Memories and Texts
When I was a teenager, I was very fond of the Lost Regiment book series by the American author William R. Forstchen. In the book, during the American Civil War a regiment of some 600 Union soldiers loads up onto a ship, gets into a maritime storm, and is transported onto a different planet. The planet is host to groups of humans from different geographical regions and historical periods of Earth - so that Medieval Rus neighbors on the Roman Empire. The human civilizations are subjugated by a horde of humanoid aliens that prevent human civilizations from developing. The American regiment, staunch believers in Lincoln and abolitionism, first stages a democratic revolution to overthrow the feudal lords, and then an accelerated industrial revolution to produce modern weapons and fight off the alien horde.
The main series consists of eight volumes and an attempt to follow up in a twenty-years-later setting. The story spans several decades, tracks dozens of characters, involves a rapid advancement of military technology, and traverses over complex geography by land, sea, and air. Of course, it is easy to spot social, political, historical commentary, and undoubtedly I would have picked up different or deeper themes had I encountered the book today. But I was a teenager. I was very fond of the actual plot, anchored by the emotional climax of each book. Several times I proudly recited the story arc of eight books in a rehearsed one-hour monologue to semi-willing listeners. Pro tip: don't do this on a date.
What strikes me today is not the plot details or the political commentary, but the sheer fact that I was able to remember the whole story and recite it. These days, people close to me notice my bad memory: I keep forgetting events, people, movies, conversations from just several days or even hours ago. It usually leads to a humorous effect, and if the fact is important to someone other than myself, people would remind. Ironically, this helps me to not hold grudges as I quickly forget minor misgivings of others. The major ones, ones worth cutting a person from my life, hold on tight to my brain. Or I write them down.
It is very hard to judge quantitatively whether my memory has gotten worse or there are just more events happening to me per unit time. In a way, I would need to gather data about the very process of loss of data. Memory and forgetting is one of the first subjects of experimental psychology, dating to the 1880s German experiments of Hermann Ebbinghaus, conducted on himself. Ebbinghaus taught himself sequences of nonsense syllables and after an interval of time checked his recall and the effort required to re-learn the sequence. He summarized the observed statistics in a so-called forgetting curve which inspired the flashcard based interval reminder strategy built into any language learning app today. In 2015 the experiment was faithfully replicated by a Dutch team with 70 hours of experiments on a sample size of n=1 learner (the second author of the paper). These experiments are so involved that it is hard to compare different people by their memory. Yet, some forgetting is normal, and might even be an epistemic virtue, cleaning our mind of irrelevant details.
But some details are not irrelevant and are dangerous to forget. To remedy this, I structured my life as a constant dialog with text notes. The progress of my PhD research is recorded in (*checks notes*) 292 txt files with notes on meetings, ideas, derivations, drafts, revisions, and upset rants. Writing is therapeutic as it gets thoughts out of my head without throwing them out of my life.
I need to write things down so I remember them for later, and I need to write things down to forget them right now. I find myself rushing out of the shower or jumping before sleep to write down a few more lines, even if they sometimes amount to a banana peel being larger than a banana. Writing for myself is easy because I can ignore typos and capitalization and fill all those in later if a text needs to be revised. As a side benefit, this mode of operation releases writing inhibitions: if you write constantly, if you stare at a proverbial blank page 4-5 times a day, none of those are special or intimidating anymore.
My technical solution for note-taking evolved over time. In my luddite undergrad days I relied on paper Moleskine notebooks in which I would scribble in classes, trains, and planes, and into which I would hand-copy the street map of the relevant neighborhoods of Madrid. In grad school I had a loosely structured stack of text files, but I always had to remember which folder to look in - is it my main dissertation research or a side project or an outreach gig? In recent years I switched to Evernote, a dedicated piece of note-taking software with a transparent subscription-based business model and a contained data ecosystem.
Evernote can snip recipes from web pages, scan business cards, do optical character recognition, sync up with the cloud. But the most amazing function, and the one for which other users sing most praise, is search. Instead of searching the collective wisdom of the internet, I search my own individual wisdom. I have fingertip access to everything I wrote down in the past five or so years (yes, the txts are imported too) through just a handful of keywords. Somewhere along the way, I evolved a notation: I for Idea, Q for question, T for task. A few more little features like strike-through or bold font, or a to-do list of checkmarks, and my stream of consciousness turns into an action plan and a self-filling progress report that I don't need to recall anymore.
A special place in my life as a theorist is reserved for LaTeX notes, which are not very Evernote-able. This is the purgatory of derivations, this is where they sink into obscurity or soar into implementation. I believe that to truly understand a piece of math, especially one you invented, you need to write it at least three times, and the LaTeX notes fill in the second of those, after pen-on-paper brainstorming and before a manuscript. LaTeX notes are immediately shareable for other people to check your work, and hard-coded dates provide immediate evidence for any contribution disputes in collaborations, if you have the kind of collaborators that believe in evidence.
I recently had to do something novel and intellectually challenging. With a great surprise I discovered several thousand words of notes from a week-long workshop half a year ago, on that precise task. My notes have many more blog posts that I started writing (and a few that I finished writing and abstained from publishing). I even have a note called Little Red Book for science questions that I would like to pursue one day. I am endlessly grateful to the past me, the one I forgot.
P.S. I first read the licensed translation of Lost Regiment into Russian that covered the first six books. Several years later, an official translation for the seventh book appeared, ending in a cliffhanger, but the eighth one was nowhere to be seen. Circa 2010, an unsung Russian pirate with no access to the English hard copy used a combination of speech recognition on the audio book and the Search in Text function on Amazon to reconstruct the full text and translate it himself. This naturally was very meticulous and took him a very long time. One of the most impressive examples of pulling a camel through the eye of a needle that I have seen. I later tracked down the ninth book in English on the shelves of the MIT Science Fiction Society, a venerable institution with no less impressive labors.