What Is This?
Second Brain
My âfirst brainâ 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 Shaliziâs notebooks, and
- Partially an attempt to force Obsidian to be a Personal Information Management engine, Where Iâll post the fleeting thoughts that pop up as I read books and make connections between things đ.
To some extent theyâre separated into categories, but there are two things that Obsidian+Quartz gives me that Iâm 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⊠itâs designed around a bunch of Markdown (
.mdformat) files, which is great for a ton of reasons, but it just doesnât exactly match the OOP way of thinking that fires so many serotonins in my brain. Itâs 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 thereâs 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 đ±. 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)!
Iâm⊠still figuring out how in-text citations like @wood_chechnya_2007 work, so bear with me on that part!
Top-Level Categories:
Notebook Index
| Page | Last Updated |
|---|---|
| @wolin_politics_1960 | 7:20 PM - December 23, 2025 |
| @hodges_mexico_1983 | 7:06 PM - December 23, 2025 |
| @hare_language_1952 | 7:00 PM - December 23, 2025 |
| 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 |
| Russell-Sartre Tribunal | 3:37 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| Rhodesian_UDI | 3:37 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| Russian_Imperialism | 3:37 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| Russian_Federation | 3:37 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| Lesotho | 3:37 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| Lenin | 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 |
| Italy | 3:37 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| July_Revolution | 3:37 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| July_Monarchy | 3:37 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| Lao_Peoples_Democratic_Republic | 3:37 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| Italian | 3:37 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| French_Revolution | 3:37 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| Germany | 3:37 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| Ghana | 3:37 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| Greg_Grandin | 3:37 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| Ingushetia | 3:37 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| Ian_Smith | 3:37 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| Fidel_Castro | 3:37 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| What Do All The Flags Mean? | 3:37 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| France | 3:37 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| Ethiopia | 3:37 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| First_Chechen_War | 3:37 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| Eswatini | 3:37 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| Cote dâIvoire | 3:37 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| Cuba | 3:37 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| Decolonization | 3:37 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| El_Salvador | 3:37 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| Anti-Apartheid_Struggle | 3:37 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| Angola | 3:37 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| Apartheid_South_Africa | 3:37 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| Apartheid_Rhodesia | 3:37 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| Cold_War | 3:37 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| Caribbean | 3:37 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| Chechnya | 3:37 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| @wood_chechnya_2007 | 3:37 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| African National Congress | 3:37 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| Amharic | 3:37 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| @runciman_treatise_1983 | 3:37 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| @runciman_social_1969 | 3:37 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| @sartre_existentialism_2007 | 3:37 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| @wedeen_ambiguities_2015 | 3:37 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| @horne_white_2019 | 3:37 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| @may_southern_1973 | 3:37 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| @louis_imperialism_1977 | 3:37 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| @reader_africa_1999 | 3:37 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| @grandin_empires_2006 | 3:37 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| @hacking_representing_1983 | 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 |
| tf-idf | 3:37 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| Evariste_Galois | 3:37 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| Galois_Theory | 3:37 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| Group | 3:37 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| Gödelâs_Incompleteness_Theorem | 3:37 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| Insolubility_of_the_Quintic | 3:37 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| Principia_Mathematica | 3:37 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| Set | 3:37 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| Object-Oriented_Programming | 3:37 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| 2024-08-09 | 3:37 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| 101 Coping Skills | 3:37 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| Self-Help Summer 2024 | 3:37 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| Alfred_North_Whitehead | 3:37 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| Bertrand_Russell | 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-ăąăă | 3:37 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| NENE | 3:37 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| Teddy_Faley | 3:37 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| Chipmunk_Soul | 3:37 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| Camron-Oh_Boy | 3:37 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| Camâron | 3:37 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| CunninLynguists | 3:37 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| ZAPU | 3:10 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| ZANU | 3:10 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| Zimbabwe | 3:10 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| SWAPO | 3:10 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| Second_Indochina_War | 3:10 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| Southern_Africa | 3:10 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| Soviet_Union | 3:10 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| Terrorism | 3:10 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| Ukraine | 3:10 AM - November 26, 2025 |
| Occupied_Namibia | 3:10 AM - November 26, 2025 |