April 2011 Archives

In a library safeguarded by security officers and ubiquitous, motion-sensitive cameras, Young's dress is sharp but laid-back. He sports a worn-in pair of lightweight camel tennis shoes and a quotidian brown sweater. Young, in his mid-forties, is trim and animated. His boyish grin compliments the gaiety of blue eyes unstrained by decades of heavy reading. His forearms never rest; Young illustrates in the air as he speaks. The sunshine spilling into his office from floor-to-ceiling windows accentuates his chipper demeanor.

The honeybees' solution was to invent their own version of the college mixer. Males from many colonies gather within flying spaces called drone congregation areas (DCAs), typically 10 to 40 meters above the ground and upward of 30 meters across. Queens then make their way to the DCAs and inject themselves into this cloud of randy drones to mate on the wing with a number of them. The no-longer-virgin queen then returns to the hive for a lifetime of babymaking, the lucky but eviscerated drones fall from the skies, and the unsuccessful drones either try again at another DCA or go home to sulk.

If you're from the neighborhood, you can borrow up to five books for a few weeks for $1.00 apiece, a figure which Kipen admits is more of a suggested donation. But that's when something happens, he says. He'll lend the book to an adult, and sometimes they'll come back with their children; a teenager will return with his parents. The little wooden table at the center of the space can be populated by four different generations speaking four different languages, perusing everything from fine art coffee table books to Agatha Christie murders translated into Spanish.

The essence of the platform centres around anonymously posting both a location and description of an attractive person whom one has spotted.

Ultimately, The Silicon Jungle is a cautionary tale of how much power can slip into the hands of a single company - and the potential for abuse of that power - as we share more and more highly personal information over the internet. Web services that are seemingly provided gratis come at a price, Baluja shows. He explores just what can go wrong when young, brilliant - and immature - minds have free rein of people's most personal data.

Gibson also believes that a pinkish Norwegian school exercise book in the archive, which has a complete and previously unknown narrative, may in fact be a missing Wittgenstein gem - something talked about but never seen. "This may or may not be the missing item called the Pink Book or Yellow Book that scholars have long been hoping for." There is also a series of thousands of mathematical calculations in which Wittgenstein examines Fermat's little theorem. "It's an extraordinary, even bizarre, and yet original series of calculations," said Gibson.

Remarkably, the loss of a single factor, the DNA cytosine-5-methyltransferase 3 (Dnmt3) initiates queen development. Among the effects of Dnmt3 downregulation is a massive expansion of ovarian tissue, which allows a queen to fulfill its role as mother to the hive.

Finally, and I think most importantly, this is a collection, a library, that has been seriously, intelligently, brilliantly curated, so you get the best. Every touch is rewarded. That keeps you going.

For three years after the double-handprint decree of 1679 had been announced, when the Fifth had completely withdrawn from public life and knew his end was near, he gave Sangye Gyatso additional instructions: the Regent was to keep his coming death a secret. It was a ruse the Fifth had probably learned from the Bhutanese, who had done the same on the death of their leader, also a lama, thirty-one years earlier.

When the Fifth died in 1682 at the age of sixty-five, Sangye Gyatso duly informed the public that the Dalai Lama was in retreat. On the rare occasions when important visitors were allowed an audience, he enlisted an elderly monk of similar age and appearance to pretend to be the Fifth; the monk wore a large eye-shade, much like the current Dalai Lama, albeit for different reasons.

The deception was so effective that it was fourteen years before the Chinese Emperor realized he had been duped, and then only because some Mongolian prisoners of war mentioned reports they had heard in Lhasa that the Dalai Lama had died more than a decade earlier. By then the next Dalai Lama had been identified, educated, and established: a succession crisis had largely been avoided.

And because when you ask him his grandest aim, his most cherished ambition, what he really wants to be, he answers, without hesitation, is a "master of information."

Eric Schadt's the biggest thinker in biology, but meeting him sometimes feels like meeting Einstein and finding out that what he really liked about physics was the parties, like meeting Niels Bohr and having to look at his autograph collection.

"When I was interviewing for that job, the head of the company's research department said, 'You're either completely full of shit or the smartest person on earth. We're not smart enough to know. But we're willing to bet that you're the smartest person on earth.' "

What he said, in Eric's recollection: "You are of the devil. Leave and never come back." Eric's answer, of course, was to do the hardest thing he could think of doing, even after his mother called a year and a half later and invited him back into the fold. He went to UC Davis to get a doctorate in pure math.

A paradigm shift requires not only scientists practicing extraordinary science; it requires "attackers" and "persuaders" willing to declaim the end of the old order and announce the dawn of the new. Schadt has turned out to be both. He's very aware that biology is in the middle of a paradigm shift and very aware of his role in both the murder of molecular biology -- the king is dead! -- and the establishment of its successor.

He likes to do his supercomputing on planes now, because that's the one place where he's alone. [...] On cross-country flights he tells Amazon what data to crunch after takeoff, and for a few hundred bucks the job's done by the time he lands.

Privacy questions aside, I wonder how we might use something like this in libraries. What if we tracked usage of our resources better down to the patron level? We could then send patrons a notification each month that said something like this:

You used Academic Search Complete for 10 hours this month, and you used JSTOR for 7 hours. You downloaded 37 articles and complete 157 searches. This qualifies you to win a free coffee from the café. The average library usage time for a freshman at Ohio University is 21 hours, and the average G.P.A for those searching who used the library 28+ hours a week was 3.2 during the last quarter. Next month, the café will give free smoothies to those who spend more than 25 hours online. The total estimated value of the information you retrieved was $2,176.00. Your total ResearchScore is 3718. Keep up the good work!

They're fetishizing old Underwoods, Smith Coronas and Remingtons, recognizing them as well designed, functional and beautiful machines, swapping them and showing them off to friends. At a series of events called "type-ins," they've been gathering in bars and bookstores to flaunt a sort of post-digital style and gravitas, tapping out letters to send via snail mail and competing to see who can bang away the fastest.

Because the author uses the fax as his primary mode of written communication, the archive preserves both outgoing and incoming parts of the conversation. Correspondence includes letters to and from Beckett, as well as the artists/writers Pedro Almodovar, Sophie Calle, William Corbett, Don DeLillo, Jonathan Lethem, Sam Messer, Michael Ondaatje, Philippe Petit, Rick Moody and Jonathan Safran Foer.