Author: Craig Constantine

About notebooks

Published 3 Days Ago · All posts on Nov 12

The problem facing knowledge work in our current moment is not that we’re lacking sufficiently powerful technologies. It’s instead that we’re already distracted by so many digital tools that there’s no time left to really open the throttle on our brains.

Cal Newport, from https://calnewport.com/forget-chatbots-you-need-a-notebook/

This is something I’ve been thinking about for a few months. I recently went back to my lab notebook habit from 30+ years ago. Iit’s like discovering a bicycle for your mind: It multiplies the power of what my mind is good at. But not too much. (like a car where you’re completely cut off from the world.) Using a notebook I can hold thoughts outside my mind, return to them, and see them.

There’s also the magic that happens when you hold onto a thought long enough to write it down. That’s much longer than we usually hold on to any thought.

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Due proportion

Published 12 Days Ago · All posts on Nov 4

Philosophy demands self-restraint, not self-abnegation—and even self-restraint can comb its hair. The limit I suggest is this: Our habits should mingle the ideal with the ordinary in due proportion, our way of life should be one that everyone can admire without finding it unrecognizable.

~ Seneca, Moral Letters, 5.5

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Stay in the tension

Stay in the tension

Published 15 Days Ago · All posts on Oct 31

I’m a little behind :) this episode of The Creatively Engaging is from 4 years ago, but is worth listening to.

About halfway through Anna and Monika start talking about what it was like to play the specific piece of music. There’s an interesting discussion about staying in the tension of being out of perfect timing… which all struck me as related to doing work as a creative in general.

@brucedevereux was also on Podtalk back at, https://forum.podcaster.community/t/persistence-with-bruce-devereux/540

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Forbearance

Published 19 Days Ago · All posts on Oct 28

Clearheadedness and action are not always enough, in politics or in life. Some obstacles are beyond a snap of the fingers or novel solution. It is not alway possible for one person to rid the world of a great evil or stop a country bent toward conflict. Of course, we try—because it can happen. But we should be ready for it not to. And we need to be able to find a greater purpose in this suffering and handle it with firmness and forbearance.

~ Ryan Holiday, from The Obstacle is the Way

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Powwow

Powwow

Published 25 Days Ago · All posts on Oct 22

Second of three from a recent trip to a grower who specializes in them.

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What defines you

Published 26 Days Ago · All posts on Oct 21

Bruce, deep down you may still be that same great kid you used to be. But it’s not who you are underneath, it’s what you do that defines you.

~ Rachel Dawes, Batman Begins (2005)

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Temenos? What’s that?

Published October 13 · All posts on Oct 13

Me, the other day after hearing a brief mention of a new-to-me-word on a podcast: “Is there a Greek work, something like (sounds like) tem-in-oss, that has to do with a special protected place of healing, particularly out in nature?”

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You’re likely thinking of temenos (τέμενος), pronounced roughly “TEM-eh-nos.”

In ancient Greek, a temenos was a sacred precinct or sanctuary—a piece of land marked off and dedicated to a god or gods. These were often places of worship and healing, particularly sanctuaries dedicated to Asclepius (the god of medicine), where people would go for ritual healing practices.

The term literally means “a piece of land cut off” (from the verb τέμνω, “to cut”). These sacred spaces were set apart from ordinary use, often located in natural settings like groves or near springs, and served as protected places for religious activities, healing rituals, and refuge.

In Jungian psychology, Carl Jung later adopted “temenos” to describe a protected psychological space for inner work and transformation—which connects nicely to the original sense of a sacred, healing precinct.

So much yak shaving even this post

Published September 30 · All posts on Sep 30

So I was off talking about something, which was in fact a classic example of yak shaving. The person I was talking with is intimately familiar with the term. But in case you are not…

me: There was an old—sesame street maybe?—tv episode from the 70s or early 80s with a song, “There’s a hole in the bucket, Dear Liza, Dear Liza…” that describes that sort of recursion. Decades earlier than yak shaving.

You’re absolutely right! “There’s a Hole in the Bucket” is actually much older than that—it’s a traditional folk song that dates back to at least the 1700s in Germany (as “Lieder von der Zithermädchen”). The English version became popular in the 1800s.

The song became widely known in America in 1961 when Harry Belafonte and Odessa Turner recorded it, and yes, it was performed on various children’s shows including Sesame Street in later years.

The song is the perfect example of circular dependency/yak shaving! The structure is that Henry needs to fix the bucket, but to do that he needs to sharpen the axe, but to sharpen the axe he needs to wet the stone, but to wet the stone he needs water, but to get water he needs… the bucket. It’s an endless loop of prerequisites that circles back to the original problem.

So you’re totally right—this concept of getting stuck in recursive task dependencies has been around in folk culture for centuries! The MIT folks just gave it a modern, absurdist name with “yak shaving.” The bucket song might be one of the earliest comedic explorations of dependency hell.

It’s funny how the same human experience—whether it’s 18th century peasants or 21st century sysadmins—keeps rediscovering this frustrating pattern and finding ways to laugh about it.

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Two-fer from an introduction

Published September 22 · All posts on Sep 22

I’m currently in the Introduction from Will Stone’s translation of, Montaigne by Stefan Zweig. Two things:

First, a nit about getting the right ideas into our minds when we read. Not a criticism of authors’ (such as Stone) word choices, but rather of our thinking correctly as readers.

Stone quotes Zweig as, “How to keep humanity intact in the throes of bestiality?” Stone’s translation is from 2015, and our current English usage carries sexual connotations. But I had a hunch that Zweig had something like “in the way of beasts” in mind since he was writing in German, in Brazil, in 1941, amidst the global throes of WWII.

It took me just a few moments to get an LLM to show me that Zweig almost certainly wrote «Bestialität»—which in Zweig’s German would have meant brute savagery or barbaric cruelty with no modern (circa 2025) sexual connotation. And in the larger context of the brutality of the war, that connotation makes perfect sense.

Second, further along Stone quotes a vivid metaphor from Zweig relating to suicidal ideation:

[…] always in moments of impotence it emerged, surging powerfully upwards like a dark rock whenever the tide of passions and hopes in his soul ebbed.

Relax; I’m not suicidal. I’m only remarking on the sublime perfection of that metaphor.

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The do-not list

The do-not list

Published September 22 · All posts on Sep 22

If you’ve not heard of Burkeman’s book (Four Thousand Weeks, I’ve not yet read it) the seed is simple: Your life will be about 4,000 weeks in duration.

In this podcast episode, Burkeman talks about the common advice to prioritize your work and to do the important things first—an echo of Stephen Covey’s metaphor of rocks, pebbles and sand to be put into a jar representing your limited time. Burkeman zooms in on the implication—missed by most people—within Covey’s advice.

You only have finite time. If you have a prioritized list of what’s important to you, it’s the stuff in the middle that will do you in.

Your top 5 items are clearly those big things you should work on. But, your number 6 item—that one feels almost as important as number 5. You need to actively avoid the danger of getting sucked into that number 6 (and the other almost as important items right behind it.)

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