How About These Links #30 20230106
The H.A.T. Scouts report back with their findings for their first update in 2023
OPENING RE:MARKS
The new 3 days/week publishing schedule is officially in place, so far so good. Also, back to work after a few days off for the holidays, so onward.
Also, I’m going to be collaborating with
of on a Substack Letters series, starting later this month - it’ll be fun! I also have another Substack Letters series in progress with another newsletter publisher which will have an interesting twist… more to come on that as it unfolds!DECEMBER 2022 NOTEBOOK GIVEAWAY: The winner was subscriber
- congratulations! Your MOO notebook will be on its way to you very soon!JANUARY 2023 NOTEBOOK GIVEAWAY: I am giving away a Dingbats* notebook at the end of January 2023 to the winner of a draw. It’s a A5 sized hardcovered notebook with dotted pages. Each H.A.T. subscriber automatically gets one entry into this draw if they are a subscriber as of the end of January 31, 2023. For every post a subscriber comments on in January 2023, they will receive another 2 entries into the draw (maximum of 2 entries per post commented on - must be a post that was published in January 2023).
A few of us are working on New Year’s Resolutions in a separate Discord group. If you’d like to take part, please E-mail me at markdykeman@gmail.com!
OVER THERE (found elsewhere)
I don’t normally link to Wikipedia but I learned about the Synopticon while reading How To Read a Book by Adler and Van Doren. Mortimer Adler and team undertook creating a Synopticon (first edition 1952), featuring 100+ Great Ideas (as they called them) as a part of Encyclopedia Britannica’s Great Books of the World series.
Per Wikipedia, the list of 102 Great Ideas appeared in two volumes (some, like Good and Evil, were considered a single Great Idea):
Volume I: Angel, Animal, Aristocracy, Art, Astronomy, Beauty, Being, Cause, Chance, Change, Citizen, Constitution, Courage, Custom and Convention, Definition, Democracy, Desire, Dialectic, Duty, Education, Element, Emotion, Eternity, Evolution, Experience, Family, Fate, Form, God, Good and Evil, Government, Habit, Happiness, History, Honor, Hypothesis, Idea, Immortality, Induction, Infinity, Judgment, Justice, Knowledge, Labor, Language, Law, Liberty, Life and Death, Logic, and Love.
Volume II: Man, Mathematics, Matter, Mechanics, Medicine, Memory and Imagination, Metaphysics, Mind, Monarchy, Nature, Necessity and Contingency, Oligarchy, One and Many, Opinion, Opposition, Philosophy, Physics, Pleasure and Pain, Poetry, Principle, Progress, Prophecy, Prudence, Punishment, Quality, Quantity, Reasoning, Relation, Religion, Revolution, Rhetoric, Same and Other, Science, Sense, Sign and Symbol, Sin, Slavery, Soul, Space, State, Temperance, Theology, Time, Truth, Tyranny and Despotism, Universal and Particular, Virtue and Vice, War and Peace, Wealth, Will, Wisdom, and World.
In this context, a synopticon is a book that provides information about each Great Idea and then cross-references it to source works, plus to other Great Ideas where there are connections:
The Syntopicon consists of 102 chapters on the 102 Great Ideas. Each chapter is broken down into five distinct sections: the introduction, an outline of topics, references, cross-references, and additional readings.
The first two editions of this encyclopedia on steroids were gifted to U.S. President Harry S. Truman and Queen Elizabeth II.
Sadly, the book was not a hit (which is why you probably haven’t heard of it before) and contained lots of errors. An abridged edition was published in 1990, probably to the sound of crickets.
Ironically enough, probably the only place you can find more information about the Synopticon is Wikipedia, which is a superior tool to the Synopticon because it’s not constrained to a single book and it does pretty much everything the Synopticon was supposed to do (though Wikipedia does have its share of flaws).
Soaring Twenties Social Club:
Symposium #7 - this was a fiction-themed collection. I didn’t submit anything this time but please check it out, there’s lots of great stories in this one.
Omnibus #48 (Best of 2022) - each person participating in the Omnibus chose their best, or favorite, work from 2022 and included it in this Omnibus issue. The regular weekly Omnibus will be back in just a couple of days.
BACK HERE (the past week’s posts)
Sunday, January 1, featured the 8 month update for How About This.
Monday featured the interview with Tim Rutherford, UK based educator and member of the Soaring Twenties Social Club.
Wednesday featured the latest Curious Realizer post, an update on my ever-evolving collection of notebooks.
RELEASE
The H.A.T. Scouts are scouring the Web again, looking for more good stuff. And remember, it’s always better to be a H.A.T.T.E.R. than a hater.
Catching up, (Happy New Year, Mark!) and this is a great place to start doing it again. You've been creating a personalized Synopticon with these enjoyable posts.
My 2c, Mark, just 'cause me mama told me this many years ago, so in her memory: Did you know that the "S" in Harry Truman's name is actually not an initial, and therefore, needs no period following? His folks couldn't decide on a middle name, and just placed an "S" there. Regardless, the Prez, himself, would often put a period after the "S," so it's just one of those things! Here's one article, and I'm sure there are others to verify: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/harry-truman-middle-name/