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People who can't give up paper

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Re: People who can't give up paper

#151

Post by travanx »

We do Civil Engineering and I have stacks of notebooks of calculations and decided I wanted to try using an ipad and stylus. Using Goodnotes, I can organize by job and create a new notebook for each plan check by date. Really enjoying not using a notebook every year as the paperwork was just getting out of hand, plus much more organized. I still use an RPN calculator, but slowly switching to spreadsheets. In this case digital works a lot better for me.

For archiving, some cities still have pen drafted mylar that sits in vaults. If you want to revise plans, go to City, check out the mylar with your life, use a razor blade to edit, pen with permanent ink and send back into the vault. New plans are plotted, but still to mylar.

With kids I am curious if they will learn how to handwrite. Will schools even teach how to read handwriting? Some interesting stuff as more goes digital and type printed.

Pen, Pencil, paper still has very great uses.

Re: People who can't give up paper

#152

Post by jmopp »

hoseja wrote: post #132
clnq wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pen and paper doesn't have many failure modes. Put it in a fireproof safe, and it will outlive most digital media. No hacker in a foreign country will steal it, no one will encrypt it, no cloud provider will lose it, and no government will read it, no SSD will byte-rot it. There's really not much to be said against pen and paper.

Modern paper will disintegrate over time, something with acid.

Most printer-paper you can buy in a shop is acid-free. I still have high-school printouts from 20 years ago that show no signs of degradation. I don't think any of my own digital assets have survived from 2003 — granted I was a teenager at the time, so I did not engage in the greatest archival practices. But see the comment above: all you need to preserve paper is to make sure it doesn't get damaged, and simply eyeballing it will confirm whether or not it has.

Re: People who can't give up paper

#153

Post by jjav »

deafpolygon wrote: post #127
jjav wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> git/cloud/external drive backups, you are unlikely to lose them I can guarantee with total certainty that github & cloudprovider & your external drives will not exist in 200 years. Probably not even in 50. If you want to leave anything at all (photos, documents) for your grandchildren to see, how would you do it?

How Gen A does it; cloud drive shared to your kids.

Right, which will go away as soon as cloudservice discontinues that feature or the company disappears. That is far from a long-term solution.

Re: People who can't give up paper

#154

Post by ramses0 »

foobarian wrote: post #37
TheCapeGreek wrote: post #27

Sometimes I want to get more into paper, so I have an excuse to buy pretty notebooks. I do that about once a year and never end up using it right now. Secondarily, hearing about our risks of EMPs from solar flares (or even in war scenarios), or in case of electrical grid collapse (a not-impossible scenario in some countries), paper is the only way I'll have survival knowledge available to me.

My favorite indulgence is high quality thesis-like paper. Archival quality, with nice cotton fibers. Pair with some nice ink nibs or fountain pens... ahhh

Look for a ream of short-grain (bookbinding) paper. Other option is a ream or stack of 11x17 and have it yourself. Even a bit thinner it tends to be nice for writing.

Re: People who can't give up paper

#155

Post by Tomte »

throwaway87651 wrote: post #136
gorgoiler wrote: post #69

Bound lab books with printed numbers on the pages are, I am led to believe, at the forefront of any technical defence of a patent or discovery. You just can’t fake ‘em. This is why I record all my ideas in a lab journal — a cargo cult it may be but we’ll see who’s laughing when I finally invent homomorphic encryption / perpetual motion / alchemy!

That's no longer true. The US used to use "first to invent" to determine patent rights, but it was changed to "first to file" in 2013. It's no longer necessary to prove when you first invented something, it's now just a matter of checking filing dates. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_to_file_and_first_to_i...

It can still be useful to prove prior use, though. It doesn't invalidate the patent, if unpublished, but let's you keep using it.

Re: People who can't give up paper

#156

Post by forgotmypw17 »

For me, paper helps a lot with proofreading. I can proofread on the screen all day, but the best edits happen once I print it out and start using a pen. I generally go through several iterations of this before a paper or story is done.

Re: People who can't give up paper

#157

Post by neuralRiot »

II2II wrote: post #131
fragmede wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fireproof safe's, aren't. A thief could steal it out of your house, you can't access it on the go, it'll get water damaged and mold and rot. The ink will fade. You won't have a drive to read the floppy disk/CD-rom/DVD/USB-A flash drive. You can't grep it and unless you meticulously organize it, it's a jumbled pile of unopened envelopes. Cloud and digital isn't the be all and end all, but there are plenty of problems…

Mold is a failure mode for floppy disks and water is a failure mode for many electronic storage media or the tools we use to read them. I suspect that many people associate durability with electronic media simply because it becomes obsolete so rapidly that we don't experience it in the same way. We don't know whether that dusty floppy disk or CD-R is readable since we disposed of our last computer with a drive, or we…

> I suspect that many people associate durability with electronic media simply because it becomes obsolete so rapidly that we don't experience it in the same way.

Or probably because paper or other media has already stood the trial of time, there are some papyrus dating around 2500BC that’s more than 4000 years ago, now think if any of the tools needed for current media will be available 4000 years from now.

Re: People who can't give up paper

#158

Post by twobitshifter »

FalconSensei wrote: post #5
dzonga wrote: post #3

I support paper notebooks compared to the e-forms. I can bet a notes written today in a paper notebook - would be accessible 200+ years from now. compared to notes written in some notebook app. whether inaccessibility is due to data damage, lost passwords etc. whereas with a notebook as long as it's not damaged by fire. it should be good. also invest in waterproof paper notebooks i.e stone-paper.

> I can bet a notes written today in a paper notebook - would be accessible 200+ years from now. compared to notes written in some notebook app I think it's the opposite, at least if you use obsidian or just md files. With paper notes, they can get lost more easily, there are no backups. In many countries, termites are a real problem (tell that to my damaged comic books and magic cards). If you use md files (which ar…

I’m trying to imagine a future where historians pour over modern day Leonardo’s markdown files.

Re: People who can't give up paper

#159

Post by roryisok »

> real paper made from trees is still considered crucial to countless businesses and government systems globally, despite the environmental impact of producing it. For decades, computers, smartphones and tablets have provided an alternative.

Is the impact of printing a paper navigational chart really higher than replacing that chart with an electronic device?

Re: People who can't give up paper

#160

Post by sl0tr4cer »

hnthrowaway0315 wrote: post #112
gspencley wrote: post #17

I've worked in tech as a software engineer developing web applications for 25 years and I'm one of these people. For note taking, I prefer pen and paper. For diagramming and brainstorming, I prefer a physical whiteboard. For non-work related scheduling, I prefer marking things on the physical calendar hanging on my wall... or sometimes I'll reach for a post-it note. For bills, I prefer that my company mail me a paper…

Same. I have tried a few tools but none beat taking notes on paper. You immediately get to mix text, tables and pictures. You can do it however you want. You can arrange it however you want. Nothing beats this. Digital tools might be good at organizing old notes but I feel it is not necessary most of the time.

I have found the physical act of writing, and this is borne out by research, helps me retain what I have just taken down.
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