Podcast appearances and mentions of alexander humboldt

Hello Interactors,I recently read an intriguing article about unexpected forms of life thriving deep within the Earth's crust. These discoveries are revitalizing environmental theories and processes that mainstream science has long tried to dismiss—yet I've been exploring them over the past few summers. While working outside, I realized that some of these processes are unfolding right under my nose...and possibly even inside it!On that note, this might sound a bit awkward, but...Let's dig in!WORLDWIDE WEATHERING WHISPERSI'm behind on my pressure washing. This can have detrimental effects here in the predominantly damp Northwest as moss spores, tiny lightweight travelers, are lifted and lofted by the wind's wings until they land on damp concrete. A new home for moss to roam.Upon contact, the spores absorb moisture and germinate, developing into a protonema — fine lines of sprawling verdant vines. As the structure crawls through the creviced concrete an anchored lace unfolds. Atop it grows a carpet of green and gold, down below tentacles grab hold.The rhizoid roots anchor mounding moss, absorbing food and water nature has tossed. As the concrete crumbles into nutrient stores, the soft moss blossoms with chromophores. Over time, atop the luscious mountains and rocky moistened pours, the wind releases more lofting spores.It turns out the contrasting boundary between soft squishy plants and hard concrete is as pronounced as the divisions between the disciplines of biology and geology. But advances in Earth System Science are starting blur these boundaries, as integrative science tends to do. Like moss softening concrete.My expansive moss colonies, part of the plant kingdom, house communities of tiny microorganisms like bacteria, fungi, and microscopic animals like rotifers and tardigrades. Many of these communities have symbiotic relationships with moss. For example, some bacteria promote moss growth through the production of the plant growth hormone auxin using specific enzymes in plant tissues.As the moss and its associated microbes grow and expand, they can penetrate small cracks or pores in the concrete, potentially widening them and exposing more surface area to weathering processes. This can be accelerated by certain bacteria and fungi that produce organic acids as metabolic byproducts. These acids can slowly dissolve or weaken calcium carbonate and other minerals found in concrete.The biogeochemistry contributing to rock weathering and sediment formation reveals the intricate connections between biological processes and geological phenomena. At massive space and time scales they can not only affect the meteorological conditions above ground, but also the layers of sediment below ground.In a recent New York Times piece, Ferris Jabr, author of “Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life” reveals how“Within the forest floor [of the Amazon rainforest], vast symbiotic networks of plant roots and filamentous fungi pull water from the soil into trunks, stems and leaves. As the nearly 400 billion trees in the Amazon drink their fill, they release excess moisture, saturating the air with 20 billion tons of water vapor each day. At the same time, plants of all kinds secrete salts and emit bouquets of pungent gaseous compounds. Mushrooms, dainty as paper parasols or squat as door­ knobs, exhale plumes of spores. The wind sweeps bacteria, pollen grains and bits of leaves and bark into the atmosphere. The wet breath of the forest — peppered with microscopic life and organic residues — creates conditions that are highly conducive to rain. With so much water vapor in the air and so many minute particles on which the water can condense, clouds quickly form. In a typical year, the Amazon generates around half of its own rainfall.”Below ground, he describes work by Earth scientist Robert Hazen and colleagues.“When Earth was young, microbes inhabiting the ocean crust were likely dissolving the basalt with acids and enzymes in order to obtain energy and nutrients, producing wet clay minerals. By lubricating the crust with those wet byproducts, the microbes may have accelerated the dissolution of both mantle and crust and their eventual transfiguration into new land. The geophysicists Dennis Höning and Tilman Spohn have published similar ideas.They point out that water trapped in subducting sediments escapes first, whereas water in the crust is typically expelled at greater depths. The thicker the sedimentary layer covering the crust, the more water makes it into the deep mantle, which ultimately enhances the production of granite.In Earth's earliest eons, micro-organisms and, later, fungi and plants dissolved and degraded rock at a rate much greater than what geological processes could accomplish on their own.In doing so, they would have increased the amount of sediment deposited in deep ocean trenches, thereby cloaking subducting plates of ocean crust in thicker protective layers, flushing more water into the mantle and ultimately contributing to the creation of new land.”LOVELOCKS LIVING LOOPSThis kind of Earth System Science has been given a name by one of first contributors, James Lovelock — geophysiology. Lovelock describes geophysiology as a systems approach to Earth sciences, viewing Earth as a self-regulating entity where biological, chemical, and physical processes interact to maintain conditions suitable for life. It integrates various scientific disciplines to understand and predict the behavior of Earth's systems, aiming to diagnose and prevent environmental issues by considering the planet as a cohesive, self-regulating system.This concept, rooted in Lovelock's initial Gaia hypothesis, emphasizes the feedback mechanisms that stabilize Earth's environment, akin to physiological processes in living organisms. Gaia is named after the primordial Greek goddess who personifies the Earth. This naming occurred in the context of Lovelock developing his ideas about Earth as a self-regulating system in the 1960s and early 1970s.Lovelock had been working on methods to detect life on Mars at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which led him to consider how life might be detected on a planetary scale. This work eventually evolved into his hypothesis about Earth functioning as a complex, self-regulating system maintained by the community of living organisms.As Lovelock was formulating these ideas, he was looking for a suitable name for his hypothesis. It was during this time that William Golding, Lovelock's neighbor and renowned author of "Lord of the Flies", suggested using the name "Gaia".In Greek mythology, Gaia is considered the ancestral mother of all life and one of the first beings to emerge from earliest chaotic stages of Earth's formation. She is often depicted as a maternal, nurturing figure who gave birth to the Titans, the Cyclopes, and other primordial deities. Gaia is associated with fertility, the earth's abundance, and the cycle of life and death.In ancient Greek religion, Gaia was worshipped as the Great Mother and was sometimes referred to as "Mother Earth." That title, and her influence, extends beyond Greek mythology, perpetuating the concept of Earth as a living, nurturing entity — a concept that has resonated in various cultures for Millenia.Elements of the Greek notion of Gaia likely have roots in earlier Middle Eastern knowledge.  Several ancient cultures had earth goddesses that predate or are contemporaneous with the Greek Gaia. For instance, in Mesopotamia, Sumerian mythology offers Ki is the earth goddess, and in Akkadian mythology, there is Ninhursag.It turns out “Mother Earth” birthed similar concepts all around her. Egypt had Isis, Anatolia (modern-day Turkey) had Cybele, India's Hinduism had Parvati and Durga, Pre-Columbian American cultures featured Pachamama, Celtic cultures had Danu and Brigid, while Norse mythology features Frigg and Freyja.In 1960's and 70's America, “Mother Nature” and “Gaia” emerged among some environmentalists as New Age mystical beliefs associated with alternative spiritualities. Lovelock's decision to use the word “Gaia” thus made him and his ideas a target among many Western trained scientists and his Earth system concepts endured harsh criticisms.It's worth mentioning that when Alexander Humboldt put forth similar ideas in his book "Cosmos" (first published in 1845), taking a holistic view of nature, exploring connections between various Earth systems and life forms, he was heralded as the greatest scientist of his time. Even Charles Darwin took a copy of Cosmos with him on his famous Beagle voyage. Humboldt, like Lovelock, uniquely and successfully integrated knowledge from diverse fields like astronomy, geology, biology, meteorology, and even art and literature.But the specialization, reductionism, and quantification of dominant Western science distanced itself from these holistic approaches viewing them as too spiritual and outdated. By the twentieth century, the growing New Age interpretation of Gaia often personified the Earth as a conscious, living entity, drawing on both Lovelock's scientific hypothesis and ancient mythological concepts. Many modern religions and philosophical concepts about the origin of life still incorporate anthropomorphic elements, such as the idea of a creator with human-like qualities or intentions.These mainstream images can lead to engrained tendencies to see humans and other living organisms as being born:* into a world as separate entities from the world they inhabit* onto a physical plane as a separate, tangible reality* unto which they individually acquire and consume energy to live and grow.This perspective sees living beings as somewhat separate from their environment, rather than as integral parts of a larger system. It's a view consistent with traditional Western science that emphasizes reductionist approaches, breaking systems down into component parts. But it contrasts with more holistic perspectives, such as those found in ecological theories like Geophysiology, other branches of Earth System Science, or Traditional Ecological Knowledge which see earth's components, including humans, as inseparable parts of their environments.This was confirmed at the 2001 Amsterdam Declaration, signed by the Chairs of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program (IGBP), International Human Dimensions Program (IHDP), World Climate Research Program (WCRP) and DIVERSITAS at the 2001 ‘Challenges of a Changing Earth' conference. The declaration concluded:“The Earth System behaves as a single, self-regulating system comprised of physical, chemical, biological and human components, with complex interactions and feedbacks between the component parts.”Integrative Western scientists have now amassed enough data to recognize that living matter is born:* into a living, interconnected Earth system,* onto a dynamic web of relationships,* unto which we belong as integral participants, exchanging energy and matter in a continuous cycle of life and growth.In this view, my moss colonies and their microbial companions emerge as vital threads, weaving together the living and non-living elements of our planet. These intricate communities, from the tiniest bacteria to the visible expanse of moss, exemplify the self-regulating nature of Earth's systems that Lovelock envisioned.As they slowly transform concrete through their metabolic processes, they participate in the larger process of biogeochemical cycling. They influence not only my cinderblock walls and concrete surfaces, but they also contribute to the broader patterns of weathering, sedimentation, and even microclimate regulation.This interplay between the microscopic and the global, the biological and the geological, embodies the essence of Humboldt's and Lovelock's theory — a planet alive with interconnected processes, where every organism, no matter how small, plays a role in maintaining the delicate balance of life.In this living system, my moss and its microbiome, like me and the symbiotic communities of microorganisms in me and on me, are not mere passive inhabitants, but active agents in the ongoing story of Earth's evolution. Together we demonstrate the profound interconnectedness that defines our planet's unique capacity for self-regulation and adaptation.Now where's my pressure washer? This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io

Moin, uns steht ein wahrhaft aufregendes Wochenende bevor: St. Pauli könnte den Aufstieg in die Bundesliga schaffen, der Hafen feiert Geburtstag mit Großseglern, Feuerwerk und vielen Konzerten auf einer schwimmenden Bühne, und dann beginnt auch noch die Badesaison! Wo es voll wird, was sich lohnt, was die Hamburgerinnen und Hamburger sagen – hört ihr hier. Viel Spaß dabei wünscht Maiken Was war heute in Hamburg los? Maiken Nielsen und Ole Wackermann werfen im wöchentlichen Wechsel zum Tagesende einen Blick auf die News und das aktuelle Stadtgeschehen. Das sind die Nachrichten heute mit Maiken Nielsen am Freitag, 10.05.2024 +++HAMBURGER HAFENGEBURTSTAG 2024+++ Besucher aus aller Welt bewundern Großsegler wie die Alexander Humboldt 2. Heute treten unter anderem die Band Scooter auf einer schwimmenden Bühne an den Landungsbrücken auf. Zudem gibt es ein großes Feuerwerk.

El futuro nunca fue más aterrador. En un apacible pueblo donde nada parece suceder, Alexander Humboldt, un joven de diecisiete años con una mente inquieta y una familia que lo ama, desafía a las autoridades escolares al presentar una arriesgada teoría científica: la Tierra no es plana como se cree y órbita alrededor del Sol. Su atrevimiento desencadena una serie de eventos que lo llevará a descubrir una aterradora verdad: vive en un mundo totalitario donde cualquier idea contraria al oficialismo es silenciada sin piedad. Conversamos en el #TraficantesDeCultura con Julio Rojas, autor de Freeland, libro editado por PLANETA. Conduce: Humberto Fuentes

Irene Antonez is a Prague based Russian/Ukrainian artist and musician, who works in the genre of bio art and botanical/mycological illustration with a focus on fungi and microorganisms. She holds two Masters' degrees: in Future Design and in Fine Art. Irene draws inspiration from her microscopic research of fungi as well as mushroom hunting, ethnomycology, ethnobotany, old scientific illustration books as well as from her family history of " mushroom obsession". She uses a microscope to explore the invisible world of tiny organisms that we typically overlook. Irene believes that it's highly important to emphasize the spirit or « soul » in each living being no matter its scale or size. In her artwork, Irene plays with combinations of various scales to show the beauty and importance of tiny, microscopic creatures to the World. She is constantly engaged in various mushroom-related projects all around the world. She has been a guest speaker at mycological events like the Hawaii Mushroom Conference and has her artwork displayed in exhibitions both in Prague and internationally.    TOPICS COVERED:   Growing up in a Mycophilic Culture   Family Love of Art & Music   Future Design   Ethnomycology    Psychedelics & Artistic Expression   Traveling through Microscopic Worlds   The Soul and Spirit of Microorganisms   Scale & PerspectiveFlow & Curiosity   Becoming a Fungal Ambassador   Inspiring Mycological Awakenings   Early Art Exhibitions   Immersion into Audio & Visual Artwork   Mushroom Foraging in Prague   EPISODE RESOURCES:   Irene Antonez Etsy: https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/IreneAntonezArt?ref=search_shop_redirect   Irene Antonez IG: https://www.instagram.com/irene_antonez_art/   Mikhail Vishnevsky (inspiration): https://golden.com/wiki/Vishnevsky%2C_Mikhail_Vladimirovich-DZKYXW5   Rhodotus palmatus: https://www.mushroomexpert.com/rhodotus_palmatus.html    Hydnellum peckii: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydnellum_peckii   "The Invention of Nature" (book): https://www.andreawulf.com/about-the-invention-of-nature.html   "Entangled Life" (book): https://www.merlinsheldrake.com/entangled-life   

18th-century explorer Alexander Humboldt found the vestiges of a dead South American language in the most unusual host! Music from Fesliyan Studios Please support the show at www.patreon.com/historyobscura or at www.buymeacoffee.com/historyobscura Thank you!

✅𝐋𝐀𝐒 𝐋𝐄𝐘𝐄𝐒 𝐃𝐄 𝐈𝐍𝐃𝐈𝐀𝐒 𝐞𝐬 𝐮𝐧 𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐮𝐝𝐢𝐨 𝐝𝐞 𝐥𝐚 𝐥𝐞𝐠𝐢𝐬𝐥𝐚𝐜𝐢ó𝐧 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐦𝐮𝐥𝐠𝐚𝐝𝐚 𝐩𝐨𝐫 𝐥𝐨𝐬 𝐫𝐞𝐲𝐞𝐬 𝐡𝐢𝐬𝐩𝐚𝐧𝐨𝐬 durante más de trescientos años en América de la mano de Julio José Henche Morillas 𝐋𝐀𝐒 𝐋𝐄𝐘𝐄𝐒 𝐃𝐄 𝐈𝐍𝐃𝐈𝐀𝐒: ORDENAMIENTO DE PROTECCIÓN DE LA MONARQUÍA HISPANA A LOS PUEBLOS NATIVOS DE AMÉRICA Versión Kindle https://amzn.to/3BgbBC4 Va acompañado del la necesaria exposición y revelación de hechos históricos y circunstancias que hicieron de estas leyes un pilar de la convivencia y desarrollo de los pueblos de América hasta principios del siglo XIX donde el reputado geógrafo alemán Alexander Humboldt llegó a describir aquellas tierras como las mas prosperas del mundo. Los reyes españoles desde el mismo momento del descubrimiento de ese continente se esmeraron en dotar a los pueblos nativos de una protección absoluta y no dudaron en aplicar con rigor las leyes a los colonizadores europeos que las desacataron o practicaron abusos contra los indígenas. El papel fundamental de la Iglesia se describe en este libro refiriendo algunos acontecimientos históricos muy reveladores que demuestran que los reyes elaboraron a conciencia un entramado legal de contrapoderes para garantizar el cumplimiento de las leyes y la protección a los indios nativos. Por ello, no es de extrañar que con motivo de las declaraciones de independencia de los diferentes países de Hispanoamérica, los pobladores indios se pusieron, con abrumadora mayoría, a favor de la Corona de España con muestras de lealtad admirables o que mantuvieran durante décadas la reivindicación de los derechos de posesión de sus tierras por los títulos legales obtenidos con los reyes de España. COMPRA EN AMAZON CON NUESTRO ENLACE AFILIADO https://amzn.to/3gDTmfV

Produced by Jeffrey Crecelius, Wayne Hall, Preston Frazier and Bill Govier After a few technical hitches, we managed to speak to legendary Yes guitarist, Steve Howe, about his brand new solo album, 'Love Is'. It features his son and recent YMP interviewee, Dylan Howe, on drums and Steve's fellow Yes member, Jon Davison, on backing vocals and bass guitar. If you like Steve's solo work, you'll absolutely love this new album, which is packed full of his trademark multi-guitar work and contains half instrumental tracks and half songs. Steve is pleased with his lead vocals and we can see why! Does Steve enjoy writing, producing, engineering and performing?How does Steve choose from his incredible collection of guitars?Are there any clues to future Yes happenings? Portrait of English progressive rock musician Steve Howe, taken on February 3, 2020. (Photo by Will Ireland/Prog Magazine) Here's the Press Release: Legendary Yes guitarist Steve Howe has announced he is to release Love Is on 31st July through BMG Records. Love Is is Howe’s first solo album since the all-instrumental Time in 2011 and has a balance of five instrumental tracks and five songs.  The album will be available as CD - gatefold digi-sleeve with 12 page booklet and LP – Black vinyl 180gm with gatefold sleeve, liner notes and lyrics.  Link to Steve Howe Official store pre-orders:  https://SteveHowe.lnk.to/D2CPR Link to Amazon pre-orders: https://SteveHowe.lnk.to/LoveIsPR Steve Howe sings lead vocals and plays electric, acoustic and steel guitars, keyboards, percussion and bass guitar on the instrumentals while Yes vocalist Jon Davison provides vocal harmonies and plays bass guitar on the vocal tracks. The album also features Dylan Howe on drums. Many years in the making, Love Is brings together a consistently strong and polished listening experience, forging the very best from the writing and playing throughout the album. This may well be considered the real 'stand out' album of Howe’s solo career. The instrumentals keep a highly progressive rock guitar style to the fore, with songs that explore stories of lives lived and lives only just begun. Love Is A River is the central longer song with several textural shifts, featuring a theme played on 12 string and steel guitars. “I called the album Love Is because it hints at the central idea that that love is important but also love of the universe and the ecology of the world is very important,” says Steve Howe. “Alexander Humboldt went around the world and recognised we are destroying the planet but that was 200 years ago! We are still destroying the planet and, I suppose, my songs show the yearning I have for the love of nature and how beauty, art and music all stem from nature. There is a theme about those things, love, beauty, ecology, nature and wonderful people. “Love Is A River just seemed a very important track to me, a sort of quintessential track with lots of moods, lots of interesting things going on with steel guitars and acoustic guitars.  Further tracks grew from time spent writing in my studio. “See Me Through looks at the idea that we get through life by not driving ourselves that hard but attempting to achieve things with people who help you along the way and Imagination is dedicated to my granddaughter Zuni. It’s about how I see some of the things she’s experienced in her short seven years.” “I invited Jon Davison to sing harmonies with me and add bass on the songs. If he was singing on the songs I thought why doesn’t he play bass as well and it turned out nice. He’s been with Yes for seven or eight years and he’s a great guy, great performer and a great interpreter of Yes songs. “I’ve been singing for years, mainly in harmony but I’ve sung lead on lots of my own albums before and I feel that, as I’ve got older, I’ve got a grip on that and, hopefully, it’s improved over the years.” The album includes many distinctive Steve Howe signatures among the in...

Produced by Jeffrey Crecelius, Wayne Hall, Preston Frazier and Bill Govier This week, Mark and I have been listening to the album which Jon Anderson released shortly after leaving Yes following the Big Generator tour, 'In The City Of Angels'. It’s not exactly progressive rock but see if you agree with our assessment of the music and take a listen to an audio contribution on this subject from Stephen Lambe as well. We also have time for a two pence about the latest Roger Dean Yes album cover and its public development as well as a very exciting YMP Announcement connected with what the YMP Patrons have been up to in secret lately. And that’s not all. There’s the result of the Dave Watkinson Warriors EP competition, news of Miguel Falcao’s PlayForChris6 project and the official press release from Steve Howe about his new album. So, Look out for all that! What's this album like?Why did Jon go in this direction?Is it worth buying? Listen to the episode and let us know what you think! If you would like to support the Yes Music Podcast financially and also have access to exclusive activity and opportunities, there is a special page you can use to sign up and 2020 is the time to join us: Become a Patron! Why not get yourself one of these? Head over to the YMP Emporium via the link on the menu. Show notes and links: Love Is Release date 31st July 29th April 2020: Legendary Yes guitarist Steve Howe has announced he is to release Love Is on 31st July through BMG Records. Love Is is Howe’s first solo album since the all-instrumental Time in 2011 and has a balance of five instrumental tracks and five songs. The album will be available as CD - gatefold digi-sleeve with 12 page booklet and LP – Black vinyl 180gm with gatefold sleeve, liner notes and lyrics. Link to Steve Howe Official store pre-orders: https://SteveHowe.lnk.to/D2CPR Link to Amazon pre-orders: https://SteveHowe.lnk.to/LoveIsPR Steve Howe sings lead vocals and plays electric, acoustic and steel guitars, keyboards, percussion and bass guitar on the instrumentals while Yes vocalist Jon Davison provides vocal harmonies and plays bass guitar on the vocal tracks. The album also features Dylan Howe on drums. Many years in the making, Love Is brings together a consistently strong and polished listening experience, forging the very best from the writing and playing throughout the album. This may well be considered the real 'stand out' album of Howe’s solo career. The instrumentals keep a highly progressive rock guitar style to the fore, with songs that explore stories of lives lived and lives only just begun. Love Is A River is the central longer song with several textural shifts, featuring a theme played on 12 string and steel guitars. “I called the album Love Is because it hints at the central idea that that love is important but also love of the universe and the ecology of the world is very important,” says Steve Howe. “Alexander Humboldt went around the world and recognised we are destroying the planet but that was 200 years ago! We are still destroying the planet and, I suppose, my songs show the yearning I have for the love of nature and how beauty, art and music all stem from nature. There is a theme about those things, love, beauty, ecology, nature and wonderful people. “Love Is A River just seemed a very important track to me, a sort of quintessential track with lots of moods, lots of interesting things going on with steel guitars and acoustic guitars. Further tracks grew from time spent writing in my studio. “See Me Through looks at the idea that we get through life by not driving ourselves that hard but attempting to achieve things with people who help you along the way and Imagination is dedicated to my granddaughter Zuni. It’s about how I see some of the things she’s experienced in her short seven years.” “I invited Jon Davison to sing harmonies with me and add bass on the songs.

Alexander Humboldt, le visionnaire oublié. ​Il y a deux siècles, il a révolutionné notre conception de la nature. Il parlait déjà du changement climatique et des risques sanitaires.

Böszörményi Nagy Gergely korábban is sokat beszélt  két kedvencéről, a Design Terminalról és a Brain Barról. A Felforgatók legújabb epizódjában viszont Kadarkai Endre szokás szerint a nagy alkotások mögötti embert kereste. És partnerre lelt!Aki meghallgatja az adást, megtudhatja, hogyan állt fel a padlóról Böszörményi Nagy Gergely, amikor váratlanul kiderült, hogy az állam kihátrál a Design Terminalból, és így piaci alapokra kell helyezni. Elviseli-e, ha egy beosztottja vitába száll vele? Mit tesz, ha irigységgel vagy rosszindulattal találkozik? Miért nem tudja értelmezni saját magával kapcsolatban a „hihetetlen munkabírású” jelzőt? És mi volt a szimbolikus különbség két középiskolai focimeccs között?Az adásban elhangzó hivatkozások:Alexander Humboldt életrajzi könyveAz Apollo 11 fotója

Today we celebrate the botanist who bred more than 40 types of pears - including our most popular varieties. We'll learn about the cultural meanings associated with the chrysanthemum and the Swedish botanist who posed as a Dutchman to botanize in Japan. We'll hear some thoughts on November from one of my favorite garden writers And, we Grow That Garden Library with one of the best books on Gardening for Butterflies I'll talk about straightening your ornamental trees, and then we'll wrap things up with the story of the woman who loved blueberries so much she shared them with the world.   But first, let's catch up on a few recent events.     Gardens, Paradise, & Kashmir| Searchkashmir.org | @SearchKashmir   It's no surprise that the word 'paradise' was first used to describe a garden.   This Farsi poem about Kashmir by Amir Khusrau does the same:   If ever there is Paradise on Earth, It is here! It is here! It is here!       How to grow orchids by Alys Fowler| @guardian @guardianweekend This is an excellent post about orchids, and I always love to hear how people approach caring for their orchids. Alys says: "An east-facing window... plus consistent watering (every week in the growing season, every other during winter) & Lou’s Poo, dried alpaca poo." Every gardener reading this now will search online for Lou's Poo... but just a heads up - they don't deliver to the US.       Vermont Garden Journal: Some New Ideas For Perennial Garden Care| @charlienardozzi @vprnet I couldn't agree more! Love this post from @charlienardozzi @vprnet The first thing I tell my student gardeners is that plant material doesn't leave the property. The second thing I teach them is Chop & Drop. https://buff.ly/32aL8TI     Now, if you'd like to check out these curated articles for yourself, you're in luck - because I share all of it with the Listener Community in the Free Facebook Group - The Daily Gardener Community.So there’s no need to take notes or track down links - the next time you're on Facebook, just search for Daily Gardener Community and request to join. I'd love to meet you in the group.     Brevities   #OTD  Today is the birthday of Jean-Baptiste Van Mons, who was born on this day in 1765. The name of the game for Van Mons was selective breeding for pears. Selective breeding happens when humans breed plants to develop particular characteristics by choosing the parent plants to make the offspring.   Check out the patience and endurance that was required as Van  Mon's described his work:   “I have found this art to consist in regenerating in a direct line of descent, and as rapidly as possible an improving variety, taking care that there be no interval between the generations. To sow, to re-sow, to sow again, to sow perpetually, in short, to do nothing but sow, is the practice to be pursued, and which cannot be departed from; and in short, this is the whole secret of the art I have employed.”   Jean-Baptiste Van Mons produced a tremendous amount of new pear cultivars in his breeding program - something north of forty incredible species throughout his lifetime. The Bosc and D'Anjou pears, we know today, are his legacy.          #OTD On this day in 1790, Chrysanthemums are introduced to England from China. Chrysanthemums are the November birth flower and the 13th wedding anniversary flower. The greens and blossoms of the chrysanthemum are edible, and they are particularly popular in Japan, China, and Vietnam. Generally, chrysanthemums symbolize optimism and joy - but they have some unique cultural meanings around the world. Back in the Victorian language of flowers, the red chrysanthemum meant "I Love," and the yellow chrysanthemum symbolized slighted love. In China, the chrysanthemum is a symbol of autumn and the flower of the ninth moon. During the Han dynasty, the Chinese drank chrysanthemum wine - they believed it made their lives longer and made them healthier. As a result, the chrysanthemum was often worn to funerals. On Mother's Day down under, Australians traditionally wear a white chrysanthemum to honor their moms, and Chrysanthemums are common Mother's Day presents. In Poland, chrysanthemums are the flower of choice to be placed on graves for All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day. Finally, in 1966, Mayor Richard Daley declared the chrysanthemum as the official flower of the city of Chicago.       #OTD  On this day in 1799, the Leonids meteor shower was seen from Europe and South America. The famous German explorer and botanist Alexander Humboldt had just arrived in South America to begin his great five-year exploration, and he wrote this in his journal from Chile as he saw the Leonids: The night between November 11 and 12 was calm and beautiful... During 4 hours, we observed thousands of huge fireballs, often with a brightness like Jupiter. Long smoke trails were left behind, lasting 7-8 seconds, often the meteors exploded, leaving trails too. It wasn't just Humboldt who witnessed this event. Andrew Ellicott Douglass, an early American astronomer who was born in Vermont, observed the Leonids from a ship off the Florida Keys. Douglass, who later became an assistant to the famous astronomer Percival Lowell, wrote the first- known record of a meteor shower in North America in his journal, saying that the, "whole heaven appeared as if illuminated with skyrockets, flying in an infinity of directions, and I was in constant expectation of some of them falling on the vessel. They continued until put out by the light of the sun after daybreak."        #OTD  Today is the anniversary of the death of the father of South African botany, the botanist Carl Peter Thunberg, who died on this day in 1828.   As fellow Swedes, Carl Linnaeus had taught Thunberg, and Linnaeus encouraged him to continue his work by visiting other parts of Europe.   Eventually, Thunberg joined the Dutch East India Company, and he botanized in South Africa for three years. After South Africa, he set his sights on Japan. But, before he went, Thunberg needed to become Dutch.    Averse to the influence of Christianity, the Japanese had closed their country off to all European nations except for Holland - because they valued the medicinal plant knowledge of the Dutch botanists.   So, when Thunberg went to Japan, he hid his Swedish heritage and posed as a Dutchman.   In fact, during the 18th century, Thunberg was Japan's only European visitor, and his Flora Japonica published in 1784 was a revelation to botanists around the world.    During his time in Japan, Thunberg discovered the Easter Lily growing near the city of Nagasaki. He also found Forsythia in Japan, and he named it to honor William Forsyth.   And, during his entire time in Japan, Thunberg was confined to a small artificial island in Nagasaki harbor. So how did he manage to learn so much about the country's flora?   Ever the clever end-rounder, Thunberg came up with a unique strategy to obtain botanical samples. Thunberg knew that goats are picky plant-eaters. So, while staying on the island, Thunberg asked to have some goats. Then, he asked his Japanese assistants to collect plants to feed the goats.   It was through the guise of feeding the goats that Thunberg was able to collect all kinds of plant specimens. The most impressive examples were a total of five different species of hydrangea that were previously unknown to the West. These hydrangeas included the lace caps – they're the ones that produce the beautiful UFO ring of blooms around the flowerhead of small florets -  Japan was very private about them. Can you imagine his excitement? The entire time Thunberg was away, which amounted to an incredible nine-year journey -  from his native Sweden to South Africa and then Japan - Thunberg sent plants and letters to his old teacher and friend, Linnaeus, who wrote that he had never received, "more delight and comfort from any other botanist [than Thunberg]."     Unearthed Words   "Most people, early in November, take last looks at their gardens, are then prepared to ignore them until the spring. I am quite sure that a garden doesn't like to be ignored like this. It doesn't like to be covered in dust sheets, as though it were an old room which you had shut up during the winter. Especially since a garden knows how gay and delightful it can be, even in the very frozen heart of the winter, if you only give it a chance." - Beverley Nichols, garden author   It's time to Grow That Garden Library with today's book recommendation: Gardening for Butterflies by The Xerces Society The subtitle for this book is How You Can Attract and Protect Beautiful, Beneficial Insects. In this 2016 book, gardeners get practical and expert advice from the Xerxes Society on all things butterflies. You will learn why butterflies matter, why they are in danger, and what simple steps we can take to make a difference.   Gardeners will appreciate learning about the best blooms for attracting the garden's prettiest winged visitors, like Penstemon, Pearly Everlasting, and Golden Alexanders. There are sections on designing a butterfly garden, creating shelter, observing and conserving, even tagging butterflies to help track migration. Gardening for Butterflies  provides home gardeners with everything they need to create a beautiful, beneficial, butterfly-loving gardens.      Today's Garden Chore It's the perfect time to stake your ornamental trees. While you are outside wrapping your boxwoods, arborvitaes, and shrubs in burlap, take the time to stake your trees - especially your smaller ornamentals like lilacs and hydrangea. It's something you can do now that can actually mean one less thing to do in the spring.      Something Sweet  Reviving the little botanic spark in your heart Today is the anniversary of the death of the Queen of Blueberries, Elizabeth Coleman White, who died on this day in 1954. When Elizabeth was a little girl, growing up on her dad's Cranberry Farm in the Pine Barrens of Burlington County, New Jersey, she would take walks and gather blueberries - wild blueberries. There wasn't any other way to procure them.  Over time, Elizabeth began to wonder about creating a blueberry crop - something that would fit in nicely with the cranberry harvest, which happened at the end of the season. Cranberries grow in highly acidic soil, which is also perfect for growing blueberries. Elizabeth began by having the local blueberry pickers keep their eyes out for the plants with the biggest berries, and then she would have them transplanted to her father's field. She wrote: "I used to call them swamp huckleberries and thought an occasional one - half an inch in diameter - huge. They always grew luxuriantly about the margins of our cranberry bogs, and as a girl, I used to hunt the largest and best-flavored berries and dream of a field full of bushes as good. I knew it was a wild dream."   As fate would have it, in 1910, the chief botanist at the USDA, Frederick Colville, was also working on blueberries at his summer home in New Hampshire. When Elizabeth read about his efforts, she reached out, and the two worked out a deal where Elizabeth would use her land and labor. Colville would supply his technical expertise, especially when it came to propagation. Together, they crossbred the largest New Jersey blueberries with the largest New Hampshire blueberries, and the rest, as they say, is history. "Enough of the puzzle has been fitted together to show that my old dream was but a faint shadowing of the possibilities. Now I dream of cultivated blueberries shipped by the trainload, - blueberry specials - to every part of the country.    She continued:   The little berries of today's dreams are half an inch in diameter. And the big ones? - Well, it is hard to measure a dream accurately, but they are at least an inch across. And raising all these blueberries will give healthful remuneration and employment to lots of people. But you can dream for yourself - [but] only if you are to share my confidence that this dream is not wild. Some day it will come true."   It took Elizabeth five years to develop the first blueberry crop. The wastelands around the pines districts in New Jersey where  Elizabeth grew her blueberries increased in value from 50 cents an acre to $500 an acre after the blueberry was cultivated. That first harvest yielded 21 bushels of berries, and it sold for $114. By 1947, more than 8,000 bushels were harvested.  In 2016, a total of 690 million pounds of cultivated wild blueberries were harvested in the United States, and annual revenue was s around $80 million. In addition to cultivating the first blueberry in 1916, Elizabeth was the first person to use cellophane to protect and market blueberries. The Whitman chocolate company inspired her because that was how they packaged their chocolates. Whitman's also partnered with Elizabeth; they helped her source the cellophane from France so that people all around the country could see her blueberries - right through the packaging. And there's one more footnote to the Elizabeth Coleman White story. She was a champion of native plants. She fought to save the American holly, and in 1947, Elizabeth helped found the Holly Society of America.   Thanks for listening to the daily gardener, and remember: "For a happy, healthy life, garden every day."

Sie ist Alexander Humboldt-Expertin und möchte ihre Biografie über den großen Gelehrten und Naturforscher einem breiten Publikum nahebringen. Hier antwortet sie den Fragen von MDR KULTUR.

Alexander von Humboldt war ein großer deutscher Universal-Gelehrter, der den menschgemachten Klimawandel vorausgesagt hat - und zwar schon vor 300 Jahren. Bei Thadeusz zu Gast ist die Autorin Andrea Wulf, die sich intensiv mit dem genialischen Naturforscher beschäftigt hat.

Alexander von Humboldt war ein großer deutscher Universal-Gelehrter, der den menschgemachten Klimawandel vorausgesagt hat - und zwar schon vor 300 Jahren. Bei Thadeusz zu Gast ist die Autorin Andrea Wulf, die sich intensiv mit dem genialischen Naturforscher beschäftigt hat.

Thema dieser Episode ist, wenn man so möchte, eine erste »Iteration«, der Frage, wie sich das Zusammenspiel zwischen Menschen und Technik gestaltet, vor allem hinsichtlich der Formung neuer Technologien in der Zukunft. Leben wir in Symbiose mit Technik? Treibt uns die Technik oder treiben wir die Technik?   Wer hat die Kontrolle?   Ein Buch, auf das ich dabei immer wieder zurückkomme ist »What Technology Wants« von Kevin Kelly.   Dabei ist ein Buch ist nicht unbedingt deshalb wertvoll, weil man den Thesen zustimmt. Ein Buch ist wertvoll, wenn man einen neuen Blickwinkel, neue Argumente bekommt, an die man selbst zuvor in dieser Form nicht gedacht hat, weil es einen originellen Blick auf Technologie und unsere Gesellschaft wirft. Das trifft auf dieses Buch zu.   Drei Thesen von Kelly werden diskutiert: »Vor etwa 10.000 Jahren haben die Menschen einen Wendepunkt überschritten, an dem unsere Fähigkeit, die Biosphäre zu verändern, die Fähigkeit des Planeten, uns zu verändern, überstieg.« Technik und Menschheit leben in einer Symbiose »Wir sind an einem zweiten Wendepunkt, an dem die Fähigkeit der Technik, uns zu verändern, unsere Fähigkeit, die Technik zu ändern, übersteigt.« Am Beispiel von radikalen Technologiekritikern (der Vergangenheit wie Jean Jacques Rosseau, dem Ludismus, sowie dem »Una Bomber« Ted Kaczynski) aber auch Techno-Optimisten (des 17. Jahrhunderts, bis zu den Singularisten der Gegenwart) bespreche ich Technik-Kritik, die Rolle die Technik für unsere Gesellschaft spielt und was wir überhaupt noch beeinflussen können.   Referenzen Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants Kevin Kelly, Inevitable Manfred Geier, Aufklärung, das europäische Projekt Andrea Wulf, Alexander Humboldt und die Erfindung der Natur Douglas Ruskoff, Team Human Sternstunde Philosophie 16.9.2018, Der Philosophische Stammtisch: Schöne neue digitale Welt? (mit Richard David Precht, Harald Welzer & Katja Gentinetta)

Thema dieser Episode ist, wenn man so möchte, eine erste »Iteration«, der Frage, wie sich das Zusammenspiel zwischen Menschen und Technik gestaltet, vor allem hinsichtlich der Formung neuer Technologien in der Zukunft. Leben wir in Symbiose mit Technik? Treibt uns die Technik oder treiben wir die Technik?   Wer hat die Kontrolle?   Ein Buch, auf das ich dabei immer wieder zurückkomme ist »What Technology Wants« von Kevin Kelly.   Dabei ist ein Buch ist nicht unbedingt deshalb wertvoll, weil man den Thesen zustimmt. Ein Buch ist wertvoll, wenn man einen neuen Blickwinkel, neue Argumente bekommt, an die man selbst zuvor in dieser Form nicht gedacht hat, weil es einen originellen Blick auf Technologie und unsere Gesellschaft wirft. Das trifft auf dieses Buch zu.   Drei Thesen von Kelly werden diskutiert: »Vor etwa 10.000 Jahren haben die Menschen einen Wendepunkt überschritten, an dem unsere Fähigkeit, die Biosphäre zu verändern, die Fähigkeit des Planeten, uns zu verändern, überstieg.« Technik und Menschheit leben in einer Symbiose »Wir sind an einem zweiten Wendepunkt, an dem die Fähigkeit der Technik, uns zu verändern, unsere Fähigkeit, die Technik zu ändern, übersteigt.« Am Beispiel von radikalen Technologiekritikern (der Vergangenheit wie Jean Jacques Rosseau, dem Ludismus, sowie dem »Una Bomber« Ted Kaczynski) aber auch Techno-Optimisten (des 17. Jahrhunderts, bis zu den Singularisten der Gegenwart) bespreche ich Technik-Kritik, die Rolle die Technik für unsere Gesellschaft spielt und was wir überhaupt noch beeinflussen können.   Referenzen Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants Kevin Kelly, Inevitable Manfred Geier, Aufklärung, das europäische Projekt Andrea Wulf, Alexander Humboldt und die Erfindung der Natur Douglas Ruskoff, Team Human Sternstunde Philosophie 16.9.2018, Der Philosophische Stammtisch: Schöne neue digitale Welt? (mit Richard David Precht, Harald Welzer & Katja Gentinetta)

From Ecuador to the Scottish borders: Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough meets Maren Meinhardt and Graham Robb who explore the land on their doorsteps and also follow in the footsteps of others from Humboldt the naturalist and explorer to the forgotten territory of the Debatable Land. They'll be joined by novelist Natasha Pulley whose fascination with Victorian exploration and empire building is reflected in her latest novel The Bedlam Stacks which took her to Peru.Another Burns night and Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough discusses the new radical ways in which Scotlands artists and writers are approaching and getting inspired by the man who almost invented the term National Bard. Burns Unbroke is a festival designed to showcase how Robert Burns speaks to Scotland's creators today and two of the featured artists are David Mach, sculptor, installation artist and poet, and Kevin Williamson of Neu! Reekie! Williamson has been exploring how Robert Burns might have performed his own poetry while David Mach reflects on why he's still in two minds about a poet who was also a tax collector who still speaks powerfully to a Scottish present. Graham Robb's book The Debatable Land is out in February. Maren Meinhardt's book A Longing For Wide and Unknown Things: The Life of Alexander Humboldt is published in January. Natasha Pulley The Bedlam Stacks is out now.Burns Unbroke CONTEMPORARY ARTS INSPIRED BY ROBERT BURNS 25 JANUARY - 10 MARCH 2018 @ SUMMERHALL, EDINBURGHKevin Williamson Independent Minds: New Poetry from HMP Kilmarnock; Producer: Jacqueline Smith

This is a devotional image, paying homage to science, Nature and God. Huge in its pictorial implications, the painting is nonetheless modest in size. South American landscape is one of the ‘prototype’ South American subjects the thirty-year-old Church composed before embarking on his magisterial Heart of the Andes 1859, which lifted him to first place among American artists. In South American landscape Church responds to the renowned geographer Alexander Humboldt who identified the Andes as best portraying the separate ecologies that together made the global geography. Humboldt’s theory stemmed from an expedition to South America from 1799–1804, when he and his companions travelled from tropical jungle at sea level to mountains with permanent snow. Charles Darwin, travelling to South America thirty years later – with Humboldt’s writings in hand – found evidence that a parallel to Humboldt’s adaptive ecologies existed in biology. Church, visiting Colombia and Ecuador in 1853, deliberately set out to capture in art Humboldt’s geography of the cosmos. Looking at the painting, it soon becomes apparent that this is not a landscape taken from one place. Rather, it is an assemblage of unlikely points of view which combine to overwhelming effect. Judged by photographic realism, the scene is frankly impossible; yet it is precisely because the painting lacks a governing perspective that the artist is able to suggest a scale that is measureless. Church’s concept is therefore unlike the panoramic landscapes by von Guérard, Bierstadt and Daubigny, which show the scope of a scene from a single vantage point. Church painted for an audience whose aesthetic embraced the idea that the path to inspiration was through education. Within this approach, South American landscape expresses two types of ‘truth’. One is the truth of inspired imagination; another is the minutiae of description. Knowledgeable viewers in the mid-nineteenth century used opera glasses to study the details incorporated into the picture from Church’s many field drawings. Failing a handy magnifying glass, we still view the image as a composite of separate parts, each with its own scale and perspective. Multiple possibilities offer themselves. Following the path of light from a bridge and waterfall gleaming in the chasm on the left, the eye is led vertically to a church poised on the peak of a mountain. The dark, sheer rugged country between those signs of human habitation conveys a subliminal message that the eye may travel where a human body cannot. Another kind of separation is implied on the other side, where a figure strolls towards us along a sun-striped path. A giant in comparison to the trees flanking the path, the figure is likewise strangely dissociated from the scene by a nonchalant disregard for what it portends. Behind is a tumescent mountain capped with snow, hazed and ruddy-coloured below, where it rises from a labyrinth of impassable mountains and bottomless clefts. This scene cannot conform to practicable travel, even tourism to the exotic: it is visionary. The urgency of Church’s vision of natural ecology is relevant again in our time. The canvas suggests vast natural rhythms of an ongoing natural evolution on a scale that stretches human faith and imagination. Disjunctive landscape forms and abrupt conjunctions of tones and colours enforce incredible combinations, whereby a tropical palm is cheek-by-cheek with eternal snow. The idea of order seems interchangeable with cosmic disorder. Mary Eagle

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: This ends up becoming a question about file standards more than it does about application functionality. I can take a notion document and fairly easily translate that into a text file, a very linear document format. There’s currently not really a file format for spatial canvas. Right now there’s just not a good way for Muse to talk to another spatial canvas app. 00:00:30 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for deep work on iPad and Mac, but this podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about the small team and the big ideas behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here with my colleague Mark McGrenigan. 00:00:45 - Speaker 2: Hey, Adam, and another colleague, Adam Wulf. 00:00:48 - Speaker 1: Hey everyone. 00:00:49 - Speaker 2: And Wulf, I understand you recently spent some time in prison. 00:00:53 - Speaker 1: That’s true, and it’s so good to be out with everyone again. I, of course, was not technically in prison, well, I guess I was. I volunteer with a program called the Prison Entrepreneurship Program. They actually help felons who are near release go through and kind of 3 month entrepreneurship school. They do character development and then learn about starting their own business, and really help them get their feet under their ground again, find their sea legs when they get released. So they do a lot with employment. And housing and support, and a lot of education on the inside of the walls, and a lot of support on the outside of the walls and family reunification, and it’s really just a wonderful program that helps. Inmates helps their families, and ends up helping society. And so the, the big number that matters is national recidivism, which is the number of people who get released from prison and go back into prison, is extremely high. It’s somewhere around like 40 or 50% end up going back into prison. And graduates of this program, it’s as low as like 5 or 7%, and so it just has a dramatic effect for these men and for their families. And so it’s been really fun to volunteer with the past. Gosh, probably 5 years, something like that. So, yeah, if anyone ever wants to be locked in prison with me, then give me a shout out. We’ll make it happen. 00:02:18 - Speaker 2: Sounds like a really worthy program. Well, we’ll link them in the show notes. I’m definitely a believer that how a society treats the people that need to be removed for sort of justice reasons and what you do when they’ve, you know, fulfilled their debt to society, as the saying goes, and how you make a transition back to normal life says a lot about it. It seems like a really great program you’re involved in there. So we can jump straight into our topic today, which is listener questions. This is our second mailbag episode. Mark, you and I did one year and change back, and I think it was quite a lot of fun to go through all the questions people submitted. And now feels like a good time to me just because we’re 2 months or so out from the launch of our 2.0 product and the dust is still settling, but in many ways we spent a lot of the last two months just answering questions through all channels Twitter. Hacker news, but most especially through our support channel, that’s hello@museapp.com and the in-app thing. So we’re in a question answering mood and we have a lot of common questions that we thought would be good to kind of address on air as well as we put out a call on Twitter for folks to submit questions. We’ve got lots of really interesting ones, more than we’ll have time to answer, so we’ll do our best to get to as many of them as we can. You fellows ready? Let’s do it. Yeah. So I guess we’ll start with roadmap just because that tends to be the biggest or most numerous questions are in that category, what features we building and when, but we can go from there and how people use Muse or how we use Muse, things about the broader ecosystem, tools for thought, as well as more even broader than that, some things about how our team works and even some things about Ink & Switch. So the nuts and bolts of roadmap doesn’t work for you. You can jump forward a little bit and things will get more far ranging. But yeah, starting at the beginning here, so I think a broad question many people ask, but here I’ll quote from Penny Chase who basically just said, I’d like a glimpse into the Muse roadmap, and we answered that question mark, I think a year, year and a half ago, and I think it included, you know, going local for sync and going multi-device and having desktop apps. So check, has that roadmap changed other than what we’ve accomplished since then. 00:04:30 - Speaker 3: Well, the good news is that with this launch, I think we’ve got a lot of validation on the direction that we’ve been going since day one, really, which is this idea of a tool for helping you have better ideas that spans your iPad, Mac, iPhone, eventually the web, and is very rich. And what we’ve heard from our users, I think, is, yes, and let’s see the rest of it. And just to give a few buckets there, I think one building on the local first sync, you have the phone, that’s a pretty obvious gap for us right now, a more complete phone app, both in terms of making the phone a better tool for getting things into and out of your corpus, and also being able to look up stuff on the go. You can also see something with the web, sharing on the web or even a full blown web client. and also building on sync. We talked during our tech episode how that’s really the foundation for collaboration, both synchronous and asynchronous, so I wouldn’t be surprised if we see something there. And then back in the what we call like app features, there’s some pretty standard stuff that I think we’re missing. Better search, linking, these are things that people ask for very often. Another one I would say is more rich tech support. That’s a really foundational content site, and I could see other content types like videos and better support for free ride web pages and so on. And then there’s a few more things I think we need in terms of like organizing and managing your content, stuff like non-spatial collections we’ve had on our list for a long time, a better inbox, which might be a variant of that. But those are, I think the main buckets on the horizon and then I still have on my medium to long term was this idea of end user programming or like scriptability, programmability more generally. I think that’s incredibly powerful and we have a really compelling foundation for that. I think we need a little bit more on the core app first. 00:06:11 - Speaker 2: Yeah, one way I’ve summarized it to myself and others is Muse 1 was a multimedia thinking canvas for iPad only. Muse 2 goes multi-device. We’ve got the desktop and iPad, the local first syncing between them, phone, I think is going to be part of the 2. X series, at least that’s my hope, kind of it’s part of that vision. It’s everywhere you need it, and then Muse 3 is where you get into the sharing collaboration, making it more than. It will always be first and foremost a personal tool as something that is better connected to the outside world, both other humans, but also other tools through integrations and things like that. And then yeah, maybe the end user programming feels like the, I don’t know if that’s Muse 4 or just kind of the finishing move that ties it all together. 00:06:58 - Speaker 1: In some ways I see use one as use the teenager and Muse 2 as used the college graduate, and now we have all of the education and skills and life foundation to be able to bring Muse to this great career beyond in collaboration and teams and end user programming and text formatting and we finally entered adulthood, I think, ready to go out into the workforce and make a difference in the world? 00:07:23 - Speaker 2: Absolutely. Now on some specific features folks have asked about, a big one here is Zoom, being able to zoom in closer on some things, usually images or PDFs, and being able to zoom out further, especially boards as your boards get bigger and more complex, and a representative tweet on this is from our friend Marsen Igna, who says, where can I read more about why Muse has no zoom out for bird’s eye view of my board? Yeah, it clashes with the navigation gesture, but I’d love to work at 50 to 75% zoom. 00:08:01 - Speaker 1: When I think of Zoom, I think of solving at least two different problems. The first problem is on a very large board, I want to zoom out and still be able to work and move selections around to kind of reorganize a very large desk or very large workspace. The second problem is I’m working on a very large board, and I want to quickly jump to a different location. Scrolling is currently just kind of wandering around in the wild, and I’d really like to be able to see a map and quickly go from the bottom left to the top right or the top middle. So I think whenever we do build Zoom, we need to think about it in that kind of context of which problem are we trying to solve? Do we find a solution that maybe can solve both problems? It’s not obvious to me which of those is the most important to start with, or the right lens to look at the feature through. 00:08:55 - Speaker 3: Yeah, Zoom is a very subtle challenge in Muse, just mechanically speaking, say you want to zoom out, OK, you pinch to zoom out on a board. How do we know that that’s different from wanting to zoom out to the next level up? That’s a problem we can solve, right? And you can have a quasi mode to toggle between the two, or you can have a detent in there somewhere or something. It’s just it’s quite subtle. Another challenge with Zoom that we’ve known about since our research in the lab is with these freeform canvases, especially if you have Zoom and especially if you have infiniteness, you have this real risk of becoming lost. Like you’re looking at this solid off-white thing and it looks the same regardless of where you are and how far you are zoomed in, and people just get totally discombobulated. And so we’re trying to push back against that a little bit. And this isn’t just a challenge for boards. We’ve also got a lot of requests for zooming into PDFs and images. So there’s a lot of stuff going on. You got zoom in, you got zoom out, you got navigation versus the document, you got different from document types, got temporary versus permanent. There’s a lot of stuff to figure out. So the answer is we just gotta sit down and do it. I think it’s very doable. It’s gonna take some time and some design work, and maybe some cutting of the Gordian not as Adam would say, you know, just get the 80% in there. I think we’ll get it done eventually. 00:10:05 - Speaker 2: We actually even discussed that as a potential thing to work on post launch. We were looking for things that would be more smaller projects, quick wins, crowd pleasers, just things to refresh our palettes after working so long on this big massive release with big data migration and so on. And actually the conclusion we came to is it was too big of a project because we do want to think about all that stuff holistically and even if we do just carve off a small piece of it to do first, just doing a kind of boring and obvious way to do it like there’s a zoom level drop down or something like that we think will quickly create the problems that I think make a lot of other software not that enjoyable to use, which is disorientation and so on, and it’s particularly bad in the infinite canvas setting, but yeah, we need it, we badly need it as people’s boards get more sophisticated, as people are bringing in more different types of PDFs and images as they just want to do more things. Yeah, you need the ability to zoom and we’ll solve that hopefully much sooner than later. 00:11:03 - Speaker 1: I think Zoom is also related to accessibility and potentially text size and text formatting, which we’ll talk about in a little bit. But tech sizes for some users can feel a bit small in use, and being able to zoom into a board or into an image in PDF mark, as you mentioned, is also related in some ways to allowing for custom text sizes or larger headers or text formatting, just generally being able to. See content no matter what your screen size happens to be, if you’re on a small iPad or a large iPad or a big screen. 00:11:37 - Speaker 3: Yeah, then we’re getting into the real Pandora’s box on the implementation side of when do you rasterize this content. If you only have one zoom level, you have a lot of flexibility and kind of do it whenever you want. But if you’re zooming all over the place, you either need to rasterize later or essentially suffer the effects of rescaling, so it’s quite gnarly. 00:11:55 - Speaker 2: A related one that’s challenging technically is dark mode. Again, another one we’ve gotten many, many requests for over the. Well, years now, and one of my favorite stories actually, actually one of the best ways to ask for features is to tell a story, as we would say in our podcast episode about storytelling, attaching something to a story makes it much more memorable. So one story I remember well was someone writing that they were on an international flight, you know, overnight flight, 10 hours, 12 hours or something, and they spent the whole session basically with Muse and they had a bunch of PDFs loaded up and deep reading and deep thinking, perfect opportunity for that, right? But they’re in this darkened cabin. They turn their screen brightness down, but it’s just still too bright and they’re kind of afraid of waking the other passengers and so on. 00:12:44 - Speaker 2: Oh, that’s such a vivid image just blasting the cabins, but many folks have asked for it for similar reasons or just because they like dark mode. But because we have the zooming interface that uses what we call internally snapshots, which are basically those thumbnails you see of the boards that give you this, you have this scaling transition, this sense of seamless zoom and traveling around in this kind of open world where you’re never loading a document or what have you, and that’s very nice, but the snapshot rendering. actually pretty CPU intensive. You see this also, if you log in to a new device like an iPad with an account that has a lot of data in it and it downloads it all, the downloading it may take a while, but then generating all the snapshots actually will also cause your device to be pretty busy for a while if you have a lot of boards and deeply nested boards and so on. And so dark mode has the problem that, OK, now we basically need to generate new snapshots for every single board and do we keep both of them all, you know, do we make two all the time and slow down every regeneration every time you change something for a feature that maybe most people won’t ever use. Or is it when you switch modes, do we turn on the regeneration and suddenly your iPad is heating up and you grinding the CPU for 5 minutes while it tries to re-render everything and maybe you just want to check it quickly and then you switch it back and now it’s grinding again for another 5 minutes, so totally solvable, but I guess it’s, as with many things because we have this unique zooming interface and nested boards, that’s something that sets me apart, makes it unique and pretty special to my mind. But it also can make what seem like basic features much harder. 00:14:17 - Speaker 1: I use Zoho mail for my male client and their dark mode. It was an interesting choice because they need to be able to support dark mode for attachments that anyone can send and so it’s not only their own interface, but they’re trying to create a dark mode for the content of the email itself and what they settled on was for those attachments to literally invert the colors, which was functional but a bit jarring. 00:14:51 - Speaker 2: When greens turn into purples and everything else, and so there’s er colors can be really funky, especially like a picture of a face, for example. 00:14:56 - Speaker 1: Yes, exactly, yeah, photos or anything else, and so I’m not sure what their heuristic was for when to invert the image and when to lead the image in plain color. There were certainly some surprises when I first turned that on. 00:15:12 - Speaker 2: Another frequent request is search. A representative question here was asked by Josh Job, who asks, Are there plans for search inside the app, i.e., text? I worry I won’t be able to find anything if I can’t search the contents of blocks if I go big on muse. 00:15:28 - Speaker 1: I look at search As a navigation feature, almost more than anything else. Back in the very olden days of the internet, there was the Yahoo directory, and you just manually search down into homeownership, lawn care, to find the nearest nursery to get some plants, whereas now you just go to Google and you say find me cheap plants. I think the same thing for M where a lot of navigation is pinch in, pitch out, pinch in, pinch out, trying to find. Where you want to go and muse and search. Has this ability to jump very quickly from one side of your tree to the other side of your tree and back, and Supporting the content, both PDF content, text block content, and really making as rich of a search as possible. I think it is really gonna open up new workflows inside of Muse, and something I’m particularly excited about. 00:16:26 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I would emphasize that I think search is really important for navigation as well as the more obvious use case of finding stuff, especially on the desktop where you have a keyboard. So if I want to go to my to do list and muse, it should be like command PTO enter all in one flow, 100 milliseconds or so and I’m there. And by the way, search should be. Much faster and better in use because of local first data. A huge issue that you have with search on most apps, traditional SAS apps that they got to go to whatever Virginia and, you know, query the database and then come back. And then when you load the actual page, you gotta go all the way back again and get the data. This should all be able to happen locally within a few tens of milliseconds. So there’s really no excuse for searching out to be awesome and you just need to spend a little bit of time on it. 00:17:10 - Speaker 2: Yeah, definitely slop that one as it’s important, we definitely want it. Everyone asks for it. Now it’s a matter of when does it, you know, when does it bubble up on the priority list of all the stuff we want to do. I will go ahead and reference something you and I have talked about before, Mark, just because it was, I think pretty foundational. We started Us, which is a book called The Science of Managing Our Digital Stuff where they do a pretty thorough academic survey of basically how people use computers over the last 20 to 30 years. And looking at files and search through things like Google and searching on your local computer and so forth, and there’s a lot of predictions of either tagging or search or other things kind of killing the file system and well if you kind of maybe hinted in that direction, which is we don’t need a Yahoo style directory of the internet anymore because we have Google. But I think the total sum of human knowledge of Google or Wikipedia or something is a little bit in a different category from my own stuff and spatial navigation and particularly the sense that things live in a place. This was one of the takeaways from the research in that book as well, which was things like symbolic links, for example, outside of file references where you basically can have a pointer. To file in multiple places, the vast majority of even relatively power users didn’t use these or didn’t use them much because it actually is very powerful for our brains, spatial memory to say I know where this lives. It’s 3 folders deep. I get to it from here. And certainly I think that can be heavily supplemented by things like search or tagging or other ways to get at your data and providing more approaches is good, but we felt like the foundation of the spatial navigation is actually going back to something that has proven to just work incredibly well for personal data sets. 00:19:02 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I do think the main use case of search is going to be, I basically know this thing exists and probably even know where it is. I just don’t want to traverse the whole mind palace. I want to teleport with my search command right to where I know what it is. There will be some cases where you are actually doing a legit keyword search and just I’m not sure what, if anything, you have in your corpus about that. Yeah, the navigation is really important. 00:19:26 - Speaker 1: Using search to jump into a document, feels very natural to me, and I’m switching context and starting a new task, and then once I’m in that task, I think it’s more natural, uh, Wiggins, as you mentioned, to walk around the mine palace and just pinch in, pinch out and stay in that context because A search result in jumping through search feels very jarring sometimes to switch context so suddenly inside of the app, and I don’t know, we’ll leave it there because it’s not fully baked in my mind. 00:20:03 - Speaker 3: I do think there’s a very interesting question around what is the flavor of search. The default way to do it is that search is a feature. It’s like this little box up in the corner and you type things and then a medium sized box appears with links and you click on a link and then you go back and tap. We’ve long had this idea, again, going all the way back to the lab. of search that’s more integrated into the flow and capabilities of the app. So just to give you an idea, you can imagine, I’m not promising to do this, but you can imagine you have a search view, which is like a card and can be saved and persisted and moved and shared and resized within your corpus. It’s like a magic card. You type in the top of the card, and as you’re typing, the view changes to present different subsets of your corpus, which you can then teleport through to go to those rooms, if you will. But then you can do stuff like save this search, you know, I want to save all my long chair references on a card so I can go back to them later. That’s pretty cool. And you can also start to imagine. All the things you’re building around search, like the results for you as being a capability that’s general to the rest of the app. Things like seeing a view over your data is something you want elsewhere. So for example, we’ve talked about the idea of an archive. That should just be like a different view. It’s like search is the lead equals true and you might have some sugar in the app around that to make it easier and more standard to access that. But I like the idea of searches as building powerful generalized views versus a very specialized feature and wanting to get that right is I think why we’ve Delete a little bit on implementing it. 00:21:36 - Speaker 2: Daniel Rivera writes, uses my new go to for brainstorming, love how simple it is for quick ideas and sketches on the iPad, but I do wish it had inking for desktop. Is that coming? 00:21:48 - Speaker 1: I would love for it too. There’s no technical reason we can’t have ink on the desktop. All the code is obviously shared between the iPad and the Mac. I think the big question is, what does that input mechanism look like? Is there a way to Use the trackpad for ink input. Is that something where the the mouse is generally very bad at organic ink lettering if it’s anything beyond just a simple line or a simple arrow. Another thing we’ve talked about is using Wacom tablets and stylus tablets that I think could be very promising, but is obviously fairly niche use case for a subset of users, but I think it would be a very powerful way to bring ink into the Mac. 00:22:36 - Speaker 2: You know, one interesting thing is we already support that, not kind of on purpose, but we’ve had a number of folks write in to say, hey, I see that I can ink on Mac with my Wacom tablet, but I can’t, I don’t know what, get out the inkwer or you know, it’s sort of like partial because it just so happens that the input events that it sends is the same as the Apple pencil and we respond to that. So we’ve done nothing explicit to support it and it’s kind of doesn’t work great. You could imagine if we had a lot of demand there, we would put the effort in to make that work. Yeah I agree drawing with a mouse is just the worst freeform drawing even with a trackpad. What I do think we might want is first of all, just highlighting, which could be highlighting of text, highlighting of cards. Craft does a really great job at this. Just a very simple way to add colors. Colors can give you context or they just brighten up your document, which is nice. But I think you can also look at something like a diagramming tool where you’re drawing, say, arrows between elements or you’re making a connection between them like an OO. So I think those things would make sense on the desktop, the idea of just being able to kind of circle something or try to handwrite something really hard for me to imagine there’s anything we can do there that would have a feel that would be acceptable from our perspective. 00:23:50 - Speaker 1: I’m glad you brought up the mind mapping because that’s, I think the most common scenario for me on the Mac. is wanting to draw just a very quick line between two cards, or a very quick box around a couple of cards. It’s a feature Leonard has been experimenting with some various designs to start connecting cards and create a bit more of a mind map and I think there is a way that we can create some of these features in a mouse friendly and Mac friendly way. That’s also balanced with not trying to create too many tiny little features or expand Muse into a grab bag of a billion features. I think the simplicity of Muse is extremely important, and so balancing what each platform is able to do and what each platform is designed to do, is a very delicate balance between supporting literally every use case on every platform. And optimizing for specific use cases on specific platforms. 00:24:46 - Speaker 2: If it starts to feel like a technical drawing tool with a huge toolbar and lots of options, and let’s see, I just want to draw an arrow between two things. Do I use the loose, you know, wire-like connection? Do I use the structured arrow? Do I use ink and draw an actual arrow? And if you find yourself making choices like that in the moment, I think that’s really gets in the way of your thinking process. So yeah, it has to be balanced against our kind of overall mission and design values. 00:25:15 - Speaker 3: Also part of the thinking here is about inking on the desktop as in Mac and inking on the desktop as in your office desk. And part of the original idea with Muse was that you have these different complimentary devices, and they’re not only used at disjoint times, you might actually use them at the same time. I was actually just rummaging in my archives from like 5 years ago yesterday, and I was looking at one of the original presentations I did about what would eventually become used, and we had this idea of you have A desktop like a Mac, and then right in front of you, basically where your keyboard is, you have an iPad and you’re using your Mac for the big heads up display and seeing all these PDFs and so on. And then when you want to do a little drawing that you insert into your presentation, for example, you just draw that on your iPad because that’s the device that’s better for that. So, that’s not to say we shouldn’t have some sort of inking capability in the map, but I would also just point out that there’s this possibility of running two devices at the same time. We might need to add a little bit more kind of smoothness to make that even better, but that’s a possibility as well. 00:26:17 - Speaker 2: I do that with some frequency, actually, I’ll kind of convert my desk chair from the sitting upright mode, good posture, you know, 90 degree knees, feet flat on the ground, which I’ll use when I’m typing and using the mouse, and I’ll kind of convert it to the leaning way back mode, stick my feet up on the desk and have kind of my iPad and my pencil in my lap, but I still have muse up on the big monitor. I can see it live updating as I’m going and often see a bigger view, just have a much bigger monitor of the board I’m moving around. But yeah, if we wanted to put more effort into supporting that simultaneous use case, one for me that would take a lot of friction out would be having the iPad be on the same, you know, when I open it, it’s on the same board that my desktop is on, but maybe not everyone wants that feature. Maybe you actually want to keep them on different ones, so I don’t know that would need some thought. 00:27:05 - Speaker 3: Well, maybe you should be able to make a search card that’s recently seen boards and put that in your inbox. 00:27:12 - Speaker 2: Smart. So another category of feature request is web sharing, and we’ve got a few examples here, including InterPlato ask or board shareable and navigable on the web with a shared link, and then Nikita, who asks, I wish to have notion like level of control on which canvas and which depth I want to share a link. My biggest barrier to using Muse is that I want to share my research as I do it. 00:27:37 - Speaker 1: This is something we’ve experimented with pre-sync that was very useful for a number of users, and I think post-sync we’re finally in a place where we can start thinking about this again. One of the limits in the presync era was the web share was fully static, and there was just no ability for anyone reading it to add comments or certainly to add content, whereas now post-sync. We can imagine a web viewer that is a full client of Muse that is able to interact with and sync content back up into your corpus, and so you can share feedback, get comments and content from your team, and have that go straight back into your muse. And so I think that’s a powerful team and collaboration feature that we’re certainly thinking about that sync has finally given us the foundation to support. 00:28:32 - Speaker 2: I’ll note from that earlier very brief beta test we did where we just gave it to a few folks, the ability to kind of share a pretty static, basically they kind of dumped your muse board to Kind of like static image, static HTML page was not the lack of interactivity or not even being able to add comments, but actually just that it wasn’t live. So I think one of the things we get with the modern web conception of real-time collaboration, Google Docs, figMotion, etc. is that a URL becomes a place where you know you’re always seeing the latest version of something. So we do quite a bit of news board sharing internally. And actually a lot of times folks send us news boards either as, you know, PNG exports or full board bundles with feedback on the app or other comments, which we love. So it’s a great format for sharing work in progress and thinking with your colleagues, but it never fails, right? You go to share it, you know, I’ll just post it in a slack as an upload, which is a little clunky, but whatever, and then I realized I need to change three things that I left out or that are wrong. And I’m going back and deleting it from Slack and hoping that, you know, no one’s downloaded it yet and uploading it again, and this of course the whole world of email file attachments and finalfin2. doc and so on. So I think to me that’s why we kind of sunsetted that little experiment, the early shared web experiment, but now we do have the technology foundation for a live, even if it’s completely static, all you can do is navigate through it and maybe copy paste stuff in and out. If it’s live updating and you know you’re looking at the latest version, that is a game changer. Alright, so one last roadmap question here is about linking hyperlink or wiki or Rome style linking. So one example of someone who asked us is Robert Haysfield, who says any plans on enabling users to place the same board in multiple boards? I struggled before trying to use Muse because I don’t know, hierarchical organization without an ability to bridge trees makes it difficult for me to find things and pick up where I left off. So I think for sure linking you know Ted Nelson’s excellent branding with hyperlinking in the web is obviously hugely empowering. We saw it in wikis. I think Notion is the modern version of a team wiki and then Rome with its kind of invented the category of, personal knowledge graphs, back linking. Now there’s a whole profusion of apps that do this really, really well, often with the double bracket kind of linking format. And yeah, I’m happy to say on that one, we’re actually working on it right now. So for those of you who are prom members, keep an eye on your backstage pass, some goodies coming up there soon. 00:31:04 - Speaker 1: The Backstage pass on this one is gonna be a really helpful piece of feedback for us to hear from customers what they think of this linking feature, cause there’s a few different ways we’ve looked at building it. I know Yuli and Leonard are taking the lead on this, and It’s a lot more complicated than just, oh, put a link down, you click it and you go. There’s a lot of nuance in how those links are presented and How the content appears in a link and in a backlink, particularly because, at least for me, a lot of my boards don’t have titles. That’s probably a personal failure of myself, but linking to something that does not have a title, there’s not much metadata there, and so, showing a piece of the board you’re linking into is important, but then it gets a little confusing because it looks like a normal card, and so how do you tell the difference between a linked card and a normal unlinked card that’s not a mirror. So there’s a lot of nuance and kind of how these things are displayed and so the Feedback we get from customers in the Backstage Pass is really gonna help us to iron out all of those little details to make sure that this is not only as powerful as the linking features we all expect, but really fits within the music universe and fits within all of the rest of our content in a tidy way. 00:32:25 - Speaker 2: So another big category of questions is using Muse, and this is a place I feel we’ve underinvested, which is that you can’t get a lot of information beyond the mechanics of how to use the app, but in terms of how people use it, and we have some projects in the works on that to try to better showcase what people’s boards look like and what the different kinds of uses you might use muse for and what things Muse is not a good fit for, but a few questions here that folks raised. The first one is from Alex Antozek. Who says, how often do you guys use Muse for non-muse related work? 00:33:02 - Speaker 1: Most recently, I started using Muse for custom keyboard organization. So I’ve entered the rabbit hole of mechanical keyboards and building your own keyboards. I’ve recently come up for air, and I’m just using my regular laptop keyboard, but I think I’m gonna fall back down and fight the dragon again soon. But Muse has been very, very helpful because there’s 1000 parts and there’s 1000 versions of each part, and Linking to a random Amazon link just does not give enough context for what it is that I’m actually looking at. And so Muse has been very helpful. I can put it in a photo, a short description, a link, and some context about each of the different parts and each of the different steps of construction. So using Muse to organize all of those different parts and be able to physically see photos of them next to the link next to the description has been a really helpful way to map out that rabbit trail that I have found myself getting lost in. 00:34:02 - Speaker 2: You’re just looking over my current news home board, I think it’s about a 50/50 split, kind of depends on what big personal projects I have going on. You know, on the work side I have things like a little editorial calendar for the podcast, upcoming guests and things. We’ve got the chapter plan board that basically Leonard led the planning session and produced the shared board. I’d like to be able to go back and reference that things about Twitter, I draft all our shareholder updates there. I have a whole board that’s not news related, but it’s kind of career related, which is I which held a lovely un conference recently, and I have a bunch of notes from all the talks there and so on. Then on the personal side, I have things like, I don’t know, the Kita, that is to say the kindergarten daycare that my daughter attends, you know, they sent out a PDF that’s, here’s the days we’re off this summer, and you know, in some cases I excerpt out the like coming up month, especially when it’s a critical, OK, we’ve got the summer holiday, and how does that match up to our summer holiday and this sort of thing. But also holiday planning for sure. I mean, travel planning. It is, you know, in some ways a fairly basic use case, but it’s really helpful though you have pictures and maps and PDFs of tickets and it’s all in one place. I do personal journaling, you know, just classic daily pages, sit down and write out what’s on your mind in the morning. And then bigger projects, for example, when I was searching for a home a couple of years ago and eventually made a home purchase, but that is a place where the sharing and collaboration capabilities would be a big help because there I was doing it with someone else, my partner, and so I kind of have my personal world that’s inside Muse, but at some point we need to share and I can’t really share it directly with her, so then we kind of have some stuff stuck in an ocean or a Google doc somewhere, but that’s really awkward. So, yeah, when I have a bigger project, something like that, home improvement, yeah, personal hobbies, that sort of thing, that tends to occupy a big portion of my home board. 00:35:57 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I also really like Muse for personal projects, and one of my favorite pieces of it is that you can use it from the very beginning, where you’re just literally sketching out, you’re jotting down ideas, you’re taking little scribbling notes, and that board can evolve over time as you add text and PDFs and web links and images, and that rich multimedia is so important for these projects I find I can’t imagine going back to a world with just one content type. I also use Muse just for my to do list, that’s probably my heaviest use case. I’m in there every day, and that’s mostly just text, but it’s not all texts, you know, every once in a while there’s like, whatever, you gotta call the plumber, so you put the link for the plumber’s page on your to do list or what have you. And also just like that it’s two dimensional so that you don’t just have one. Huge multi-page linear list, which is, I don’t know demoralizing for me. So I have on the top left, it’s like today’s most important stuff, and then way off on the right side is, you know, longer term stuff, and you can just kind of move stuff in two dimensions. So, I like it for that. I also use Muse as my reading buffer. So for links and PDFs, I have a big per month reading board, and I kind of queue up stuff there and then maybe once on the weekend, I go and read it all and then archive that board and go back next month and so on. 00:37:08 - Speaker 2: Mm. One I’ve seen from a number of customers is making a daily reading board where it’s actually a link or a PDF and some notes or thoughts that was generated by that. It could even just be like a half a sentence scribble, nothing too complex or this made me think of this other thing, or here’s a tweet that’s connected to this, and they just make one per day and it just scrolls vertically or horizontally, and then they just like kind of accumulate these over time. And it’s a way to synthesize ideas and get more out of what you read and pull together the sparks of inspiration that you’re getting from consuming the information hot fire hose. So when we’ve heard frequently and I think we even addressed this in the last listener questions episode, but maybe it’s worth touching on here is basically about the home board and how you structure things or organize things there without explicit work workspaces. So a lot of apps, notion, craft, even Apple Notes or something like that will have kind of top level workspaces where you say, here’s my daily notes, and here’s my to do’s and here’s my stuff for work, and here’s my home. Improvement projects and you kind of bucket things that way and they find it surprising maybe that you have the top level home board, it’s just like any other board, it’s a free form thing you can put stuff however you want. You can make neatly organized, you can scroll vertically, stroll horizontally, scroll both ways, you can have a lot of stuff, a little stuff, it’s like completely up to you. What’s our answer on that one? 00:38:39 - Speaker 3: So in terms of home organization, I tend to have two dimensions going on. The first dimension is more obvious, which is, it tends to be organized by projects, ish or domain. But there’s also an organization along the dimension of like recency or proximity to the cash. It’s like the things that I’m currently and actively working on. So what I end up having is I have a few boards, both work and personal, that I’m very actively working on. And then I have a few more like archival boards that are more defined in terms of the domain. So I might have a board for my today’s to do list and a board for today’s reading, and a board for whatever my personal project is for this week. And then I have my muse board and my personal board, and I might even have, if I’m just a little bit discombobulate that day, I might even have just a few things blasted on the top level, like here’s a PDF that I want to read, and here’s a, you know, repro case from a youth book I’m working on. And what happens is things filter down through this cache hierarchy over time. And this is a good example of how we didn’t want to have too prescriptive a setup in terms of workspaces. Like if we just said you have to divide your corpus into workspaces, it wouldn’t work for having the second dimension of the cash hierarchy. Also just kind of go into the philosophy of why we don’t have a separate construct for workspaces. It’s kind of echoes the thing I was saying earlier about search cards, like we wanted you to have the full richness and power of muse to be able to organize your top level in the same way that you would be able to organize your individual boards. Like you have all these capabilities around, you know, freeform boards and inking and multimedia and different sizes. Like why should you have to throw that out the window just because it’s the top level? That seems exactly backwards. 00:40:16 - Speaker 2: I’m reminded of we talked about a very similar philosophical point with Pallo a couple episodes back where basically on sketch they originally had kind of an art board template editor that was a standalone thing but you quickly realized you wanted to do all the things to the templates that you wanted to do to a regular art board, so eventually they made it so you could just name an art board as a template and then whatever you do to that art board. Goes into the template and then you don’t need to make a duplicate editor but worse. And I think there’s something similar where if we’d make a top-level workspace, OK, you need to be able to move stuff, delete stuff, you probably want to duplicate things, and at some point you go, wait a minute, I want to just do all the same things I can do in my subboards. 00:41:00 - Speaker 3: Yeah, now in fairness to them, many, many users who keep requesting this, I don’t think it’s just that people don’t understand this possibility of generalized boards being used at the top level. I think there is some sense in which the current freeform spatial boards aren’t the best fit for some top level use cases. If logically, you just want to split your space into A, B, and C, and you want that to be Coherent regardless of what device you’re on or what size you’re looking at or whatever, or as you add and remove top level spaces that having to manually manage that on a spatial board isn’t exactly right. And this comes to the topic of spatial collections, which we’ve had on the radar for a long time. And you can imagine a spatial collection working as follows. You put end things into the non-spatial collection, it’s like a folder basically, and then Muse automatically sizes and arranges these objects as appropriate, sort of like math finder. You can imagine it it sizes and arranges them and lines them up or whatever in a nice way. And if we had that primitive, I think a lot of users would opt to use that at the top level where they’re currently asking for the separate workspaces feature. But importantly, such a non-spatial collection could also be used all over the place. For example, my reading board should probably be a non-spatial collection, it’s a little goofy to have to manually manage literally 100 PDFs on a board. Um, there’s kind of like weirdly overlapping in places and whatever. And also, by the way, coming back to our search discussion, that should probably just be. A view that dynamically produces a non-spatial collection. So this is another example of how you get the right primitives and they can apply in a lot of different places, including this top of workspace idea. 00:42:32 - Speaker 1: I think one thing that’s interesting about the way I’ve organized my home board is. I have all of the projects that I care about visible when I’m fully scrolled to the top left corner, and then the priority is based on kind of the size of the card, and so my personal card is fairly large for family and that sort of thing, work, I often go into that, that’s a larger board. Then I have lots of much smaller boards. But then I’m able to actually hide less important boards outside of the scroll visible area, which is nice because some of those boards are important, but they kind of stress me out because I just don’t want to think about that project right now. And when that project shows up, I think, oh my gosh, I haven’t finished that project, and my heart starts racing. 00:43:14 - Speaker 2: And so if I just hide it out of view, tuck it off camera, exactly. 00:43:16 - Speaker 1: It’s, you know, out of sight, out of mind. I don’t have very much object permanence for some of these projects that are a bit more discouraging that they’re still around. And so, that’s been another nice thing for me, it’s just a trick to be able to focus on certain projects that I can see, and then when I don’t want to focus on it anymore, I can put it physically out of my sight, but still very readily available, and so that’s a nice thing. 00:43:44 - Speaker 2: Yeah, you point to some interesting column folk behaviors there that now I realize I do, but up until you just described how you do it, I didn’t realize it’s something I do almost unconsciously, which is, yeah, the size and the position of the board reflects how roughly important it is or how large it’s looming in my consciousness and that as something is still kind of current, but maybe it’s in a monitoring state, I’ll tend to shrink it down a little bit and move it kind of down lower, it’s down more towards the bottom. And then eventually, once I decide it’s really not relevant to me anymore, then I’ll move it to a board called archive. And I think Mark you said you have her kind of project and category boards, I kind of just go to the Gmail route, which is archive everything. If I need to find it later, I’ll just scroll through all of it. Which I think brings us to another question on use use and also connects a bit to the roadmap, which is this one actually comes from our support channels. So since it was a private correspondence, I won’t name the person. I hope they’re all right with me quoting their words here since I think it’s representative of the common question. So they say, what is your recommendation for archival of old news boards? I find that currently my main board is getting clustered and I have a number of ideas that can be archived. I like to export the new board and add to Devonthink database for storage. Yeah, I sometimes do the same or I’ll periodically take my archive board when it gets kind of big and I think, OK, all this stuff is pretty old news now, just kind of historical interest and maybe I’ll just export it and save it on the Dropbox or iCloud or something. But I thought this one was interesting because a feature I’ve wanted from you is an archive button similar to what GitHub has this for repositories. Gmail obviously has it for email. There’s other examples, and I asked Leonard about this before we recorded just because I know it’s part of his vision for the user flow, and he basically says that he doesn’t think it’s useful to keep everything you ever have worked in in one giant space and sort of it’s nice to put something away when you’re done with it. Lets you focus on what’s currently important and you can think of it as kind of the muse home board is your desk is the stuff that’s active and current and important right now, but then there’s a longer term personal library, things that represent your knowledge work and thinking over the longer term, and so we may eventually have just, you know, a context menu option for archive, but then you can pull it up in some kind of a search or. A non-spatial collection or something like that, or maybe just automatically adds it to a board named archive, but it’s a sort of a nice way to decide you’re done with something and put it away, but no, you can still get to it when you want it, do the much more drastic act of deleting, which always just feels really wrong, especially for something you spent a lot of time thinking about and working on even if it’s not current anymore. What do you both think? How do you do your personal archival of boards and what do you think about potential features in that direction? 00:46:36 - Speaker 3: Well, there’s actually a lot going on with archiving, so there’s archiving in the sense of removing it from your desk, which I do through this cascading hierarchy ending in what are basically archive boards. There’s archiving in a sense of persisting the data in a file format that’s likely to be around and call it 1020, 30 years, which for me the only thing that I trust for that is like playing files on a Unix directory, so TXT, PDF, XML and JSON and so on. There’s archiving in the sense of like freeing up disk space, and there’s archiving in the sense of moving something into a third party knowledge management system. So the last one I don’t do, so I can’t really comment on it. In terms of persisting to stable file formats, I try to do that for all of my work. I basically cascade everything that I ever do into One of a half dozen file formats into a big directory called data, and I try really hard to never lose that directory, you know, I back it up in all kinds of different places and so on. That’s a nice forcing function. I do that occasionally with Muse, basically export to a muse bundle, call it, you know, Corpus-2022, whatever, month, day, and just save it and forget about it. 00:47:39 - Speaker 2: A quick note for our listeners here actually, because you’ve used the Corpus terminology, we use that internally to talk about a one person’s muse database, the collection of everything that’s in it. I think more publicly speaking we’ll typically say your muse, put something in your muse, but yeah, corpus is, I think it’s a Latin word for body, so it’s just the body of your knowledge, data, what have you. So we use that to differentiate from board or set of boards or a bundle export or one subset of data, but it represents one user’s complete. Yeah, use database. Now do muse bundles fulfill that kind of flat file format desire for you because they are zip files containing flat files? 00:48:21 - Speaker 3: Yeah, not completely ideal, but certainly if I ever needed to go back and get something, it’d be easy enough. 00:48:28 - Speaker 2: Certainly not as browsable as, for example, exporting everything to PDF or even images if you wanted to take the effort to work through the hierarchy and do an image of each board. 00:48:37 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I can actually imagine a world where both for this persistent durable archiving and for integration with third party apps, you really lean on the scriptability and programmability. You could have a little bot that says, whenever I see a new PDF, send it to my PDF manager. That sounds awesome, but I don’t do anything like that myself yet, I see. 00:48:57 - Speaker 1: Whenever I want to archive something, I think that the ark has already hinted at this. I think the Muse bundle format is a really nice one because it’s a zip file, you get some JSON, you get all the attachments, and so you know you always have all of your data there, kind of no matter what, and very simple to open formats that are gonna survive for the next. 50 years, and I’ll generally save that right next to a PDF export, and so I can open up the PDF, look at everything. If I really want it back, I can import it into Muse. If I’m 85 years old inside of my robot body in the future, then I can just open up the zip file and look at things that way, and so I know that I’ve got the future safety of those archive formats. 00:49:43 - Speaker 3: This is a bit of an aside, but I read a fair amount of history and you always read about these historical figures, papers, and like, basically everything is in there for a lot of these folks, like their drafts and their correspondence and their bills and whatever. And I asked around a little bit like, how do we have all this? Like, how do we have all these papers? And the answer that I got was basically people had a big box and they just, whenever they wrote something, they put it in the box or a copy of it in the box. And it’s not super useful the day, month, or year after you do that. But it over a course of a lifetime, it builds up and it’s nice to have all one’s papers. I wish I had known this when I was younger, so I could start archiving it, but as of a few years ago, I started building this set of documents. So hopefully that accrues over time. 00:50:22 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I’ve looked at the accumulated papers of Darwin, of Alexander Humboldt, Marie Curie, and other kind of famous thinkers in the past. It’s yeah, it’s a huge amount of content, right, because it’s, yeah, every random scribble and letter they wrote to someone, but of course very valuable for people that did do these breakthroughs, understanding how their minds worked and how they came to those conclusions, what their interactions with others in the field were like. But I wonder if there is also some function of just people didn’t move that much back in those days, because at least for me, who’s done a lot of moving in my life, including across continents, you know, hauling giant boxes of papers, feels kind of infeasible. Happily, hopefully digital archiving should be easier again if you take the steps that you describe, Mark, because there’s many ways that digital stuff is more ephemeral. 00:51:14 - Speaker 3: Well, maybe now we’re getting to the whole theory of information persistence, but I think not only are we moving more often, but I think this digital stuff is fundamentally more brittle. Certainly the very bespoke and fast moving apps, but even basic file formats on Unix directories, if you don’t quite actively maintain those, they go away after 5 or 10 years, like the disk corrupts and the media format is no longer readable and so on, whereas with a book, if you just like don’t light it on fire, it’s gonna be there in 100 years. I don’t know, it’s a very interesting property. I think we still haven’t fully confronted the consequences of trading off dynamism for durability in the computing realm. 00:51:51 - Speaker 2: And for interested listeners, I’ll point you to the Meta Muse episode on software longevity, when we take a deeper dive into the very topic. So one example is another question from Petty Chase, who asks how you and maybe customers who share their use cases and workflows with you use Muse with other tools of thought. And so typically we see a lot of people linking from knowledge graphs. This is where we do seemuse as complimentary to Rome, Obsidian, Logsick, and so forth that you can link out to Muse board. People often do that by getting the deep link. You just basically hit copy on the board and that will give you a muse app cola slash link. And also you can like, of course, the other way around. We’ve also seen folks use shortcuts to put, for example, news boards directly on their home screen as kind of like a launch point then obviously something like screen share, which I guess is less of a tool for thought, but I think is important in modern work, so using use as a real-time whiteboard or a kind of a presentation live presentation tool, including teachers, they use it for their classes kind of Choctaw style. We obviously use that for presentations and planning sessions on our team. As well. So I think those are some of the simple ones. Can you both think of other examples? 00:53:05 - Speaker 1: Yeah, for me personally, it ends up being more of an archive question than an integration question. I find myself almost purposefully keeping apps separate, and when I work in Muse, kind of process the information and create some sort of an output, and then I’ll take that and just physically export it into Notion is the other common app that I use for storage is kind of my knowledge graph, my personal wiki. And so I end up exporting from notion into Muse, processing around, doing some thinking and then exporting from use back into notion. But beyond that, I think links to and from are also a very nice thing, Wiggins that you mentioned, because then it’s integration agnostic, no matter what other apps people use, you can always create a link to and from things and so it becomes a very lightweight interaction point. I think there’s some risk for creating very heavyweight integrations. Maybe we’ll talk about that soon, but it can be very limiting, ironically, to create a very deep integration with some other app because it forces that workflow, as opposed to allowing a lot more flexibility with very lightweight integrations with lots of different apps. I think there’s some balance there, but I’ve found the very lightweight integration slash archiving export to be very helpful for my own use. 00:54:25 - Speaker 2: That’s a great point. Copy paste, drag and drop, shares sheets, you know, files in and out, that kind of quote unquote integration that is basically using standards rather than needing a many to many API integrations heavyweight thing I think is most always better. That said, that is certainly a place I think we can continue to get better. We’ve invested a lot there, but you mentioned the case of copy pasting. In and out of notion and weird things can happen with line breaks and some stuff comes across that seems like it should be left behind and other things sometimes get copied in or things get omitted, so I think continuing to improve that which partially is just the tricky challenge of trying to kind of work out what the other app is expecting in terms of line breaks and format content and You know, if you send the text in one way, you get a bunch of individual blocks, and if you send it another way, you get one giant block with a bunch of line breaks, for example. But yeah, I think that’s important and something we can improve a lot. It’s a fascinating question we get from our friend Tim Lloyd. Tim writes, text first tool for thoughts. Is that a noun tool for thoughts? Yeah, why not. Like Rome and spatial first, like muse. So he’s comparing text first and spatial first tools. Do you think these will converge? To tools that are great for both. Are the current differences more about technical feasibility and interaction challenges, or is it actually an incompatible vision or just two different kinds of ways to aid thinking? And if it is the latter that it’s sort of incompatible, the sort of spatial first is fundamentally different from text first, does that mean there’s things Muse would never do? That’s the end of Tim’s quote, but I’ll just add on, we’ve already talked about adding things like linking and search. What you expect from the text first tool for thoughts. So you know what’s the limit on that? And yeah, is there some world where both the text-based stuff grows to be more spatial or visual and use grows to be more textual, or is there a limit on that and they’re just sort of fundamentally different kinds of tools. 00:56:31 - Speaker 3: Well, OK, I think there’s some abstract sense in which we’re on a multi-dimensional tool space and there’s different points in those spaces for all the different tools like notion and Rome and uses and so on, and theoretically you can imagine those tools traversing the space to meet up somewhere. I think in practice. You make foundational decisions pretty early on that tend to strongly suggest which region of the space you’re going to tend to move around in. So I guess I would expect some convergence among these tools, but not 100% overlap in the future. I expect Rome, for example, will remain quite text focused and use will remain more free form and spatial, but You will get more tech support, you will get non-spatial support, and so on. I don’t think that they’ll exactly look the same in the end. 00:57:21 - Speaker 1: For me, this ends up becoming a question about file standards more than it does about the application functionality. And I say that because I can take a notion document and fairly easily translate that into a text file, a very linear document format. There’s currently not really a very good file format for Spatial canvas, and so converting a spatial canvas into a linear document. It is currently a very difficult thing and depends very much on the tool, and in some ways taking a document can translate literally into a very tall spatial document in air quotes there. But being able to convert to and from different formats, or even just have a standard format for what a spatial canvas document is, I think will really help. Bridging these two worlds together, because right now there’s just not a good way for Muse to talk to another spatial canvas app. There’s just not a language that we both speak to describe what a spatial canvas is. 00:58:28 - Speaker 2: It’s a great point that For example, for the top to bottom text oriented documents, I use now and basically always have