| >inability to acquire new stuff or inability to focus due the large number of associations running out from each thought you have It's exactly this. In the active mind (hyperactive, perhaps), the dataset is ever increasing and the memory banks are thrashing. On the best days, the cache is very deep. You never really know how deep the cache goes, though, so what might be the in L3 one day silently becomes /dev/null. This is a problem. (It's also, as you point out, a blessing) A permanent store is the solution, but the brute force (write everything down) doesn't immediately solve the issue. There is no metadata in writing, so searching through papers involves full-text O(ludicrous) kind of searches. Every permanent store needs an index to be useful. It looks like the author has developed an extensive, coherent(?) way to colocate and index written information. Considering how slowly most people can write, I'd be very curious to see how good mapping software could be used with ~300wpm stenographer-paced typing (Plover). Typing as fast as I can think into a searchable, sortable, arbitrarily small/large/nested/rearrangable/duplicable/etc medium is intriguing, to say the least. EDIT: One more thing. The 'immobilization' that some ridicule is inherent in the medium: ink on paper. A written page is immutable and cannot show a diff. This is a bit like Purely Functional Data Structures. The 'structure' is at best just a single page, rewritten fairly quickly. As the ideas grow, sheet by sheet, editing a single page requires rebuilding the now-12-page idea. This is refactoring with pen & paper. The only way to be 'mobile' is to either not write it down in the first place or to archive and never look at again. You're right in that rehashing old ideas thwarts gc: it's like burning an image into your screen, right into the phosphorus. |