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.
A key transitional work for Wheeler is his untitled "light canvas" from 1965. The canvas was primed white, then over-sprayed..., but with no emblems or polished elements. The contrast in the light canvas is provided not by any imagery within the painting but by back-lighting; the canvas is backlit with neon light, which is embedded in a reverse bevel Plexiglass frame that projects the piece about five inches from the wall. The effect suggests an eclipse, or some other spectral occlusion of a bright light source.
On an autumn night in 2009, I experienced a version of this piece installed in a stone barn in rural France. The evening was moonless and cold; I stood with two friends inside the piece for the better part of an hour, as our eyes adjusted to almost total darkness, before any of us could begin to see one another. It was the definition of a liminal, or barely perceptible, experience. Eric Orr, who died in 1998, was involved with Zen Buddhism and considered these pieces to be spaces for meditation. Experiencing them as intended requires the visitor to focus quietly on the mechanics of their own perception.
As a student at Chouinard, Larry Bell also started as a painter. His early canvases features simple shapes rendered in gestural strokes...From there he started eliminating the texture of the strokes, applying opaque color (thin Liquitex paint) to unprimed canvas, masking off shapes to create straight-edged parallelograms. An example of these works is Little Blank Riding Hood, whose top left and bottom right corners are clipped, suggesting an isometric projection of a three-dimensional form.
The entire box is suspended from the ceiling by only four evenly spaced monofilaments, so that it seems to float with no physical connection to the wall or to a power source. Behind the wall (which must be purpose-built and is quite thin) is a cabinet containing four Tesla coils. The coils emit a high-frequency energy that passes through the wall and lights the tubes. The energy pulses a bit, making the tubes flicker at times both vertically and horizontally. The Tesla coils make a crackling static sound that is mostly muffled by the barrier wall, while the neon tubes emit a low hum that is audible close to the work. The work is elegant and slightly menacing, evoking something of a mad scientist's experiment.
One of the most extraordinary examples of McCracken's illusory surfaces occurs with Five Paintings IV, 1974. This wall-mounted work has a black polyester resin finish. From some angles the surface is opaque, from others highly reflective, and from still others it seems to reveal great depth. A happy accident in the creation of the work sealed many tiny air bubbles or particulates in the piece. When these catch the light, they suggest a galaxy of stars on a moonless night.