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!