Brandymore Castle

I didn't know it, but all my life I've engaged in "graphic recording" when it came to exploring new ideas or learning. I never went as far as the artists who made a series of recordings for the sustainable agriculture and food conference, but my subjects were technical, and I was a technical kid growing up, so my "confections," as Tufte calls them, were more mathematical, graphical and textual in nature. I used them to illustrate things to myself, like working out visually how cycles represent waveforms in musical instruments. Now, I see them as graphic recordings. I was a bit ashamed of them, since I thought it meant that I wasn't a good learner and tried to suppress or limit them. That was a mistake. The drawings are simply wonderful and I got put onto them by Brenda Dawson who tweeted about the graphical recordings made for the March 29 2009 conference Inaugural National Symposium on Food Systems and Sustainability at the University of California, ...

While looking for some tips on good writing, I found a page on how to make writing more concise by substituting awkward or redundant phrases, such as "after" for "after the conclusion of" or "near" for "in the vicinity of." I noticed "honest truth" was on the list. I could see why on its face this appears to be a redundancy. Taken literally, there should be no difference between the "honest truth" and the "truth" given there is only one truth. I do not believe this is a mere redundancy (unless used by habit in as a cliche) but an expression of mutual knowledge . If you've read Stephen Pinker's The Stuff of Thought , you will understand how important mutual knowledge can be in human affairs. When we say "honest truth" we are acknowledging there is a public truth, a conventional truth everyone must acknowledge, and a private truth we all know is reality. The "honest truth" is a warning to ev...