Responsibility

Collection of reasons for public notes, my philosophy on what I write, and why this brainless collection is online.

It is okay to be wrong.

I make no claims about what goes onto these pages. What is not mine, I will credit its true author and cite in a clear manner. Can't expect a collected set of footnotes every time, but it should be clear what is and what is not mine. Still, at any given time, some nonzero component of this brainless mass is going to have factually incorrect information. I strive to be accurate but the likelihood of perfect information is zero. Something will be amiss. The problem is that I will not know what is correct, and what is not.

Some time ago, this article got the idea in my head for the need to take notes without having to move over to the mouse. As I think more about it, a mouse is a far more rudimentary method interacting with data: it is better optimized for the direct sharing of information, such as when a second person takes direct control. For a single person wanting to communicate an idea directly to an electronic screen, it is much easier to keep the hands on the home row and navigate using modal editing.

When I read about how simple it is to convert notes between formats using pandoc, the benefits of typing notes got the idea in my head for the need to take notes without having to lift a hand over to the mouse. Pretty much everything that I could want to do in capturing an idea with ink and paper. Typing is faster certainly, but the cost is difficulty to be deliberate about what gets put down since that and more can be removed in a few keystrokes.

Math can be written about with less repetition. Inline math helps blend the line between talking about concepts using variables which are beyond the scope of simple variable placeholders. For example, when I write $\hbar$, the reduced Planck's constant likely jumped to mind without having to have mentioned any physics previously. Simply the fact, this document is in English and that quanta of electromagnetic action is traditionally represented with the variable $h$, being reduced by the circular frequency, or the bar in hbar, the knowledge that was already in your head jumped to the front of mind. If that little experiment worked, then the rest of this might be useful to you.

This knowledge is not meant to be kept by me alone. It is our responsibility as custodians, online to share what we know. To remember how very small this project is, here is some sense of scale.

Put this eloquently, "Existence preceeds essence" or better still...

$$\color{red}\texttt{Fucking around precedes finding out.}$$