Thinking about how to best use this blog.

When you look at my most read posts here you’ll find it’s all tool posts. The Hobonichi, the Plotter, Cameras, etc. It’s true of my blog reading habits as well. Reviews of software, stationary, cameras, etc. I have to presume this is universal since the tools cut across all of the other areas of interest which are much smaller- topics like decision theory, systems and neuroscience. Yet we know that these small niches are where dedicated audiences are built through consistent posting. I read blogs on AI safety, quantum mechanics and statistics. All of interest, but nothing directly useful to me.

I’ve long subscribed to the idea that the primary benefit of the act of creating art goes to the artist. So much work is thrown out before ever seeing the light of day and most art never finds much of an audience. While creating is an act of communication, whether through image, music or words, it’s the artist that speaks and the audience reacts. The process of creation is itself valuable to the artist. Also valuable to the audience if anyone is there to appreciate it.

In most of the arts, we create a body of work and seek an audience. I make images and share them in a variety of ways including here on the site. There was Flickr, now there’s Instagram but at this point, we’re without solid social media support for my kind of photography. Since I’m producing it anyway, I remain motivated to carry the camera and make casual images, although no longer so focused on the craft.

Now having nearly completed a 75,000 word manuscript about how the brain decides almost entirely outside of our awareness, I’m now learning that non-fiction publishing is definitely not art. In fact, I’ve finally come to realize that having completed a manuscript is a distinct disadvantage in the commercial publishing world. I think I was a bit taken in by the self-publishing industry which operates a bit like social media- getting creatives to make product for free then monetizing their effort with services and platforms.

Non-fiction publishing is very crowded and there are lots of books on the brain, lots of books on irrational decision making and while none are really similar to mine in form or content, the manuscript I’ve produced has clarified my thinking and provided lots of opportunity for research, but doesn’t have the kind of simple point that the industry is looking for. It seems most likely I’ll finish the edit, self publish electronically through a few channels and move on to the next project.

I’ve enjoyed having the room to fully develop ideas as I’ve found the short form of blogging to be limited as a way to tell big stories. I do want to publish here more once the manuscript is edited and out, possibly elaborating on the ideas in the book which can serve as a basis for the ideas that’ I’ve been exploring.

This gave me pause:

Why To Not Write A Book · Gwern.net:

So, a book is a lot of work for a writer, even if it is mostly already-written writing, which crowds out new writing or exploration, and which tends to freeze them in place. But it gets worse.
A book commits you to a single task, one which will devour your time for years to come, cutting you off from readers and from opportunity; in the time that you are laboring over the book, which usually you can’t talk much about with readers or enjoy the feedback, you may be driving yourself into depression .

It reminded me of why I spent over a year on a first draft of the ODB manuscript and now the better part of a year editing, rearranging, doing deeper readings and thinking, thinking, thinking. You see, I’m writing for me, not to pursue a new career as a published author. For a long time, I’m been frustrated with the blog format to outline complicated ideas in depth. I’d write a post, but I had trouble writing it to be self contained enough to stand alone as an essay. Or having to repeat background over and over across essays to provide the background to understand the underlying framework.

Clearly, the answer to these problems is the extended format we call a book. Where development of ideas can proceed step by step with enough room to dig a bit deeper. That was the impetus to collect the ideas into a single work.

What I didn’t expect, but should have known, was the enormous value to me as author in working through the process of explicitly laying out the ideas clearly enough that an interested reader with limited background could grasp the big picture. Explaining the ideas to a reader means that you have to understand them yourself. Can’t get away with half baked ideas and unjustified assumptions. Plus, as one thing leads to another, one discovers all sorts of implications and truths that the writing process uncovers.

Now I will admit, as Gwen points out well, is that there is a huge opportunity cost in communicating on a regular, more limited basis. So often I’ve thought about writing here, but the priority just isn’t high enough to put aside the current activity to spend even a few minutes on a brief post.

Let this post stand as the justification to myself of the choice of working on the manuscript for hours when I could be writing here.

I picked up my reserved Vision Pro yesterday morning and just had time to get it up and running at home before I needed to prepare for a business trip. So I won’t get anymore actual usage until Friday at the earliest. In the meantime, while there are some great reviews out there, here are a few quick observations I think are important.

• I don’t think its been fully realized that this is the first “halo” product for Apple. The demo slots were full at the store all day and the Apple employees all agreed that the Vision Pro was going to be driving store traffic like crazy just from those who are curious and want to check it out. One couldn’t demo Google Glass or any of the many generations of VR headsets. Apple stores have clearly driven sales and relationship with users. This is a big attraction and certainly will help move other types of products big and small even if most don’t actually buy this first gen product.
• The fit is fiddly. I had lots of light leak from the suggested face measurements and moved to a more narrow fit. But a fit I now realize is a better seal at the bottom, but not quite as comfortable.
• The video pass through is great to have as it prevents the claustrophobic disconnected feeling I’ve gotten with VR headsets. You have a setting in which the information is being projected. But it’s by no means Augmented Reality in that the video quality isn’t good enough to use for tasks in the real world while augmenting the activity with projected information. The interface, video and photos are shockingly clear and real. The real world is diminished. So if I were a surgeon, I’d need a video feed of the operating field to look at, not the pass through video. My impression is the EVFs (electronic view finders) on my cameras are better video, but then I never try to read text on paper through an EVF.
• The diminished quality of the real world and the astounding quality of the computed world is why for now this is device to immerse in, using the video pass through just for environmental awareness. If not using apps, looking at video, one would immediately want to take it off.
• And when you do take it off, it’s true that the real world seems somewhat diminished. I know that my iPad screen has the same resolution. It’s just removed. I’m in the real world, not immersed in it. The world of the Vision Pro is one of hightened immersion.
• And yes, we’ve been through this before. The Mac with a single floppy. The iPhone with no apps other than Apple’s. This is a better experience than we’ve seen before and will be interesting to see how it evolves.
• I’m thinking about the Vision Pro as “headphones for the eyes”. There’s a Steve Jobs video clip I’ve seen where he makes the point that headphones are a portable great sound system substituting for the room, speakers and big devices. The Vision Pro adds vision to that mix. It’s a display device with control by gesture. Nothing more or less.

Google Bard has added image generation. Here’s an example. Love the walnut brown eyes. Lousy bokeh.

Here’s the real thing. With feeling. iPhone 15 Pro Max

Quite a difference here in the real

It’s taken a while for the Kindle Scribe to find its place among my working tools.

As I discussed in my first take on the device, it’s a highly modal experience. There is a Library view of books and PDFs plus a Notebook view of, well, Notebooks. The Scribe was picked up and put down over and over until I understood its strengths and weakness.

Here how I’m using each mode for now.

Notebooks

Quite simply, the Scribe is an excellent digital facsimile of my usual fountain pen and notebook.

There are a few advantages to the Scribe in fact. The stylus never runs out of ink, although the device can run out of juice. I’d say charging is of the same frequency as refilling one of my Pelikan piston filling pens so it really just comes down to the fact the stylus lives with the Scribe while I often sit down and don’t have a pen at the ready. My fault, given how many pens I own. The writing experience on the Scribe is really paper like and reminds me why I never could use the iPad pencil for note taking. Plus, the scribe is the size of my favored A5 size notebooks, but light and rigid enough to write on standing or sitting away from a desk. Notebooks really need writing surfaces for use, a pad like the Scribe can be held with one hand and written on with stylus in the other. Lets just say that the Scribe lends itself to casual use.

In the hybrid analog digital model, the Scribe is digitizing the image of my handwriting in real time and frequently uploading the file for off device storage. If the Scribe is lost or destroyed, my notes are secure. Notebooks can be lost, misplaced or soaked in the rain. Fountain pen ink is water based, so a wet notebook is not only wrinkled, but often smeared to the point of uselessness.

Barring loss or damage, a notebook needs the extra step of digital capture by scanner or photo. I use GeniusScan when I want a digital version of a notebook. I’m selective, copying over handwritten notes that I want to revise as text files. But the PDF images of a notebook sit side by side with PDFs sent from the Scribe, so ignoring the extra step of the iPhone capture, the end result is the same.

My notebooks have a couple of hundred pages, so I’m selective about what I archive digitally. The Scribe has no way of being selective other than exporting a PDF of an entire notebook and deleting unwanted pages or dividing up the file into multiple topic specific PDFs. For now, I’ve settled on starting a new notebook every month, so there are exported Scribe PDFs in a journal folder in DEVONthink for reference. DEVONthink does handwriting recognition and allows searching for notebook contents. I love the fountain pen and notebook experience at my desk. If not for that, I might have switched over to the Scribe completely for this kind of note taking.

PDF Annotation and eBooks

PDFs can be sent through the Send to Kindle service. Though PDFs live in the library, their interface is like that of a Notebook since once the page opens, the natural way to annotate is to write on the PDF with the stylus. Choosing the highlighter gives a transparent way to color over the PDF like one would highlight a paper printout. However, a long press on the text of the PDF allows the more standard type of PDF highlighting with the option of adding a note. Unfortunately, at this point that note only accepts typed input, which is less than optimal on this stylus focused device. Export of PDFs show the handwritten annotations with the highlighted text and note text following the PDF.

eBook annotation is much better developed, where the highlighter choice for the stylus acts in the usual way to select and highlight text. But if you add a note, one can enter either typed text or handwriting. I hope that they bring this over to PDF notes as well. But as with PDF output, we get the highlighted text followed by the note- handwritten or typed. This PDF also nicely goes into DEVONthink where the highlighted text or the handwritten annotation can be searched. The experience here is nice enough that I bought a book through the Kindle store (Thomas Hertog’s On the Origin of Time: Stephen Hawking’s Final Theory) which I am now reading and annotating on the Scribe. So for some types of reading, the Scribe may move me back toward eBooks from physical books read with a notebook at the desk.

Summary

Like all the tools we have for reading and note taking, the Scribe is a product that excels for specific use cases. I’m using it for notes involving brainstorming and option exploration in a monthly journal format, knowing that these kinds of notes would be lost in a paper notebook system. I’m also reading, highlighting and annotating a book with handwritten notes, which solves one of my frustrations with the traditional Kindle format. Amazon seems committed to improving the software on the device, likely to make it more useful in the future.

Having gotten through Passover, routine is beginning to return. Reading has continued apace and I’ve finished the wonderful Saving Time by Jenny Odell. It’s more a meditation and memoir than standard non-fiction, a category I truly appreciate.

I’m focusing down to just two projects in the coming months moving into the summer, my notes on Jaynes and making images. I’ve made it through Jayne’s discussion of boolean algebra and have a much deeper appreciation of the relationship between logic and the aspiration for rationality in reasoning. While he only alludes to the subject here, I think his caution against “the mind projection fallacy” is very important. In math and logic, “is” has a particular, rather abstract meaning. Not so in common language usage and we like to use “is” to create equivalence between what really “is” and our beliefs, perceptions and mental models. It’s a trap that is easy to fall into.

This was one of those email on sale alert impulse purchases I make for Kindle Books from time to time. It looked like it would fit into my current theme of reading on creativity and craft. It turned out to be a great intuition.

This a 25th anniversary editon of what is called in the blurbs “a classic book”. Picture This is very simply a short, illustrated deconstruction of how some identifiable elements of an image (color, position in the frame, shape, distance from other objects) are interpreted by us emotionally. Since it’s a classic book and I readily agreed with almost all the observations, these truly appear to be universal, wired in aspects of brain function in interpreting the visual world. Often Bang takes exactly the kind of ecological approach I’d use, talking about why something would feel a certain way based on relationship or common experience without resort to theory or some evolutionary design concept. Quite simply, we can’t be sure how we got here, but here we all are. In fact, it would be interesting to know to what extent these observations hold true across cultures.

Right after I finished the book, I pulled up my public gallery in Flickr. It’s been a while since I actively used the app, but it’s a quick way to get an overview of my photographic work.

Looking at my work through the eyes of Bang’s book, it’s amazing how almost all of my images are restful, balanced and lacking tension. I chose this image from a few years ago as a good example. There are two objects in frame, the white paint square to the left and the remnant window sill on the right. There are the background gray and white color blocks. The main characters here are off center vertically, but balanced. They seem friendly as if they might be chatting with each other. Even though nothing is centered vertically, the greater weight of the dark object rests comfortably away from the picture edge and the the white square takes up the other side, getting close to the dark bar in its space.

Will my images change? Actually, I doubt it, given that this is how I see the world. Maybe more a reflection on me than on the art. Or both.

Number seven in the series, Slough House by Mick Herron is another great addition to this spy thriller series. Of course, if you’ve read any of the series or watched the AppleTV+ show, it’s character drama and commentary on post-cold war bureaucracy and politics. This book focuses particularly on the domestic politics of England.

I’ve realized through reading the series that by focusing on this outcast group in the spy world and their often inept efforts that are always successful ultimately, the books have a way of looking upwards into the corridors of power- both political and organizational. Like much good fiction, we get a pointed reflection of our times. This is what life was like.

One of the older posts here that continues to get some hits is a bit of a meditation on the photographer Eliot Porter, who was an influential early color landscape photographer who is now, I fear, largely forgotten, even though he was an important influence on landscape photographers and my own approach to the intimate view.

I had no answer at the time, but after finishing Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr, I felt like maybe I had a bit of insight into why some artists, while influential, are forgotten while others, influential or not, continue to be relevant. Cloud Cuckoo Land is very much a work of contemporary fiction. It is generally somewhat fantastic in its settings, plot and characters- shifting in time and space from ancient Greece to the fall of Constantinople to modern day and a future time, all tied together through the device of the Ancient Greek manuscript, Cloud Cuckoo Land. Most fiction today shifts scene and character point of view. Or makes narrative construction a central part of the experience in one way or another.

For some reason, it brought to mind James Joyce’s Ulysses, which I reread last year, and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, which I reread a few years ago, both influential books of my youth. But it seems to me that while Joyce is still celebrated and read, Pynchon is becoming another forgotten artist who was influential, but now seeming less interesting to read.

Perhaps one reason why artists like Porter and Pynchon fade is that those they influence, surpass them in the very areas in which they innovated. It’s clear that most landscape images taken by YouTube photographer influencers and now much better images than those Porter took. We have better capture methods, better exposure control and better post-processing tools than Porter had. On the other hand, I don’t think anyone has created the kind of majestic monochrome images that Ansel Adams made, keeping his work relevant for us. Sometimes doing it first means doing it so well that those that follow seem to be imitating. Others are surpassed by those that come after and so are forgotten as they were innovative and influential, but ultimately not of a quality that lasts.

Cloud Cuckoo Land seemed to me to take the tools of modern fiction and use them in a fun, somewhat hopeful way. The basic text is an absurd Greek fantasy of no great merit and the stories told that are spun from it similarly are comedies of no particular great merit. Yet the whole is a nice meditation on literature, stories, comedy and, perhaps best of all, is a compelling fun read.

I won’t judge it for the ages. That will depend on those that follow us.