Milam's Notes was originally inspired by Excerpts from the Notebooks of Lazarus Long, written by Lazarus Long, a fictional character in a Robert A. Heinlein science fiction story.  The story was Time Enough for Love, The Lives of Lazarus Long, © 1973.  I don't remember exactly when I first began Milam's Notes, but it must have been sometime during the early 1970s.  Anyway, when I began Milam's Notes, I intended for it to be the same sort of thing that Lazarus Long did in the story.  In recent years, I haven't added much to the collection.  Most of the thoughts that would otherwise have been added to the collection have, instead, gone into the Frontiersman, where they appeared as Stray Thoughts.  Excerpts from Time Enough for Love are available in The Sovereign’s Library, in the Main Directory, under Heinlein:  Some Comments and Observations by Robert A. Heinlein.

When I first began Milam’s Notes, I wrote the notes on 3 x 5 note cards.  There’s also a collection of hand-written 3 x 5 cards that eventually became  Another Compendium of Wit and Wisdom.  I still have those original cards.  Click here.  When I first transferred the collection from the original note cards onto 8 1/2 x 11 paper, using a typewriter, I organized them chronologically with the undated notes first.  The chronological order made it simpler to update the collection by simply adding new pages at the end.  Later, for some forgotten reason, I moved the undated notes to the end of the collection.  Some time after that, again for a forgotten reason, I revised the collection into reverse chronological order.  During the middle 1980s, I switched from a typewriter to a computer and reorganized the collection into topics.  With a computer, I could easily insert changes wherever I wanted them and reprint the collection.  Therefore, the chronological order wasn’t necessary any longer.

Milam’s Notes is still organized into topics but, within each topic, there isn’t any particular order to the notes.  I recall trying, for a while, to sort the notes rationally within the topics.  However, most of the notes are independent of one another, so any rational ordering of them within the topics is elusive.  Even putting a particular note into a particular topic can be somewhat arbitrary.  More recently, I’ve put the notes into whatever order in the topics would cause them to fit the pages the best.  That has changed from time to time as I’ve used later versions of the word processor, and later versions of the operating system.  Such later versions have often resulted in changes in the way that things fit on the pages.  The order in which the notes appear isn’t relevant anyway.  Read them in whatever order you want.

Occasionally, over the years, I’ve corrected the grammar, the punctuation, and the choice of words that I used in some of the notes.  I’m still doing so and will probably continue to do so.  However, for each such change, I try to make each revised note convey more correctly the idea that I’d originally intended when I first wrote it.  Also, I’ve occasionally removed notes that no longer seemed appropriate, sometimes in the light of more recent thinking.  That isn’t necessarily a good idea, since I’ve often quoted from Milam’s Notes in other documents.  It would be nice if the quoted note was still there, later.  Maybe I ought to stop removing notes, even if I no longer like them.  Anyway, Milam’s Notes isn’t as I originally wrote it.  Regarding such modifications of my own previous work, I distinguish myself from The Ministry of

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