Mind maps

Euler and Leibniz

A giant like Euler was completely blind in his later years. This did not seem to bother him at all. He simply did his calculations in his head, and dictated them to his scribe. I'm afraid that I am at the other end of that spectrum.

  I have a very small working memory, and I tend to get lost in a forest for the trees. Therefore I have had a long standing interest in ways to organize information.

  It is comforting for me to know that someone like Leibniz carried around with him a cabinet with scraps of paper pinned to rows of nails, and someone like Newton rewrote his Principia dozens of times.

hypertext

There are various ways to organize and cross-link information outside your head. Books come to mind, but ever since we all have a computer on our desk, hypertext has also become very attractive.

commercial tools

There are commercial tools to organize information, like Prezi for presentations or Obsidian for personal notes, but they came too late in life for me. Also, I am wary of tools that may go in and out of fashion, or may sudden­ly disappear behind paywalls.

  Last but not least, they violate every rule of normalized database ( and knowledge ) management and until this is fixed, such systems make me nervous.

my solutions

Over the years I have developed an elaborate memo system to organize my own personal information, and the website you are looking at is basically a gentrified view on that.

further reading

For a lovely overview of the never ending battle against information overload ever since the Enlightenment, I heartily recommend the charming book "Too Much To Know", by Ann Blair.