The Helsinki Bus Station Theory An Article by Arno Rafael Minkkinen www.fotocommunity.com Stay on the bus. Stay on the f*cking bus. Why? Because if you do, in time you will begin to see a difference. The buses that move out of Helsinki stay on the same line but only for a while, maybe a kilometer or two. Then they begin to separate, each number heading off to its own unique destination. Bus 33 suddenly goes north, bus 19 southwest. ...It’s the separation that makes all the difference, and once you start to see that difference in your work from the work you so admire (that’s why you chose that platform after all), it’s time to look for your breakthrough. Suddenly your work starts to get noticed. Now you are working more on your own, making more of the difference between your work and what influenced it. Your vision takes off. creativitypracticephotographyexperience
A Reflection of the Truth An Essay from Field Notes on Science and Nature by Roger Kitching The need to recordMental infrastructureScientific writingA three-layered process of documentationIncidental details+1 More
The need to record With collecting comes the need to record. A specimen without a label is simply a (sometimes) pretty object. Without its associated data it is scientifically worthless. informationorganization
Mental infrastructure The diary provides the mental infrastructure that stimulates the mind to remember. To serve as a reminder memory
Scientific writing What Mick Southern taught me was both the imperative to and the means of writing scientific prose—“if it’s not published it’s not done,” as a later adviser put it. Mock showed me that the rather dry technical requirements of scientific writing did not necessarily mean that elegance, humor, and even wit need be excluded from the scientists’ products. Selling new ideasYou cannot consume what is not produced sciencewriting
A three-layered process of documentation A three-layered process of documentation: (1) First, there is the field notebook. This is where the actual numbers are recorded, together with passing observations relevant to the interpretation of these numbers. Paper is still proving more durable than electronic data. (2) The journal is a parallel record to that of the notebook—a daily account of events, thoughts, and observations. (3) Last of the three strata, then, are the publications. Traditionally, in science, these are articles in academic journals leavened with chapters in books. To be successful, a young scientist need aspire to no more than these two forms of output together with their oral versions at interminable conferences and meetings of learned societies. There came a time in my scientific development, however, when other forms of publication became important: magazines articles, and writing books. notetakingrecords
Incidental details In these journals lay the incidental details by which a book can be differentiated from a set of scientific articles. Such incidental details can become ends in themselves. details
Memory prompts Journals are memory prompts and perhaps capture exquisite (and not so exquisite) moments of experience. notetakingmemoryexperience