Welcome, readers of David Carr's New York Times column! It's great to have you here. A quick orientation: 1) If you want to get in touch, all you have to do is hit reply. 2) Each day, I provide a language usage tip from  Margaret Nicholson's A Dictionary of American-English Usage, which was published in 1957. This is why. 3) Here is the fullest explanation of the newsletter I've given. 4) Please feel free to send me intriguing links.

1. Who will dominate the drone industry—established defense contractors or startup types?

"The two groups tend to have different sensibilities and different target customers, even meeting at different conferences. They've coexisted amicably, with the big firms serving the military and the smaller players serving hobbyists. But now their relationship has soured over efforts to influence long-delayed drone regulations and their increasing convergence in the market as demand for drones takes off."

2. Planets are very common, so many astronomers believe life is abundant in the universe, but... this biologist doesn't think there are any other intelligent beings in our galaxy. 

"Overall we have a spare, powerful and persuasive model for why there are no aliens. Life has barely had time to get started. Unfortunately this model shows the chances of us meeting a second form of intelligent life are nil. It takes billions of years to evolve, and millions of years to flood the galaxy. First one gets it all. Also note there’s plenty more time for intelligent life to evolve elsewhere before the universe gets old. So if humans self-destruct before expanding, then other intelligent aliens will do it later. In say, another 10 billion years."

+ :(

3. If we want to talk directly to the brain, we have to reverse-engineer its codes. 

"The basic unit of neuronal communication and coding is the spike (or action potential), an electrical impulse of about a tenth of a volt that lasts for a bit less than a millisecond. In the visual system, for example, rays of light entering the retina are promptly translated into spikes sent out on the optic nerve, the bundle of about one million output wires, called axons, that run from the eye to the rest of the brain. Literally everything that you see is based on these spikes, each retinal neuron firing at a different rate, depending on the nature of the stimulus, to yield several megabytes of visual information per second. The brain as a whole, throughout our waking lives, is a veritable symphony of neural spikes—perhaps one trillion per second. To a large degree, to decipher the brain is to infer the meaning of its spikes."

4. The Coffee Brewing Institute is a thinktank I can get behind.

"Throughout modern coffee history, one consistently recognized method has prevailed that determines a properly brewed cup of coffee. Of course, this is the brewing control chart. This tool takes something as subjective as the desired taste profile and gives us a quantifiable method to track the consistency of each brew. Despite some modern criticisms of this method, the tool remains a trusted staple of the specialty coffee industry, and continues to help many coffee professionals understand strength and extraction. What is perhaps most impressive about this invention is its longevity. In fact, the work on this fundamental tool began in the 1950’s and was conducted through the 1970’s by an establishment named the Coffee Brewing Institute (CBI). In fact, the CBI laid a majority of the cornerstone brewing concepts we still utilize today to brew fresh, tasty specialty coffee."

5. Sure, you can kill a drug kingpin. But what about his personal zoo animals?

"A herd of hippopotamuses once owned by the late Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar is on the run. If Colombian authorities don’t figure out a way to capture, or at least control, the fugitives soon, they may meet the same end as their former owner. Hippos have been living at Escobar’s former ranch, Hacienda Napoles, about 200 miles northwest of Bogota, since the early 1980s. The leader of the Medellin Cartel used his ill-gotten wealth to stock a private zoo with exotic animals, including giraffes, zebras, elephants and four hippos — three female and one male."

Today's 1957 American English Usage Tip

caduceus. Ancient herald's staff, esp. that of Hermes. The symbol of a physician and of the medical corps. 

+ So that's what it's called.

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The Meaning of Its Spikes