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How Darwin Managed His Inbox
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."
Many of the posters here are say in various ways, "Big Deal, they responded to mail the way we respond to email, so what?". But it is an interesting finding.
But there are many components of the analysis that need to be understood. First, assuming that the mail was from their celebrity period then we should ask does pre-email celebrity present a parallel to email in terms of unsolicited incoming messages. If so does it present a way of trying to manage it.
Second, the fact that people in the pre-email days are responding to the same kind of fractions as we are with email then we can try and understand if email is a complete parallel for regular mail. In which case many things follow, for exampl the question about whether the "massive" penalties for mail interference should be extended to email.
Then we could think about the social impact of mail. Is the proportion of responded email a "guilt" thing or a measure of the relevance of the mail. In otherwords do we reply to X% of our mail because to do less makes us feel bad and if we bump up the number of incoming does the amount of responding increase, or do we settle for a lower X.
These are all interesting questions and historical data from a parallel, perhaps corellated, source is a worthy place to do analysis.
"The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."
Beisdes that, since they were nerds, what other type of intercourse could they get?
Oh, to the contrary, Einstein was quite the ladyman:
Einstein wanted and enjoyed the company of women, and his intellectual celebrity certainly wouldn't have hurt his chances with the socialites of Berlin or, later, the women of America. The relationships rarely lasted, however - usually once they were established, Einstein cooled off and looked elsewhere. Avoiding deep emotional ties in this way may have given him the solitude he needed to pursue his work, but few would find such behaviour admirable.
(source)
I don't know about Bohr, though.
"Oh, a lesson in not changing history from Mr I'm-my-own-Grandpa." - Dr Hubert Farnsworth
On "Selected Letters on Evolution and Origin of Species", it is interesting that some of the letters really have a conversation "sequence", considering the long "latency" time between each packet. This was specially true during Darwin's trip, but also when he was at home.
Something like we will experience when exchanging emails with colonies on other planets or solar systems: You write, and your grandson gets the answer.
When a quick response was expected, they'd send a messenger and ask that recipient answered by return mail (and the messenger would wait for the answer to be written).
Also, something as easy as sending an article you wrote for a friend to review (attach/send today) would require that someone hand-copied your writings or that you send the only original and wait for it to come back with the review. You didn't keep a copy on your "sent items".
In the book, Darwin's son says his father was troubled by the chore of processing mails, and spent a lot of time just doing that.
Those were the times.
Unfortunately, scientists say there's no evidence of "feathered dinosaurs".
Eric