I received this about Too Big to Know from Isaiah Hoogendyk, Biblical Data Engineer at Faithlife Corporation:

In chapter 9, “Building the New Infrastructure of Knowledge,” (sorry, don’t have a page number: read this in the Kindle app) you state:

“There was a time when we thought we were doing the common folk a favor by keeping the important knowledge out of their reach. That’s why the Pope called John Wycliffe a heretic in the fourteenth century for creating the first English-language translation of the Christian Bible.”

This is quite false, actually. There was in fact nothing heretical about translating the Scriptures into the vernacular; instead, Wycliffe was condemned for a multitude of heresies regarding rejection of Catholic belief on the Sacraments and the priesthood, among other things. Some of these beliefs were interpolated into the translation of the Scriptures attributed to him (which weren’t even entirely translated by him), but it was mostly his other writings that were censured by the Pope. You can read more about that here: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2011/entries/wyclif/.

Thanks, Isaiah.

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Someone alert MIT’s recruitment office: Thomas Alva Edison was a fan.

Here’s a 1916 letter from a father asking Edison’s advice about where to send his son who is “not a very studious boy” but is “mechanically inclined”:

Edison’s handwritten response says, as best I can make out:

My advice is to send him to the Mass Institute of Technology – Boston of all the young men out of college which I have employed those from the Mass Tech were far superior to all others.”

Source: “Letter from Harry C Shaaber to Thomas Alva Edison, October 30th, 1916,” Edison Papers Digital Edition, accessed July 20, 2018, http://edison.rutgers.edu/digital/document/E1632AD./a>. The ever-vigilant Lewis Brett Smiler sent it to me.

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Yesterday afternoon, our three year old grandson, who I’ll call Eliza because I’ve heard people have noticed a creep on the Internet recently, played with “Amos,” a 2.5yo child he had never met before. Amos is a sweet, fun child who was eager to join in. Eliza turned three a few days ago, so there was a noticeable age difference but not a huge gap. They played for hours out on the lawn, along with Amos’ wonderfully sociable and kind 6yo sister. It gave me full-body memories of watching our children play with their cousins on the very same lawn. There aren’t a lot of stretches when I’d say I was happy without adding some type of qualifier. Yesterday earned no qualifiers

Then, after maybe four hours of play, Amos swung a bubble wand and accidentally hit Eliza in the head with it. It’s a foot-long light plastic tube with a long slit in it, and Amos is only 2.5, so there was no damage, no mark, no blame. But, still, no one likes being beaned, especially by surprise.

Eliza started to make the quivering face of a child about to cry, but quickly realized what had happened. You could see him struggle not to cry. His mom — who was born empathetic — took him into the hammock where she was lying down and snuggled him. He spooned so she wouldn’t see that he was still stifling tears. But I could see. And his mom of course could tell. And so could Amos, who started getting upset because Eliza was.

Now, I’m Eliza’s grandparent and he and I are very close in both senses of the word. So I am undoubtedly one of the two most biased people in the world when it comes to him. On the other hand, I have the joy of knowing him well. And I am certain that Eliza was holding back the display of his emotions because he did not want to upset Amos.

I think we often overrate empathy. But not always. And what Eliza exhibited was not just empathy. It was empathy for the person who accidentally hurt him. It was empathy rising above his own contrary feelings. It was empathy in the moment, without pause, that helped the object of that empathy, Amos. It was empathy that could not be expressed as empathy .

So why did I wake up at 2:30 this morning and weep?

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<rant>

Moral rights of creators are inventions grounded in a bad analogy with property rights.

If you want to maintain your “moral right” to what you’ve written, then don’t publish it.

If you publish it, you are making it public. Thank you for doing so.

You will make money from it for some fixed period — a period designed to provide you (but not necessarily Stephen King) with sufficient incentive to continue to create and publish works, but a short enough period that creative works can be assimilated by the culture.

Why put limits on the author’s exclusive right to publish? To keep culture lively. Which is the same as keeping that culture alive.

Cultural assimilation requires the freedom to talk about your work, to reuse it, misuse it, abuse it, to get it terribly wrong, to make it our own as individuals, to make it ours as a culture.

Imagine a Renaissance in which “moral rights” were enforced. Can’t.

Moral rights kill culture.

(Note that this applies to works that are published as copies. Please don’t take a hammer to any irreplaceable statues. Thanks.)

</rant>

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License.

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