note file. That means, if I hit Cmd-F to search in the file, results show for all of the embedded files. For instance, if I search for the term “- read” here is what the results look like:
Note that the search results span multiple days in this view, meaning they span multiple embedded files. This is what I was hoping for when I began looking into this solution.
The best of both worlds?
This solution — using individual daily note files and a separate Daily file with embedded notes via transcluded links — is better and gets me closer to the two competing requirements I’ve been aiming for. I can use native daily note functionality; I can see references to daily notes in backlinks, and I can scroll through the daily notes as if they are all in a single file. But it is not perfect. There is still at least one challenge to overcome, and a relatively easy one at that.
Challenge: Automating the Daily file
As I said, currently, at the end of each day, I add a new transcluded link to the current daily note at the top of my Daily note file. If I forget to do this, I won’t see the previous day’s note. This isn’t all that cumbersome, but it is something that I want to automate.
A simple shell or Python script can take care of that. The script will add the trancluded link to the new daily note at the beginning of each day so that I can see it there at the start of the day, instead of just at the end. This really is a simple script and when I get it written, I’ll post a link to it on GitHub1.
Daily summary and Dataview
There is one other adjustment I’ve been playing around with in my daily notes. Now that each day is in a separate file, my daily notes template includes YAML frontmatter for capturing some information that I care about. Currently, that template looks as follows:
---
locations: ["Arlington, VA"]
sleep: 1
summary: Good writing day, busy work day. Upgraded Obsidian. Good response to latest PP post
---
Here is what this data is for:
Locations: a list of places that I was at on a given day. Not every place I go, but rather where I was based on that day. On days I travel, this list contains multiple entries, like [“Arlington, VA”, “Wisp Resort, McHenry, MD”]
Sleep: a rating of the quality of my previous nights sleep on a scale of -2 to 2, where 0 is an average night, -2 is a absolutely terrible sleep, and 2 is a dreamless, perfect sleep. For those curious, I learned of this method listening to Jim Collins describe this method on the Tim Ferris Show podcast.
Summary: A short, one line summary of my day, written at the end of the day.
I use this in a Dataview table that provides a kind of index to my daily notes. At a glance I can see where I was on a given day. I can also use the summary to help remember what happened on that day. I can then drill into the specific note for more details. I have a note called “Daily Notes Index” and within that note, use the following dataview query:
```dataview
TABLE summary, locations FROM "Daily Notes"
SORT file.name DESC```
Here is what this Daily Notes Index looks like for March 2020 so far:
This hasn’t replaced my Daily file containing embedded daily notes. Instead, I find this file more useful as a high-level review of my days, something I can scan through at the end of the month or end of the year, or a place I can go to quickly see where I was or what I did on a certain day without flipping through the details of the individual daily notes file.
Putting it all together
To sum up the current state of my daily notes:
I have gone back to using a single-note-per-day to get the most benefit from Obsidian’s native daily note functionality. I always have “today’s” note open in a pinned window.
I maintain a “Daily” note that emulates the all-daily-notes-in-one-file that I started with back in Episode 15. This allows me to easily scroll through all of my daily notes and search them without having to open multiple files. Given the way that I work, this is more efficient for me.
I use the YAML frontmatter in my daily notes to populate a dataview table in a Daily Notes Index file that I use periodically for skimming my days
This is as close as I’ve been able to get to the best of both worlds: each day in its own note, and all notes in a single file. So far, it seems to be working for me, but as always, I am open to ideas an suggestions for improvment.
In next week’s post, I’m going to change pace a bit and talk about my personal views on information security with respect to my notes in Obsidian. I’ve been asked questions about security quite a bit. This was also try when I was writing about using Evernote a decade ago. The post will summarize how I think about security, some tools I use to protect my data, and what I do and won’t worry about. See you back here next week!
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I suppose I could try to make this a plug-in but (a) this is too niche a use case, and (b) I’d have to deal with all of the overhead involved in a plug-in. A Python script on a scheduled job is much simpler for this. ↩
Lately I have been frustated how I see my kids being taught in school. They frequently don’t seem to be engaged with the material. They don’t connect what they learn with the world around them. Most importantly, they don’t seem to be encouraged to make practical applications of their what they learn. Instead, they are taught to pass whatever the next test is and then move on. It would not at all surprise me if, after passing their test, my kids would flush that knowledge from their minds.
I don’t think this is the teachers’ fault: they have guidelines they have to follow, and they have limited resources as it is. I would have a word or two for the people who make those guidelines, but that is a post for another time. Part of my frustration stems from my own education: I was taught to learn things, and I was taught that the things I learned could be applied in the world around me. Kelly says that I was just a weird kid, who happened to have a real interest in the subjects I was learning. I disagree: I was taught in a way that made me interested in those subjects.
It bothers me when people complain about something without offering solutions, and so let me present one possible way that students can be better prepared to learn and to use what they learn in ordinary life, as opposed to just passing a test: teach using biographies. I’ve written about the value of biographies before, but let me enumerate some of the ways I think biopgraphies can help with the overall learning process in a practical way:
Biographies are great for practicing reading. There are biographies for all reading levels. That said, I think kids should be encouraged to stretch their abilities. If they are interested in a book that may be challenging, go for it!
Biopgraphies allow students to sample differentcareer possibilities. Biographies are about people and people do things, whether they are writers, doctors, generals, presidents, actors, football players, teachers, astronauts, scientists, lawyers, entepeneurs, etc. You can see what it was like for someone to live that career. And there are countless biographies so you can get lots of different perspectives.
Biogrphies are great tools for teaching research. How did the author know that particular fact about that person? Was it footnoted? (What is a footnote for that matter?) How can you as reader verify that what the author is saying is true? Biographies usually have notes and citations. Having students track down the source of just one or two facts using those citiations shows how the research process works–in reverse.
Biographies can teach students to be skeptical. Just because it is printed in a book doesn’t mean it is true. This is related to the previous point. It is okay to question assertions made in biographies. The question becomes: how would you confim the assertion — or prove it wrong?
Biographies provide history in context. Instead of just learning names and dates, biographies presents a person’s life in the context of their times. Reading a biography of, say, Franklin Roosevelt will also involve you in the Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Second World War. Reading a biography of a scientist like John von Neumann will involve a history of the development of the atomic bomb. I’ve found that by reading a wide variety of biographies over the decades my sense of the flow of history has improved, as well as my sense of the scope–what was happening when, in relation to other things.
Biographies can be used to teach how to take good notes. Do schools even teach how to take notes anymore? I’m hard-pressed to remember if I learned how to take notes in school, with the exception of my 7th grade science teacher, who integrated notetaking into the scientific process. For a while I used the first blank page in the book to jot down a summary of notes that I took away from my reading. I also tried to relate those notes to other things I’ve read.
Biographies can recommend all sorts of tips and tricks that their subjects found useful in their lives and which students might find useful in theirs. Reading a biography of Dwight Eisenhower, I learned how he prioritized tasks: by importance and urgency. The fact that this tool of his was useful to him in such important jobs as General of the Army and President of the United States made a big impression on me. Would such a tool work for me?
Biographies provide a source of information to bring to other subjects. It seems to me that stuff that my kids learn in math and history, or composisiton and science are rarely related to one another. (Why would they be: the test is only going to cover what’s in the chapter, right?1). When learning about the periodic table in science, a biography of Mendeleev, and how he came up with the periodic table in the first place (i.e. why it is periodic) can make understanding the table of elements much easier.
Biographies can be used as teaching tools in any subject. There are biographies of writers, mathematicians, scientists, politicians, musicians, athletes, actors, artists, criminals, saints, you name it. The story of a subject, or a part of subject, can be told through the life of someone who has lived it. The information you get is not just relevant to the subject at hand, but it is the experience of someone involved with the subject. That experience in the context of the subject under study can be invaluable.
Biographies are fascinating and there are many ways they can be used to improve education. I’ve outlined just a few. It is interesting to read biographies of people who were students in ancient Rome, or colonial America. We know more today about science and technology, but I sometimes wonder if they had better methods for teaching and learning.
Written on March 8, 2022.
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Recently, Audible had a site-wide sale where everything on the site was up-to 85% off. I love sales like these because they are a feeding-frenzy for buying books. But to make the most effective use of such a sale requires a bit of skill. I picked up more than a dozen audiobooks in the latest sale, and I thought I’d use that as an example of audibook economics that I have picked up in the 9+ years I have been using Audible.
The first thing to understand is my subscription to the Audible service: I have the Audible Premium Plus subscription. This subscription entitles me to 2 credits each month, a 30% discount of the prices of Audiobooks, access to anything in the “Plus” catalog, special discounts like the Daily Deal, and other features. For this I pay about $25/month.
At $25/month my credits are worth $12.50 each. So when I am browsing books to buy, if the book in question costs less than $12.50, I won’t use a credit for it. Instead, I’ll pay separately. Moreover, I can buy an additional 3-pack of credits for $35, which amounts to $11.60/credit. So in practice, my rule is that if an audiobook costs more than $12 I’ll use a credit; if it costs less than $12 I’ll pay separately for it. This is just common sense.
There are always exceptions, however. For instance, especially with nonfiction books (the bulk of what I listen to) I will frequently also buy the Kindle version. Often times, if you look at the Kindle page for a book, you will see an option to add the Audible audiobook version for a fraction of the normal price. For instance, the Kindle edition might cost $12.99 and there will be an option to add on the audiobook for an additional $7.99. That is a grand total of $21, which is more than the cost of a credit. However, because the audiobook add-on is only $7.99, which is less than my $12 threshold. In these cases, I generally don’t use a credit to pay for the editions. I justify this because I get more than I would for buying the audiobook alone. And besides, often times the audiobook alone wouldn’t be $7.99, but more like $20. It is only bundled with the e-book that is becomes discounted.
There are other deals I look out for. I always check out the Daily Deal, which usually offers an audiobook at a deep discount each day, normally in the range of $2-6. In these cases, I never use credits to pay for the book because the credits are worth more than the book. I’ll just pay normally for these.
Then there are the 2-for-1 deals that popup now and then. In these deal, you can use a single credit to get 2 audiobooks. These can be tricky. If I see books that I want, I have to weigh the cost of getting 2-for-1, over the paying separately for the Kindle edition, if I want it. In other words, I will look to see if the Kindle edition offers a discounted add-on for the audiobook and then weight the difference over the use a single credit. Sometimes it is worth spending the credit, other times, I pay without the credit to get the bundle with the Kindle edition.
At the time of the recent site-wide sale, I think I had 4 credits stored up. Here is how I ended up aqcuiring 16 books from that sale using the method detailed above (and using just one credit):
For the 14 books I ordered, I paid just 28% of the list price. Note that I used a credit for the most expensive of the books on sale (The Man From the Future). Techically, that credit cost me about $11 so I saved $13 by using it, which means I should add the $7 to the price I paid. That brings my total to $124.58, which is still only 29% of the list price. I think that is a pretty good bargain.
That, good readers, is my theory of audiobook economics. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some reading to do.
Written on March 7, 2022.
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Today is one of those perfect days for reading. Windy and snowy with accumulations between 3-5 inches expected. I plan on trying to get through as much of The Rising Sun as I can. Meanwhile, here is what I read this week. Some of the articles/posts may require a subscription to read them. I also share my recommended reads on Pocket for anyone who wants to follow along there.
Books
The numbers in parentheses following each book represent: (a) the nth book I’ve finished reading this year, and (b) the mth book I’ve finished reading since January 1, 1996.
How to Avoid Nuclear War With Russia by Ross Douthat (NY Times, 3/5/22). I’m having flashbacks to those nervous days in the early 1980s when I used to worry about things like nuclear war. #current-events
Harry Truman Helped Make Our World Order, for Better and for Worse by Beverly Gage (New Yorker, 3/7/22). David McCullough’s biography, Truman, is one of the best presidential biographies I’ve ever read. This one seems like a worthy candidate to pair with that one. I’m looking forward to reading this new bio.
John McPhee’s Slow Productivity – Study Hacks – Cal Newport by Cal Newport (blog, 3/9/22). McPhee is a favorite of mine, and Cal Newport’s take on McPhee’s productivity (slow productivity) resonated with me. It reminds me of how I think of my own progress, small, incremental increases over long periods of time. #productivity
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Several times a year we make long roadtrips. We drive to Florida or we drive to Maine, or we go on some summer excursion that takes us to places we’ve never been before. Road trips are great because there is no hassel of airports, airplanes, security checks, and baggage claim. We have the freedom to depart whenever we want, shorten or extend our trip as we see fit. We can divert easily to some place that catches our eye. The only limitation is time.
There is a strangeness to road time that I notice when we drive. We are generally not in a rush on these trips. Especially when driving long distances, we know that we will leave early in the morning and arrive at our final destination sometime the following afternoon. We have a hotel reservation, but no sense of urgency to get there. And yet, I find that as the drive progresses, the road creates its down sense of urgency.
I do the driving because I don’t mind it. It means I can listen to audiobooks for hours on end as I drive. Kelly handles “cabin resource managment,” which takes the strain of worrying about the kids off me as I drive. The beginning of the drive is always the worst part–driving out of any metropolitan area is tough under the best of conditions. Once we are south of Stafford, Virginia, however, we leave the metropolitan areas behind. This is where I began to relax. Our car has all sorts of features that make driving easy: progressive cruise control, blind-spot detection, lane drift detection. I set the progressive cruise control once we are on the open road, and I can go for hours without touching it again.
And yet… as the drive progresses, something about road time makes me want to go faster as time wears on. For the first few hours, I can settle four or five car lengths behind a truck that is doing 70 MPH in a 70 MPH zone and be perfectly content. After several hours, however, I’ll go to pass a truck or a car, and after that, settling back in at 70 MPH or 65 MPH doesn’t seem to cut it anymore. I feel like I am not making progress. I can’t explain why this is but I have theories. For instance, despite the highway signs that indicate speed saying “Speed Limit” we tend to treat those as minimums. Nearly everyone on the road is driving 5-10 MPH behind the “limit.” That alone gives a sense of urgency. If I am driving 72 MPH in a 70 MPH zone and nearly every car is passing me, I feel somehow like I am being left behind. Behind what, I have no idea.
Then, too, when I work out the math, there is no signfican different between driving the speed limit, or 10 MPH above it. Over the course of an 8 hour drive, driving 75 MPH instead of 70 MPH saves 5 miles every hour–which amounts to maybe 4 minutes per hour or half an hour over the course of 8 hours. In other words, driving 75 MPH gets me to my destination 30 minutes sooner than driving 70 MPH. But I am in no rush, so what’d the big deal about 30 minutes? It just means we’ll sit at the hotel 30 minutes longer. It also means 30 minutes more of audiobook listening. And yet, I still feel that sense of urgency as the hours slide past.
The trick is, it seems to me, not to pass cars. Find a spot and a decent speed, and stick to it. Relax. Enjoy the scenery. Listen to audiobooks. Chat with the family. There is no rush. And that sense of urgency a false one. All of this is good advice. I only wish I had the discipline to take it.
Written on March 6, 2022.
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I was out the door just before 7 am this morning. It was already 60°F. I wore shorts because I wear shorts when the temperature is above 55°F. It felt wonderful out. It always feels good to go on early morning walks in spring1. After being cooped up indoors, with the heat running or a fire in the fireplace for most of the winter, the fresh air of an early spring morning is particularly refreshing.
Sunday mornings make for quiet walks, especially early. People sleep in later around here on Sundays. I expected to see lots of people out, given how nice it was, but for the first half of my walk, I saw only a single person and dog. The bike path on which I walk was otherwise deserted. It was just me and George Dyson who was talking about the evolution between analog and digital worlds.
People may have been nestled snug in their beds, but the birds were out in force, another sign of early spring. I could see some of them, but hear many more. The woodpeckers, in particular, were in top pecking form, ready to beat their beaks against the bark after the long, cold winter. Listening to George Dyson talk about the analog and digital worlds, and then hearing the percussion of the woodpeckers, I couldn’t help but wonder if they were sending some kind of signal to one another, or perhaps they were just as grateful for the spring as I was. I’ve frequently said it is hard to apprecite the spring without the winter.
Later, while on my walk home, Dyson was talking about time in the analog sense and the digital sense. It occurred to me, while listening to Dyson, that one of our strange quirks of time was almost upon us–Daylight Saving time–certainly another sign of spring. Daylight saving time begins here on the east coast in a week. It means it will be darker in the early morning again, at least temporarily, but lighter later.
More people were on the bike path on my return home. Runners were out running. Dogs were out walking their people. I imagine the park will grow increasingly crowded as the day wears on. It is supposed to be close to 70°F today, and nearly 77°F tomorrow. It is strange to think that it so warm, especially after returning from our recent ski trip, where the morning temperatures were well below freezing.
I’m already looking forward to my early morning walk tomorrow. There is some rain in the forecast, but it looks like it will hold off long enough to allow me to get in my walk. I always appreciate nature’s little courtesies in this regard.
Written on March 6, 2022.
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Technically (as my kids would say), it is not quite spring yet, but it is close enough for government work (as my flight instructor used to say about my landings). ↩
I have never been interested in skiing. I can’t say why exactly. The only time I can ever recall being on skis is as a young child, in my backyard in New Jersey. They may have been toy skis, and I was probably four years old at the time. Between the intervening decades I have not set foot on skis. But we have friends that love skiing, and their kids ski, and we thought it would be a good idea to go on a ski trip to see if our kids would enjoy the sport.
Kelly made the arrangements and on a recent weekend, we made the 3-hour drive to the Wisp Ski Resort in McHenry, Maryland. Actually, in order to avoid crowds, were there on a Thursday evening and Friday, and returned home on a Saturday morning. Kelly strategically picked the dates because the kids got out of school early on the Thursday in question, and had no school on Friday. I had some afternoon appointments, after which we hit the road.
We arrived at the Wisp resort and checked into the lodge, and then headed over to the snow tubing slopes. All five of us participated in this particular event. We were told that the hills were particularly fast. I’d never been tubing before. They had something called a “magic carpet” which was like an escalator that took passengers and tubes to the top of the hill, very, very slowly. At the top were a series of lanes where people lined up with their tubes, waiting to be given the okay to head down the hill.
The snow-tubing hill, with the “magic carpet” to the right.
Our youngest was a little too nervous to head down the hill herself, so she and I lashed our tubes together and raced down the hill. It was far faster than I imagined. Along the way are two drops that sent us briefly airborn. As we approached the end of the run, I used my snow boots to slow us down a bit. There were these large garbage bags filled with I don’t know what that helped to slow people down. We stopped before those bags on the first run. I was more focused on the Littlest Miss’s reactions to really take in the ride down the hill.
We decided on another run, and so back up the hill we went. Once again, the Littlest Miss and I went together. This time, we were in the very first lane. That was a particularly fast one. On our next run, I tried to enjoy the ride down, but we picked up quite a bit of speed. The Littlest Miss grew increasingly nervous, and I was focused on her rather than slowing us down. We blew through the garbage bags, which didn’t do much to slow us down, and continued to a fence that ran across the end of course (and which prevented us from going off a cliff). I had turned so that I was backwards and hit the fence back first. The fence itself was springy, but there was a metal pole running across the bottom that caught me in the back. After that, I decided I’d had enough of for one day.
Kelly and the older kids rode the tubes a few more times, while the Littlest Miss and I people-watched. She also made quite collection of snow angels in the artificial snow. It was amusing to watch people come down the hill. On almost every run, someone lost something on the way down: hats, gloves, sunglasses. Afterward, we headed back to the lodge and got pizza.
The next day, the older kids were scheduled for lessons in the morning. Kelly had prescheduled all of this which made things easy. It helped that the place was not very crowded. We headed to the training center next to the lodge at 9:30am, filled out some forms, and then checked in. The kids got their rental equipment. Zach was snowboarding and Grace was skiing. They split into their various lesson groups, and then, for the next 90 minutes, learned their various crafts. Kelly took the Littlest Miss to find a place to go sledding, but I stuck around, watching Grace learn to ski. She seemed to take to it quickly, and by the end of 90 minutes, she was ready to hit the bunny slopes.
It was cold out–24 degrees when their lessons started–but the sun felt good. With the lessons over, Zach and Grace headed for the bunny slopes to practice. They made a few runs, and then we decided to have lunch. There wasn’t a great selection of food, but the chili was warm and tasted pretty good. After lunch, Grace headed back to the bunny slopes. Zach wanted to try a real slope. I wasn’t sure he was ready yet, and he agreed to make one more run down the bunny slope. Then he headed off to the lifts to make a run down a regular slope.
Meanwhile, I watched Grace complete run after run down the bunny slopes. There was a “magic carpet” like at the snow-tubing hill, so that she didn’t have to walk up the hill each run. Each time she came down the hill, I could tell she was getting better and better, building her confidence. The first few times, she was nervous about stopping and tended to “land long.” But eventually, she found her balance and was able to stop sooner, and even curve around as she came to a stop.
I watched skiers come down the black diamond slope, and couldn’t quite understand the nerve it must take to do that. Then again, I used to fly airplanes and it never bothered me, so I guess everything is relative. After more than an hour had passed, I realized that Zach hadn’t returned yet. I wondered what was keeping him. At one point, I saw a snowboard come down the mountain, sans rider. I began to worry. I tend to worry about these things and Kelly is far more calm about them than I am. In these cases, therefore, I outsource my anxiety to her. Still, I couldn’t help but wonder what was keeping him.
Not long after, Kelly came out to find me. Apparantly, Zach had made it partway down the slope, fell, got nervous, and and tried to make it back up to the top. He didn’t have his phone with him, and so asked several skiers if he could use their phone to make a call. Surprisingly, most refused. He made his way back to the top of the mountain and found an employee, who allowed him to use the phone. He called Kelly who then drove up to the top of the mountain to pick him up. He was fine, but wanted to rest for a while.
Meanwhile, Grace was relentless, practicing her runs down the bunny slope again, and again. I’d have to guess that she went down the slope thirty times that day. Later, after resting, Zach returned to the bunny slopes.
That evening, faces sunburned, we headed to a nearby restauarant, The Greene Turtle, for dinner. I think we all slept well that night. The next morning we headed home.
Overall, I’d say the trip was a success. The kids had fun, and would definitely want to do it again. The Littlest Miss, who was half a year too young for lesson, also wanted to do it again. Next year, she’ll be old enough for lessons herself.
Written on March 6, 2022.
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Given how much I read, I am occasionally asked what my favorite book is. My answer is the same as when my kids ask me what my favorite food is: it depends. With books, especially, I’m no longer certain I can say I have a favorite. I don’t rate books because I don’t find much objective value in rating systems. Instead, I simply indicate if the book is one that I would recommend and/or read again.
Friends, however, rarely let me get away with this answer. They want something definitive. Again, it varies based on all kinds of factors. For instance, my favorite baseball book is currently Joe Posnanski’s The Baseball 100, which recently unseated W. P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe on my personal best-baseball book list. My current favorite fiction series is Craig Johnson’s Longmire books.
My clever friends try another tact: what if you were stranded on a desert island? What book would you want with you then?
Put that way, I have an answer. Indeed, I have a bookshelf just in case such a situation arises. Of all of the books sitting on the shelves in my office, there is a single shelf that I consider to be my desert island bookshelf. The shelf contains the 11-volume Story of Civilization series by Will and Ariel Durant, as well as four other books by the Durants, including their Dual Autobiography. If pressed, this would be my desert island bookshelf.
Why The Story of Civilization, the first of which was published in 1935 and the final volume in 1975? Certainly some of the material is outdated, and new discoveries have supplanted what is in these books. Even so, these eleven volumes provide a history of human civilization that is epic in scope and meticulous in detail. And best of all: I simply love Durant’s writing style. His style can make any subject seem interesting. Then, too, I feel for the Durant’s as I read each volume. You can see from the introductions to each book how the project grew far beyond their original expectations, but they kept going.
The books highlight the key figures of history, so I’d never been lonely for company. But the books also provide a picture of what life was like for the average person, too. The story of civilization is also the story of war and art and literature and science, and thus, I have all of these fascinating subjects as company. At more than 10,000 pages, it would take a while to get through the entire series, so that when I started over again at the beginning, the early parts would seem fresh and at the same time, I’d have additional context from the later volumes. It seems to be I could never be bored with these books on my island.
As it happens, I’ve considered the question of desert island books before. Way back in 2007, I mentioned Will Durant as an author whose books I’d want with me if I was stuck on a desert island for 20 years. In 2014, I considered this question again, and again come up with Will Durant’s Story of Civilization as my desert island books. And in 2017, I once again considered this question, and once again gave as my answer, the Durant’s Story of Civilization as the books I’d want with me on a desert island.
I am nothing if not consistent.
Now if I could only figure out how to take this bookshelf with me when traveling by plane over water, or by sea, so that I have it with me in the unlikely even that I am stranded on a desert island.
Written on March 5, 2022.
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This episode is less of a “how-do-I” and more of a “how-I-struggle with…” post. I have been working with tags for more than a decade and still struggle with them. I wanted to give fair warning at the top in case anyone is expecting brilliant revelations about tagging notes in Obsidian here.
I can’t remember when I first learned of the concept of tags. As someone who grew up during the personalcomputerrevolution, my approach to organizing information was naturally hierarchical. From my earliest days using computers, operating systems organized files in a hierarchical structure, and it seemed natural to follow that model.
Moreover, my schooling, which from 5th grade on paralleled my experience with personal computers–seemed to encourage a hierarchical form of information organization. Textbooks had tables of contents that were organized by Part / Chapter / Section. We used outlines to plan arguments. School notebooks were organized by tabs (remember Trapper-Keepers?). Even something as unbiquious as TV Guide was organized hierarchcally: by Date / Time / Station. Indeed. the closest thing to “tags” that I can think of were the indexes that accompanied many nonfiction books. Entries in these indexes (which themselves were sometimes hierarchical) spanned the hierarchy of the book itself. That is, an entry for “atmosphere, of Earth” might have references in multiple parts, sections, and chapters of the book in question.
The best I can say is that my awareness of tags probably came out of the various photo-storage apps and services that began to appear around 2004 or so, a decade after the Internet as we know it began to take shape.
Tags: In theory
These photo apps (Flickr was an early one I recall using) allowed users to “tag” photos with arbitrary keywords. This was a revelation to me. After living in a hierachical box for so long, tags introduced two ways that freed me from that box.
The keywords were completely arbitrary. There was no set list. I could make them up, or choose from words that had already been used.
One was not limited to a single keyword. I could tag an image with multiple keywords, placing it in multiple categories at once.
The latter point especially was important. Hierarchies, by their nature, limit where you can place something. A photo, for instance, can be placed in a folder path called /Family/Trips/Italy, or in /Buildings/Cathedrals. To put the photo in both places requires duplicating the photo file and then maintaining it in both places. Tags compliment the hierarchy, allowing one to tag a photo as “Italy” and “Cathedral” simulatenously, without having to duplicate the file.
There was another dimension to tags that I found interesting: crowd-sourcing. Because I first discovered through Internet services like Flickr, tags were often crowd-sourced, meaning anyone could apply tags to photos, thereby creating a kind of public melange of the categorization of images.
At the time, I remember thinking how useful it would be to have the ability to artitrarily tag files in a file system. MacOS introduced such a feature in OS X 10.9 in 2013. When that happened, however, I didn’t jump on it and start tagging my files.
The problem for me was that tags seem like a great idea in theory, but are much more difficult to implement in practice. I discovered this in my first concerted attempt to use tags — back when I was writing my Going Paperless series for Evernote between 2012-2016. Evernote allows you to tag notes with an arbitrary number of user-generated tags. When I began using Evernote (around 2010) I did what I suspect many users did: I started tagging everything without a whole lot of thought about it.
Tags: In practice, a.k.a., by intuition
In practice, tagging has been tricky for me: a classic case of having enough rope to hang myself. It turns out that, for me, at least, tagging comes with the same problems as hierarchical organization: if you just start arbitrarily creating tags, you create a mess of confusion that it is difficult to escape from. Escape is difficult because the process is self-perpetuating, and once started, I find I’d rather go with the flow than to start over from scratch.
What is needed for tags is some kind of taxonomy: a set of rules to follow for when to apply tags, when to create a new tag, and how tags relate to the information they are organizing. Here, however, I come up against a limitation of personal knowledge and experience: I am not a researcher, nor do I have expertise in subjects like library sciences that might provide some kind of guidance in the development of a useful taxonomy for tagging. Ultimately, I am tagging by intuition, which is probably not the best approach.
So back in my Evernote days, I began to think about practical ways in which tagging fits into my note organization, and from that thinking.
1. Tags can span hierarchies
Hiearchical organization can be useful because its very structure provides a map for locating something. I discussed the practical utility (for me) back in Episode 18, when I talked about how I use folders to quickly locate Maps of Content notes. The main limitation to hierarchies from my vantage point is that a note falls into only one path.
Tags can span hierarchies. If you imagine folders and tags as two dimensions of a grid, then the organizational model of notes would look something like this, where folder hierarchies cross horizontally, and tags (in this case, notes tagged “#jamie”) slice vertically across all folders.
Tags, therefore, compliment hierarchies by allowing you to create categories of notes that span multiple hierachies. In a practical sense, this allows two quick ways of finding a note or collection of notes: by either following a path in a single hierarchy, or by tag for specific collection of notes that span multiple paths in a hierarchy.
2. Tags can be used to quickly identify an arbitrary collection of notes that have a practical everyday utility
I frequently have to find a note related to a specific person. Kelly might ask, “Do you have Grace’s 4th grade report card from the spring?” Or maybe I need my son’s “School Health Entrance Form” for a camp application. One practical arbritrary collection of notes, therefore, is to tag notes by person. I do this way many notes, and these notes often span multiple paths in my folder structure.
This kind of tagging allows me to quickly locate all notes tagged “jamie”, for instance no matter where they are located, and then quickly whittle those notes down to the specific note I am looking for by adding additional search criteria. In the above illustration, the tag #jamie serves as that arbitrary collection of notes.
Similarly, I use tags to identify document types: forms, statements, correspondence, receipts, confirmations, etc. Again, the documents themselves may be spread throughout a file structure, but if I am looking for all school-related forms for my daughter, Grace, then my search would begin with notes tagged “grace” and also tagged “form” — from that result set, I can quickly locate the specific forms in question, regardless of where they are in the file system.
3. Tags can be placeholders for future ideas and concepts
I’ve also found tags useful as placeholders for future ideas and concepts. I described one of these uses in Episode 20, where I illustrated how I tag task lines in my daily notes files with the “post-idea” tag for ideas that I want to write about here on the blog. I then use the dataview plug-in to collect all of the “incomplete” tasks with the tag “post-ideas” in a query that lists the open ideas in a single place.
There are also subjects that I have a broad interest in, and I’ve taken to using a tag/sub-tag model for captuing notes related to these interests. A few examples include:
theme/theory-of-notes
theme/theory-of-work
theme/value-of-reading
sports/baseball
This provides a quick way for me to collect notes together around a theme or concept that I am interested in.
Tagging problems I still struggle with
Despite these practical uses, I still feel like an amateur when it comes to tagging, and no doubt this is reflected in my tag structure in Obsidian today. Indeed, just looking at my list of tags in Obsidian makes me cringe a little. It still feels too arbitrary.
There is a time investment required to tag a note, but at the time I tag the note, it is not clear whether or not there is a clear return on that investment of time. Adding a bad tag is worse than adding no tag at all because time invested to add the tag is either wasted or, worse, does not help in locating the tagged document later on.
Another problem is that, intuitively, I feel that I should be using the fewest tags required to find what I am looking for. And yet tags, like rabbits, seem to proliferate faster than I can wrangle them in.
All of this points to a lack of taxonomy. A clearly defined taxonomy provides a scope for tagging, and more importantly, removes any abiguity from the tagging process. In other words, there is no confusion between two tags, no flitting about wondering, should I tag this note using tag A or tag B. It is always clear from the taxonomy how best to tag a note. But a taxonomy requires knowledge and experience that I don’t have, and this comes to the crux of the tagging problem that I struggle with today:
I don’t know enough about what I need to know to define a useful tagging taxonomy.
I have started to tackle this problem using sub-tags to try to identify those areas of interest I want to collect, but even this seems tenuous at best. It is an ongoing process, and the better handle I have on what goes into Obsidian, the better chance I have of coming up with a reasonably useful taxonomy in the long-run.
For now, my biggest take-aways when it comes to tagging are to ask myself the following questions when tagging notes:
Does this tag help to locate the note or collection of notes that it takes?
Is this tag clear enough that I will remember it in the future without much thought?
Is tagging this note absolutely necessary? Can I find this note easily without a tag?
Outside of some simple, practical use cases that I’ve outlined above, I’m still wary of tags, and yet, ironically, I use them more than I should. I’ve been doing this for more than a decade with only small hints toward a useful taxonomy. Finding the taxonomy that works for me will be the information-theory equivalent of the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
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