A collection of notes on general Knowledge.

The knowledge portal serves as a clipboard, a place to collect various bits of knowledge from various books and their authors.

A collection of notes on Ascetism.

One must first place oneself from the point of view of Epicurus and distinguish natural from imaginary needs. When we are able to despise in practice all that is unnecessary to life, when we will disdain luxury and comfort, when we will savor the physical pleasure that come from simple food and drink.

The wise man notes that material progress has as its object the increasing of the artificial needs of some and the labor of others. Material progress appears to him as an increasing weight, which increasingly plunges man in the mud and in suffering.

The philosopher Diogenes was eating bread and lentils for supper. He was seen by the philosopher Aristippus, who lived comfortably by flattering the king.
Said Aristippus, 'If you would learn to be subservient to the king you would not have to live on lentils.'
Said Diogenes, 'Learn to live on lentils and you will not have to be subservient to the king'

A collection of notes on Health.

health knowledge

• Eat varied foods, biodiversity in the diet means less monoculture in the fields.
• Pay more for foods grown or raised less intensively and with more care, eat less.
• Eat mostly plants, especially leaves. Cook, and if you can, plant a garden.
• Avoid food products with unpronounceable ingredients, or more than five in number.
• Don't eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food.

• Survival Health

A collection of notes on Design.

You should be planning, expecting, desiring to live among material surroundings created, manufactured, distributed, through radically different methods from today's. It is your moral duty to aid this transformative process. This means you should encourage the best industrial design.

Get excellent tools and appliances. Not a hundred bad, cheap, easy ones. Get the genuinely good ones. Work at it. Pay some attention here, do not neglect the issue by imagining yourself to be serenely "non-materialistic." There is nothing more "materialistic" than doing the same household job five times because your tools suck. Do not allow yourself to be trapped in time-sucking black holes of mechanical dysfunction.

design knowledge

• Good design makes a product useful.
• Good design makes a product understandable.
• Good design is unobtrusive.
• Good design is honest.
• Good design is long-lasting.
• Good design is thorough down to the last detail.
• Good design is environmentally friendly.
• Good design is as little design as possible.

design pragnanz

• The mind perceives objects as being symmetrical and forming around a center point.
• The mind perceives objects that are near, or proximate to each other, to be grouped together.
• The mind can only keep 7 (plus or minus 2) items in their working memory, on average.
• The mind has a propensity to best remember the first and last items in a series.
• The mind remembers uncompleted or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks.
• The mind will perceive and interpret ambiguous or complex images as the simplest form possible.
• The time it takes to make a decision increases with the number and complexity of choices.
• The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target.

A collection of notes on Writing.

writing knowledge

• Never use a long word where a short one will do.
• If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
• Never use the passive where you can use the active.
• Never use a foreign or scientific word, if you can think of an English equivalent.
• Never use a figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
• Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Improvement means deterioration.

programming practices

• Prototype before polishing. Get it working before optimizing it.
• Separate policy from mechanism, separate interfaces from engines.
• Write simple modular parts connected by clean interfaces.
• Design programs to be connected to other programs.
• Write programs to write programs when you can.
• Design for the future, because it will be here sooner than you think.
• In interface design, always do the least surprising thing.
• When a program has nothing surprising to say, it should say nothing.
• When a program must fail, it should fail noisily and as soon as possible.
• Write big programs only when it is clear by demonstration that nothing else will do.
• Consider how you would solve your immediate problem without adding anything new.

A collection of notes on Work.

work knowledge

• Find your passion and figure out how to get paid for it.
• Do whatever you want to do, but be the best at it.
• Strive for simplicity and competence, but embrace the messiness along the way.
• Under-promise and over-deliver, and own up to your screw-ups.
• Doing what everybody else is doing feels like the safest thing to do, making it the most competitive, and thus the riskiest.
• No one is on their deathbed is wishing they spent more time at work.
• Never stop learning.

work habits

• Doing the right tasks is more important than doing your tasks efficiently.
• Write down your goals. Break them down into manageable tasks.
• Tackle one task at a time, and group similar tasks together.
• You're more attentive in the morning, tackle hard stuff then.
• If you can't do it in 8 hours, you can't do it in 10.
• Don't forget to stretch, and drink plenty of water.
• Keep a record of your time use.

work charisma

• Always look a person in the eye when you talk to them.
• Always stand up to shake someone's hand.
• Be conscious of your body language.
• Ask more than you answer.
• First impressions matter.
• When you walk, look straight ahead, not at your feet.
• Never hit anyone unless they are an immediate threat.
• No matter their job or status, everyone deserves your respect.

• Thousand true fans
• Geeks Mops Sociopaths