What's with Ray Kurzweil?

6/4/2012 2:50 PM EDT

Did you ever see Bob Pease's office at National Semiconductor? 'nuf said.

6/4/2012 3:55 PM EDT

yes it is easier to densely pack and insert or remove books standing on edge.

Unfortunarely, from a book binders perspective it is not the best method to maintain the binding over long periods of time...flat is:)

6/4/2012 5:31 PM EDT

Easier to read the titles?

6/4/2012 5:47 PM EDT

no need to buy book ends?

6/4/2012 9:00 PM EDT

Those are pre-Google electronic component data books that have been sorted into horizontal stacks, of approximately equal BTUs and burn times, and can be readily fed into his fireplace.

6/5/2012 1:56 AM EDT

More efficient use of space. The space between the top of a book and the shelf above it is usually wasted if you stack books vertically. Especially if books are not of constant height and the shelf has to be adjusted to accomodate the tallest one. Anyway, he's probably read them and isn't going to read them again, but like most of us, can't throw books away.

6/5/2012 11:45 AM EDT

That is an interesting thought. The shelf set pretty clearly looks to be designed that way intentionally rather than adapted.

I would guess that it's done to protect the books. I would also guess that, along with stress on the binding, he's also carefully considered the tradeoffs between accessibility, compressibility and space design efficiency.

6/5/2012 3:01 PM EDT

I have no idea, but this is so fascinating that I'm going to start stalking his garbage can. Whatever would I learn from that? The music of the spheres? Gather a big tub of phlogiston?

It's early for the silly season, isn't it?

6/5/2012 4:43 PM EDT

Placing bound books on the edge is hard on the binding; the weight of the printed material tries to lever itself away from the binding. placing the book either on the flat or with the bound edge down alleviates the problem.

Paperbacks and other books which don't have a cover larger than the printed material don't suffer this issue.

6/6/2012 7:01 AM EDT

The notion that the man concerned about prolonging his current physical existence long enough to be somehow reincarnated and immortalized in a bunch of bloody code would care about the preservation of books...

The shelf space argument could have a grain of truth, although I use the space above a conventional vertical row for more books as it is (I'm am always running out of space).

6/6/2012 10:21 PM EDT

That really bugs you OCD types, right Rick? Kurzweil obviously is more focused on other things.

Besides, as noted, the space above dissimilar book heights is volumetrically inefficient. Horizontal book orientation also allows them to be placed on top of a papers stack.

The other aspect is the problem of how to stack scientific papers on end?

6/7/2012 7:16 AM EDT

Maybe this futurologist thinks print is dead and is letting the books Rest-In-Peace?

6/8/2012 3:48 PM EDT

OK, this does not require serious forensics folks other than to still-frame the Kurzweil image and look.

It doesn't look like Mr. Kurzweil's shelves are adjustable. (He probably can afford something better than Ikea.) Most carpenter dudes are going to place those shelves on 12" centers. 1" inch dimensional lumber is 3/4" thick leaving 11-1/4" for bound printed material. Could be that dimensional lumber wasn't used and the shelves are 1" or 5/8" with a 1"x 2" stiffener along the front. I've lived in a house with bookcases that were on 12" centers and I can assure you it was a PITA with 50-80% of my material laying flat just like Mr. Kurzweil's.

6/9/2012 12:49 AM EDT

books?

6/9/2012 3:29 AM EDT

I usually do the same, specially for which have hardcovers which are bigger than the book's pages. The reasons?

- If you put the books standing, with the pass of time, the pages will bind (specially for heavy books), putting an unnecessary stress on the area where they are adhered together and to the book covers.
- With the pass of time, dust gathers over the top part of the book, making it look very nasty and ugly.

These two situations you can avoid if you just stack your books laying.

6/9/2012 7:45 AM EDT

I did it for two reasons; 1. Ran out of shelf area and realized I should think of it as volume, rather than area. 2. Some instrument companies like SRS think their manuals need to be letter size paper in ring binders that are taller than the distance between my shelves. No idea why Kurzweil did it. Because he can? Thank goodness for the Internet and PDFs.

6/11/2012 7:03 PM EDT

I don't know why Ray Kurzweil is often associate with Speech Recognition, since he has very little to do with it. Yes, it's true he started a company in the 1980s developing a speech recognition product, like many others did at that time. However, most likely, he did not use the leading technology (statistical methods), which was already well known a that time (thanks to think-tank places such as IBM research and AT&T Bell Laboratories), and it was rapidly forgotten. Sure, he wrote interesting books, but in my opinion he did not contributed to the technology, like many other (less famous) scientists did in the 60+ years of the history of computers and speech, as I describe in "The Voice in the Machine" http://www.amazon.com/The-Voice-Machine-Computers-Understand/dp/0262016850/ref=sr_1_sc_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1339455670&sr=8-1-spell. Associating Ray Kurzweil to the speech recognition technology is a little bit like associating Al Gore to the invention of Internet... I can't comment on the horizontally placed books.

6/12/2012 5:35 AM EDT

Perhaps Mr Kurzweil just doesn't think in a vertically-oriented way ? (See for example the book "A Perfect Mess- the Hidden Benefits of Disorder").
I believe it's fairly well established now that some folks spread stuff out horizontally, and some stack it vertically in a manner that suits their way of thinking/mental indexing. This, of course, drives absolutely crazy those people obsessed with lining things up in an orderly way and creating clean-desk policies... :-)
Mal.