Section 5 of The Autobiography of Charles Darwin. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Adam Marcicic, Alexandria, Virginia, June 2009. The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, edited by his son Francis Darwin. Section 5. Residents at Down from September 14, 1842 to the present time, 1876. After several fruitless searches in Surrey and elsewhere, we found this house and purchased it. I was pleased with the diversified appearance of vegetation proper to a chalk district, and so unlike what I had been accustomed to in the Midland countries, and still more pleased with the extreme quietness and rusticity of the place. It is not, however, quite so retired a place as a writer in a German periodical makes it, who says that my house can be approached only by a mule track. Our fixing ourselves here has answered admirably in one way, which we did not anticipate, namely by being very convenient for frequent visits from our children. Few persons can have lived a more retired life than we have done. Besides short visits to the houses of relations, and occasionally to the seaside or elsewhere, we have gone nowhere. During the first part of our residence, we went a little into society and received a few friends here, but my health almost always suffered from the excitement, violent shivering and vomiting attacks being thus brought on. I have therefore been compelled for many years to give up all dinner parties, and this has been somewhat of a deprivation to me, as such parties always put me into high spirits. From the same cause, I have been able to invite here very few scientific acquaintances. My chief enjoyment and sole employment throughout life has been scientific work, and the excitement from such work makes me, for the time forget, or drives quite away my daily discomfort. I have therefore nothing to record during the rest of my life, except the publication of my several books. Perhaps a few details, how they arose, may be worth giving. End of Residence at Down The success of this, my first literary child, always tickles my vanity more than that of any of my other books. Even to this day, it sells steadily in England and the United States, and has been translated for the second time into German, and into French and other languages. This success of a book of travels, especially of a scientific one, so many years after its first publication, is surprising. Ten thousand copies have been sold in England of the second edition. In 1846, my geological observations on South America were published. I record in a little diary, which I have always kept, that my three geological books, quarrel-recent-cluded, consumed four-and-a-half years steady work, and now it is ten years since my return to England. How much time have I lost by illness? I have nothing to say about these three books, except that, to my surprise, new editions have lately been called for. Geological observations, second edition, 1876, quarrel-recent-second edition, 1874. In October, 1846, I began to work on syrupedia. When on the coast of Chile, I found the most curious form, which burrowed into the shells of concholapas, and which differed so much from all other syrupedies that I had to form a new suborder for its sole reception. Lately, an allied burrowing genus has been found on the shores of Portugal. To understand the structure of my new syrupedia, I had to examine and dissect many of the common forms, and this gradually led me on to take up the whole group. I worked steadily on this subject for the next eight years, and ultimately published two thick volumes, published by the Ray Society, describing all the known living species, and two thin quartos on the extinct species. I do not doubt that Sir E. Litten-Bowler had me in his mind when he introduced in one of his novels a Professor Long, who had written two huge volumes on limpets. Although I was employed during eight years on this work, yet I record in my diary that about two years out of this time was lost by illness. On this account, I went in 1848 for some months to Melbourne for hydropathic treatment, which did me much good so that on my return home I was able to resume work. So much was I out of health that when my dear father died on November 13, 1848, I was unable to attend his funeral or act as one of his executors. My work on the seripidia possesses, I think, considerable value, as besides describing several new and remarkable forms, I made out the homologies of the various parts. I discovered the cementing apparatus, though I blundered dreadfully about the cement glands, and lastly I proved the existence in certain genera of minute males, complementary to and parasitic on the hermaphrodites. This latter discovery has at last been fully confirmed, though at one time a German writer was pleased to attribute the whole account to my fertile imagination. The serepides form a highly varying and difficult group of species to class, and my work was of considerable use to me, when I had to discuss the origin of species, the principles of a natural classification. Nevertheless, I doubt whether the work was worth the consumption of so much time. From September 1854, I devoted my whole time to arranging my huge pile of notes, to observing, and to experimenting in relation to the transmutation of species. During the voyage of the Beagle, I had been deeply impressed by discovering in the Pampian formation great fossil animals covered with armor, like that on the existing armadillos. Secondly, by the manner in which closely allied animals replace one another in proceeding southwards over the continent. And thirdly, by the South American character of most of the productions of the Galapagos archipelago, and more especially by the manner in which they differ slightly on each island of the group, none of the islands appearing to be very ancient in a geological sense. It was evident that such facts as these, as well as many others, could only be explained on the supposition that species gradually become modified, and the subject haunted me. But it was equally evident that neither the action of the surrounding conditions, nor the will of the organisms, especially in the case of plants, could account for the innumerable cases in which organisms of every kind are beautifully adapted to their habits of life. For instance, a woodpecker or a tree frog to climb trees, or a seed for dispersal by hooks or plumes. I had always been much struck by such adaptations, and until these could be explained, it seemed to me almost useless to endeavor to prove by indirect evidence that species have been modified. After my return to England, it appeared to me that by following the example of Lyell in geology, and by collecting all facts which bore in any way on the variation of animals and plants under domestication and nature, some light might be perhaps thrown on the whole subject. My first notebook was opened in July 1837. I worked on true Bajonian principles, and without any theory, collected facts on a wholesale scale, more especially with respect to domesticated productions, by printed inquiries, by conversation with skillful breeders and gardeners, and by extensive reading. When I see the list of books of all kinds which I read and abstracted, including whole series of journals and transactions, I am surprised at my industry. I soon perceived that selection was a keystone of man's success in making useful races of animals and plants. But how selection could be applied to organisms living in a state of nature remained for some time a mystery to me. In October 1838, that is, fifteen months after I had begun my systematic inquiry, I happened to read for amusement Malthus on Population, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence, which everywhere goes on from long continued observation of the habits of animals and plants. It at once struck me that under these circumstances favorable variations would tend to be preserved and unfavorable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species. Here then I had at last got a theory by which to work, but I was so anxious to avoid prejudice that I determined not for some time to write even the briefest sketch of it. In June 1842, I first allowed myself the satisfaction of writing a very brief abstract of my theory in pencil in 35 pages, and this was enlarged during the summer of 1844 into one of 230 pages, which I had fairly copied out and still possessed. But at that time I overlooked one problem of great importance, and it is astonishing to me, except on the principle of Columbus and his egg, how I could have overlooked it and its solution. The problem is the tendency in organic beings descended from the same stock to diverge in character as they become modified. That they have diverged greatly is obvious from the manner in which species of all kinds can be classed under genera, genera under families, families under suborders, and so forth. And I can remember the very spot in the road, while in my carriage went to my joy the solution occurred to me, and this was long after I had come to down. The solution, as I believe, is that the modified offspring of all dominant and increasing forms tend to become adapted to many and highly diversified places in the economy of nature. Early in 1856, Liel advised me to write out my views pretty fully, and I began at once to do so on a scale three or four times as extensive as that which was afterwards followed in my origin of species, yet it was only an abstract of the materials which I had collected, and I got through about half the work on this scale. But my plans were overthrown. For early in the summer of 1858, Mr. Wallace, who was then in the Malay Archipelago, sent me an essay on the tendency of varieties to depart indefinitely from the original type, and this essay contained exactly the same theory as mine. Mr. Wallace expressed the wish that if I thought well of his essay, I should send it to Liel for perusal. The circumstances under which I consented at the request of Liel and Hooker to allow an abstract from my manuscript, together with the letter to an Asa Gray, dated September 5th, 1857, to be published at the same time with Wallace's essay, are given in the Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnaean Society, 1858, page 45. I was at first very unwilling to consent, as I thought Mr. Wallace might consider my doing so unjustifiable, for I did not then know how generous and noble was his disposition. The extract from my manuscript, and the letter to Asa Gray, had neither been intended for publication and were badly written. Mr. Wallace's essay, on the other hand, was admirably expressed and quite clear. Nevertheless, our joint productions excited very little attention, and the only published notice of them, which I can remember, was by Professor Houghton of Dublin, whose verdict was that, at all, that was new in them was false, and what was true was old. This shows how necessary it is, that any new view should be explained at considerable length, in order to arouse public attention. In September 1858, I set to work by the strong advice of Lyle and Hooker to prepare a volume on the transmutation of species, but was often interrupted by ill health in short visits to Dr. Lane's delightful hydropathic establishment at Moore Park. I abstracted the manuscript, begun on a much larger scale, in 1856, and completed the volume on the same reduced scale. It cost me 13 months and 10 days hard labor. It was published under the title of The Origin of Species in November 1859. Though considerably added to and corrected in the later editions, it has remained substantially the same book. It is no doubt the chief work of my life. It was from the first, highly successful. The first small edition of 1,250 copies was sold on the day of publication, and a second edition of 3,000 copies soon afterwards. 16,000 copies have now, 1876, been sold in England. And considering how stiff a book it is, this is a large scale. It has been translated into almost every European tongue, and even into languages as Spanish, Bohemian, Polish, and Russian. It is also, according to Ms. Byrd, been translated into Japanese. Editors note, Ms. Byrd is mistaken, for I learned from Professor Mitsukuri, Francis Darwin. And there it is much studied. Even an essay in Hebrew has appeared on it, showing that the theory is contained in the Old Testament. The reviews were very numerous. For some time I collected all that appeared on The Origin, and on my related books. And these amount, excluding newspaper reviews, to 265. But after a time I gave up the attempt in despair. Many separate essays and books on the subject have appeared. And in Germany, a catalogue or bibliography on Darwinismus has appeared every year or two. The success of The Origin may, I think, be attributed in large part to my having long before written two condensed sketches, and to my having finally abstracted a much larger manuscript, which was itself an abstract. By this means I was enabled to select the more striking facts and conclusions. I had also, during many years, followed a golden rule. Namely, that whenever a published fact, a new observation or thought came across me, which was opposed to my general results, to make a memorandum of it, without fail, and at once. For I had found by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt to escape from the memory than favorable ones. Owing to this habit, very few objections were raised against my views, which I had not at least noticed, and attempted to answer. It has sometimes been said that the success of The Origin proved that the subject was in the air, or that men's minds were prepared for it. I do not think that this is strictly true, for I occasionally sounded not a few naturalists, and never happened to come across a single one who seemed to doubt about the permanence of species. Even Liel and Hooker, though they would listen with interest to me, never seemed to agree. I tried once or twice to explain to able men what I meant by natural selection, but signally failed. What I believe was strictly true is that innumerable well-observed facts were stored in the minds of naturalists, ready to take their proper places, as soon as any theory which would receive them was sufficiently explained. Another element in the success of the book was its moderate size, and this I owe to the appearance of Mr. Wallace's essay. Had I published on the scale in which I began to write in 1856, the book would have been four or five times as large as The Origin, and very few would have had the patience to read it. I gained much by my delay in publishing from about 1839, when the theory was clearly conceived, to 1859, and I lost nothing by it, for I cared very little whether men attributed most originality to me or Wallace, and his essay no doubt aided in the reception of the theory. I was forestalled in only one important point, which my vanity has always made me regret, namely, the explanation by means of the glacial period of the presence of the same species of plants, and of some few animals on distant mountain summits, and in the Arctic regions. This view pleased me so much that I wrote about it in extentso, and I believe that it was read by Hooker some years before E. Forbes published his celebrated memoir, Geological Survey Memoirs, 1846, on the subject. In the very few points in which we differed, I still think I was in the right. I have never, of course, alluded in print to my having independently worked out this view. Hardly any point gave me so much satisfaction when I was at work on the origin, as the explanation of the wide difference in many classes between the embryo and the adult animal, and of the close resemblance of the embryos within the same class. No notice of this point was taken, as far as I remember, in the early reviews of the origin, and I recollect expressing my surprise on this head in a letter to Asa Gray. Within late years, several reviewers have given the whole credit to Fritz Müller and Hackle, who undoubtedly have worked it out much more fully, and in some respects, more correctly than I did. I had materials for a whole chapter on the subject, and I ought to have made the discussion longer, for it is clear that I failed to impress my readers, and he who succeeds in doing so deserves, in my opinion, all the credit. This leads me to remark that I have almost always been treated honestly by my reviewers. Passing over those without scientific knowledge is not worthy of notice. My views have often been grossly misrepresented, bitterly opposed and ridiculed, but this has been generally done, as I believe, in good faith. On the whole, I do not doubt that my works have been over and over again greatly overpraised. I rejoice that I have avoided controversies. And this I owe to Liel, who many years ago, in reference to my geological works, strongly advised me never to get entangled in a controversy, as it rarely did any good and caused a miserable loss of time and temper. Whenever I have found out that I have blundered, or that my work has been imperfect, and when I have been contemptuously criticized, and even when I have been overpraised, so that I have felt mortified, it has been my greatest comfort to say hundreds of times to myself that I have worked as hard and as well as I could, and no man can do more than this. I remember when in Good Success Bay, in Tierra del Fuego, thinking, and I believe, that I wrote home to the effect, that I could not employ my life better than in adding a little to natural science. This I have done to the best of my abilities, and critics may say what they like, but they cannot destroy this conviction. During the two last months of 1859, I was fully occupied in preparing a second edition of The Origin, and by an enormous correspondence, on January 1st, 1860, I began arranging my notes for my work on the variation of animals and plants under domestication, but it was not published until the beginning of 1868. The delay having been caused partly by frequent illnesses, one of which lasted seven months, and partly by being tempted to publish on other subjects, which at the time interested me more. On May 15, 1862, my little book on the fertilization of orchids, which cost me ten months' work, was published. Most of the facts had been slowly accumulated during several previous years. During the summer of 1839, and I believe, during the previous summer, I was led to attend to the cross fertilization of flowers by the aid of insects, from having come to the conclusion in my speculations on the origin of species, that crossing played an important part in keeping specific forms constant. I attended to the subject, more or less, during every subsequent summer, and my interest in it was greatly enhanced by having procured and read in November 1841. Through the advice of Robert Brown, a copy of C.K. Springles' wonderful book, Das Indechte Geheimnis der Nature, for some years before 1862, I had specially attended to the fertilization of our British orchids. And it seemed to me the best plan to prepare as complete a treatise on this group of plants as well as I could, rather than to utilize the great mass of matter which I had slowly collected with respect to other plants. My resolve proved a wise one, for since the appearance of my book, a surprising number of papers and separate works on the fertilization of all kinds of flowers have appeared, and these are far better done than I could possibly have affected. The merits of poor old Springles, so long overlooked, are now fully recognized many years after his death. During the same year, I published in the Journal of the Linnaean Society a paper on the two forms, or Dimorphic Condition of Primula, and during the next five years, five other papers on Dimorphic and Trimorphic plants. I do not think anything in my scientific life has given me so much satisfaction as making out the meaning of the structure of these plants. I had noticed in 1838 or 1839 the dimorphism of Linnum flavum, and had at first thought that it was merely a case of unmeaning variability, but on examining the common species of Primula, I found that the two forms were much too regular and constant to be thus viewed. I therefore became almost convinced that the common cow slip and primrose were on the high road to become dioecious, that the short pistol in the one form and the short stamens in the other form were tending towards abortion. The plants were therefore subjected under this point of view to trial, but as soon as the flowers with short pistols fertilized with pollen from the short stamens were found to yield more seeds than any other of the four possible unions, the abortion theory was knocked on the head. After some additional experiment, it became evident that the two forms, though both were perfect hermaphrodites, bore almost the same relation to one another as do the two sexes of an ordinary animal. With Leithrom, we have the still more wonderful case of three forms standing in a similar relation to one another. I afterwards found that the offspring from the union of two plants belonging to the same forms presented a close and curious analogy with hybrids from the union of two distinct species. In the autumn of 1864, I finished a long paper on climbing plants and sent it to the Linnaean Society. The writing of this paper cost me four months, but I was so unwell when I received the proof sheets that I was forced to leave them very badly and often obscurely expressed. The paper was little noticed, but when, in 1875, it was corrected and published as a separate book, it sold well. I was led to make up this subject by reading a short paper by Asa Gray, published in 1858. He sent me seeds, and on raising some plants, I was so much fascinated and perplexed by the revolving movements of the tendrils and stems, which movements are really very simple, though appearing at first sight very complex, that I procured various and other kinds of climbing plants and studied the whole subject. I was all the more attracted to it, from not being at all satisfied with the explanation which Henslow gave us in his lectures about twining plants, namely, that they had a natural tendency to grow up in a spire. This explanation proved quite erroneous. Some of the adaptations displayed by climbing plants are as beautiful as those of orchids for ensuring cross fertilization. My variation of animals and plants under domestication was begun, as already stated, in the beginning of 1860, but was not published until the beginning of 1868. It was a big book, and cost me four years and two months hard labor. It gives all my observations, and an immense number of facts collected from various sources, about our domestic productions. In the second volume, the causes and laws of variation, inheritance, etc., are discussed as far as our present state of knowledge permits. Toward the end of the work, I give my well abused hypothesis of pangenesis. An unverified hypothesis is of little or no value, but if anyone should hear after be led to make observations by which some such hypothesis could be established, I shall have done good service, as an astonishing number of isolated facts can be thus connected together and rendered intelligible. In 1875, a second and largely corrected edition, which cost me a good deal of labor, was brought out. My dissent of man was published in February 1871. As soon as I had become, in the year 1837 or 1838, convinced that species were mutable productions, I could not avoid the belief that man must come under the same law. Accordingly, I collected notes on the subject for my own satisfaction, and not for a long time with any intention of publishing. Although in the origin of species, the derivation of any particular species is never discussed, yet I thought it best, in order that no honorable man should accuse me of concealing my views. To add that by the work, light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history. It would have been useless and injurious to the success of the book to have paraded, without giving any evidence, my conviction with respect to his origin. But when I found that many naturalists fully accepted the doctrine of the evolution of species, it seemed to me advisable to work up such notes as I possessed, and to publish a special treatise on the origin of man. I was the more glad to do so, as it gave me an opportunity of fully discussing sexual selection, a subject which had always greatly interested me. This subject, and that of the variation of our domestic productions, together with the causes and laws of variation, inheritance, and the intercrossing of plants, are the sole subjects which I have been able to write about in full, so as to use all the materials which I have collected. The Descent of Man took me three years to write, but then as usual some of this time was lost by ill-health, and some was consumed by preparing new editions and other minor works. A second and largely corrected edition of The Descent appeared in 1874. My book on the expression of the emotions in men and animals was published in the autumn of 1872. I had intended to give only a chapter on the subject in The Descent of Man, but as soon as I began to put my notes together, I saw that it would require a separate treatise. My first child was born on December 27, 1839, and I at once commenced to make notes on the first dawn of the various expressions which he exhibited, for I felt convinced, even at this early period, that the most complex and fine shades of expression must all have a gradual and natural origin. During the summer of the following year, 1840, I read Sir C. Bell's admiral work on expression, and this greatly increased the interest which I felt in the subject, though I could not at all agree with his belief that various muscles had been specially created for the sake of expression. From this time forward, I occasionally attended to the subject, both with respect to man and our domesticated animals. My book sold largely 5,267 copies, having been disposed of on the day of publication. In the summer of 1860, I was idling and resting near Hartford, where two species of drosera abound, and I noticed that numerous insects had been entrapped by the leaves. I carried home some plants, and on giving them insects saw the movements of the tentacles, and this made me think it probable that the insects were caught for some special purpose. Fortunately, a crucial test occurred to me, that of placing a large number of leaves in various nitrogenous and non-nitrogenous fluids of equal density, and as soon as I found that the former alone excited energetic movements, it was obvious that here was a fine new field for investigation. During subsequent years, whenever I had leisure, I pursued my experiments, and my book on insectivorous plants was published in July 1875, that is, 16 years after my first observations. The delay in this case, as with all my other books, has been a great advantage to me, for a man after a long interval can criticize his own work almost as well as if it were that of another person. The fact that a plant should secrete, when properly excited, a fluid containing an acid, and ferment closely analogous to the digestive fluid of an animal, was certainly a remarkable discovery. During this autumn of 1876, I shall publish on the effects of cross and self-fertilization in the vegetable kingdom. This book will form a compliment to that on the fertilization of orchids, in which I showed how perfect were the means for cross-fertilization, and here I shall show how important are the results. I was led to make, during 11 years, the numerous experiments recorded in this volume, by a mere accidental observation, and indeed it required the accident to be repeated before my attention was thoroughly aroused to the remarkable fact that seedlings of self-fertilized parentage are inferior, even in the first generation, in height and vigor, to seedlings of cross-fertilized parentage. I hope also to republish a revised edition of my book on orchids, and hereafter my papers on dimorphic and trimorphic plants, together with some additional observations on allied points, which I never have had time to arrange. My strength will then probably be exhausted, and I shall be ready to exclaim, Nunk Dimitis. End of Section 5. Section 6 of the Autobiography of Charles Darwin. Written May 1st, 1881. The effects of cross and self-fertilization was published in the autumn of 1876, and the results there arrived at explain, as I believe, the endless and wonderful contrivances for the transport of pollen from one plant to another of the same species. I now believe, however, chiefly from the observations of Herman Mueller, that I ought to have insisted more strongly than I did on the many adaptations for self-fertilization, though I was well aware of many such adaptations. A much enlarged edition of my Fertilization of Orchids was published in 1877. In the same year, the different forms of flowers, etc., appeared, and in 1880 a second edition. This book consists chiefly of the several papers on hetero-styled flowers, originally published by the Linnaean Society, corrected, with much new matter added, together with observations on some other cases, in which the same plant bears two kinds of flowers. As before remarked, no little discovery of mine ever gave me so much pleasure as the making out of the meaning of hetero-styled flowers. The results of crossing such flowers in an illegitimate manner, I believe to be very important, as bearing on the sterility of hybrids, although these results have been noticed by only a few persons. In 1879, I had a translation of Dr. Ernst Krause's Life of Erasmus Darwin, published, and I added a sketch of his character and habits from material in my possession. Many persons have been much interested by this little life, and I am surprised that only 800 or 900 copies were sold. In 1880, I published, with my son Frank's assistance, Our Power of Movement in Plants. This was a tough piece of work. The book bears somewhat the same relation to my little book on climbing plants, which cross fertilization did to the fertilization of orchids. For, in accordance with the principle of evolution, it was impossible to account for climbing plants having been developed in so many widely different groups, unless all kinds of plants possessed some slight power of movement of an analogous kind. This I proved to be the case, and I was further led to a rather wide generalization, visibly that the great and important classes of movements, excited by light, the attraction of gravity, etc., are all modified forms of the fundamental movement of circumnutation. It has always pleased me to exalt plants in the scale of organized beings, and I therefore felt a special pleasure in showing how many, and what admirably well-adapted movements, the tip of a root possesses. I have now, May 1st, 1881, sent to the printers the manuscript of a little book on the formation of vegetable mold through the action of worms. This is a subject of but small importance, and I know not whether it will interest my readers. Between November 1881 and February 1884, 8,500 copies have been sold. But it has interested me. It is a completion of a short paper read before the geological society, more than 40 years ago, and has revived old geological thoughts. I have now mentioned all the books which I have published, and these have been the milestones in my life, so that little remains to be said. I am not conscious of any change in my mind during the last 30 years, accepting in one point presently to be mentioned. Nor, indeed, could any change have been expected, unless one of general deterioration. But my father lived to his 83rd year with his mind as lively as it ever was, and all his faculties undimmed, and I hope that I may die before my mind fails to a sensible extent. I think that I have become a little more skillful in guessing read explanations and in devising experimental tests, but this may probably be the result of mere practice, and of a larger store of knowledge. I have as much difficulty as ever in expressing myself clearly and concisely, and this difficulty has caused me a very great loss of time. But it has had the compensating advantage of forcing me to think long and intently about every sentence, and thus I have been led to see errors in reasoning and in my own observations, or those of others. There seems to be a sort of fatality in my mind, leading me to put at first my statement or proposition in a wrong or awkward form. Formerly I used to think about my sentences before writing them down, but for several years I have found that it saves time to scribble in a vile hand whole pages as quickly as I possibly can, contracting half the words, and then correct deliberately. Sentences thus scribble down are often better ones than I could have written deliberately. Having said thus much about my manner of writing, I will add that with my large books I spend a good deal of time over the general arrangement of the matter. I first make the rudest outline in two or three pages, and then a larger one in several pages, a few words or one word standing for a whole discussion or series of facts. Each one of these headings is again enlarged, and often transferred before I begin to write it in extenso. As in several of my books, facts observed by others have been very extensively used, and as I have always had several quite distinct subjects in hand at the same time, I may mention that I keep from thirty to forty large portfolios in cabinets with labeled shelves, into which I can at once put a detached reference or memorandum. I have bought many books, and at their ends I make an index of all the facts that concern my work, or, if the book is not my own, write out a separate abstract, and of such abstracts I have a large drawer full. Before beginning on any subject, I look to all the short indexes and make a general and classified index, and by taking the one or more proper portfolios, I have all the information collected during my life ready to use. I have said that in one respect my mind has changed during the last twenty or thirty years. Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave me great pleasure. And even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical plays. I have also said that formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry. I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also almost lost my taste for pictures or music. Music generally sets me thinking too energetically on what I have been at work on, instead of giving me pleasure. I retain some taste for fine scenery, but it does not cause me the exquisite delight which it formerly did. On the other hand, novels which are works of the imagination, though not of a very high order, have been for years a wonderful relief and pleasure to me. And I often bless all novelists. A surprising number have been read aloud to me. And I like all, if moderately good, and if they do not end unhappily, against which a law ought to be passed. A novel, according to my taste, does not come into the first class unless it contains some person whom one can thoroughly love, and if a pretty woman, all the better. This curious and lamentable loss of the higher aesthetic tastes is all the odder as books on history, biographies, and travels, independently of any scientific facts which they may contain, and essays on all sorts of subjects interest me as much as ever they did. My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. A man with a mind more highly organized, or better constituted than mine, would not, I suppose, have thus suffered. And if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry, and listen to some music at least once every week, for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature. My books have sold largely in England, and have been translated into many languages, and passed through several editions in foreign countries. I have heard it said that the success of a work abroad is the best test of its enduring value. I doubt whether this is at all trustworthy, but judged by this standard my name ought to last for a few years, therefore it may be worthwhile to try to analyze the mental qualities and the conditions on which my success has depended, though I am aware that no man can do this correctly. I have no great quickness of apprehension or wit, which is so remarkable in some clever men, for instance, Huxley. I am therefore a poor critic. A paper or a book, when first read, generally excites my admiration, and it is only after considerable reflection that I perceive the weak points. My power to follow a long and purely abstract train of thought is very limited, and therefore I could never have succeeded with metaphysics or mathematics. My memory is extensive, yet hazy. It suffices to make me cautious by vaguely telling me that I have observed or read something opposed to the conclusion which I am drawing. Or, on the other hand, in favor of it, and after a time I can generally recollect where to search for my authority. So poor, in one sense, is my memory that I have never been able to remember for more than a few days, a single date or a line of poetry. Some of my critics have said, oh, he is a good observer, but he has no power of reasoning. I do not think that this can be true, for the origin of species is one long argument from the beginning to the end, and it has convinced not a few able men. No one could have written it without having some power of reasoning. I have a fair share of invention, and of common sense or judgment, such as every fairly successful lawyer or doctor must have, but not, I believe, in any higher degree. On the favorable side of the balance, I think that I am superior to the common run of men in noticing things which easily escape attention, and in observing them carefully. My industry has been nearly as great as it could have been in the observation and collection of facts. What is far more important, my love of natural science, has been steady and ardent. This pure love has, however, been much aided by the ambition to be esteemed by my fellow naturalists. For my early youth, I have had the strongest desire to understand or explain whatever I observed, that is, to group all facts under some general laws. These causes, combined, have given me the patience to reflect or ponder for any number of years over an unexplained problem. As far as I can judge, I am not apt to follow blindly the lead of other men. I have steadily endeavored to keep my mind free, so as to give up any hypothesis, however much beloved, and I cannot resist forming one on every subject, as soon as facts are shown to be opposed to it. Indeed, I have had no choice but to act in this manner, for with the exception of the coral reefs, I cannot remember a single first formed hypothesis which had not after time to be given up or greatly modified. This has naturally led me to distrust greatly deductive reasoning in the mixed sciences. On the other hand, I am not very skeptical, a frame of mind which I believe to be injurious to the progress of science. A good deal of skepticism in a scientific man is advisable to avoid much loss of time, but I have met with not a few men who, I feel sure, have often thus been deterred from experiment or observations, which would have proved directly or indirectly serviceable. In illustration, I will give the oddest case which I have known. A gentleman, who as I afterwards heard, is a good local botanist, wrote to me from the eastern countries that the seed or beans of the common field bean had this year everywhere grown on the wrong side of the pod. I wrote back, asking for further information, as I did not understand what was meant, but I did not receive any answer for a very long time. I then saw in two newspapers, one published in Kent and the other in Yorkshire, paragraphs stating that it was a most remarkable fact, that the beans this year had all grown on the wrong side. So I thought there might be some foundation for so general a statement. Accordingly, I went to my gardener, an old Kentish man, and asked him whether he had heard anything about it, and he answered, Oh no sir, it must be a mistake, for the beans grow on the wrong side only on leap year, and this is not a leap year. I then asked him how they grew in common years, and how on leap years, but soon found that he knew absolutely nothing of how they grew at any time, but he stuck to his belief. After a time I heard from my first informant, who, with many apologies, said that he should not have written to me had he not heard the statement from several intelligent farmers, but that he had since spoken again to every one of them, and not one knew in the least what he had himself meant. So that here a belief, if indeed a statement with no definite idea attached to it, can be called a belief, had spread over almost the whole of England without any vestige of evidence. I have known in the course of my life only three intentionally falsified statements, and one of these may have been a hoax, and there have been several scientific hoaxes, which, however, took in an American agricultural journal. It related to the formation in Holland of a new breed of oxen by the crossing of distinct species of bows, some of which I happen to know are sterile together, and the author had the impudence to state that he had corresponded with me, and that I had been deeply impressed with the importance of his result. The article was sent to me by the editor of an English agricultural journal, asking for my opinion before republishing it. A second case was an account of several varieties raised by the author from several species of primula, which had spontaneously yielded a full complement of seed, although the parent plants had been carefully protected from the access of insects. This account was published before I had discovered the meaning of hetero-stylism, and the whole statement must have been fraudulent, or there was neglect in excluding insects so gross as to be scarcely credible. The third case was more curious. Mr. Hooth published in his book on consanguinious marriage some long extracts from a Belgian author, who stated that he had interbred rabbits in the closest manner for very many generations, without the least injurious effects. The account was published in a most respectable journal. That of the Royal Society of Belgium. But I could not avoid feeling doubts. I hardly know why, except that there were no accidents of any kind, and my experience in breeding animals made me think this very improbable. So with much hesitation, I wrote to Professor von Benedin, asking him whether the author was a trustworthy man. I soon heard an answer, that the society had been greatly shocked by discovering that the whole account was a fraud. The falseness of the published statements, on which Mr. Hooth relied, has been pointed out by himself in a slip inserted, in all the copies of his book, which then remained unsold. The writer had been publicly challenged in the journal, to say where he had resided, and kept his large stock of rabbits while carrying on his experiments, which must have consumed several years, and no answer could be extracted from him. My habits are methodical, and this has been of not a little use for my particular line of work. Lastly, I have had ample leisure from not having to earn my own bread.  Therefore, my success as a man of science, whether this may have amounted to, has been determined, as far as I can judge, by complex and diversified mental qualities and conditions. Of these, the most important have been, the love of science, unbounded patience in long reflecting over any subject, industry in observing and collecting facts, and a fair share of interest. With such moderate abilities as I possess, it is truly surprising that I should have influenced, to a considerable extent, the belief of scientific men on some important points. End of Section 6 End of The Autobiography of Charles Darwin End of Section 6 End of The Autobiography of Charles Darwin


Is it possible to make a thin and light notebook that's not just an all-rounder, but is suitable for gaming too? ASUS says so, but we're here to verify that claim. The model we have with us today is the new ASUS TUF-F15 FX517. That's the successor of the popular FX516. It did well in our tests, but we weren't happy that it reached almost 60 degrees Celsius on the outside when put under heavy load. This time around, the F15 has an even more powerful CPU and GPU, but the cooling system is upgraded as well. Let's put it to the test. The new Dash F15 is indeed pretty thin and light, especially given its hidden gaming nature. Yes, it kind of looks like an office device, as its metal lid has clean lines and a subtle tough logo in the upper right corner. Lifting the lid gets us to the first impressive upgrade. The FX516 didn't have a camera due to its narrow borders. Now the borders are even smaller, but there's an HD webcam above the screen. Actually, the whole body is a bit smaller, but that doesn't make it weaker. It meets the military grade A10H standards. Despite the smaller chassis, we have a full-sized keyboard with a 1.5mm travel distance and a numpad section. The WASD keys are transparent, which pairs nicely with the backlight. The touchpad offers excellent gliding and tracking, while also having a much larger surface area compared to last year's model. The I.O. is well populated with everything you might need. There are two Type-C ports, one of which supports Thunderbolt 4. The other one is a USB 3.2 Gen 2 with DisplayPort 1.4 and G-Sync support, plus it can be used for charging. There are also two full-sized USB 3.2 Gen 1, HDMI 2.0B, Gigabit LAN port, Audio jack, and a Kensington lock slot. There are three panels to choose from. Even the base variant has a 144Hz refresh rate. It's an IPS panel with great viewing angles, and its brightness maxes out at 284 nits. It's far from accurate in terms of colors, but things get better when we apply our design and gaming profile, which you can get from the link in the description below the video. Well, it's pretty good for gaming, but if you're planning to do professional work with colors, get the 300Hz variant, which covers the full sRGB color gamut. Actually, there's an even better option, a 165Hz one with a QHD resolution. This panel covers 100% of the ultra-wide DCI-P3 gamut, which is impressive to say the least. The base display option might not be the best for color-sensitive work, but it goes easy on the 76Wh battery, allowing it to reach almost 9 hours of web browsing, or a bit less than 7 hours of video playback. That's a very good result for a gaming notebook. It's possible thanks to the MS Hybrid Eco mode of the MUX switch, which forces the system to use the integrated GPU. Only 2 per 100 people watching this video are subscribers. If you decide to just start following us, we'll be able to reinvest more in our laboratory, thus making even more helpful videos for you. Thank you, you're awesome. But if you need maximum performance, you can make the TUF-F15 use the discrete GPU, boosting the frame rate by up to 30% on the embedded display. This results in over 90 FPS in games like Battlefield 5, on ultra settings, even with the mid-range 75W RTX 3050 Ti. The top configuration of the FX517 has an RTX 3070 with 105W TGP, which is more than 30% higher than the FX516's 80W best GPU. And it uses the full potential of the 144Hz screen since it runs with 147 FPS on average. On the CPU side, the top option is the Core i7-12650H, which is powerful enough for photo and video editing or any other type of heavy load. Looks like the cooling system is well thought out, but let's take a peek. We see a setup of 5 heat pipes and 2 arc flow fans with very thin blades. According to ASUS, that leads to up to 13% more airflow and reduced noise. By the way, when the temperature drops below 50 degrees Celsius, the fans turn off and the notebook becomes completely silent, dissipating heat passively. The left fan is intentionally positioned just below the WASD keys, and as you can see on our IR thermal photo, that's the coolest area on the keyboard. Also, the temperature on the warmest point is below 47 degrees Celsius, which is more than 10 degrees lower compared to the predecessor FX516. Good job! Despite the smaller footprint, the notebook keeps its upgrade ability sharp, and it even has a new easy upgrade design with a captive screw in the corner which pushes the bottom of the chassis away from the body. Below, we find two DDR5-4800 Sodem slots for up to 50% faster RAM compared to the DDR4 modules. There are also two M.2 SSD slots, one of which supports Gen4 drives for some configurations. You can watch our Teardown video for more info on that. If specced properly, the Dash F15 can be a fantastic laptop for gaming that can also be used for productivity and creator work. That's a huge upgrade over the FX516. Now the Tough Dash looks and works as a true high-end notebook. It doesn't just provide great performance, but it also has many additional perks like Dolby Atmos support, AI noise cancellation, and fast charging. Basically everything we wanted after our F15 2021 review is present in the new F15 2022. We'll leave a quick remark here. The CPU is fast, but it's obvious that it has even more potential and we expect it to be unleashed with a software update. We'll contact ASUS about it and we'll update our detailed text review with their answer. Of course, we've done a lot more tests and you can check out all the results in our in-depth review on laptopmedia.com. You'll find the link in the description below the video.


What's up everybody Jason here for jazby's case breaks calm We just sold off flawless Pikachu number 13 with one of these random number blocks that sold out that Holds on to for you guys the Mavericks in the net so everybody gets a piece of the Mavericks and nets in this random number block and Same thing as any other random block format everybody gets a random number from 0 through 9 We go by the first number on the left side of the serial number dash. There's your examples there Remember if there is any redemption where there shouldn't be But if there is that'll go automatically spot zero any one-on-ones go spot one if there isn't any numbered cards Not number cards in the break then we'll be randomized to the customers in this break itself for the Mavericks and Brooklyn Nets There's a customer names Paul down a Danny zero through nine Here we go roll it Five into two seven times. Good luck one two three four five six and seven but here with Spot at the top P. I'll paw at the bottom seven times one two three four five six seven four done at eight So about here with four Larry with seven Andrew any one-on-ones as well as three Danny with six Gretchen with zero Larry with nine Gretchen with five Danny With two and Paul with eight So again guys we got to do two more RMBs, but once those are done. We will get the break on guys. So good luck


Part of what's going on with Carl's project, which we'll talk a teeny bit about, is trying to create a national inventory of legal materials, a spreadsheet of your database of all primary legal materials at the state and also at the federal level at some point. And it started off with California, and the folks at Stanford started off doing inventory through NoCal, a double A double chapter for California. And double A double L recently has kind of joined in to encourage, created these working groups for librarians in different states to join. Because double A double L's been very involved over the years in concerns about access to a ton of legal information, issues about authentication, permanency. And Joan's been very much involved in that. So she's going to give you a little bit of an introduction into what double A double L's done in the past with some of these issues. And I'm going to go into a little bit about the world that we've been doing, Joan and I and other people in Massachusetts on our own inventory as part of this larger project. Well, it sort of started, it says 2003, but I know it started in 2002 because I was one of the state authors for the state by state report on permanent public access to electronic government information. And double A double L was aware of the fact that with the event of electronic information it was possible to make more legal information accessible. The problem was to make sure that it was permanent. At least that was the first thing we were looking at. And here in Massachusetts we were making it all permanent because we weren't making any of the electronics, so that worked pretty well. And that was pretty good because what happened was by 2007 double A double L did their state by state report on authentication of online legal resources, I guess it was called. And by then five states had already stopped their paper administrative registers and went strictly to electronic sources. The problem with that is that they hadn't thought at all about the notion of permanency or authenticatability. So in 2007 double A double L held a national summit on authentication of digital legal information. And this was, they presented the findings from their survey and they invited lots of players from federal and state government and from all branches of government. And people who were really interested in this issue and one of the best things that came out of that in my opinion was the fact that one of the participants was one of the national commissioners of my uniform state laws. And she asked them to make a study group, which they did. And the study group made a proposal and the conference of commissioners has now got a working group on drafting standards for the authentication and preservation of electronic state legal materials. And that's part of what you've been asking for is a solution. Some of the players have already, some of the big players have already started. The commissioners have followed their procedures to develop standards that will allow that to happen. What else is on our team that we did? Oh, you want to click on the lovely, I don't want to show up there now. I want to show the lovely pamphlet because I hope that's one that AAOL did in 2007 adopt principles on access to electronic legal information you can flip to page two. And we decided that these five, these things are all, we think these are all essential and we're trying to get this information to all the makers of legal information to make sure that they know that what they produce has to be accessible. I have to tell my favorite story that I just love this story. It has to be a long time ago, but when the Massachusetts Register was not very old, like it was about eight to ten years old. I have a patron who needed some regulations and she couldn't find them anywhere and I called the agency on the phone and they said they'd send them to me and I asked why their rates weren't in the CMR. And I'm talking the paper CMR in those days and she said, well, we change them so often we decided it's better not to publish them. And I said to her, how do you expect anyone to follow them if you don't publish them? And luckily for me I can't remember what agency this was.  But if you're old enough, as some of us are, the CMR didn't exist until 1978.  But it has to be reliable that the official status is something that used to be given when everything was in paper. It's very difficult now to figure out what's official and what's not and harder. It needs to be comprehensive. And that it has to have to be to the future. When you're really older you have lots of stories to remember, but I remember when the Secretary of State of Massachusetts decided to improve the way the CMR was updated. And it really was an improvement in the updating of the CMR, but it totally destroyed historical copies of the CMR. And I know in my library we have like a six month to a year gap where we just actually don't know what the rates were during that time period because we didn't do a good enough job of preparing for that change. So that can be multiplied by zillions of times as more and more stuff moves electronic and is very fragile and temporary. So luckily double A double L is working on a lot of fronts including the working groups to go back to the PowerPoint to bring us back to what we did. And I'm going to put this on so people can follow the links to all the documents as of that time. So Joan and I and a few other people in Massachusetts have started working on the inventory. It's very, very much still a work in progress, but we thought when we were having this event today we'd share some of the things we found so far and I remember really that Earth's shatteringly new. We kind of already knew that they existed. And we're just kind of raising issues that we think are important for people to know about Massachusetts in general. So where are we looking at in this inventory? We're looking at the scope of the content. So for example if something's available on a government website, is it just the current edition that they made available previous editions? The format, are they making the content available only in HTML? Are they making it available in PDF? Are they making it available in XML? Which could be used for various purposes. Copyright assertions that publishers try to make on works. There's a general notion in Massachusetts that legally copyright is not an issue on state materials as it can be in other states. But when you look at a lot of publications there are a lot of copyright assertions. In terms of use sometimes different publishers, they might make their content free available on their website, but they might be onerous terms of use so that it's caused to just the earlier if you wanted to try to take that content and do something that you'd be limited. The costs involved in trying to maintain certain type of materials or access certain materials. The issues of digital authentication and permanent access which Joan raised currently, I don't think Massachusetts is dealing really right now depending on legislation with the digital authentication issue. And we're also just kind of looking at the whole sense of access in general, just how usable are these materials that are on the web for real people trying to use them. So overall impressions I have thus far and I think Joan would share them with me is that Massachusetts is doing an okay, I'd say okay not great but okay job of making current material available, but there's not as much access to older material except where libraries or other entities have maybe stepped in and had efforts to make that content available. One of the things that's frustrating about Massachusetts is a very diffuse system, so the content might be available but it's available in many different places. There's not a centralized portal or place or office or something that's responsible for pushing the material out or creating standards so that everybody's doing things the same way or on the same page. And as I mentioned before the other thing that the impression I have is there's a lot of copyright statements on materials. Now what that actually really means legally is kind of a separate issue, but it's interesting when you look at the various materials, especially things like municipal ordinances and such that have copyright notices on them. So one of the things I wanted to raise and I'm going to actually show you the website because it illustrates how butter is the SJC website for reports. So one of the things is you can get SJC decisions for free but only in certain formats and one of the big concerns is that if you want to actually access the advance sheets to the SJC decisions, which have the head notes and the proper pagination of the citation for citating the official reports, it's actually by subscription because West actually does the printing for the advance sheets and they also provide I think the content for this particular service. And I think this is the link to the pricing for it. Yeah, so you can see this is a different pricing if you wanted to try to get the pricing for it. You have to pay $175 a year if you have only up to 15 attorneys in your organization, but it can go up to $510 if you have a larger firm or organization. So that to us is problematic because should this content really be behind the paywall and I think the SJC or the people responsible would argue that there is this opinion archive and there are other forms of the decision available but really to have them not available with the head notes for that interim period of time before they're in the bound volumes is problematic. The other thing is a lot of the lower courts, some of the lower courts actually, there are different issues of the precedential value but still people have interest in looking at lower court, trial court decisions and even though they're available, a lot of times they're not available necessarily from the court itself. For example, superior court decisions, you can get slip opinions from social law library back to a certain point in time. And other than that, you actually have to pay for something like the Massachusetts Law Reporter, which is a commercial service that's put out or have access to Lexis and Westlaw to access such content. And again, that's problematic because you have a lot of people in the superior courts that might want to access that content that are limited. Moving on to the legislative branch of government, Massachusetts does make its general laws in Massachusetts available. Their print edition is actually published with West, which I'll show you an interesting issue in a second. If you look at the website, you'll see huge disclaimer on the top. So somebody trying to use it, an actual patron using it in a person in real life pro se trying to use it gets this very daunting message. Yeah, yeah, you can use this but you really can't rely on it. And definitely the law would actually like this because this really isn't an authenticated version of the text. And they're very concerned part of what they want to do with these working groups is do this inventory to make sure that websites where the information is not authenticated. It is clear to the person using it that it's not the official version. But from a user perspective, that's very discouraging I think in terms of the usability of the information. Also has a nice little suggestion about contacting a lawyer. And the other concern is, well, first they don't have previous editions. So if you wanted a previous compilation from a previous year, there are instances where people want to know the status of the law from let's say four or five years ago. You can't do that on their website. You can look at the session laws back to a certain period of time but not the codified version which is generally the more usable version for generally applicable laws. And the other thing is the time date which I'm not sure maybe some of my colleagues from the state libraries know why it's not as up to date as 2009. I didn't know that something to do with there are certain rules about effective dates in Massachusetts. How many days before statute actually effective and I didn't know if that was part of the reason why the current see currentness might be an issue. But that's another issue in terms of the usability of the website. So it's there and people can use it but it's not necessarily the most ideal way for people to access the information. The other interesting thing is the copyright statement and it's a statement that it's copyrighted by Massachusetts and Thomson Reuters. And then when you go further it didn't bother putting the text up but in the preface part it talks about how the editorial editions, it talks about all the different things that aren't in the original general laws and it's implied that West has added them. So it's a whole issue of what if we as a library wanted to go ahead and just scan the general laws and then make them available on what kind of copyright claims can they put on the editorial information and what would we have to be concerned about. But it's interesting because people generally patrons have the impression that the general laws are copyright free public domain and like I said in Massachusetts copyright on the primary legal materials is considered to be a non-issue but this is our official code put out jointly printed by West with some little bit of editorial, very little. And in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts so it's interesting to see the copyright notice there. Maybe Carl or others would have thoughts about that when we get on to discussion. And then Joan's going to talk a little bit about her impressions. Well, yeah, the first thing is that there is a searchable CMR that the state runs on the web. And of course not official and they want to share 110 bucks to search it and I don't know why. And good luck for us the trial courts have put links to all those rigs that are out there on the free web from the agencies but they're not in a searchable form, they're just there. And then there is the problem that Carl mentioned this earlier. Somebody mentioned it earlier. But that the CMR itself is full of all sorts of standards that cost thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars to buy and that you can't produce and there needs to be, it's not just the needs to redo law, we need to redo the way standards are paid for in this country. Basically the revenue scheme from all the standards organizations has been, it's not showing up, it hates me. I always thought it would take a long time to upload because it's a big beauty and that's a good reason. But this is just a page from the CMR, I'm actually about six or eight pages from the CMR that lists all the different standards referenced in the building code. Or I actually didn't use the building code, I used the plumbing code, one of the codes. And if you have to go out and buy all these standards, which you have to do, it's thousands of dollars. I don't know how anybody complies with our rigs because I don't know any plumber who can afford to buy all this stuff. So it takes me back to the, you know, why do we publish, why do we pass these laws or these rigs if we don't want people to follow them? And older rigs. Oh, I mentioned that earlier that you can't get, well there's actually a microfiche version of the old CMR that you can buy, you can't get them electronically, you can't get an older version of the code and you can't even actually get to all of the mass registers. There is actually a, there's still about 20 or 30 issues that I've never found in the mass register that now that you take them apart and file them, when everyone did that, when they came out, I don't know if anybody saved a perfect copy that we had. Do you have one? I love them. I love them because there would be times in my life when I said, don't patron, I can't help you and I don't know where you can go to get help. You never, you know, if you saved a complete set, thank you. I tried to get my library too, I was overruled in my library, they thought that was a silly thing for me to want to do, so go figure it out. Dr. Romney under him is the one who actually started the chart. I do believe it was free before Governor Romney, so it's a free access of money. Well, and that's, I mean, part of the, when I did it back in 2002, when I was getting all the information for the survey, money was the big issue, that a lot of the Massachusetts information is in databases and it's dynamically generated web pages and it's awesome information that they could make available but don't want to and that at the time in 2002, my concern for them was, were they saving it in some way? Was there a way to find out what had been in the databases at certain times? And the state library had come to RAID and said yes, or RAID, meaning the people of Massachusetts, not me personally, that they started archiving stuff on disks or on floppy's or on CDs or something, just because they said this information will be lost if we don't just start saving it. And so they have a lot of it saved, but there's, again, no money to make it publicly available is the problem. And content that patrons need all the time, it's very real-life, affordable content. D, Marty, is there any sense of how much money they actually make from the CMR service? I mean, I can't imagine it's that much. I have no idea and we don't use it, so... You know how we won the federal register fight? When we finally found out the total revenue the government printing office was making on all the official journals of government, the federal register code of federal regulations, total revenue was $220,000, including $17,000 that we expect. So the minute Congress figured that out, they said, why are you bothering us with this? Drop the paywall. That's all it took. Technology decision from the state of Massachusetts. If you go and ask RAIDs, now I'll be talking a little bit about this. Our constitutional system of government, they have all these constitutional offices, they control their own electronic domain. The CMR is not controlled by the executive department of the governor, but by the secretary of the commonwealth office. So if at the time the Romney administration, these territories were imposed, they would have been imposed by a separate elected official, the secretary of the commonwealth. And it's one of those things that I'll be talking a little bit about in a second, that we don't have any central contents that can come up with rules about open access across the entire constitutional office. You do have the state archivist who was in the state archivist. The secretary of the commonwealth office, not under the governor. Right. And they're the people that are really in charge of making sure, I mean, everything that gets thrown away has to go through their office.  It's awesome. There are laws in place that provide for permanent preservation of these materials. And it is through the secretary of state's office, not through the governor's office. Okay, so the other thing we noticed was looking at the agency decisions. They're really all over the place, as Joan suggested before. She did a little research and she did confirm that most agencies still are only, the decisions are only available for inspection. They're not really published. I'm looking up here because my screen went out, so just bear with me a little bit. The agency is very greatly in terms of the availability of the content and it's available in a lot of different forms, print on the web, commercial services. A lot of the older content in particular, it's got tied into commercial publishers. And that's one of the things that struck me in terms of going back to the issue again of what if you wanted to do some great project first on clinical or something like that and take the decisions and make them available. You would really only be able to do it easily for a certain period of time for the ones around the website, the agency that do make them available on the website because for earlier, even though the decisions in some cases go back into sometimes even the 70s or the 80s, there are issues because land law publishing has published a lot of them and they have a commercial electronic service and then a print service and they claim copyright on the content, so again maybe it's an issue, how relevant that really is. But it struck me in doing the inventory that for current material you're fine but for older material it's a lot less accessible without the costs and for this kind of information a person doesn't necessarily need just like the current five years or ten years they need to know what the whole body of law is for particular agency. And the other thing that we haven't done yet but that I'm really anxious to do once we've actually gotten through the whole inventory is it's been just an impression because I haven't really had time to really look at it carefully but there seems to be a lot of differences in the scope of the decisions that are covered in the different sources in terms of the land law publications versus the things that are on the website so it would be really interesting to do some statistics to see like how many decisions are available in each type of sources for a given agency. The other thing we did is, oh go ahead. I just want to say not just agency decisions but Massachusetts is actually a pretty good space in terms of other executive things. In a lot of the other states once a new governor or attorney general takes office they try to remove all evidence of their predecessors which means removing executive orders into attorney general opinions and we're a pretty good space here because our stuff is still up there even from previous administrations which is amazing and awesome so somebody is paying attention I hope and listening and keeping stuff available and not taking it away because it's not just getting it all there it's keeping it there, that's a big issue. And it's just really interesting because like for example I know when I was looking at the housing appeals committee decisions there was this big disclaimer on the website saying if you want all available decisions you must go to Lexus or Westlaw or land law and these are only the recent ones and it's just very interesting from a patron perspective to see that information presents it that way. So we're also trying to do an inventory of local laws, municipal and ordinances town by laws but because we just started the project of course we haven't had time to go through all the different municipalities and towns so we just tried to do a quick survey of a few of them and what was really interesting is that what was Carl's found in other places in other states is there are a lot of copyright claims on the content and what's really interesting is the people that were helping with the project there were a lot of discrepancies between what was claimed on a given website or publication versus what the vendor themselves said so for example I can't remember what town it is but one town on their website they claim copyright but when the person helping me contacted the towns clerk office they say oh no we don't have copyright and then vice versa another town had no copyright claim on their website yet when they were contacting them about pricing information and things like that they were told oh you can't just go ahead and copy it because we have copyright on it so it's really interesting the different information that's conveyed and I think how much thoughts put in by the vendors and the publishers and the notices that they put out but again it goes to the issue of what if you just wanted to take this content and try to make available in some other way because in some of these instances there are also terms of use on the websites that you can't actually do things with the content and also a lot of these sources are online now but there are a lot of disclaimers that the online version is not official and it's very out of date even more so a lot of times than the mass general laws and if you want to get a print publication you actually in some instances if it's not sold through the vendor you have to actually like a unit code or something you actually have to go to the town clerk's office to actually purchase so even from a library's perspective if you want to have the content in your library just trying to acquire it can be difficult and the costs aren't insignificant they seem to be ranging between $100 and $300 so this is just a list of the biggest commercial publishers and vendors in Massachusetts it's been really interesting Alexis I was noticing with the attorney discipline reports again they're claiming copyright on the content which is really interesting so those are sort of the bigger issues that we found doing the inventory and I would love to have conversation with the librarians here about whether they'd be interested in participating or any other issues they think that we're going to encounter that we haven't discovered already and if you're interested I can also show you what the inventory itself looks like Does anybody have any questions or comments? Does anybody want to help with the inventory? It's very interesting from a librarians perspective I mean like I said I went into this knowing I knew about the CMR, I knew about some other things but when you actually, you know when you help people with real problems that's when you notice these issues coming up with the structure of the content or the availability of the content If I should write you one I can show you what this spreadsheet looks like and hopefully I didn't feel comfortable because we're so early in the process and like Joan and I said it's not ready at all for the prime time and I don't even think it's ready for like good night cable station or anything like that but I'm going to show you what this spreadsheet looks like but the other thing I wanted to mention is that I think there's a lot of, to the librarians that are here I think there's a lot of potential to create synergy with other projects that we're working on for example in Massachusetts we have this B2F2 program going on a collaborative collection developer program with a different area academic law school libraries and it might be something that there might be certain types of data that we have this master inventory that we're using for purposes for Carl for AALL that we could use it for other purposes for example I thought it would be interesting in some instances especially with the ordinances where you know not a lot of libraries in a certain area are going to have a copy of like a local town ordinance except maybe for like the public library in the area I thought it would actually be interesting to go in and list which particular libraries might have a particular publication or if we're going to be canceling certain titles we can have lists of who who's the record holder for that particular title Somehow we've got to get past that and say you could be involved in the working committee even if you're not a AALL member I think that would be fun I think that message is out there and that you can take on a small part or whatever so I think we need to answer Yeah let me make that message really clear this was actually started by Paul O'Neill and Erica Wayne at Stanford it is very much a grassroots activity and we're very fortunate that the AALL is assisting in that on the other hand this is very much grassroots and I would encourage anybody to adopt a jurisdiction and make a statement as to what the state of that jurisdiction is and to do so in any way that is comfortable and I mean it could be the spreadsheet but if you prefer a Microsoft Word document or an email message I think the important point is to get the information out there and this is an awareness raising campaign so you don't have to be a member of anything in order to participate This is the spreadsheet looks like so this is very still much in the early stages but these are all the different things that we're trying to look at which is why you can see it's in her time assuming project but I do think that having worked on it now for a little bit that it can have a lot of applications so I think once we actually have that and I also think we could do really interesting things which I wanted to do but I just I didn't feel that that data was valid enough to do with visualizations in terms of the information like I would look to do with administrative decisions some sort of visualizations to explain like where the content is available for certain date spans and things like that but I think that the potential here for libraries to use this and just all sorts of different type of people the general public to use it is really great and speaking of standards I'd like to have us develop standards for this I mean we're looking at a spreadsheet that I filled in and I'm not sure of all of my data some of it I'm sure of and some of it I'm not and I would love to get more input from more people especially the agencies that are involved and people just other people's opinions of who really owns the data or who's doing what with it you know this is based on what I could figure out but I've been known to make mistakes in my life there was a time when I was young and had made no mistakes but now that I'm whole I've made quite a few so tell me about the Code of Massachusetts Regulations it's $110 is two questions is copyright being asserted and has anybody forked over $110 and just crawled the site and made it available you sound like an undergraduate help sign that right just in jail it's available on their website now I've called it and several older versions they have on the site budgetary information and the proposed bills that they're going through okay that's not the paid CMR though that's the legislative website the secretary's website the legislative website is great but is that the same as the CMR I know the CMR I'm shocked that there isn't an undergrad someplace how many universities are there in Boston most of our law students access it on Lexington Westlaw or through our subscriptions at social law libraries so most of the people who would want to break in have access to the data through some other paid vendor so that people haven't seen the need because the law students being on Lexington Westlaw is the same as being free even though in the real world nothing could be further from the truth but citizens of Massachusetts don't have access to the CMR well they actually I was in the title of the law we have access in our law libraries to the social law version because the legislature pays money to the social law to put it up and create it so we negotiated that and said it's public money creating so the answer is in 17 locations as you show up physically you can actually have access now you might correct me when I just said that going into the libraries can access to the social law but that's still sort of paid for I'm going into your libraries they can access it through westlaw as well that is correct it's physically show up in your library at one point the social law was charging us and we walked back and said wait a minute I'm interested in the person who is scraping the legislature website so are you making those available or are you kind of a 50 state project no my plan was to make them better for them and analyze them and also do an essential analysis especially over time and then I wanted to see if I could see bills actually impact and trace it back to the impact on one version of the law but as again I just scraped and done some basic cleaning of the day the single most powerful thing we've been able to show people in Washington, in the White House and Congress and the judges is something called OregonLaws.org when the State of Oregon sent us a takedown notice for having the Oregon Revised Statutes all we had was a big zip file and we went to testify and they waved the certions of copyright and about six months later a 2L at Lewis and Clark who had a COPSI undergrad took the Oregon Revised Statutes and created this just absolutely amazing beautiful user interface with semantic searching it's got everything you could possibly want and that's an example of the kind of innovation that happens when bulk access is provided to the data we've also seen the same thing on the Federal Register there's been a whole bunch of groups out there like GovPulse.us and Thread.org that have taken the Federal Register and done some really amazing things with them and that hits home when you show that to a judge because they go, wow, this is way better than what they had So I have a question for everyone else, the copyright expertise what do you think about the notices that there are, like, the general laws one? I, well, Thumb alone is going to deal with this Jamie Boyle has dealt with it Professor Pat Samuelson dealt with it look, I'm not a judge I'm not even a lawyer, I'm a law school dropout but in my reading of the public policy of the United States if you start at Wheaton v. Peters and you move along and look at the Supreme Court decisions is that there is no copyright in the law now, there may be copyright in a driver's ed film from a state but the law and at all levels my understanding and this has not been definitively ruled is that there's no copyright in that one of the big questions is do we need to amend the copyright law to make that more explicit one sentence, section 105 amendment that says the law has no copyright but certainly for the state legislatures that assert copyright themselves, right not over a vendor, that's a more complicated situation but when the state asserts copyright over their state statutes that seems rather speculative it seems so counter to me it's counter intuitive that if we want people to follow the laws you have to make them no I don't still understand why that's all of a sudden some wonderful revenue stream for them you know this issue is so easy to explain it's something that if you're sitting in a bar having a beer and you turn to the guy and ask him to explain what's going on and get it to you right and the common reaction on that is that's really stupid it's also interesting I think because I think that publicly people who work in Massachusetts government are joking correctly but I mean I have an impression in Massachusetts the public records laws are pretty good I mean the stuff is clearly staff toy required to be made available and then the issue is just how accessible is it really so you know you can have these wonderful public records laws where yet theoretically somebody has the right to go in and get the information but if you're not actually making it available that's a separate issue so maybe we need to be doing more in the state to strengthen those requirements because that is not publishing requirements but not as many I guess as there could be now you know there's one other important thing to remember when we went and discussed the issue with the Oregon Legislative Council he told me something very interesting he said you know that's a 1945 law we're talking about you know and it turns out in 1945 the only people that looked at the Oregon by statutes were lawyers and they looked at printed documents and it just wasn't an issue and the idea that ordinary citizens might want to consult those or even technical standards when I put US patents on the internet one of the main arguments from the commissioner of patents is nobody's going to want to read this why are you taking away our revenue stream because the only people that are going to access are a bunch of patent lawyers now that turned out to be raw right it was engineers and computer scientists and others were reading those patents but a lot of what we see in the current situation is simply the fact that that's the way it was in the 70s and the 60s and it kind of made sense and I think part of our job here is to kind of make the case as to why it doesn't make sense anymore we have lunch coming at 12 but we can break a little early so if anybody wants to help with it or please grab me or email me lunch is just going to be on a table outside I'm not sure it's actually there yet if it's not you can just know about restrooms are to the right outside the room so we're going to have lunch you can have lunch in here you can have lunch outside and then we'll come back at 1 o'clock for a couple more sets of speakers thank you


Hundreds of millions of people want to have better lives, moderner lives, which means more energy. The question is, is that how do we figure out a way to provide a cost-effective economic solution by giving them power? When you first try to bring electricity to a village or a small town, people can't afford to pay for it. There's a capital cost up front. The world needs to develop new models of producing and consuming energy, a new energy architecture. Countries must plan for a transition to serve the needs of their future societies. Some of these factors include energy security, energy sustainability, and perhaps most of all the need for quality economic growth. Energy is the lifeblood of the economy. We have to find ways in which the energy architecture evolves using the least possible number of resources. One of the best ways to bring energy to people is through greater economic growth. That's why if you look at China or behind in India, more and more people have access to modern energy. We have to use energy much more efficiently. It's possible to consume less than we consume today. If you look at the amount of effort it takes to build a car so that you can get into it, drive yourself to a grocery store, buy a bottle of milk, and drive home, you think about the energy that's involved in that. Demand should be reduced across all countries so that the pressure on supply reduces and costs go down as well. We're going to see the wind industry, which is really about a 30-year-old industry taking a bigger, bigger share. The cost of solar is coming down. The World Economic Forum has created a report of many important stakeholders. Some countries are seeking to provide basic access to energy to their population. Other countries are seeking to modernise their energy system and reduce carbon emissions. This report then provides solutions that decision makers can use to help that transition. You also have a good mix of policymakers and experts who are able to challenge also the CEOs. I just finished a meeting under renewable energies and I think we had an excellent discussion. I've never been to any other conference or event where you get that kind of group of people working together.