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I bought an encyclopedia

optoutproject.net

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Re: I bought an encyclopedia

#71

Post by hobobaggins »

contingencies wrote: post #65
ClosedPistachio wrote: post #2

Similarly, I purchased a copy of "Bosch Automotive Handbook" [1]. For $65 it will literally walk you through every component of a vehicle, from the metals required, the fuel, to the electronics. It's presence on my bookshelf is meant to be aspirational. https://www.sae.org/publications/books/content/bosch10/

Thanks! Looks like a great book, and it's on libgen (11E). However, the English is positively atrocious . The next edition would be wise to invest in a competent editor. Very first page: The International Convention on Road Signs and Signals [1] defines a motor or power-driven vehicle as a self-propelled road vehicle. Rail-borne vehicles and country-specifically mopeds which are not treated as motorcycles are excepti…

Perhaps this is better for you:

A second definition in this convention limits the term motor vehicle to those vehicles which are used for carrying persons or goods, or for drawing on-the-road vehicles used for the carriage of [not or] persons or goods.

Re: I bought an encyclopedia

#73

Post by gravescale »

ClosedPistachio wrote: post #2

Similarly, I purchased a copy of "Bosch Automotive Handbook" [1]. For $65 it will literally walk you through every component of a vehicle, from the metals required, the fuel, to the electronics. It's presence on my bookshelf is meant to be aspirational. https://www.sae.org/publications/books/content/bosch10/

Another great book like that is Machinery's Handbook: https://books.industrialpress.com/machinery-handbook/

Re: I bought an encyclopedia

#74

Post by susiecambria »

Before my younger daughter headed off to college, I put her through a mini library studies class. It was designed to teach her how to identify authors with different positions on a topic, write summaries, and write brief analyses. It was very loosely based on a required prep school class I took in the early 1980s. She absolutely hated it. Not sure how much good it did her given her lack of interest in the lessons.

To this day I am grateful I had to take the library studies class. And while I was not the biggest fan of Mr. Hickock, he helped prepare me to learn better. We spent a ton o' time using encyclopedias and the card catalogue.

I am a huge fan of printed books. There's nothing quite like them and they almost magical way they work.

Re: I bought an encyclopedia

#75

Post by emmelaich »

aidenn0 wrote: post #67

> For one thing, my kids were increasingly being asked to "do research" for their school projects. As far as I could tell, this meant just Googling materials, copying and pasting what they found, stealing photos on the internet, and generally neither digesting nor evaluating anything that popped up in search results. The degree to which my children's teachers actively don't care about this is hard to overstate. I was…

Some teachers are spectacularly ignorant about internet things too; my students were given urls for movie editing on PCs and Macs. For the Mac the link for iMovie was not the Apple store but something like coolapps.ru.cn.cx/blah.

Re: I bought an encyclopedia

#76

Post by elbasti »

tivert wrote: post #43

> How do we make crayons? If you're being retro, old Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers episodes covered that regularly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQ_MEFVx5jM https://www.pbs.org/video/mister-rogers-neighborhood-competi... > We had just bought an emulator to teach them to play Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? They loved it, but wanted to quickly look up clues --- quick, he drove off in a car with a blue and yel…

The world almanac that shipped with Carmen Sandiego was also used to prevent piracy.

There were some parts of the game that would only allow you to proceed by answering a question that required possession of the physical book.

Re: I bought an encyclopedia

#77

Post by aldanor »

aidenn0 wrote: post #67

> For one thing, my kids were increasingly being asked to "do research" for their school projects. As far as I could tell, this meant just Googling materials, copying and pasting what they found, stealing photos on the internet, and generally neither digesting nor evaluating anything that popped up in search results. The degree to which my children's teachers actively don't care about this is hard to overstate. I was…

They say that modern LLMs have reached intelligence of older kids. Perhaps it's the other way around...

Re: I bought an encyclopedia

#78

Post by patrickdavey »

pixelmonkey wrote: post #31
globular-toast wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to take advantage of the browser's "work offline" functionality. This started to work less and less reliably, even by the early 2000s, but Wikipedia still worked nicely. I would dial up at night when everyone was asleep and click through to all the pages surrounding some topic, like internal combustion engines. Then the next day I'd work offline and digest it all. I was sad when I clicked a link that hadn't be…

On Android, the official Wikipedia app is surprisingly good at marking articles for offline reading, organizing them into collections, and downloading them, including related assets like images. When I'm traveling I install the app on my "travel phone" (which is Android / Google Fi) and take advantage of it along with Kindle app offline reading for Lonely Planet guides, and the Google Maps offline maps feature.

I can absolutely recommend osmand+ (Android) or maps.me (iPhone) for OpenStreetMap offline data. Streets better than Google maps ;)

Re: I bought an encyclopedia

#79

Post by initramfs »

Thankfully it's nice to know that someone knows how important encyclopedias are and how much prior knowledge is taken for granted as the basis for a functioning society. Consumerism has become so accustomed to acquiring new goods and ideas that it is almost losing its ability to retain the very knowledge of intelligible information-sifting capability. People are not able to think critically to pass down the value of doing so, to tell whether a flood of AI non-sense is real, and no longer knows what to think, because the new products aren't encouraging that at all. I have read that AI is creating a selective pressure, but there's so much a human can do against millions of bots.

Re: I bought an encyclopedia

#80

Post by skissane »

emmelaich wrote: post #75
aidenn0 wrote: post #67

> For one thing, my kids were increasingly being asked to "do research" for their school projects. As far as I could tell, this meant just Googling materials, copying and pasting what they found, stealing photos on the internet, and generally neither digesting nor evaluating anything that popped up in search results. The degree to which my children's teachers actively don't care about this is hard to overstate. I was…

Some teachers are spectacularly ignorant about internet things too; my students were given urls for movie editing on PCs and Macs. For the Mac the link for iMovie was not the Apple store but something like coolapps.ru.cn.cx/blah.

> Some teachers are spectacularly ignorant about internet things too

Nothing new; I remember when I was in high school, my geography teacher asked me if another student had plagiarised his assignment-she wasn’t sure, so she decided to ask the class “computer whiz”. He’d literally printed out Microsoft Encarta’s article on marijuana, stuck it to a piece of green cardboard, and used a green highlighter to colour in the photo of a marijuana leaf (he’d printed the article in black and white). He didn’t even bother to remove the “Copyright Microsoft Corporation” from the end of it, and yet still she was asking me whether or not it was plagiarised.

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