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Small things can become big things. Aeneas, fleeing from the destruction of his home town of Troy, fell in love with Dido, the queen of Carthage. That was a small thing, people fall in love all the time. Even I fell in love with Dido when, in her despair at finding that Aeneas was abandoning her to go found Rome, “Sleep fled her eyes, as quiet fled her mind. /Despair, and rage, and love divide her heart”.
That shouldn’t happen to anyone.
The news of their love affair was spread across the sea by Fama, the Roman goddess of gossip, rumor and fame. The bible says we’re supposed to love our enemies (and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young say we’re supposed to love the one we’re with). The Aeneas and Dido affair was a case of prescient loving one’s enemy, for news of their aborted tryst, carried across the waters by Fama, led ultimately to the Punic wars (according to legend, at least). Virgil described Fama as, “at the start a small and cowardly thing, it soon puffs itself up, and walking upon the ground, buries its head in the clouds”. If you’ve ever read a copy of People’s magazine or Hello!, you know exactly what he meant about something small and inconsequential taking on giant proportions.
Surveys are collections of lots of small bits of information. William the Conqueror’s Domesday Book was one. The human genome project is another.
It’s not only gossip that can grow from the small to the large. Surveys are collections of many small facts and items of information; individually these facts are often inconsequential, but the survey may be greater than the sum of its parts. One of the first great surveys of public information was the Domesday survey, ordered by William the Conqueror of his new holdings in England. To make sure taxes and levies were correctly allotted, he ordered a survey of all the sources of income of the lords and counties. This included big things as well as the lesser. A coppice is a stand of small trees that is cut back periodically; the wood was used for baskets and barrels, poles and pikes, and whatever other uses one had of pliable wood before the advent of plastic and sheet metal, and in Domesday Book these are called silvia minutia, or ‘tiny woods’. A single coppice is not worth very much, but a single hamburger isn’t worth very much either, and yet McDonalds is worth over 100 billion dollars. Size may not matter, but numbers may. William had a lot of coppices, or at least, a number he felt was well worth counting.
A genomic sequence is another survey, with three billion entries per person. Even a simple survey of just a person’s most variable bits of their genome (since we are all 99.9% identical at the level of our genetic sequence) often has a million entries. Each entry in these surveys is a single base, just an A, C, T or G. Pretty small, and not very important.
