Inside the Box

Read about it in Inside the Box, but of course I’ve known of this idea from before. Like, when I wrote somewhere that, unimaginable is usually imaginable, truly unimaginable things are impossible to imagine. I read about a similar idea in Abundance, where they talked about who gets funded for new research - it’s not truly new research, it’s familiar research. Though the story was different there.

Other than poetry, I finally picked up Inside the Box this week and also Just for fun, which is about Linus and Linux. All hardcovers. I really do love hardcovers. Though I prefer my book - a year of mornings in paperback.

While reading Inside the Box today, I came across the story of Mendelev and how he discovered the periodic table. David talks about how, in a book about sleep, the author mentioned that when he slept, his unconscious mind made sense of all the facts and gave him the solution. Then, David says that's not it. Mendelev had a book contract and he had to write about around 53 elements in a single volume, so he was trying to find a way to group the elements.