Ward Explains Ralf to Kelley

I got up early to prep for a call with Kelley. Instead I got distracted by something Ralf had written. Let me explain.

Kelley — This forwarded email will require some explanation.

Last time we spoke I suggested that I had an interesting approach for indexing content in wiki. [⇒ Indexing Wiki Content] I thought it would be implemented and documented by our call today so we could explore it together. Every day this week I intended to finish this work. By yesterday afternoon I was feeling that finishing was my top priority for the day. But it didn’t happen.

The problem was that yesterday morning I was remembering the Radio Network Simulator that I had done back in graduate school. I’ve returned to that off and on over the years always bringing newer tools to the task of understanding the emergent properties of the simulation. And I thought: I should really model that old network as a Property Graph.

So yesterday afternoon I got distracted when I should have been finishing my top priority. I wondered, where did I leave my most recent exploration of the radio network simulation three years ago? I had lots of notes in my simnet wiki. And lots of notes on visualization methodology which was a hot button for me three years ago. Then it occurred to me that I could write a simple little html script to “browse” the network I built as input for my graduate school work. How cool would that be?

As you might imagine, this consumed the rest of the evening.

So I got up early this morning to work on my top priority. But then I took a look at this email that appeared overnight.

As it happens, I write a lot of notes to myself when working in wiki. These are public so I might explain myself a little more carefully. This is really helpful to me when returning to work left incomplete but promising. And I might have readers that I hadn’t imagined.

Ralf Barkow is a Swiss Citizen of German Origin (dual citizen) studying computational humanities and many related interests.

Ralf Barków writes in wiki using some variation of the Zettelkasten wikipedia that I don’t fully understand. [⇒ Antinet Zettelkasten ⇒ Zettelkasten]

Ralf Barków reads what I write, connects what I’m thinking to his other reading, and then posts his day by day reading summaries to our Federated Wiki chat when he thinks others might be interested.

So last night Ralf dug into my distractions and especially how I went about recalling my own work from three years ago and extra especially my thoughts on visualization of complex behavior. And now it is 7am. I’ve been up since 5 thinking I will work on my top priority but instead I am thinking about Ralf thinking about me thinking about work I was thinking about three years ago.

I wonder if I can untangle this reflection. Probably the best thing to do is save it in wiki.

More soon. — Ward

Matrix hosts the federated wiki chat. It sends me email when my name is mentioned. This is the notice that got me started on this reflection.

Ralf's posted link includes his notes. link