Smithsonian Libraries

Smithsonian Libraries Presents...George Dyson!

The Smithsonian Libraries Presents…

›“Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe” by George Dyson

Lecture, Book Signing, and Reception

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

5:00 p.m.

National Museum of Natural History (10th St. & Constitution Ave. NW)

Baird Auditorium, Ground Floor

Join us for this event! It is FREE and open to the public!

George Dyson

 Author, kayak designer, historian of science and technology, unconventional career. Despite (or because of) the absence of formal education, Dyson has always found time for intellectual pursuits, working on the edges of the academic establishment but contributing to the mainstream with a wide range of lectures and three successful books. Dyson’s kayak designs have been built by thousands of followers and his books have been well received. James Michener praised Baidarka as “a grand, detailed book that will be a standard for years to come,” Oliver Sacks wrote that Darwin Among the Machines was “a very deep and important book, beautifully written... as remarkable an intellectual history as any I have read,” and Arthur C. Clarke describes Project Orion as “essential reading for engineers/scientists involved with government bureaucracies and the notorious Military Industrial Complex... also vice versa.”

Joyeux anniversaire, Jules Verne!

 

Today, February 8th, 2012, marks the 184th anniversary of the birth of French science fiction pioneer Jules Verne. Verne was a visionary writer who took 19th century scientific inventions to wondrous levels in his books.

The Smithsonian Libraries has several early editions of works by Verne. To learn more, visit "A Jules Verne Centennial: 1905-2005".

 

 

 

 

 

Image: Science and Invention, Vol. VIII, No. 4, Aug. 1920 , 1920.

Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and Smithsonian Research Online

During the week of January 16-19th, I visited the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) to discuss several matters relating to the Smithsonian Research Online (SRO) program and to offer technical support and training to STRI library staff. I was accompanied from Washington by Digital Services Head, Martin Kalfatovic, who was to attend a three-day Encyclopedia-of-Life meeting at Barro-Colorado Island during the same week.

Together we met with Oris Sanjur (STRI Associate Director for Science Administration), Vielka Chang-Yau (STRI head librarian), Angel Aguirre (librarian), Klaus Winter (STRI scientist) and Eldredge Bermingham (STRI Director). Everyone was in agreement that STRI-authored publication data ought to be collected in one place and that the SIL is doing a good job of coordinating this program across all Institution units. The Director and Associate Director will discuss the specific needs of their unit and report back to SIL, who will propose a workflow to accomplish this.

Meanwhile, I held a brief introduction to the bibliographic tools, EndNote and Zotero for STRI library staff and volunteers. While we had a training room available to us, unfortunately there was not a copy of these programs available to all participants. But they were still able to see the possibilities of using these tools in day-to-day library services.

Alvin and Vielka review the SRO website and list of Smithsonian-authored publications using the newly-installed LCD screen in the STRI library. Photo courtesy of martin_kalfatovic via Flickr.

Finally, I met with Fernando Bouché (Head, Office of Information Technology) and STRI programmer, Carlos Caballero, to discuss the management of publication data, its re-use on the STRI web page and inclusion in the SI Collections search system (EDAN).

STRI scientists publish over 300 scholarly papers every year. Approximately 70% of them are captured automatically by the SRO via websites and associated tools. This circumvents the need for manual data entry. The inclusion of the complete corpus of work being done there is an essential part of representing the research being conducted at the Institution and the cooperation between the SI Libraries and STRI will bring the project to fruition.

 

 

 

The handwriting of Galileo

Would you like to see Galileo’s hand-writing?—I asked a visiting friend who came to see highlights of the Dibner Library in the Smithsonian Institution Libraries the other day. In the age of mobile devices, email messages, texting and the many other forms of digital communication are we still interested in the way someone writes by hand? Does that provide any other kind of information besides the text?

 

 

These questions came to me much later because my friend very quickly answered “yes” to my first question. So, I headed to the temperature and humidity controlled secure stacks to the manuscript section, where the library holds the ca. 1600 manuscript groups that were donated to the Smithsonian by Bern Dibner, 20^th century engineer, inventor and science historian, in 1976. I carefully removed the folder that contains the letter from the archival storage box and took it to the reading room where my friend was sitting. I told him about the content of the letter and its story which is interesting.

Galileo wrote this letter on May 12^th, 1635 (in Italian) replying to his colleague and supporter, the French amateur mathematician and natural philosopher, Nicolaus Claude Fabri de Preiresc. Their correspondence had started years earlier mainly about Preiresc’s repeated appeals to Cardinal Barberini (Pope Urban VIII) to lighten the restrictions of Galileo’s house arrest he was under due to his sentence at his 1633 trial. The letters (as this particular one too) discussed scientific topics as well, among them a curious water clock developed by Franciscus Linus in Liège.  The clock consisted of a small globe balancing and rotating in water contained in a larger round vessel. Next to the globe was a small fish hovering in the water and pointing to the numbers on the small globe showing the hour of the day. According to the letter, the clock was driven by a mysterious magnetic force. Galileo used the occasion of discussing Linus’s water clock to describe his own similar model that he developed some years earlier. Then he quickly added: “I, meanwhile, have wished to indicate […] that I have not usurped the invention from Father Linus—if indeed his machine does not have any more to it than mine.”

 

 

“Beautiful, even hand-writing”—said my friend looking at the letter—“It does not bespeak about a crushed, oppressed old man’s state of mind.” And this should remind us that, in fact, Galileo did not suffer in the casemates of the Inquisition, since he revoked some of his scientific ideas. This made it possible for him to have a prolific time during his years following the trial and publish one of his most significant works, the Discourses concerning two new sciences. The book, published in Leyden in 1638, is considered by many Galileo’s main contribution to physics, in which he laid down the foundations of the modern science of dynamics.

—Lilla Vekerdy