Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I bought the only physical encyclopedia still in print

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 199 posts

Re: I bought the only physical encyclopedia still in print

#171

Post by schoen »

manifoldgeo wrote: post #161
paulddraper wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Of course you couldn't use it as a source when writing a paper" Why not?

My college professors said that an encyclopedia article can't be cited because it's a tertiary source of information. That's considered too far abstracted from the original source of the info to be used as a citation. Primary sources are original documents like the U.S. Constitution; secondary sources are books about the U.S. Constitution that offer some kind of analysis by professionals; tertiary sources are aggrega…

Conversely, Wikipedia policies ask article editors to use only secondary and tertiary sources when writing the encyclopedia (related to the "no original research" policy).

Re: I bought the only physical encyclopedia still in print

#172

Post by jkubicek »

somat wrote: post #170

Growing up in the 80's we had a set of 1960's world book encyclopedias. I would read them for fun. Sort of the same sort of thing as hitting random on wikipedia today, but in alphabetical order. Admittedly I suspect my love of reading is largely due to not having a tv growing up. Some people say they read the dictionary for fun, which I never understood, dictionaries are boring. encyclopedias are much more interestin…

I liked the old encyclopedias so much more than the modern ones, as a kid it was fun to look up articles that were significantly outdated. "Here's an artist's rendering of life on Venus may look like"

Re: I bought the only physical encyclopedia still in print

#173

Post by robwwilliams »

Many older generation scholars had the same gut feeling about the 1911 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica and claimed, with some justice, that it was the last “truly” comprehensive summary of human knowledge.

Of course this was due to the mismatch between the maximum practical and economical size of an encyclopedia and the rate of gain of knowledge beginning in the early 20th century.

When I was 23 years old in 1976 I won a $125 award at Alta Bates Hospital in Berkeley for a faster way to stock the wards. I bought a gorgeous leather-bound gilt-edged copy of the 1911 Britannica for precisely $125 at a huge used bookstore in downtown Oakland—-all 29 volumes, each volume just under 1000 pages.

That 11th edition has always held a place of honor in our home (well, my significant other does not have quite the same warm feelings as I do since $125 was a bucket-load of money when we were getting started).

It makes for interesting reading.

It would be amusing to add the World Book encyclopedia of 2044 to the collection although I doubt my kids or grandkids would be quite as amused as me.

Re: I bought the only physical encyclopedia still in print

#174

Post by pessimizer »

If you're old, when we were kids we needed encyclopedias to read anything (esp. nonfiction.) You can't understand a book if you don't know any of its references, and you're not going to go to the library to look up all of them. All you had is what you'd stored up in your head, and the encyclopedias in the basement.

They were nice to kill idle time following references, just like Wikipedia is now, but they were essential for reading nonfiction at home.

Re: I bought the only physical encyclopedia still in print

#175

Post by quartz »

robwwilliams wrote: post #173

Many older generation scholars had the same gut feeling about the 1911 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica and claimed, with some justice, that it was the last “truly” comprehensive summary of human knowledge. Of course this was due to the mismatch between the maximum practical and economical size of an encyclopedia and the rate of gain of knowledge beginning in the early 20th century. When I was 23 years old…

For anyone interested, the entire 11th edition is available online from a few sources: http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/metabook?id=brit...

Re: I bought the only physical encyclopedia still in print

#176

Post by pessimizer »

lifefeed wrote: post #22

I don't find modern encyclopedias interesting, but the older encyclopedias (and textbooks) are fascinating. Specifically I love reading entries before major changes to a field. Like cells in 1950, right before the double helix structure of DNA was discovered. Or Germany in the inter war period, when everyone knew it was unstable, but no one was quite sure what that meant.

Everything educational from 1895 to the end of WWI in the US is deeply, overtly racist - race is inserted into places where one wouldn't even expect it. I'm fascinated by reading the stuff. Especially geography textbooks.

Re: I bought the only physical encyclopedia still in print

#177

Post by somat »

jkubicek wrote: post #172
somat wrote: post #170

Growing up in the 80's we had a set of 1960's world book encyclopedias. I would read them for fun. Sort of the same sort of thing as hitting random on wikipedia today, but in alphabetical order. Admittedly I suspect my love of reading is largely due to not having a tv growing up. Some people say they read the dictionary for fun, which I never understood, dictionaries are boring. encyclopedias are much more interestin…

I liked the old encyclopedias so much more than the modern ones, as a kid it was fun to look up articles that were significantly outdated. "Here's an artist's rendering of life on Venus may look like"

Hard to quantify without a set of both side by side to compare. But the writing was better in the old ones. I would describe it as more technically competent.

Re: I bought the only physical encyclopedia still in print

#178

Post by casey2 »

If your goal is an offline wikipedia then try

https://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/kiwix/zim/ with the http server from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwix

Other mirrors exist carring different sitesrips. https://mirror.accum.se/mirror/kiwix.org/zim/ https://ftp.fau.de/kiwix/zim/

Between http-serve, git clone, yt-dl and various emulators internet access is hardly a necessity unless you enjoy seeding or arguing, and the latter is currently being deprecated by local models.

Re: I bought the only physical encyclopedia still in print

#179

Post by [deleted] »

RandallBrown wrote: post #109
F00Fbug wrote: post #42

My parents had Encyclopedia Britannica and I'm convinced that was a huge benefit to me that I'm still realizing today. I was born in 1965 and can remember even in elementary school any time I had a question my parents couldn't answer we'd look it up in the EB. Pretty soon I was habituated to just go there on my own and look up anything. When bored I'd pull out a random volume and just flip through it looking for anyt…

I grew up with World Book encyclopedias and it was very much the same. Until we got a computer. Encarta was the coolest thing I had ever used and I spent hours playing with the interactive encyclopedia. After that I hardly touched the printed books.

[deleted]

Re: I bought the only physical encyclopedia still in print

#180

Post by cubefox »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #136
cubefox wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If modern encyclopedias are like Wikipedia, then I can see how you wouldn't find them interesting. Although Wikipedia does have interesting information within it, it's now written so verbosely that my eyes glaze over most of the time. Yeah, there's simple.wikipedia.org, but it's not nearly complete enough. The problem with the writing in Wikipedia articles is that they are often extremely detailed in certain aspect…

> One problem is that sometimes articles are slightly biased because the author has certain views, I just assumed that I hadn't done enough philosophising, and had come to the Wrong conclusion. Glad to see it's not just me!

Well, it's more like some article seems great if you don't know the topic well, and it may look flawed only when you do know a lot about the subject.
Post reply on HN