Notes and Notes

It’s easy to push interesting ideas and articles into drafts all day long using the share sheet across my Apple products. It’s becoming habit. At the end of the day I end up with a page of collected notes. Just bullet points and links. A quote or two. The process is to sit down for a bit at the end of the day, cllean ’em up and publish the blog.

I’ve adopted some of the Zettelkasten principles in my note taking for specific projects. With back linking being all the rage in the new generation of note taking apps, I think the point is being missed. The power of the Zettelkasten is in the processing of notes and writing higher level summaries that link down to the individual items being considered. And when summarizing items, drawing the link to a similar idea directly. But this is linking with awareness, not creating a rat’s nest of linkage.

Brain

To understand how we decide, it’s necessary to understand how the brain creates feelings about options and the odds of different outcomes. It’s not a rational, algorithmic process, but one driven by imagination and emotion. That emotion is coded in deep parts of the brain known collectively as the limbic system, but areas distinct from those representing sensation, language and action of the cerebral cortex. Feeling, desire, need or more broadly positive or negative valence is evoked by those representations. Our brains get into poorly functioning states like depression, anger and anxiety that can flood all sensation and action, blinding us.

So it was nice to see the Washington Post illustrating the struggle of college students with mental health in the pandemic on their app with a brain.

When I saw mental health represented by a brain not a face or abstraction, it gave me hope the the idea of embodied cognition is catching on in popular conception, with acceptance that our thoughts and emotions are based in physical events in the brain. Mental health is brain health. Healthy mind in a healthy body.

Learn the art of the pleasant but firm rebuke. When, in casual conversation, I hear vaccine or public health misinformation being shared, as a physician I feel obligated to correct it. But its hard to relay to others that this is really important, the science and medicine matter, and that even though we have lots of uncertainty and lots to learn we need to work to separate the honest truth from the tales told to inspire fear.

Apple News

Apple announced its new MacBook Pro with higher powered Apple Silicon chips.

Things are kind of pathetic over at Intel even before the latest. My son’s gaming and streaming computer has an AMD Ryzen processor and NVIDIA graphics.

But I’m betting that the 14″ MBP with the M1 Max I ordered is as fast or faster than that huge hot box. And I finally have a laptop with a notch! Arriving in a week? Outstanding work, Apple.

I was hoping to replace my Mac Mini with a faster one, but no announcement. It will probably come later, but for now I’ll consolidate with a fully decked out laptop, something I’ve avoided in the last few years wit more mobile computing generally being done on iPad. Like this casual blogging I’m doing at the moment

Confusion reigns regarding Apple’s Apatial Audio. Apple isn’t helping. In fact, they seem to be fostering the confusion to move product. They confused everyone again in the announcement today.

Spatial Audio works with any headphones, not just the Apple iPod Pro and Max. Those apple products automatically switch it on with the default settings. When I’m using my fancy Sennheiser or Dan Clark headphones through an external DAC, I just need to manually switch it on in Settings. I actually have a shortcut on my iPhone to switch because sometimes my iPhone feeds a DAC connected to speakers. But on my iPad, it’s always turned on since I only ever use digital out for headphones, never speakers.

Om expresses my thoughts on the iPad Mini. Early on there were lots of small tablets that were best used hand held. My iPad Pro is an extremely flexible, portable device. The mini is more special purpose, great for reading and scribbling.

Rules for Casual Blogging

Rule 1: Streamline your workflow. Then refine it some more. Repeat until there is no friction and a thought is a post

Rule 2: Capture that thought like you’re bullet journaling. Don’t wait until you’ve written the well researched, fully argued discussion. This is a blog not an Atlantic article or your Bloomberg column. Those are written, edited and re-edited to drive clicks and ad revenue

Rule 3: Write for yourself. The audience may or may not show up. It’s for you, not for them. Forget search engines and SEO. There’s no magic algorithm that’s going to gain you readers. Only community and participation in the conversation.

Case in point is Dave Rogers putting off a post and breaking Rule 2.

So, a couple of ideas for long-ish posts. Probably going to take a few days to pull together. The risk is that they ultimately never come together

Dave Winer is also a cyclist. I agree with him that, for the cyclist on the public roads in America, car drivers suck. As Dave points out, sometimes they honk as they approach you. Sometimes they honk as they pass you. Sometimes they throw litter at you. Sometimes they sideswipe you. A good rule (I’m full of rules today, it seems) is to take over the lane clearly and unambiguously when it is not safe to pass and move over toward the right only when its safe and they have room to go by safely. It turns out that traveling by bike is very safe by most measures even though sharing the road with distracted drivers in multi ton vehicles can be stressful

Craig Mod tells a cycling tail.. One of the pleasures of blogging is having a way to publicly appreciate the work of hard working, talented artists. Craig is the real thing. Check out Craig’s site. Subscribe to his newsletters, buy his book, and if you like it, support his work.

In other news of Japan, my 2022 Hobonichi arrived from Jet Pens. More gratitude to Jet Pens for importing so much cool Japanese stationary and thanks to the fountain pen and notebook community for uncovering and publicizing these products. All enrich my life.

Plotter is launching its products in the US. This is a loose leaf style system from the folks at Midori who make the MD great notebooks and the Traveler’s Notebook system. I’ll pass for now, even though David Allen has said that the best GTD system is a loose leaf notebook. My best GTD system was the Palm Pilot and I mostly try to emulated using plain text editors on Mac and iOS.

One last great product is the Birkenstock Arizona EVA Sandals. I bought a pair this year after reading this Wirecutter rave. In the fall, I switch back to my Boston clogs, but I can see wearing the EVAs into the fall with socks.

Cycling

Dave Rogers and I are having a conversation about cycling.

I’ve been a cyclist all my life really, but in my mid 60’s am now in my most intense period every. I can’t be sure whether I’m faster now than ever before or more fit than ever before since age becomes such a huge factor at this point. In the last few years its become a much bigger focus. I was riding when I had my paper route for the Hudson Dispatch in Fort Lee, New Jersey. In high school I had a Sears 3 speed which I frequently rode over the George Washington Bridge into Manhattan to circle around the Cloisters. I picked up riding again in Medical School when I bought a classic Raleigh Gran Prix which I rode out to the now rather infamous Stone Mountain. During my years here in Baltimore, I’ve ridden on our local roads pretty consistently when family and work responsibilities allowed.

About 3 years ago, when my internist suggested I get a bit more regular cardiovascular exercise to supplement my weight training, I began this latest phase of seeing just how well I could perform on the bike. After starting out with some training plans from Zwift for use on a smart trainer, I ended up with a local coach, Mike Birner and a serious commitment to riding.

This morning, the schedule was for 3 hour ride. I rode with a small group from our local bike club on the flatter terrain west of where I live.

I mentioned having finished the Foundation Trilogy yesterday. For some reason, I’ve been re-reading a few of the classics. This year I read the Hobbit and the Lord of the RIngs trilogy and the original Dune trilogy. They all hold up very well. We don’t seem to read Heinlein anymore. I wonder how Larry Nivea’s Ringworld books would hold up. I was a big fan of Phillip Jose Farmer’s Riverworld books. Some streaming platform will probably try to adapt them at some point I suppose.

I don’t see making a series out of the Foundation books. There’s no villain and no conflict except history itself.

I’m hoping for a Mac Mini from Apple tomorrow that supports my two monitor setup. I really need a replacement for my current mini with a bigger internal hard drive, but the first Apple Silicon version was too limited in monitor support to use.

Last night I had some sad dreams. Old friends and mentors acting totally out of character. Lost items which disappear in greater numbers the harder you look until nothing is left. Interestingly, the few prospective studies of the emotional content of dreams have shown about equal positive and negative emotional valence, but this is biased by recall of dreams from just before awakening. The functions of dreams and sleep continue to be guessed at but seem central to preparing the brain for another round of activity in the waking state.

Dreams are passive creations of the imagination. Awake we have a drive to create things separate from ourselves. Blogs, bookcases and fancy cakes. Is this a way of creating a legacy? Something to outlast ourselves, independent from ourselves? In the end, becoming better versions of ourselves has to be our most important act and our greatest legacy.

I finally got around to watching Marvel’s Black Widow. Not bad but mostly just the usual parade of set pieces including car chase, fighting the invincible robotic bad guy. Felt transitional and not as emotionally deep as the studio’s best.

Also finished Azimov’s Foundation Trilogy this afternoon. Amazing how well it holds up as science fiction written in the 1940s. One reason is that it uses technology gimmicks sparingly, needing faster than light travel between worlds, but leaves vague communication methods and mostly deals in what people say and do. Not at all cinematic like most contemporary sci-fi but does have the modern technique of cutting back and forth between story threads, making it feel modern in that non-linear way. Now I can watch the Apple streaming series without it affecting my view of the original, although I understand the streaming series is very loosely based on the story.

It’s hard for me to place Foundation as written in its time period, although like The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, national power and the importance of the individual are themes central to the stories. Always about people, institutions and making choices.

I added back a link to Amazon for the book just as an affordance for you dear reader if you want a quick way to get it on Amazon or read on Kindle.

Blogging more means reading less. For the most part its just a time constraint. There’s work, physical activity, household needs like shopping and cooking. This morning getting some editing time in on the book manuscript was my priority.

I’ve found the most powerful productivity hack is simply routine and having just a few priorities. Then, I just trust that what needs to get done will get done.

I did read this early this morning in a newsletter:

In Novardok (Yeshiva), they repeated a million times: you are not responsible to ‘finish”. Reb Yisroel Salanter (b. 1809 – d. 1883) said: just “do”, don’t ‘complete”

I’ve found that if you release some of that urge to control and step back a bit, you get way more done with lower stress.

Or as Dave Winer says “Keep Digging”.

Capture Everywhere, Read Everywhere, Write Everywhere

Dave and I chatted on Twitter today. You do that and you drive views to your site. But we don’t want views, we want community and conversation.

I’ve been describing my Drafts to WordPress blogging flow for these daily notes.

Dave wants an app for mobile that would be similar but a flat outline that he can edit and deploy as needed.

I think we agree that Markdown is a fine way to structure plain text documents. In most text editors like BBEdit or Atom, Markdown is recognized as a code syntax and it’s easy to fold and move blocks marked off by Markdown headings. Of course FoldingText was designed to do this in a slightly different way. We eventually got TaskPaper which has been updated more recently but with its own todo oriented markup.

The only mobile app I have that does folding based on Markdown is Editorial but its not kept up with current sync methods like Cloudkit or iCloud folders.

That’s creating structure within a file. I see my nested folders as an outline with the bottom layer being individual files. And in general, I’m fine with one file at a time for reference or writing.

But with this resurgent environment of note taking and blogging, I’m hoping for some new solutions besides the big note taking back linking systems of Obsidian and Notion and Craft which seem so closed to me.

Outlines mostly live on in the form of mindmaps. From David Allen:

I f you’re concerned about your ‘work-life balance’ I’d encourage you to grab a pen and paper and draw a mind map or a list of your Areas of Focus, both personal and professional. Then you may see which parts of your world you have been too focussed on and which deserve more attention. Whenever I feel a sense of imbalance I ‘pop up’ to visit this horizon

Another category that died was the Reader like Pocket and Instapaper. I use Safari’s Reading List now or quick capture to drafts, but that’s bookmarking. What I’d like is an app to open on my iPad that would be like the Kindle app but give me webpages, PDFs, email newsletters and RSS feed articles all integrated. While the ways these reads get to me are different, in the end its all reading. You know we used to have books and we used to have magazines and we used to have newspapers. Now it a torrent from every direction leaking through every crack it can find in the information environment.

Time to read a book now.

Today’s notes edited in Drafts and copied as Markdown into the WordPress app on an iPad. Pretty easy workflow and I end up with the Markdown file right here. Will probably start an archive in DEVONthink just to have a searchable repository with good backup.

Immigration; Where I Get My News

All four of my grandparents came to the US from the economic bleakness of the Pale of Settlement. of the Russian Empire around the turn of the century. She refused to ever talk about where she came from and life before coming to America. But as the grandson of 4 immigrants with an MD, PhD, now pretty well off over 100 years after they arrived, I feel like I have a personal stake in discussions of immigration. My parents and I took full advantage of the opportunity here and I cannot fully express my gratitude to the idea and the reality that is the United States. So it was interesting for me to read a bit about the history of open borders in the US and our current state of affairs. This book review of Open Borders by Bryan Caplan outlines the books arguments to return to the open borders the US had prior to 1920, when all of my grandparents were immigrants at Ellis Island. My ancestors, like those of most other Americans, were brave souls who left behind everything they knew for opportunity for themselves, and, as it turns out, this particular Neurologist.

What goes around, comes around. I can’t stomach the point of view journalism of CNN, MSNBC or Fox. So, as in days of old, NPR is my news source once again. It tends to have depth, but seems to successfully avoid both one side-ism and both side-ism. I believe its because they are not chasing ratings or clicks. Thank you for the public service.

Fitness and Quality of Life

Apple Fitness+ is so compelling, I finally got my wife to at try my previous Apple Watch and see how she likes the service. I continue to find it a game changer for me and personal fitness off the bike.

I think I got Dave Rogers to try it out.

But I do need to add some strength training/core work. I’m reluctant to use the extensive fitness facilities here because of COVID, so Apple Fitness may be something that’ll motivate me

On the bike, the Garmin Variaâ„¢ RTL515 | Bike Radar and Tail Light is a game changer. It’s a radar unit that alerts me to cars approaching from the rear. No more sudden side swipes and comfort in confirmation that the road is clear behind when I need to make a left turn. These technologies made possible by microprocessors are so ubiquitous and so common that I think we’re blind to their magical nature. After every ride, I pause and appreciate how quickly we turn knowledge into valuable technology. And that I have survived another ride on the roads of Baltimore County.

I believe the data is pretty good that we have just a few ways to delay the inevitable decline of growing older. One of these is regular exercise. Enough to cause physiological stress and adaptation from wherever you are now. Similarly, intellectual engagement that stresses capacity promotes adaptation and prevents loss of cognitive ability. Similar to what exercise does for heart, lung, muscle and metabolism. Stress is good when its a stimulus and recovery is promoted by rest- physical and mental. That includes laughing, listening to music, being with friends and family, and realizing that while the effort is in your control, the result is not.

I did place 7 of 13 for my age group (55-64 year old Men) in the Grand Fondo National Series by riding 4 events this year.

My deepest appreciation goes to Dave Rogers and Dave Winer for getting me back to blogging in recent days. Dave Rogers for starting up conversations again which is where our blogging association started from the beginning and Dave Winer for creating a tool in Drummer that promotes casual blogging.

# Drafts, Not Drummer for Now

For now, I won’t be using Drummer since I’ve put together a quick workflow using my own tools without disrupting my ongoing site here. I was there when Dave unleashed the power of editing the internet with his EditThisPage community. I’ve been writing on the web at On Deciding . . . Better ever since, but all of that original content was wiped from the web when Dave shut the service down. I did get a download, but never figured out how to easily get it all back up as an archive.

After that, I wanted to more directly control my content, but learned that these sites are by nature impermanent. I moved from self hosting to now using a great hosted WordPress system.

Opening the WordPress app is really not that different from EditThisPage. There’s a title spot and a blank page to write on. Images, links and emphasis are all easier now and Markdown spares me from HTML pretty much completely.

So I have a nice little system cobbled together this week of capture to Drafts during the day out of all manner of reading and jotting notes. My paper notebooks are still there for capture, but I find myself typing a quick idea into Drafts on my phone because its purposeful. It’s for publishing. I subscribed to Drafts just to be able to append Draft Quick Captures to my daily running note. Edit the note to make it presentable, copy it to the WordPress app, press publish and I’m done. I’ve generally had extra content these few days, so they get rolled over to tomorrow’s Draft.

Public Journaling Promotes Mindfulness

Ironically, I was trying to inspire myself when I wrote Why You Need to Publish Your Notebook – On Deciding . . . Better 3.0. Yet I didn’t take the time to translate my notebooks into public writing. I believe that journaling is good, but public journaling is better.

Public journaling is fun if its as casual as my private bullet journal or my morning notes in the Hobonichi. Even if it’s an internal conversation, riffing on subjects and writing down the ideas makes them more alive and the thoughts more complete. Knowing I want to share things publicly makes me more mindful of what I’m reading, thinking about whether its really interesting or just some text designed to decorate the ads generated by the click.

Promoting Community; The Return of RSS?

Since I know my audience here is small, I can talk to myself more or less without trying to be performative. That is to say, posting on Twitter, Instagram or Flickr always had this motivation contaminated with seeking likes or clicks or favorites or what have you. I really have no personal reason to become internet famous, so I can write for my pleasure and yours, my dear reader.

Blogging itself on website like this got contaminated with SEO, the seeking of hits from Google. I have one post on this site, How BIll Gates Takes Notes – On Deciding . . . Better 3.0 that was picked up by Mark Bernstein, creator of Tinderbox, and eventually found its way to some pages with pretty high readership. The post is both an explanation of the Cornell system and a discussion of the value of note taking in meetings as a means to become an active listener. So every day it gets 4 or 5 reads, but those reads never translate into regular readership here as far as I can tell. That post has great search engine placement but doesn’t make me any friends.

Back to the to the two Daves then, Rogers and WIner. As old school bloggers they seek community and conversation. Before Twitter and search algorithms took over, we had bookmarks and RSS feeds to keep track of activity in our communities. WordPress supports RSS feeds without any effort; it was the shutdown of Google Reader that signaled to many that the RSS era was at an end. There’s word that Google may be bringing RSS directly into Chrome Google, but that’s the mass market. I’m really more interested in whether efforts like Drummer might be able to kindle some communities outside of Twitter and its like for conversation and sharing of ideas. And simple blogging tools and workflows are a necessary component of that potential future.