Building a knowledge base An Article by Will Darwin www.willdarwin.com What is a commonplace?Curiosity spurred onInformation remixHow to be a genius commonplaceknowledge
Blogging with Version Control An Article by Will Darwin willdarwin.com I’ve been musing for a while now on the way blog posts are typically presented—in reverse chronological order. This format has never truly made sense and does not reflect the way good writing and thinking happens. ...The main issue with the ‘pile’ system is that this post is eventually buried beneath more recent pieces of writing; there is no incentive for revisiting or updating the work. Even worse, if an author does decide to unearth the piece and make some major changes, those who read the original piece are not made aware of these alterations. The sorting order is static. bloggingwritinginformation
How to Think About Notes An Article by Will Darwin www.willdarwin.com Thinking in terms of outputs Maggie Appleton's Digital Garden notetakingwritinginformation
Ideas behind their time An Article by Tim Harford www.ft.com These days I am more interested in the reverse case [of Da Vinci's helicopter]: ideas that could have worked many centuries before they actually appeared. The economist Alex Tabarrok calls these “ideas behind their time” Curious minds want to know why these ideas appeared so late — and whether there might be anything that would prevent delays in future. One explanation is that the ideas aren’t as simple as they appear. The bicycle is not as straightforward an invention as it seems. To move from ox-hauled cart to human-powered bicycle requires smooth-rolling wheel bearings, which in turn need precisely engineered bearing balls. Modern steel ball bearings were not patented until the late 1700s, and demand from the 19th-century bicycle industry helped to improve their design. Materials and how to employ them inventionideas