barnsworthburning.net
- What this site is
- Colophon
- Contact me
- Shortlist of interesting spaces
- Behind the scenes
Your Brain, Your Notes: A clean and powerful notes app for Mac & Windows.
Directories aren’t surging. There isn’t this nascent directory movement fomenting - ready to take on the world. Directories aren’t trending.
But there is a certainly really sweet little directory community now. From the Marijn-inspired stuff listed in Directory Uprising to the link-sharing ‘yesterweb’ collected around sadgrl.online - or the originals at Indieseek and i.webthings.
Barnsworthburning (by Nick Trombley) is a very formidable addition to this community - a clean, multilayered design and an innovative bidirectional index.
One of the best (and easiest) ways to start making sense of a document is to highlight its “important” words, or the words that appear within that document more often than chance would predict. That’s the idea behind Amazon.com’s “Statistically Improbable Phrases”:
Amazon.com’s Statistically Improbable Phrases, or “SIPs”, are the most distinctive phrases in the text of books in the Search Inside!™ program. To identify SIPs, our computers scan the text of all books in the Search Inside! program. If they find a phrase that occurs a large number of times in a particular book relative to all Search Inside! books, that phrase is a SIP in that book.
Highlighter is a personal knowledge bank and collaborative learning network designed to feed your curiosity and help you examine new ideas.
Build ideas mindfully.
Save content, create collections, and connect ideas with other people.
An open collection of notes, resources, sketches, and explorations I'm currently cultivating. Some notes are Seedlings, some are budding, and some are fully grown Evergreen.
Technology is seeing a little return to complexity. Dreamweaver gave way to hand-coding websites, which is now leading into Webflow, which is a lot like Dreamweaver. Evernote give way to minimal Markdown notes, which are now becoming Notion, Coda, or Craft. Visual Studio was “disrupted” by Sublime Text and TextMate, which are now getting replaced by Visual Studio Code. JIRA was replaced by GitHub issues, which is getting outmoded by Linear. The pendulum swings back and forth, which isn’t a bad thing
A meta note, inspired both by Proust and by this book about Proust: after reading a book, when you're making notes, don't refer to the book; just write down the most interesting things that come to mind. This is a better way of digging out what actually struck you about the book; as soon as you have the book to reference, you will start looking up the bits you "should" write about, and end up aiming at comprehensiveness rather than interestingness. Your actual criterion should be whatever interested you. Later, you can fill in quotations & references.
The visual workspace for notes. Humans have incredible visual-spatial memory. Leverage that with Nototo.
- Pause at the end of each chapter and try to recall it (Recall)
- Highlight relevant passages for later comparative reading
- Analyze the book once I’m finished
- Explain it to unfamiliar audiences (The Feynman technique)
- Review topics I care about at regular intervals (Space repetition)
A note-taking tool for networked thought.
A zettelkasten consists of many individual notes with ideas and other short pieces of information that are taken down as they occur or are acquired. The notes are numbered hierarchically, so that new notes may be inserted at the appropriate place, and contain metadata to allow the note-taker to associate notes with each other. For example, notes may contain tags that describe key aspects of the note, and they may reference other notes. The numbering, metadata, format and structure of the notes is subject to variation depending on the specific method employed.
Evergreen notes are written and organized to evolve, contribute, and accumulate over time, across projects. This is an unusual way to think about writing notes: Most people take only transient notes.
- Evergreen notes should be atomic
- Evergreen notes should be concept-oriented
- Evergreen notes should be densely linked
- Prefer associative ontologies to hierarchical taxonomies
The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have known since long.
Intelligent note-taking. Non-linear file management. Ideas and relationships visualized.
In order that the mind may not be taxed, moreover, by the manifold and confused reading of so many such things, and in order to prevent the escape of something valuable that we have read, heard, or discovered through the process of thinking itself, it will be found very useful to entrust to notebooks...those things which seem noteworthy and striking.
Before attaining enlightenment,
mountains are mountains, rivers are rivers.At the moment of enlightenment,
mountains are no longer mountains,
nor are rivers rivers.After attaining enlightenment,
mountains are mountains, rivers are rivers.
Penetrating the Blue Cliff, you will open
the eye within eyes
and realizing life through the Blue Cliff,
you yourself will become a torch,
the light beyond light.Being so, you will find no door at which to knock, nor any door to be opened.
A Ch'an master once wrote that the wise enshrine the miraculous bones of the ancients within themselves; that is, they do not regard teachings of ways to enlightenment as an external body of knowledge or information to be possessed as an acquisition or believed or revered as inflexible dogma, but rather apply it as far as possible to themselves and their situations, vivifying the way of enlightenment with their own bodies and lives, not just in their thoughts. It is therefore a matter of course that new Buddhist literature has been produced; for the Buddhist canon is not closed, as long as people continue the search for enlightenment.
Ch'an was referred to by its followers as the "school of the patriarchs" because it was transmitted by a living succession of human exemplars; not a school of doctrine, or philosophical or scholastic interpretation, it was not based on any particular scripture, but on the direct experience of the enlightened mind, by whatever means currently necessary.
Ch'an masters tell us to look right where we stand and step: they ask what is there, is there anything, who are you and where do you come from, what did you see and hear when you were there?—in a hundred ways they try to make us wake up, clear our minds, and face reality directly.
Bodhidharma, the first Patriarch of Ch'an in China, was asked by Hui K'e, the future Second Patriarch, so pacify his mind for him; Bodhidharma said, "Bring me your mind and I will pacify it for you." Hui K'e said, "When I search for my mind, I cannot find it." Bodhidharma said, "I have pacified your mind for you." At this Hui K'e was enlightened.
The ultimate path is without difficulty;
Speech is to the point, words are to the point.
In one there are many kinds;
In two there is no duality.
As soon as Te Shan crossed the threshold he said, "Long have I heard of Lung T'an (Dragon Pond), but now that I've arrived here, there's no pond to see and no dragon appears." Master Lung T'an came out from behind a screen and said, "You have really arrived at Lung T'an." Te Shan bowed and withdrew.
During the night, Te Shan entered Lung T'an's room and stood in attendance till late at night. Lung T'an said, "Why don't you go?" Te Shan bade farewell, lifted up the curtain, and went out; he saw that it was dark outside, so he turned around and said, "It's dark outside." Lung T'an lit a paper lantern and handed it to Te Shan; as soon as Te Shan took it, Lung T'an blew it out. Te Shan was vastly and greatly enlightened.