A look at my notes

Image by paul+photos=moody via FlickrFor the purposes of my own interpretation of GTD and a couple of thoughts that were wanting to get into that process, I've looked at some of the notes I've been taking. Ouch! What is the point of a note without context. Even a date would be good. Although I would call it criminal to leave out the project.

Basically I've run through notes from 2006 through to now. The earliest notes are actually quite good in relating the topic and date. Just not in the reason for their existence. Of the nine months of notes from 2006, only about 10 days were worth keeping. That equates to a lot of pages that have at long last been tossed.

The more recent notes have definitely improved in terms of the relevance. Unfortunately it seems that is must have been intuitively obvious as to when they were written and against which project. I get to keep a lot more as reference, I'm just uncertain as to how to relate them to this world of references I'm creating for myself.

I now hope to take the following into account:

1. Context
1. Date of the event
2. What the notes refer to
3. Who else was there
2. Relevance
1. It must make sense
2. It must have a purpose

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Predisposed to Pessimism?

Image via WikipediaIt would seem that there is an inherent tendency towards a negative outlook within the universe.

There are basically 3 final states for the universe that depend on the space-time curvature. Each state ultimately has a rather unappealing end state.

In a closed universe the curvature is such that the universe does not have escape velocity. There will come a time when the expansion reverses and the great collapse begins. This is known as the Big Crunch. It could be that the universe will Big Bang again after the crunch but it is likely that the replacement universe will not have the same initial conditions and thus will not be the same place we know.

An open universe will continue to expand through eternity. It is likely to slow but will never reach a point where it stops expanding.

A flat universe's expansion will slow until it eventually reaches an equilibrium point. This will be a stable position. It was to attain this ideal that lead to Einstein's "greatest blunder".

Ultimately though a flat and open universe will suffer the same fate although the open universe will reach it first. When stars die, they release heavy atoms into the universal stew. Heavy atoms are not as good a nuclear fuel as the lighter elements especially hydrogen. This means that as the universe ages, the fuel available for stars does not burn as furiously as in the earlier universe. There is therefore a reduction in the energy generated.

Another consideration is that the basic elements of an atom also have a shelf-life even if it is a pretty long one.

The long term picture is not all that great. In one case everything goes splat and in the other everything eventually disperses in a haze of subatomic particles. Not a happy place.