What is this?

Everyone has a story. No one is can tell it, but you.

WIP - WYSIWYG

This is a collection of notes and documents constitute a sample of my knowledge.

Why put this on the internet? Well this information has helped me so, with a little luck, someone in need of this might find it too.

This site is one of many digital gardens. Though the naming is not perfect, I prefer this name because it promotes the idea of cultivation. The term gardening breaks free from the more mundane part of writing. Tending to this garden is nonlinear and stochastic: doubling effort doesn't mean double the content, nor will doing the same thing twice will give the same results. Additionally, the process of growth is not beautiful and typically ugly for the duration. This helps me make peace with the difference between what I envision this garden to be in my mind and how it is on the screen.

Organization

The following subsections are what you can find in the sidebar on the left. Go to the sidebar on the right if you want to skip to a particular section description.

Organizing these pages came from an interative process. First step is to write and throw words at a page. Then, gather what is worth reading through some pruning and organization. These are collected as pages under the [unreleased] heading. Finally, the unreleased pages are dropped whole or piecemeal into the sections below.

Meta

“If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.” - Source Disputed

Often while writing, I worry that I could do better: written more concisely, been more clear, developed these ideas to maturity before attempting to save them here. But our time on earth is finite, so these pages will be as long or, more likely, as short as they will be

These pages relate to my thoughts and reasoning on why this is a public work. A newcomer should begin with the essay on Responsibility Online. The (Human) geography is my own personal history, if you want to get to know where I've been. Sharing is a set of inspirations which links to other digital gardens (second brains or zettelkastens, if you prefer). Research are the list of projects which I have worked on.

Ideas

One of the main reasons for creating a work of art is to be though t provoking. As a person online in 2020, keeping track of these persistent works is difficult but worthwhile. Computer games, books, and film are all human creations: they serve no utility other than to make people feel something. In grade school, teachers feed students the little lies so that they will be ready for the big ones.

A little lie which students hear is that during English class, that they are searching for hidden meanings. I disagree fully: what students are actually doing (and what the teachers use the lie for) is to better the quality of though on the work. Give it time and enough thought, some meaning should bear fruit.

STE[A]M

An acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math, these pages are based on class notes, but as I develop them further, the baseline organization is currentlysyllabus -> lecture notes -> student notes -> assignments. But this will begin to break down into a more organic arrangements, dependent on their topic.

Mollusk

Just moving from shell to shell. These pages collect computer notes and day-to-day workflows.

Description of Brainless

This collection of markdown and other documents constitute a representative collection of my knowledge, since what is the point of doing something if you aren't willing to put your name to it? There are obviously advantages to remaining anonymous but to make a real impact, there needs to be accountability.

Internally, these Gitbooks are half-blog, half-journal, and perhaps half-something-else. Externally, these books serve as a lasting resource which documents the learning process for a variety of engineering courses as well documenting the processes for working on whatever projects are at hand. Additionally, it serves as a method of reclaiming social media as I, alone, manage the files here and are not hosted on a platform such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, or one of the numerous companies which make profit their from their user's information. There is an implicit expectation of regularity in posts which is not present here: I'm going to be working at my speed.

Why bother putting these up?

“Never forget what you are, for surely the world will not. Make it your strength. Then it can never be your weakness. Armour yourself in it, and it will never be used to hurt you.” - G. R. R. Martin

Hopefully, this becomes that suit of armor, indeed, a source of strength. Something to point at, which I created completely under my own power. During the creation of this, I can confess that it feels like being a shitty Soundcloud rapper, but on Github.

But, this mess of an entity is not meant to be read in one sitting. Finishing one page should not necessarily lead on to the next; reading more than one page should not be necessary because each file should be a self-contained document.

Each page should hold all the necessary information on whatever topic: not explicitly but should at least point at where to turn to for more. Though one can always point at something to reference but unless you made something with it outside of your brain, one day when you reach for it, it will be gone.

Built with Gitbook

A web based interfaced that can works off on top of a network of plain text .markdown files. This has the benefits of version control and easy integration with other programs such as Typora and Obsidian. There are other benefits: hyperlinking, image and file hosting with built in commenting, math fonts through LaTeX, the list goes on. However, cloning the entirety of the repo will also clone documents which belong in other books and is a problem for another time.

Navigation

If I had a set of three words which I try to live by, something which I have thought on for some time now, they would be curiosity,integrity, and compassion. Something about those three words, together, ring true to me. Particularly so, if treated as an ordered list. First, being curiosity as without the desire to know, there there is no impetus for the rest. If one doesn't know about the topic then what integrity is there to uphold or what is there compassion to be shown for? There needs to be that innate desire to know which will serve as the foundation for everything else. Then comes integrity, which is the property which allows for something to withstand the test of time. Finally compassion, which is more of a colligative property. It is something you can have for yourself but is most clearly seen when shared between two people.

This brainless mass is most like the curiosity that I try to live by. For this to do some work, I've got to make some record. It might be at least two years late in writing this down, but in my defense I did not know that these resources existed and even if I did, I would not yet have

Making your own

The first step is the hardest: saving a file. I personally am one of the passive procrastinators and am trying to be an active one, so having an unfinished work which is open to the public is... not what I would consider ideal.

But once it is there and you treat it as a connection to all of the other files you manage, then in the process of tracking things down, this knowledge will grow over time. The real problem is ironing out all of the kinks from a living document. And though this document is dedicated to the sciences and engineering, I think back to the quintessential polymath...

A work of art is never finished, merely abandoned. - Leonardo da Vinci