Interesting article about aether in there :)
Britannica11.org – a structured edition of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica
81–90 of 138 posts
Re: Britannica11.org – a structured edition of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm in favor of using all the tools available to better yourself, including LLM's. However, for things like this the I would argue that one should first try to understand it on their own. Sometimes the work is the POINT. We read things like this not just to learn about the past, but for novelty and to exercise our critical thinking powers. To outsource that labor before even trying is like going to the gym and having…
Historically, these texts were often consumed (especially in formal or semi-formal settings) by either having them read aloud for you or reading them aloud yourself. They were more like a written-down formal speech to be slowly pondered upon than something to be read smoothly and silently on one's own, which is how we now regard almost all texts. There was "labor" involved but that labor was not really about being mo…
Yes, let the LLM bias and misinterpret it instead.
Re: Britannica11.org – a structured edition of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica
#83Interesting that the articles on Euler and Gauss are so much shorter than the ones on Kant and Schopenhauer. I guess authors of Britannica were not very interested in mathematics.
Re: Britannica11.org – a structured edition of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica
#84Some parts are ... amusing to read. For example the article on stars [0]...
"anything approaching a uniform distribution of the stars cannot extend Limits of the Universe. indefinitely. It can be shown that, if the density of distribution of the stars through infinite space is nowhere less than a certain limit (which may be as small as we please), the total amount of light received from them (assuming that there is no absorption of light in space) would be infinitely great, so that the background of the sky would shine with a. dazzling brilliancy ...."
[0] https://britannica11.org/article/25-0806-star/star#section-1...
Re: Britannica11.org – a structured edition of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica
#85I rebuilt the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica into a clean, structured, navigable site: https://britannica11.org/ What it does: – ~37k articles reconstructed from the original volumes – section-level structure (contents are clickable within articles) – cross-references extracted and linked – contributors indexed and searchable – original volume + page references preserved and shown while reading – links to the original…
Nice job. How about wikipedia-style links to other articles for topics mentioned within another article?
Re: Britannica11.org – a structured edition of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica
#86[deleted]
Re: Britannica11.org – a structured edition of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica
#87[deleted]
Re: Britannica11.org – a structured edition of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica
#88Some parts are ... amusing to read. For example the article on stars [0]... "anything approaching a uniform distribution of the stars cannot extend Limits of the Universe. indefinitely. It can be shown that, if the density of distribution of the stars through infinite space is nowhere less than a certain limit (which may be as small as we please), the total amount of light received from them (assuming that there is n…
Sounds like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olbers%27_paradox
Re: Britannica11.org – a structured edition of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica
#89Nice. Reading old books is a great way to be exposed to ways of thinking that have fallen out of fashion - some for (in my opinion) good reason, such as having been discovered to be incorrect or genuinely immoral, some for (in my opinion) bad reason, such as having become "politically incorrect", and some simply because they were forgotten.
But whatever the reason is why the ideas have fallen out of fashion, it can broaden the mind to encounter them.
Re: Britannica11.org – a structured edition of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica
#90Excellent resource. Small bug to report, the table here is broken (BANTU NEGROIDS section) https://britannica11.org/article/01-0358-africa/africa#secti... . Its quite fascinating to read what they thought about Africans as an African.
Thanks, nice catch. The tables can be tricky and I appreciate the heads-up on this markup leak. It will be corrected shortly.