index card

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Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548-1929 by Markus Krajewski, Peter Krapp

Apollo 11, business process, Charles Babbage, continuation of politics by other means, double entry bookkeeping, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Gödel, Escher, Bach, index card, Index librorum prohibitorum, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Jacques de Vaucanson, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, knowledge worker, means of production, new economy, paper trading, Turing machine, work culture

“Money does not pulsate in the financial veins with the same regularity as in humans, but shares with the latter that a momentary blockage can cause danger or death.”56 A disturbance in the materiality of the flow of thought, one might add, is the threat of outdated, missing, or faulty index cards. It is the insufficient quantity of index cards that leads to effacement or malnourishment. “I feed the computers with my data.” Only in their sheer abundance can citations create something new. The database emits, donates blood, gives life, on a massive scale. The circulation of index cards thrives on abundance as well—the more the better. “I am the database. Bleeding in the crowd.” 57 Balance Sheet In their time, men like Moser could proudly refer to their index cards as a text-generating technology, contributing to the Enlightenment with an almost uncanny production rate.

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In this book, I seek to write this history from the material, thus allowing many voices to be heard, naturally at the risk of discordant polyphony. However, as the task consists of tying together episodes involving an arrangement of paper slips and their respective links, I will allow index cards to lead the way.7 This very box of index cards may leave some issues aside owing to the limited scope of the study—and sometimes simply owing to lack of information. Its first deficiency is thus an inability to write a universal story of index cards. Therefore, the trajectory does not begin at the dawn of history, and does not describe Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Greek, or Roman methods of cataloging stored texts. Also excluded is the famous library of Alexandria with its equally famous librarian Callimachus, who affixed inventories of texts on clay pinakes on the shelves, as well as the Roman laterculi or administrative registers.8 For neither are paper machines—both use different materialities, the by far more valuable and costly papyrus on the one hand and clay on the other.9 Instead, we begin card index history in the sixteenth century, with an alleged origin that, all misgivings about choosing one such entry notwithstanding, can serve as a provisional starting point for paper catalogs, even though one could have started earlier.

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Nor is this study able to remedy a lack that Foucault proclaimed in a footnote: “Appearance of the index card and development of the human sciences: another invention little celebrated by historians.”10 Although one development, the “make-up of the human sciences,” serves as a methodological example for this book, a direct connection to the appearance of the index card could not be made unambiguously. The plan had been to fulfill the promise of that footnote and develop the transfer between librarians and businesspeople around 1890 in an appendix to the evolution of the index card. Yet this plan fell victim to lack of space. In such a chapter one would have found not only the development of the materiality of the index card from paper scrap to cardboard.

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott

do what you love, index card, Mason jar, Ralph Waldo Emerson, retail therapy, rolodex

When I get stuck or lost or the jungle drums start beating in my head, proclaiming that the jig is about to be up and I don’t know what I’m doing and the well has run dry, I’ll look through my index cards. I try to see if there’s a short assignment on any of them that will get me writing again, give me a small sense of confidence, help me put down one damn word after another, which is, let’s face it, what writing finally boils down to. There are index cards on my desk that record things I thought of or saw or remembered or overheard in the last week or so. There are index cards from a couple of years ago. There is even one index card from six or seven years ago, when I was walking along the salt marsh between Sausalito and Mill Valley.

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When a child comes out of your body, it arrives with about a fifth of your brain clutched in its little hand, like those babies born clutching IUDs. So for any number of reasons, it’s only fair to let yourself take notes. My index-card life is not efficient or well organized. Hostile, aggressive students insist on asking what I do with all my index cards. And all I can say is that I have them, I took notes on them, and the act of having written something down gives me a fifty-fifty shot at having it filed away now in my memory. If I’m working on a book or an article, and I’ve taken some notes on index cards, I keep them with that material, paper-clip them to a page of rough draft where that idea or image might bring things to life.

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And so, if you hold some space open, an image may come to you. Then, for goodness sakes, jot it down. I have an index card here on which is written, "Six years later, the memory of the raw fish cubes continued to haunt her," which I thought might make a great transitional line. But I have so far not found a place for it. You are welcome to use it if you can. I eventually throw away a lot of my index cards, either because I use what’s on them in a paragraph somewhere or because it turns out that the thought wasn’t all that interesting. Many index cards on which I write in the middle of the night tend to be incoherent, like some incredibly bright math major thinking about oranges or truth while on LSD.

Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age by Alex Wright

1960s counterculture, Ada Lovelace, barriers to entry, British Empire, business climate, business intelligence, Cape to Cairo, card file, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Babbage, Computer Lib, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, Deng Xiaoping, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, folksonomy, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Great Leap Forward, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, linked data, Livingstone, I presume, lone genius, machine readable, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, Norman Mailer, out of africa, packet switching, pneumatic tube, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog

There was as yet no reliable mechanism for copying such large numbers of index cards 77 C ATA L O G I N G T H E WO R L D other than typing them out by hand (Otlet and La Fontaine offered a cash prize of 500 francs to anyone who could design a machine ­capable of reproducing index cards in large numbers). Eventually they invested the considerable sum of 22,000 francs in a costly printing scheme that never bore fruit. Instead, the IIB ended up distributing copies of the bibliography in book form, with a set of instructions directing subscribers to take out their scissors, cut up entries by hand, and paste them one-by-one onto index cards. Even four centuries later, Gessner’s indexing technique was proving remarkably durable.

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In Otlet’s day, microfilm may have qualified as the most advanced information storage technology, and the closest thing anyone had ever seen to a database was a drawer full of index cards. Yet despite these analog limitations, he 14 I ntrod u ction envisioned a global network of interconnected institutions that would alter the flow of information around the world, and in the process lead to profound social, cultural, and political transformations. By today’s standards, Otlet’s proto-Web was a clumsy affair, relying on a patchwork system of index cards, file cabinets, telegraph machines, and a small army of clerical workers. But in his writing he looked far ahead to a future in which networks circled the globe and data could travel freely.

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In 1876, Dewey established a company called the Library Bureau, whose mission was to sell to libraries and other organizations supplies such as catalog cards, drawers, “bureau boxes,” and other material to help companies implement his scheme. The company also encouraged businesses to adopt its index-card systems for their internal record keeping, claiming that they would realize efficiency gains of up to 50 percent. By 1893, the firm had opened a new office in Chicago and had plans to expand to London and Philadelphia. In 1895, the Library Bureau invested in its own factory, expanding from the production of index cards into a wider range of business equipment designed to help organizations of all stripes manage their collective intellectual capital: cabinets, trays, embossing equipment, and a range of other office supplies.

Reset: How to Restart Your Life and Get F.U. Money: The Unconventional Early Retirement Plan for Midlife Careerists Who Want to Be Happy by David Sawyer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, beat the dealer, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Cal Newport, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency risk, David Attenborough, David Heinemeier Hansson, Desert Island Discs, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, financial independence, follow your passion, gig economy, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, imposter syndrome, index card, index fund, invention of the wheel, John Bogle, knowledge worker, loadsamoney, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, mortgage debt, Mr. Money Mustache, passive income, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart meter, Snapchat, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, The 4% rule, Tim Cook: Apple, Vanguard fund, William Bengen, work culture , Y Combinator

Along the way, thousands of insights, and an untold amount of calmness, have been lost through complicated systems that, although started with best intentions, have fallen by the wayside after a few weeks. This all changed when I discovered the bulldog-clip-and-ruled-index-cards approach. I have plastic (and shoe) boxes[115] full of index cards for: life in general; RESET; and getting with the digital programme, complete with index-card-size subdividers. Now, whenever I have a thought worth capturing, I write it on an index card in either marker pen or biro (depending on the length of the thought), and place in the relevant box. I use index cards for books, blogs, conversations I overhear at the club, memories, etc. They’re in my coat pocket when I fetch the kids from school.

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Ryan Holiday[116], Anne Lamott[117], Robert Greene[118], Oliver Burkeman[119], Ronald Reagan, Vladimir Nabokov[120] and Ludwig Wittgenstein[121] all use (d) the humble index card to catalogue and organise their thoughts. If you’re serious about embarking on this digital journey, buy a hundred-pack of 127 x 76mm ruled index cards for less than a pound, rescue a shoebox from the attic and stick a few marker-penned notecards on their end to act as dividers. Write a “My Digital Box” label on the top of the shoebox, and you’re off. Index cards capture what you think about the world and leave your mind clear to do things. The secret to going digital: index cards. #5 Listen As a midlife professional, what is your biggest life-energy-leech on a weekday?

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Happiness 2. Fears 3. Life’s a Struggle 4. Finding Meaning 5. On Purpose 6. Values and Your Worldview 7. Plan and Goals 8. Part I Index Card Part II: Going Digital – How to Future-Proof Your Career 9. Trapped in “Digital or Die” Land 10. PR: a Case Study 11. How to Master Your Digital Fear: a 25-Point Plan 12. Part II Index Card Part III: Declutter Your Life 13. Digital Declutter 14. Mental Declutter 15. Physical Declutter 16. Part III Index Card 17. Halftime Downer Interval Part IV: Getting F.U. Money – a Plan 18. Structure 19. You’re Not alone – Money is the Commonest Problem 20.

The Card Catalog: Books, Cards, and Literary Treasures by Library Of Congress, Carla Hayden

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, index card, information retrieval, Johannes Kepler, late fees, machine readable, W. E. B. Du Bois

Henriette Avram’s work in developing MARC (Machine-Readable Cataloging) during the 1960s enabled discrete bits of structured data to be encoded and transmitted across long distances, an important advancement in the birth of the Internet. But the Internet also owes its existence, in part, to those who came even earlier and envisioned and implemented standardized index card catalogs. Paul Otlet was one of those visionaries. Born in Belgium in 1868, Otlet, a lawyer, was fascinated by bibliographic techniques and the potential for organizing information using standard index cards. Although he operated on the periphery of the library community and was drawn to various classification schemes, he developed an idea of bringing together the entire world’s knowledge into a searchable system.

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One would need to venture farther into the stacks to find the Main Card Catalog. Opening a drawer and flipping through the well-worn cards, many handwritten and filled with marginalia containing valuable information not to be found in an Internet search, leaves one with a sense of awe at how catalogers distilled so much information onto simple 3-by-5-inch index cards—cards that still sit neatly filed, waiting to reveal the treasures hidden in the hundreds of miles of Library stacks on Capitol Hill. —PETER DEVEREAUX Writer-Editor, The Library of Congress Die Bibliothek der Universität Leyden La bibliothèque de l’université de Leyde. Jan Cornelis Woudanus, circa 1570-1615.

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Excavations beginning in the late nineteenth century uncovered thousands of these tablets—filled with epic poems, hymns, fables, and myths. One tablet, found near the Sumerian city of Nippur and dated around 2000 B.C., was clearly identified as a library catalog by renowned Sumerian history and language expert S. N. Kramer. At just 2 1/2 by 1 1/2 in (6.5 by 4 cm), the tablet foreshadowed the use of small index cards in cataloging, and it was divided into two columns listing the titles of sixty-two literary works. Among these titles was the oldest surviving piece of Western literature, The Epic of Gilgamesh, which predates Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey by more than fifteen hundred years. The epic poem follows the adventures of the legendary king of Uruk through fierce battles and tender moments of friendship and grief as he attempts to make sense of his life.

What’s Your Type? by Merve Emre

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, behavioural economics, card file, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, emotional labour, fake news, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Gabriella Coleman, God and Mammon, Golden Gate Park, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, index card, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, means of production, Menlo Park, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, p-value, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, planned obsolescence, Ralph Waldo Emerson, scientific management, Socratic dialogue, Stanford prison experiment, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, women in the workforce

To discover the shade that best suited you, Katharine urged her reader to write down each type and its traits on a 3˝ × 5˝ index card, spread the cards across a flat surface, and arrange them vertically from most descriptive to least descriptive. Later, Isabel would further standardize the work of self-discovery with a questionnaire, but for now, Katharine believed that her readers possessed enough self-awareness to navigate her descriptions of Jung’s types on their own, sliding index cards up and down their dining room tables. The extraverted (E) sensing (S) type was an “extreme realist,” she summarized, “valuing above all material possession and concrete enjoyment.”

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Introverted (I) intuitives (N) could be found among the world’s “philosophers, religious leaders and prophets, artists, queer geniuses and cranks.” Their impulsive attitudes were counterbalanced by the practicality of the extraverted (E) thinkers (T), the “reformers, executives, systematists, and men of applied science.” If her reader recognized himself in one of these descriptions, he was to move the index card to the very top of the table, where it would stay until it was displaced by another, more appropriate type description. In its insistence on self-discovery as a civilizing form of self-mastery, “Meet Yourself” modeled a new genre of writing known as popular psychology: self-help in an era when the public demand for psychological counsel far outstripped the number of psychologists available to provide it.

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She believed she had made peace with her specialty in life, and, for the next several years, she would remain unencumbered by the kinds of psychological burdens that descended upon her mother and her amateur practice. CHAPTER FIVE Desperate Amateurs Like many analytic psychologists in the 1920s and 1930s, Katharine Briggs was fond of analyzing people’s dreams—indeed, she had developed a thoroughly scientific method of doing so. Every morning, she would remove a 3˝ × 5˝ index card from a stack she kept by the bed and turn expectantly to Lyman, who would then relay everything he remembered of the people, places, and events that had impressed themselves upon his sleeping mind. Katharine would then list the “dramatis personae”—the characters—in Lyman’s dreams before ascribing to each of them a deeper, more incisive meaning.

The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload by Daniel J. Levitin

Abraham Maslow, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anton Chekhov, autism spectrum disorder, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, big-box store, business process, call centre, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, complexity theory, computer vision, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Exxon Valdez, framing effect, friendly fire, fundamental attribution error, Golden Gate Park, Google Glasses, GPS: selective availability, haute cuisine, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, human-factors engineering, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, impulse control, index card, indoor plumbing, information retrieval, information security, invention of writing, iterative process, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, language acquisition, Lewis Mumford, life extension, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, more computing power than Apollo, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, optical character recognition, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, phenotype, placebo effect, pre–internet, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, shared worldview, Sheryl Sandberg, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, statistical model, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, traumatic brain injury, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, ultimatum game, Wayback Machine, zero-sum game

And importantly, “when information is organized in small chunks that can be accessed and sequenced at random it becomes much more valuable than when you have to take it in serial form. . . . They [the index cards] ensured that by keeping his head empty and keeping sequential formatting to a minimum, no fresh new unexplored ideas would be forgotten or shut out.” Of course our heads can never be truly empty, but the idea is powerful. We should off-load as much information to the external world as possible. Once you have a stack of index cards, you make it a point to sort them regularly. When there are a small number, you simply put them in the order in which you need to deal with them. With a larger number, you assign the index cards to categories. A modified version of the system that Ed Littlefield had me use for sorting his mail works: Things to do today Things to do this week Things that can wait Junk drawer It isn’t the names of the categories that are critical, it is the process of external categorization.

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Some people go crazy with the index card system and extend this to use different-colored cards for the different categories. But this makes it more difficult to move a card from one category to another, and the whole point of the 3 x 5 system is to maximize flexibility—any card should be able to be put anywhere in the stack. As your priorities change, you simply reorder the cards to put them in the order and the category you want. Little bits of information each get their own index card. Phaedrus wrote a whole book by putting ideas, quotes, sources, and other research results on index cards, which he called slips.

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If more information will remove that uncertainty, then figure out what that information is and how to obtain it, then—to keep the system working for you—put it on an index card. Maybe it’s talking to a few more homes, maybe it’s talking to other family members. Or maybe you just need time to let the information set in. In that case, you put a deadline on the decision card, say four days from now, and try to make the decision then. The essential point here is that during your daily sweep through the cards, you have to do something with that index card—you do something about it now, you put it in your abeyance pile, or you generate a new task that will help to move this project forward. The index card system is merely one of what must be an infinite number of brain extension devices, and it isn’t for everyone.

User Story Mapping: Discover the Whole Story, Build the Right Product by Jeff Patton, Peter Economy

anti-pattern, Ben Horowitz, business logic, business process, card file, index card, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, mail merge, minimum viable product, performance metric, software as a service, tacit knowledge

(Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing) describe the story process best: Card Write what you’d like to see in the software on a bunch of index cards. Conversation Get together and have a rich conversation about what software to build. Confirmation Together agree on how you’ll confirm that the software is done. If it sounds simple, it’s because it is. Just remember, simple isn’t easy. 1. Card Imagine you’re responsible for working with a team to get some software built. Imagine that software as best you can. Then, for each thing users want to do with the product, write a card. You’ll end up with a bunch of them. Kent’s original idea was to write them on index cards because it’s easy to organize a bunch of cards on a tabletop.

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We could even ask everyone, “Do you all agree with what’s written there?” and we might all say, “Yes! Yes, we do.” However, if we get together and talk, you can tell me what you think and I can ask questions. The talking goes better if we can externalize our thinking by drawing pictures or organizing our ideas using index cards or sticky notes. If we give each other time to explain our thoughts with words and pictures, we build shared understanding. It’s at this point, though, that we realize that we all understood things differently. That sucks. But at least now we know. It’s not that one person is right or wrong, but that we all see different and important aspects.

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Document to Help Remember I’ve heard people joke, “We’re using an Agile process because we’ve stopped writing documents.” It’s a joke for people who know, because a story-driven process needs lots of documents to work. But those documents don’t always look at all like traditional requirements documents. It takes talking and sketching and writing and working with sticky notes or index cards. It’s pointing to documents we brought into the conversation and marking them up with highlighter and scribbled notes. It’s interactive and high energy. If you’re sitting at a conference table while a single person types what you say into a story management system, you’re probably doing it wrong.

A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order by Judith Flanders

computer age, death from overwork, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, index card, Index librorum prohibitorum, invention of movable type, invention of the wheel, invention of writing, trade route, Y2K

F is for Firsts: From the Birth of Printing to Library Catalogues in the Fifteenth to Sixteenth Centuries 7. G is for Government: Bureaucracy and the Office, from the Sixteenth Century to the French Revolution 8. H is for History: Libraries, Research and Extracting in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries 9. I is for Index Cards: From Copy Clerks to Office Supplies in the Nineteenth Century 10. Y is for Y2K: From the Phone Book to Hypertext in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries Timeline Bibliography Footnotes Notes Index List of Illustrations IN THE TEXT 1. A round robin letter of 1621, petitioning for the right of Huguenots to settle in the New World. 2.

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They put the state, the ruler, at the centre of everything (an old idea), and then bureaucratized all of it (a new one). To do so, they broke with thousands of years of custom, moving from the bound manuscript and the printed ledger to the most basic unit, the precursor to so much of alphabetization in the future: the index card. 8 H is for History Libraries, Research and Extracting in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries In the mid-twentieth century, the medievalist C.S. Lewis summed up his view of the period he had studied for so long: ‘[M]ediaeval man,’ he wrote, ‘was not a dreamer . . . He was an organizer, a codifier, a builder of systems.

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For in the new world of science and technology, of the Enlightenment and of secular values, it had become obvious to many that there was not one single, divinely ordained route to knowledge, nor one single path of learning. Rather, readers, students and the learned could all, via the neutrality of alphabetical order, carve out their own paths. 9 I is for Index Cards From Copy Clerks to Office Supplies in the Nineteenth Century Between 1750 and 1850 the population of Europe increased by 70 per cent, from around 167 million to 284 million. In North America over the same period, the population soared from 2 million to 26 million.1 Driving this demographic boom, and in turn being driven by it, was increased trade.

The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, George Spafford

air freight, anti-work, antiwork, Apollo 13, business intelligence, business process, centre right, cloud computing, continuous integration, dark matter, database schema, DevOps, fail fast, friendly fire, Gene Kranz, index card, information security, inventory management, Kanban, Lean Startup, shareholder value, systems thinking, Toyota Production System

Thinking furiously, I finally say, “Let’s take a ten-minute break.” When we reconvene the meeting, I say, “We are not leaving this meeting without a list of authorized and scheduled changes that we’re implementing in the next thirty days. “As you can see, my assistant has brought in a pile of blank index cards. I want each group to write down every change they’re planning, one change per index card. I want three pieces of information: who is planning the change, the system being changed, and a one-sentence summary. “I’ve drawn a calendar on the whiteboard where we will eventually post approved changes according to their scheduled implementation,” I continue.

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I tell him about my attempts to get some sort of change process going and my attempt to elevate the discussion above how many fields there were on the change form, which then resulted in getting people to put their intended changes on index cards and our need to juggle them on the board. “Very good,” he says. “You’ve put together tools to help with the visual management of work and pulling work through the system. This is a critical part of the First Way, which is creating fast flow of work through Development and IT Operations. Index cards on a kanban board is one of the best mechanisms to do this, because everyone can see WIP. Now you must continually eradicate your largest sources of unplanned work, per the Second Way.”

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* * * I try to wave away the stench of failure as I walk to the CAB meeting. I’m still thinking about how I’m going to break the bad news to Wes and Patty when I walk into the conference room that Patty has coined the Change Coordination Room. All thoughts of Steve disappear when I see what’s there. Almost every area of the wall is now covered in whiteboards. Index cards cover nearly every inch of the whiteboards on two of the walls. It’s not just one deep—in some places there are hooks attached to the board, with ten cards hanging off them. On the conference room table are twenty, maybe even thirty, more piles of cards. On the far side of the table, two guys who work for Patty have their backs to us, studying a card.

Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

index card

JAMES BOSWELL, the Life of Samuel Johnson Contents Cover Other Books by This Author Title Page Copyright Dedication Foreword Pale Fire A POEM IN FOUR CANTOS Canto One Canto Two Canto Three Canto Four Commentary About the Author Books by Vladimir Nabokov Foreword Pale Fire, a poem in heroic couplets, of nine hundred ninety-nine lines, divided into four cantos, was composed by John Francis Shade (born July 5, 1898, died July 21, 1959) during the last twenty days of his life, at his residence in New Wye, Appalachia, U.S.A. The manuscript, mostly a Fair Copy, from which the present text has been faithfully printed, consists of eighty medium-sized index cards, on each of which Shade reserved the pink upper line for headings (canto number, date) and used the fourteen light-blue lines for writing out with a fine nib in a minute, tidy, remarkably clear hand, the text of his poem, skipping a line to indicate double space, and always using a fresh card to begin a new canto.

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I stared at his powdered cheeks, at the magical flower in his buttonhole where it had passed through a succession of different colors and had now become fixed as a white carnation, and especially at his marvelous fluid-looking fingers which could if he chose make his spoon dissolve into a sunbeam by twiddling it, or turn his plate into a dove by tossing it up in the air. Shade’s poem is, indeed, that sudden flourish of magic: my gray-haired friend, my beloved old conjurer, put a pack of index cards into his hat—and shook out a poem. To this poem we now must turn. My Foreword has been, I trust, not too skimpy. Other notes, arranged in a running commentary, will certainly satisfy the most voracious reader. Although those notes, in conformity with custom, come after the poem, the reader is advised to consult them first and then study the poem with their help, rereading them of course as he goes through its text, and perhaps, after having done with the poem, consulting them a third time so as to complete the picture.

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And I’ll turn down eternity unless The melancholy and the tenderness Of mortal life; the passion and the pain; The claret taillight of that dwindling plane Off Hesperus; your gesture of dismay 530 On running out of cigarettes; the way You smile at dogs; the trail of silver slime Snails leave or flagstones; this good ink, this rhyme, This index card, this slender rubber band Which always forms, when dropped, an ampersand, Are found in Heaven by the newlydead Stored in its strongholds through the years. Instead The Institute assumed it might be wise Not to expect too much of paradise: What if there’s nobody to say hullo To the newcomer, no reception, no 540 Indoctrination?

Clean Agile: Back to Basics by Robert C. Martin

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Boeing 737 MAX, c2.com, cognitive load, continuous integration, DevOps, disinformation, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, Frederick Winslow Taylor, index card, iterative process, Kanban, Kubernetes, loose coupling, microservices, remote working, revision control, scientific management, Turing machine

This is one of Ron Jeffries’ definitions of a story. Typically, we write the story on an index card. I know, I know. Why in the world would we use such ancient and primitive tools when we have computers and iPads and…? It turns out that being able to hold those cards in your hands, pass them across a table to each other, scribble on them, and otherwise handle them is immensely valuable. Automated tools do sometimes have their place, and I’ll talk about them in another chapter. For the moment, however, think of the stories as index cards. Please remember: World War II was managed3 on index cards, so I think the technique scales. 3. Well, to some extent anyway.

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Great tools do the following: Help people accomplish their objectives Can be learned “well enough” quickly Become transparent to users Allow adaptation and exaptation Are affordable We hold up Git here as an example of a great tool…as of 2019. You may be reading this in some future year, so remember that the landscape changes. Physical Agile Tools Agilists are known for using whiteboards, tape, index cards, markers, and various sizes of sticky notes (small and flip-chart-size) for visual management of their work. These simple “hand implements” have all the qualities of a great tool: They help make work in progress visible and manageable. They’re intuitive—no training required! They require negligible cognitive overhead.

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Yet, despite being feature rich and commercially successful, ALM tools utterly fail at being great. This failure provides a good cautionary tale. Great tools can be learned “well enough” quickly: ALMs tend to be complicated, usually demanding up-front training. (Hmm. We’re trying to remember the last index card training we attended.) Even with training, team members must often resort to searching the internet to figure out how to accomplish tasks that ought to be simple. Many acquiesce to the tool’s complexity, punt on digging any deeper to figure things out, and end up tolerating slow, clunky ways of working.

Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg

Air France Flight 447, Asperger Syndrome, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Black Swan, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Brooks, digital map, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, framing effect, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, index card, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, meta-analysis, new economy, power law, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, statistical model, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, theory of mind, Toyota Production System, William Langewiesche, Yom Kippur War

Once, when the writer Michael O’Donoghue was inordinately proud of an obscene commercial parody, Michaels ordered it read at eighteen different rehearsals—even though everyone knew the network’s censors would never let it on the air. “I remember walking up to Lorne once and saying, ‘Okay, here’s my idea, it’s a bunch of girls at their first slumber party and they are telling each other how sex works.’ And Lorne said, ‘Write it up,’ just like that, no questions asked. Then he took an index card and put it on the board for the next show.” That sketch—which appeared on Saturday Night Live on May 8, 1976—became one of the show’s most famous pieces. “I was on top of the world,” said Miller. “He’s got this social ESP. Sometimes he knows exactly what will make you feel like the most important person on earth.”

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Another attempt was suspended in 2010 after auditors concluded it would cost millions more simply to figure out why the system wasn’t working. A few years before Janssen was kidnapped, the agency’s databases were still so outdated that most agents didn’t even bother inputting the bulk of the information they collected during investigations. Instead, they used paper files and index cards, like their predecessors decades before. Then, in 2012, the bureau had rolled out Sentinel. Simply put, it was a system for sorting and managing evidence, clues, witness testimony, and the tens of thousands of other little pieces of information agents collected every day. Sentinel was tied into analytical engines and databases that the bureau and other law-enforcement agencies had developed to look for patterns.

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In fact, the EI was succeeding because teachers had been ordered to set aside those slick data tools and fancy software—and were told instead to start manipulating information by hand. Each school, under orders from the central office, had established a “data room”—in some cases, an empty conference room, in others, a large closet that had previously contained cleaning supplies—where teachers had to transcribe test scores onto index cards. They were told to draw graphs on butcher paper that was taped to walls. They ran impromptu experiments—Do test scores improve if kids are placed in smaller reading groups? What happens when teachers trade off classes?—and then scribbled the results onto whiteboards. Rather than simply receiving information, teachers were forced to engage with it.

Kanban in Action by Marcus Hammarberg, Joakim Sunden

Buckminster Fuller, business logic, call centre, continuous integration, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, index card, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Lean Startup, performance metric, place-making, systems thinking, the scientific method, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, Two Sigma

They can be big posters with charts showing the progress of a project, walls of index cards detailing the actions from a workshop, or whiteboards with columns showing a workflow, with stickies representing the work items. They’re placed so that the team can always see them, but they should also be easily accessible to stakeholders outside the team. The information radiator should be easy to keep up to date, so that it’s constantly updated with the necessary information and worth visiting. This is why many teams prefer hand-drawn charts and low-tech equipment such as whiteboards, papers, stickies, and index cards. Perhaps more importantly, this also makes it easy to continuously experiment with and improve the information radiator to make it fit your particular context.

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Why not create a good information radiator for all of this? Kanban teams use a lot of information radiators, but one that stands out as the most common and prominent is the board itself. 3.2.1. The board The basic board is a whiteboard or some empty wall space where you put up stickies or index cards to visualize your workflow and how the work is progressing. Update it frequently, so everyone can see and act on the most current information. Using a big board not only makes it a good information radiator, but also makes it easy for a group of people to simultaneously move things around, to discuss what is happening, to create new work items, and so on.

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In order to get a better overview of who’s working on what and the status of the work, you visualize the work—thereby making information visible that previously wasn’t. By far the most common way to track work items is to create a small card that represents the work that is being done. It can be an index card or a sticky note[1]: anything that is easy to work with and move around on a board, such as a white board. Cards on a board are a simple yet powerful way to see progress, bottlenecks, and queues happening in your workflow—and to make it in-your-face apparent to everyone what is happening. 1 For example, a Post-it® Note.

Comedy Writing Secrets by Mel Helitzer, Mark Shatz

Albert Einstein, built by the lowest bidder, David Sedaris, Donald Trump, elephant in my pajamas, fake news, fear of failure, index card, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, the scientific method, Yogi Berra

—Alan Coren To keep track of ideas and potential material, the humorist's toolbox typi¬ cally includes the following items: a note pad, index cards, a tape recorder, and a computer with Internet access. If you hope to sell your writing, you'll need a copy of Writer's Market, the bible of the publishing industry. Regardless of the tools you use, you'll need to devise a system for organizing your writing. The traditional method is to organize jokes by topics using some type of filing system. Milton Berle and Bob Hope each had a vault containing more than six million jokes on index cards sorted by topic. The digital alternatives to index cards are database or spreadsheet programs. 16 Comedy Writing Secrets If you plan to write more elaborate humor (such as columns, arti¬ cles, or scripts), there are a variety of software programs that can aid your writing.

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It's critical that you complete these exercises now, because they will be used throughout the next few chapters. •List your ten favorite comedians and humorists, and use the Internet to search for jokes or quotes by each of these individuals. • After you amass twenty jokes, write each joke on an index card. On the back of each card, identify the subject or target of the joke, and explain why you think the joke is funny. This exercise will help you become aware of the format of successful jokes and provide you with insight into your own comedic preferences. • Collect ten to fifteen cartoons or comic strips and tape each one on a separate piece of paper.

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. • found missing • living dead • good grief • working vacation • larger half • soft rock • extinct life • Microsoft Works • plastic glasses • alone together • exact estimate • taped live • small crowd • even odds SHOWTIME Words are the instruments or humorists, and mastering the subtleties of language is a necessary step to becoming a successful humor writer. Use the following exercises to practice your POWs. • Search a dictionary for ten words that you do not know the definitions for. Don't look at the definitions! Write each word on an index card, and on the back of the card, create a logical but whimsical definition. • Search the Internet for clichés, proverbs, or common phrases that relate to the potential humor targets you identified in the last chapter. Compile a list of ten items. Using the techniques described in this POW: Play on Words 73 chapter, reform the clichés into jokes by changing the original ending or adding on to the phrase.

When the Air Hits Your Brain: Tales From Neurosurgery by Frank Vertosick

butterfly effect, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, index card, medical residency, planned obsolescence, random walk, sparse data, zero-sum game

Several minutes later, a frenetic figure darted to the table, his tray rattling in front of him, the coffee flying out of his cup. He had a boyish face and blond hair. This was clearly Eric, the intern, late for morning card rounds. Carl cast a perturbed look at the intern, pulled his own stack of index cards from his lab coat pocket, and began the daily litany. “Beckinger, room nine.” Eric flipped through his cards, locating Beckinger. I surmised that Beckinger was someone on the floor—Eric’s responsibility. “She’s fine, afebrile, no headache, no face pain, wound is dry. She’s now four days out from surgery.”

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As I expected, the problem for the night. Surgical soap stained her scrawny little body orange from her neck to feet. Heating lamps dangled above the bed, to restore warmth to her frigid body. She looked like a little cornish hen roasting under the heat lamps of a delicatessen. Maggie handed me an index card. “Here, I’ve calculated the doses of the resuscitation drugs for her weight. I think everything is there—epi, bicarb, bretylium…The nurses know the defib settings, they’ll help you with that. You’ve taken infant CPR? Good. You’ll need it. She’s going to have a rough night, but if she makes it twelve or twenty-four hours, she has a shot.

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I escorted him down the hall to Andy’s room. “I’ve got something to show you.” We went into the room, where Andy lay motionless, his belly bulging and his eyes closed. He still had a tracheal breathing tube and had not stirred a muscle since his Monday surgery. “So?” Gary was impassive as he flipped through his index cards of patient data. I vigorously rubbed Andy’s chest with my knuckles, which prompted Andy to open his eyes and grab at my arm. The chief resident was startled. “Jesus Christ, the poor bastard’s awake.” “That’s right,” I said, flashing a grin. I pulled a large wad of toilet paper from my white lab jacket and handed it to Gary.

Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries by Kory Stamper

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, company town, index card, microaggression, natural language processing, obamacare, Ronald Reagan, Steven Pinker, why are manhole covers round?

And so we begin to define. As we grow, we grind words into finer grist. We learn to pair the word “cat” with “meow”; we learn that lions and leopards are also called “cats,” though they have as much in common with your long-haired Persian house cat as a teddy bear has with a grizzly bear. We set up a little mental index card that lists all the things that come to mind when someone says the word “cat,” and then when we learn that in parts of Ireland bad weather is called “cat,” our eyes widen and we start stapling little slips of addenda to that card. At heart, we are always looking for that one statement that captures the ineffable, universal catness represented by the word “cat,” the thing that encompasses the lion “cat” and the domestic-lazybones “cat” and the bad weather in Ireland, too.

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At Merriam-Webster, every editor has the same set of tools at their desk: a personalized date stamp, with your last name and the date, which is how you sign and date any physical thing that crosses your desk; a fistful of pens and pencils (including a few stubby old Stabilo pencils, formerly used to mark insertions and deletions on shiny-papered galleys and now hoarded against the coming Pencil Apocalypse); and a box of three-by-five index cards in pink, yellow, white, and blue. The colors are not to make your tan-gray cubicle festive; they have a purpose. White cards are for citations, any little slip of English usage that you want to make note of. Blue cards are for production reference. Yellow cards, or buffs, as we call them, are for drafted definitions only.

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At Merriam-Webster, the citation files are both paper and electronic; the paper citation files take up a solid third of the floor and date back to the mid-nineteenth century. I dragged my finger over the drawer labels until I found the one that housed all the paper citations for “irregardless,” then slid it open. It’s pretty unlikely, I thought, plucking a stack of index cards from the file, that “irregardless” was an intensive form of “regardless,” but I should do my due diligence. Almost immediately, I ran across this snippet of use: I remembered the magnitude of his problems—problems I was just beginning to truly understand—as a black man and as an artist, growing up poor, forced to endure the racist terrorism of the American South.

Fluent Forever: How to Learn Any Language Fast and Never Forget It by Gabriel Wyner

card file, crowdsourcing, en.wikipedia.org, index card, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, language acquisition, machine translation, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, pattern recognition, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Skype, spaced repetition, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Yogi Berra

Some cards’ final intervals will wobble between two and four months. This doesn’t turn out to be a big deal; if you have a problem remembering a card, it will return often enough to work its way into your long-term memory, and if not, then huzzah, you remembered it. Here’s what you’ll need: • A whole bunch of index cards (at least a couple thousand) • A large index card box or file • Eight index card dividers, labeled “New,” “Level 1,” “Level 2,” and so on, up to “Level 7” • A calendar • A trusty set of pens and/or pencils (colors can help you make more memorable pictures) Your index file will look like this: The Rules of the Game Your Leitner box is a flash card game.

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You’ve also downloaded and installed my demo deck, so your main job involves finding information and recordings, putting them in the right boxes, and clicking the Add Flash Cards button. If you’ve chosen a Leitner box, you’ve read Appendix 3, gone out to your local office supply store, and purchased your materials. You have an index card file-box full of dividers, a stack of blank index cards, some pencils, and a calendar in front of you (today is day 1!). You also remember my earlier caveat: Since paper flash cards can’t talk, you’re going to take extra care to learn a phonetic alphabet and to listen to recordings of example words when you write your flash cards.

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(Three feet tall, between twenty-two and forty pounds.) Could the dodo fly? (Nope.) And so on. The more ways you study the same information, the better you know your material. I want you to become an expert in your language, but you should have some fun in the process. So I’m going to make some changes to this tired, index-card-shaped theme. First and foremost, we’re sticking all of your flash cards into an SRS, which will tell you when to study each and every card. As we discussed in Chapter 2, this makes them a lot more effective and a lot more fun. You’re playing a constant game with yourself, trying to see how long you can go before you forget one of your cards.

Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business by David J. Anderson

airport security, anti-pattern, business intelligence, call centre, collapse of Lehman Brothers, continuous integration, corporate governance, database schema, domain-specific language, index card, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, knowledge worker, lateral thinking, loose coupling, performance metric, six sigma, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, Toyota Production System, transaction costs

This is a specific example of reducing the chance-cause variation in the Extreme Programming method by asking the team to standardize user story writing around a given template. By doing so, Tim changed the rules of the game. The original rules asked team members to write stories on index cards in narrative form, and the new rules asked them to continue with index cards but to follow a specific sentence format. These changes are quite clearly under the influence and control of local managers. They are internal to the system. The size of a user story is controlled by chance-cause variation. Work Item Type Mix When all work is treated the same, and perhaps called by a single type, there is likely to be greater variation in size, effort, risk, or other factors.

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More often the signal is generated from a software work-tracking system. Chapter 6 provides examples of the mechanics of kanban systems as they apply to IT work. Card walls have become a popular visual control mechanism in Agile software development, as shown in Figure 2.1. Using either a cork notice board with index cards pinned to a board, or a whiteboard with sticky notes to track work-in-progress (WIP) has become commonplace. It’s worth observing at this early stage that despite some commentary in the community to the contrary, these card walls are not inherently kanban systems. They are merely visual control systems.

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Class of service determines priority within the system. Classes of service allow for a self-organizing, value- and risk-optimized approach to prioritization and “re-planning.” Typical Class-of-Service Definitions Classes of service are typically defined based on business impact. Different-colored sticky notes, index cards, or tickets are assigned to each class and clearly signify the class of service of any given request, as in Figure 11.1; otherwise, separate swim lanes are drawn on the card wall to signify membership in a class of service. Figure 11.1 Card wall showing colored tickets to signify class of service Each class of service comes with its own set of policies that affect how items are prioritized when they are pulled through the kanban system.

The Internet Is Not the Answer by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bob Geldof, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, computer age, connected car, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, data science, David Brooks, decentralized internet, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Hacker Ethic, happiness index / gross national happiness, holacracy, income inequality, index card, informal economy, information trail, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, libertarian paternalism, lifelogging, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, nonsequential writing, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, packet switching, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer rental, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Potemkin village, power law, precariat, pre–internet, printed gun, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, the medium is the message, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, work culture , working poor, Y Combinator

There’s nothing high-tech about either the office’s dingy, cramped rooms or the electric typewriters, rotary telephones, and primitive switchboards on all of its desks. In spite of Mielke’s order to network its information, much of Stasi’s data in 1989 was still confined to handwritten or typed index cards. The museum even has an index card on display written by Mielke’s secretary explaining what the Stasi chief liked to eat for breakfast. But for all its millions of meticulously transcribed index cards, East Germany’s former ministry of surveillance is as much an introduction to the digital future as it is a look back at the analog past. As a museum displaying how technology was used to acquire other people’s data, the Stasi museum—in our age of data-hungry multinationals like Google and Facebook and big data agencies like NSA and GCHQ—has contemporary relevance.

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Erich Honecker, the head of the East German Communist Party, who liked to think of his country as more technically advanced than the capitalist West, even though its main business model and source of foreign currency was selling its citizens to West Germany, wanted to “start collating computerized files and reports” on all sixteen and a half million people in East Germany.2 The historian Victor Sebestyen describes this as a “computerized snooping system.” Its intention was to digitize the 39 million index cards and 125 miles of documents containing more than 2 billion sheets of paper.3 The goal was a computer system that knew everything about everyone in the country. By the mideighties, Mielke’s Stasi had become the largest company in East Germany, employing around 100,000 full-time snoops and at least another half a million active informers.

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It never occurred to him that billions of people globally might freely give up their most personal data. And he didn’t understand that there were much more scalable strategies for aggregating people’s photos than by disguising cameras inside watering cans. No, to create a truly global crystal man, it wasn’t enough to put a hundred thousand spies on your payroll and have 39 million handwritten index cards. On the Internet, an electronic world of increasingly intelligent connected machines that Nicholas Carr calls a “Glass Cage,” there are billions of “gläserne Menschen.” And, it seems, they are all willing to work for free. The Eyes of the Venetian In Las Vegas, there isn’t a casino built around the theme of either East Germany or the Berlin Wall, surprisingly enough.

Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet by Claire L. Evans

4chan, Ada Lovelace, air gap, Albert Einstein, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Charles Babbage, colonial rule, Colossal Cave Adventure, computer age, crowdsourcing, D. B. Cooper, dark matter, dematerialisation, Doomsday Book, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, East Village, Edward Charles Pickering, game design, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Haight Ashbury, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, junk bonds, knowledge worker, Leonard Kleinrock, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, Network effects, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, PalmPilot, pets.com, rent control, RFC: Request For Comment, rolodex, San Francisco homelessness, semantic web, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telepresence, The Soul of a New Machine, Wayback Machine, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Y2K

The Berkeley Barb ran back-page ads for resistance organizations, and a group called the Haight-Ashbury Switchboard had even built a sophisticated phone tree in the late 1960s, linking human “switchboards” to one another to help distraught families track down their wandering hippie kids. This grew into an informal network of interest-specific Switchboards in the Bay Area, one of which, the San Francisco Switchboard, had offices at Project One. With a couple of phones and boxes of index cards, it coordinated extensive group action for quick-response incidents like the 1971 San Francisco Bay oil spill—an early version of the kind of organizing that happens so easily today on social media. Resource One took up where these efforts left off, even inheriting the San Francisco Switchboard’s corporate shell.

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She was intrigued by the sheer volume of information, and the seemingly Sisyphean task of organizing it into a useful database. Realizing she was more interested in information itself than in chemistry, she took a job at Stanford helping scholars with technical research—gathering reprints and running around to different libraries before summarizing her findings on index cards, much as a search engine works today. At Stanford, Jake worked in a basement lab. It wasn’t long before an upstairs neighbor, Douglas Engelbart, began popping down to her office for organizational advice. Engelbart had invented a computer system called NLS (oNLine System) in the late 1960s, a predecessor to the modern personal computer in both form and philosophy, and the first system to incorporate a mouse and a keyboard into its design.

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“And I’d say, ‘What are all those people doing upstairs, staring at television sets?’” Whatever it was, it made technical research look boring. One day, when Engelbart came down to visit her office, Jake asked him for a job. He told her he didn’t have one, but he kept her in mind and, six months later, he came back. “I have a job now,” he announced. It had nothing to do with index cards; instead, Douglas Engelbart introduced Jake Feinler to the wild new world of networked computing. Her life would never be the same. In the fall of 1969, one of Engelbart’s machines had been on the receiving end of the first transmission between two host computers on the ARPANET. The connection crashed halfway through, truncating that very first Internet message from LOGIN to the somewhat more prophetic LO.

The Mad Man: Or, the Mysteries of Manhattan by Samuel R. Delany

affirmative action, Berlin Wall, East Village, gentrification, index card, Pepto Bismol, place-making, publish or perish, rent stabilization, sexual politics

And in the letters I wrote back, I pretended—to him, to myself—I, too, was galvanized: Dear Irving, Maybe what would pull my thesis together is a chapter on the relation between cantos seven through nine of Adler’s long poem “Meridian” and Hasler’s two “predicate negation” papers. After all, the poem and the papers were all written in the summer of ‘71—when Hasler and Adler were together at Breakers’ Point. The fact is, I’ve already got more than forty pages of notes and a box of index cards on the topic. To sit down, to put it into readable shape—possibly to show it to the Old Poet herself for comment (you say she’s suddenly become amenable to us—well, to you—after all this time) might get my part of the project on track! And it wouldn’t impinge on your work .... It also galvanized Almira Adler.

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The paradox was—to me—that I’d have trusted the scholar who’d first inquired of her far more than I would have the scholar of today—and, though I could not have said so to him, I suspected Mossman felt the same. That scholar had had a purpose, a passion, a sense of enterprise. The scholar of today had a jumble of notes, a welter of contradictory information: in my case that was five plastic boxes full of index cards labeled “problems” and not a jot of drive to solve them—in short, what / had, at any rate, was the imponderable wreckage of a project, over which your current scholar sat and gazed, like a sphinx whose ineffable secret was that the years’”work” making me, in the eyes of friends and colleagues, if not of people like the Old Poet and Mossman, a “serious Hasler scholar,” had also made me—in my own eyes—a gibbering, jerking, half-blind creature, buried under the contradictions, stalled in the gaps, paralyzed by the sheer unknowability of the fast-fading shadows that were the dense, lingering texts of Timothy Hasler.

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Here in Ann Arbor the good weather and the snow pulse, one after the other—a day of one, a day of the other, now filling the streets with students, now all but emptying them of everything but wind ... Really, I wasn’t paying a lot of attention to what I was reading. It was more like taking in a sentence here, another there. ... The daunting stack of index cards in their red rubber band that so far make up “The Mad Man” have sat by my bed, accusing me of their incompletion, now in Chicago, now at Breakers’ Point, now in New York. 256 have so far been completed—though I haven’t really worked on it in a couple of months ... ... In four thousand years, writing has made of us a social animal to dwarf the bee and the ant ... ...

Learn Python the Hard Way by Zed Shaw

complexity theory, finite state, functional programming, index card, web application

Notice that you used your functions the way you use things like exists, open, and other "commands". In fact, I've been tricking you because in Python those "commands" are just functions. This means you can make your own commands and use them in your scripts too. Extra Credit Write out a function checklist for later exercises. Write these on an index card and keep it by you while you complete the rest of these exercises or until you feel you do not need it: Did you start your function definition with def? Does your function name have only characters and _ (underscore) characters? Did you put an open parenthesis ( right after the function name?

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Here's a tip on how to memorize something without going insane: Do a tiny bit at a time throughout the day and mark down what you need to work on most. Do not try to sit down for two hours straight and memorize these tables. This won't work. Your brain will really only retain whatever you studied in the first 15 or 30 minutes anyway. Instead, what you should do is create a bunch of index cards with each column on the left on one side (True or False) and the column on the right on the back. You should then pull them out, see the "True or False" and be able to immediately say "True!" Keep practicing until you can do this. Once you can do that, start writing out your own truth tables each night into a notebook.

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What I've done here is written out all the Python symbols and keywords that are important to know. In this lesson take each keyword, and first try to write out what it does from memory. Next, search online for it and see what it really does. It may be hard because some of these are going to be impossible to search for, but keep trying. If you get one of these wrong from memory, write up an index card with the correct definition and try to "correct" your memory. If you just didn't know about it, write it down, and save it for later. Finally, use each of these in a small Python program, or as many as you can get done. The key here is to find out what the symbol does, make sure you got it right, correct it if you do not, then use it to lock it in.

Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success by Shane Snow

3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, attribution theory, augmented reality, barriers to entry, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, fail fast, Fellow of the Royal Society, Filter Bubble, Ford Model T, Google X / Alphabet X, hive mind, index card, index fund, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, Neil Armstrong, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, popular electronics, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, social bookmarking, Steve Jobs, superconnector, vertical integration

While his brothers experimented with cigarettes and alcohol, young Edwards began fixating on something a little lower to the ground: sneakers. By sixth grade, he was drawing shoes every day. He drew them on three-by-five index cards. “It was the perfect size to draw a shoe on,” he said. He would sit a shoe down in front of him and try to copy it perfectly. He’d study the footwear of his sports heroes, like Pittsburgh Steelers running back Franco Harris, who wore PONY shoes. All through middle school, Edwards kept sketching. His math teacher, Mrs. Weathers, often busted him drawing sneakers during class. She would take the index cards away. When he got to high school—countless sketches later—he was nudged out of art class because he was better than the teacher.

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To his delight, the temp agency placed him as a file clerk at LA Gear, a shoe brand founded in 1983 by a man named Robert Greenberg. Day in and out, Edwards filed paperwork. But one day, the company installed suggestion boxes around the office to solicit employee feedback. One of the boxes was right by his desk. Edwards began putting his index cards into it. Every day, he dropped a new shoe sketch through the slit of that wooden box, asking for feedback on each design. Nobody responded. But Edwards persisted. After six months, Greenberg called Edwards into his office. On his desk was a stack of Edwards’s sketches. What school did you learn to do this at?

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D’WAYNE EDWARDS USED ALL the principles of Smartcuts to change his and others’ lives, sometimes intentionally, often not. He made his own path, found leverage to do more in less time, and swung for the fences. And now his students are paying it forward. What we put on our feet matters. But what Edwards has done transcends footwear. More than 20 years after he started putting those index cards in the LA Gear suggestion box, he’s sold all the shoes he could dream of. What matters most at the end of the day is not how many sneakers he’s shipped, but how many people he’s helped become a little bigger or better. I hope we, too, can use the principles in this book to improve our lives and careers.

Discardia: More Life, Less Stuff by Dinah Sanders

A. Roger Ekirch, Atul Gawande, big-box store, Boris Johnson, carbon footprint, clean water, clockwatching, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, credit crunch, do what you love, endowment effect, Firefox, game design, Inbox Zero, income per capita, index card, indoor plumbing, Internet Archive, Kevin Kelly, late fees, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, Merlin Mann, Open Library, post-work, side project, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand

Keep that fare amount and $20—enough for an emergency taxi ride—separate from the rest of your cash in your wallet. Set yourself up for smooth sailing even when the seas get rough. Don’t give yourself a hard time for not keeping things in your head. Make a list. Your brain isn’t meant to carry all that stuff around; it’s meant for thinking and working on the stuff on your list. Keep some index cards or other small note-taking supplies with you and put them next to the phone and the computer. Write yourself notes. Leave yourself voicemails. Send yourself emails. It’s fine. No one remembers everything. Really. Symptom #6: Procrastination Solution #6: Bottom Line: Deeds are Better Joining a Facebook group about creative productivity is like buying a chair about jogging.

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Keep the core items at the ready If you have different kits for different purposes—for example, a purse, a laptop bag, and an errand satchel—set each up with the things you always need so you only have to transfer your unique items when you head out. I move my wallet, phone, and key ring to the appropriate bag knowing that it already has a pen, handkerchief, index cards for notes, business cards, and a comb. This is one place a little redundancy makes a lot of sense. Optimize for what you really do need often and what would be a serious hassle if you needed it and didn’t have it. Then keep fine-tuning to keep up with changes. It’s amazing how fast you can collect random stuff and carry it around constantly.

…

Now my instinctive action corresponds to my desired result. Once again, grease the slope toward where you want to be so that your easiest, most automatic behavior takes you there instead of hitting a wall. Got an annoying commute? Upgrade it by carrying music, earphones, reading material, and the means to jot down notes about ideas. (A smartphone, index cards, and a pen will give you all this functionality.) Peppermints or other flavorful scented candy can also reduce the impact of an unpleasant situation. Maybe that sweaty guy fresh from his gym has nowhere else to sit on the train than beside you, but at least you don’t have to spend the whole ride smelling him.

Marriage and Lasting Relationships With Asperger's Syndrome: Successful Strategies for Couples or Counselors by Eva A. Mendes

airport security, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, deliberate practice, index card, job satisfaction, Lao Tzu, neurotypical, theory of mind

If the children are with us, which they always are, I’m even more on edge.” In order to ease things for John, his wife and him came up with a detailed, written sequence of events and a list of “to dos” for him on each leg of the trip. I advised John to write everything on a three by five (about 7 cm by 12 cm) inch index card. “Armed with the index card in my pocket, I had a much better trip this time,” John reported, “I felt less anxious knowing I had a plan for what was next.” Medications Medications can alleviate anxiety, treat depression, and even reduce the obsessiveness and rage that the partner with ASD might struggle with.

…

THE APPRECIATION AND GRATITUDE EXERCISE™ 1.Each partner may separately create a list of things that they appreciate and are grateful for in their partner. This list can include anything and everything; nothing is too big or small! Don’t worry if you only start with a few items. 2.Write down the list on a piece of paper or index card, or use your smartphone or computer, to easily access it—at least twice a day. The more places you post it, the more likely you are to use it. 3.As you practice appreciation and gratitude, every day, twice a day, it can easily become second nature to how you think. You may find that you are more easily able to notice the positive qualities and behaviors of your partner.

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APPENDIX I THE APPRECIATION AND GRATITUDE EXERCISE™ 1.Each partner may separately create a list of things that they appreciate and are grateful for in his/her partner. This list can include anything and everything; nothing is too big or small! Don’t worry if you only start with a few items. 2.You can either write down the list on a piece of paper or index card, or use your smartphone or computer, to easily access it—at least twice a day. The more places you post it, the more likely you are to use it. 3.As you practice appreciation and gratitude, every day, twice a day, it can easily become second nature to how you think. You may find that you are more easily able to notice the positive qualities and behaviors of your partner.

The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars by Dava Sobel

Albert Einstein, card file, Cepheid variable, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Dava Sobel, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Charles Pickering, Ernest Rutherford, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, index card, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, luminiferous ether, Magellanic Cloud, pattern recognition, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson

In the interim she filed them by telescope and by type—the chart plates that mapped each section of the sky, the group spectra, the individual bright spectra, the star trails, and so on—each one in a brown paper envelope, each envelope labeled by number, date, and other identifying details, all of which were repeated on index cards in a card catalogue. Rather than pile the plates in columns, she stood them on edge for easy access. Reason to revisit one or another stored plate arose daily as the assistants examined, measured, discussed, and performed computations upon each new batch of photographs. When, for example, Mrs. Fleming spotted a spectrum that struck her as characteristic of a variable star, she did not need to wait for future observations to confirm her hypothesis.

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Miss Cannon collected all the magnitude determinations made by coworkers and correspondents, and merged them with those of enthusiasts at overseas observatories, from Potsdam to Cape Town, who published their results in professional journals such as the Astronomische Nachrichten and the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Since 1900, when she took charge of Harvard’s variable star card catalogue, she had added twenty thousand new index cards. In 1903 she turned the whole unwieldy database into a series of tables that could be read by any interested party. Miss Cannon’s opus, “A Provisional Catalogue of Variable Stars,” appeared in the Annals and enjoyed immediate wide distribution. Numerous other variable star catalogues, including three by Seth Carlo Chandler, had preceded Miss Cannon’s, and yet she called hers “provisional.”

…

Miss Cannon’s Acousticon carbon hearing aid enabled her to enjoy all these things. Sometimes she brought Miss Leland or another coworker home from the observatory to lunch with “Sissie.” As Miss Cannon searched the deep space of the map plates for new variables, she continued her telescope observations and augmented her index card collection. Having twice updated her “Provisional Catalogue of Variable Stars” to append the new crops of 1903 and 1904, she hardly expected her “Second Catalogue of Variable Stars,” published in 1907, to be her final word on the subject. Miss Cannon was a census taker in the midst of a population explosion.

Dirty Work by Gabriel Weston

battle of ideas, index card, Rubik’s Cube

Surely, my judges wouldn’t look this equable if she were dead? All the room settles for a moment around my fear, and my fear changes too. Oh, please don’t let me be undoctored. Do not strike me off, erase me, make me nothing. I was good at all those exams. I kept boxes of index cards, packed full of medical facts, all colour-coded. And now I will prepare the ghosts of index cards in my mind. A pink for my patient. A blue for me. I will record only crucial facts since I know I cannot expect to catch every detail. With this wandering, this unravelling, there is only so much I can achieve. The middle-aged woman, who reminds me of Boadicea, is a surgeon called Miss Mansfield.

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I looked at what they wore. When others went to the canteen for lunch, I headed for the library and surreptitiously ate my sandwiches while reading a big book with a jazzy font called Gems of Clinical Governance from cover to cover. When I needed the loo, I took an extra minute there to study one of the index cards I carried in my pocket at all times, which outlined key steps for handling every emergency of my specialty. On my way home in the evening, I stopped at the municipal pool and mouthed my responses to classic interview questions, my lips billowing oddly against the chlorine, staring goggle-eyed at the steep slant of the pool’s base as if I were facing my interviewers, undeterred by the plasters and occasional panty-liner I saw dotted there.

Testing Extreme Programming by Lisa Crispin, Tip House

business logic, c2.com, continuous integration, data acquisition, database schema, Donner party, Drosophila, fail fast, hypertext link, index card, job automation, systems thinking, web application

How does this relate to my project? I can keep track of a story on an index card, but what if my management is in a different location and wants to see this information? What if I'm doing a project for an external customer, and stakeholders at that organization want to see the stories? This tool would allow them to do that. What business problem is it solving? How does it solve it? Index cards work great for small, self-contained projects, where everyone who needs to know the status of a story can simply walk in and look at the index cards and talk to the team. If my team is split across two or more locations, I need some way for everyone to see the stories.

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These data and metrics are available to all interested stakeholders online. For example, if an upper-level manager of the business wants to know how the current iteration is progressing, he can log into XTrack and see. Teams split across various locations can track tasks, stories, and iterations for a project. Using index cards or some other offline means of documenting these artifacts won't work if team members aren't all located in the same place. It maintains historical information about each project. For example, the team can look back during a retrospective and see whether they're getting better at accurately estimating stories.

Gamers at Work: Stories Behind the Games People Play by Morgan Ramsay, Peter Molyneux

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, book value, collective bargaining, Colossal Cave Adventure, do what you love, financial engineering, game design, Golden age of television, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, index card, Mark Zuckerberg, oil shock, pirate software, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, Steve Jobs, Von Neumann architecture

Earl got a series of index cards. He had a college kid help him do it. He had index cards on how each pitcher did against each hitter. Earl had more detailed statistical knowledge than other managers did, and he used that to influence his decisions. That’s thinking mathematically. There was one time sitting in his office, which was one of the great experiences in my life. Imagine you’re sitting with one of the most famous thinkers in the world on a topic that you’re interested in, and he reaches into his desk and pulls out a stack of index cards. If it were economics, that stack of index cards might be what won him the Nobel Prize.

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If it were economics, that stack of index cards might be what won him the Nobel Prize. Earl Weaver is in the Hall of Fame. One of the reasons he’s in the Hall of Fame is because of his stacks of index cards. He reached into his desk, pulled out his index cards, and showed them to me, which he normally wouldn’t do. That was a fabulous, fabulous moment. Eddie and I had access to that level of feedback from Weaver, so that was fabulous. La Russa is a very different sort of a manager. People would say that you couldn’t have two managers who were successful but who were more different. Their careers only overlapped for a few years in baseball, but what they have in common is that they both think very mathematically.

Small Space Organizing: A Room by Room Guide to Maximizing Your Space by Kathryn Bechen

estate planning, index card, McMansion, new economy, Pepto Bismol

When I redecorated my bathroom in all-white this past year, I bought several small white vases and pitchers. I stood my hair gel and hand lotion in the vases and put my reading glasses in a pitcher. Another pitcher holds my cell phone while it’s recharging. I bought a white china serving tray to use on my hubby’s bathroom vanity to hold his keys, eyeglasses, and the love notes I write him on index cards. Pump soap dispensers are always neater and more sanitary than soap dishes. Clear glass containers with lids attractively hold cotton balls and prevent them from getting dusty. I use a clear antique spoon holder to store Q-tips. I have also put them in an antique floral creamer that was just the right size.

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If you love color, why not buy purple file folders and colored paperclips? (Although be aware that colored file folders often go out of vogue and then go out of stock.) My own home office supplies, for example, include green polka-dotted binder clips, a beautiful peach floral clipboard, brightly colored index cards for notes, floral notepads, hot-pink mailing envelopes, and of course, my favorite hot-pink roller ball pens! The point is, whatever your taste, you can find it these days in office supplies—so why not integrate them into your home office to make it more fun? Office Equipment and Supply List To make it easy for you to shop, I’ve included a list of office equipment and supplies on pages 227–29.

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Home Office Equipment and Supplies List Desk Area Comfortable desk with drawers Comfortable desk chair Office armoire Attractive slipcover for desk chair All-in-one machine (or separate machines) Computer and printer Fax machine Phone Cell phone Drawer trays to divide and hold supplies in desk (silverware trays work great) Paper clips Binder clips Highlighters (yellow are best as they do not show through on photocopies) Post-it flags to mark pages in books or on photocopies Scotch tape Carton cutter Post-it notes in several sizes and colors Pencil sharpener Rubber bands Letter divider to hold envelopes, Post-it notes, etc. Mugs to hold pens, letter opener, etc. Wall calendar Task lighting Stapler Staples Pens (Uni-ball brand roller ball pens are great and come in several colors) Scissors Paintbrush to dust desk and computer keys Index cards for capturing ideas and taking notes Pencils Phone message pad Business card holder Business cards Notecards with your logo to write thank-you notes Legal size mailing envelopes Letterhead or stationery Small spiral notebooks for notes Notepads Glue stick Liquid Paper correction fluid Postage stamps and holder Paperweight Calculator Bold permanent marker pen Planner calendar with address book (either paper or electronic—whatever works for you) Caddy to hold hanging file folders Manila file folders Manila file pockets Green hanging files Green hanging files—box bottom Clear label holders for green hanging files Bookcases Three-ring binders with clear pocket on front (1", 2", 3" sizes in white) Handheld label maker for binder labels Three-hole punch Bookends Photo boxes (hold a lot of miscellaneous supplies and can be labeled by topic) Wicker baskets (hold supplies nicely) Magazine holders Files Two-drawer cabinets are low and can be put side-by-side like a credenza and the top used to sort papers etc.

The Blue Cascade: A Memoir of Life After War by Mike Scotti

Bear Stearns, call centre, collateralized debt obligation, Donald Trump, fixed income, friendly fire, index card, information security, London Interbank Offered Rate, military-industrial complex, rent control

But I had used the momentum of the exercise and all of its bathing and cleansing properties, and the compassion of people who were now my friends, to reboot it. I had pressed a button and sent a shockwave of good chemicals through my system—just as an infantry battalion, when it’s fighting the way it should be, sends a shockwave through its enemy. After the run, I climbed the stairs to my apartment and grabbed an index card and a marker. I wrote the word on the index card and taped it to my mirror underneath the other pieces of paper. And when I read it, my heart skipped a beat. Reset. * * * My mom called me one day and said she wanted to tell me a story about my dad. “Your father had an idea the other night of writing a story about what it’s like for parents when their child goes to war.

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O’Brien Chief Credit Officer Global Head of Credit Risk Management Member—Chairman’s Board and Management Council He was just a few rungs from the very top of the entire 63,000-​employee, $60-billion-per-year multinational investment bank. He was like a general. A guy like that could snap his fingers and change your whole life, I thought. After asking the HR folks if they needed any help, I headed inside to review the list of MDs that I had scribbled using a small golfer’s pencil on the single 3 × 5 index card that I carried in my pocket. The index card was less bulky than a notebook and didn’t ruin the lines of my suit. It was also easy to quickly and discreetly check between ass-kissing circles because it didn’t need to be unfolded. One of my buddies showed up a few minutes later. Our conversation easily accompanied the stress and mild form of insanity that was the fall MBA recruiting season.

Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made by Jason Schreier

cloud computing, crowdsourcing, game design, Google Hangouts, gravity well, imposter syndrome, index card, inventory management, iterative process, Kickstarter, pirate software, side project, SimCity, spice trade, trade route

During this process, Straley and Druckmann brought in a rotation of designers and cowriters, both to help plot the story and so they’d get a feel for who could replace them as directors when they eventually left the project. For weeks, they’d meet in the same room, assembling index cards on a big board that became their Uncharted 4 bible. Each index card contained a story beat or scene idea—one midgame sequence, for example, was just called “epic chase”—and taken together, they told the game’s entire narrative. “One thing we’ve never done here is sat down and written down an entire script for the whole game start to front,” said Josh Scherr, a writer who sat with Straley and Druckmann for many of these meetings.

…

“They had a plan, a clear plan, and they expressed it to the team. It instilled confidence. As sad as it was to see the team that had such a long history with the franchise leaving, [we could] see the future and the light at the end of the tunnel.” Over the next few weeks, Straley and Druckmann sat in a conference room and stared at index cards, trying to craft a new version of Uncharted 4’s story. They’d decided to keep Nathan Drake’s brother, Sam, but they wanted to make him less of a villain. Instead, he’d serve as a temptation, as the catalyst that got Nathan Drake out of domesticity and back to his treasure-hunting ways. They kept the antagonist Rafe, too, writing him as a rich, spoiled brat who was fueled by jealousy for Drake’s success.

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“We all wanted to make sure that, because this was the last Nathan Drake game we were making, it was going to go out with as much stuff as we possibly could.” Nowhere was this more evident than their E3 demo, which became the Uncharted 4 team’s biggest milestone as they entered 2015, following a successful showcase at PSX. This would be the “epic chase” from their index cards—a wild ride through the streets of a fictional city in Madagascar, showcasing the game’s complicated new vehicles and explosions. In the weeks leading up to E3, Uncharted 4’s artists and designers worked nonstop hours trying to make everything click. Once a week (and sometimes once a day) the whole E3 team would meet up in the theater to go over their progress.

Among Schoolchildren by Tracy Kidder

always be closing, desegregation, index card, pattern recognition, Ronald Reagan, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, white picket fence

"Felipe, you did all these problems by yourself! A light went on up there in the old attic, huh? You should be proud of yourself. Are you proud of yourself?" Felipe shrugged coyly. He did look proud, but Chris was prouder than he, faintly smiling from her desk at the volatile, black-haired, gleaming child. She printed out on index cards the steps to long division, and taped the one that read COMPARE to Manny's handsome forehead. That made Manny grin and, for the time being anyway, remember. Her introduction to astronomy was, she felt, far and away the best of her science lessons so far: a tour of the solar system with charts and glossy photographs, the children arguing loudly with each other when Arabella, playing Galileo before the Inquisition, suggested that the sun might be larger than the earth, and Chris chuckling to herself and lifting her eyebrows and saying, "We'll find out."

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Chris herself sometimes felt a great desire to glue Claude's glasses to his nose, shake him by the shoulders, and say, "Forget the illnesses, forget the fishing, forget the excuses. Concentrate on what you're doing right now!" She had to keep on him. But she had to do it gently. The boy was enough of an outcast as it was. Chris taped an index card to the top of Claude's desk: DON'T FORGET TO COPY YOUR ASSIGNMENT! Claude was very happy with the card and kept fingering it, but he didn't usually follow its command, at least not yet. Chris kept lecturing him, but she did it quietly and in private. First thing in the morning, she would call Claude to her desk, ask him for the work he owed, and then tell him she was disappointed.

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One day Chris heard her say to Ashley that if Ashley's spelling partner was out, Ashley should work with another group—she could work with Kimberly's. Chris thought, "I'm seeing little sparks out of Kimberly. Now if I could just grab them..." And was something like a change coming over Claude? He had lovingly fingered the index card Chris had taped to his desk top, the one with the message DON'T FORGET TO COPY THE ASSIGNMENT! The card had peeled up. Now it had vanished—to where, Claude couldn't say. The red piece of construction paper on which Judith had recorded Claude's bet with Dick still lay on the counter under the window.

Wealth Without a Job: The Entrepreneur's Guide to Freedom and Security Beyond the 9 to 5 Lifestyle by Phil Laut, Andy Fuehl

Alan Greenspan, British Empire, business process, buy and hold, declining real wages, fear of failure, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, index card, job satisfaction, Menlo Park, Silicon Valley, women in the workforce

Change your interpretation of fear to “GET READY.” Fear means you should get ready to meet the challenge at hand. NO MORE PROCRASTINATION METHOD Here is a method we learned from our friend, author and teacher Jeffery Combs. Do this right away. Gather together: • A supply of index cards or sticky notes • Paper clips • A supply of dollar bills Write down the tasks you are currently avoiding, one for each index card or sticky note. Then write down the date and time when you want to complete each one. An example might be: Graphics designed and organized for my new book. Noon Friday April 4, 2005 Make sure to state the goal, date, and time precisely, as in the example, so that your mind has no doubt about what you mean.

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EXERCISE: DEVELOP YOUR SMART GOALS Take a few minutes right now and write down your top five goals. Make sure they are SMART. Take action now to achieve what you desire and deserve. No more procrastinating! The way to achieve your goal is to take massive action now. Do you want to cheat yourself or treat yourself? Once you have your SMART goals written, copy them onto a 3-x-5 index card. Carry the index card with you. Any chance you get, take out your goals and read them. The more you do this, the more your unconscious mind will grasp on to them and make them a reality for you. Read your goals at least twice a day—once when you wake up and right before you go to sleep. Make sure you have a good mental image of what your goals are.

Thinking in Numbers by Daniel Tammet

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anton Chekhov, computer age, dematerialisation, Edmond Halley, Georg Cantor, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, index card, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Paul Erdős, Searching for Interstellar Communications, Vilfredo Pareto

A new story he would frequently write backwards, starting out from its final lines. Lolita, Nabokov’s most famous (and infamous) novel, began life on a long series of three-by-five-inch index cards. He sketched out the story’s closing scenes first. On subsequent cards Nabokov jotted down not only paragraphs of text but also plot ideas and other bits of information; on one, a chart of statistics on the average height and weight of young girls; on another, a list of jukebox songs; on a third, an illustration of a revolver. Every so often Nabokov would rearrange his index cards, searching for the most promising combination of scenes. The number of possible permutations would have been immense.

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Three of Nabokov’s cards can be rearranged in a total of six different ways: (1, 2, 3), (1, 3, 2), (2, 1, 3), (2, 3, 1), (3, 1, 2), (3, 2, 1), while ten cards (equivalent to between two and three printed pages in a book) would be capable of permuting into more than three and a half million sequences. To compose only four or five pages (equivalent to the contents of about fifteen index cards) would require a choice from among some 1.3 trillion variations. Lolita runs to sixty-nine chapters and over three hundred and fifty pages, which means that the number of its potential versions exceeds (by an almost unimaginable margin) the number of atoms that make up our universe. Of course, many of these potential Lolitas would simply not have been viable.

Polaroids From the Dead by Douglas Coupland

dematerialisation, edge city, guns versus butter model, index card, mandelbrot fractal, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, Norman Mailer, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, upwardly mobile, urban planning

Cannot be used against you. 310 207-XXXX Benedict Canyon house for rent. 4-bdrm, hdwd floors, quiet patio, 2-car garage. $1,800/month Westec patrol officer seeks guest house for rent. [Various index cards touting home computer training, home security systems and pizza ovens. A vogue for home pizza ovens seems to have apparently come to an end.] 1976 Porsche 911S Targa. $10,000 Ted Soqui/Sygma One has a hunch that in 1964 the same billboard harbored index cards offering dance lessons, free kittens and piano lessons. The local newspaper, the Brentwood News, a puree of local chitchat fueled by real-estate-driven editorial, follows Brentwood’s home sales minutiae with seemingly pornographic fidelity, chronicling monthly the ebb and flow of land capital followed by ads for local properties.

Hot Lights, Cold Steel: Life, Death and Sleepless Nights in a Surgeon's First Years by Michael J. Collins

index card, Saturday Night Live

I was terrified that at any moment it might go off and a frantic nurse would scream, “Doctor, come quickly! Mr. Arnold’s TQF is trans-debilifying on his acute dorsi! His TKA is UTO’d! For God’s sake, hurry!” I spent the rest of the day reviewing charts, slowly gleaning bits of information, jotting down on my ever-present index cards things like “TKA="Total" Knee Arthroplasty,” “ORIF="Open" Reduction Internal Fixation,” “UTO="Upper" Tibial Osteotomy.” Some things, however, defied my best efforts to decipher them. “Patient is TTWB,” I read. Too tired with bending? Three times without bleeding? Terribly thirsty without beer? How in the hell did I know?

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But someday my turn would come—and I’d better be ready. I studied harder than I had ever studied before—partly because I was ashamed of my ignorance, partly because I realized that patients’ health and lives would soon depend on me, and partly because I actually liked this stuff. I was falling in love with orthopedics. Every night I took out the index cards upon which I had jotted down questions and notes. I went over them one by one, often waking at 2:00 or 3:00 A.M., my head slumped forward on the desk, drool staining the page I had been reading. I would stagger to bed and curl up next to Patti for a few hours. The next morning I would start all over again.

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The little boy’s body was lying naked on a metallic table in the center of the room. The man was obviously performing the postmortem. He held a Dictaphone in his left hand, a tape measure in his right. I introduced myself. We said a few words and then went about our business. I examined the boy and scribbled a few notes on the index card I carried in my shirt pocket. Lying pale and naked on that table, he didn’t look like a little boy anymore. He looked like a dead body. The pathologist adjusted his glasses and went on with his dictation. “Severe cranial contusion involving the right temporoparietal region…” This was too much for me.

The Connected Company by Dave Gray, Thomas Vander Wal

A Pattern Language, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, Berlin Wall, business cycle, business process, call centre, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, complexity theory, creative destruction, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, disruptive innovation, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, folksonomy, Googley, index card, industrial cluster, interchangeable parts, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, loose coupling, low cost airline, market design, minimum viable product, more computing power than Apollo, power law, profit maximization, Richard Florida, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, two-pizza team, Vanguard fund, web application, WikiLeaks, work culture , Zipcar

And though the task was impossible, I did try to speak to everyone, understand every company, and read every book and article that was suggested. My desk piled high with books, papers, and transcribed interviews, which were soon were marked, folded, plastered with sticky notes, and supplemented with boxes and boxes of cross-referenced index cards, diagrams, and sketches. So many people contributed to this effort that it would be impossible to recognize them all in such a small space. But I must single out a few people whose contributions loom large. The book would not have happened without a series of conversations with Thomas Vander Wal, which led to my initial blog post, “The Connected Company.”

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You can read more about Morning Star on their website, or in the excellent HBR article by Gary Hamel, “First, Let’s Fire All the Managers.” The Nordstrom Way Nordstrom is a publicly traded, high-end retailer known for excellent service, with revenues of about $9 billion a year. Nordstrom’s employee handbook is so short and simple that it can fit on an index card. It states: “Use your best judgment in all situations. There will be no other rules.” Nordstrom salespeople are free to make their own decisions, although Nordstrom’s strong culture of putting the customer first provides a guiding light for all to steer by. That customer service culture is at the core of Nordstrom’s success.

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When setting parameters, the simplicity or complexity of the rules can expand or reduce the latitude people feel that they have to do their jobs. Rules that people can keep in their heads are easier to follow and easier to share. Here is the Nordstrom employee handbook in its entirety, written on an index card: WELCOME TO NORDSTROM. We’re glad to have you with our Company. Our number one goal is to provide outstanding customer service. Set both your personal and professional goals high. We have the great confidence in your ability to achieve them. Nordstrom rules: Rule #1: Use your good judgment in all situations.

Singular Intimacies: Becoming a Doctor at Bellevue by Danielle Ofri

if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index card, medical residency, placebo effect, rent stabilization, union organizing

The smudges and wrinkles and stains bespoke weighty duties that surmounted any possible fashion statement a crisp clean coat could offer. Li-Chan wore the sleeves crammed up past her elbows, ready for important intern work at a moment’s notice. The coat itself was a monument to economy and proficiency. The side pockets bulged with syringes, gauze pads, alcohol swabs, and IVs. The breast pocket was jammed with index cards, pens, EKG calipers, and the tiny blue Facts and Formulas book. The eighty-two pages of microscopic print in that three-by-five-inch book contained everything from disorders of phosphorous metabolism to the calculations for fractional excretion of sodium. Page 30 was folded over for rapid access to Renal Tubular Acidosis—every intern had to be able to distinguish Type IV RTA from Types I and II.

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When I was an intern I’d had to do all the horrible scut work for my patients, but I always had the relief of my resident, who made all the important decisions. No matter how awful things became, there was always my resident to turn to who seemed to know all the answers. Once the clock had struck 12:01 A.M. on July 1st, I had to come up with those answers myself. I consulted my freshly printed index cards. Harold Goode—homeless, shooter with a fever, admitted last night, empiric antibiotics for possible endocarditis. I had picked up the 16-West service this morning and didn’t know the patients yet, but I had to learn them quickly. Now I was the resident. Sarita was biting her lip to keep from crying outright.

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Later that afternoon when Sarita and I were rounding, I was both shamed and relieved to see that the IV team had managed to get a scrawny IV in his arm. “Look at this one, baby.” Mr. Goode flaunted it at us. “You doctors don’t know shit about IVs. I been around. I been to Beth Israel. I know what’s up and I’ll be stickin’ with the IV team.” Sarita looked away hurriedly, pulling her index cards from her pocket and shuffling them haphazardly. I think she was trying to spare me the embarrassment. How I wished I could have sunk a 14-gauge IV into his deep brachial vein just at that moment. A really big, painful IV the size of a ballpoint pen—one stick, ram it in, no blood spilled. One solid IV barreling through all those scars and skin ulcers down to the damn obstreperous veins that I knew were lurking underneath his opaque, dark skin.

We Don't Need Roads: The Making of the Back to the Future Trilogy by Caseen Gaines

Albert Einstein, index card, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, out of africa, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Skype

A few weeks earlier, when I reached out to Christopher Lloyd’s manager, he asked me if Zemeckis was on board. A line was drawn in the sand: The day I spoke to the director would be the day an interview would be scheduled with the Doc. Challenge accepted. I hung up the phone with Lloyd’s rep and retrieved the index card with Zemeckis’s agent’s phone number written on it, a three-by-five piece of card stock that had been haunting me ever since I’d scribbled on it four months earlier. Without jumping through too many hoops, I got a hold of Zemeckis’s assistant, who promptly scheduled a half-hour interview for us, with only one request: “We respectfully ask that you contain the time to the thirty minutes which we have allotted.”

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After a few minutes of monologue, his partner gave him a nudge, stopping Bob Z just long enough for the two to be offered a development deal at Columbia to expand their idea into a screenplay. Within a few days, the two got to work. “Bob and I always sat in the same room, usually our office, and talked through everything,” Gale says. “We would first outline the movie on index cards and put them up on a corkboard on the wall. Once we had a structure and plan for the film, we’d start with the first scene and talk it through. We’d work out the dialogue in each scene together, and I’d make detailed notes.” “It was a true collaboration,” Zemeckis adds. “We were very much in sync, and when a good idea got sparked, it was pretty much just back-and-forth, talking everything through.

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His girlfriend’s name is Suzy, his mother’s is Eileen, Marty travels back to 1952, and his parents have their first kiss while the band Lester & the Moonlighters plays Eddie Fisher’s 1951 single “Turn Back the Hands of Time” at the Springtime in Paris dance. Frank Price still thought the general conceit of the movie was good, but believed the screenplay was too rough around the edges. The Bobs, ever hopeful, went back to their office with index cards in tow. “Inevitably, our opinion regarding our own first rough draft was that it was terrible,” Gale says. “This was true with every script we’d ever written. We proceeded to revise, deconstruct, and overhaul the work.” A second draft was completed on April 7. Price thought their second go-around was better, but he passed on giving Future the green light.

Beautiful Visualization by Julie Steele

barriers to entry, correlation does not imply causation, data acquisition, data science, database schema, Drosophila, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, global pandemic, Hans Rosling, index card, information retrieval, iterative process, linked data, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, no-fly zone, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, performance metric, power law, QR code, recommendation engine, semantic web, social bookmarking, social distancing, social graph, sorting algorithm, Steve Jobs, the long tail, web application, wikimedia commons, Yochai Benkler

Lombardi would meticulously comb through newspaper articles and magazines, recording his findings by hand. He had neither an API to pose his questions to, nor any kind of database or software to store his answers in. Instead, Lombardi amassed a collection of more than 14,000 index cards, on which all of his questions and answers were written and from which he drew his historical diagrams (see Figure 10-1 in Chapter 10). Unless you happen to have a few thousand index cards and a few weeks of spare time handy, we’re going to need to think of a faster way to manage all of our questions and answers. There are a number of different ways we could approach this on a computer, and a variety of different software tools and programming languages that would be up to the task.

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Databases As Networks Structured data in the fields of art history and archaeology, as in any other field, comes in a variety of formats, such as relational or object-oriented databases, spreadsheets, XML documents, and RDF graphs; semistructured data is found in wikis, PDFs, HTML pages, and (perhaps more than in other fields) on traditional paper. Disregarding the subtleties of all these representational forms, the underlying technical structure usually involves three areas: A data model convention, ranging from simple index card separators in a wooden box to complicated ontologies in your favorite representational language Data-formatting rules, including display templates such as lenses (Pietriga et al. 2006) or predefined query instructions Data-processing rules that act according to the data-formatting instructions Here, we are interested first and foremost in how the chosen data model convention interrelates with the available data.

Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) by Mindy Kaling

Berlin Wall, Burning Man, Donner party, East Village, financial engineering, illegal immigration, index card, medical residency, pre–internet, rent control, Saturday Night Live, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory

So, it turns out that keeping your eyes open is the key to learning to ride a bike. Once I mastered balance, my dad left me alone to do bike drills so I’d have it ingrained. “Doing drills until it’s ingrained” is actually a classic Indian technique of teaching children things that goes back to Sanskrit liturgical texts. Index cards and Sharpie pens are actually distinctly Indian cultural artifacts to me. I rode my bike, for hours, around the parking lot behind Beth Shalom. Let me remind you that this was before iPods. This was even before those bright yellow sports Walkmans. With no music to listen to, I just biked around in circles talking to myself like a kid on the cover of a Robert Cormier young adult novel, circling around puzzled Jewish families walking back to their cars.

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The self-proclaimed no-holds-barred atmosphere reminds me of signs for strip clubs on Hollywood Boulevard: “We Have Crazy Girls. They Do Anything!” We don’t have to do anything. Let’s bar some holds. My Favorite Eleven Moments in Comedy WHEN I WAS a kid, I was obsessed with listing my favorite things. I kept an index card with all my favorite foods folded in my wallet, just in case anyone asked me what they were. Then when people walked away, I imagined they’d say: “Whoa, Mindy Kaling is so cool and self-actualized. McDonald’s pancakes are her favorite food, and she was able to tell me right away.” I was prepared for all kinds of potential fun situations when I was kid.

Loving Someone With Asperger's Syndrome: Understanding and Connecting With Your Partner by Cindy Ariel

Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, index card, Nelson Mandela, neurotypical, place-making, scientific management, theory of mind

Try appealing to his sense of logic; help him understand the tasks necessary for the smooth operation of your relationship system. Exercise 8.1 Developing Your Relationship Connection Through this exercise both you and your partner can gain some clear ways to express and feel your relationship connection. Use at least five slips of paper or 3 by 5 index cards to write things you do that help you to feel connected to your partner. Use additional slips of paper or cards to write at least five things you would like your partner to do that would help you feel connected to her. For example, you may need (and get) things like greetings on arrivals and departures, compliments, sitting or walking together, and e-mails.

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Ask your partner for what you need in specific terms, such as a hug when she comes home each day. Perhaps she already does some things that you enjoy; make sure to offer appreciation and ask for her to continue doing them. Write the activities that you and your partner agree to do for each other on separate 3 by 5 index cards or slips of paper, and put a rubber band around them to keep them together. Make it a goal or a rule for you and your partner to randomly choose one statement or activity from the card pile to offer each other regularly. You can increase the frequency later, but for now start slowly. Focus on getting more of what you need without overwhelming your partner.

The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies by Jason Fagone

Albert Einstein, Bletchley Park, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, cuban missile crisis, Drosophila, Easter island, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Fellow of the Royal Society, General Magic , index card, Internet Archive, Neil Armstrong, pattern recognition, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, two and twenty, X Prize

The president of Harvard changed admissions rules to keep Jews out. Henry Ford launched an anti-Semitic weekly newspaper with a declaration that “the Jew is the world’s enigma.” Officers in the Military Intelligence Division of the War Department tracked intelligence reports about Jewish activities on index cards labeled “Jews: Race” and kept a central dossier on the “Jewish Question” that included documents like “The Power and Aims of International Jewry.” The MID men were William’s colleagues. So he treaded carefully in Washington, lest he provoke an anti-Semitic reaction that seemed to always be near.

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Immediately after his funeral, in the now-empty house, she sat at William’s own desk, the one with the 1918 KNOWLEDGE IS POWER photo under the glass, and worked to complete the annotated bibliography of his papers. The task occupied her for eight to ten hours a day. She mourned her husband while writing crisp descriptions of his articles and books on index cards. She did it out of a sense of duty to William, who would have wanted the project completed, and she also hoped that the collection, once open to the public, would entice a first-rate historian to write a biography of William, a book to cement his reputation. The Marshall Library paid for a typist to help her one to two days a week and it still took months to finish the 3,002 cards for the 3,002 unique items in William’s collection.

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The NSA sent representatives to the library twice, in 1979 and 1983, each time removing an unknown number of William’s items, but the Friedmans had done such a careful job of indexing that a sharp-eyed professor at Virginia Military Institute, Rose Mary Sheldon, noticed that about 200 of the 3,002 index cards were missing. Sheldon submitted a series of Freedom of Information Act requests that eventually prodded the NSA to release 7,000 additional Friedman documents. In the last two decades the agency has gotten more comfortable telling its history—today it holds public cryptologic history conferences and operates a museum—but it took a while, and in the meantime, the Friedmans had created this alternate archive, beyond U.S. government control, where anyone could learn about U.S. codebreaking.

Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals by Robert M. Pirsig

Albert Einstein, Buckminster Fuller, feminist movement, gentrification, index card, John von Neumann, luminiferous ether, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, trade route

The earlier slips began to merge about a common topic and later slips about a different topic. When enough slips merged about a single topic so that he got a feeling it would be permanent he took an index card of the same size as the slips, attached a transparent plastic index tab to it, wrote the name of the topic on a little cardboard insert that came with the tab, put it in the tab, and put the index card together with its related topic slips. The trays on the pilot berth now had about four or five hundred of these tabbed index cards. At various times he’d tried all kinds of different things: colored plastic tabs to indicate subtopics and sub-subtopics; stars to indicate relative importance; slips split with a line to indicate both emotive and rational aspects of their subject; but all of these had increased rather than decreased confusion and he’d found it clearer to include their information elsewhere.

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Experiments have shown that spiders fed LSD do not wander around doing purposeless things as one might expect a hallucination would cause them to do, but instead spin an abnormally perfect, symmetrical web. That would support the de-hallucinogen thesis. But politics seldom depends on facts for its decisions. Behind the index card for the PEYOTE slips was another card called RESERVATION. There were more than a hundred RESERVATION slips describing that ceremony Dusenberry and Phædrus attended — way too many. Most would have to be junked. He’d made them because at one time it looked as though the whole book would center around this long night’s meeting of the Native American Church.

Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (And How to Take Advantage of It) by William Poundstone

availability heuristic, behavioural economics, book value, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, equal pay for equal work, experimental economics, experimental subject, feminist movement, game design, German hyperinflation, Henri Poincaré, high net worth, index card, invisible hand, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, Landlord’s Game, Linda problem, loss aversion, market bubble, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Nash equilibrium, new economy, no-fly zone, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, Potemkin village, power law, price anchoring, price discrimination, psychological pricing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, RFID, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, rolodex, social intelligence, starchitect, Steve Jobs, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-martini lunch, ultimatum game, working poor

“The foisting of Psychology on Economics seems to me inappropriate and vicious,” he wrote. For several decades in the twentieth century, Fisher was probably America’s most famous economist. The public first knew him as the author of a bestselling self-help book with the earnest title How to Live. A successful inventor, Fisher devised an index card system, a precursor of the Rolodex, and came into a fortune when his index card company merged into Remington Rand (a typewriter company that eventually became the early computer company Sperry Rand). From his perch at Yale, Fisher pontificated on the issues of the day. He was for vegetarianism, prohibition, eugenics, and just about every nutty health regimen under the sun.

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The market’s recent volatility, he said, was only a “shaking out of the lunatic fringe.” With the lunatics out of the market, prices were sure to rocket higher. “Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.” They hadn’t, and that statement trashed Fisher’s reputation just as the market decimated his index card fortune. Fisher believed it ought to be possible to predict prices with the rigor of a physicist. He must have been encouraged in this by his doctoral advisor, the reclusive physicist Josiah Willard Gibbs. Just as the volume of a gas can be computed from its pressure and temperature, Fisher aspired to predict prices from supply and demand.

Help for Women With ADHD: My Simple Strategies for Conquering Chaos by Joan Wilder

crowdsourcing, Firefox, impulse control, index card, TED Talk

Some online Capture Systems, like Evernote, have a reminder function built in. Use your reminders to prompt motivation, not just memory – linking to images, meaningful quotes, or positive messages that will keep you from just swiping those notifications away. If you prefer paper over digital, try an old-school “tickler” file. Set up an index-card box or Pendaflex sorter labeled 1-31 and January-December, and you can pop in messages to your future self. (Of course, you have to remember to check the folders!) Here again, make the reminder engaging and inspiring so you don’t just skip over it. Photo postcards, quote-a-day or cartoon-a-day calendars work great for this, too.

IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black

Bletchley Park, book value, card file, computer age, family office, ghettoisation, government statistician, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, profit motive, stock buybacks, Transnistria

But IBM was in a unique commercial position. While Watson and IBM were famous on the American business scene, the company’s overseas operations were fundamentally below the public radar screen. IBM did not import German merchandise, it merely exported American technology. The IBM name did not even appear on any of thousands of index cards in the address files of leading New York boycott organizations. Moreover, the power of punch cards as an automation tool had not yet been commonly identified. So the risk that highly visible trading might provoke economic retaliation seemed low, especially since Dehomag did not even possess a name suggestive of IBM or Watson.101 On the other hand, the anticipated reward in Germany was great.

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Although a network of Jewish and non-sectarian anti-Nazi leagues and bodies struggled to organize comprehensive lists of companies doing business with Germany, from importers of German toys and shoes to sellers of German porcelain and pharmaceuticals, yet IBM and Watson were not identified. Neither the company nor its president even appeared in any of thousands of hectic phone book entries or handwritten index card files of the leading national and regional boycott bodies. Anti-Nazi agitators just didn’t understand the dynamics of corporate multinationalism.64 Moreover, IBM was not importing German merchandise, it was exporting machinery. In fact, even exports dwindled as soon as the new plant in Berlin was erected, leaving less of a paper trail.

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Personal data that could not be tabulated by an organization for lack of an on-site Hollerith system were assembled on simple handwritten cards, forms, or copied onto registries that were forwarded to race offices and security services for punching and sorting. Churches were among the leading sources of such information. Their antique, ornately bound church books were often bulky and difficult to work with so supply companies developed a variety of index cards in various sizes designed to facilitate the tracing of ancestry. Often the process was awkward and anything but fast.70 One small church office in Braunlage in the Harz Mountains was typical when it complained in a letter to the Reichssippenamt, the Reich’s leading raceology agency, that the cards were too small and the data too large.

Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls by David Sedaris

big-box store, call centre, David Sedaris, desegregation, illegal immigration, index card, Maui Hawaii, remote working, stem cell

I should have quit the restaurant and found something more substantial, but I told myself I needed the free time, needed it for my real work, my sculpture. This wasn’t completely unfounded. I’d been in a couple of juried shows, one at the state art museum. For a few hours every day I applied myself. I bundled sticks, I arranged things in cardboard boxes. I typed cryptic notes onto index cards and suspended them from my ceiling. I could have easily held a full-time job, then come home at night and tied twigs together, but in a way I needed the poverty, needed it as proof that I was truly creative. It was a cliché, of course, but one that was reinforced every time you turned around. People didn’t say “artist,” they said “starving artist,” so even if you weren’t doing anything of consequence, as long as you were hungry you were on the right track, weren’t you?

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After that I called my parents, aware that I was stealing someone else’s news, and aware too of how dramatic I sounded. “Gretchen’s been attacked.” The officer who arrived began by saying that he’d been in my apartment once before. “It was a narcotics case, years ago,” he told me, looking from the kitchen to the living room, where dozens of index cards dangled from the ceiling. He took my sister’s statement, and as he drove off to canvass the area, our parents pulled up, my mother saying before she’d even set her purse down that this was all Gretchen’s fault. “Walking to the store at eleven o’clock at night, you were as good as asking for it!”

Daring to Rest by Karen Brody

business cycle, index card, microbiome, randomized controlled trial

When we see these archetypes, they often help us tap into our Wild Woman nature. They can also help us understand our behaviors and patterns. If you’d prefer to make your own deck of guidance cards, use your soul whispers. Simply write your soul whispers from days 1 through 20 on separate pieces of paper or index cards. If one day you aren’t able to practice yoga nidra or call in your Council of Women, you can simply pick a guidance card instead. First, hold all the cards (or soul whisper papers) in your hands and ask that they be used for your highest good and the highest good of humanity. Then spread out the cards.

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In fact, many times in a live class, I will lay out laminated cards with all the Daring to Rest tools (see appendix 2) and encourage women to place them face down, breathe, and then with their left hands, pick a card. Then this is the Daring to Rest tool they practice after yoga nidra meditation. And guess what? They always receive the tool they need. You can do this too by writing the name of each tool/practice on an index card, turning the cards face down, and then picking a card. Simple, easy, and restful. Share Yoga Nidra with Others For many years, my husband worked for Heifer International, a charity committed to ending hunger and poverty. Most people know Heifer because of its catalog, which lists a variety of animals—like cows, goats, and chickens—you can choose to give to someone in a poor country.

Rust: The Longest War by Jonathan Waldman

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Anton Chekhov, computer age, David Brooks, digital map, Exxon Valdez, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Golden Gate Park, index card, Isaac Newton, Mason jar, military-industrial complex, pez dispenser, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Works Progress Administration, Y2K

So he drank: he spent the next six years reading everything he could about metallurgy, starting with periodicals and journals about chemistry, barely stopping for a lunch of bread and dates. Next he read about manganese, and every process by which it could be detected in steel. Then he read about every other steelmaking element; all the while he kept index cards detailing what he had learned from each book. He developed his knowledge carefully, procedurally, accumulating as much as he could. Lab protocol stipulated that anyone who figured out how to save time could enjoy his savings as he wanted. Brearley got his day’s work done in a couple of hours, and spent the rest of the day reading and experimenting.

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Then he engaged a second man, who knew all about hardening and tempering steel; then a third man who could neither make steel, nor analyse it, nor harden and temper it—but this last tested it, put his OK mark on it and passed it into service.” It was a disgrace. To Brearley, progress seemed like regress. Nobody cared about D.G.S. anymore. He felt like he was the only steelmaker left with his head screwed on right. His expertise was careful and deliberate, untainted. His index cards didn’t lie. In 1911 he wrote The Heat Treatment of Tool Steel, his third book—and dedicated it to his employer: “To Thos. Firth & Sons, Limited, in whose service labour and learning have been agreeably combined, from 1883 to the present time, these pages are respectfully dedicated by the author.”

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He wrote his autobiography, as well as an unpublished children’s book, called The Story of Ironie. Actually, there was one more symbolic action. Before going on his first vacation (beyond Riga, he’d been to New York to serve as a witness, and Berlin for a conference on applied chemistry), at age fifty-eight, he piled up all of his index cards and a few hundred books and burned them in a great bonfire. Perhaps it seemed a fitting ritual to honor his mentor James Taylor, who’d recently died. Perhaps, tired of all the litigation pertaining to stainless steel, he lashed out in that strange way. He’d never been much of a servant to pencil and paper.

Decoding Organization: Bletchley Park, Codebreaking and Organization Studies by Christopher Grey

Bletchley Park, call centre, classic study, computer age, glass ceiling, index card, iterative process, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, military-industrial complex, old-boy network, post-war consensus, seminal paper, work culture

This in the services applied especially to the WRNS and ATS . . .’42. This generality is illustrated by the interviewee Vera, who, describing her recruitment interview, commented in passing on ‘the fact that I’d been to grammar school, that was of interest’, which seems, given the fact that the actual work she did was fairly routine filing of index cards, perhaps to suggest that it was social as much as educational standing which was being probed. In a not dissimilar way, Dora learned, after the war, that she had been identified for BP when the head of the secretarial college she had attended had been approached to identify ‘girls of integrity’ for confidential war work43.

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For this reason, where a station was transmitting a weather report in a breakable cipher BP sometimes sought to ensure that the RAF did not bomb it and thus deprive the cryptanalysts of a reliable crib. 18. CCAC RLEW 5. 19. One, literal, conduit for this during the early days of the war was a wooden tray, propelled by string and a broom handle which passed decrypts from Hut 6 to Hut 3 (Welchman, 1982: 129). As with index cards in shoeboxes, this rather quaint system should not lead to the view, sometimes heard, that this was an ‘amateurish’ operation. 20. All information in the paragraph to this point is based upon TNA HW 14/145: 11–13. 21. TNA HW 3/119: 44. See HW 43/70: 112 for the analogous development of formalized training in Hut 6.

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Hut 4: Section responsible for non-Enigma naval cryptanalysis and translating and analysing the results of this plus decrypted Naval Enigma material from Hut 8 and distributing the resulting intelligence to the Admiralty. Hut 6: Section breaking Army (Heer), Air (Luftwaffe or GAF) and Railway (Reichsbahn) Enigma. Hut 8: Section breaking Naval (Kriegsmarine) Enigma. Index: Card-based systems to store, cross-reference and retrieve information, extensively used at BP to handle enormous quantities of material from, for example, decrypts. Indoctrinated: The US term for enrolment into a particular secret or level of classified information, which as the war progressed became increasingly used at BP and supplanted the term enwised.

Waiting for Superman: How We Can Save America's Failing Public Schools by Participant Media, Karl Weber

An Inconvenient Truth, antiwork, collective bargaining, feminist movement, hiring and firing, index card, knowledge economy, Menlo Park, Robert Gordon, school choice, Silicon Valley, Upton Sinclair

At the Zone’s Promise Academy II, 100 percent of the third graders scored at or above grade level in the statewide math exams, and 100 percent of the Promise Academy I third graders were at or above grade level in math. Hmm, let’s see . . . 100 percent proficiency. Two different sets of schools. It’s hard to argue with reform that boosts the learning of not some, not many, but all students. A New Kind of Lottery One Monday morning while we were deeply immersed in rearranging colored index cards containing various story ideas on the wall in our edit bay, Davis came into the production office with an amazing idea. He’d just read an op-ed piece by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman about a local SEED school and the lottery it used to select students for the coming year. The SEED schools are the only urban public boarding schools in the country, designed to provide underserved kids with a round-the-clock nurturing atmosphere.

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Often the tension was almost too much to bear. At one lottery, I wanted to throw the bingo ball cage across the room—it didn’t look to me as if there were enough balls in the cage for each grade. There were simply not enough spaces. Another time, I watched a lottery official reach into a bin of folded index cards inscribed with individual names in Sharpie pen and accidentally grab two, only to shake one off and give a classroom seat to the student whose card was left in his hand. Whose card did he drop? Was it one of our kids? Did one of our kids just lose his or her chance at a good education? The lotteries with computer-generated numbers were no better.

Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris

Albert Einstein, complexity theory, David Sedaris, East Village, Easter island, Great Leap Forward, index card, means of production, rent control

I left promising to enroll in a French class and then forgot that promise as soon my plane landed back in New York. On the following trip I sanded the floors and began the practice of learning ten new words a day. exorcism facial swelling death penalty I found my words in the dictionary, typed them onto index cards, and committed them to memory while on my daily walks to the neighboring village. slaughterhouse sea monster witch doctor By the end of the month, I’d managed to retain three hundred nouns, none of which proved to be the least bit useful. The next summer we went to France for six weeks, and I added another 420 words, most of them found in the popular gossip magazine Voici.

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When the cranes arrived to build a twelve-story hotel right outside our bedroom window, Hugh and I decided to leave New York for a year or two, just until our resentment died down a little. I’m determined to learn as much French as possible, so we’ll take an apartment in Paris, where there are posters and headlines and any number of words waiting to be captured and transcribed onto index cards, where a person can comfortably smoke while making a spectacular ass of himself, and where, when frustrated, I can lie, saying I never wanted to come here in the first place. Me Talk Pretty One Day AT THE AGE OF FORTY-ONE, I am returning to school and have to think of myself as what my French textbook calls “a true debutant.”

My Year of Rest and Relaxation: A Novel by Ottessa Moshfegh

East Village, illegal immigration, index card, messenger bag, off-the-grid, out of africa, Pepto Bismol, rent control, white picket fence

Reva covered her ears. Someone brought her father a glass of water and helped him back to his seat. Then it was Reva’s turn to speak. She checked her makeup in her compact mirror, powdered her nose, dabbed her eyes with more tissues, then went up and stood at the rostrum and read lines off index cards, shuffling them back and forth as she sniffled and cried. Everything she said sounded like she’d read it in a Hallmark card. Halfway through, she stopped and looked down at me as though for approval. I gave her a thumbs-up. “She was a woman of many talents,” Reva said, “and she inspired me to follow my own path.”

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The measly payments were running out anyway, so it wasn’t a huge loss. I threw the notice in the trash. There was a postcard from my dentist reminding me to come in for my yearly cleaning. Trash. There was the bill from Dr. Tuttle for my missed appointment—a handwritten postcard on the back of an index card. “November 12th no show fee: $300.” She’d probably forgotten all about it by now. I put it aside. I threw away a coupon to a new Middle Eastern restaurant on Second Avenue. I threw away spring catalogues from Victoria’s Secret, from J. Crew, from Barneys. An old water shut-off notice from the super.

Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing by Jacob Goldstein

Alan Greenspan, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, back-to-the-land, bank run, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, break the buck, card file, central bank independence, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, Edmond Halley, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, index card, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, life extension, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, side hustle, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, Steven Levy, the new new thing, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs

As he later wrote, in 1896 he “had not come to appreciate the evils of unstable money, nor how impossible it was for business men to provide against them through foresight alone.” Fisher became obsessed with the way changes in the value of the dollar could mess up people’s lives, and with figuring out ways to solve the problem. At his index-card company, he put his economic theories to work by tying employees’ wages to inflation and deflation. When prices went up, pay went up; when prices went down, pay went down. Employees’ inflation-adjusted pay stayed the same. (Raises were handled separately.) So rational! “As long as the cost of living was getting higher, the Index Visible employees welcomed the swelling contents of their ‘high Cost of Living’ pay envelopes,” Fisher wrote.

…

“The index of the dollar’s purchasing power gave to several million people every Monday morning the opportunity to read of the weekly change in the dollar.” If he wanted to win people over to his movement, Fisher realized he first had to change the way they thought about money. In the boom of the 1920s, Fisher sold his index-card company for a fortune, then invested that fortune in the booming stock market and watched it grow. He spent his money on his obsessions, including $20,000 a year on propaganda for stable money, and a full-time salary for a personal trainer and physician. The physician had invented a variation on volleyball that Fisher called “battle ball.”

Happy-Go-Lucky by David Sedaris

airport security, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, David Sedaris, defund the police, desegregation, do what you love, Donald Trump, Ferguson, Missouri, George Floyd, index card, McMansion, Minecraft, pre–internet, QAnon, Skype, social distancing, Transnistria

I hated being excluded, so between a brief visit in May 1997 and a much longer one the following August, I took a ten-session private French class taught by a petite, sharp-nosed thumbtack of a woman. Elise was Canadian, and we met twice a week in the World Trade Center. At around the same time, I started opening my Larousse dictionary, writing random nouns on index cards, and memorizing them on my daily walks. “Why did you learn the word bruise?” she groused one afternoon. “When is that going to come in handy?” In retrospect, I suppose I can see her point. Why master bruise before, say, umbrella? How many of us know, though, when learning a foreign language, what words and phrases might prove useful?

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When Hugh and I lived in Normandy, he heard a local woman telling a friend about a mentally challenged man she often saw marching past her house. He wore headphones, she said, and looked at pictures while talking to himself. That, of course, was me, but they weren’t pictures I was holding. They were index cards with that day’s ten new French vocabulary words on them. In Sussex not long ago, an acquaintance approached me to share a similar story. Again I was identified as mentally challenged, this time because I was picking up trash and muttering to myself. Only I wasn’t muttering—I was repeating phrases from my Learn to Speak Japanese or Swedish or Polish audio program.

Shoe Dog by Phil Knight

banking crisis, corporate raider, fail fast, fear of failure, fixed income, index card, intangible asset, Menlo Park, Silicon Valley

He was anal, he recognized that I was not, and though he enjoyed complaining (to me, to my sister, to mutual friends), he saw that my managerial style gave him freedom. Left to do as he pleased, he responded with boundless creativity and energy. He worked seven days a week, selling and promoting Blue Ribbon, and when he wasn’t selling, he was beaverishly building up his customer data files. Each new customer got his or her own index card, and each index card contained that customer’s personal information, shoe size, and shoe preferences. This database enabled Johnson to keep in touch with all his customers, at all times, and to keep them all feeling special. He sent them Christmas cards. He sent them birthday cards. He sent them notes of congratulation after they completed a big race or marathon.

…

He’s converted an old barn into a five-story mansion, which he calls his Fortress of Solitude. Twice divorced, he’s filled the place to the rafters with dozens of reading chairs, and thousands and thousands of books, and he keeps track of them all with an extensive card catalog. Each book has its own number and its own index card, listing author, date of publication, plot summary—and its precise location in the fortress. Of course. Scampering and prancing around Johnson’s spread are countless wild turkeys and chipmunks, most of whom he’s named. He knows them all so well, so intimately, he can tell you when one is late in hibernating.

Democracy's Data: The Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census and How to Read Them by Dan Bouk

Black Lives Matter, card file, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, desegregation, digital map, Donald Trump, George Floyd, germ theory of disease, government statistician, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, index card, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, linked data, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, public intellectual, pull request, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Scientific racism, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social distancing, surveillance capitalism, transcontinental railway, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

Interviewers might write down initial responses on a sheet of paper, for instance. Then a clerk might transfer those responses onto a more compact, mobile tool, like an index card. Such cards may seem to have been around forever, but they had to be invented: first to aid libraries in keeping track of their collections and later to help banks and insurance companies keep track of their customers. Eventually scientists, too, realized that this technology would allow them to organize information about their subjects.10 Another clerk might have, in past decades, translated the index card’s information into punched holes in a different paper card as part of a system for counting and sorting mechanically that was invented in the 1880s expressly for the U.S. census.

…

The same people who developed the card catalog for making a vast library’s holdings accessible realized in the late nineteenth century that stiff paper cards could create searchable inventories of entire populations. Melvil Dewey—of Dewey decimal system fame—started a company that got into the business of secretly sharing medical records among big U.S. insurance firms.48 Soon enough, the federal government also realized the power of the index card. That is nowhere better illustrated than in a photograph from the offices of Roosevelt’s crowning achievement: the Social Security Board (later renamed the Social Security Administration), where men in suits, suspenders, and vests leaf through card files containing wage records for tens of millions of Americans.49 Ordinary Americans could well be forgiven their fears that the government had gone dossier mad.

Atlas Obscura: An Explorer's Guide to the World's Hidden Wonders by Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras, Ella Morton

anti-communist, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, centre right, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, cosmic microwave background, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Day of the Dead, double helix, East Village, Easter island, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, germ theory of disease, Golden Gate Park, Google Earth, Haight Ashbury, horn antenna, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, index card, intentional community, Jacques de Vaucanson, Kowloon Walled City, Louis Pasteur, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, mutually assured destruction, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, phenotype, Pluto: dwarf planet, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Tunguska event, urban sprawl, Vesna Vulović, white picket fence, wikimedia commons, working poor

The final blow came during the Nazi invasion of Belgium, when soldiers destroyed thousands of boxes filled with index cards and hung Third Reich artwork on the walls. Otlet died in 1944, his Mundaneum and World City mere memories. He is now regarded as one of the forefathers of information science—his vision of a globally searchable network of interlinked documents anticipated the World Wide Web. The remains of the Mundaneum—books, posters, planning documents, and drawers with original index cards—are now on display at the Musée Mundaneum in Mons. 76, rue de Nimy, Mons. The Mundaneum is a 15-minute walk from the Mons train station. 50.457674 3.955428 The Mundaneum, with its 12 million info-packed index cards, was the early-20th-century version of the internet.

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Cold beer is provided for drinking. BELGIUM The Mundaneum MONS, HAINAUT The Mundaneum was, to put it mildly, an ambitious undertaking. Belgian lawyer Paul Otlet and Nobel Peace Prize winner Henri LaFontaine established the project in 1910 with the aim of compiling the entirety of human knowledge on 3 × 5-inch index cards. The collection was to be the centerpiece of a “world city,” designed by architect Le Corbusier, forming a nucleus of knowledge that would inspire the world with its libraries, museums, and universities. To address the daunting task of arranging bits of paper into a coherent compendium of world history, Otlet developed a system called Universal Decimal Classification.

…

The Mundaneum is a 15-minute walk from the Mons train station. 50.457674 3.955428 The Mundaneum, with its 12 million info-packed index cards, was the early-20th-century version of the internet. The Grottoes of Folx-les-Caves ORP-JAUCHE, WALLOON BRABANT Down a narrow staircase, 50 feet below the small town of Folx-les-Caves, are nearly 15 acres of human-made caves. Carved from tuff, or compressed volcanic ash, they were probably dug during the Roman era or the Middle Ages. In 1886, farmers began growing mushrooms in the cold, dark grottoes—the fungi grow there to this day. Prior to the mushroom era, the cave served as a refuge for bandits on the lam.

The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future by Chris Guillebeau

Airbnb, big-box store, clean water, digital nomad, do what you love, fixed income, follow your passion, if you build it, they will come, index card, informal economy, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, late fees, messenger bag, Nelson Mandela, price anchoring, Ralph Waldo Emerson, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, solopreneur, Steve Jobs, Tony Hsieh, web application

Net promoter score: What percentage of customers would refer your business to someone else? Some businesses choose more specific metrics. Brandy Agerbeck, the graphic facilitator we met in Chapter 7, earns her living through corporate and non-profit bookings. Every year she needs a certain amount of bookings, so she keeps a set of index cards to track this number. When the index cards fill up, she knows she’s good for a while and can focus on other things. Once or twice a month it’s good to take a deeper look at the business and record some metrics that should be improving over time. The kinds of things you’ll probably be interested in are more detailed sales figures, site traffic and social media, and the growth of the business.

User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development by Mike Cohn

A Pattern Language, c2.com, call centre, continuous integration, do well by doing good, Great Leap Forward, index card, iterative process, job automation, job satisfaction, phenotype, tacit knowledge, web application

To estimate the stories, three programmers—Rafe, Jay and Maria—get together in a room with Lori, the customer. They bring along the story cards and a few dozen blank cards. The programmers talk about 19.1, clarify a few details on it by asking questions of Lori, and then each programmer writes his or her estimate on an index card. When everyone is done, each programmer holds his or her card up so everyone can see it. They’ve written: Rafe: 1 Jay: ½ Maria: 2 These three developers discuss their estimates. Maria explains why she thinks this story is worth two story points. She talks about how they’ll need to select a search engine, incorporate it, and only then be able to write the screens to fulfill the story.

…

For example, she may offer something along the lines of “I can see how that might be ten story points as you’re describing it but I think I’m asking for something much, much simpler. All I really want is …” Advanced Search On to 19.2, the advanced search. The programmers again write their estimates on index cards and turn them over at the same time showing: Rafe: 2 Jay: 1 Maria: 2 Rafe says the advanced search will take a little longer than the basic search because there’s more to search on. Jay agrees but says that since the basic search will have already been coded, it won’t take long to add the advanced search features.

House of God by Samuel Shem

affirmative action, index card, lateral thinking, medical residency, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Norman Mailer, placebo effect

If you're smart, you'll use me. Like those dolled-up jets that cargo the gomers to Miami: I'm Fats, fly me'. Now, let's get on to the cardflip." The efficiency of the Fat Man's world rested on the concept of the three-by-five index card. He loved three-by-five cards. Announcing that "there is no human being whose medical characteristics cannot be listed on a three-by-five index card," he laid out two thick decks on the table. The one on the right was his. The duplicate deck on the left he split in three, and handed a stack to each of the new terns. On each card was a patient, our patients, my patients.

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asked Potts. "To TURF is to get rid of, to get off your service and onto another, or out of the House altogether. Key concept. It's the main form of treatment in medicine. Just call up psychiatry, tell them about the Nazi stuff, don't mention the gut pain, and presto—TURF TO PSYCHIATRY." Ripping up the index card containing the Nazi-seeker and throwing the bits over his shoulder, the Fat Man said, "The TURF, I love it Let's go. Next?" Potts presented his last admission, a man of our age who'd been playing baseball with his son, and who, while trying to beat out a hard screaming line drive, had dropped down in the base path unconscious.

Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive ScrabblePlayers by Stefan Fatsis

deliberate practice, Donner party, East Village, forensic accounting, Golden Gate Park, Gödel, Escher, Bach, index card, ITER tokamak, junk bonds, Michael Milken, Neil Armstrong, Saturday Night Live, zero-sum game

It’s unclear which ones he’s downing at precisely this moment, but the possibilities seem endless. Plastic containers are scattered on the end tables, on the desk, next to the television, inside drawers. Zinc. Caffeine. Glucose. Glycine. Lphenylalanine. Pyroglutanic acid. Taurine. Tyrosine. Next to the sink, atop the toilet tank, spread across the bed. On a five-by-seven index card, Graham has written in one column the names of twenty pills to be taken in the morning on an empty stomach; in another column, he has listed seventeen more to be downed with breakfast. NADH. Glutamine. Herb for Men. Mega Mind. Gotu kola. Potassium. Graham squeezes a few drops of DMAE-H3 into a glass of cranberry-orange-flavored Blast Off II, a powdered amino-acid concoction containing twenty-one vitamins and minerals — and, more to the point, eighty milligrams of caffeine — per serving.

…

Lipoic acid. Ashwagandha. Healthy Greens. Coenzyme Q. Pygeum, a prostate drug promising “Natural Health Care for Men Over 50.” Suphedrine. Herbal Formula for Men. (“The reason I take this is it’s got ma huang, which is ephedrine, which is a stimulant,” Graham says, as if there were any doubt.) There are index cards plastered with obscure words. A Cookie Monster doll. A copy of the December 1993 issue of a Scrabble newsletter called Medleys which includes an article about that year’s world championships titled “On Crowns and Clowns.” The piece takes a potshot at Graham, who was then just emerging on the Scrabble scene but qualified for the event in New York nonetheless.

…

I have difficulty remembering names, images from my past, plots of novels, what I did last weekend. How can I, closing in on age thirty-five, start learning words? Where in my brain will I put them? I tote my new study aids to a weekend tournament in the resort town of Port Jefferson, on Long Island. I have my photocopied lists, my Franklin, and a stack of index cards on which I have written three-, four-, and five-letter words containing J, Q, X, and Z and some mnemonic aids. For JOTA, a Spanish dance, I write “JO ⫹ TA,” which are acceptable two-letter words. For JIMP, I write “JUMP IMP.” For ZARF, I underline ARF. Sitting on the john in the inn where the tournament is being staged, reading my cards, I say aloud, “JAPAN is good,” using proper Scrabble lingo.

Nine Pints: A Journey Through the Money, Medicine, and Mysteries of Blood by Rose George

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air freight, airport security, British Empire, call centre, corporate social responsibility, Edward Snowden, global pandemic, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, index card, Jeff Bezos, meta-analysis, microbiome, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, period drama, Peter Thiel, Rana Plaza, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, Skype, social contagion, stem cell, TED Talk, time dilation

“But it was not so simple to obtain in this way individuals whose Wassermann reaction was likely to remain permanently negative.” After Nurse Linstead gave her pint of blood to King’s College Hospital, the Olivers decided to do something radical. They would set up a register of reliable blood donors who would never ask for payment. Percy Oliver noted their names on a database, which in 1921 meant index cards, and each card would list contact details, plus the donor’s blood group and health history. Donors would be screened ahead of donating and their blood group noted. A telephone would be manned day and night. Hospitals would call for blood; the Olivers would have it brought to them, in the shape of a person.

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Opening the vein, cutting down upon it, or levering it up, is forbidden.”69 It made more sense: a less invasive needle meant a donor could be reused, and a less painful procedure meant they would more readily volunteer in the first place. They began to set their scheme in motion, using their home as an office. (Percy Oliver continued to work for the council.) It was named the London Blood Transfusion Service, and “The Service” by its volunteers. It may have consisted of some index cards and a phone, but the Olivers’ operation was the world’s first voluntary blood panel and the beginning of a shift to a model of altruistic blood donation in Britain that has endured one hundred years. In the first year, only four donors were signed up and they were called upon only once.70 The next year, the donors numbered thirteen.71 In August 1922, a woman whose husband was dying at Guy’s Hospital was “reduced to stopping strangers in the street to ask them to give their blood.”

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But possibly this last protest would not be supported by a majority of the association.”75 Even disgruntled donors rarely snitched on the hospitals, simply marking politely on their donor cards that they were unwilling to serve at the hospital again. Eventually, it was discovered that hospital staff assumed that donors were paid and so felt entitled to treat them carelessly. Logistics was another concern. Finding a donor on an index card was one thing; finding a donor who had a private telephone in 1920s London was much harder. (Even ten years into the service, when there were 2,050 registered donors, only 400 had a phone.76) The Olivers dealt with this with gusto. “When hospitals called,” wrote Kim Pelis, “they contacted donors by telegraph, constable, taxi-driver, and sometimes by bicycle.”77 Another option was the police force.

Writing Effective Use Cases by Alistair Cockburn

business process, c2.com, create, read, update, delete, finite state, index card, information retrieval, iterative process, operational security, recommendation engine, Silicon Valley, web application, work culture

Each XP user story needs to be just detailed enough that both the business and technical people understand what it means and can estimate how long it will take. It must be a small enough piece of work that the developers can design, code, test and deploy it in three weeks or less. Once meeting those criteria, it can be as brief and casual as the team can get manage. It often gets written just on an index card. When the time comes to start working on a user story, the designer simply takes the card over to the business expert and asks for more explanation. Since the business expert is always available, the conversation continues, as needed, until the functionality is shipped. On rare occasion, a small, well-knit development team with full-time users on board will take usage narratives or the use case briefs as their requirements.

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Some projects need next to no quality in the writing of the requirements document, because they have such good communications between users and developers: The Chrysler Comprehensive Compensation project team, building software to pay all of Chrysler's payroll using the "eXtreme Programming" methodology [Beck99], never went further than use case briefs. They wrote so little that they called them "stories" rather than use cases, and wrote each on an index card. Each was really a promise for a conversation between a requirements expert and a developer. Significantly, the team of 14 people sat in two (large) adjacent rooms, and had excellent in-team communications. The better the internal communications are between your usage experts and developers, the lower the cost of omitting parts of the use case template.

To Pixar and Beyond by Lawrence Levy

Apollo 13, computerized trading, index card, Larry Ellison, Loma Prieta earthquake, reality distortion field, risk tolerance, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, spice trade, Steve Jobs, Wall-E

“Animation is really all about acting,” Ed explained. “Before the animators animate a character on screen, they will often act out the part in front of a mirror so they fully understand the movements they need to create on screen.” Ed walked me to Pixar’s storyboard department where rows upon rows of large cork boards were filled with index cards on which appeared hand-drawn scenes from the movie. Each storyboard represented a sequence from the film, and there seemed to be an endless number of them stacked against every wall, and every spare scrap of space. The quality of each drawing was remarkable, and there were thousands of them, all drawn by hand, all telling a little piece of the film’s story.

…

One illustration of this idea came early in the draft agreement in a clause called “Treatments.” This provision said, simply, that for each picture under the new agreement Pixar would submit to Disney one or more film ideas in the form of a treatment. But what would constitute a treatment? Could it be one line on an index card: “A father goes on an adventure to find his son; oh, and they’re both fish”? That probably wouldn’t make the cut. So the agreement spells out the details: a written treatment less than three pages that can be the basis for a screenplay. But Pixar often presented its treatments orally, using sketches and short storyboards.

The Startup Wife by Tahmima Anam

Anthropocene, Black Lives Matter, cryptocurrency, DeepMind, driverless car, family office, glass ceiling, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, index card, lockdown, microdosing, nudge theory, post-truth, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Stanford marshmallow experiment, stealth mode startup, TED Talk, the High Line, TikTok

“Welcome, Asha Ray, we are delighted to have you here,” the moderator says. She’s the same woman who interviewed Manishala Brown all those months ago, a kind of Smart Barbie, bleached-blond hair, big smile, oversize glasses. Right now she’s in millennial-pink everything and holding on to a set of index cards with her gleaming manicure. She introduces me, pointing out all my excellent accomplishments: “Your platform needs no introduction. Many of us have become frequent users of WAI. Tell us, how did you and your co-founder Cyrus Jones come up with the concept?” “WAI was totally Asha’s idea,” Destiny says.

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“Cyrus, Julian Cabot, and I were just experimenting with the idea of using AI to give people a different social platform—we never thought we’d end up here.” Pink Fingernails asks a few more questions about how we got started. I tell her about the s’mores, about working long nights at Julian’s house, about dropping out of Dr. Stein’s lab. Then she flips to a new index card. “And do you personally come from a business background? Are your parents entrepreneurs?” “They are, actually. They came over here from Bangladesh in their twenties, right out of college. And now they run a small chain of pharmacies.” “What a sweet story. So I guess you’re used to mixing business with family life?

The Vortex: A True Story of History's Deadliest Storm, an Unspeakable War, and Liberation by Scott Carney, Jason Miklian

anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Bob Geldof, British Empire, clean water, cuban missile crisis, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, hive mind, index card, Kickstarter, Live Aid, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, rolodex, South China Sea, statistical model

Most of the representatives and senators she spoke with were shocked. For many, it was the first time they’d even heard about it. Just after Operation Searchlight, Nixon cited executive privilege and effectively banned the US State Department’s own reports on the situation. Candy left Morgan’s office and jotted down notes from the meeting on an index card, with “THOMAS MORGAN (D)-Penn” scrawled across the top. She planned to fill out a card for the important representatives like Morgan—and all one hundred senators, too. Candy came to Washington with one goal: to get the United States to stop funding and arming West Pakistan. The Bengali diaspora beat her by a month, arranging small protest marches and fasts in front of the White House, but few paid attention.

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She didn’t mind that she had next to no chance of success; no legislative branch had ever curbed a president’s foreign policy in this way. Then again, Candy didn’t care about history. Each morning, Candy walked to the Senate office buildings from her friend’s house in Georgetown, armed with her stack of index cards. Lobbyists were rare in the early 1970s, and security at the Capitol was more or less based on the honor system. So Candy just walked through their front doors and asked for a chat. Most of the senators, ninety-nine men and the lone woman, were sympathetic to the plight. A few, like Edward Kennedy, already knew about the genocide.

…

Each time Jon’s mom got a letter from her son, she carefully copied the contents in triplicate and sent them out to three people: her senator, her representative, and Candy. Candy used the evidence in her meetings as proof not only of the genocide but also of the American support for it. With Nixon preventing the State Department’s analysts from doing any real work, the senators counted on her information pipeline. Candy’s index cards filled up with neat notes, summarizing each senator’s pressure points. But while senators were supportive to her face, few lifted a finger after she left their office. Her best hope lay in Frank Church, a Democrat from Idaho. He had lived in Calcutta during World War II, where he served as an intelligence officer, supporting Tikka Khan and the rest of the Allies in the Burmese theater.

Hatching Twitter by Nick Bilton

4chan, Airbus A320, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Blue Bottle Coffee, Burning Man, friendly fire, index card, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, messenger bag, PalmPilot, pets.com, rolling blackouts, rolodex, Ruby on Rails, Saturday Night Live, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, social web, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, technology bubble, traveling salesman, US Airways Flight 1549, WikiLeaks

One of the more corporate employees, Dom Sagolla, had been hired in October 2005 to help test new podcasting products. He had previously worked at the software giant Adobe and often used corporate jargon at Odeo, trying his best to help institute some organization. In one effort he created a grid of index cards on the wall near his desk. The top row listed all the employees’ names, then, trickling down, more index cards listed each person’s designated tasks for the week. As soon as Dom stepped away from his desk, engineers would slyly walk by, kneel over pretending to tie a shoelace or pick something up, and switch the cards around, placing jobs they didn’t want to do under someone else’s name.

The Cohousing Handbook: Building a Place for Community by Chris Scotthanson, Kelly Scotthanson

Buy land – they’re not making it any more, card file, index card, intentional community, land bank, off grid, the built environment, urban planning, urban sprawl, value engineering

The secretary shall see that all members receive notice by phone, by first-class mail or in person of the time and place of meetings at least five days before regularly scheduled meetings. 2. No meeting may be convened without two thirds of the member households represented in person but the meeting may continue despite the withdrawal of enough members to leave less than a quorum. At the start of the meeting, a dated 5” x 8” index card shall be signed by all the members present and used to divide the card file into a section for each meeting. APPENDIX: SAMPLE DOCUMENTS 3. All members may participate in decision-making and voting on proposals. 4. Only one person has the right to speak at any one time during a meeting. Anyone else wishing to speak shall so indicate nonverbally and the recorder shall list them in the order they will be called. 5.

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The order of business at meetings shall be: a) Call to order by facilitator and quiet time; b) Brief report of the last meeting by reviewing the agenda cards, short committee reports, announcements/comments and report of actions taken by the Management Board since the last meeting; c) Agenda items with tabled decisions first, followed by ongoing business, and last, new business; d) Announcement of next meeting time and place; e) Closure. 8. Only business on the agenda shall be considered during a meeting. For an item to be placed on the agenda it must be written on one side of a 5” x 8” index card and given to the facilitator at least one week before the scheduled meeting. For good reason, the facilitator may fill out an agenda card and place an item on the agenda if requested by a member no later than 24 hours before the meeting. 265 266 THE COHOUSING HANDBOOK 9. After an item has been disposed of, the recorder shall note the disposition and date on the back of the agenda card.

How Doctors Think by Jerome Groopman

affirmative action, Atul Gawande, classic study, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deliberate practice, fear of failure, framing effect, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index card, iterative process, lateral thinking, machine translation, medical malpractice, medical residency, Menlo Park, pattern recognition, placebo effect, seminal paper, stem cell, theory of mind

I sat in the front row in the lecture hall and hardly moved my head, nearly catatonic with concentration. During my clinical courses in internal medicine, surgery, pediatrics, obstetrics and gynecology, I assumed a similarly focused posture. Determined to retain everything, I scribbled copious notes during lectures and after bedside rounds. Each night, I copied those notes onto index cards that I arranged on my desk according to subject. On weekends, I would try to memorize them. My goal was to store an encyclopedia in my mind, so that when I met a patient, I could open the mental book and find the correct diagnosis and treatment. The new interns gathered in a conference room in the Bulfinch Building of the hospital.

…

"Remember, be an ironman and hold the fort," the resident said to me, the clichés offered only half jokingly. Interns were to ask for backup only in the most dire circumstances. "You can page me if you really need me," the resident added, "but I'll be home sleeping, since I was on call last night." I touched my left jacket pocket and felt a pack of my index cards from medical school. The cards, I told myself, would provide the ballast to keep me afloat alone. I spent the better part of the day reading my patients' charts and then introducing myself to them. The knot in my stomach gradually loosened. But it tightened again when my fellow intern and supervising resident signed out their patients, alerting me to problems I might encounter on call.

The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World by Oona A. Hathaway, Scott J. Shapiro

9 dash line, Albert Einstein, anti-globalists, bank run, Bartolomé de las Casas, battle of ideas, British Empire, clean water, colonial rule, continuation of politics by other means, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, failed state, false flag, gentleman farmer, humanitarian revolution, index card, long peace, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, power law, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, spice trade, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, uranium enrichment, zero-sum game

Schmitt repaid his generosity by engineering Kelsen’s dismissal a year later when the Nazis came to power. 3 A report compiled by the Allies after the war described Schmitt as Germany’s leading political scientist and one of the world’s greatest political writers, “a man of near-genius rating.” The report also called for his prosecution as a war criminal. 4 This index card shows the history of Schmitt’s internment by the United States Military Government at the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg (arrested March 20, 1947, released on May 6, 1947). 5 The dock at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg (center row, left to right: Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Wilhelm Keitel, Ernst Kaltenbrunner).

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., Mark Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea (New York: Penguin, 2012); Paul Kennedy, The Parliament of Man: The Past, Present, and Future of the United Nations (New York: Random House, 2006). 64. Grundgesetz der Bundesrepublik Deutschland [Constitution], Art. 26 (1949) (F.R.G.). 65. Nihonkōku Kenpō [Constitution], Art. 9 (1946) (Japan). 66. La Costituzione [Constitution], Art. 11 (1948) (Italy). TEN: FRIEND AND ENEMY 1. Index cards to the war crimes case files (”Cases Not Tried”), 1944–1948, and witnesses and defendants in war crimes cases, 1946–1948, Record Group 549, Records of United States Army, Europe 549.2, Records of U.S. Army, Europe (USAEUR) 1933–1964, Records of the War Crimes Branch of the Judge Advocate General Section, U.S.

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Bendersky, “Carl Schmitt’s Path to Nuremberg,” 20. The discussion in this section is much indebted to Bendersky’s masterful discussion. 92. Duška Schmitt to Hermann Jahrreiss, April 1, 1947, cited in Reinhard Mehring, Carl Schmitt: A Biography, trans. Daniel Steuer (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2014), 416. 93. Index cards to the war crimes case files (“Cases Not Tried”), 1944–1948 and witnesses and defendants in war crimes cases, 1946–1948, Record Group 549, Records of United States Army, Europe 549.2, Records of U.S. Army, Europe (USAEUR) 1933–1964, Records of the War Crimes Branch of the Judge Advocate General Section. 94.

Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age by Virginia Eubanks

affirmative action, Alvin Toffler, Berlin Wall, call centre, cognitive dissonance, creative destruction, desegregation, digital divide, Fall of the Berlin Wall, future of work, game design, global village, index card, informal economy, invisible hand, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, low-wage service sector, microcredit, new economy, post-industrial society, race to the bottom, rent control, rent stabilization, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social contagion, South of Market, San Francisco, tech worker, telemarketer, Thomas L Friedman, trickle-down economics, union organizing, urban planning, web application, white flight, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

Chapters 3 through 5 each deal specifically with an aspect of the relationship between technology and women’s poverty that was identified as central to social justice in an age of IT by the women in the YWCA community: policy and technology access; economic development and the high-tech, low-wage workplace; and welfare administration technologies. Though the data set was massive, most of my coding and analysis was done manually by writing in the margins of transcripts, using multicolored highlighters to group themes together, and creating conceptual index cards that I could move around to help identify and explore relationships within the data. Near the end of my writing process, I began using the qualitative data analysis software ATLAS.ti to make sure there weren’t relationships or insights in the data that I had missed. Appendix B: WYMSM Sample Agendas The following WYMSM meeting agendas and minutes are provided to give the reader a sense of the actual activities undertaken on a week-to-week basis by WYMSM.

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Once we’ve established the number of groups to do each simulation, we want to ask for four to six volunteers who would be comfortable navigating through The Sims and reading/distributing the ROWEL activity. Barnyard Bingo (3 minutes) This may not be necessary once we’ve asked people what they want to do. Begin with four to six groups of index cards, each group with the name of an Appendix B 183 animal on it. First, we make sure that each of the navigators receives a different animal. Next, we ask residents if there is a specific simulation they want to do. (We keep them in mind when handing out the note cards so that they get one of the animals that the respective leader has.)

The Icon Thief by Alec Nevala-Lee

fixed-gear, index card, MITM: man-in-the-middle

Then he headed back to the Five Points. 36 When the gallerina unlocked the door of the Lermontov Gallery, Maddy brushed past her without a word, heading for the office at the rear. The gallerina followed close behind, heels clicking against the floor, protesting this invasion of her sacred space. Maddy tuned her out. She couldn’t remember if the gallery had a security guard, but supposed that it probably did. Lermontov was at his desk, going over a stack of index cards with a blue pencil. As she entered, he set the cards aside. “Yes, my dear?” Maddy shut the door, stranding the gallerina in the hallway. “I need to talk to you.” After what seemed like the briefest of internal debates, Lermontov rose from his desk, went to the door, and opened it. The gallerina was waiting outside, a look of indignation on her perfect face.

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Lermontov regarded him for a second, as if deciding whether to let him in. At last, he stood aside. “Come. We’ll talk in my office.” Ethan went into the gallery. Around them, the lights had been turned down, the gallerina’s counter deserted, as if awaiting the return of its resident goddess. In the rear office, Lermontov sat down at his desk, on which a number of index cards were arranged. “What can I do for you?” As Ethan took a seat, he noticed that a velvet curtain had been hung across one wall. The words began to come more easily. “It’s about Maddy. Has she tried to contact you since last night?” “No,” Lermontov said. “She came to see me on Wednesday afternoon, but I haven’t spoken to her since.

The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession by Susan Orlean

Donald Trump, financial independence, index card, Joan Didion, new economy, offshore financial centre, Richard Bolles, Suez canal 1869, traveling salesman, tulip mania

I ran my fingers up and down the smooth, rubbery orchid roots and up and down the nubbly mango bark, and then we went back in the house. Savilla opened a small file box and pulled out the index cards on which she records information about all the wild plants she’s collected. She handed me two cards. One said “Tiny Ghost Harrisella porrecta Collected 5/89 Big Cypress” and the other said “Polyrrhiza lindenii 5/89 Collected Big Cypress.” These were the plants that were on her mango tree. She put the index cards away and said there was one last chapter in the story of the seedpod. It takes about eight months for orchid seeds to germinate, and eight months after her seedpods were stolen Savilla received a letter from the curious man.

The 5 AM Club: Own Your Morning. Elevate Your Life. by Robin Sharma

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, dematerialisation, epigenetics, fake news, Grace Hopper, hedonic treadmill, impulse control, index card, invisible hand, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, large denomination, Mahatma Gandhi, Menlo Park, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Rosa Parks, telemarketer, white picket fence

Yet,” the homeless man responded, heightening the mystery of where he’d discovered much of his insight. The entrepreneur turned away from the artist and jotted down some of her thoughts into her device. The homeless man then reached into a pocket of his hole-ridden plaid shirt and produced a heavily used index card. He held it up like a kindergarten student at show-and-tell. “A distinguished person gave this to me when I was a lot younger, as I was starting my first company. I was a lot like you cats: dripping with dreams and set to make my mark on the world. Hungry to prove myself. Amped to dominate the game.

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“You can lean on me,” the artist said tenderly. He placed a hand with a hippie ring on a pinky finger onto his heart as he spoke these words, looking both chivalrous and bohemian. The homeless man interrupted the intimate moment the two were sharing. “Here, read this,” he instructed as he handed over his index card. “It’ll be useful as you both rise to your next performance levels and experience everything that comes with this adventure into human leadership, personal mastery and creating a career of uncommon productivity.” In red lettering over the paper that had yellowed by the advances of time, it read: “All change is hard at first, messy in the middle and gorgeous at the end.”

The Tunnel Through Time: A New Route for an Old London Journey by Gillian Tindall

clean water, congestion charging, Crossrail, index card, John Snow's cholera map, market design, megaproject, New Journalism, New Urbanism, railway mania, urban sprawl

The pointless brick wall that has replaced the house was given a different commemorative plaque in the 1970s, by which time the enlarged local authority of Tower Hamlets had acquired some notion of respect for the past – but not sufficient, it seems, to rebuild the house as it had been, or to construct anything worthwhile on the puddled parking lot that has replaced it. In the summer of 1963, five years after Cook’s house was destroyed, a girl is walking round Stepney with a pack of index cards in the little basket she uses as a handbag. She wears a checked cotton dress she has made herself, and flat sandals. Her plait of hair is pinned up. Young and energetic, she can walk several miles a day through the streets without effort, but she does not always have her mind entirely on what she is supposed to be doing.

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Nor does she discover at the time that adjoining this cemetery, and still more hidden away from the surrounding streets behind high walls, is an Ashkenazi Jewish burial ground that is almost as old. Some of the local descendants of those who lie there are people she has recently met. She is employed by the Stepney Old People’s Welfare Association, on a casual basis, to check up on the names and addresses she has on the dog-eared index cards. How many of the old ladies, and a smaller number of old men, are still at their recorded addresses, and what state are they in? And, indeed, what state are the houses in – still tremulously there, or swept away by the Greater London Plan that is designed to change the old parish of Stepney beyond recognition?

The Glass Castle: A Memoir by Jeannette Walls

East Village, glass ceiling, haute couture, index card, indoor plumbing

Dad built shelves all along the upper walls to store Mom's art supplies. She set up her easel under the stovepipe, right next to the back window, because she said it got natural sunlight—which it did, relatively speaking. She put her typewriters under another window, with shelves for her manuscripts and works in progress, and she immediately started thumbtacking index cards with story ideas to the walls. We kids all slept in the middle room. At first we shared one big bed that had been left by the previous owner, but Dad decided we were getting a tad old for that. We were also too big to sleep in cardboard boxes, and there wasn't enough room on the floor for them, anyway, so we helped Dad build two sets of bunk beds.

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The cheapest cloth we could find cost seventy-nine cents a yard, and you needed more than two yards for a dress. It made more sense to buy thrift-store clothes, and they had the armholes in the right places. Mom also tried to make the house cheerful. She decorated the living room walls with her oil paintings, and soon every square inch was covered, except for the space above her typewriter reserved for index cards. We had vivid desert sunsets, stampeding horses, sleeping cats, snow-covered mountains, bowls of fruit, blooming flowers, and portraits of us kids. Since Mom had more paintings than we had wall space, Dad nailed long shelf brackets to the wall, and she hung one picture in front of another until they were three or four deep.

The Last Best Cure: My Quest to Awaken the Healing Parts of My Brain and Get Back My Body, My Joy, a Nd My Life by Donna Jackson Nakazawa

back-to-the-land, epigenetics, index card, longitudinal study, medical residency, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, mouse model, place-making, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, stem cell

I take the exercise one step further. I put the large five-by-seven index card on which I’ve written my three blessings under my pillow. Sometimes I have trouble falling asleep, or wake up in the middle of the night, or too early. There are times when I have so much on my plate—more than can be done—that as I wake I feel my heart beating in my head as if the lining of my brain were the skin of a drum. My sympathetic nervous system is churning up the PIN response before I’m even fully conscious. I can’t get back to sleep. But if I run my fingers over the now crumpled index card beneath my pillow on which I’ve written my three blessings, the lovely moments of the previous day come flooding back.

Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War by Fred Kaplan

air gap, Big Tech, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, computer age, data acquisition, drone strike, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, game design, hiring and firing, index card, information security, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, John von Neumann, kremlinology, Laura Poitras, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Morris worm, national security letter, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, packet switching, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stuxnet, tech worker, Timothy McVeigh, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, Wargames Reagan, Y2K, zero day

The following Wednesday morning, back in the White House, Reagan met with the secretaries of state, defense, and treasury, his national security staff, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and sixteen prominent members of Congress, to discuss a new type of nuclear missile and the prospect of arms talks with the Russians. But he couldn’t get that movie out of his mind. At one point, he put down his index cards and asked if anyone else had seen it. Nobody had (it had just opened in theaters the previous Friday), so he launched into a detailed summary of its plot. Some of the legislators looked around the room with suppressed smiles or arched eyebrows. Not quite three months earlier, Reagan had delivered his “Star Wars” speech, calling on scientists to develop laser weapons that, in the event of war, could shoot down Soviet nuclear missiles as they darted toward America.

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Back at West Point, he worked on computers in the electrical engineering and physics departments. In the early 1980s, at the Naval Postgraduate School, in Monterey, California, he built his own computer and developed a program that taught Army personnel how to make the transition from handwritten index cards to automated databases. Soon after graduating, he was assigned to the Army Intelligence Center, at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, where he spent his first weekend memorizing the technical specifications for all the Army’s computers, then prepared a master plan for all intelligence and electronic-warfare data systems.

How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet (Information Policy) by Benjamin Peters

Albert Einstein, American ideology, Andrei Shleifer, Anthropocene, Benoit Mandelbrot, bitcoin, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commons-based peer production, computer age, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Davies, double helix, Drosophila, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Gabriella Coleman, hive mind, index card, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, linear programming, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, power law, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, scientific mainstream, scientific management, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, transaction costs, Turing machine, work culture , Yochai Benkler

Critics have accused its founder, Frederic Friedel, of having “ruined chess” because few games now occur that include new combinations of moves that are not found in “the Book.”46 The result is a new cold war tension of human players against the book, in which top chess players and their opponents know that, given almost any chess board arrangement, the best game they can play is played out in “the Book.” Botvinnik’s secret library of index cards that recorded global grandmaster games, saved exclusively for study by students at his Soviet school, did not migrate online, but it modeled what has become the global networked norm. Top players worldwide now memorize tens of thousands of recorded games and positions. All chess competitors now play aware of the networked heir of Botvinnik’s book and the humbling fact that most chess sequences have already been played before.

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National technical networks connecting factories were approved but never realized at the same time that local computer centers in those factories were built but never interconnected—all because of coordination problems (our coordination problems are as great today as their solutions are subtle). Sophisticated chess algorithms outmaneuvered long-term national planning methods and even the occasional chess master, but never to the same effect as a simple notational system kept on index cards (and now online databases). Ministerial ecosystems of paperwork collided and proliferated, and the committee meeting—that omnipresent black box of bureaucracies (even written minutes leave opaque the logics of small-group decisions)—remains among the most undertheorized and delicate techniques governing modern private power networks.

The Crux by Richard Rumelt

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, air gap, Airbnb, AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, biodiversity loss, Blue Ocean Strategy, Boeing 737 MAX, Boeing 747, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, creative destruction, crossover SUV, Crossrail, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, drop ship, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, financial engineering, Ford Model T, Herman Kahn, income inequality, index card, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Just-in-time delivery, Larry Ellison, linear programming, lockdown, low cost airline, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, meta-analysis, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, packet switching, PageRank, performance metric, precision agriculture, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, search costs, selection bias, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, software as a service, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stochastic process, Teledyne, telemarketer, TSMC, uber lyft, undersea cable, union organizing, vertical integration, WeWork

In college he was able to get a summer job writing code at Apple for the forthcoming Macintosh. After college he took a job at Oracle in customer service and was later promoted to vice president of the client/server division. While at Oracle, Benioff became familiar with Oracle’s OASIS system for customer- relationship management. Customer-relationship management systems started as index cards and evolved into computer databases in the 1970s. Such databases listed customers, contacts, order histories, evaluations, identification of leads, and other information useful in managing sales activities. Later, the databases began to include accounting, shipping, and other operations information.

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One approach, detailed in the Intel exercise described in Chapter 4, is to formally evaluate both the importance and the addressability of each of a number of challenges. A second approach is to “take things off the table.” At one government agency, the group had developed a list of twenty-six “key” challenges. Each was noted on a five-by-eight-inch index card on the conference table. I told the group that we had to simplify down to five by physically taking twenty-one “off the table.” No one volunteered to remove any of the “key” challenges. I turned to the director and said, “This is where you earn your pay. It is up to you to pick the five most important.”

Keep It Real: Everything You Need to Know About Researching and Writing Creative Nonfiction by Lee Gutkind

David Sedaris, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, index card, Joan Didion, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Mahatma Gandhi, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, Ronald Reagan, The Soul of a New Machine

Good, old-fashioned research and scholarship, either through immersion in a chosen subject à la John McPhee or through traditional print and electronic sources, are inescapable parts of a literary occupation. Yet creative nonfiction writers, especially beginners, often consider fact collecting and information gathering to be nothing more than the drudgery that must get done: the piles of handwritten index cards stacked on the card table; the color-coded file folders stuffed with assorted facts; the scraps of random details recorded on the pages of journals. All kept, but for what? Still, writers like John McPhee hang on to those “useless” factoids and half-forgotten notes culled from a variety of scholarly and personal sources, for they may come to life later in unexpected ways.

Do You Mind if I Cancel?: (Things That Still Annoy Me) by Gary Janetti

Golden age of television, hiring and firing, index card, rent control, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory

Does any of this matter when I’m twenty-four or twenty-five and going into Lend-A-Hand for an interview? It doesn’t. But it annoys me when I think of how much easier everything could’ve been. The Lend-A-Hand office is small and cluttered and there is one woman who works there. She sits behind a desk with a stack of index cards on them. Each card has an available job on it. They range from cleaning apartments to cater waiter for a private party—the most sought-after job she tells me, often involving large tips and the glamour that’s associated with serving cocktails to people who can afford to hire help. Getting into a wealthy person’s Upper East Side apartment is the perfect gateway to my career as a successful author I decide.

Digging Up Mother: A Love Story by Doug Stanhope

call centre, false flag, index card, pre–internet, rent control, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, telemarketer

Everyone was bedraggled, sitting at highway salvage desks, yelling into phones. I noticed the manager had a water-bong on his desk. I guess I didn’t really need to wear the suit. In fact, I probably looked like a little tiny narc at first glance. The scam was selling toner. You had a lead on an index card for a small business along with the type of copying machine and the name of the person in charge of purchasing. The pitch went like this: “Yes, Barbara? Hi, this is Doug calling on the Xerox. How’s the copier working for you?” You don’t say you are calling from Xerox. You insinuate it. “The reason for the call is we just had a price increase for the toner and developer you use for the machine.

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So when pay-day came, it was a gumball rally to be first to the nearest bank to cash it. If you were too late and there were insufficient funds, then you had to endure the process of finding a check-cashing place that didn’t have this company on file as deadbeats. Those pre-Internet days where everything was done on index cards in a Rolodex were golden when it came to scamming the system. I was there for less than a month before they shut down and fled but there were plenty more in town, and if one shut down, you’d have a job at another by the end of the day. Some were really shaky, some almost felt corporate. One had it down to such a science that you could only call people with certain first names—names that were generally of young people.

The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg

Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Checklist Manifesto, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, delayed gratification, desegregation, game design, haute couture, impulse control, index card, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, patient HM, pattern recognition, power law, randomized controlled trial, rolodex, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Stanford marshmallow experiment, tacit knowledge, telemarketer, Tenerife airport disaster, the strength of weak ties, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, Walter Mischel

When she had worked through all of the nails, she felt a brief sense of completeness, she said. That was the habit’s reward: a physical stimulation she had come to crave. MANDY’S HABIT LOOP At the end of their first session, the therapist sent Mandy home with an assignment: Carry around an index card, and each time you feel the cue—a tension in your fingertips—make a check mark on the card. She came back a week later with twenty-eight checks. She was, by that point, acutely aware of the sensations that preceded her habit. She knew how many times it occurred during class or while watching television.

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Then Mandy was to search for something that would provide a quick physical stimulation—such as rubbing her arm or rapping her knuckles on a desk—anything that would produce a physical response. The cues and rewards stayed the same. Only the routine changed. MANDY’S NEW HABIT LOOP They practiced in the therapist’s office for about thirty minutes and Mandy was sent home with a new assignment: Continue with the index card, but make a check when you feel the tension in your fingertips and a hash mark when you successfully override the habit. A week later, Mandy had bitten her nails only three times and had used the competing response seven times. She rewarded herself with a manicure, but kept using the note cards.

Working Effectively With Legacy Code by Michael Feathers

business logic, c2.com, computer age, functional programming, HyperCard, index card, Mars Rover, Silicon Valley, web application

In the 1980s, Ward Cunningham and Kent Beck were dealing with this issue. They were trying to help people start to think about design in terms of objects. At the time, Ward was using a tool named Hypercard, which allows you to create cards on a computer display and form links among them. Suddenly, the insight was there. Why not use real index cards to represent classes? It would make them tangible and easy to discuss. Should we talk about the Transaction class? Sure, here is its card—on it we have its responsibilities and collaborators. CRC stands for Class, Responsibility, and Collaborations. You mark up each card with a class name, its responsibilities, and a list of its collaborators (other classes that this class communicates with).

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Several years ago, I met Ron Jeffries at a conference. He’d promised me that he would show me how he could explain an architecture using cards in a way that made the interactions rather vivid and memorable. Sure enough, he did. This is the way that it works. The person describing the system uses a set of blank index cards and lays them down on a table one by one. He or she can move the cards, point at them, or do whatever else is needed to convey the typical objects in the system and how they interact. Here is an example, a description of an online voting system: “Here’s how the real-time voting system works. Here is a client session” (points at card).

In Our Own Image: Savior or Destroyer? The History and Future of Artificial Intelligence by George Zarkadakis

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, animal electricity, anthropic principle, Asperger Syndrome, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, British Empire, business process, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, continuous integration, Conway's Game of Life, cosmological principle, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Edward Snowden, epigenetics, Flash crash, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, income inequality, index card, industrial robot, intentional community, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, machine translation, millennium bug, mirror neurons, Moravec's paradox, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Plato's cave, post-industrial society, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, theory of mind, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y2K

In 1910, Otlet envisaged the ‘Mundaneum’, the Library of Alexandria of the twentieth century.13 It would include everything – newspapers, books, pamphlets, photographs, even audio recordings. Otlet devised an indexing system that could catalogue and aid search and retrieval of this information. The system would be realised in a Universal Bibliography made up of fifteen million index cards stored in filing cabinets. To reduce the enormous size of his Bibliography, Otlet advocated the miniaturisation of documents on microfilm, and designed automated search systems to locate information – a precursor of contemporary search engines.14 All this information would be broadcast to users by radio, and stored in la Mondothèque, a workstation equipped with microfilm reader, telephone, television and record player.

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Initially they offered him the Palais Mondial, a building in central Brussels, then later confined him to a corner of the building, only to finally evict him in 1924. In a sad outcome for a great vision, Otlet’s collection was mostly destroyed by the Nazis in 1940. But Otlet never lost faith in his project. It is said that in his old age he could be seen piling up jellyfish on the beach, and then placing on top an index card bearing the number 59:33: the code for Coelenterata in his Universal Decimal Classification. Paul Otlet is considered one of the visionaries of the information age, and yet his grand idea suffered from an obvious problem: what would happen to the Mundaneum if a great big bomb exploded on it? Wouldn’t that spell the catastrophic end of all human knowledge?

What Would the Great Economists Do?: How Twelve Brilliant Minds Would Solve Today's Biggest Problems by Linda Yueh

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bike sharing, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, forward guidance, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, lateral thinking, life extension, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working-age population

It would not have escaped his notice that his wife’s money was to a great extent maintaining his family’s standard of living. Fisher always thought that invention would be the key to making a personal fortune. He had tried many times, but his visible index card system was the breakthrough. It was a simple idea. He cut a notch at the bottom of an index card. These could be attached to a metal strip and mounted vertically, horizontally or even on a circular drum. It was a much more efficient way of finding records than flipping through boxes of cards. The concept had come to him in 1910, but he couldn’t find anybody to manufacture the device.

The Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today by Linda Yueh

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bike sharing, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, forward guidance, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, lateral thinking, life extension, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working-age population

It would not have escaped his notice that his wife’s money was to a great extent maintaining his family’s standard of living. Fisher always thought that invention would be the key to making a personal fortune. He had tried many times, but his visible index card system was the breakthrough. It was a simple idea. He cut a notch at the bottom of an index card. These could be attached to a metal strip and mounted vertically, horizontally or even on a circular drum. It was a much more efficient way of finding records than flipping through boxes of cards. The concept had come to him in 1910, but he couldn’t find anybody to manufacture the device.

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain

8-hour work day, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, call centre, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, emotional labour, game design, hive mind, index card, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, new economy, popular electronics, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, telemarketer, The Wisdom of Crowds, traveling salesman, twin studies, Walter Mischel, web application, white flight

When he does find himself at other people’s parties, Edgar goes to great lengths to play his role. “All through college, and recently even, before I ever went to a dinner or cocktail party, I would have an index card with three to five relevant, amusing anecdotes. I’d come up with them during the day—if something struck me I’d jot it down. Then, at dinner, I’d wait for the right opening and launch in. Sometimes I’d have to go to the bathroom and pull out my cards to remember what my little stories were.” Over time, though, Edgar stopped bringing index cards to dinner parties. He still considers himself an introvert, but he grew so deeply into his extroverted role that telling anecdotes started to come naturally to him.

Your Money or Your Life: 9 Steps to Transforming Your Relationship With Money and Achieving Financial Independence: Revised and Updated for the 21st Century by Vicki Robin, Joe Dominguez, Monique Tilford

asset allocation, book value, Buckminster Fuller, buy low sell high, classic study, credit crunch, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, fiat currency, financial independence, fixed income, fudge factor, full employment, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, index card, index fund, intentional community, job satisfaction, junk bonds, Menlo Park, money market fund, Parkinson's law, passive income, passive investing, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, retail therapy, Richard Bolles, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, software patent, strikebreaker, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Vanguard fund, zero-coupon bond

Kept by thrifty housewives for decades and made famous by Amy Dacyczyn, author of The Tightwad Gazette,10 a price book enables you to recognize quickly the cheapest prices of your most commonly purchased items. You can create your own system (some folks prefer a small loose-leaf binder, others like index cards) but the format is similar. Each item gets its own page (or index card) with the name of the item (e.g., “Peanut Butter”) at the top. Below that on one horizontal line, record the store name, product brand name, price, quantity and unit price. (The per-ounce unit price is often printed on the price tag on the shelf—or you can figure it out yourself).

Doing Data Science: Straight Talk From the Frontline by Cathy O'Neil, Rachel Schutt

Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, bike sharing, bioinformatics, computer vision, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, distributed generation, Dunning–Kruger effect, Edward Snowden, Emanuel Derman, fault tolerance, Filter Bubble, finite state, Firefox, game design, Google Glasses, index card, information retrieval, iterative process, John Harrison: Longitude, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, machine translation, Mars Rover, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, p-value, pattern recognition, performance metric, personalized medicine, pull request, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, selection bias, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, statistical model, stochastic process, tacit knowledge, text mining, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, X Prize

Nobody is an expert in everything, which is why it makes more sense to create teams of people who have different profiles and different expertise—together, as a team, they can specialize in all those things. We’ll talk about this more after we look at the composite set of skills in demand for today’s data scientists. A Data Science Profile In the class, Rachel handed out index cards and asked everyone to profile themselves (on a relative rather than absolute scale) with respect to their skill levels in the following domains: Computer science Math Statistics Machine learning Domain expertise Communication and presentation skills Data visualization As an example, Figure 1-2 shows Rachel’s data science profile.

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Rachel’s data science profile, which she created to illustrate trying to visualize oneself as a data scientist; she wanted students and guest lecturers to “riff” on this—to add buckets or remove skills, use a different scale or visualization method, and think about the drawbacks of self-reporting We taped the index cards to the blackboard and got to see how everyone else thought of themselves. There was quite a bit of variation, which is cool—lots of people in the class were coming from social sciences, for example. Where is your data science profile at the moment, and where would you like it to be in a few months, or years?

A People's History of Poverty in America by Stephen Pimpare

affirmative action, British Empire, car-free, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dumpster diving, East Village, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Gilder, green new deal, hedonic treadmill, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, index card, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, moral panic, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, payday loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, subprime mortgage crisis, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, union organizing, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Some well-meaning neighbor secretly mailed a post card to the Charity society, telling of our plight. One day a stranger called. He was a slim fair-haired, young Christian with a brisk hurry-up manner and a stylish collar and necktie. He placed his umbrella against the wall, and shuffled through a bunch of index cards.... This was evidently one of the brusque young men who came from the Board of Health, or the Public School, or the Christian missions, or the settlement houses. They asked many questions, and one must answer them or go to jail.... “And so your husband is out of work? Is he kind to you? Does he drink?

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His face was pale, he trembled with rage. He glared at the young blond question-asker, and shouted: “‘Get out of this house, mister! You have no business here. It is true we are poor, but that does not give you the right to insult us.” “I am not insulting you,” said the young investigator, blowing his nose and shuffling his index cards nervously, “I ask these questions in about fifty homes a day. It is just the regular form.” My father drew himself up proudly. “I spit on your regular form,” he said. “We don’t want any charity; we can live without it, mister.” . . . What he reported on his cards we never knew, but we were spared the indignity of any further visits by Organized Charity.

Statistics hacks by Bruce Frey

Bayesian statistics, Berlin Wall, correlation coefficient, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, distributed generation, en.wikipedia.org, feminist movement, G4S, game design, Hacker Ethic, index card, Linda problem, Milgram experiment, Monty Hall problem, p-value, place-making, reshoring, RFID, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, statistical model, sugar pill, systematic bias, Thomas Bayes

Zener decks have 25 cards with matching backs. The face of each card displays one of five symbols: a circle, cross, square, star, or wavy lines, as shown in Figure 6-7. Figure 6-7. Zener cards If you don't have a deck of these cards handy, you can make them pretty easily with a pack of blank index cards and a black magic marker. Just make sure that no one can see right through them (unless they are psychic, in which case they can see right through you, too). Make 5 cards of each symbol for a total of 25 cards. There are a few different ways you can use a shuffled deck of Zener cards to conduct an ESP test: One person tries to guess the order of the cards by announcing each one before it is turned over.

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By the way, because your research interest is legitimate, you shouldn't have to worry about violating any Internet protocols. Throw a party When hosting a large party (Milgram would have loved it if you used a cocktail party, the inspiration for his original study), hand out supplies to your guests. Give them each a large index card and a pen. At the bottom of each card, list the name of a guest at the party. If guests don't know the person listed below, they should sign their name at the top of the card and hand it to someone else who they think might know the person. The process should continue, just as in the Milgram study, until the cards reach the person who is named on the bottom.

Hard Landing by Thomas Petzinger, Thomas Petzinger Jr.

airline deregulation, Boeing 747, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, cross-subsidies, desegregation, Donald Trump, emotional labour, feminist movement, index card, junk bonds, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Michael Milken, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Ponzi scheme, postindustrial economy, price stability, profit motive, Ralph Nader, revenue passenger mile, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, technological determinism, the medium is the message, The Predators' Ball, Thomas L Friedman, union organizing, yield management, zero-sum game

After boarding a United flight, he would change into a cardigan sweater and then work the cabin of an airplane, asking pilots and flight attendants whether they were happy and what the airline could be doing better. Hearing any criticism or suggestion, he reached into his pocket for an index card and passed a note to an aide traveling with him. The card was delivered to the desk of the appropriate department head, who was required to take action and report back to the chairman. Eddie Carlson’s index cards “Ready Eddies,” people called them—became a symbol of management’s willingness to listen. In 1971 alone Carlson logged 186,366 miles on United, half of them in coach. This was, after all, a service business, so Carlson considered the views and attitudes of stewardesses of particular importance.

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From its first day of operation Sabre began accumulating reels of information, the most detailed information ever compiled on the travel patterns emanating from every major city—by destination, by month, by season, by day of the week, by hour of the day—information that in the right hands would become exceedingly valuable in the industry that American sought to dominate. Those airlines that ignored the computer revolution did so at tremendous peril. One was Trans World Airlines. In 1966, four years after American was on-line with Sabre, clerks at TWA were still taking reservations by hand, on index cards. It was in that year that TWA hired a 30-year-old Bob Crandall from Hallmark Cards as its manager of credit and collections, though he would not stay in that position for long. TWA had contracted with Burroughs Corporation to develop a massive airline reservations system called George, as in, “Let George do it.”

Design Is a Job by Mike Monteiro

4chan, crowdsourcing, do what you love, index card, iterative process, John Gruber, Kickstarter, late fees, Steve Jobs

The goal is to expand your view of your job as a designer to include not just your talent, but the business and communication aspects as well. I made it a short book so you can get back to work. This book does not contain a “system.” At the end of this book you will not run out to buy forty-three index cards. You will not get real. You will not add five items to your bucket list. You will not have to adjust your social media strategy, nor will you unlock a secret. You will have more confidence in yourself and a deeper understanding of your craft. Why listen to me? I’ve been running Mule Design, along with my partner Erika Hall, for almost ten years.

Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness by Frederic Laloux, Ken Wilber

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, blue-collar work, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, different worldview, driverless car, Easter island, failed state, fulfillment center, future of work, hiring and firing, holacracy, index card, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kenneth Rogoff, meta-analysis, ocean acidification, pattern recognition, post-industrial society, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, radical decentralization, randomized controlled trial, selection bias, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, the market place, the scientific method, Tony Hsieh, warehouse automation, zero-sum game

These initial training modules are therefore expanded with follow-up training and workshops that are interwoven into daily life. At FAVI, Jean-François Zobrist used to chair a one-hour session every Friday morning, open to whoever wanted to join. The topic: An in-depth look at one of FAVI’s core organizational tools. (FAVI calls them fiches, or index cards, as they are literally available in the form of index cards to employees.) These include the purpose of the organization, its values, its decision-making mechanisms, and lean manufacturing techniques. Formats used by other organizations include team coaching (to work through some upset), company retreats, purpose circles, and values days.

Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing (Writing Science) by Thierry Bardini

Apple II, augmented reality, Bill Duvall, Charles Babbage, classic study, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, experimental subject, Grace Hopper, hiring and firing, hypertext link, index card, information retrieval, invention of hypertext, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Rulifson, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Leonard Kleinrock, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, Multics, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, packet switching, Project Xanadu, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Silicon Valley, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Ted Nelson, the medium is the message, theory of mind, Turing test, unbiased observer, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture

Thus the problem of regression of the hand already exists today at the in- dividual if not the species level. (Leroi-Gourhan, 1993 [19 6 5], 255-56) Leroi-Gourhan parallels this evolution of the hand with the dynamic of the liberation of human memory via books, punched index cards, and other "memory-collecting machines." For him, the evolution started with the op- portunities provided by books, which he compares to "hand tools." Card in- dexes, on the other hand, are comparable to "hand-operated machines," while "punched index cards represent yet another stage, comparable to that of early automatic machines" (ibid., 264). About this later stage, he wrote: A punched card index is a memory-collecting machine.

The Personal MBA: A World-Class Business Education in a Single Volume by Josh Kaufman

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Atul Gawande, Black Swan, Blue Ocean Strategy, business cycle, business process, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Heinemeier Hansson, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Dean Kamen, delayed gratification, discounted cash flows, Donald Knuth, double entry bookkeeping, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunning–Kruger effect, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Santayana, Gödel, Escher, Bach, high net worth, hindsight bias, index card, inventory management, iterative process, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, loose coupling, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, Network effects, Parkinson's law, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, place-making, premature optimization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, scientific management, side project, statistical model, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, systems thinking, telemarketer, the scientific method, time value of money, Toyota Production System, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, Y Combinator, Yogi Berra

By taking a few minutes to identify a few tasks as particularly important, you’ll make it easier to focus on achieving them first. At the beginning of every day, create a list of two or three MITs, then focus on getting them done as quickly as possible. Keep this list separate from your general to-do list or task tracking system. I typically use a 3 × 5 index card or David Seah’s “Emergent Task Planner,”7 a free downloadable PDF that makes it easy to plan your day. When creating your list of MITs, it’s useful to ask a Self-Elicitation question : “What are the two or three most important things that I need to do today? What are the things that—if I got them done today—would make a huge difference?”

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After breaking up the book into well-defined sections, it was much easier to make progress, since each individual task was less overwhelming. To keep yourself from feeling overwhelmed, track your projects and tasks separately. Here’s what I do: I always carry around a notebook that contains a 3 × 5 index card.9 The card contains a short list of my active projects. The notebook contains my to-do list: the next actions that will move my projects forward, which I process using a system called “Autofocus,” which was created by Mark Forster.10 The system helps me use my intuition to identify what I can do right now to make progress.

Theft by Finding: Diaries (1977-2002) by David Sedaris

clean water, David Sedaris, East Village, index card, Joan Didion, place-making, Ronald Reagan

I couldn’t work so just sat in the rocking chair and listened to him. August 6, 1996 La Bagotière Things are moving along at the house. Not only do we have water, but now there’s even a washing machine. This saves us from doing laundry in the tub, which always took forever, especially the wringing-out part. I’m continuing to put new vocabulary words on index cards. “What does that mean?” I keep asking Hugh as he’s talking to people. “How do you spell it?” He lost his patience a few hours after we arrived. In the morning we went to the small city of Flers and ran into R. and her husband, P. They’re a fit and attractive couple fifteen years older than us who feel that their friends should be equally youthful and good-looking.

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August 14, 2000 La Bagotière Hugh went to Ségrie-Fontaine to see Jocelyn, who heard a rumor that I am retarded. It’s being spread by a woman in the village of Taillebois who’s seen me “looking at pictures and talking to myself.” “Il n’est pas normal,” she says. What she thinks are pictures are actually my index cards, and I’m testing myself on French vocabulary words, not having arguments with the little demons perched on my shoulders. The woman said that I’m not dangerous, which I guess is good. Apparently I’m one of those retarded people who can wander off for a few hours but still manage to find their way back home.

Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice by Bill Browder

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Berlin Wall, British Empire, corporate governance, El Camino Real, Gordon Gekko, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, index card, off-the-grid, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, transfer pricing, union organizing

We sat and he politely asked me to go through the whole story. He listened intently, periodically scribbling notes on an index card, not saying a word. Only when I was done did he start talking, which was when I began to see how he’d earned his reputation. “Have you been to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on this yet?” he fired at me in a low, staccato voice. “No. Should I have?” “Yes. Add them to the list.” He put a check mark next to one of the notes on his index card. “What about the House Committee on Investigations?” “No. Who are they?” I was starting to feel inadequate. “It’s a House committee that has virtually unlimited subpoena powers.

The Naked Presenter: Delivering Powerful Presentations With or Without Slides by Garr Reynolds

death from overwork, deliberate practice, fear of failure, Hans Rosling, index card, Kaizen: continuous improvement, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Mahatma Gandhi, Maui Hawaii, mirror neurons, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, TED Talk

You need both a place and a set amount of time to quiet your busy mind, see things clearly, and link associations that you may have missed before. 2. Remove the distractions. Turn off your computer and unplug yourself from the grid. You’ll be amazed at your creativity and insights when you remove the sources of interruptions. 3. Go analog. Grab a sketch book, sticky notes, or index cards. Alternatively, place yourself in front of a large whiteboard. You do not need a computer—that comes later (if ever). College students prepare their presentation together by turning off the computer and sketching their ideas. Chapter 2 First Things First: Preparation 49 Wow! eBook <WoweBook.Com> 4.

Intertwingled: Information Changes Everything by Peter Morville

A Pattern Language, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, augmented reality, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Black Swan, business process, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Computer Lib, disinformation, disruptive innovation, folksonomy, holacracy, index card, information retrieval, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Kanban, Lean Startup, Lyft, messenger bag, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, Nelson Mandela, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Project Xanadu, quantum entanglement, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, single source of truth, source of truth, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, zero-sum game

We were exhilarated by co-learning and co-creation, and deeply inspired by the potential of this global network to lift us up and bring us together. Today, it’s easy to get lost in the streams of Facebook and Netflix, but back then it was all about the bridges. In 1934, Paul Otlet envisioned a scholar’s workstation that turned millions of 3 x 5 index cards into a web of knowledge by using a new kind of relationship known as the “Link.”lxiv In 1945, Vannevar Bush imagined the memex, a machine that enabled its users to share an associative “web of trails.”lxv In the early 60s, Ted Nelson coined “hypertext” and set out to build Xanadu, a non-sequential writing system with visible, clickable, unbreakable, bi-directional hyperlinks. lxvi Figure 3-1.

Sleepwalk With Me: And Other Painfully True Stories by Mike Birbiglia

index card, Ralph Nader, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, telemarketer, traveling salesman

I’ve discovered since then that making fun of audience members is an entire genre of comedy. Comedians have entire acts that consist of pointed nuggets like, “Nice shirt, faggot!” To which the people around that gay-shirted audience member reply, “It’s so true! His shirt does suck! This guy’s a genius!” I’m standing on the sidewalk, holding a 3x5 index card with five bullet points. I’m desperately trying to figure out how I’m going to stretch this into thirty minutes. It says: “Stick Insects. Cookie Monster. A-Team. Teletubbies. Millionaire. Slash.” This was the material: Stick insects I’d hate to be a stick insect because all the other insects are always bumping into you because they don’t know you’re there, and you have to be like, “Watch it.”

Endgame: Bobby Fischer's Remarkable Rise and Fall - From America's Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness by Frank Brady

anti-communist, Charles Lindbergh, El Camino Real, illegal immigration, index card, long peace, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, Socratic dialogue

Spurning Abramov’s offer of an introduction to the city, Bobby asked to be brought immediately to the Tsentralny Shakhmatny Klub, the Moscow Central Chess Club, said to be one of the finest in the world. Virtually all of the strongest players in Moscow belonged to the club, which had been opened in 1956 and boasted a library reported to consist of ten thousand chess books and over one hundred thousand index cards of opening variations. Bobby simply couldn’t wait until he saw it all. Upon arriving at the club’s headquarters on Gogolsky Boulevard, Bobby was first introduced to two young Soviet masters, both in their early twenties: Evgeni Vasukov and Alexander Nikitin. He began playing speed chess in rotation with both, in a hallway on the first floor of the club, and won every game.

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“It wouldn’t have made any difference,” Bobby responded. He then showed the Russian all of the variations he’d worked out during the adjournment. Soon, grandmasters Efim Geller and Robert Byrne jumped into the fray. There was a blur of hands as the four men made moves on a chess set hardly larger than an index card. At that moment Offenbach’s “Les oiseaux dans la charmille” filtered down from the stage. But the chess players seemed not to notice. Eventually, Fischer was given his two prize checks, one from the Icelandic Chess Federation and the other from James Slater, the millionaire whose eleventh-hour financial offer had saved the match.

Market Wizards: Interviews With Top Traders by Jack D. Schwager

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, beat the dealer, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, commodity trading advisor, computerized trading, conceptual framework, delta neutral, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, fixed income, implied volatility, index card, junk bonds, locking in a profit, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Michael Milken, money market fund, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, short selling, Teledyne, transaction costs, uptick rule, yield curve, zero-sum game

Forty-five minutes into the interview, I began to think that things were going so well that Dennis would continue our conversation beyond the allotted hour. At exactly ten minutes before the end of the hour, my illusion was shattered. “I’ve only got about ten more minutes,” he said, “so if there’s still stuff that’s important you may want to get to it.” I shuffled through my index cards and quickly tried to identify some of the key questions I had not yet covered. Precisely at the end of the hour, Dennis said, “That’s about all the time I have, thank you.” One segment of questions I did not get to dealt with the political side of Dennis’ experiences. These topics included the Senate hearings on alleged manipulation of the soybean market by Dennis, the Roosevelt Institute, and the various political figures Dennis had known.

…

Often his responses were quite short. I felt like a photographer stalking a rare bird; one false step and the bird would fly off. I knew that, at some point, I would not be able to think of an immediate follow-up question. This happened about forty minutes into the interview. I quickly glanced down at my index cards, searching for a lead. Unfortunately, my eyes focused on a question I had already touched upon, and though I tried to ask it from a different perspective, it was too late. The game was over. Baldwin said he had to get going and excused himself. How did you first get interested in trading? I had taken some classes in commodities in graduate school.

The New Division of Labor: How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market by Frank Levy, Richard J. Murnane

Atul Gawande, business cycle, call centre, computer age, Computer Numeric Control, correlation does not imply causation, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deskilling, digital divide, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Gunnar Myrdal, hypertext link, index card, information asymmetry, job automation, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, profit motive, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, speech recognition, tacit knowledge, talking drums, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, working poor

Keefe asked one student to describe an alligator so that someone who had never seen one would know what it looked like. She asked other children to add to the description. She turned to a discussion of how the children could find information in books to answer their questions, and the importance of taking notes and organizing the information on index cards. In response to a question, one boy explained the importance of “not writing word for word from the books because that would be stealing another person’s writing.” The children then worked in pairs to collect and organize information on their animal. Ms. Keefe moved around the room, talking with pairs of students about the evidence they were finding, offering suggestions about organizing the information.

Ship It!: A Practical Guide to Successful Software Projects by Jared R. Richardson, William A. Gwaltney

continuous integration, David Heinemeier Hansson, Donald Knuth, index card, MVC pattern, no silver bullet, place-making, Ruby on Rails, web application

Once it fell behind the desk, the “out of sight, out of mind” rule kicked in, and they forgot the issue. When you use an issue tracking system, you provide yourself with a safety net that Harry and Lloyd never had. Your issue tracking system is a bookkeeping detail. You need it to track what you’ve worked on, what you have and haven’t fixed, and what you plan to fix. A white board, index cards, or a spiral-bound notebook might handle your needs for a few months but not for any length of time, and these certainly don’t scale to the enterprise. How Do I Get Started? If you don’t currently have an issue tracking system, don’t wait. Don’t delay your transition until you can transfer every issue ever encountered.

The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right by Atul Gawande

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Airbus A320, Atul Gawande, Boeing 747, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Checklist Manifesto, index card, John Snow's cholera map, megacity, RAND corporation, Tenerife airport disaster, US Airways Flight 1549, William Langewiesche

Using a checklist for takeoff would no more have occurred to a pilot than to a driver backing a car out of the garage. But flying this new plane was too complicated to be left to the memory of any one person, however expert. The test pilots made their list simple, brief, and to the point—short enough to fit on an index card, with step-by-step checks for takeoff, flight, landing, and taxiing. It had the kind of stuff that all pilots know to do. They check that the brakes are released, that the instruments are set, that the door and windows are closed, that the elevator controls are unlocked—dumb stuff. You wouldn’t think it would make that much difference.

The Fire Starter Sessions: A Soulful + Practical Guide to Creating Success on Your Own Terms by Danielle Laporte

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, David Heinemeier Hansson, delayed gratification, do what you love, emotional labour, fake it until you make it, Frank Gehry, index card, invisible hand, Lao Tzu, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Ralph Waldo Emerson, solopreneur, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak

I raced home from the fire-walking workshop at midnight, under a full moon, with a note card tucked into my Levis: “I, Danielle LaPorte, walked on fire. I can do anything.” (The instructor had us write these cards; I went with it.) The idea was that anytime we felt less than heroic, we could look at that three-by-five index card stuck on our bathroom mirror, and remember that we bent matter with our minds and therefore have access to special people powers. Handy. Would I do it again? I hesitate. The evening of that fire walk seminar I asked some of the repeat walkers how the night went for them. I was really surprised to hear that some people burned their feet on what was their second or third time walking.

The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee by Sarah Silverman

haute couture, index card, Nelson Mandela, Saturday Night Live, Skype

Example: My friend Mark Cohen--every comic's favorite comic and the quickest mind anyone knew--grabbed a nickel from our table at the Washington Square Diner, stuck it on his forehead, and yelped, "Jewish Ash Wednesday!" Everyone laughed but me. I was upset. Cohen (Coco) rolled his eyes at me for ruining his fun, but I couldn't help it. I was hurt that he would perpetuate a stereotype like that. I know. Index card for my first joke after Jimmy Kimmel introduced me at the Hugh Hefner roast. It was the first time I remember meeting Jimmy (though he says we met once before). The truth is, from that time up to now, inside, I haven't changed. My outer shell may mutate, I may come to embrace the things that scare and upset me, but it all comes from the same place.

Agile Project Management with Kanban (Developer Best Practices) by Eric Brechner

Amazon Web Services, cloud computing, continuous integration, crowdsourcing, data science, DevOps, don't repeat yourself, en.wikipedia.org, index card, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, loose coupling, minimum viable product, pull request, software as a service

Kanban can still work well for distributed teams through a virtual signboard online, but if you’re given the choice, sitting in close proximity near a physical signboard is better. After choosing a location for your signboard, it’s time to construct two columns for each step, plus a double-width column on the left for the work backlog. The columns for each step should be the width of a note card (sticky note or index card). You can use tape or markers to delineate the columns. Here’s what your signboard might look like. Looking back at the steps in the high-level routine that my teams use, notice how the first and last steps are treated differently from the middle steps. The first step, “Take an item from the backlog,” is replaced by a holding area for pending work.

Grand: A Memoir by Sara Schaefer

fake news, index card, Neil Armstrong, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, TED Talk

In an instant we know she is going to die again, and I feel the horror of losing her once more, rushing in like a dust storm. And then I would wake up, choking on grief as intense as the day she died. I hated my brain. It seemed hell-bent on torturing me. During the day, I was trying to write a television pilot, and I had cleared off the kitchen table and covered it with index cards and books with titles like The Eight Characters of Comedy and The Nutshell Technique and Write to TV: Out of Your Head and onto the Screen. Spoiler alert: I could not get out of my head. Every time I tried to start writing, a stampede of bad thoughts would charge in. So instead of writing, I did what every doctor recommends: I spent hours robotically checking social media.

Bacon: A Love Story: A Salty Survey of Everybody's Favorite Meat by Heather Lauer

British Empire, haute cuisine, Hernando de Soto, if you build it, they will come, index card, Ronald Reagan

The Internet is, obviously, a thrillingly comprehensive sea of 82 ~ BACON: A LOVE STORY information, and the community of food bloggers and critics is an incredibly active wave within that. I consult magazines, cookbooks, organic farming brochures and catalogs, the sides of food packaging, tattered and greasy index cards buried on the bottom shelves of pantries. If someone prepares a dish I have never encountered before, I have them write the recipe out.” Bacon recipes seem to come crawling out of the woodwork in droves for an appearance on The Bacon Show. It still is hard to believe that it is so easy to find a new bacon recipe every day.

The Lights in the Tunnel by Martin Ford

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Bear Stearns, Bill Joy: nanobots, Black-Scholes formula, business cycle, call centre, carbon tax, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, credit crunch, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, full employment, income inequality, index card, industrial robot, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, pattern recognition, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Solow, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, technological singularity, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, War on Poverty, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics

The computer then in use was a state-of-the-art mainframe machine manufactured by the Amdahl Corporation. In my first computer programming course, we were assigned the task of writing and running a program using computer punch cards.7 To do this, you first went to the university bookstore and purchased a large box of blank punch cards. These were similar to, but a little longer than, standard index cards. You then wrote your program using pencil and paper, and took your blank cards to a card punch machine at the computing center. You inserted a blank card in the machine and entered, or “keyed in,” one line from your program. As you did this, the machine punched corresponding holes in the card.

97 Things Every Programmer Should Know by Kevlin Henney

A Pattern Language, active measures, Apollo 11, business intelligence, business logic, commoditize, continuous integration, crowdsourcing, database schema, deliberate practice, domain-specific language, don't repeat yourself, Donald Knuth, fixed income, functional programming, general-purpose programming language, Grace Hopper, index card, inventory management, job satisfaction, level 1 cache, loose coupling, machine readable, Silicon Valley, sorting algorithm, The Wisdom of Crowds

A GUI might disable or remove commands that make no sense in the current context, for example, or an API might eliminate argument-ordering problems by allowing parameters to be passed in any order. A good way to design interfaces that are easy to use correctly is to exercise them before they exist. Mock up a GUI—possibly on a whiteboard or using index cards on a table—and play with it before any underlying code has been created. Write calls to an API before the functions have been declared. Walk through common use cases and specify how you want the interface to behave. What do you want to be able to click on? What do you want to be able to pass? Easy-to-use interfaces seem natural, because they let you do what you want to do.

Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany

centre right, East Village, index card

She was going away. She was laughing like, as though, as if. He stood, losing her laughter, replaced by whirled bewilderment in the tides of his consciousness fading— V When they returned, Brass called, “Good news. We got who we wanted." "Crew's coming along," commented Calli. Rydra handed him the three index cards. "They'll report to the ship discorporate two hours before— what's wrong?" DaniI D.Appleby reached to take the cards. "I. . . she . . ." and couldn't say anything else. "Who?" Rydra asked. The concern on her face was driving away even his remaining memories, and he resented it, memories of, of.

War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning by Chris Hedges

anti-communist, Danilo Kiš, index card, military-industrial complex, Norman Mailer, Ronald Reagan

They bulldoze fields where bodies are buried, as they did in Srebrenica, dynamite mine shafts where bodies were dumped, or dissolve the corpses in acid. But the industrial-scale killing of the twentieth century makes such erasure difficult. And years later there often is a dogged and methodical effort, usually by lonely dissidents, to uncover the past. These statisticians wield with index cards the fate of despots, the return of historical memory and, finally, hope. I was taken to a school in northern Iraq days after Iraqi soldiers withdrew from the region following the Gulf War. Kurdish rebels there told me that under the concrete in the schoolyard were hundreds of bodies. They vowed to smash through the concrete and dig them up.

Land of Big Numbers: Stories by Te-Ping Chen

index card, invisible hand

They’d found him. It was an elderly man out walking his border collie in the hills who’d made the report. Gao’s body was dangling from a tree, face black, clad in his leather jacket, ID and car keys in his breast pocket. He’d been there all night. His car had been found in the otherwise empty parking lot, an index card with my name and number written in his hand on the dashboard. I searched the apartment in disbelief for days, but there wasn’t anything else, no apology, no note of explanation. He had been private in almost everything, and he was private, too, in his death. The days proceeded in his absence: phone calls with friends and funeral homes, details that needed arranging.

My Own Country: A Doctor's Story of a Town and Its People in the Age of AIDS by Abraham Verghese

contact tracing, gentleman farmer, gentrification, index card, Mason jar, medical residency

For several weeks now—ever since Essie Vines had brought Gordon down to the emergency room—I had been going through the motions at the VA. Patients at the VA were interesting (though somewhat predictable), my research was going well, and I had my hands full with student and resident teaching. But I couldn’t stop fingering the index cards I now carried in my breast pocket: one each for Gordon, Ed and Bobby, Fred and Otis. One for Clyde McCray with Vickie’s name penciled in on the seventh card, awaiting the results of her test. I put a date on Fred and Otis’s cards and wrote their CD4 counts next to it. I spread the cards in my hand and wondered idly, How many cards I would be carrying next week?

…

You could shop in the mall, cut your hair in Parks & Belk, pick up milk in the Piggly Wiggly, bowl at Holiday Lanes, find bawdy entertainment at the Hourglass Lounge—and never know that one of my patients was seated right next to you, or serving you, or brushing past you in the parking lot, a deadly virus in his or her body that was no threat to you, but might nevertheless cause you to stand up and scream if you knew how close it was. My problem was the opposite: I saw AIDS everywhere in the fabric of the town; I wanted to pick up a megaphone as I stood in a checkout line and say, “ATTENTION K-MART SHOPPERS: JOHNSON CITY IS A PART OF AMERICA AND, YES, WE DO HAVE AIDS HERE.” My ubiquitous stack of index cards floated in front of my face at night. I could rattle off precisely where each person was in the downhill trajectory that was the natural history of HIV infection. The integers and the units of measurement—“liters,” “cells per cubic millimeter,” “grams per deciliter”—sometimes inhabited my dreams in a peculiar “dream-work” routine, as if I was on the eve of a math exam, a Cambridge tripos, truly a nightmare for one so disinclined toward mathematics as I.

The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman by Timothy Ferriss

23andMe, airport security, Albert Einstein, Black Swan, Buckminster Fuller, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, Dean Kamen, game design, Gary Taubes, Gregor Mendel, index card, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, language acquisition, life extension, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, messenger bag, microbiome, microdosing, p-value, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, Paul Buchheit, placebo effect, Productivity paradox, publish or perish, radical life extension, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, stem cell, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, survivorship bias, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, William of Occam

Only I will remain. —Bene Gesserit “Litany Against Fear,” from Frank Herbert’s Dune For most of us, the how-to books on our shelves represent a growing to-do list, not advice we’ve followed. Several of the better-known tech CEOs in San Francisco have asked me at different times for an identical favor: an index card with bullet-point instructions for losing abdominal fat. Each of them made it clear: “Just tell me exactly what to do and I’ll do it.” I gave them all of the necessary tactical advice on one 3×5 card, knowing in advance what the outcome would be. The success rate was impressive … 0%. People suck at following advice.

…

I believe adiponectin is largely to thank for Ray’s muscle gain.17 Speculation notwithstanding, the research is in its early stages, so I’ll reserve adiponectin as an intellectual dessert for the geeks. My forays into its potential can be found in the online resources. BAT and my related torture experiments, on the other hand, are worth taking a closer look at. If the science gets too dense and you want the index card version, skip to “Ice Age Revisited—Four Places to Start” on this page. I won’t be offended. Fat-Burning Fat Not all fat is equal. There are at least two distinct types: white adipose tissue (WAT) and brown adipose tissue (BAT). WAT is what we usually think of as fat, like the marbling on a steak.

The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley by Jimmy Soni

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Ada Lovelace, AltaVista, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, book value, business logic, butterfly effect, call centre, Carl Icahn, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, COVID-19, crack epidemic, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, digital map, disinformation, disintermediation, drop ship, dumpster diving, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, fixed income, General Magic , general-purpose programming language, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global pandemic, income inequality, index card, index fund, information security, intangible asset, Internet Archive, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Kwajalein Atoll, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, mobile money, money market fund, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Potemkin village, public intellectual, publish or perish, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, rolodex, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, SoftBank, software as a service, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, technoutopianism, the payments system, transaction costs, Turing test, uber lyft, Vanguard fund, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Y2K

He also enjoyed pointing out that the URL was rare, one of only three single-letter .com URLs in the world at the time (the other two: q.com and z.com). Musk had a practical rationale for the name, too. He believed the world would soon be overrun with handheld devices—pocket-sized computers with index-card-sized keyboards. In this world, X.com was the ideal URL because a customer was only ever a few thumbstrokes from their full financial life. Musk’s conviction about X.com also stemmed from his consternation with the name “Zip2.” “First of all, what the hell does it mean? It’s literally one of the worst URLs you could possibly have.

…

” * * * eBay’s troubled relationship with payments long preceded its skirmish with PayPal. In the inaugural versions of eBay, founder Pierre Omidyar had simply trusted auction users to mail him their auction fees. eBay’s first employees recalled thousands of envelopes arriving in the office, some with nickels and dimes taped to index cards. Even as eBay grew, payments remained an afterthought. Reed Maltzman, an early eBay employee, recalled walking into a room of humming fax machines. When he asked what the fax machines were printing, he was told they were collecting credit card authorization receipts. The payments coated the office floor.

PostgreSQL Cookbook by Chitij Chauhan

database schema, Debian, fault tolerance, GnuPG, Google Glasses, index card, information security

So, instead of rebuilding the index, you have to perform the following three steps: First, create an index identical to the one you wish to rebuild using the CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY option. Next, drop the old index. The final step is to rename the new index to the same name as the one that the old index had. The following code demonstrates the preceding steps: CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY card_index ON creditcard (cardno); BEGIN; DROP INDEX credit_card_idx; ALTER INDEX card_index RENAME TO credit_card_idx; COMMIT; Maintaining log files The information stored in log files can prove invaluable when diagnosing or troubleshooting problems. With the help of the information stored in the log files, you can identify the sources of the problems in the underlying database.

Humans Need Not Apply: A Guide to Wealth and Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Jerry Kaplan

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, bank run, bitcoin, Bob Noyce, Brian Krebs, business cycle, buy low sell high, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, driverless car, drop ship, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, estate planning, Fairchild Semiconductor, Flash crash, Gini coefficient, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, haute couture, hiring and firing, income inequality, index card, industrial robot, information asymmetry, invention of agriculture, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kiva Systems, Larry Ellison, Loebner Prize, Mark Zuckerberg, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Own Your Own Home, pattern recognition, Satoshi Nakamoto, school choice, Schrödinger's Cat, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software as a service, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, Turing test, Vitalik Buterin, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

I would also like to acknowledge that the title for this book is not original—it is borrowed from an outstanding short video of the same name by the famously reclusive C. G. P. Grey. I’m a big fan. Check out his work on YouTube. Last but not least, thanks to my amazing wife, Michelle Petti-grew-Kaplan, for permitting me to jot down ideas on index cards during what might otherwise be construed as romantic moments. Let’s hope she doesn’t read the personal portions of this manuscript until it’s too late to make changes. Oops, forgot to mention the kids—Chelsea, Jordan, Lily, and Cami—hi, guys, guess what? I finished the book! Notes INTRODUCTION 1.

Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids by Meghan Daum

delayed gratification, demographic transition, Donald Trump, financial independence, happiness index / gross national happiness, index card, Joan Didion, Mason jar, Multics, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, risk tolerance, Skype, women in the workforce

And when she warned me to keep the episode secret, I felt deeply ashamed. I’ve felt, ever since, like something is wrong with me. My view of myself as fucked up comes less from the actual hospitalization than from my mother’s reaction to it. * * * I had other depressive episodes. In tenth grade, I couldn’t write my English term paper. I had stacks of index cards filled with my notes and quotes from Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, but I couldn’t focus enough to write the essay. It was my first long paper and I wanted it to be perfect. As the deadline approached, I panicked. I couldn’t sleep. I stayed up all night watching black-and-white reruns on Nick at Nite.

Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality by Scott Belsky

centralized clearinghouse, index card, lone genius, market bubble, Merlin Mann, New Journalism, Results Only Work Environment, rolodex, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supply-chain management, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Hsieh, young professional

Why throw away the evidence of your achievements when you can create an inspiring monument to getting stuff done? Some teams, including the Behance team, have created “Done Walls” covered with old Action Steps. We literally gather up the records of completed tasks from projects—often notebook pages of checked-off actions and index cards with descriptions of features we’ve added—and then we decorate certain walls with these artifacts. For us, the “Done Wall” is a piece of art that reminds us of the progress we have made thus far. When we feel mired in the thick of it all, we can look up and see the wake of progress that trails behind us.

The Cheapskate Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of Americans Living Happily Below Their Means by Jeff Yeager

An Inconvenient Truth, asset allocation, Boeing 747, carbon footprint, delayed gratification, do what you love, dumpster diving, index card, job satisfaction, late fees, mortgage debt, new economy, payday loans, Skype, upwardly mobile, Zipcar

And, man, do cheapskates know their grocery prices, continually updating and expanding that databank stored in their frontal lobes. Fellow cheapskates might ask each other “What are you paying for peanut butter?” before they even say hello. If you don’t have that sixth sense naturally, make yourself a 3×5 index card listing recent “good prices” for items you buy regularly, and use it to evaluate prices when you go grocery shopping. Batch it and forget it: Whether a stockpiler or a spontaneous chef, when we cheapskates cook, we rarely make just a single serving. Batch-cooking is the name of the game. Double, triple, or even quadruple the recipe you’re making so you can freeze some for later.

To Show and to Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction by Phillip Lopate

Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, David Sedaris, desegregation, fear of failure, index card, Jane Jacobs, Joan Didion, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Lewis Mumford, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight

One of the best parts about researching is that it inspires in you an obligation to finish your writing project, if only to serve faithfully the scholarly materials to which you have become so attached. It is no longer all about you, but about them too, as though they had somehow become your offspring when you weren’t watching. “Print me, Papa,” beseech those index cards, those notepads, those Post-its. The Lyric Essay Ambivalence being the essayist’s nectar, I am happy to find some immediately in taking up the subject of the lyric essay. I mistrust the lyric essay; I welcome it; I don’t know what it is. First, mistrust. Since the nonlyric or shall we say the classical essay, against which the lyric essay is being posited by way of contrast, is an amazingly fluid, shape-shifting, language-engorging form, what is ostensibly so new about the lyric essay per se?

Unfamiliar Fishes by Sarah Vowell

California gold rush, Easter island, index card, Maui Hawaii, polynesian navigation, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Steve Jobs, trade route

(Imagine all the entries on Wikipedia being written by Steve Jobs, Doris Lessing, Garry Wills, Jay-Z, and what’s-his-name, that string-theory guy.) The entire laborious enterprise of the Encyclopédie was illumined by curiosity. Thinking about it again was a sort of homecoming for me, a return to my freshman goose bumps over Candide. I tracked down Denis Diderot’s mission statement for the encyclopedia and wrote it on a purple index card I tacked up next to my desk as a talisman: “All things must be examined, debated, investigated without exception and without regard for anyone’s feelings.” Hawaiians, I discovered, take a different approach to collecting, discussing, and presenting information. One afternoon I was sitting at my desk in New York, noodling around the Internet, trying to nail down the meaning of the Hawaiian word kupuna.

I Am Not Myself These Days: A Memoir by Josh Kilmer-Purcell

Day of the Dead, East Village, index card, young professional

One is excited to get his time in the spotlight. The other looks like the kind of guy who never would normally do this sort of thing, but given the parade of empty glasses on his table, he’s probably amenable to most anything at this point. Just my type. “Aqua is so slutty . . .” CoCo says, reading off an index card. “. . . How slutty is she?!” the crowd roars back on cue. “Aqua is so slutty,” CoCo continues, “the federal government has declared her bedroom a ______.” The sound guy starts up the theme song while the contestants begin thinking up their answers. I scribble my answer on 98 I Am Not Myself These Days a card.

In Pursuit of the Traveling Salesman: Mathematics at the Limits of Computation by William J. Cook

Bletchley Park, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Numeric Control, financial engineering, four colour theorem, index card, John von Neumann, linear programming, NP-complete, P = NP, p-value, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, traveling salesman, Turing machine

The process runs as follows. The position of a point in the tour depends only on its relative position h on the spacefilling curve. The Georgia Tech team precomputed the value of h for a fine grid of (x, y) locations from a standard map of Atlanta. The list of active clients was stored on two sets of index cards, one sorted alphabetically and the other stored in the tour order, that is, by increasing value of h. To delete a client, his two cards are simply removed. To insert Figure 3.2 Spacefilling curve for Atlanta region. Image courtesy of John Bartholdi. The Salesman in Action a new client, the map is used to determine the (x, y) coordinates of the client’s location, the table is used to look up the corresponding value of h, and h is used to insert the client’s card into the tour order.

Hey Nostradamus! by Douglas Coupland

Berlin Wall, index card, Maui Hawaii, PalmPilot, Silicon Valley, telemarketer

Truth was, Jason and I were doing everything in there that weekend, but I have to admit that for a moment or two I enjoyed watching Lauren squirm at my nonresponse. In any event, I was far too preoccupied to have any sort of conversation. I told Lauren I had to go to my homeroom and sequence some index cards for an oral presentation later that afternoon on early Canadian fur trappers, and I left. In homeroom I sat at my desk and wrote over and over on my pale blue binder the words GOD IS NOWHERE/GOD IS NOW HERE/GOD IS NOWHERE/GOD IS NOW HERE. When this binder with these words was found, caked in my evaporating blood, people made a big fuss about it, and when my body is shortly lowered down into the planet, these same words will be felt-penned all over the surface of my white coffin.

Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Buckminster Fuller, Columbine, Honoré de Balzac, index card, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Paul Erdős, placebo effect

I have one free hour and then an hour’s walk. Then 2 hours’ practice, and then I retire with the chickens. Thus I have only about 4 hours a day for composition. Too little!” Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) The Russian-born novelist’s writing habits were famously peculiar. Beginning in 1950, he composed first drafts in pencil on ruled index cards, which he stored in long file boxes. Since, Nabokov claimed, he pictured an entire novel in complete form before he began writing it, this method allowed him to compose passages out of sequence, in whatever order he pleased; by shuffling the cards around, he could quickly rearrange paragraphs, chapters, and whole swaths of the book.

The autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X; Alex Haley

desegregation, fail fast, Gregor Mendel, index card, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, rent control, Rosa Parks, transatlantic slave trade, W. E. B. Du Bois

I was thinking that I might have to advise the publisher that I simply couldn't seem to get through to my subject when the first note of hope occurred. I had noticed that while Malcolm X was talking, heoften simultaneously scribbled with his red-ink ball-point pen on any handy paper. Sometimes it was the margin of a newspaper he brought in, sometimes it was on index cards that he carried in the back of a small, red-backed appointment book. I began leaving two white paper napkins by him every time I served him more coffee, and the ruse worked when he sometimes scribbled on the napkins, which I retrieved when he left. Some examples are these: “Here lies a YM, killed by a BM, fighting for the WM, who killed all the RM.”

…

Malcolm X worked hard not to show it, but he was upset. “There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action. Goethe,” he scribbled one day. He hinted about Cassius Clay a couple of times, and when I responded only with anecdotes about my interview with Clay, he finally asked what Clay had said of him. I dug out the index card on which the question was typed in advance and Clay's response was beneath in longhand. Malcolm X stared at the card, then out of the window, and he got up and walked around; one of the few times I ever heard his voice betray his hurt was when he said, “I felt like a blood big-brother to him.” He paused.

Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece by Michael Benson

Alistair Cooke, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, British Empire, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, haute couture, index card, Internet Archive, Jon Ronson, low earth orbit, Marshall McLuhan, mutually assured destruction, RAND corporation, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

Kept waiting one afternoon due to an alleged problem with a piece of recording equipment, Kubrick took in the mumbo-jumbo technical explanation offered by Derek Cracknell, digested it, waited a few more minutes, and then said, “The next time the sound mixer’s late back from lunch, just tell me.” Regularly stopping assistants such as Ivor Powell in the hallway, the director would pull out a set of index cards and ask for status updates as he shuffled rapidly through them, plowing through innumerable bullet points covering various aspects of the production. Powell quickly learned that if he didn’t know something, he should say so rather than risk bluffing. When Kubrick asked for a technical explanation, he homed in mercilessly on fuzzy thinking or partial accounting by people who should know better.

…

Depending on the nature of the backing artwork, those changing patterns could manifest kinetic striations (for example, Scientific American diagrams that had been enlarged and colorized), or morphing, organic undulations (colorful reproductions of op art paintings), or spidery, strobing, jagged-edged abstractions (electron microscope images of plant stems or insect mandibles). Some image categories were chosen by Kubrick himself, as attested by a surviving set of index cards dating to April 1967 and filled with his scribbled notes (“Doug—also use op-art and electron art”). Trumbull’s core innovation was to introduce that hurtling y-axis camera motion—an idea that Whitney hadn’t explored. It gave his slit scan footage its visceral sense of transport; the viewer was seemingly vaulted down scintillating corridors of cosmic space and time.

A Burglar's Guide to the City by Geoff Manaugh

A. Roger Ekirch, big-box store, card file, dark matter, Evgeny Morozov, game design, index card, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, Minecraft, off grid, Rubik’s Cube, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, statistical model, the built environment, urban planning

In a short essay called “Every Move Will Be Recorded,” historian Grégoire Chamayou recounts a hypothetical system of urban surveillance devised by an eighteenth-century police officer named Jacques François Guillauté. In a book about police reform written for King Louis XV of France, Guillauté proposed thoroughly and rigorously updating the Parisian address system. This would require a behemoth piece of machinery that operated a bit like an oversize index-card file—or what Chamayou describes as a “huge archiving machine linked to a map in a central room”—and some arithmetical cartography. “Paris was to be divided into distinct districts,” Chamayou writes, “each receiving a letter, and each being subdivided into smaller sub-districts. In each sub-district each street had accordingly to receive a specific name.

Time Travel: A History by James Gleick

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Arthur Eddington, augmented reality, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, crowdsourcing, Doomsday Book, Eddington experiment, index card, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, luminiferous ether, Marshall McLuhan, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Plato's cave, pneumatic tube, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, telepresence, The future is already here, time dilation, Wayback Machine, wikimedia commons

This far-future cosmic archeological perspective frames the nearer-future narrative, which we are meant to understand was written in the last days of papyr. The narrator himself seems to be a bewildered civilian navigating a paranoid military bureaucracy. We readers, knowing what we know about the sad fate in store for the written word, may smile grimly as clerks stamp index cards “classified,” documents tumble from mail chutes, envelopes shoot through pneumatic tubes, dog-eared folders vanish into metal safes, and paper tape snakes from computers. Of course, we recognize our own world, too. Rambling deeper and deeper into the labyrinth, the narrator stumbles upon a room full of books: “gray, crumbling” books on dusty, sagging shelves.

Our Robots, Ourselves: Robotics and the Myths of Autonomy by David A. Mindell

Air France Flight 447, air gap, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apollo Guidance Computer, autonomous vehicles, Beryl Markham, Boeing 747, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Charles Lindbergh, Chris Urmson, digital map, disruptive innovation, driverless car, drone strike, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fudge factor, Gene Kranz, human-factors engineering, index card, John Markoff, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, telepresence, telerobotics, trade route, US Airways Flight 1549, William Langewiesche, zero-sum game

Big Safari developed the prototype into a fieldable system quickly and relatively cheaply, but it took years for Predator to be properly integrated into the air force’s acquisitions and logistics systems. The clunky flight manual for Predator was more than 1,500 pages long, and still left out critical information. The standard checklist, designed to sit on a pilot’s knee, comprised 198 pages of index cards. To fly the Predator, the air force needed a source of pilots. In 1995 the service reactivated a dormant group, the 11th Reconnaissance Squadron (which had operated drones in Vietnam and into the 1970s), to fly the Predator. It was led by a rated pilot—“rated” being the air force lingo for qualified aircrew, whether pilots or other specialties like navigators.

You'll Grow Out of It by Jessi Klein

Airbnb, Ben McKenzie, index card, pre–internet, Saturday Night Live

I adored her because she was such a badass, and because she was a woman in comedy before there were enough women in comedy for anyone to bother counting them. I adored her because once you see A Piece of Work, the documentary about her life, it’s pretty much impossible not to love her. You see her filing her jokes on index cards in an enormous metal cabinet that spans a hallway of her hard-earned Upper East Side Versailles-style mansion and you think, I need to work harder, because this seventy-something lady is lapping me by the minute. I saw her perform live once, about eight years ago, when I was living in Los Angeles.

Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google?: Trick Questions, Zen-Like Riddles, Insanely Difficult Puzzles, and Other Devious Interviewing Techniques You ... Know to Get a Job Anywhere in the New Economy by William Poundstone

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, cloud computing, creative destruction, digital rights, en.wikipedia.org, full text search, hiring and firing, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, index card, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, lateral thinking, loss aversion, mental accounting, Monty Hall problem, new economy, off-the-grid, Paul Erdős, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, sorting algorithm, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, The Spirit Level, Tony Hsieh, why are manhole covers round?, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

This is something like telling your grandmother how to build an iPad so clearly that she could make one. It can be done! It’s possible to explain a bare-bones implementation of RSA to a naive Bob who doesn’t know how to code. (I give the whole explanation in the “Answers” section.) A lean version of the instructions will fit on a three-by-five-inch index card, even a business card if you’ve got microscopic handwriting. The candidate who succeeds in drafting his RSA message to Bob will feel he’s knocked the ball out of the park. Not so fast. He’s just given the “Microsoft answer.” Eve or no Eve, Bob is sure to balk at following complicated instructions just for the mundane task of confirming a phone number.

Collider by Paul Halpern

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, Dr. Strangelove, Ernest Rutherford, Gary Taubes, gravity well, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, horn antenna, index card, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, Magellanic Cloud, pattern recognition, Plato's cave, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, time dilation

Members of his cabinet, concerned about the fallout from the project’s asteroidlike impact on the budget, ardently tried to intercept it. With all of their strategic defenses, however, they could not shoot it down. At Reagan’s January 1987 announcement that he would support the SSC, he took out an index card and recited the credo of writer Jack London: I would rather be ashes than dust, I would rather my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze, Than it should be stifled in dry rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, With every atom of me in magnificent glow, Than a sleepy and permanent planet.3 After reading the credo, Reagan mentioned that football player Ken Stabler, known for coming from behind for victory, was once asked to explain what it meant.

How to Predict the Unpredictable by William Poundstone

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, Bernie Madoff, Brownian motion, business cycle, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, buy low sell high, call centre, centre right, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Edward Thorp, Firefox, fixed income, forensic accounting, high net worth, index card, index fund, Jim Simons, John von Neumann, market bubble, money market fund, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, power law, prediction markets, proprietary trading, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Rubik’s Cube, statistical model, Steven Pinker, subprime mortgage crisis, transaction costs

Ziemba’s group found that these numbers were also under-chosen: 1, 28, 34, 37, 45, 46, and 47. Here is a reasonable plan for achieving favorable bets in lotteries. You’ll be using up to eleven unpopular numbers, shown above. 1. First, select six numbers from this set at random. A low-tech way to do that is to write the numbers on index cards, shuffle them, and draw numbers. It should be clear by now that shuffling is preferred to a mental “random” pick. For Lotto, you’d use only the twelve numbers in the first two rows. Draw six numbers (without replacement) from the shuffled deck of twelve. For the main EuroMillions picks, you add fifty to the available numbers, drawing five.

Just Listen: Discover the Secret to Getting Through to Absolutely Anyone by Mark Goulston M. D., Keith Ferrazzi

Abraham Maslow, do well by doing good, hiring and firing, index card, Jeff Bezos, Leonard Kleinrock, Mikhail Gorbachev, mirror neurons, Ronald Reagan, zero-sum game

If you don’t move quickly beyond these knee-jerk responses, you’ll set yourself up for future failure by convincing yourself either that (a) you’re an idiot who’ll keep screwing up or (b) the people around you are idiots who make you screw up and there’s nothing you can do about it. Instead of laying the groundwork for your next disaster, do something different the next time you make a mistake. Take out an index card, write down the following words, and fill in the blanks with your answers: This is a powerful approach because you’re not wallowing in self-blame or deflecting responsibility onto someone else—two traps that allow you to avoid looking honestly at what really happened and why. Instead, you’re reframing your experience in a way that leads to positive action.

Raw Data Is an Oxymoron by Lisa Gitelman

23andMe, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, continuous integration, crowdsourcing, disruptive innovation, Drosophila, Edmond Halley, Filter Bubble, Firefox, fixed income, folksonomy, Google Earth, Howard Rheingold, index card, informal economy, information security, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, longitudinal study, Louis Daguerre, Menlo Park, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peer-to-peer, RFID, Richard Thaler, Silicon Valley, social graph, software studies, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, text mining, time value of money, trade route, Turing machine, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks

Ihre Anlage und Führung, vol. 5 of Orga-Schriften, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Organisation Verlagsanstalt, 1922), 7f.: “A limp box is quickly worn out, it quickly becomes unsightly and then no longer allows the rapid and secure browsing which is the prime requirement for convenient card index management. . . . With index cards, which are often in daily use for years, the cheapest is always the best.” 18. See Deutsches Institut für Normung e.V. (DIN), Publikation und Dokumentation 2. Erschließung von Dokumenten, Informationsverarbeitung, Reprographie, Bibliotheksverwaltung, Normen, vol. 154 of DIN-Taschenbuch, 2nd ed.

The Numerati by Stephen Baker

Berlin Wall, Black Swan, business process, call centre, correlation does not imply causation, Drosophila, full employment, illegal immigration, index card, information security, Isaac Newton, job automation, job satisfaction, junk bonds, McMansion, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, off-the-grid, PageRank, personalized medicine, recommendation engine, RFID, Silicon Valley, Skype, statistical model, surveillance capitalism, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, workplace surveillance

The only folks who can make sense of the data we create are crack mathematicians, computer scientists, and engineers. They know how to turn the bits of our lives into symbols. Why is this necessary? Imagine that you wanted to keep track of everything you ate for a year. If you're like I was in the fourth grade, you go to the stationery store and buy a fat stack of index cards. Then, at every meal you write the different foods on fresh cards. Meat loaf. Spinach. Tapioca pudding. Cheerios. After a few days, you have a growing pile of cards. The problem is, there's no way to count or analyze them. They're just a bunch of words. These are symbols too, of course, each one representing a thing or a concept.

Generation A by Douglas Coupland

Burning Man, call centre, Drosophila, Higgs boson, hive mind, index card, Large Hadron Collider, Live Aid, Magellanic Cloud, McJob, Neil Armstrong, new economy, post-work, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Stephen Hawking

If you’re hot, people pay you shitloads to do TV and webcasts—he’d forgotten that. Also, one of my groupies, Rachel, had a capitalist edge and set up a killer commerce site selling Zack merchandise. Specifically, she would extract blood, mix it with vodka (a bit of alcohol helps, for some reason) and then quickly dip half an index card into the liquid. Once the cards dried, I autographed them. Two grand a pop; easiest money I ever made. Aside from my harem, another feature of those first golden weeks was visiting scientists who weren’t expecting to find a Playboy Mansion lifestyle deep within the armpit of Mahaska County. We’d be talking earnestly about my pre-sting diet, my pesticide usage or my ancestry, and a girl would come walking in wearing a thong and my old varsity jacket.

Running the Dream: One Summer Living, Training, and Racing With a Team of World-Class Runners Half My Age by Matt Fitzgerald

caloric restriction, caloric restriction, fear of failure, index card, Tacoma Narrows Bridge

And I’ll bet that same amount that there are plenty of you who’ve done this only to become frustrated because you’re not hitting the times in practice that some chart says you should be hitting if you want to run that particular time. Am I right?” Suddenly my mind flew back to last year’s bonfire. On that occasion, Steph asked each camper to write down three goals—a modest “C” goal, a more ambitious “B” goal, and an audacious “A” goal—on an index card and share them with the group. Unable to run at the time, I told my fellow campers that my “C” goal was to find a way to still race the Chicago Marathon in seven weeks. My “B” goal was, as I put it, “to run my fastest marathon since my fastest marathon,” which meant beating the time of 2:49:14 I’d run in Eugene in May.

Principles of Web API Design: Delivering Value with APIs and Microservices by James Higginbotham

Amazon Web Services, anti-pattern, business intelligence, business logic, business process, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, collaborative editing, continuous integration, create, read, update, delete, database schema, DevOps, fallacies of distributed computing, fault tolerance, index card, Internet of things, inventory management, Kubernetes, linked data, loose coupling, machine readable, Metcalfe’s law, microservices, recommendation engine, semantic web, side project, single page application, Snapchat, software as a service, SQL injection, web application, WebSocket

Dedicate the next columns to each of the three components, “When, I want to, so I can.” Finally, add a fifth column for notes. Since many spreadsheets support collaborative editing, multiple people can review, comment, and contribute as needed. ■ Documents – Documents are also useful, though they are a bit less structured. They are useful when teams wish to mimic an index card style for capturing job stories. Start with a heading that indicates the job story identifier, such as a number or brief description. Place each of the three components of a job story, “When, I want to, so I can”, on a separate line for readability. Leave room for capturing additional insights or details as a list of bulleted items.

Never Panic Early: An Apollo 13 Astronaut's Journey by Fred Haise, Bill Moore

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apollo Guidance Computer, Boeing 747, Gene Kranz, ice-free Arctic, index card, Kickstarter, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, panic early, Strategic Defense Initiative, two and twenty, women in the workforce

At the right time, for effect, I would drop a pencil and while retrieving it turn off the fuel valve on the deck for one engine. The engine would continue to run for a bit from the fuel in the lines and then suddenly sputter and quit. The student had to handle the shock of losing an engine and respond accordingly. During night-flying missions, I slid my window open just a bit and secretly held an index card in the gap. The flapping and shredding of the paper sounded like a structural failure. As a result, I never had a student flunk their final check ride. * * * — CHAPTER 4 BACK TO SCHOOL AND INTO NASA Before my discharge in August 1956, when I was twenty-two years old, I wrestled with what I should do next.

NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity by Steve Silberman

Albert Einstein, animal electricity, Apollo 11, Asperger Syndrome, assortative mating, autism spectrum disorder, Bletchley Park, crowdsourcing, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental subject, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, hydroponic farming, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, Kickstarter, language acquisition, Larry Wall, megacity, meta-analysis, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, neurotypical, New Journalism, pattern recognition, placebo effect, scientific mainstream, side project, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skype, slashdot, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, sugar pill, the scientific method, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, union organizing, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

Meanwhile, the counterculture of the Bay Area was also evolving, though technologically it was still stuck in the precomputer era, depending on classified ads in underground newspapers, bulletin boards, telephone switchboards, and the post office for community organizing. It disturbed Felsenstein that valuable information was perpetually getting lost: if someone compiled a list of essential names or a box of helpful index cards and then went off to India to find a guru, the data he or she had accumulated tended to go astray. It occurred to him that computer networks could perform many of the functions of personal filing systems but much faster and better—and they didn’t forget anything. Felsenstein was also fascinated by social critic Ivan Illich’s notion of promoting the use of tools that would facilitate “conviviality”—one of many aspects of social interaction that Felsenstein had always found difficult and confusing.

…

Because it was widely believed that autistic children were incapable of learning—a misconception largely caused by their being warehoused in institutions for the “feebleminded,” where education was not on the agenda—Rimland assumed that his experimental treatment was responsible for Mark’s improvement: “We think it is mostly due to Deaner,” he informed Kanner. He even canceled plans to bring Mark to Minneapolis for an evaluation by Kanner, “since Mark’s taking of Deaner has resulted in such striking improvement that additional diagnosis of autism might be difficult.” — AFTER FIVE YEARS OF RESEARCH, Rimland had filled enough notebooks and index cards to open a medical library himself. He began compiling his observations into a monograph that he planned to call “Kanner’s Syndrome of Apparent Autism.” As the paper got longer and longer, he started mimeographing it and sending it out to experienced researchers in the field for comments and criticism.

Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin: From Money That We Understand to Money That Understands Us (Perspectives) by David Birch

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banks create money, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, business cycle, capital controls, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, creative destruction, credit crunch, cross-border payments, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, dematerialisation, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, double entry bookkeeping, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial exclusion, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, index card, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Irish bank strikes, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, land bank, large denomination, low interest rates, M-Pesa, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, Northern Rock, Pingit, prediction markets, price stability, QR code, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, social graph, special drawing rights, Suez canal 1869, technoutopianism, The future is already here, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, wage slave, Washington Consensus, wikimedia commons

Yes, social media includes a variety of incredible new technologies and yes we can use them for all sorts of exciting new purposes, but it is what they are doing to identity that will be disruptive in business, commerce and government. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Tumblr and the rest are already demonstrating just how our identity paradigm is changing. Identity is becoming a concept built on networks, rather than index cards in a filing cabinet. We already use these social networking identities, albeit in primitive ways, to log in and browse around on the web. We could find ourselves using them for ‘serious’ business soon. Why shouldn’t I be able to log in to the Benefits Agency using my Facebook identity? This might be very convenient for me and it might also be very convenient for the Benefits Agency, but right now the Benefits Agency couldn’t really be sure it was me because it has no way of identifying the ‘legal me’ online, and neither has Facebook.

The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia by Andrew Lih

Albert Einstein, AltaVista, barriers to entry, Benjamin Mako Hill, Bill Atkinson, c2.com, Cass Sunstein, citation needed, commons-based peer production, crowdsourcing, Debian, disinformation, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Ford Model T, Free Software Foundation, Hacker Ethic, HyperCard, index card, Jane Jacobs, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, jimmy wales, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, optical character recognition, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Stallman, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social software, Steve Jobs, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, wikimedia commons, Y2K, Yochai Benkler

It was called WildCard then. I was blown away.”14 In HyperCard, Cunningham saw a tool that could help him with his knowledge-sharing project. “I wanted something kind of irregular, something that 48_The_Wikipedia_Revolution didn’t fit in rows and columns.” HyperCard used the idea of a “stack” of virtual index cards, in which the user could easily create new cards, create links between them, and place content on them. Putting a picture, sound, or video onto a card was as easy as inserting it and dragging it around on the screen. You could also put virtual buttons on cards that could respond to clicks and other commands.

Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, asset allocation, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, Everything should be made as simple as possible, George Santayana, index card, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex

If these aren’t specifically next actions that can go directly on your action lists, you’ll still need to capture and organize them somewhere that makes sense. Of course the most critical tools for ensuring that nothing gets lost is your collection system—your in-basket, pad, and paper (or equivalents) at work and at home, and in a portable version (an index card) while you’re out and about. You need to hold all your ideas until you later decide what to do with them. Tools and Structures That Support Project Thinking No matter at what level project ideas show up, it’s great to have good tools always close at hand for capturing them as they occur.

Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground by Kevin Poulsen

Apple II, Brian Krebs, Burning Man, corporate governance, dumpster diving, Exxon Valdez, fake news, gentrification, Hacker Ethic, hive mind, index card, Kickstarter, McMansion, Mercator projection, offshore financial centre, packet switching, pirate software, Ponzi scheme, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, SQL injection, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, traffic fines, web application, WikiLeaks, zero day, Zipcar

Clara reluctantly admitted she lived there; her face fell when Watts told her it was his next stop. With Clara’s house keys and a new search warrant in hand, the detectives arrived at the Aragon home and began their search. In Chris’s home office, they found an unlocked safe in the closet. Inside were two plastic index-card cases crammed with counterfeit cards. There were more cards in the bedroom, bundled in rubber bands and stashed in the night table. An MSR206 rested on a shelf in the family room, and in the connecting garage, a box of purses sat on the floor next to the fitness machine. Aside from the dining room and bathrooms, the only space in the house clean of evidence was the boys’ comfortable bedroom.

The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman by Richard P. Feynman, Jeffrey Robbins

Albert Einstein, Brownian motion, impulse control, index card, John von Neumann, Murray Gell-Mann, pattern recognition, Pepto Bismol, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, scientific worldview, the scientific method

In this particular case, we worked out all the numerical steps that we were supposed to, that the machines were supposed to do, multiply this, and then do this, and subtract that. And then we worked out the program, but we didn’t have any machine to test it on. So what we did, I arranged, was a room with girls in it, each one had a Marchant. But she was the multiplier and she was the adder, and this one cubed, and so we had cards, index cards, and all she did was cube this number and send it to the next one. She was imitating the multiplier, the next one was imitating the adder; we went through our cycle, we got all the bugs out. Well, we did it that way. And it turned out that the speed at which we were able to do it–we’d never done mass production calculating and everybody who’d ever calculated before, every single person, did all the steps.

The Ledge: An Adventure Story of Friendship and Survival on Mount Rainier by Jim Davidson, Kevin Vaughan

Columbine, index card, Kim Stanley Robinson

WE PULL INTO the White River Ranger Station, just about eight miles northeast of Rainier’s summit. It’s Wednesday afternoon, June 17. Seeing the rustic building among the giant conifers triggers my memories of having been here nine Junes before. Mike and I check with the rangers about the conditions on the mountain, the weather forecast, and recent climbs. We fill out little index cards, listing our names and addresses, the route we plan to take, and emergency contact information for our families. I jot down Gloria’s name and our home number. My unmarried wanderlust friend lists his parents in Oklahoma. An hour later, in the White River Campground, we dump out all our gear, talking about what to take and what to leave—a blending of risk assessment and climbing confidence and gut instinct.

The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter, and Live Better in a World Addicted to Speed by Carl Honore

Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Apollo 13, Atul Gawande, Broken windows theory, call centre, carbon credits, Checklist Manifesto, clean water, clockwatching, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, Dava Sobel, delayed gratification, drone strike, Enrique Peñalosa, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Exxon Valdez, fail fast, fundamental attribution error, game design, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, index card, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, lateral thinking, lone genius, medical malpractice, microcredit, Netflix Prize, no-fly zone, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, retail therapy, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, ultimatum game, urban renewal, War on Poverty

The gymnasium is a reminder that this is an Assembly convened for the people by the people. Posters warn pupils not to smoke, litter or rollerblade. A disco ball hangs from the rafters above, ready for the next dance night. Through the wall you can hear squeaking trainers and the yelps of children playing basketball. Jugs of water and stacks of yellow index cards for taking notes sit on tables around the gymnasium. My place is on Table K along with a software engineer, an unemployed labourer, a chartered auditor, a trainee architect, a music student, a marketing manager, an interior designer and Katrin Jakobsdottir, the young minister for Education, Science and Culture.

The Big Book of Backyard Cooking: 250 Favorite Recipes for Enjoying the Great Outdoors by Betty Rosbottom

index card

Remove from the refrigerator 10 minutes before serving and sprinkle with remaining chives. DEEP SOUTH BARBECUE SAUCE This barbecue sauce is an old family recipe that I discovered by accident when sorting through a stack of old folders in the back of a filing cabinet. There on a tattered and yellowed index card I found directions handwritten by my late father-in-law (who grew up in western Louisiana, near the Texas border) for the celebrated barbecue sauce he slathered on his ribs. This sauce, which is slightly tart and has no smokiness, is different from most commercial ones, which are sweet with smokey undertones.

Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, Kenneth Cukier

23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Black Swan, book scanning, book value, business intelligence, business process, call centre, cloud computing, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, dark matter, data science, double entry bookkeeping, Eratosthenes, Erik Brynjolfsson, game design, hype cycle, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, lifelogging, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, obamacare, optical character recognition, PageRank, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Plato's cave, post-materialism, random walk, recommendation engine, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systematic bias, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Turing test, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

Employing around a hundred thousand full-time staff, the Stasi watched from cars and streets. It opened letters and peeked into bank accounts, bugged apartments and wiretapped phone lines. And it induced lovers and couples, parents and children, to spy on each other, betraying the most basic trust humans have in each other. The resulting files—including at least 39 million index cards and 70 miles of documents—recorded and detailed the most intimate aspects of the lives of ordinary people. East Germany was one of the most comprehensive surveillance states ever seen. Twenty years after East Germany’s demise, more data is being collected and stored about each one of us than ever before.

How to Write Like Tolstoy: A Journey Into the Minds of Our Greatest Writers by Richard Cohen

Anton Chekhov, Bonfire of the Vanities, colonial rule, Honoré de Balzac, index card, Joan Didion, non-fiction novel, Norman Mailer, Ronald Reagan, University of East Anglia

It was written as a rebuttal to “Fiction as One of the Fine Arts,” a lecture given by Sir Walter Besant, in which Besant argued that plot is more important than characterization. “the characters have been required”: E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel, pp. 126–27. How does one get the emotional and narrative arcs to mesh? Peter Dunne, in his book Emotional Structure: Creating the Story Beneath the Plot, recommends that you write the headline of a scene on an index card and jot a few notes about the action, being careful to hit only the high points. Turn the card over and write a headline for the emotional content of this scene and jot a few notes about how the emotions change. Turning the card over in this way forces you to consider what your character would really feel in this situation, and connects the inner and outer conflict in a simple yet powerful way.

How to Be Champion: My Autobiography by Sarah Millican

Albert Einstein, call centre, Downton Abbey, index card, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Nelson Mandela, Nick Leeson

It was a great environment to be myself in. My new self. And we did a show that night – God knows how. To a lovely, receptive crowd, I read my monologue aloud. The paper I held shook with the aftershock of my crazy heartbeat. That’s why if you see me do new material now, I read it from a notebook or index cards. Books and cardboard do not shake like paper does. Luckily I stopped there and didn’t end up with a plank of wood or a brick with my notes scrawled on. I read the monologue and parts of it were brutal, and parts, it turns out, were hilarious. I went into the ladies’ loos after my set and jumped up and down in a cubicle.

Know Thyself by Stephen M Fleming

Abraham Wald, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, backpropagation, citation needed, computer vision, confounding variable, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, fake news, global pandemic, higher-order functions, index card, Jeff Bezos, l'esprit de l'escalier, Lao Tzu, lifelogging, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, patient HM, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, prediction markets, QWERTY keyboard, recommendation engine, replication crisis, self-driving car, side project, Skype, Stanislav Petrov, statistical model, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, traumatic brain injury

My strategy was to sit in the carrels of my college library with a textbook open, writing out the strange vocabulary on sheets of paper: Purkinje, spiny stellate, pyramidal; circle of Willis, cerebellar vermis, extrastriate cortex. I would then go through with a colored highlighter, picking out words I didn’t know. In a final step, I would then (time and willpower permitting) transfer the highlighted items onto index cards, which I would carry around with me before the exam. This worked for me, most of the time. But looking back, I had only blind faith in this particular approach to exam preparation. Deciding how to learn in the first place is a crucial choice. If we don’t know how to make this decision, we might inadvertently end up holding ourselves back.

Waco Rising: David Koresh, the FBI, and the Birth of America's Modern Militias by Kevin Cook

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, COVID-19, crisis actor, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, friendly fire, index card, Jones Act, no-fly zone, obamacare, Oklahoma City bombing, Peoples Temple, QAnon, Ted Kaczynski, Timothy McVeigh, wikimedia commons

Chief negotiator Noesner settled into the Bureau’s command post in a windowless airplane hangar on the technical-college campus, the site of a former air force base. He commandeered a private room where a supervisor—often Noesner himself—would sit near the man on the phone, listening in and passing him suggestions on index cards. Another member of the negotiating team made sure the tape recorder was working properly. A fourth agent took notes, keeping track of key points in their discussions with the Davidians—usually Steve Schneider and Koresh, who did most of the talking. At 4:48, as arranged, Koresh sent two more children out to the white sedan waiting by the water tower.

Starstruck: The Business of Celebrity by Currid

barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, Donald Trump, income inequality, index card, industrial cluster, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, natural language processing, place-making, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, power law, prediction markets, public intellectual, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Florida, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, rolodex, search costs, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Stephen Fry, the long tail, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, upwardly mobile, urban decay, Vilfredo Pareto, Virgin Galactic, winner-take-all economy

Eric turned to a fellow staffer, a young, pretty blond girl, and asked, “Do you have any of those media passes left? We’ll use those for backup.” With barely a beat between request and delivery, she proudly reached into her enormous Prada handbag and produced a handful of hot pink passes the size of index cards with Senator Clinton’s name emblazoned across the top and MEDIA in boldface on the bottom. Thanks to Eric and his friendly fellow staffers, there I was with backups to backups of access to see one of the most important public figures in the world. Senator Clinton’s speech was impassioned and exhilarating in the way that television can never quite capture.

Capitalism Without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy by Jonathan Haskel, Stian Westlake

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, book value, Brexit referendum, business climate, business process, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer age, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, dark matter, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, financial innovation, full employment, fundamental attribution error, future of work, gentrification, gigafactory, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Kanban, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mother of all demos, Network effects, new economy, Ocado, open economy, patent troll, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, place-making, post-industrial society, private spaceflight, Productivity paradox, quantitative hedge fund, rent-seeking, revision control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, TSMC, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban planning, Vanguard fund, walkable city, X Prize, zero-sum game

Other gyms contained machines like the Nautilus, the original fixed-weight machine, invented by Arthur Jones in the late 1960s. If you were to look around a gym of the time, you might be surprised to see many similarities to today’s gym. Granted, there might be fewer weight machines and they would be less advanced. Membership would be recorded on index cards rather than on a computer; perhaps the physical fittings would be more rough-and-ready, but otherwise many of the business’s visible assets would look the same: some workout rooms, some changing rooms, some equipment. But if we return to our 2017 gym and look more closely, we’ll notice a few differences.

Most Likely to Succeed: Preparing Our Kids for the Innovation Era by Tony Wagner, Ted Dintersmith

affirmative action, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Bernie Sanders, Clayton Christensen, creative destruction, David Brooks, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, immigration reform, income inequality, index card, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, language acquisition, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, new economy, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, school choice, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steven Pinker, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the scientific method, two and twenty, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Y Combinator

As they turn to SMART Boards, iPads, online courses, and flipped classrooms, it would appear our schools are on the cutting edge. These advances prompt some pundits to predict that it’s just a matter of time before teachers are obsolete. But these “innovations” are all variants of ineffective passive education. Sure, it’s easier to tee up cards on an iPad than have a teacher or tiger parent write them out on index cards. It’s easier to have kids do multiple-choice quizzes online with instant feedback than to grade quizzes by hand. It’s easier to plop students down in front of an online lecture where their brain waves go dead than to have them attend a live lecture . . . where their brain waves go dead. But passive is still passive.

The Battery: How Portable Power Sparked a Technological Revolution by Henry Schlesinger

Albert Einstein, animal electricity, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, British Empire, Copley Medal, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, index card, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Livingstone, I presume, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, pneumatic tube, popular electronics, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RFID, Robert Metcalfe, Stephen Hawking, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method, Thomas Davenport, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Yogi Berra

The engineers and scientists who dream up all the fancy spy gear spend a lot of time worrying about batteries. While surprising, it also made perfect sense. James Bond was never seen popping into a drugstore for a couple of AAs to power up his gadgets, but something had to power them. The espionage book was a lengthy project, but during my downtime I began making notes about batteries on small index cards. One slim stack of cards very quickly turned into two, then grew into four, and soon expanded into eight. The answer to each question seemed to prompt four more questions. Clearly there was more to batteries than we generally realize. A little more research revealed that there was almost nothing written about batteries for the nontechnical reader.

Exploring Python by Timothy Budd

c2.com, centre right, duck typing, functional programming, general-purpose programming language, Guido van Rossum, higher-order functions, index card, random walk, sorting algorithm, web application

Match each action (verb) with an agent (noun). That is, match each what with a who. A useful tool in this process is the CRC card. The letters in the name stand for Class, Responsibility, and Collaborators. We will explain only the first two of these. For each agent (noun) write the name of the agent on an index card. Below this write a short English language description of the responsibilities of this agent. A collection of scenarios and CRC cards is a good starting place for the process of designing a new application. Walk through the scenarios, and for each action (verb) make sure you have identified an agent (represented by a CRC card) responsible for performing the action.

The Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt, Dave Thomas

A Pattern Language, Broken windows theory, business logic, business process, buy low sell high, c2.com, combinatorial explosion, continuous integration, database schema, domain-specific language, don't repeat yourself, Donald Knuth, Ford Model T, Free Software Foundation, general-purpose programming language, George Santayana, Grace Hopper, higher-order functions, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index card, Kaizen: continuous improvement, lateral thinking, loose coupling, Menlo Park, MVC pattern, off-by-one error, premature optimization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, revision control, Schrödinger's Cat, slashdot, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, systems thinking, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, traveling salesman, urban decay, Y2K

Prototyping Architecture Many prototypes are constructed to model the entire system under consideration. As opposed to tracer bullets, none of the individual modules in the prototype system need to be particularly functional. In fact, you may not even need to code in order to prototype architecture—you can prototype on a whiteboard, with Post-it notes or index cards. What you are looking for is how the system hangs together as a whole, again deferring details. Here are some specific areas you may want to look for in the architectural prototype: Are the responsibilities of the major components well defined and appropriate? Are the collaborations between major components well defined?

Gray Day: My Undercover Mission to Expose America's First Cyber Spy by Eric O'Neill

active measures, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, computer age, cryptocurrency, deep learning, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, fear of failure, full text search, index card, information security, Internet of things, Kickstarter, messenger bag, Mikhail Gorbachev, operational security, PalmPilot, ransomware, rent control, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Skype, thinkpad, Timothy McVeigh, web application, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, young professional

My life became a relentless series of Excel spreadsheets and long flights. Within a few months, I knew I’d fallen off my path. A year to the day after I’d started, I walked into my boss’s office and quit my consulting job. My Navy dreams had passed me by, but I could still serve my country. I filled out index cards and mailed them to every alphabet agency I could find in the phonebook. The FBI, NSA, Secret Service, and DEA all sent back thick applications that I fed into my old typewriter. (The CIA never responded. Their loss.) I decided to focus my efforts on the FBI and the DEA. In the early ’90s, you had to be at least twenty-five to become an FBI special agent, but my application had caught the attention of the SSG.

Making It All Work: Winning at the Game of Work and the Business of Life by David Allen

Abraham Maslow, cognitive dissonance, index card, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, shareholder value, Skype, telemarketer

A simple, numbered list of our twenty-plus standards of best behavior works fine. On the individual level, a list of personal affirmations or a written personal “credo” would be ideal. How you organize the list may depend on how you want to be reminded of the contents—for years I maintained a set of 3 × 5-inch index cards, each with its own affirmation, held together by a rubber band. I could carry the batch with me and reaffirm the statements whenever I wanted to be inspired or had a moment to work on my own self-programming. Now I simply keep a list on my computer, synchronized to my PDA. Vision Where and in what form would it be wise to keep track of long-term success images and goals?

Kick Me: Adventures in Adolescence by Paul Feig

index card, Saturday Night Live, upwardly mobile

But now, sitting in his den with him, as he leafed through the pages and pages of nightclub jokes he had stored up over the past thirty years, I felt closer to him than I had ever felt in my life. Simply put, he and I were bonding over comedy. “Okay, here’s a good one to open with,” he said as he brought over a three-by-five index card out of the kitchen recipe box that made up his “joke file.” He told me the joke, an acceptably off-color anecdote about an elephant eating cabbages in a garden, and I listened, laughed, and then memorized every pause and inflection he put into his delivery. I knew I was learning from the master, or at least the only joke master I had access to, and I treated him with the proper amount of respect and deference.

Dishwasher: One Man's Quest to Wash Dishes in All Fifty States (P.S.) by Pete Jordan

big-box store, Exxon Valdez, financial independence, Haight Ashbury, index card, intentional community, Kickstarter, Mason jar, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, wage slave

Then some girl whined to me, “The nonfat milk is warm.” A Three-Day Soaker 41 This was no way to land a dish job—a job where I could wear my own grubby clothes and avoid the gabby customers. At 7:05 a.m., I grabbed my shirt and escaped with a vow to never again wear company garb. A couple days later, I studied dozens of three-by-five-inch index cards on the campus ride board. One read: “Two guys driving up to Alaska looking for a third person to help share the cost of gas.” I called them and was told they were heading up to find work in the oil spill cleanup. It was April 1989. A few weeks before, the oil tanker Exxon Valdez had struck a reef and dumped at least ten million gallons of crude oil into the Prince William Sound.

The Real Doctor Will See You Shortly: A Physician's First Year by Matt McCarthy

cognitive dissonance, index card, off-the-grid, sensible shoes, upwardly mobile

I was deliriously sleep-deprived, but this had nothing to do with that. “I’m deeply sorry, but it has never been communicated to anyone that she’s suffering. And I can’t have a translator just following me around.” He clenched his teeth. “It was communicated to me. And there are phone translators in every room.” He scribbled down a phone number on an index card and handed it to me. “Use it.” I looked at the numbers and tried to wrap my head around what was happening. I took a deep breath. “Okay.” He closed his eyes and sighed. “That’s it. That’s all I have to say. I’ll give you one more chance to get this right.” Then what? I was too scared to ask. 28 Two days later I found myself sitting cross-legged in a group circle in Palisades, New York, at the intern retreat, where for twenty-four hours we were given a much-needed respite from hospital life.

Ugly Americans: The True Story of the Ivy League Cowboys Who Raided the Asian Markets for Millions by Ben Mezrich

index arbitrage, index card, invisible hand, Nick Leeson, profit motive, proprietary trading, short selling, vertical integration, white picket fence

It seemed more the setting for an interrogation than an interview. From recent experience, Malcolm knew that these things tended to be a little bit of both. In the past week, he’d been to fourteen interviews, most of them taking place within four blocks of where he was sitting. His pockets were full of index cards with addresses and contact information. Investment banks, consulting firms, start-ups, insurance companies: he’d sent his résumé out to almost every open finance position listed in the Princeton alumni office and had been making the forty-five-minute New Jersey Transit trip from Mercer County nearly every morning since.

Digital Photography Hacks by Derrick Story

Hacker Ethic, index card, Steve Jobs, two and twenty

ISO 400 requires much less light for a good picture than ISO 100 requires. Take more than one picture of each object. Then, after you upload the photos to your computer, pick the shot that has the largest file size [Hack #47] . The bigger the file size, the sharper the picture will be. Use pink 3" 5" index cards. Pink cards reflect less light than white ones do. This will make them easier to read, because they will require about the same exposure as the objects you're photographing. Finally, remember to update your home inventory at least once a year to keep it current. Hack 81 Rental-Car Tips and Other Auto Hacks A camera phone can help you prove that you didn't put those dents in a rental car.

Wiseguy: The 25th Anniversary Edition by Nicholas Pileggi

air freight, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, index card, load shedding

A year after Henry Hill’s arrest I was approached by his attorney, who said that Hill was looking for someone to write his story. At that point I had been writing about organized-crime figures for most of my career as a journalist and had gotten bored with the egomaniacal ravings of illiterate hoods masquerading as benevolent Godfathers. In addition, I had never heard of Henry Hill. In my office are four boxes of index cards upon which I compulsively jot the names and various details of every major and minor organized-crime figure I run across in the press or court dockets. When I looked in it I discovered I had a card on Hill, dated from 1970 and misidentifying him as a member of the Joseph Bonanno crime family. And yet, from the mountain of data the feds had begun to compile about him since his arrest a year earlier and the importance they attached to him as a witness, it was clear that Henry Hill was at least worth meeting.

Spooked: The Trump Dossier, Black Cube, and the Rise of Private Spies by Barry Meier

Airbnb, business intelligence, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, false flag, forensic accounting, global pandemic, Global Witness, index card, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, Londongrad, medical malpractice, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, WikiLeaks

He had also jury-rigged a miniature video camera that was now concealed behind his tie and he had audio recorders in his pockets. THE LUNCHEON WENT ON for about ninety minutes. John Scott-Railton and Michel Lambert both spoke in French and the supposed consultant, who said he had grown up in Morocco, described how his work regularly took him to Africa. He came across to Scott-Railton as bumbling. As he spoke, he took index cards from his jacket pocket and kept referring to them as though they contained prompts. He also pointed a pen toward Scott-Railton that the researcher suspected contained a recording device. Lambert probed for details about Citizen Lab, including where the group got its financial support and how it chose its targets.

Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love, and Acid to the World by Nicholas Schou

airport security, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, fixed income, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, index card, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, no-fly zone, old-boy network, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea

WHEN BOB ROMAINE joined the Laguna Beach Police Department in February 1971, the war on the town’s hippie culture that began with Neil Purcell’s high-profile bust of Timothy Leary in Dodge City had been raging for more than two years. A tough but jovial former marine and Korean War combat veteran, Romaine had been busting hippies in south Orange County with military zeal, building a detailed profile of each suspected drug dealer he arrested, copying down every name in their address books on four-by-five-index cards, stowing them away for future use. When Purcell heard about Romaine’s exploits, he persuaded Romaine to join him and Detective John Saporito in their crusade against the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. “He was a very aggressive, strong-willed field deputy,” Purcell says of Romaine. “If there was a robbery all points bulletin that went out, he was the guy who could spot the thief.

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert

Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, Columbian Exchange, correlation does not imply causation, double helix, Easter island, Honoré de Balzac, index card, Jacob Silverman, Maui Hawaii, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, out of africa, seminal paper, Skype, Steven Pinker, the long tail, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Yogi Berra

They started with a cluster of bats hanging at the widest part of Guano Hall. On closer inspection, Smith noticed that most animals in the cluster were already dead, their tiny feet hooked to the rock in rigor mortis. But he thought he saw some living bats among the corpses. He called out the number to von Oettingen, who’d brought along a pencil and some index cards. “Two lucis,” Smith said. “Two lucis,” von Oettingen repeated, writing the number down. Smith worked his way deeper into the cave. Von Oettingen called me over and gestured toward a crack in the rock face. Apparently at one point there had been dozens of bats hibernating inside it. Now there was just a layer of black muck studded with toothpick-sized bones.

Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980 by Rick Perlstein

8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Alistair Cooke, Alvin Toffler, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Apollo 13, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boeing 747, Brewster Kahle, business climate, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, death of newspapers, defense in depth, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, equal pay for equal work, facts on the ground, feminist movement, financial deregulation, full employment, global village, Golden Gate Park, guns versus butter model, illegal immigration, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, index card, indoor plumbing, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, kremlinology, land reform, low interest rates, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, oil shock, open borders, Peoples Temple, Phillips curve, Potemkin village, price stability, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Suez crisis 1956, three-martini lunch, traveling salesman, unemployed young men, union organizing, unpaid internship, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, wages for housework, walking around money, War on Poverty, white flight, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, yellow journalism, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

It causes me to lose my eye contact.” On important occasions, his wife Nancy accompanied him—and “as she watches her husband give the speech she has heard countless times before,” a reporter marveled, “her look of rapt, wide-eyed adoration never falters.” The same jokes, set down on the same stack of four-by-six index cards he’d been compiling since the 1960s, some of them yellowed with age. (A doctor had pronounced Reagan “sound as a dollar.” He fainted straightaway. The reason the Little Old Lady Lived in a Shoe was because property taxes were so high. “The dollar’s shrunk, the dime hasn’t changed. You can still use it for a screwdriver.”

…

Then, finally, the same, glorious soaring perorations about America’s ineluctable rendezvous with destiny as God’s shining city on a hill, as the last best hope of man on earth—and then the same ecstatic, electric ovation, as if their Rotary club, Republican organization, or trade group had been touched by the hand of God. There might be a question and answer period with the audience; attendees scribbled questions on index cards to be posed by the master of ceremony. (Once—again, only once—Deaver tried to show the boss the cards in advance. Reagan frowned and threw them in the garbage: “Mike, you can’t hit a home run on a softball.”) And, usually, beforehand or afterward, a fifteen-to-twenty minute “press availability”—for which the preparations were also rigorously prescribed: the room cooled to fifty-five degrees an hour prior to start time to counteract the TV lights’ heat; backdrop light blue or beige (“ideal for TV cameras”), free from “fancy decorations that distract from the speaker”; a “reliable volunteer” posted outside with orders to admit “bona fide press,” banning “well-wishers and friends” who might cause undue distraction.

…

Reportedly, Reagan’s handlers had considered the idea, which Sears rejected because it would only call attention to his age, though another advisor said it was “something we might consider at a later date.” One problem was that Reagan was delivering pretty much the same speech he had since the Kennedy administration. When he started in once more to shuffling those now famous yellowed index cards, the traveling press would groan, brace themselves for the same dubious statistics, corny one-liners, and bromides they had heard so many times before—and dismiss what one called the “docile Chautauqua circuit lecture campaign of tried-and-true one-liners” as sheer laziness. But this was a key component of John Sears’s strategy: doing the exact same thing he always did was supposed to insinuate the conclusion that Reagan’s victory was so predetermined, he needn’t even campaign.

The Virgin Way: Everything I Know About Leadership by Richard Branson

barriers to entry, Boeing 747, call centre, carbon footprint, Celtic Tiger, clean water, collective bargaining, Costa Concordia, do what you love, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, flag carrier, friendly fire, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, index card, inflight wifi, Lao Tzu, legacy carrier, low cost airline, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Tesla Model S, Tony Fadell, trade route, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, work culture , zero-sum game

Addressing this very common affliction, Twain spoke about a rightly timed pause being every bit as critical and effective as choosing the right words. ‘The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.’ Before the teleprompter arrived on the scene, I always used to work from index cards. David Tait, who would usually write my speeches for Virgin Atlantic in the US, used to take delight in sticking in the odd strategically placed card that in big letters would just say ‘PAUSE’ to ensure I stopped long enough to let a point sink in with the audience – low-tech, for sure, but highly effective nevertheless.

Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes

book value, commoditize, Donald Trump, index card, Indoor air pollution, Maui Hawaii, telemarketer

I bought the issue of Premiere magazine that lists "the 100 most powerful people in Hollywood." Gee, there it was, my Dream 100 list, and someone had already done the work for me. Then I subscribed to Hollywood Creative Directory, which gives you all the contact information for anyone of substance in Hollywood. Next I had one of my assistants make up index cards for me with all their contact data, and I began my process. I called the CEOs of all the major studios, including Paramount, Disney, Warner Bros., Universal, and Sony Pictures. Using the techniques we'll go over in Chapter Nine, I was able to get seven out of 11 of the biggest CEOs in Hollywood on the telephone.

Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code by Martin Fowler, Kent Beck, John Brant, William Opdyke, Don Roberts

business logic, conceptual framework, database schema, index card, MVC pattern, no silver bullet, place-making, sorting algorithm

When you refactor, you will inevitably discover cases in which the code doesn't work right. You'll be absolutely certain of it. Resist temptation. When you are refactoring, your goal is to leave the code computing exactly the same answers it was when you found it. Nothing more, nothing less. Keep a list (I always have an index card beside my computer) of things to change later—test cases to add or change, unrelated refactorings, documents to write, diagrams to draw. That way you won't lose those thoughts, but you won't let them mess up what you are doing now. 335 Bibliography References [Auer] Ken. Auer "Reusability through Self-Encapsulation."

Every Patient Tells a Story by Lisa Sanders

classic study, data acquisition, discovery of penicillin, high batting average, index card, medical residency, meta-analysis, natural language processing, pattern recognition, Pepto Bismol, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan

But none of those seemed to fit. There were other, less likely possibilities. Rheumatoid arthritis can come on like this, as can lupus. Justin Thompson, the intern working with me that month, had admitted Freeman for her earlier hospitalization. When I asked him about her, he wearily flipped through a stack of index cards that he pulled from his pockets. “Right. We tapped her knee and cultured her up,” he said, meaning that they’d drawn fluid from her knee, which should offer some clues, and had sent off some of the fluid, as well as her blood and urine, to check for evidence of infection. “I thought it was gonorrhea,” the intern stated flatly.

NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children by Po Bronson, Ashley Merryman

affirmative action, classic study, cognitive load, Columbine, delayed gratification, desegregation, hedonic treadmill, impulse control, index card, job satisfaction, lake wobegon effect, language acquisition, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, randomized controlled trial, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, telemarketer, theory of mind

But once Morgan spent a year in the classroom of a hypercritical teacher, she could no longer unwind at night. Despite a reasonable bedtime of 9:30 p.m., she would lay awake in frustration until 11:30, sometimes midnight, clutching her leopard-fur pillow. On her fairy-dust purple bedroom walls were taped index cards, each a vocabulary word Morgan had trouble with. Unable to sleep, she turned back to her studies, determined not to let her grades suffer. Instead, she saw herself fall apart emotionally. During the day, she was crabby and prone to crying easily. Occasionally Morgan fell asleep in class. Morgan moved on from that teacher’s classroom the next year, but the lack of sleep persisted.

Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State by Dana Priest, William M. Arkin

airport security, business intelligence, company town, dark matter, disinformation, drone strike, friendly fire, Google Earth, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, index card, information security, Julian Assange, operational security, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Timothy McVeigh, WikiLeaks

The mission description seemed too intentionally bland, Arkin thought, and a logistics agency was an odd place for a new policy office to be. The paper trail indicated that the $15 million had initially been deleted because the DPAO’s duties were seen as redundant with the work of other agencies, but then had been mysteriously restored. Arkin wrote “Defense Policy Analysis Office” at the top of an index card and put it in his Secret Units box, where it remained for nearly a year, until one day a source sent him two CD-ROMs’ worth of unclassified and “For Official Use Only”1 documents for a different project he was working on. There, in the thousands of documents from the newly created Northern Command, was a single page mentioning a civilian liaison officer from DPAO who had been assigned to another bit of alphabet soup—“N/NC-J39.”

No Regrets, Coyote: A Novel by John Dufresne

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, always be closing, fear of failure, illegal immigration, index card, mirror neurons, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, young professional

Had a rehearsal to get to. Plus she’d have to take time off from work. So long, I said. Plus it would expose her to shame in the community. After a quick rehearsal spent on blocking and ironing out a few rough spots, I drove home. I saw that Red had put his name on my mailbox. He had written P. Soileau on an index card and affixed it with clear shipping tape. I asked him what the P stood for, and he told me Pableaux, and he spelled it for me. He pointed at the gray and glowing briquettes in the hibachi and asked me to join him for supper. Hot dogs. Fabulous, I said. I’ll bring the beer. And bring some diced onions if you have any, he said.

Busting Vegas: The MIT Whiz Kid Who Brought the Casinos to Their Knees by Ben Mezrich

airport security, Donald Trump, Firefox, independent contractor, index card, trickle-down economics

Twelve square inches of white paper marred by poorly stenciled black ink, daggered to aging cork by a half-dozen brightly colored pushpins. Crumpled at the edges, creased and yellowed by too many fingers, nearly lost and overwhelmed by a sea of other makeshift advertisements bleeding out across the pockmarked board: yellow construction-paper parchments offering cheap guitar lessons; pink and blue index cards heralding last-minute apartment rentals; still-warm photocopied flyers scalping concert tickets; dot-matrix cuneiform listings spiriting intramural sports teams that nobody wanted to join. And there, in the middle of it all: MAKE MONEY OVER THE SUMMER. PLAY WITH THE MIT BLACKJACK TEAM. SATURDAY MORNING, APRIL 12.