Earlier thie month, The New York Times wrote of the insights now being sifted from the 45 tons worth of Buckminster Fuller's personal archives, given by his family to Stanford University in 1999. Why 45 tons? Noted James Sterngold in the Times, "Because he believed his ideas and life would hold enduring interest, Fuller collected nearly every scrap of paper that ever passed through his hands..." (What? Why are you looking at us like that? We only hang on to the important scraps of paper, the ones we'll surely need to refer to later.)

Yesterday the Times published a letter written in response to Sterngold's piece. It came from Peter Loge of Washington, who writes that at the age of ten, he sent Fuller "a design for a solar house that, if I recall correctly, would have exploded had anyone been foolish enough to build it. Fuller responded with a very nice note complimenting my 'thoughtful design'" and an inscribed copy of The Dymaxion World of Buckminster Fuller. "That correspondence kept alive an interest in physics and energy for many years," wrote Loge. "And [it] continues to remind me ideas are worth having and sharing because you never know what might happen to them when you do." Not only are ideas worth having and sharing, they're also worth keeping—forever, Fuller likely would have added. Something tells us that Loge's childhood drawing is now in a cool, dry place in Palo Alto.