progress
You can get anywhere from anywhere
You need to make the step forward
To do something well you have to like it
If you can't beat the classics
The Evolution of Useful Things
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge
The illustrated guide to a Ph.D.
Stepping stones in possibility space
An Article by Gordon BranderIf we try to cross this lake by following only the stepping stones that lead toward our objective, we’ll soon get stuck. But what if we let go of our objectives? What if we focused on trying to find new stepping stones instead? This is novelty search. Instead of looking for something specific, you look for something new.
Novelty search isn’t just random, it’s chance plus memory. Together, these ingredients do something interesting.
...Stepping stones are also combinatorial. Each new stepping stone we discover expands our potential to find even more stepping stones. Collecting stepping stones is a luck maximization algorithm. By collecting and combining stepping stones, we might arrive at our destination by accident, or somewhere more interesting!
Stepping out of the firehose
An Article by Benedict EvansIn 1800, if you’d said that you wanted something ‘made by hand’, that would be meaningless - everything was handmade. But half a century later, it could be a reaction against the age of the machine - of steam and coal-smoke and ‘dark satanic mills.’ The Arts and Crafts movement proposed slow, hand-made, imperfect craft in reaction to mass-produced ‘perfection’ (and a lot of other things besides). A century later this is one reason I’m fascinated by the new luxury goods platforms LVMH and Kering, or indeed Supreme. How do you mass-manufacture, mass-market and mass-retail things whose entire nature is supposedly that they’re individual?
...we keep building tools, but also we let go. That’s part of the progression - Arts and Crafts was a reaction against what became the machine age, but Bauhaus and futurism embraced it. If the ‘metaverse’ means anything, it reflects that we have all grown up with this now, and we’re looking at ways to absorb it, internalise it and reflect it in our lives and in popular culture - to take ownership of it. When software eats the world, it’s not software anymore.
How do you know when your paintings are finished?
A Quote by Gerhard RichterWhen nothing disturbs me and I have no idea what to do more, what I could add or destroy. This is very surprising, often, when I’m painting, again and again, every day and it feels like it is never-ending […] and it will never become a good painting. And suddenly, it’s finished. Oh! Good. Thanks.
One Tenth of a Second
An Article by Venkatesh RaoThe details are fascinating, but the central argument — that the birth of modernity can be traced to a meta-crisis spawned by the 0.1s problem — is worth understanding and appreciating whether or not you’re a time nerd like me.
There is no convenient leitmotif, comparable to the 0.1s problem, for our contemporary version of the rhyming conditions, but something very similar to the “tenth of a second crisis” is going on today. I suspect our Great Weirding too involves some sort of limiting factor on human cognition that we haven’t yet properly wrapped our minds around. It isn’t reaction time, but something analogous.
Become a person who actually does things
An Article by Neel NandaIf there’s one thing you take from this post, let it be this: notice the next time you agonize over a choice, or pass up an opportunity. And ask yourself not “what is the right decision” but rather “which decision will get me closer to the kind of person I want to be”.
Four stages of competence
An IdeaIn psychology, the four stages of competence, or the "conscious competence" learning model, relates to the psychological states involved in the process of progressing from incompetence to competence in a skill.
- Unconscious incompetence
- Conscious incompetence
- Conscious competence
- Unconscious competence
Life-friendly design
An Article by Ralph AmmerI suggest that our industrial heritage has been an important preliminary stage. The next step is to carefully examine and implement design values that nurture our joy of life. Just like our “industrial design” illustrated our industrial values, a life-friendly design could express our biophilic values.
This optimistic design approach differs from naive nostalgia or fear of extinction. There is no way back to nature but only forward to nature.
Letters to the Future
The lapse of many years
At this point I wish to emphasize what I believe will ultimately prove to be the greatest purpose of our museum. This value will not, however, be realized until the lapse of many years, possibly a century, assuming that our material is safely preserved. And this is that the student of the future will have access to the original record of faunal conditions in California and the west, wherever we now work. He will know the proportional constituency of our faunae by species, the relative numbers of each species and the extent of the ranges of species as they exist today.
— Joseph Grinnell, 1910
The Grinnell System
The recording of field notes was common practice for biological surveyors and naturalists generations before Grinnell. His system continues this tradition but is distinguished by its distinctive standardized format. It consists of three sections:
- The journal contains a narrative account describing the study site and summarizing each day’s activities and observations, including a list of species encountered. This section is often peppered with sketches, photographs, or maps.
- The catalog is a sequential record of all voucher specimens collected, each with a unique field number and the information needed for the specimen’s museum tag, such as its sex, mass, breeding status, and standard body measurements.
- Species accounts are species-specific summaries of information and observations, gradually accumulated over multiple days at a site or across multiple sites, that eventually grow to detailed summaries of physical description, seasonal behaviors, microhabitat associations, and other characteristics.
Separating the notebook in this fashion allows each section to have its own context-specific structure and format.
Jim's system
From the earliest days of my fieldwork until now, throughout a given day I jotted notes, typically in pencil, into a small, spiral-bound pocket notebook, remembering the admonition not to trust one’s memory but to record observations as continually as possible. I then transcribes these notes into my handwritten journal in the evenings on the best of days or every few days when an intense field effort allowed.
From 2000 onward, I would still takes pencil notes in a small pocket notebook in the field, but I transcribes these into a word-processor document with margins set for the size of our field note pages. I combined this document with my field catalog for a particular trip and eventually both would be bound in the same manner as standard, handwritten field notes.
This approach had the advantage of producing both an archival paper copy as well as an electronic copy. It was also easy to intersperse specialized maps and digital photographs, which had become the norm by this time, throughout the journal text.
John's system
I have two field notebooks: a “raw" notebook and my formal Grinnellian notebook.
In the field, I take all my raw notes in a waterproof notebook using a fine-point permanent pen (or pencil when its raining). The entries have virtually no structure other than the date at the top of (almost) every page.
At the end of the day, I transcribe the notes into my Grinnellian journal as if I were writing a latter to a colleague.
Record them all
You can’t tell often in advance which observations will prove valuable. Do record them all!
— Joseph Grinnell, 1908
Recommendations for field notes
Being an end-user of someone else’s field notes certainly gives you insight into the benefits of good note-taking skills. Our experiences as end-users and creators of archival field notes lead us to a few specific recommendations:
(1) Don’t get bogged down in the details of format or style.
Rules are counterproductive if they prevent a researcher from taking field notes in the first place.
You will get more return by focusing on your content than by refining your formatting.
(2) Compose your notes as if you were writing a letter to someone a century in the future.
Writing for an external audience requires you to be more explicit in your descriptions and to take less knowledge for granted. Avoid the use of abbreviations, symbols, and other shortcuts that only you will understand.
Ask yourself: How would you describe this to someone over the phone?
(3) It is better to spend five minutes writing the important details than twenty minutes writing the trivial ones.
Field notes
Field notes example.
Camp's notes
Grinnell-era field notes example, Charles L. Camp.