This is all good advice but one thing it doesn't touch on is: which pen and notebook?
I like the pilot precision v5 pens because they come in a lot of different colors and the point is very fine.
For notebooks, I prefer the Leuchtturm 1917 series. They come with page numbers, a space for TOC, a pocket in the back for stuff, two book marks, and lots of different sizes and colors and page layouts.
That's important because the other important thing about hand notes for me is one book per topic, and keep them different colors because they will pile up and it helps with differentiating them.
> This is all good advice but one thing it doesn't touch on is: which pen and notebook?
In what way could it possibly be relevant? Do you actually believe that the author could suggest a universally suitable pen and paper type? What if he'd had his best results with toilet paper, a sugar thermometer and a soot/diarrhea/lemon juice blend for the ink? Would his advice be any more complete?
The moment you lose sight of the habit and instead pay homage to paper and pens, its a fetish instead of a practical discipline.
You can't separate the tools from the craft. Practical disciplines aren't just about doing things but also doing them well. The title of the piece was "take better notes, by hand" so you know, the tools I think are relevent. And come to mention it, the "by hand" part needs some attention too, because one complaint I often hear is that typing is less fatiguing than writing longhand. Ergonomics plays a big role here -- you're not going to write anything at all if you get cramped up. So yeah, I think that the tools are wholly relevent to the idea of taking better notes.
Generally people don't write with diarrhea for a good reason. I think anyone suggesting positive results would be suspect.
My favorite writing implement these days is a black Milwaukee Inkzall ultra fine pen, bought in 4 packs at Home Depot.
I have three primary things I write on, mostly todos for home yard or office, groceries and hardware or tools to buy, and bands and songs to listen to, and the occasional song lyric.
The first is a mini clipboard made from a 3" x 4" piece of cedar shingle and a mini binder clip holding a 4x6 craft paper card folded in half, giving me four sides to write on. On the back side I keep a one-year calendar printed on standard letter paper and folded down to fit where I keep track of my band gigs.
The next one is a standard wire-bound 4x6 note book, mostly for work todos using sort of a bullet-journaling type of progress system.
The third at this point is a regular letter sized clipboard holding scrap one-side-blank printer paper, mostly for meetings.
Then I frequently take pictures of any of these pages so I have a dated copy on my phone.
They also all get added to with typical 3x3 sticky notes in mostly neon colors.
Finally I also do lots of writing in Obsidian, notes in source files with Sublime Text, and sometimes even the StickyNotes Windows app.
My philosophy about this over the last few years is that its better to write something down anywhere on whatever system, even on multiple systems, rather than to try to adhere to one format all the time.
I love the Leuchtterm 1917s. They've got everything you say, and they hold up under daily use without falling apart.
As for pens, I use the Uniball Jetstream 0.38 ballpoint--fine point, doesn't skip, and I prefer ballpoints. I used a Coleto Hitec C multi-pen for a while, but the refills are skinny and run out of ink quickly, and I like the feel of the Jetstream ballpoint better. (The refills for the regular Coleto Hitec are much thicker and last a lot longer...but skip horribly. Life is too short.)
I think pens and pencils are mostly just preference and habit. I have some draftmatic mechanical pencils, nothing special really, but I’ve been using them for decades.
I suspect the real advantage of handwritten notes (for those who benefit from them) is that writing them fulfills a learned ritual for putting the brain in learning-mode. So, might as well match the environment as closely as possible, and prioritize familiarity over some quality.
Anyway, I can write obnoxiously small with my draftmatics, so I don’t see how the process could be optimized by a fancier pencil or pen anyway.
A good 0.5mm gel pen, and a pad with blank 8.5x11 pages, no lines no nothing. About once a week, I consolidate whatever is still relevant onto a few sheets.
I'm right handed, but write from right to left (Hebrew). Smudging is not an issue with any ink, I don't drag my hand over written text. I don't know why people do that.
I usually use Pilot inks, I currently have a dark blue that I've added a touch of old green to. I absolutely love it.
For other left-handers out there, Pigma Micron pens from Sakura are outstanding. They aren't fountain pens, but their archival quick-dry ink doesn't smudge at all when writing with the left hand. They come in varying weights, and I tend to prefer the 05s or 08s. Lots of arts and crafts stores stock them.
I'll def be looking around. I have some bottled ink already, but this is a huge concern. Hopefully the fine tip has decent portion control. That helps a lot.
You may be unpleasantly surprised. I have TWSBI Eco-T pens in both <M> and <F>, which write similarly to some Japanese <B> and <M> nibs respectively. I would recommend, if you want something with true portion control, to get a Pilot Prera in <F> or a Kakuno in <EF> (or any pen with a Japanese nib), just to check it out. Both are fairly affordable.
Also, given you’re a lefty, you may want to avoid “good paper” for fountain pens. Coatings on the paper that allow inks to “sit on top” of the page while they dry, preventing feathering and allowing the ink’s properties to develop, understandably slow the drying process. In addition, avoid Noodler’s inks. They look beautiful but dry at an absolutely glacial pace—in my experience, up to several days’ time to fully dry (unassisted, in a dry environment) on Midori MD notebook paper.
I’ve used an ECO and while it’s not my favorite pen, I have nothing bad to say about the nib (I believe mine was a fine as well). The way FP’s write can vary dramatically between different inks though. I’d recommend first trying out the ink you have and seeing what about it you don’t like before researching other inks.
Just asking out of precaution, but are you sure this bottled ink of yours can be used with fountain pens? Even if it is, it’s best to be careful with a fine nib (I’ve learned the hard way).
Good to know. TBH I haven't checked. I have some cartridges too (for a different, cheaper fountain pen) but if none of those work, I'll scout for options.
I’m in a long distance relationship at the moment, so one of the things I try to bridge the distance is sending letters! That’s how I got started, but now I’ll send letters to any of my friends (or anyone really) that sends me a mailing address.
One thing I strongly advise when it comes to writing letters with FP ink is to use waterproof/permanent inks. I had to learn that hard way that typical ink doesn’t handle rain well… Diamine just came out with a new lineup of permanent inks which I quite like, but the Platinum stuff (my favorite being Carbon Black) is quite good as well.
That's lovely! I do the same now with a few friends. Postcards, letters, etc.. It's a blast. Just got some Strathmore letter paper too. So much nicer than what I was using.
To be fair, if your interpersonal skills and relationship dynamic are such that you find yourself seriously asking the Internet (Reddit of all places) for relationship advice... yeah, just end it is probably the null hypothesis.
Problem is they don’t know how to express themselves and many people, especially those interested in tech, don’t want to learn.
I can’t tell you how many times I have a CS student in my office for advising and they tell me they only want to take technical courses, because anything reading or writing or psychology or history based is “soft”, unrelated to their major, and a waste of their time.
I’ve spent years telling them critical reading and expressive writing skills are very important to being a functioning adult, but they insist what they need to know can only be found in the Engineering college.
Much of my time at work is reading through quickly typed messages from my boss and understanding exactly what questions I need to ask in order to make it easy for him to answer clearly.
Engineers who lack soft skills cannot be effective in team environments.
RTFM and being able to quickly reduce problems to the simplest possible test case are my superpowers.
To be fair, LLMs can be quite useful for quickly finding the correct place in TFM to look when you don't necessarily have a function or feature name to go on.
Haha. I always say that I'm only a good IC not because of my technical skills but because of my communication skills and my willingness to, as Steven Covey says, seek first to understand.
I literally got a transfer to a more exciting position and most likely a raise (discussing it on Tuesday =P) just because I communicated things related to the new position proactively and more than other people who, after the fact, expressed interest in the position.
Nice, congrats! A former boss once told me that over communication never hurt anyone. Of course there are ways to fine-tune and get the point across more succinctly but I think the point still stands - err on the side of over than under communication.
Yes, people forget that in the early days of the pandemic, they were playing political games with PPE, sending it to red states with no population or cases, while NYC was running out of space in hospitals. It got so bad, RFK's grandson became a whistleblower because he was dismayed that he and other 20-somethings with no relevent experience were in charge of the government response.
It "was like a family office meets organized crime, melded with Lord of the Flies," Kennedy said. "It was a government of chaos." Kennedy says was shocked that he and a dozen other twenty-somethings with no experience in the medical sector were tasked with procuring much-needed PPE for the country, using their personal laptops and email addresses.
"We were the team. We were the entire frontline team for the federal government." Kennedy added, "It was the number of people who show up to an after-school event, not to run the greatest crisis in a hundred years. It was such a mismatch of personnel. It was one of the largest mobilization problems ever. It was so unbelievably colossal and gargantuan. The fact that they didn’t want to get any more people was so upsetting." [1]
That kind of executive negligence and dereliction of duty absolutely cost lives.
What Kennedy described during COVID is now the entire government from top to bottom. DOJ, FBI, DOD, FEMA, DHS, ICE, NASA, USPS, SSA etc etc, rotting from the head.
Not just uber slow to compile, because as a Rust dev I could take that. But it rejects correct programs without telling you why! The compiler will just time out and ask you to refactor so it has a better shot. I understand that kind of pathological behavior is present in many compilers but I hit it way too often in Swift on seemingly benign code.
Did that happen recently (the compiler just bailing out)?
Because they got much better at that, and it’s been a long while since that happened to me. Like “I don’t even remember when was the last time it happened” long.
I think that’s probably just a universal truth in many industries. How many people have donated to the Linux foundation versus how many people have bought some sort of Tux merch?
And why should that fact be haunting? The point of being in a band isn’t to sell records, but to make music. The only reason the t-shirts sold is because the music was good and they were iconic. Where is the ghost?
It depends on how much you promote your repo and how big it is. I know when my repo gets posted somewhere because I'll get a little burst of stars for a few days and then it'll calm down until it's posted somewhere again. Much larger repos will get stars at a more constant rate as they reach a critical liftoff velocity.
No it isn’t. The metaphor is that if you throw a frog into already boiling water it would attempt to jump out. If you start with tepid water and increase the temperature slowly enough they don’t. Sadly this was proven through experiment in the 1800s.
It’s an argument that if you make changes slowly enough people won’t notice.
In the experiment you mention, before they put the frog in the cool water, they removed its brain. Then they boiled the water. The frog did not jump out of the water because it had no brain. The experiment proved the opposite of what you are asserting.
If every wealthy country had a frog to represent their culture of taking care of workers (strong unions, workers rights, vacation days, not having healthcare tied to their employment, maternity and paternity leave, equitable pay etc), there is one particular frog which most would describe as having had its brain removed.
From the wikipedia article linked to just below this reply, it says that the first such experiment is as you described. But then goes on to say:
Other 19th-century experiments were purported to show that frogs did not attempt to escape gradually heated water. An 1872 experiment by Heinzmann was said to show that a normal frog would not attempt to escape if the water was heated slowly enough, which was corroborated in 1875 by German scientist Carl Fratscher.
I don't see the point of the experiment with the brain removed, but given that they did the experiment with intact frogs as well confirms their original hypothesis.
However, later on in the article, it's been disputed in recent years: as the water is heated by about 2 °F (about 1 °C), per minute, the frog becomes increasingly active as it tries to escape, and eventually jumps out if it can. Earlier it also says that frogs put into already water just die (not mentioned, but presumably from shock) and so don't have a chance to start attempting to jump out. I imagine humans dumped into boiling water would have a similar response.
In reality when these experiments were conducted the frog simply jumped out as soon as the temperature started to raise, frogs will not sit there in slowly boiling water and just die without trying to escape way before the water becomes dangerous.
Sadly most of us are hopeless lobster boiled by greater powers. Unlike the crabs through you still can save the other lobsters by refraining to eat them.
You know the story about how the frogs, thrown into a hot pot will jump out. But, if you turn up the heat slowly, they just eventually die? Well, the other day, at work, we were called into a room to watch a mandatory video of frogs in this environment. I actually noticed that management had turned the thermostat up really high. I hopped out of that meeting very quickly.
We as a society are both ATCs and plane passengers, and most often, the latter. And when an overworked ATC makes an error, we indeed may fail to survive.
Starting in 2020 when I was a new professor, I was contacted by a company that works with Chinese families to tutor their students directly. I would be paid $400 an hour to teach them online remotely.
Originally I thought it was because of COVID lockdowns and that may be part of it.
But the opportunities have continued since then. I stopped doing it as my career has become more involved but I still get solicitations from time to time, so it must be because of what you say.
I like the pilot precision v5 pens because they come in a lot of different colors and the point is very fine.
For notebooks, I prefer the Leuchtturm 1917 series. They come with page numbers, a space for TOC, a pocket in the back for stuff, two book marks, and lots of different sizes and colors and page layouts.
That's important because the other important thing about hand notes for me is one book per topic, and keep them different colors because they will pile up and it helps with differentiating them.
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