— William Deresiewicz, The Disadvantages of an Elite Education
Mesofacts are the facts that change neither too quickly nor too slowly, that lie in this difficult-to-comprehend middle, or meso-, scale. Often, we learn these in school when young and hold onto them, even after they change. For example, if, as a baby boomer, you learned high school chemistry in 1970, and then, as we all are apt to do, did not take care to brush up on your chemistry periodically, you would not realize that there are 12 new elements in the Periodic Table. Over a tenth of the elements have been discovered since you graduated high school! While this might not affect your daily life, it is astonishing and a bit humbling.
For these kinds of facts, the analogy of how to boil a frog is apt: Change the temperature quickly, and the frog jumps out of the pot. But slowly increase the temperature, and the frog doesn’t realize that things are getting warmer, until it’s been boiled. So, too, is it with humans and how we process information. We recognize rapid change, whether it’s as simple as a fast-moving object or living with the knowledge that humans have walked on the moon. But anything short of large-scale rapid change is often ignored. This is the reason we continue to write the wrong year during the first days of January.
Our schools are biased against mesofacts. The arc of our educational system is to be treated as little generalists when children, absorbing bits of knowledge about everything from biology to social studies to geology. But then, as we grow older, we are encouraged to specialize. This might have been useful in decades past, but in our increasingly fast-paced and interdisciplinary world, lacking an even approximate knowledge of our surroundings is unwise.
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When Thomas Young was alive the world contained about a billion people. Few of them were literate and fewer still had the chance to experiment on the nature of light or to examine the Rosetta stone. Today the planet teems with 6.7 billion minds. Never have so many been taught to read and write and think, and then been free to choose what they would do with their lives. The electronic age has broken the shackles of knowledge. Never has it been easier to find something out, or to get someone to explain it to you.
Yet as human learning has flowered, the man or woman who does great things in many fields has become a rare species. Young was hardly Aristotle, but his capacity to do important work in such a range of fields startled his contemporaries and today seems quite bewildering. The dead cast a large shadow but, even allowing for that, the 21st century has no one to match Michelangelo, who was a poet as well as a sculptor, an architect and a painter. It has no Alexander von Humboldt, who towered over early-19th-century geography and science. And no Leibniz, who invented calculus at the same time as Newton and also wrote on technology, philosophy, biology, politics and just about everything else.
Although you may be able to think of a few living polymaths who rival the breadth of Young’s knowledge, not one of them beg ins to rival the breadth of his achievements. Over the past 200 years the nature of intellectual endeavour has changed profoundly. The polymaths of old were one-brain universities. These days you count as a polymath if you excel at one thing and go on to write a decent book about another.
"— Edward Carr, in The Last Days of the Polymath
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This quote comes from a 2003 article by Johanna Drucker titled “The Virtual Codex from Page Space to E-Space.”
I find it fascinating to read a six-year-old article on how electronic media interacts with the concept of a book, especially now that the ubiquity of devices like laptops, netbooks, tablets, Kindles, iPhones, etc. has began to truly impact how we consume the written word. However, many of Drucker’s points are still valid. The quote above touches on something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately- that the codex format employs something special that is the result of its physical construction. This special property is how elements from two side-by-side pages can interact graphically. When you hold a book open, you visually take in both sides at once, though you know you will likely begin reading at the top left, work your way down to the bottom, and then resume at the top right. In many textbooks or diagrams, the two sides present a unique opportunity to engage the design of the page in a conversation of elements on each side. “Breaking” the gutter with a visual element that crosses from one side to the other begins to create another space that is beyond the page. In other words, the single page has some inherent design limitations that can be harnessed when another page is attached to it and used to expand the graphic possibilities of the layout. As this works wonderfully in printed media, I think it could do even more in an electronic device that maintains the convention of the codex.
