I dislike writing miscoranda entries. There are always so many choices of what to write and how to phrase it, and I usually end up sounding barely literate next to people like Aaron Swartz, so in fact most of the entries I work on I don't even bother to publish. Some of them have a string of semi-interesting ideas, but I'm rarely happy with the results.
A lot of the time, I'll try to capture a thought chain, and then realise that in the process of trying to capture it you tend to affect it too much. It's like the quantum principle of the observer always having an effect on the outcome. But to cut a long story short, I've decided to collect a handful of fragments from unpublished entries and provide them here:
On Antilinearality:
I used to rank all sorts of things into "favourites" lists, e.g. songs, books, etc., because I thought it'd help me to discover other things that I might be interested in, but it just drove me nuts because I'd find that I'd like P more than Q, Q more than R, and R more than P.
On Learning:
It's a bit of a chicken and egg thing: I have a good idea for teaching a language, but I need to learn the language first, so if only my idea were already in place, I could use it myself! And the further irritating part is that I'll never be able to test my own idea as a learner myself unless someone else does it, since once a language is learned, a language is learned.
On Art:
There's a phrase in Chimes of Freedom that goes "through the wild cathedral evening the rain unraveled tales", and it's always fascinated me because cathedral as an adjective modifying evening just doesn't make any sense at all, and yet it's clear exactly what's meant. [...]
Photorealists are extraordinarily skilled, but the nice thing about art is that it lets you create, not just mirror. [...] I kinda expect holographic painting to become popular at one point (if you've ever looked down a holographic microscope and been startled, you'll know what I mean and why), and I've also got a strange photosonic idea from years ago that I sometimes expect to see come to independent fruition.
On Invention:
I had the idea of making it into a book first of all and calling it the Art of Innovation: I'd've gone through some of the neat innovations through history (perhaps some surprising ones, too), done some of my own, and then maybe written a more general section too. But the thing about books is that they're too much effort to get published, so I'd probably just end up putting it online anyway, and then it'd be ignored for the rest of eternity, and I'd grumble. So yeah, I decided not to do the book thing.
On Semantics:
That there were Five Kings stood around in the ergative case, discussing Boyle's Law with Demetrius. And, I dreamed, the cyllowre that oversprawled them was replete with gems and stars.
There was painted a pastiche of intellectual osmoses, that within every page of a charity shop book there lurked a post-nominal, and that Camelopardus had been reinstated and a constant relation. That prostitutes with left-handed masks could go to the vote; that larchfinches ate tallow provided by the Danish government.
That Kitty's Rambles were conducted in a hermitian conjugate matrix I also dreamed—and Elizabethan underwear was made chairperson of the Operatic Society as I found a T'ai chi t'u on a desk by chance. But ine kan decheinen buochstap anyway.