Posts by Dr. Boli
THE FUTURE ARRIVES.
At Phipps Conservatory in Pittsburgh, the new Center for Sustainable Landscapes, billed as “one of earth’s greenest buildings” (though it is plainly various shades of brown and grey—perhaps someone in the public-relations department is colorblind), will soon be open. Dr. Boli and a few hundred other supporters of the conservatory were given a tour of the building this evening, and the offices (shown above) particularly caught his attention. On the right in the photograph we see a wall of glass through which sunlight pervades the offices during the day, making electric lighting unnecessary. Furthermore, if someone feels a need to adjust the temperature inside the building, the glass can actually be raised to admit fresh air from outside.
Dr. Boli mentions this astonishing technological innovation because he himself predicted it a little more than a year ago as a fixture of the office building of the future:
Large openings covered with glass in the walls of office buildings will virtually eliminate the need for artificial lighting during the day, as it will be possible to harness the light of the sun itself for most everyday tasks. A clever mechanical arrangement will make it possible to raise the glass panels, allowing natural air circulation that will greatly reduce the need for artificial climate control.
If this prediction has come true, can the rest of Dr. Boli’s predictions be far behind? They laughed at him as a visionary dreamer, but they will be sorry—all of them—when they see his predictions coming true one after another. To prepare yourself for the marvels of a future that may be only moments away, read the original article.
ON EBOOK READERS.
Dr. Boli would not have imagined that the mere mention of ebook readers could lead to such spirited discussion among his regular correspondents. Clearly the topic is one that provokes strong opinions, even among those who do not use ebook readers.
If everyone else has strong opinions on the subject, it will come as no surprise that Dr. Boli has some opinions of his own. To carry around a whole library in an object smaller than a single book is a wonderful advance in technology, but far too little attention has been paid to elementary considerations like type. Dr. Boli is looking at one of the most popular ebook readers right now. It right-justifies lines, but cannot hyphenate words, making pages look as if they were laid out by a third-grader with a home printing press. It counts all hyphens as nonbreaking hyphens, and two words separated by an em dash as one unbreakable word, which makes the page look even sloppier. One has the impression that the thing was designed by people who had heard of books at second hand, possibly by watching a short television documentary on the subject, but had never handled a book themselves.
For this reason, Dr. Boli prefers to read scanned books on a tablet computer, which is probably as close as one can come to having the experience of a paper book without any paper. Fortunately there are thousands and thousands of such books available from Google Books and the Internet Archive. Google Books even makes scanned pages searchable; Dr. Boli has no idea how such a miracle is accomplished, but he imagines it has something to do with slave labor.
Finally, Dr. Boli is pleased to report that, since he last wrote, he has found a simple and elegant solution to the problem of synchronizing an ebook with the paper copy at home. With most of the popular ebook readers, it is a simple matter to synchronize the book across multiple devices—in Dr. Boli’s case, various Linux computers, ebook readers, and Android devices. Having set up that synchronization on the desktop computer at home, one simply instructs one’s valet to check the last location read in the ebook a few minutes before one is expected at home, and then find that place in the printed book and insert a bookmark there. Similarly, before one leaves the house, the valet checks the position of the bookmark and advances the ebook to that location. Thus the synchronization is accomplished with no effort at all on the reader’s part.
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ASK DR. BOLI.
Dear Dr. Boli: What do you think of these “ebook” things? —Sincerely, Mavis Buckle, Reference Librarian, Carnegie Branch Library, Blandville.
Dear Madam: Dr. Boli finds that ebooks are still in a very primitive state. He would like to do one simple and obvious thing with ebook readers, but it cannot be done with current technology. All Dr. Boli wants is an ebook reader that will sync to the paper copy of the book at home. One ought to be able to come home and find the bookmark stuck in the same page where one left off in the ebook while one was waiting for the streetcar. It is a very simple thing, yet no currently available device can do it, and that is frankly appalling.
FROM THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION.
ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
Mosaic from the Temple of Astarte, Carthage.
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On this day in 202 b.c., the Romans conquered Carthage.
On this day in a.d. 439, the Vandals conquered Carthage from the Romans.
The moral to be drawn from these events is that October 19 is a very bad day to be in Carthage.
MOCHA DICK.
Visitors to Google have doubtless noticed that today is Moby-Dick day, in which we celebrate the publication of one of the greatest works of American literary art. What few readers of Melville’s great novel remember, if they ever knew it, is that the story itself is not entirely original. It was based on real reports of a white whale, whom sailors named “Mocha Dick,” that actually did roam the Pacific mashing boats to splinters in the early nineteenth century. The account of the whale that Melville read, and that set him to furiously scribbling, appeared in the Knickerbocker magazine for May, 1839.
And because Dr. Boli loves a good sea story as much as the next man, and possibly even better than the man after that, he has found a copy of that original publication for you, his esteemed readers.
Mocha Dick: or the White Whale of the Pacific: A Leaf from a Manuscript Journal. By J. N. Reynolds, Esq., in the Knickerbocker for May, 1839.
Moby-Dick and other works by Melville may be found in Dr. Boli’s expanding on-line library, which, though it is still in early development, may reward the the literary visitor with unexpected treasures.
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ASK DR. BOLI.
Dear Dr. Boli: Why are tattoos so popular today among ordinary middle-class citizens? Do you have any explanation for the phenomenon in sociological, psychological, historical, or artistic terms? And are they merely a fad, or are tattoos a permanent addition to our culture? —Sincerely, a Student of Art History, with Minors in Psychology and Sociology.
Dear Sir or Madam: The popularity of tattoos today is merely an expression of the universal artistic impulse. Tattoos are one of the two last refuges of representational art. There was a time when an ordinary middle-class citizen, seized by a desire to surround himself with original art, could go buy a picture of the Battle of Camifex Ferry done in oils by a reputable artist. Now that the reputable artists can barely draw stick figures, the ordinary citizen finds that the only nearby artist who can draw a picture of something he can recognize uses human skin for a medium.
As for your second question, tattoos are likely to go the way of other forms of art within a generation or so. As their popularity increases, they will necessarily breed an elite class of intellectual tattoo artists who consider representational art beneath them. The lesser tattooists will naturally imitate the leaders in their field, and the ordinary citizen will soon find that there is hardly a tattooist left on the continent who can draw even a rudimentary skull. Then tattoos will cease to appeal to the ordinary middle-class citizen, and will become the exclusive domain of snobbish intellectuals.
Dr. Boli mentioned earlier that tattoos were one of the two last refuges of representational art. The other one, of course, is the comic book; and it is no coincidence that there is a considerable overlap between collectors of comic books and collectors of tattoos.
ASK DR. BOLI.
Dear Dr. Boli: Why is it that many European beers are served at room temperature, whereas most American beers are always supposed to be served as cold as possible? —Sincerely, Albrecht M. Biertrincker, Dutchtown.
Dear Sir: Cold dulls the sense of taste. The advantage of that fact for drinkers of mass-produced American beers will not be lost on the connoisseur.