O problema de Lineu

Many scholars, like the 17th-century chemist Robert Boyle, preferred to work on loose sheets of paper that could be collated, rearranged, and reshuffled, says Blair. But others came up with novel solutions. Thomas Harrison, a 17th-century English inventor, devised the “ark of studies,” a small cabinet that allowed scholars to excerpt books and file their notes in a specific order. Readers would attach pieces of paper to metal hooks labeled by subject heading. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the German polymath and coinventor of calculus (with Isaac Newton), relied on Harrison’s cumbersome contraption in at least some of his research. 

Linnaeus experimented with a few filing systems. In 1752, while cataloging Queen Ludovica Ulrica’s collection of butterflies with his disciple Daniel Solander, he prepared small, uniform sheets of paper for the first time. “That cataloging experience was possibly where the idea for using slips came from,” Charmantier explained to me. Solander took this method with him to England, where he cataloged the Sloane Collection of the British Museum and then Joseph Banks’s collections, using similar slips, Charmantier said. This became the cataloging system of a national collection.

A história do aparecimento de um revolucionário recurso para organizar a informação, que caiu em desuso no virar de milénio com a net.

Domingo no mundo (37)

Paul Child/ The Julia Child Foundation for Culinary Arts, Julia at her kitchen sink, Paris, 1952.

I learn by going where I have to go

Recursos Humanos

As I prepared to leave Princeton, I stacked my John McPhee books on the passenger seat of my car, and there were so many of them that the car thought it was a person and frantically beeped at me to buckle the seatbelt. Before McPhee said goodbye, he started to give me driving directions. Then he remembered about my phone. This reminded him of my trip down. How, he wondered, had I gotten to Princeton? What route did I take? What roads did I drive? He was curious to know how my phone had solved the problem of orientation, how its machine directions had differed from his human directions.

Unfortunately, I told him, I had no idea. I had hardly been paying attention. I just trusted the computer, followed its instructions turn by turn and spent my time daydreaming about this and that.

This answer did not satisfy John McPhee. He wanted to know the roads I took. Didn’t I remember anything?

I told him I remembered passing a water tower. At some point, there was maybe a reservoir. I searched my memory. There had been a sign that said “Fog Area,” after which everything got foggy immediately, as if the sign had summoned the fog. I remembered, on the radio, a D.J. named Clay Pigeon saying that scientists had successfully encoded a 19th-century film of a running horse into a living cell. At some point I hit traffic, and my phone rerouted me onto back roads. I remembered a very old stone house, the Johnson & Johnson headquarters, a park called “Sourland.”

Based on those scraps of information, McPhee was able to reverse-engineer my route.

“Very interesting,” he said. “That’s not the way I would have told you to go.”

Sam Anderson, The Mind of John McPhee.

Alguns dados curiosos acerca das laranjas

McPhee has built a career on such small detonations of knowledge. [...] Literature has always sought transcendence in purportedly trivial subjects — “a world in a grain of sand,” as Blake put it — but few have ever pushed the impulse further than McPhee. He once wrote an entire book about oranges, called, simply, “Oranges” [...]

Sam Anderson, The Mind of John McPhee.

Domingo no mundo (36)

Ingrid Bergman e George Sanders ao sol durante Viaggio in Italia de Roberto Rosselini, 1954.

Didion's point

Over time Didion realized that the myth of the West was Janus-faced. On one side was the heroic pioneer, capable of bending the landscape to his will. On the other was the lonesome wanderer, who could appreciate her insignificance on a geological scale. In a review of Norman Mailer’s The Executioners Song, Didion applauded Mailer for capturing “that vast emptiness at the center of the Western experience, a nihilism antithetical not only to literature but to most other forms of human endeavor, a dread so close to zero that human voices fade out, trail off, like skywriting.” But those voices don’t disappear immediately. As she read Mailer’s novel, Didion also “remembered that the tracks made by the wagon wheels are still visible form the air over Utah, like the footprints made on the moon.” Even if the traveler couldn’t control the world, she could leave a lasting record of her solitary passage through it. 

Didion received this half of the Western mythos, like its more heroic elements, from her mother, who first gave her a notebook and told her to write down what she saw and felt. The purpose was to “remember what it was to be me: that was always the point.” Fierce loyalty to her own experience entailed being at odds with what others said it ought to be, but it also laid the foundation of her aesthetic vision. Didion admires the modernist painter Georgia O’Keeffe because O’Keeffe is “simply hard, a straight shooter, a woman clean of received wisdom and open to what she sees.” When critics offered their own interpretations of O’Keeffe’s paintings of flowers, she rebuked them: “I made you take time to look at what I saw … and you hung all your associations with flowers on my flower and write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see—and I don’t.”

Paul Gleason, The Picture in Her Mind. 

O tresmalho dos vagões

Quando eram comboios de mercadorias competia-lhe ainda assegurar-se de que o último vagão levava a placa da cauda, garantia de que nenhum veículo tinha ficado pelo caminho.

Carlos Cipriano, Guardas de passagem de nível.

Domingo no mundo (35)

Thomas D. MacAvoy, Saturday morning with Françoise Sagan, 1956.

Vida: Modo de Usar (4)

One form of moral pride involves the belief that we’re self-made people. Moral pride can make us feel superior to others and more liable to find fault with them, because the belief that all persons are self-made implies that others’ bad traits are entirely of their own making. For the same reason, moral pride can also undermine feelings of compassion towards those who have had difficult formative histories (such as early emotional trauma), faced hard moral decisions (social pressure in Nazi Germany, for example), or had minimal help from others in the moral life (if, for example, they haven’t had good role models).

But our reflections (...) should shatter the illusion that we’re self-made people. We’re all significantly – but not entirely – shaped by luck. The recognition that we’re not wholly self-made should help us to credit others for their roles in our moral lives and perhaps most importantly to be compassionate and generous to those who are down on their luck. After all, with different luck, we might have shared their fate.

 Robert J. Hartmann, Moral luck.

Blues

O tio Arlindo, que cumpriu serviço militar em Angola, esteve em Jersey, tornou à Madeira, avançou para a Venezuela. [...] O tio João continuava na África do Sul. A tia Rosa e o tio Agostinho também. O tio Martinho foi para a Venezuela. O tio Gabriel também. Dos homens do lado da mãe, já só faltava o tio Ernesto. «Eu achava-me envergonhado. Ia à missa e já não via rapazes», conta ele. «Todos caminhavam e eu ali, armado em tonto. Um homem... Sozinho... Eu pensei: "Bem, vou caminhar também!"» E lá foi.

Ana Cristina Pereira, Movimento perpétuo: Histórias das migrações portuguesas.

Elogio do «Mas»*

If you’re confident that everything not black is white, discussions about shades and hues seem beside the point. This absolutism presumes that our only position on those with whom we don’t have complete agreement is complete disapproval, and also that agreement is simple, past which there is no nuance, strategy, possibility to explore.

Rebecca Solnit, Preaching to The Choir.

* Embora, nos seus maus momentos, seja uma ferramenta obscena de relativização do que não deve ser relativizado.