Aw, shucks.
This did take me hours, but I would have had to do the same culling for ideas if just reading - the writing bit didn't take that long.
But I cheated. When you summarize, you leave out some info - e.g. leave a conclusion but remove the arguments, reduce a list of examples to one. You give about equal space to equally important points. You gloss over bits of context. You group several related ideas into one.
Here I explicitly avoided doing any of that; I just removed the parts that made me think "We get it, you're snarky, now shut the hell up about Mecca and get to the point!". I summarized the part about elasticity, but that's it. Summaries are about length; this was about density.
I can't think of a public summary I have written. I've summarized books and excerpts thereof for school, that kind of thing. My school prepared us for a summarizing exam (this exists). School told me at was good at it, so I probably am. AFAICT, I'm good at summarizing ideas and books, bad with movies, and terrible with my own ideas.
Tips (insert disclaimers):
The crucial part is the idea-finder, but I didn't learn and can't teach it. Summarizing for school (about a page into 150 words) taught me to omit needless words, but little else as the original texts tend to be garbage. To fake it, find keywords (philosophy jargon) and feed them as atomic tokens rather than rephrasable concepts to the idea-finder. This may help as practice, no idea.
They say "writing is rewriting", but I have to rewrite on the fly or get anchored. YMMV.
The crucial part is the idea-finder, but I didn't learn and can't teach it.
I have access to a pile of books to teach this to kids, and have used them. It's the number one skill that children doing poorly in reading comprehension must be taught. One of my favorite exercises related to this is. "Here's a paragraph. Find the sentence that is not on topic." Usually the sentence does seem tangentially related to the topic, but once you can concisely put in words the purpose every other sentence has been bent toward, it stands out like a sore thumb....
I can think of no better way to spend my karma than on encouraging people to read this 19th century self-help book. It's free and online in full.
The guidelines on what makes an appropriate front-page article be damned, or, if necessary, enforced by official censorship.
Thanks to User:sfb for the quote that led me here, although the decision to post is entirely my own.
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2274/2274-h/2274-h.htm