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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.
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.
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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,
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Lawyer
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To Albert Einstein,
Gr0w ur p3n1s with ...
Was not replied to.
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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.
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?"
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
http://home.pacific.net.au/~t_rout/Gravity%20waves .htm
All peoples should be exceedingly surprised to learn that Einsteins' concept of TIME, which he assigned as the 4th Dimension, and the speed of light are one and the same. It means by altering either one then the other one must remain unchanged; be declared a constant. Einstein could have made TIME the constant and the speed of light alterable. I will demonstrate this by using a high speeding spacecraft in which the speed of light within the spacecraft has halved to 150,000 k.p.sec. then the TIME, it is relative to, has to be made Stationary Time the constant and the speed of light alterable. We could use our, not so quite, stationary TIME on Earth. Now I will do it the other way by making TIME in the spacecraft as the variable and halving it, but the speed of light MUST become the constant and be related as 300,000 k.p.sec., which is the common everyday way it is stated, explained, understood and taught. What I have now done is to prove and explain more easily that I had and have proven the Speed of light is ALTERABLE. It is under my non-exclusive copyright.
A decade or more ago I stated Black Holes should be stationary. I also stated the speed of light within Black Holes has slowed and the previous paragraphs' data proves I had and have proven my statement was true and correct. With Black Holes being stationary then the speed of light within them is relative to Stationary Time making the speed of light slower due to the Black Holes massive mass and the resulting massive gravity. The speeding spacecrafts' mass increases with its' speed increasing. So an increased mass causes an increase in gravity and a slower TIME or rather a slower speed of light.
A major problem has been that the World Science Establishments, Educational and Political Systems and the colluding Media Establishments wrongly believing that the speed of light is unalterable. All this would be of great surprise to the World Science Establishments and an enormous surprise for the public to know of their surprise due to Science, Scientists and Physicists Internationally not understanding Relativity. They all have not understood Einsteins' Relativity since it's release in 1905. Maybe Spacetime's 4th Dimension being defective and deficient can take some of the blame, but only part of the blame for it is their weak minds and poor reasoning powers and arrogance that is at fault. I again have demonstrated and proven my Intellectual and Scientific superiority and again I am being denied credit, recognition, and public awareness so depriving me of financial remuneration which hinders and stops me from getting my major Fusion and Space projects underway in Australia with International involvement. The Media deceives and confuses the Public of the credibility of my achievements with its' silence.
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof which this margin is too small to contain.
It's all relative.
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 ;)
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.