It’s a strange feeling going into a new calendar year without a transition to a new Hobonichi planner. I’ve been writing about Hobonichi use almost yearly when I switch to a new planner book for the new year. But this last year’s book now sits on a shelf, just half filled and I’m not in transition mode.

These Hobonichi Years

As I’ve written about before, the Hobonichi has served as a planner in the most literal sense. Most mornings, I record the day’s appointments and essential tasks to accomplish whether errands or work deadlines. In the spaces around the calendar, I take some notes or some observations as impromptu journaling. At this point, it’s been about 10 years of using the Hobonichi to organize my days, weeks and months.

Over the years, I’ve been troubled a bit using the standard, small A6 size Hobonichi. While the page is too small to hold notes in addition to calendar events, many of the pages remain blank because the usual routine has been interrupted by travel, holidays or other events. Sometimes I’d use those blank pages as journaling space, but mostly they were dead weight. In the same way, most of the pages from past and future months weren’t really relevant since my focus was on the day and the calendars which served as longer range planning tools. In general, the planner was used in the morning and only rarely consulted once the day’s planning was done. It was a case of planning the work but then getting into a calendar driven day, not a case of working the plan.

After I started a separate Bullet Journal, I saw the value of journaling the day’s activities. I included some longer form journaling including reading notes on. I eventually moved the reading notes to a separate notebook plus the Kindle Scribe.

Between the Hobonichi, Scribe and Bullet Journal, I was lacking a way to incorporate Getting Things Done style lists into the journals. I tried pages in the Bullet Journal, but flipping pages to find this list or that plan seemed awkward. I thought about upsizing my Hobonichi to the larger A5 size, but realized that would provide some room for brief notes, but not for other content such as lists and notes.

Moving to a Ring Binder

I realized the reason it was hard to integrate reference material into a Bullet Journal was the linear, bound character or a Journal. Whether the Hobonichi, Bullet Journal, or Reading Journal, these books seem destined to be filled from to back and browsed that way- flipping through the days to review recent events and planning for days to come. There are good work arounds with indexes and tabs to note where the

While I had never tried it, I recalled that one of the basic setups for GTD systems going way back to analog days is a ringed binder. It’s easy with a binder to move pages around, replace pages when updated or full, and create sections based on project or context. Prior to digital devices like the Palm Pilot, I used a Franklin Covey ringed binder as a planner. Even in Medical School, my “peripheral brain” was a binder filled with protocols, drug doses and medical reference.

Plotter Journal

I’d been intrigued by the Plotter Journals that had been introduced to the US a few years ago by Midori, a company whose paper products I’ve used in the past. These are upscale (that is to say pricy) binder and refills that come as 6 ring binders in sizes ranging from A5 to pocket size.

For the last six months I’ve used an A5 Plotter as my daily notebook for planning, basic bullet journaling and capturing GTD lists of Next Actions. The system is still under development since some note taking is clearly better suited for the linear journal that a bound notebook provides.

The plotter sits by my side while working, allowing me not only to plan, but to record against the plan so that I can see more clearly how I spend my time and how I can adjust to ensure that I use time productively.

In my organizational system, these images go in the “Intimate Landscape” folder. It’s a term I first saw describing Eliot Porter’s work. As I walk through the landscape, whehter its surburban, a city, or a trial in the forest or park, I look for these little assemblages that remind me of still lives. An arrangement of shop and gesture is all, created by the light.

In his book, How I Make Photographs, Joel Meyerowitz describes how creating a group of representative photos for a project help keep the project alive and on track by providing a prompt to think about what’s working and what’s not as well as where the project can go. A photographer doesn’t have a book manuscript generally, they have a big body of work with developed themes and projects. Shows and publications are the product of the work, very unlike the act of sitting at a keyboard and typing out the product.

These intimate images are a constant theme of mine, an endless source of motivation to see potential photographs out in the world. Better to see and have a camera ready, I’ve found.

I’ve been diving deeply into an exploration of Jaynes and Polya’s exposition of probability as plausible reasoning. It appears to be at the core of how our brains model the mathematics of probability, which Polya calls “the long range frequencies of mass phenomena”. To us, this process of induction by which we understand the world is “plausible reasoning” where we evaluate conjectures of all types and assign them credibility in between absolute truth and falsehood.

It’s been fruitful but a long project that’s taken up the time I have for this particular project of Deciding Better. But it was where, in my book manuscript, I felt I was not doing justice to the link between probability theory and human judgment.

I’m coming to the end of the process of summarizing my detailed notes on the Polya books. Next I’d like to revisit some of the fundamental neuroscience of decisions and be sure that I have that solidly grounding in this idea of probability as plausible reasoning.

I know I’m getting toward the end of this deep dive because other areas are grabbing my attention, since recent events in the world have me think once again about the ecology that is created by an individual both living within and shaping their information environment. The stir created by Bob Sapolsky’s new book denying the existence of free will. We’re about the same age and we had some good conversations back in the day, but he’s a way more interesting character than I’ll ever be.

Back making some images after some time away. Seems that my web host has really sped up their page serving for WordPress. Lots to catch up on at the computer.

I’ve always enjoyed reading the general audience books on physics and cosmology as a general way of keeping up with the broader scientific world. However, I was drawn to Thomas Hertog’s On the Origin of Time based on it’s promise to bring some kind of evolutionary point of view to the origin of the universe and explain this improbably situation we find ourselves in where the laws of physics and the constants are so finely tuned to creating a universe where life can exist.

One potential explanation of our improbable situation is that of a multiverse, where many different versions of the universe exist, but of course we can only find ourselves in a particular one that can support us and our observation.

Hertog throws around many concepts related to natural selection, such as variation and path dependence, where particular accidents become central to our history only because they lie in our path. We know in biology, it is useless to ask why this and not that, in general. We see a particular vertebrate body plan because that’s the plan of successful ancestor from whom we and all other vertebrates descended. Clearly there are other potential paths, which we see in the very different brain and limb organization of insects and cephalopods. But asking why we don’t have 8 tentacles but an octopus does is a meaningless question.

We’re left with studying the path that brought us to this point. Prediction is impossible, we can only delve into the past to understand the accidents that led to us here and now.

But this kind of mapping of the freezing of physical laws is a real stretch.

This meta-evolution has a Darwinian flavor, with its interplay of variation and selection playing out in the primeval environment of the early universe. Variation enters because random quantumjumps cause frequent small excursions from deterministic behavior and occasional larger ones.Selection enters because some of these excursions, especially the larger ones, can be amplified and frozen in the form of new rules that help shape the subsequent evolution. The interaction between these two competing forces in the furnace of the hot big bang produces a branching process—somewhat analogous to how biological species emerge billions of years later—in which dimensions, forces, and particle species first diversify and then acquire their effective form when the universe expands and cools to ten billion degrees or so. The randomness involved in these transitions means that, just like the Darwinian evolution, the outcome of this truly ancient layer of cosmic evolution can only be understood ex post facto.

I don’t find this very illuminating. In evolution we have pre-existing variation. The variations that are stable in their environment persist into the future, which we call selection or fitness, but really is no more than stability. Hertog is positing not pre-existing variation upon which selection can operate, but more of a wandering around between states that eventually is frozen.

Now the idea of the path dependence is clear. And clearly it makes no sense to ask why the Planck Constant has the value it does if it was just frozen into place in the early universe, but Hertog offers no reasons for why those particular values that can support complex biology got frozen in other than to say that we are here, those are the values, and there is no final theory to be found.

I was hoping that Hertog had some explanation of why, during that early variation of the laws of physics, states that could support more complexity might survive and get baked in compared to sets of laws that lead to a quick recollapse of the early universe or a flat, uninteresting universe without large scale structure of galaxies and planets.

It seems to me there must be something to this idea that complexity is more stable, so it is understandable that we find ourself in this kind of universe. An immediate recollapse seems rather pointless. Our lives on the this rock moving through space asks us to find a reason for our existence here.

No idea is really bad, unless we are uncritical. What is really bad is to have no idea at all”

I’v just finished the first volume of George Polya’s books on how to solve problems, Mathematics and Plausible Reasoning, Volume 1: Induction and Analogy in Mathematics. I picked up these books, published in 1954 after Jaynes pointed them out as foundational in his book Probability Theory. Jaynes has a relative short, straightforward introduction to these concepts, but reading Polya is a delight because these books were aimed at helping math teachers guide their students into understanding how to do mathematics. As Polya points out through mathematical examples and problem sets, we solve problems by coming up with reasonable conjectures about the answer, exploring the consequences of the conjecture, collecting supportive or contradictory evidence, and some times coming to a certainty, a proof of the conjecture.

I’m still, in parallel, working my way through the Jaynes book. This all was triggered by my editing of the On Deciding . . . Better manuscript and realizing I needed to understand the basis of probabilistic reasoning. While Polya was interested in teaching mathematics and Jaynes was interested in correcting some of the errors of reasoning that had been introduced into the practice of statistics, I’m interested in how the brain performs it’s remarkable feats of inference, taking raw sensory input and creating an internal model that reflects the real physical world and the semantic world that we uniquely occupy as humans.

I’ll admit I’m in no hurry to complete these digressions into probability and plausible reasoning, but I do want to get onto another area that I don’t feel I fully grasp, the concepts of cybernetics and system control that were being expressed during the same period as Jaynes and Polya were working. Sadly, I think the lessons they learned were forgotten during periods of great advances in technology and biology, but have emerged again as relevant now that our technology has revealed to us that reductionism reaches explanatory limits when we deal with complexity and emergent phenomena.

These issues are at the root of my long interest in deciding better. Decisions would be easy if were not for the uncertainty we must deal with when the future is not predictable. Decisions would be easy if all values really were denominated in dollars. But our real world is complex and unpredictable. And our values are ill defined and full of conflicting principles. What is truly remarkable to me is that the brain deals with this uncertaintly seamlessly. And for the most part, chooses appropriate action that we understand only on reflection.

In 2023 so far, I’ve finished 23 books so far, 9 of which are non-fiction, the rest fiction. I just updated the Reading 2023 page to get it up to date. I’ve never kept such close track before, but the number seems about on par with my usual pace.

I finished Nefesh HaChaim last week, a project that began in November 2022. I read Hebrew plus English every morning for about 15 minutes, taking full notes on the book line by line. Lately, I added a short summary at the bottom of each page to facilitate review. I also filled my second notebook dedicated to the Jewish study of what we call Mussar, which is a path to self-improvement. Nefesh HaChaim is recognized as a somewhat mystical, philosophical book a man’s purpose and how to direct one’s life accordingly. Lots of what I think of as “celestial mechanics”, detailing the relationship between God, the spiritual worlds and our world of illusion.

My next book is a famous practical Mussar book, Cheshbon HaNefesh. Cheshbon means “accounting” and is a short methologicical book of how to improve and clarify the process of thought and create good habits of mind. These are both themes that have emerged as central to the idea of “Deciding Better”, so a very appropriate read at this point.

My attempted adjustment to read more nonfiction was a failure. Since reading Jaynes on Probability is real focused work, I thought I could add more non-fiction. I read through the very nice When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut which really straddles fiction/non-fiction, but then got stuck trying to read George Polya’s book Mathematics and Plausible Reaoning. I got the idea to read Polya from Jaynes and it’s a great read. It’s just too dense a read to be a leisure activity. So I need to tee up some more easy non-fiction reading in creativity or biography which was where I was going in the beginning of the year.

So it’s back to some nice fiction reading, having just finished Trust and starting Babel by R.F. Kuang.

There’s been a good bit more reading and looking in the realm of photography and image making, including a reread of Vincent Versace’s Oz books and the very nice How I Make Photographs based on Joel Meyerowitz’ online course. I found my notes on some photobooks I’d read a few years ago- also revisiting the notes and the books. I’ve learned a bit about my body of work, looking at images with a broader perspective, trying to get out of the Flickr photo stream state of mind.