I've been building a library. It isn't quite finished, and I'd like to show it to you anyway.
Last week I said I'd share a fully functioning library, but it's taking a little longer than I planned. Reading matters and building infrastructures carefully takes the time it takes, and I'd rather give it that time than hand you something faster and thinner. So, one more week, altough you are more than welcome to take a peek here: https://www.biodesign.academy/reading-room
That said, the Reading of the Marble Berry itself is finished. So here it is, ahead of everything else. The care is most of the work, and I hope you'll feel it in the pages.
Download it here:
It's a PDF, on purpose. Print it, mark it up, keep it beside you while you work.
The first Reading follows one blue all the way down
Two weeks ago I wrote here about the brightest colour in nature, and how it holds no pigment at all. That was the short version. This is the full reading which will be our first instalment in the new library.
It names the property precisely, the angle-shifting metallic blue of the fruit skin. Then it shows you how to find out what carries it, with two questions you can run on any matter you work with. Herbarium fruits collected in Ghana in 1974 are still bright, so the colour outlives the plant. Grind the berry and the blue is gone, because the colour lives in an arrangement. Which lands it at a structure you preserve.
Then it keeps going, which is the part I most wanted to build. Cellulose synthase, the enzyme laying the fibres, with three UniProt accessions you can paste in and open in about a minute.
The microtubules that rotate layer by layer and turn straight fibre-laying into a spiral. Why the fruit reflects both left and right handed polarised light, cell by cell, which no pigment could do.
And something you could actually make at the end of it: Cambridge's cellulose films, made roll to roll, coloured by geometry alone, ground into a biodegradable glitter with no dye in it.
That's the shape most Readings will take. One named matter, the actor that carries the property, sources you can open, and an honest account of what the property asks of the living thing it came from.
Here's what the rest of it will hold
Seven doors: mycelium, algae and cyanobacteria, bacteria, fibres, bio-cement, slime mould, and the uncommon in-between. Each one opens on a foundational read, the groundwork a matter needs before anything deeper makes sense, with Readings following every weeks.
Most of the shelves are still bare with only scheduled contents metadata in place, and the foundational reads are what I'm writing this week. You're seeing it early, which is the nicest stage to arrive at, because you'll watch the thing fill.
Come and look around: [THE LIBRARY READING ROOM]
Thank you for reading this letter these past weeks, and for giving me the extra one. The library exists because of you.
Yours,
Raphael
P.S. If you teach: the Reading is written to sharpen one person's judgement, and it isn't licensed for a cohort or a VLE. Something you can teach from is a different build, and I'd like to make it with you. Reply and tell me what you're teaching.
