Welcome to Jeff's Second Brain

What Is This?

Second Brain

My “first brain” gets tired if it thinks about one thing for more than ~5 minutes, which means that the attention required to complete a full blog post is rare. Hence, this is:

• Partially a shameless ripoff of Cosma Shalizi’s notebooks, and
• Partially an attempt to force Obsidian to be a Personal Information Management engine, Where I’ll post the fleeting thoughts that pop up as I read books and make connections between things 🙈.

To some extent they’re separated into categories, but there are two things that Obsidian+Quartz gives me that I’m hoping will help organize my otherwise-chaotic ADHD brain: Ontology and Cross-References.

Ontology

At some point between high school/beginning of undergrad, I had my mind completely blown by Object-Oriented_Programming. To me it was like, discovering the internal language that my brain had been using my whole life to store/organize information.

So far, the main issue with Obsidian is just… it’s designed around a bunch of Markdown (.md format) files, which is great for a ton of reasons, but it just doesn’t exactly match the OOP way of thinking that fires so many serotonins in my brain. It’s the closest thing I can find, though, especially when combined with the Metadata Menu and Dataview plugins!

Cross-References

Though there are a few top-level categories[^1], the exciting part is when there’s a Crossover in Categories, like my main math interest (Insolubility of the Quintic) being solved by a 20-year-old Evariste Galois, who had just recently been released from prison for his participation in the July Revolution 😱. Or, even more straightforwardly, how I put Bertrand Russell in the Math category because I linked to him in the context of Axiomatization of Mathematics, but he also led a super inspiring campaign to hold the US accountable for War Crimes in Vietnam (the Russell-Sartre Tribunal)!

I’m… still figuring out how in-text citations like @wood_chechnya_2007 work, so bear with me on that part!

Top-Level Categories:

Category
Art_Things
Day_to_Day
Growth
Math
Misc
References
The_World

Notebook Index

Page	Last Updated
Palestine	3:37 AM - November 26, 2025
Population_Transfers	3:37 AM - November 26, 2025
Portugal	3:37 AM - November 26, 2025
Quantification	3:37 AM - November 26, 2025
Rhodesian_UDI	3:37 AM - November 26, 2025
Russell-Sartre Tribunal	3:37 AM - November 26, 2025
Russian_Federation	3:37 AM - November 26, 2025
Russian_Imperialism	3:37 AM - November 26, 2025
Lenin	3:37 AM - November 26, 2025
Lesotho	3:37 AM - November 26, 2025
Liberia	3:37 AM - November 26, 2025
Namibia	3:37 AM - November 26, 2025
Office_of_Public_Diplomacy	3:37 AM - November 26, 2025
Italian	3:37 AM - November 26, 2025
Italy	3:37 AM - November 26, 2025
July_Monarchy	3:37 AM - November 26, 2025
July_Revolution	3:37 AM - November 26, 2025
Lao_Peoples_Democratic_Republic	3:37 AM - November 26, 2025
Greg_Grandin	3:37 AM - November 26, 2025
Ingushetia	3:37 AM - November 26, 2025
Ethiopia	3:37 AM - November 26, 2025
Fidel_Castro	3:37 AM - November 26, 2025
Cuba	3:37 AM - November 26, 2025
@wolin_politics_1960	3:37 AM - November 26, 2025
@wood_chechnya_2007	3:37 AM - November 26, 2025
@runciman_treatise_1983	3:37 AM - November 26, 2025
@runciman_social_1969	3:37 AM - November 26, 2025
@wedeen_ambiguities_2015	3:37 AM - November 26, 2025
@sartre_existentialism_2007	3:37 AM - November 26, 2025
@louis_imperialism_1977	3:37 AM - November 26, 2025
@horne_white_2019	3:37 AM - November 26, 2025
@may_southern_1973	3:37 AM - November 26, 2025
@reader_africa_1999	3:37 AM - November 26, 2025
@hacking_representing_1983	3:37 AM - November 26, 2025
@grandin_empires_2006	3:37 AM - November 26, 2025
Triple_quotes	3:37 AM - November 26, 2025
@branford_lula_2005	3:37 AM - November 26, 2025
@fisher_capitalist_2009	3:37 AM - November 26, 2025
CunninLynguists-Brain_Cell	3:37 AM - November 26, 2025
CunninLynguists-Nothing_to_Give	3:37 AM - November 26, 2025
NENE-アツい	3:37 AM - November 26, 2025
Camron-Oh_Boy	3:37 AM - November 26, 2025