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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."
But how many Rolexs did each of them buy via special offer correspondance, and did anything that turned up in the post make their wife any happier?
Yea... But come on - how many of them asked him to sign up for a credit card...
He used Evolution, of course.
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.
Yay! I'm like, Einstein!
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.
They used the cost of postage as a spam filter.
If I could charge spammers the cost of a stamp for each spam I received, I'd be quite happy.
the heading threw me off. i was thinking some kind of new spam filtering technology in which good emails with non-spammy qualities get through to the inbox. i imagined a darwinian inbox that shrinks on it's own as crapy messages are deleted in favor of good ones. guess i gotta stop smoking early in the morning.
This is just celebrity research. So Darwin and Einstein handled paper mail like we handle electronic mail. Guess what? I handle paper mail that way too. I bet most people do, and pronbably always have. The article doesn't talk about that, however.
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
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
To Albert Einstein,
Gr0w ur p3n1s with ...
Was not replied to.
[% slash_sig_val.text %]
Umm, so they both sent and received mail. Both only replied to some of the mail they got? ME TOO! I wonder what else we have in common. Perhaps they enjoyed watching The Simpsons in their underwear as well.
Thats what it takes to get a story on MSNBC these days?
you should read everything on the internet as if it had "but I'm probably talking out of my ass" appended to it.
Most of Einstein's mail was probably from a crackpot claiming Relativity was a hoax and that in all the months he'd been writing to Einstein, Einstein hadn't provided a reply he liked.
Who ordered that?
What is the point of saying he responded to "only" 32% of the letters. Many communications I get in email do not warrant a response. Granted, it's quite simple that I will respond with a "thanks" message. But if it were sent in a letter, I don't think I would bother to write (literally) back with an acknowledgement if it didn't extend the context of the message.
From TFA:
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.
Fortunately, no-one's noticed that I got the energy wrong... It's out by a factor of 10^3 because I used m=1 in E=mc^2, which is, of course, a kilogram, not a gram.
D'oh.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Beisdes that, since they were nerds, what other type of intercourse could they get?
How many of those, though, were really just multiple parts of a 'conversation'?
I know I can rack up dozens of emails when I start using it like an IM service. However I doubt Einstein would write something like "So, what time do you want me to come around on Friday?" and then wait for a reply before continuing with "and do you want me to bring anything?"
I'd like to see the real statistics involved (number of letters in various times to reply). It sounds like it might be a power-law distribution, but with coverage this lame, it's hard to tell.
Media that can be recorded and distributed can be recorded and distributed.
-kfg
Imagine how much more you'd receive if paper and delivery were free?
At least with snail mail spam, you know someone's invested some real coin to get it to you. When was the last time you received an offer for a Rolex, or a "warning - your mailbox has a virus" or a "get lots of porn for free" offer in your snail mail?
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
And unbeknownst to historians, Darwin invented the first spam filter, based on his patented Natural Selection algorithm.
It's all relative.
He didn't....
;-)
Monkeys don't have thumbs!
DEAD DEAD DEAD DELETE ME
i just compared the amount of spam i get "snail-mailed" to that i get by email: i get like 1 letter (usually bills or finacial stuff) every other day, but i get about six "spam-snail-mails" a day. that's a ratio of 1:12 - looking at the emails i got this week i have to say that my elecronic inbox doesn't recieve that much spam: i got 332 "normal" emails since monday, plus 150 spam mails - ratio 2:1! my email inbox receives 24 times less spam than my postal inbox. i'm pretty sure the "survey" did not take the amount of spam einstein and darwin recieved into account - and im absolutely certain that they too did get spam-mails... (THAT survey would actually be much more interesting!)
I think the assumption that each of the 14,500 letters he sent was a response to one of the 16,200 he received might not be correct ;)
In other news, historians have discovered that both Einstein and Darwin favored the Non-simultaneous Leg Insertion method for putting on their pants - much like you and I.
..what emails they would get.
"Mr Einstin,
plz xplain theori of relativaty 4 me as i hav midterm 2morow morn and i skipd all my classs 2 hang wiv a gurl in my dorm(i culd giv u her myspace lnk if u wan??? she has nudez up lol).
thx,
killin_burd9123"
Study suggests modern e-mail habits similar to older, letter-writing ones
It's almost as if modern e-mail was created as an electronic replacement to mail!
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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."
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.
Letters, you mean. Letters. Oh how I once fought against the term "an email" to refer to a singl "electronic letter". I've come to accept it, but I refuse to let people start saying things like "I got a mail yesterday".
According to both of your wiki links, Darwin and Wallace had no knowledge of Matthew and Wells. People had been hypothesizing about all of this biodiversity, including ideas resembling evolution by natural selection, since the ancient Greeks. Darwin was the first to take these vague ideas and tie them together with his observations from the Beagle voyage, combined with the gradualist theories of contemporary geology and come up with a unified and fairly complete method for how evolution worked. Then he sat on, er, "polished" it for years until Wallace sent him a letter (Hey, look something on topic in my post.) with some of his ideas regarding natural selection, prompting Darwin to get off his butt and publish. The importance of Darwin's work was that it gave a _why_ to biology.
Since then, of course, natural selection theory has been subject to many changes, ther biggest probably being punctuated equilibrium, but still stands as the foundation of modern biological thought.
"Bugger this, I want a better world." - Jenny Sparks
> How many of those, though, were really just multiple parts of a 'conversation'?
Most I would think, but the length and content of them would probably read like miniature essays.
My great grandfather corresponded with Darwin about chicken breeding. They exchanged about ten letters on the subject. Darwin's replies are in my aunt's cupboard and she showed them to me a few years ago. What's striking about them is that they are so densely written. The syntax, the length of sentences and the overall style seemed to me to be very labour intensive given the fact Darwin was not corresponding with a fellow scientist, but an enthusiastic hobbyist in the form of my great grandfather.
I don't think you can simply look at the numbers of letters and make a conclusion about the time or effort expended per day writing. Reading them shows you what an immense amount of intellectual power went into producing them.
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
Because 7 8 9 of course. Ba dum bum!
(I've always wondered if 9 was satiated by 7...)
If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.