| I use notebooks and pens for all of my note-taking. Pulling out a laptop is too slow, cumbersome, and not practical in all situations. My notebooks are slim and discreet. My notebooks do not need to be recharged. My notebooks are designed to hold ink and can last for hundreds of years in the right conditions. Physics won't change much in that time. Computers and file formats will. My notebooks can be easily recycled when I do not wish to keep them anymore. My laptop is expensive to recycle and there is a non-trivial amount of materials within it that are not recoverable and must simply be stored somewhere... A pen and paper is the most intuitive interface we have for recording thought. It's entirely free-form and adapts to how I wish to use it without any programming or maintaining complicated digital formats. It exists as a single artifact. I won't be interrupted mid-stream by a hardware failure, power-outage and I won't lose my work to corruption. My notebook doesn't phone home to the NSA (yet) or the cloud. With a good method of organization I can find my notes without much difficulty. Sure I can tag, search, and sort through the streams of bytes I write out on a disk but I rarely find use for such functionality. I'm sure I can keep a database of my books if this becomes an issue. My thoughts exist in a physical artifact. This gives me a sense of permanence and will certainly leave evidence of my passing when I'm gone. Someone will have to pick up that stack of books and do something with it. Digital files can simply be deleted. Time-stamps and some bytes in an archive don't seem to have the same effect. |