studying, more studying, and did I mention studying?

wish me luck on my physics quiz tomorrow!

listening to: the harry potter soundtracks, of course!

{how I take notes - for STEM subjects}

How I take notes depends a lot on how the professor of a class decides to present their notes. For instance, in 6.005 Software Construction, all of the assigned reading+problems were on the class website, so naturally it made sense for me to take notes on a computer. Also this class was heavily code-based, so there was hardly ever a need to write down complex equations or draw diagrams. For 6.046 Design and Analysis of Algorithms and 6.034 Artificial Intelligence, however, the professors write up notes on a chalkboard and theres optional textbook reading, so it makes more sense to write my notes in a notebook. It’s also much easier to draw charts, matrices, equations, etc. on paper than on a computer.

Now I’ll explain what’s going on in each of the images.

I use a few basic principles:

I hope this helps! I’ve gotten a ton of requests for showing how I take notes, and I’ve been so busy recently, but I wanted to post this for you guys :)

Obsidian Resources Masterpost

This is a masterpost of all the useful resources I’ve collected for using Obsidian. Hopefully some of them will also be useful to you, and I’ll try to keep this post updated whenever I find new and exciting stuff!

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General Obsidian

Youtube

Vault Showcases & Use Examples

The best way to get an idea of what you can do in Obsidian is to look at what other people have done. This is a collection of articles, videos, and Obsidian Publish Vaults showing various setups and processes so you can get inspired!

Markdown

Obsidian uses markdown to format text, so these are some resources to help you out with that.

CSS & Styling

You can just use Obsidian as-is, but it’s so much fun to customise it and waste all the time you should be doing work on making it look pretty. These resources cover various plugins and ways of prettifying your vault, as well as some CSS resources, since Obsidian uses CSS for styling.

Plugins

A highly opinionated collection of plugins—all of these are ones I either currently use or have used. Organised loosely from simple to complex. Links go to the github pages, which have install instructions, but the easiest way is to install them directly from the plugins manager inside Obsidian.

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check out my obsidian tag for more posts / got questions? want to say hi?

James Baldwin.

MARTHA NUSSBAUM: I wake up at night thinking about Euripides’ Hecuba. That to me is a story that says so much about what it is to be a human being in the middle of a world of unreliable things and people. Do you know the story?

BILL MOYERS: Well, from a long time ago. She was the queen of Troy, whose country was destroyed by war, and her whole life was changed. She fell from here to here.

MARTHA NUSSBAUM: Right, right. She lost her husband, she’s lost most of her children, she’s lost her political power. She’s been made a slave. But up to that point, she remains absolutely firm morally. And she even says she believes that human good character is something extremely stable in adversity and can’t be shaken. But then, her one deepest hope is pulled away from her. She left her youngest child with her best friend, who was supposed to watch over him and watch his money, too, and then bring him back when the war was over. And when she gets to the shore of Thrace, she sees a naked body that’s been washed up on the beach. And she looks at it more closely, and then she notices that it’s the body of her child.

And she realizes right away that what this friend has done is to murder the child for his money, and to do it in a callous, heedless way, without even taking thought for burying the child, just has tossed it out into the waves. And all of a sudden, the roots of her moral life are undone. She looks around, and she says, “Everything is untrustworthy. Everything that I see is untrustworthy,” because her moral life had been based on the ability to trust things and people that were not under her own control. And if this deepest and best friendship proves untrustworthy, then it seems to her that nothing can be trusted, and she bas to turn to a life of solitary revenge.

BILL MOYERS: Against the friend.

MARTHA NUSSBAUM: And we see her at the end of the play putting out the eyes of this former best friend, and turning herself into, what the chorus says is in effect, a dog. I mean, they predict that she will literally turn into a dog. But we know that the story of metamorphosis from the human to something less than human has really taken place before our very eyes.

No, I think it’s pretty clear that this comes about not because she’s a bad person, but in a sense because she’s a good person, because she has had deep friendships on which she staked her moral life. And So what this play says that’s so disturbing, is that the condition of being good is such that it should always possible for you to be morally destroyed by something that you couldn’t prevent. To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust certain things beyond your own control that can lead you to be shattered in very extreme circumstances, in circumstances for which you are not yourself to blame.

And I think that says something very important about the condition of the ethical life. That it is based on a trust in the uncertain, a willingness to be exposed. It’s based on being more like a plant than like a jewel, something rather fragile, but whose very particular beauty is inseparable from that fragility.

Martha Nussbaum: Applying the Lessons of Ancient Greece

sunday, april 21, 2024 | day 21/60 ᯓ★

reflections:

musée de l’orangerie

Sarah Perry, The Essence of Peopling

Do you also turn your pinned notes into a collage or are you normal?