#commonplace-book — Public Fediverse posts

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@0x00string/116533684752244458

My commonplace book is the Tao Te Joan #TTJ. Even if I get hauled off to the camps, it should be available for my children to access from any computer able to access the internet.

https://universeodon.com/@SrRochardBunson/tagged/ttj

#CommonplaceBook #WasteBook #quotes

“We often speak as though we are here to toil, endlessly planting and cultivating seeds and seedlings. But we have also feasted on harvests from what was sown and tended by those who came before.”

Rebecca Solnit // The Beginning Comes After the End

#CommonplaceBook #RebeccaSolnit #Quotes

@sylvia Oh nice! :D I want to post more quotes and snippets too, I made my inaugural #CommonplaceBook tag on my blog last night with that one post. I'm planning to add to it over time.

The watercolor paper is such a good idea! My youngest kiddo and me were comparing notebooks this morning, and they've been using an old watercolor paper notebook as a journal and collage space, and it's just LOVELY!

“The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled”*…

(Roughly) Daily is, in effect, a kind of notebook, a commonplace book. So it will be no surprise that your correspondent found today’s featured piece fascinating.

Jillian Hess, a professor who studies the history of note-taking, shares the lessons she took from her review of the papers of the remarkable Richard Feynman…

Formal education, at its best, prepares us for a life of learning. After all, we are only in school for a fraction of our lives and there is so much to learn!

Richard Feynman (1918-1988) understood the value of self-education. He was a Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist, a member of the Manhattan Project at the age of 25, and a dynamic public intellectual who never stopped learning.

Often touted as one of history’s greatest learners, Feynman taught himself a dizzying amount of science. I wanted to see his notes for myself—to observe the great autodidact thinking on the page. So, I visited his archives at Caltech in February…

… In the archives, I saw… for myself: Feynman’s notebooks contain imprints of thinking in real-time—the work as it happened. They were instruments for thinking through uncertainty.

What follows is a list of note-taking principles for self-education that I gathered while studying Feynman’s notebooks.

Start with First Principles: Feynman’s “Things I Don’t Know About” Notebook

Discussions about Feynman’s learning process usually draw from this notebook, which he compiled as a Ph.D. student at Princeton. The contents include mechanics, mathematical methods, and thermodynamics. Clearly, he knew something about these topics, but he found his understanding superficial. So, his response was to take the subject apart—to break it down into “the essential kernels” …

[Hess illustrates this principle, then unpacks two others: “create a reading index” and “keep learning.” She continues…]

… Uncertainty is Interesting

This is my biggest takeaway: We should fear certainty more than doubt. Learning to live with uncertainty is an essential aspect of learning, as Feynman said in 1981:

You see, one thing is, I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.

And then, in an echo of his “Notebook of Things I Know Nothing About,” compiled four decades prior, he adds:

…I’m not absolutely sure of anything, and there are many things I don’t know anything about.

If a man as celebrated for his genius as Feynman felt that way, certainly the rest of us have a lot more to learn…

[And she concludes…]

… Notes on Feynman’s Notes:

Use notes to think: Feynman didn’t think through problems in his head and then turn to his notebooks. Instead, he used his notebooks to think through problems. His thought process required paper.

Start with first principles: “Why” is a very powerful question. And asking why can lead us back to the fundamentals and help us understand them in an entirely new light. This applies to any subject. Feynman has helped me think of note-taking as a kind of expedition. Use your notes to dig deeper into topics you think you already understand.

Never stop learning: How wonderful would it be if we could hold onto the excitement of learning we had as children? After all, the world didn’t get less interesting. It’s worth returning to the note-taking methods you used in school to see if they are still useful in adulthood. I particularly like Feynman’s high school method of taking 30 minutes to understand a subject before he allowed himself to take notes on it.

[Then leaves us with the man himself, “in all his radiant, enthusiastic, brilliance”…]

https://youtu.be/P1ww1IXRfTA?si=_xqkalFg3cpe-NDR

On “Richard Feynman’s Notes For Self-Education.”

Pair with: “Curiosity Is No Solo Act“: “it gains its real power when embedded in webs of relationship and shared meaning-making”… something that Feynman’s life also demonstrated (as you can see in his autobiography and/or in James Gleick‘s biography, Genius)

* Plutarch

###

As we light that fire, we might spare a thought for Jeremy Bernstein; he died on this date last year. A physicist who woked on nuclear propulsion for Project Orion and held research and teaching positions at Stevens Institute of Technology, the Institute for Advanced Study, Brookhaven National Laboratory, CERN, Oxford University, University of Islamabad, and École Polytechnique, he is better remembered as a gifted popular science writer and profiler of scientists.

Bernstein wrote 30 books, and scores of magazine articles for “general readers”– for The New Yorker, where he was a staff writer from 1961 to 1995, and for The Atlantic Monthly, the New York Review of Books, and Scientific American, among others.

Of Feynman, Bernstein wrote “[his] Mozartean genius in physics seemed to be combined with an almost equally Mozartean urge to play the clown.” (in which, of course, Feynman was in the good company of Einstein, Claude Shannon, and others :-)

source

Filing Index Cards with a C-Line Document Sorter

https://boffosocko.com/2025/12/27/filing-index-cards-with-a-c-line-document-sorter/

#CommonplaceBook notes - not entirely about AI, and there's some novelty in the AI bits too. Thanks to all those who wrote things and linked to things recently! https://lbj20.blogspot.com/2025/10/commonplace-book-not-entirely-ai.html Share and Enjoy.

Laggy #CommonplaceBook notes: https://lbj20.blogspot.com/2025/08/commonplace-book-climate-slop-defence.html on climate, slop, defence, and more

Might be interesting to #pkm folks, even if only as a historical curiosity

https://mastodon.social/@publicdomainrev/114768374551398909

#commonplacebook #commonplacing

“If you keep hundreds of ideas at your fingertips that you’ve collected over decades… you get an unbelievable amount of inspiration from just randomly looking at 25 of those ideas every now and again and thinking to yourself, is there a way they work together in a new and interesting way?”

- Adam Alter

https://news.uchicago.edu/feeling-stuck-heres-how-achieve-breakthrough-adam-alter

#PKM #zettelkasten #CommonplaceBook #KnowledgeManagement #innovation #EverythingIsARemix

One for the commonplace book, kiddos.

#wisdom #commonplacebook https://social.seattle.wa.us/@mako/114313794566257914

🔴 :youtube: **Stop Doomscrolling with This Commonplace Book Method**

#Video length: twenty-two minutes and twenty-three seconds.

🔗 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfvZBh2pxS4

#DoomScrolling #Online #SocialMedia #Internet #CommonplaceBook #Notes

#TIL 今天又学到一招怎么给纸质笔记本加标签，号称 Japanese notebook hack，非常简单，只需在笔记本里定一页做为标签的索引页，以后记笔记时按照标签在索引的行数给笔记页边缘对应的位置染上颜色，本子合上后可以看见各种标签（“类别”）怎么自然生长。我要马上用到我的 BuJo 里去，这个妙招还可以帮我提炼常用的大类而不是给每条信息瞎加一堆标签。

[image via HighFive Blog]

#notetaking #BuJo #CommonplaceBook

The most mind blowing fact I've learned so far in Roland Allen's *The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper* is that the term "commonplace" actually derives from the commonplace book (or better termed "common place book", since it was originally intended to be an organized and indexed list of material).

Apparently it became common to write or speak specifically to encourage people to put excerpts in their books, such that those sorts of passages became "commonplace". Basically early microblogging.

#TheNotebook #notebook #commonplacebook

In the gym I've been watching videos on common place books. It tickles an itch I get this time of year for notebooks and writing and organization. Also a little nostalgia for Lemon Snicket.

It also has me considering using paper for immediate thoughts or collecting and Obsidian for a long term collection and second draft type space. I haven't tried merging paper and tech beyond calendars but I think this could work well for all my writing itches.

#CommonPlaceBook #LemonySnicket #Obsidian

I got a cool sticker by Sue Coccia for my commonplace book. I even like how it looks with the strap closed. 😁
#raccoons #CommonPlaceBook #notebooks #stickers

Does anyone around these parts keep a Commonplace Book? I've actually just learned that it's a [revived?] modern practice and got hooked in by YouTubers...which is pretty common for me tbh.
#writing #journaling #CommonplaceBook

In today's #Blaugust2024 post, I talk about how I keep a #CommonplaceBook both digitally and by hand.

#Blog #Journal

https://aywren.com/2024/08/09/keeping-a-commonplace-book-online-and-offline

“Gaze not into the abyss, lest you become recognized as an abyss domain expert, and they expect you keep gazing into the damn thing.”

—Nick Mathewson

https://twitter.com/nickm_tor/status/860234274842324993

#CommonplaceBook

#CommonplaceBook notes, including the internet grey goo and whether things are permanent online, and the wide-ranging great work of Ross Anderson

https://lbj20.blogspot.com/2024/04/notes-grey-goo-permanence-or-otherwise.html

@LinuxAndYarn @SmudgeTheInsultCat

FWIW, this is the use case and value of #PKM and a motivation to build a #SecondBrain or #commonplacebook in the style of #zettelkasten.

#KnowThyself