Once again, I’m lowered to just quoting wikipedia for you:
Plato’s theory of anamnesis recognized the new status of writing as a device of artificial memory, and he developed the hypomnesic principles for his students to follow in the Academy. The hypomnemata constituted a material memory of things read, heard, or thought, thus offering these as an accumulated treasure for rereading and later meditation.
Basically, hypomnema is ancient Greek for “notes.” Writing was relatively new, so it was kind of groundbreaking to crystallize your thoughts in a form to which you could return. This allowed people to go from “Err, it seemed like a good idea at the time” to “We believed this to be true from the following evidences.” Hypomnemata were thus the birthplace of the lab notebook and the primoridal stirrings of data, which is kind of incredible to think about.
In that tradition, this blog will contain my personal technical notes: reading notes, lab notes, etc. Since it’s a collection of multiple different notebooks, I’m calling it the plural “hypomnemata” instead of “hypomnema.”