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The end of the Taking Note blog
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Posted by Donovan
Dec 12, 2020 at 03:24 AM
I hope those of you who stopped reading Taking Note, when he announced the end of the blog, will follow the Internet Archive links (I posted in this thread) to three more years of great writing.
I have a friend who was a student of his at Boston U. He says he was the greatest professor he ever had because he didn’t just teach philosophy, he actually lived the examined life. He said he learned SO many things from Professor Kuehn — much of it beyond philosophy. Somehow most of us, that know him only from his blog, are probably not surprised at all to hear that. A blog on “note taking” was a blog on so many erudite topics and Kuehn showed all of us his reputation as a polymath. Great philosopher, great man. I’m so sorry to hear about his wife and the struggles of being a sole caretaker — especially during these difficult times. Thank you SZ for taking the time to touch base with him and pass along our affection for him and Taking Note.
Posted by Daly de Gagne
Dec 12, 2020 at 06:02 PM
Donovan, thanks for the archive links.
Daly
Posted by 22111
Jan 4, 2021 at 06:51 PM
I’m sorry to hear about Prof. Kühn’s wife; I had looked up the blog in question “regularly”, i.e. all some 3 or 4 months, and since every time, the most recent post was from Nov (or Dec?) 2018, I was aware of an alleged old age problem already, but in Kühn himself, since never any “explanation” or similar post had been added.
All the more so, now, the blog being gone, with archive.org or something the only way to find its content, I ask myself if google.blogger discards such dormant blogs after 2 full years of inactivity, automatically, or if Kühn had it discarded, and if so, why?
Fact is, the earlier posts - I had stored every post of interest to me in my own system anyway - had been much more “interesting”, no, even much more relevant, for most of them, than later ones, but then, the scope was such that Kühn would have needed, and then needed to process, much external input from the relevant research fields, an effort understandably less and less pressing with (old) age and the absence of a “business model” (be that in $$ or in recognition), so I am not surprised in the end.
On the other hand, somebody above saying something like, “from 2015 here, I’m not surprised”: No, my memory is somewhat better, Kühn then left, saying somewhat along the lines, “I don’t need that.” in response to lack of respect in the conversation, but he didn’t imply in any way that he would also stop his own blog, all to the contrary, and he was very active in that for some time after indeed.
This being said, I’m really sorry for the Kühns and their dire situation.
Posted by Donovan
Jan 8, 2021 at 06:31 AM
22111 wrote:
>On the other hand, somebody above saying something like, “from 2015
>here, I’m not surprised”: No, my memory is somewhat better, Kühn
>then left, saying somewhat along the lines, “I don’t need that.” in
>response to lack of respect in the conversation, **but he didn’t imply in
>any way that he would also stop his own blog, all to the contrary, and
>he was very active in that for some time after indeed.**
Wrong. He returned to posting later, without everyone knowing, after announcing the end of the blog On Dec. 27th, 2015. That’s why I linked to the ‘16, ‘17, ‘18 posts on the Internet Archive.
He wrote:
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 26, 2015
The End
This will be the last post on this blog of mine. I enjoyed posting for the longest time, and I know that some of the more than 780,000 visitors over the last eight years have also enjoyed some of my posts. But the posting has become more burdensome of late. I never expected to be thanked for my efforts, as I mainly did them for my own benefit to figure out what I thought about some of the things important to me. But I did not expect to be accused and insulted by someone hiding behind a pseudonym either. It takes away from the pleasure of writing in this form. I don’t need this.
But, as I said before, thanks to everyone who has been following this blog.
POSTED BY MK AT 12:21 PM
( https://web.archive.org/web/20160111115841/http://takingnotenow.blogspot.mx/2015/12/the-end.html )
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Jan 8, 2021 at 04:37 PM
Donovan wrote:
>A blog on “note taking” was a
>blog on so many erudite topics and Kuehn showed all of us his reputation
>as a polymath. Great philosopher, great man.
@ Donovan: many thanks for the web archive links to Taking Note
@ Steve: many thanks for reaching out to M. Kühn.
I find it really surprising that a blog with more than 780,000 visitors over eight years has been taken down, just two years after its last post. Without going into Hercules Poirot mode considering how this particular case may have occurred, we may have to accept that this is the future of all things that are free on the internet. As humanity keeps outputting petabytes of information, much of it worthless and often even of negative value, storage is recycled and the only priority logic may be FIFO—first in first out.
My Evernote database of web clippings now goes back 12 years; that’s not much in terms of human culture, but it is not unusual at all for me to remember a piece of important information, find it in my database, and then check the original link only to find that it is no longer there.
I am thankful for the web archive and I am thankful for Chris hosting this nice forum, even if I seldom post to it nowadays for lack of time. The forum will soon celebrate 15 years in this incarnation, and includes the archives of outliners.com which had started more than 6 years earlier…
@ Chris: it goes without saying that if you ever need financial contribution to cover the hosting costs, I’ll be more than happy to chip in.