Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

How Darwin Managed His Inbox

Posted by Zonk on from the not-easy-when-there-is-no-reply-all dept.

An anonymous reader wrote to mention an MSNBC article on how Darwin and Einstein managed their inboxes. From the article: "A new study finds that the correspondence of Albert Einstein, as well as that of Charles Darwin, followed patterns similar to modern e-mail communication. Einstein sent more than 14,500 letters. But he received more than 16,200, and responded to only a quarter of them. Darwin mailed more than 7,500 letters. He responded to 32 percent of the roughly 6,530 letters he received."

14 of 214 comments (clear)

  1. Spam? by strazzere · · Score: 5, Funny

    Yea... But come on - how many of them asked him to sign up for a credit card...

    1. Re:Spam? by MyIS · · Score: 5, Funny
      Hello, good sir!

      For an agre3able sum of 6 farth1ngs, You could be a happy recipient of Dr. Tomson's Fantastic Marriage Rev1ver 0il. The said amazing Substance is to be applied on Members involved; the forthcoming result may be hard to conceal even with a top hat, and your better half will quite soon be cured of that blasted Headache that has, undoubtedly, been plaguing the good woman every night for the past years.

      Caution: mis-use shall certainly ruin a dinner party.

      --
      http://zero-to-enterprise.blogspot.com/
  2. Darwin's Inbox? by falzer · · Score: 5, Funny

    He used Evolution, of course.

    1. Re:Darwin's Inbox? by Eric+Giguere · · Score: 4, Funny

      But how would he explain the existence of Thunderbird?

      Eric
      Read one of the best AdSense blogs around (runs on blojsom)

  3. Except they were doing real work... by LexNaturalis · · Score: 5, Funny

    It's much easier to read/respond to e-mail when you're slacking off at work and reading /. (not that I'd ever do that, boss!) but when you're on a boat studying birds on a far away island or working on important and complex physics problems it's a little more difficult to sit down and read through a letter and actually pen a response. The more interesting thing to note is that they actually did write 1,000s of letters that were probably well-written and well-formatted, unlike most modern e-mails (Or /. comments)

    However, if their letters had really been like modern inboxes, they'd be getting letters like "Is your chalk too soft? Take c1al1s to harden it up!!" or "Do you want to refinance your home, the Beagle?" or "Hot Physics action here!"

    --
    Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.
    1. Re:Except they were doing real work... by jiushao · · Score: 5, Funny

      Not to mention the time they spent circling around trying to find a mailbox on the Galapagos.

  4. Yay! by DonJoe · · Score: 5, Funny
    If you're like Einstein, you respond to some e-mails immediately and let others wait. And, of course, some you never answer.

    Yay! I'm like, Einstein!
  5. Dear Albert, by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    As a lawyer working for Bohr & Associates, we recently discovered the sum of 8*10^16 Joules held inside 1g of Uranium 237. If with your help, we can free this energy, through a fission reaction, you will receive 0.1% of it in the form of heat, which can be used to drive turbines.

    Wishing you long life,
    Asumemwe Obugo,
    Lawyer
    Nigeria

  6. They used the ancient mail filtering technique by tezza · · Score: 4, Funny
    Anything that started with:

    To Albert Einstein,

    Gr0w ur p3n1s with ...

    Was not replied to.

    --
    [% slash_sig_val.text %]
  7. I disagree by xdroop · · Score: 5, Funny
    The upshot: Einstein and Darwin exhibited a "fundamental pattern of human dynamics" that plays out every morning when you check your inbox.
    Nahh, it must have been Intelligent Design.
    --
    you should read everything on the internet as if it had "but I'm probably talking out of my ass" appended to it.
  8. This is inspired journalism... by rustbear · · Score: 5, Funny

    From TFA:

    If you're like Einstein, you respond to some e-mails immediately and let others wait. And, of course, some you never answer.

    In other news, if you're like Einstein, you eat breakfast early sometimes, sometimes you eat breakfast late. And, of course, sometimes you don't eat breakfast at all.

  9. besides that by Prince+Vegeta+SSJ4 · · Score: 4, Funny
    "Their timely responses to most letters show that they were both aware of the importance of this intellectual intercourse," Of course they were, they are respectively the most important Physicist and Biologist ever. If they had the intelligence to conceive their theories, it should be rather obvious that sorting their mail was not outside the realm of their wit.

    Beisdes that, since they were nerds, what other type of intercourse could they get?

  10. Response time by $RANDOMLUSER · · Score: 4, Funny
    > If you're like Einstein, you respond to some e-mails immediately and let others wait.

    It depends on how fast it's moving relative to my frame of reference.

    --
    No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
  11. Re:only? by xs650 · · Score: 4, Funny

    It's all relative.