Small is Beautiful

Wednesday, May 25, 2011

For amusement I read John Grisham stories, and often enough he describes courtroom or boardroom scenes with the head honcho billing $300/hour and two or three associates billing $150/hour each; they are also billing the reams, literally, of paper charged out to the client. Bulk is money, say the lawyers.

But the most earth-shattering ideas are succinct enough to make my lips purse.

Case 1: Watson & Crick’s famous paper on DNA.

Watson JD, Crick FH (April 1953). "Molecular structure of nucleic acids; a structure for deoxyribose nucleic acid" (PDF). Nature 171 (4356): 737–738

Check it out. It fits onto a single sheet of A4 paper (“Letter” in the US) and changed the face of Biology. It didn’t derail Darwin; it reinforced his ideas and showed them to be ahead of his time.

Case 2: Edsger W.Dijkstra’s “ A Case against the GO TO Statement ”

It fits easily onto two pages, but I’ve seen condensation that fit on one.

I’ll augment this blog post with other examples as they come to my mind.

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