30 Years of Notebooks

Attention conservation notice: Middle-aged dad has doubts about how he's spent his time.

In September 1994, I wanted to write a program which would filter the Usenet newsgroups I followed for the posts of most interest to me, which led me to writing out keywords describing what I was interested in. I don't remember why I started to elaborate the keywords into little essays and reading lists (perhaps self-clarification?), but I did, and then, because I'd just learned HTML and was playing around with hypertext, I put the document online. (My records say this was 3 October 1994, though that may have been fixing on a plausible date retroactively.) I've been updating those notebooks ever since, recording things-to-read as they crossed my path, recording my reading, and some thoughts. The biggest change in organization came pretty early: the few people who read it all urged me to split it from one giant file into many topical files, so I did, on 13 March 1995, ordered by last update, a format I've stuck to ever since (*).

This was not, of course, what I was supposed to be doing as a twenty-year-old physics graduate student. (Most of the notebook entries weren't even about physics.) Unlike a lot of ideas I had at that age, though, I stuck with it --- have stuck with it. Over the last thirty years, I've spent a substantial chunk of my waking hours recording references, consolidating what I understand by trying to explain it, and working out what I think by seeing what I write, by using Emacs to edit a directory of very basic HTML files. (I learned Emacs Lisp to write functions to do things like add links to arxiv.)

Was any of this a good use of my time? I couldn't begin to say. Long, long ago it became clear to me that I was never going to read more than a small fraction of the items I recorded as "To read:". I sometimes tell myself that it's a way of satiating my hoarding tendencies without actually filling my house with junk, but of course it's possible it's just feeding those tendencies. I do use the notebooks, though honestly the have-read portions are the most useful ones to me. Some of the notebooks have grown into papers, though many more which were intended to be seeds of papers have never sprouted. I know that some other people, from time to time, say they find them useful, which is nice. (Though I presume most people's reactions would range from bafflement to "wow, pretentious much?") Whether this justifies all those hours not writing papers / finishing any of my projected books / gardening / hanging out with friends / being with my family / playing with my cat (RIP) / drinking beer / riding my bike / writing letters / writing al-Biruni fanfic / actually reading, well...

The core of the matter, I suspect, is that if anyone does anything for a decade or three consistently, it becomes a very hard habit to break. By this point, the notebooks are so integrated into the way I work that it would take lots of my time and will-power to stop updating them, as long as I keep anything like my current job. So I will keep at it, and hope that it is, at worst, a cheap and harmless vice.

I never did write that Usenet filter.

*: A decade later, I started using blosxom, rather than completely hand-written HTML, and Danny Yee wrote me a cascading style sheet. I also was happy to use first HTMX, and then MathJax, to render math, rather than trying to put equations into HTML. ^.