For years now, I’ve been reading about people who create a second brain to record what they want to remember. Most of these second brain systems use software, but not all. Many base their ideas on the Zettelkasten system, which was originally stored on note cards.
Over the years, I’ve tried different methods and software applications. I’m currently learning Obsidian. I’ve used note cards, notebooks, Google Docs, Evernote, OneNote, InstaPaper, Recall, and others. I love reading – taking information in – but I don’t like taking notes.
The trouble is, information goes through my brain like a sieve. When I want to tell someone about what I’ve learned, or think I’ve learned, I can’t cite my source, or, for that matter, clearly state what I think I know. And I seldom think about how I’ve come to believe what I believe.
I’m currently reading False by Joe Pierre, MD, about how we all live with delusions. This book makes me want to rededicate myself to creating a second brain for two reasons. First, I want to take precise notes on this book because it offers dozens of insights about how we deceive ourselves, and about how other people are deceived and are deceiving. Second, the book inspires me to start tracking what I think I learn every day and study where that knowledge comes from.
One of the main ways we fool ourselves is with confirmation bias. Pierre says:
In real estate, it’s said that the most important guide to follow when buying a house and trying to understand home values is “location, location, location.” If I were asked about the most important guide to understand the psychology of believing strongly in things that aren’t true, I would similarly answer, “confirmation bias, confirmation bias, confirmation bias.”
Pierre explains how the Internet, Google, AIs, Social Media, and various algorithms reinforce our natural tendency toward confirmation bias.
Pierre claims there are almost 200 defined cognitive biases. Wikipedia has a nice listing of them. Wikipedia also has an equally nice, long list of fallacies. Look at those two lists; they are what Pierre is describing in his book.
Between these two lists, there are hundreds of ways we fool ourselves. They are part of our psychology. They explain how we interact with people and reality. However, everything is magnified by polarized politics, the Internet, Social Media, and now AI.
I’d like to create a second brain that would help me become aware of my own biases and fallacies. It would have been more useful if I had started this project when I was young. And I may be too old to overcome a lifetime of delusional thinking.
I do change the way I think sometimes. For example, most of my life, I’ve believed that it was important for humanity to go to Mars. Like Elon Musk, I thought it vital that we create a backup home for our species. I no longer believe either.
Why would I even think about Mars in the first place? I got those beliefs from reading dozens of nonfiction and fictional books about Mars. Why have I changed my mind? Because I have read dozens of articles that debunk those beliefs. In other words, my ideas came from other people.
I would like to create a second brain that tracks how my beliefs develop and change. Could maintaining a second brain help reveal my biases and thinking fallacies? I don’t know, but it might.
Doing the same thing and expecting different results is a common fallacy. Most of my friends are depressed and cynical about current events. Humanity seems to be in an immense Groundhog Day loop of history. Doesn’t it seem like liberals have always wanted to escape this loop, and conservatives wanted to embrace it?
If we have innate mental systems that are consistently faulty, how do we reprogram ourselves? I know my life has been one of repeatable behaviors. Like Phil Conners, I’m looking for a way out of the loop.
Stoicism seems to be the answer in old age. Is it delusional to think enlightenment might be possible?
I used to keep up with the world by watching NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt, reading The New York Times on my iPhone, and bingeing YouTube videos. I felt well-informed. That was an illusion.
I then switched to reading The Atlantic, New York Magazine, The New Yorker, and Harper’s Magazine. I focused on the longer articles and developed the habit of reading one significant essay a day. That has taught me how superficial my previous methods were at informing me about what’s going on around the world. Television, the internet, and newspapers were giving me soundbites, while articles provide an education.
However, I still tend to forget this deeper knowledge just as quickly. I don’t like that. I feel like I learn something significant every day. What I’m learning feels heavy and philosophical. However, it drives me nuts that I forget everything so quickly. And I’m not talking about dementia. I think we all forget quickly. Just remember how hard it was to prepare for tests back in school.
I’ve watched dozens of YouTube videos about study methods, and they all show that if you don’t put information to use, it goes away. Use it or lose it. I’ve decided to start reading with a purpose.
At first, I thought I would just save the best articles and refer to them when I wanted to remember. That didn’t work. I quickly forget where I read something. Besides, that approach doesn’t apply any reinforcing methods.
I then thought about writing a blog post for each article. It turns out it takes about a day to do that. And I still forget. I needed something simpler.
Recall allows me to save this into a structure. But again, this is a lot of work and takes a lot of time. If I were writing an essay or book, this would be a great tool for gathering research.
Recall is also great for understanding what I read. Helpful with quick rereading.
This morning, I got a new idea to try. What if I’m trying to remember too much? What if I narrowed down what I wanted to remember to something specific?
Within today’s article, the author used the term “climate gentrification” referring to neighborhoods being bought up because they were safer from climate change, and thus displacing poor people. The article mentions Liberty City, a poor neighborhood in Miami, with a slightly higher elevation, bought up by developers moving away from low-lying beachfront development.
I think I can remember that concept, climate gentrification. What if I only worked on remembering specific concepts? This got me thinking. I could collect concepts. As my collection grew, I could develop a classification system. A taxonomy of problems that humanity faces. Maybe a Dewey Decimal system of things to know.
I use a note-taking system called Obsidian. It uses hyperlinks to connect your notes, creating relationships between ideas. I could create a vault for collecting concepts. Each time I come across a new concept, I’d enter it into Obsidian, along with a citation where I found it. That might not be too much work.
I picked several phrases I want to remember and study:
Climate gentrification
Heat islands
Climate dead zones
Insurance market collapse
Climate change acceleration
Economic no-go zones
Corporate takeover of public services
Climate change inequality
Histofuturism
Sacrifice zones
Corporate feudalism
Contemplating this list made me realize that remembering where I read about each concept will take too much work. I have a browser extension, Readwell Reader, that lets me save the content of a web page. I could save every article I want to remember into a folder and then use a program to search for the concept words I remember to find them.
I just did a web search on “climate gentrification” and found it’s already in wide use. I then searched for “corporate feudalism,” and found quite a bit on it too. This suggests I’m onto something. That instead of trying to remember specifically what I read and where, I focus on specific emerging concepts.
Searching on “histofuturism” brought up another article at The Atlantic that references Octavia Butler: “How Octavia Butler Told the Future.” Today’s article by Vann R. Newkirk II is also built around Octavia Butler. This complicates my plan. It makes me want to research the evolution of the concept, which could be very time-consuming.
The point of focusing on key concepts from my reading is to give my reading purpose that will help me remember. But there might be more to it. Concepts are being identified all the time. And they spread. They really don’t become useful until they enter the vernacular. Until a majority of people use a phrase like “climate gentrification,” the reality it points to isn’t visible.
That realization reinforces my hunch to focus on concepts rather than details in my reading. Maybe reading isn’t about specific facts, but about spreading concepts?
On August 29, 2025, this blog had 10.5K hits. That’s small compared to big sites, but huge compared to my daily average of around 400 hits. Supposedly, those hits were from 322 people, which is 1% fewer than the day before. Normally, most people read just one page when they visit. But to reach 10,500, those 322 would have to read 33 pages each. That’s not normal.
In other words, I have a mystery. Here are the stats for August 30th. It had 399 hits, but 330 people. Now that’s normal.
I can only assume a web crawler, bot, or AI was reading my blog. But here’s another mystery.
Whoever, or whatever, was reading my blog was reading my most popular posts. Above, list my most popular essays in order. Why would some mindless bot or brilliant AI want to read these pages more than once? Were AIs recommending pages to their AI pals?
I wish I had Google Analytics, but the price tier I’m using with WordPress doesn’t offer that.
Do any of you living readers know what’s going on? Hell, do any of you AI beings know?
I did asked CoPilot: On 8/29/25 my blog got over ten thousand hits. It normally gets about 400 in a day. Can you explain what happened. My blog is auxiliarymemory.com
That’s a huge spike, Jim—congrats! 🚀 Going from 400 to over 10,000 hits in a single day suggests something unusual happened. While I couldn’t access the site directly just now, here are several likely explanations based on patterns I’ve seen with blogs like Auxiliary Memory, especially given your focus on digitization, cultural memory, and thoughtful essays:
🔍 Possible Reasons for the Traffic Surge
1. Viral Post or External Share
One of your recent posts may have been shared on a high-traffic platform like Reddit (e.g., r/ObscureMedia, r/OldSchoolCool, or r/DataHoarder), Hacker News, or a niche Facebook group.
If your post touched on digitization, rare media, or philosophical insights, it could’ve resonated with a specific community.
2. Mention in a Newsletter or Article
You might’ve been featured in a popular newsletter (like The Browser, Recomendo, or Morning Brew) or cited in an article about media preservation, Moon travel, or cognitive science.
3. Search Engine Boost
A topic you covered may have suddenly become trending—like a documentary release, anniversary of a Moon mission, or a viral debate on consciousness—and your post ranked high in search results.
4. Backlink from a High-Authority Site
If a university, archive, or tech blog linked to your site (especially in a post about digitization workflows or Obsidian setups), that could drive thousands of hits in a day.
5. Bot Traffic or Scraper Spike
Less exciting but worth checking: sometimes automated bots or scrapers can inflate traffic. If the bounce rate was high or session durations were low, this might be the case.
🧠 What You Can Do Next
Check your referrer logs in your blog’s analytics dashboard (WordPress, Jetpack, or Google Analytics) to see where the traffic came from.
Look at the top-performing post on 8/29 to identify what drew people in.
If it was organic and positive, consider writing a follow-up post or updating that entry with links to related content to keep new readers engaged.
If you want help analyzing the traffic patterns or crafting a follow-up post that builds on the momentum, I’d love to collaborate. Want to dig into your analytics together or brainstorm what might’ve caught fire?
My Reply: What was strange is it wasn’t a boost to one page, but many of my old posts got 50 to 250 hits each. Is that some kind of attack?
That pattern is definitely unusual, Jim—and it’s smart of you to question it. When many older posts get moderate traffic all at once, it’s not typical of a single viral share or organic surge. Here’s how to think through what might’ve happened:
🧠 Possibilities Beyond a Simple Boost
1. Bot or Crawler Activity
Some bots (especially aggressive scrapers or indexing tools) will hit multiple pages across a site in rapid succession.
If the hits came from a small number of IP addresses, had very short session durations, or lacked referrer data, that’s a strong sign.
Check for user agents like curl, python-requests, or suspicious browser strings.
2. AI Training or Archival Scraping
Your blog’s rich archive and thoughtful essays might’ve been targeted by a large-scale web crawler—possibly for training an AI model or building a digital archive.
These crawlers often avoid detection by mimicking real browsers and spreading requests over time.
3. RSS Feed or API Aggregator Spike
If someone added your blog to a content aggregator or feed reader with a large user base, it could trigger distributed traffic to older posts.
This would show up with legitimate-looking referrers but still hit many pages at once.
4. Search Engine Reindexing
Sometimes Google or Bing re-crawls a site deeply, especially if there’s been a sitemap update or structural change.
These hits are usually low-impact and spread out, but they can spike if your site was flagged for deeper indexing.
🛡️ How to Investigate
Analytics Deep Dive: Look at referrer URLs, session duration, bounce rate, and geographic origin. If most hits came from one country or IP block, that’s a clue.
Server Logs: If you have access, scan for unusual user agents or request patterns.
Security Plugins: Tools like Wordfence (for WordPress) can help detect and block malicious crawlers.
🧭 What It Probably Wasn’t
A typical “attack” (like a DDoS or exploit attempt) usually targets login pages, admin panels, or specific vulnerabilities—not dozens of archived essays.
If your site stayed responsive and didn’t show signs of strain, it was likely non-malicious.
If you want, I can help you interpret your analytics data or draft a robots.txt strategy to manage future crawlers. Or we could even turn this into a blog post—“When Your Archive Gets Raided: A Blogger’s Guide to Sudden Traffic Surges.” That’d be very Auxiliary Memory.
My reply: Unfortunately, I don’t have access to logs from my site, which is hosted at WordPress.com and I don’t pay for the advanced level that supports Google Analytics. But you’re right, this might make for an interesting blog post.
That limitation makes it trickier to diagnose, but it also opens the door to a compelling narrative—especially for Auxiliary Memory, where you often explore the intersection of technology, memory, and mystery. You could frame the post as part detective story, part meditation on digital presence.
Here’s a possible structure to spark your thinking:
📝 Working Title Ideas
“The Day My Blog Was Raided: A Mystery in Metrics”
“When the Archive Woke Up: A Blogger’s Traffic Spike Without a Trace”
“Ten Thousand Hits and No Clue Why”
🧩 Suggested Structure for the Post
1. The Setup
Describe your typical traffic patterns (400 hits/day).
Introduce the anomaly: 10,000+ hits on August 29, spread across many old posts.
2. The Investigation
Share what tools you do have (WordPress stats, Jetpack).
Note the absence of referrer data or analytics granularity.
Speculate on possible causes: bots, AI crawlers, reindexing, or a hidden share.
3. The Philosophy
Reflect on what it means to have a digital archive that suddenly gets attention.
Explore the idea of memory—how old posts can resurface, like forgotten artifacts.
Tie it to your broader themes: preservation, access, and the unpredictability of digital legacy.
4. The Takeaway
Offer thoughts on how bloggers can prepare for or interpret these events.
Maybe even invite readers to share if they were part of the traffic surge.
If you’d like, I can help you draft the opening paragraph or brainstorm a visual metaphor—like comparing the blog to a dusty library that suddenly had all its books checked out. Want to sketch it out together?
My reply: I’m good. You’ve described my regular approach to writing a post. But I will mention your help. That is an interesting aspect in itself.
Conclusion
I think this might be the best answer:
3. RSS Feed or API Aggregator Spike
If someone added your blog to a content aggregator or feed reader with a large user base, it could trigger distributed traffic to older posts.
This would show up with legitimate-looking referrers but still hit many pages at once.
I checked the stats for my other blog, Classics of Science Fiction, and found it had a similar bump on August 21.
If an RSS aggregator shared my most popular posts from each site, I don’t think it generated any subscriptions, likes, or repeat visits. Thanks for the promotion, though. I haven’t received increased traffic, but it was kind of you.
Every once in a blue moon, some big site will link to my little site, and one of my pages will get several hundred to a few thousand hits. That’s kind of nice. But I never know where the link is published.
I’ve always written my blogs with the idea that I was writing to myself. I just didn’t care who was reading my diary. It’s flattering that some people enjoy reading what I write. But I don’t want to think about that too much. I don’t want to start writing to get hits. I don’t think I have to worry about that because I seldom get hits from Google searches. Evidently, what I’m interested in is not what most people are interested in reading.
On the other hand, I wonder if AI minds are reading my blog. I’ve always loved robot stories in science fiction, so it would be cool if I had a few robot readers.
Seeing the above photos as a meme on Facebook made me think about how much people, society, and pop culture changed in the 1960s.
If a picture is worth 1,000 words, then are two pictures only worth 2,000 words? I don’t think so, I think it’s 1,000 words times 1,000 words, or 1,000,000 words. I could easily write that many from all the ideas my mind has generated since I began meditating on those photos.
Here’s the original meme from Facebook:
I was eight on 1/1/60 and eighteen on 12/31/69. I have always thought the longest years of my life were from 1963 to 1969 because so much happened to me and the world I lived in during that time. For folks who didn’t grow up in the sixties, it was much more than what you can learn from watching Grease or American Graffiti and contrasting it with Hair or Woodstock.
When I first saw the meme above I instantly thought about how rock and roll music of the 1950s ended up becoming the rock music of Woodstock. I’ve tried several times just to write an essay about that, but after typing over 5,000 words, I realize I’ve barely hinted at what I could say. That’s too long for a blog post.
I recommend that you find two photos that bracket your adolescent years or the decade you identify with the most and meditate on them. Start with remembering every place you lived and what you did each year. Remember your family and friends, your pets, your homes, your schools and workplaces, the clothes you wore, all the activities you pursued, everything you wanted to buy. Then write the shortest essay that makes it all coherent. You will then feel the mental anguish I am feeling right now.
Then branch out in your meditations. The easy and fun things to contemplate are the changes in pop culture — how music, movies, books, TV shows, games, and technology evolved over ten years. But then move on to the political and social changes. That’s when things get heavy. Can you connect your firsthand experiences with all those external events? Have you ever compared the life you lived to what you saw on the TV news every night?
Every one of us has the life experience to write a Proust-size novel and has lived through enough social change to write a series of history books about the formative decade of our lives. If you don’t think so, meditate more on the two photos you have selected.
I turned seventy-three on Monday, and getting old has made me more susceptible to memes about the past. My memories are fading away so I desperately want to cling to them. Emotions gnaw at me to make sense of everything I’ve experienced. The urge is to put it all down in words, but I don’t have what it takes to do the job and do it precisely.
There is an undefinable mental barrier that keeps me from organizing my thoughts into coherent histories. And I’m not talking about writing something worthy of publication for others to read, but just producing a narrative that makes sense of things for myself about myself and what I’ve learned. The older I get, the more I want to understand.
This essay started out about when rock and roll music became rock music. After several drafts and much contemplation, I narrowed it down to the summer of 1965 when I first heard Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” on the radio. As I kept trying to document my theory, I realized I could write a whole book on it.
Then as I was researching the subject, I found that Andrew Grant Jackson had already published the book I wish I had written, 1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music. His book is what I wanted to write in this essay when I first saw the meme above.
The Kindle edition is currently $2.99, and it’s a perfect example of what I’m talking about when I suggest we should chronicle our lives. Even if you don’t buy the book, read the sample at Amazon. I feel the format of organizing the narrative around a month-by-month description of what was happening is a great template to use for writing about memories.
Composing an essay makes me clarify my thoughts. We don’t think in sentences and paragraphs, but in vague words and images. It’s hard to write a sentence that says exactly what you mean the first time. The act of constructing a sentence helps us find out what we’re thinking.
Every day I watch videos on YouTube, and it’s become obvious that expressing an idea with both words and pictures can convey an idea more precisely. Have you noticed how infographics are being used more often in print and online?
I find this particularly true with the channel Useful Charts created by Matt Baker. Baker’s three videos explaining the types of atheists struct me as particularly clear and insightful. You should watch the series to see exactly what I mean, but I’m going to point out several things he did I thought were particularly good at making his ideas concrete.
I think the chart at the top of the page makes his point far better than if we were to just listen to the video or read the transcript. Of course, if he had written the information in an outline, it might have worked just as well.
Implicit Atheists – A person who lacks a belief in God
Babies & very young children
Those who have never heard of the concept
Those who are truly undecided
Those who really don’t care
Explicit Atheists – A person who firmly believes God does not exist
Those who have heard the concept, have seriously thought about it, and have concluded that they do not believe
What most people assume an atheist is.
But if you had to choose which form, words without graphics, or words with graphics, which helped you to see Baker’s points the easiest and fastest?
Later, Baker works to prove that people who think being an agnostic is different from being an atheist are wrong. Agnostic refers to a lack of knowledge, while atheist refers to a lack of belief. By Baker’s definition, most agnostics are atheists.
However, as the video progresses, Baker makes a good case that the term atheist isn’t especially useful because it doesn’t convey a worldview. That surprised me. I always tell people I’m an atheist, but Baker is right, the term doesn’t say much. The term atheist only says I’ve rejected the hypothesis that God created reality. It doesn’t say what I believe.
Baker claims that a worldview has three factors, ontology, epistemology, and axiology. From that I see my ontology is naturalism, my epistemology is science and reason, and my axiology is ethics. That particular combination is generally a humanistic worldview.
I should not tell people I’m an atheist but say I’m a humanist. But then, if people don’t understand the definitions Baker is presenting in his video, is that term any more informative? Baker goes into explain humanism and its history and says that humanists are naturalists aligned with science and reason interested in improving the world. That gives me a lot to think about.
The worldview image above is a mini lesson in philosophy, but the whole video is a mini lesson in how to classify your feelings about religion and philosophy.
In part 2 of the series, Baker goes into classifying atheists by personality types. For his dissertation he used the Meyers-Briggs classification system. Glancing through his dissertation, the information seems dense. It would take a bit of work to digest it. I bet the three videos explain his research far easier for most people to understand.
I’m left wondering if I should try to write my blog essays with more infographics. Or even try to write a whole essay in infographics.
Baker’s video on explaining atheists is minor compared to those where he explains larger subjects. Here’s his video on “37 Bible Characters Found Through Archaeology.” Don’t be put off that it’s about The Bible. It’s about how we know things. For example, most of the characters in The Bible that we can connect to history were from the Iron Age. And most of the characters that are considered myths come from the Bronze Age. Seeing that laid out graphically is very impressive.
I highly recommend spending some time watching the videos on Useful Charts. It’s making me rethink how to express ideas and concepts. Baker makes a wonderful video comparing commercial DNA tests people use for genealogy.
I was particularly impressed with his video on the “Western Esotericism Family Tree.” It explains a lot about people I’ve read about over the years.
Auxiliary Memory 