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I read a lot, and much of it is nonfiction. I take a lot of notes, generally to remind myself of interesting points, to digest complex descriptions, and to extract the relevant parts of the text so that I can find them again without rereading the whole book.

Except that's not really true. I often don't bother taking notes because it's too time consuming, or because the right notepad isn't at hand, or because all the working pens are mysteriously missing at the moment. Or because I'm away from home. This is particularly annoying, since I spend a lot of time away from home reading things, but I rarely have the foresight or desire to bring multiple notebooks (for different subjects) or other pieces of stationary with me. Or because although all the conditions are right, I have no desire to write in the traditional way in my random handwriting, since typing is by now my normal way of producing text.

One of my intentions in setting up this website is to attempt to use its wiki as a universal, searchable notepad which is accessible and editable from almost anywhere. Unlike traditional notepads, it's massless and occupies no volume. It has other costs and requirements, but these seem to me to be much less onerous than those of massy, voluminous, and always scandalously unsearchable physical volumes of typically unreadable scribbles. There are other advantages: It can also incorporate that scribbles (a diagram or chart I've drawn can be scanned and uploaded). It can also be edited and rewritten later, and this is something I'm finding especially useful: My initial notes are often cribbed from multiple textbooks, and then I want to digest the material and rewrite it in a different way, a way that suits my own methods of systematizing and remembering things.

It's also by default public (although I have the option of making a given page private), which is an interesting thing. Why not let others read my scribbles? After all, they concern the same universe that others occupy, and some of the things I claim or suggest might be clearly refutable or clearly provable to others, if they were to read them...

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Prologue

I'm a strange entity that manifested as a human child in Ireland a short time before the 1980s began. It's gone on like that for a while. I've gotten used to it by now, and it's really a lot of fun being a people. I like people. And things, too.

Read more...

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I work as a full-time freelance editor. People hire me to review, improve, and proofread their writing; Here's the blurb:

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Welcome to ataltane.net.

Right now, you can check out my professional services.

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