Notices by Nitin Pai (nitin@thinktanki.social), page 8

@ravisambamurthy @Daojoan Difference between intelligence and wisdom. You can have the pure knowledge of facts about the symbol, its meaning, its history, usage.
You can also have the wisdom to not use it in a global post, because you know what most people will immediately relate it to.

@sarahf Like the iPad route, cumbersome, fiddly and costs money.

I switch to 100% digital note taking in 2019…with #Obsidian and it has completely changed the way I take notes. But I miss doodling, scribbling and the nonsense that decorates my old paper notebooks.

The only disadvantage of digital note-taking is the inability to doodle casually. In my old notebooks, the doodle tells me a lot about my state of mind at the moment. The sketches are also interesting. Can’t do that easily on #Obsidian

(Yes, yes, I know it’s possible to sketch on iPad etc, but it’s not the same.)

#PKM #notetaking #Notebooks #Stationery

“My experience teaches me this…Men and nations do act wisely when they have exhausted all the other possibilities.”
- Abba Eban (1979)

@interfluidity RSS feed

@coffeegeek @coffee Yes. I second that. 16g:200ml is the optimum baseline ratio.

@larsfrommars @jordinn Right. The idea is to “try” to understand. No one quite gets there.

@cydonian Many happy returns.

“After exploring the boundaries of molecular biology, you (Venki Ramakrishnan) conclude that diet, exercise, and sleep are the best interventions we have right now for longevity. It’s a modest set of solutions, given all the options scientists are exploring.” https://www.wired.com/story/why-we-die-venki-ramakrishnan/

@alexjs @codeyarns Forget the joke. I love the way the first diagram explains the Fourier transform.

To act is a choice. To do nothing is a choice. Slow walking a response is a choice. The lesser of two evils: also a choice. Choosing something and then misrepresenting what you chose: two choices.

Life has always been full of choices. Some people want this to remain unacknowledged; the responsibility that comes with claiming agency is uncomfortable, and it's true also that YOUR agency, specifically, could pose a threat.

Our agency is very powerful. It builds worlds. You build worlds.

“we demonstrate that most of the genetic variation in Indians stems from a single major migration out of Africa that occurred around 50,000 years ago, with minimal contribution from earlier migration waves.” Kerdoncuff et al (2024)

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.02.15.580575v2

#genomics #history #India

Waiting for Philip Pullman’s third. #Literature #Fiction

China’s Great Firewall is a trade barrier.

If Beijing doesn’t permit foreign content & content companies, others are justified in returning favour.

#TikTokBan #InformationAge

Fully agree with @Mer__edith Governments must not buy into the AI FUD (Fear, Uncertainty & Doubt) that is deliberately played up to get attention, fuel speculation, raise valuations and choke off competition by inviting regulation.

@jon @codeyarns It happened on Usenet, mailing lists, IRC and blogs before social media. I think it’s mainly about the size of the connected community…of course, some platforms suffer the same malaise at higher intensity.

@jon @codeyarns Seriously, I think that’s a problem with any social network that grows beyond a “contextual community threshold.” When you can’t presume that its members share the same background, motives and norms.

Quinn argues that the habit of bundling those entities according to geographical principles – as Europe, Asia and Africa; or as West, East and South – is so simplistic as to lead to all sorts of false conclusions, some ideologically toxic (West is best), others just plain wrong.” https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/book-of-the-day/2024/02/the-myth-of-the-west (2/2)

Lucy Hughes-Hallett reviews Josephine Quinn: “One of the big ideas behind her book is that civilisation/culture (the terms are not exactly interchangeable) has evolved through a process of exchange and communication linking human communities over millennia and across vast tracts of land and sea. Civilisation is at once an amorphous but unified whole, and a conglomeration of thousands of separate cultures, in each of which shared elements are differently combined. (1/2)