Seriously. As a young scamp of 21, I find it hard to believe that anyone got anything done in any reasonable amount of time before the existence of the internet. What did people do to obtain obscure information? The only things I can think of are 1) wade through a bunch of books at the library, *praying* that one contained the tiny piece of knowledge that you needed, or 2) to find an expert in that subject. Jeez that must have sucked.
Just as an example, say I wanted to know why some people have two different colored eyes. I wouldn't even begin to know where to look for that in a book, but it took me about 20 seconds on google to find an answer.
Card catalogs, in conjunction with the encyclopedia to help you figure out what kind of things you should be looking for.
Jot down a half dozen promising looking titles, go grab said books, skim their indicies or tables of contents. Winnow it down to what looks promising and start reading.
There's still a hell of a lot out there that's not in Google, it's kind of sad/scary the way that it's becoming unknown if it's not in Google.
That being said, I wouldn't go back for all the m oney in the world. Better to go forward, to get better and more comprehensive indexes.
Jot down a half dozen promising looking titles, go grab said books, skim their indicies or tables of contents. Winnow it down to what looks promising and start reading.
You forget one popular source for arcane facts and stats: PDOMA [netlingo.com], or Pulled Directly Out of My A**. The number one source for Dads everywhere, its also the original source in many of those Google pages.
They went to a University library and obtained help from a trained librarian. If the information was *really* obscure, then they would actually hire a trained librarian experienced in information retrieval.
One would think that the Internet would rid us of the need for professional/degreed librarians, but no so! Your average person does not have the skills necessary to dig up the true depth and breadth of information available on the internet. Librarians, OTOH, are trained to do such things. Not to mention that they won't limit their search to the internet. A lot of very old and/or priceless information is still stored in archives somewhere.
Library science is actually a very interesting field. As humans we've been trying to effectively organize our information for millennia. Yet every time there's a major breakthrough in information indexing, archiving, and retrieval, we eclipse it by creating new types of information at a rates unparalleled by past experiences.
I think the biggest question is, what is a human's capacity for handling this much info? Thanks to the internet, I can cram the equivalent of a year of study on WWII into about a week of off-hand research. At that rate, will we soon experience an information overload? What sort of psychological and physiological effects will it produce?
This [blogspot.com] was #5 in the first google search I tried. (Your turn guessing my search terms:) It both mentions and disputes your candidate (Erasmus).
Simply putting the phrase "last man to know everything" (in quotes) into Google's search puts that blog on page 2. It would be relatively futile to guess what else you may have used to narrow it further.
Thanks to the internet, I can cram the equivalent of a year of study on WWII into about a week of off-hand research.
But is it really equivalent? You may get the desired information just as quickly, but poring over books in search of information provides a valuable context and reinforces the information in your mind. It's not just knowing a bunch of facts that makes someone a scholar, but knowing how the facts interconnect, and how important they are.
I would argue a partial yes, and I'll explain why. In a classroom setting, the information is doled out in bite sized pieces, thus making it difficult to connect the dots and paint a complete picture. Anyone who is really interested in the subject usually does some study independent of what the class teaches. (In the old days this meant reading several information-dense books.)
However, what a classroom setting *can* give you is an educated individual's perspective on the events being studied. Assuming you have a good teacher, they can potentially help you connect dots that few other find on their own. Of course, since those same professor's opinions are usually available in written publications, it can be argued that even that advantage can be replaced.
Example: You are studying music history. Should you pay more attention to C.P.E. Bach than to Giovanni Gabrieli, or less? Or about the same? Which compositions should you spend time listening to closely in order to best understand their contributions?
It's very hard for an unguided curious mind to absorb the essense of a broad subject via their own research, unless they happen to stumble across a very, very good book (for example, "Relativity for the Layman"
They went to a University library and obtained help from a trained librarian.
Don't make me laugh. While in some specialized areas there might be a few librarians who are useful (mostly to scholars who share their narrow field of expertise) for the most part librarians view users pretty much the same as sysadmins do: nasty people who want to get their dirty hands all over their nice pristine books/systems.
I'm a physicist, and I have never met a "trained librarian" who can tell a neutron from a neutrino.
for the most part librarians view users pretty much the same as sysadmins do: nasty people who want to get their dirty hands all over their nice pristine books/systems.
As a librarian(not in Academic library, but workstudied in one during my undergraduate days.) I find it's hard to believe. Most libraians are addicted to the detailed usage statstics provided by modern intergrated library systems.
In these days of diminishing resources, most subject-matter/faculty liaison librarians do all they can to inc
a) Reference librarians, being generalists, will never know as much as a specialized researcher does about their topic area. Reference librarians tend to be most useful to undergrads or people starting to research outside their previous field of study.
b) Most physics profs, in my experience, view students the same way sysadmins view their users: as clueless idiots who ask a lot of dumb questions and get in the way of doing their real work (ie, in the profs' case, research)... dang, ad hominem attacks are
I think that there's something written about everything on the Internet. But a lot of the time what you get is junk, or very short. There's tons of news clippings, but nothing in depth.
Not like a series of books. There might be entire volumes of study and materials on very obscure subjects, whereas on the Internet, the popular and common prevails.
Until all that work is freely available and searchable online, and I mean ALL of it, it'll never replace the library.
Not like a series of books. There might be entire volumes of study and materials on very obscure subjects, whereas on the Internet, the popular and common prevails.
+5 Strongly Agree.
In my area of study (US SSBN and SLBM history and technology), not one single page on the 'net has it right. Not one. There's probably around 3 books that get it right, plus another half-a-dozen or so with useful and important information.
I think it's almost dangerous, too, the way a lot of kids are growing up with the Internet and relying on it as the only source of information.
Anyone can put anything on a web page. Wikipedia is neat, but it's NOT a reputable source. Google only shows you what other people put out there.
Books, encyclopedias, and research papers found in libraries are often very well researched and credited - it takes a lot more time, effort and money to put out printed materials and there's a lot more review, fact pro
I agree. Wikipedia's a fine first source. If you need information and need to have a source to list in, say, a bibliography or works cited document, you can go to Wikipedia and get some general information and sources that you can then look up elsewhere. For instance, today's featured article is about Apollo 8 [wikipedia.org]. At the bottom of that entry, there are 11 web links and 5 references to books, complete with ISBN numbers.
Typing one of those ISBN numbers into my local library's catalog search page yielded th
They went to a University library and obtained help from a trained librarian. If the information was *really* obscure, then they would actually hire a trained librarian experienced in information retrieval.
I used to work at a public library in high school, it was amazing how well that system worked. If you would walked into our library, between about 10 am and 4 pm, you essentially had the whole staff at your disposal. You would ask someone for information about a subject and they would hand you off to t
Thanks to the internet, I can cram the equivalent of a year of study on WWII into about a week of off-hand research.
Many people, including myself, would dispute your use of the word "research" here. In fact the entire phrase "off-hand research" looks pretty suspect.
Would your week of "off-hand research" include spending several years working with a colleague who blew his hand to pieces melting the TNT out of a WWII shell? Or talking to your grandfather one night trying to persuade him to get up to see th
Sorry, maybe I was not specific enough. One can cram the equivalent of a one year course on WII at a University in a week of off-hand research. That's not quite the same thing as performing in-depth research for a book or research project. I'm not in any way suggesting that the Internet can replace that sort of data gathering. However, it can help facilitate bringing you in contact with the various people who have the experiences and information you need.:-)
The only things I can think of are 1) wade through a bunch of books at the library, *praying* that one contained the tiny piece of knowledge that you needed, or 2) to find an expert in that subject. Jeez that must have sucked.
Before the internet, we largely relied upon option #3
3.) Make shit up.
Seriously. The unavailability of ready data on all subjects was a two-edged sword, just as the ready availability is today. Sure, you might not know the answer, but the odds
potential offspring? I didn't know you can send unborn children to college...
Kind of like saying in the early 1960's the United States and the Former Soviet Union almost started Nuclear War with the Cuban Missle Crisis. Actually that would be the Soviet Union, thanks.
As a young scamp of 21, I find it hard to believe that anyone got anything done [...] before the [...] internet.
[...] say I wanted to know why some people have two different colored eyes.
As a not-much-older-scamp of 30, I agree with your sentiment. Yet, in these terms, what the internet (and particularly the web) has done is more to make information accessible, not necessarily to improve general productivity (i.e., make it easier to get things done, as you write). Before the web, you probably woul
Just as an example, say I wanted to know why some people have two different colored eyes. I wouldn't even begin to know where to look for that in a book...
Conan the Librarian says:
"Don't yoo know dah dewey decimal sistahm?
(Never miss an opportunity to quote the Great Classics of Hollywood cinema.)
well, all the time gained thanks to the amazing search powers of the internet is lost to pr0n anyway, so the net result is zero. And getting cought by your mum while surfing pr0n is a lot more likely nowadays than when you had the excuse of "gotta look up something in the library about this neurofisiological retrogression thing" while you went out to have a smoke with other 14 year olds while you peeked the lingerie catalog behind the bushes...
As a librarian in my late 30s, I'll point out that not only did librarians and library workers provide help in finding information, but people were well-read and were themselves sources of information. People read lots of books, studied, did research, and were generally much more intelligent than the current generations. Knowledge is not just a collection of facts, it is more than the sum of the facts that you have collected.
People read lots of books, studied, did research, and were generally much more intelligent than the current generations.
I know its fashionable to lament the passing of the educated age, but I doubt it. A hundred years ago? Except for the upper classes, I suspect most people were too busy working in the coal mines or harvesting cotton to become lay scholars. And forget about 300 years ago.
The library was the main soruce. Encyclopedias, card catalog, or asking the librarian. For hobbies you might join a club or subscribe to a magazine, the magazines would usually cycle through the beginner topics in about a year and a half, but this was usually intersperced with "you have to buy lots of stuff to be a real "
Seriously. As a young scamp of 21, I find it hard to believe that anyone got anything done in any reasonable amount of time before the existence of the internet. What did people do to obtain obscure information?
Huddled around the fire in the cave as the mammoths thundered outside, chanted the sacred songs, and waited for the effects of the sacred mushrooms to take hold.
Um...er... it is called RESEARCH. We researched in the stacks at the library. I browsed it the way I browse the Internet. I would spend hours digging up very obscure and interesting information. And true be known, the most obscure and interesting information is STILL in the library stacks, NOT on the internet.
As a young scamp of 21, I find it hard to believe that anyone got anything done in any reasonable amount of time before the existence of the internet. What did people do to obtain obscure information?
That's strange. Ever since the internet became popular, I have been wondering - why do people waste so much time looking up obscure information, rather than getting stuff done in a reasonable amount of time?
Back in my day, we kept our facts hidden in the basement, under a pile of moldy potatoes and guarded by an ill-tempered Rottweiler. If you needed some bit of information for your paper on Archduke Ferdinand (what a handsome fella!), ya had to descend five flights of rickety steps, sweeping away the cobwebs and dodging the giant spiders and Rodents of Unusual Size. Once you got to the basement, you had to divert the bloodthirsty hellhound with a two-pound slab of sirloin. And if you did get what you neede
wow.. (Score:1)
Re:wow.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Just as an example, say I wanted to know why some people have two different colored eyes. I wouldn't even begin to know where to look for that in a book, but it took me about 20 seconds on google to find an answer.
Re:wow.. (Score:5, Informative)
Jot down a half dozen promising looking titles, go grab said books, skim their indicies or tables of contents. Winnow it down to what looks promising and start reading.
There's still a hell of a lot out there that's not in Google, it's kind of sad/scary the way that it's becoming unknown if it's not in Google.
That being said, I wouldn't go back for all the m oney in the world. Better to go forward, to get better and more comprehensive indexes.
Re:wow.. (Score:3, Funny)
You forget one popular source for arcane facts and stats: PDOMA [netlingo.com], or Pulled Directly Out of My A**. The number one source for Dads everywhere, its also the original source in many of those Google pages.
Re:wow.. (Score:5, Insightful)
They went to a University library and obtained help from a trained librarian. If the information was *really* obscure, then they would actually hire a trained librarian experienced in information retrieval.
One would think that the Internet would rid us of the need for professional/degreed librarians, but no so! Your average person does not have the skills necessary to dig up the true depth and breadth of information available on the internet. Librarians, OTOH, are trained to do such things. Not to mention that they won't limit their search to the internet. A lot of very old and/or priceless information is still stored in archives somewhere.
Library science is actually a very interesting field. As humans we've been trying to effectively organize our information for millennia. Yet every time there's a major breakthrough in information indexing, archiving, and retrieval, we eclipse it by creating new types of information at a rates unparalleled by past experiences.
I think the biggest question is, what is a human's capacity for handling this much info? Thanks to the internet, I can cram the equivalent of a year of study on WWII into about a week of off-hand research. At that rate, will we soon experience an information overload? What sort of psychological and physiological effects will it produce?
Re:wow.. (Score:1)
Are you saying we have not already experienced "information overload"?
The last man who was commonly accepted by many scholars as probably the last to know "everything" the known world had to offer died in the 1500s.
Ever since then, we've all be specialists.
(Would-be librarians: Have fun googling for his name. Hint: Not DaVinci, Goethe, or Veblen, and certainly not John St
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Who was Erasmus?
GTRacer
- Jennings knows a lot too
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But is it really equivalent? You may get the desired information just as quickly, but poring over books in search of information provides a valuable context and reinforces the information in your mind. It's not just knowing a bunch of facts that makes someone a scholar, but knowing how the facts interconnect, and how important they are.
Re:wow.. (Score:4, Interesting)
I would argue a partial yes, and I'll explain why. In a classroom setting, the information is doled out in bite sized pieces, thus making it difficult to connect the dots and paint a complete picture. Anyone who is really interested in the subject usually does some study independent of what the class teaches. (In the old days this meant reading several information-dense books.)
However, what a classroom setting *can* give you is an educated individual's perspective on the events being studied. Assuming you have a good teacher, they can potentially help you connect dots that few other find on their own. Of course, since those same professor's opinions are usually available in written publications, it can be argued that even that advantage can be replaced.
Re:wow.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Example: You are studying music history. Should you pay more attention to C.P.E. Bach than to Giovanni Gabrieli, or less? Or about the same? Which compositions should you spend time listening to closely in order to best understand their contributions?
It's very hard for an unguided curious mind to absorb the essense of a broad subject via their own research, unless they happen to stumble across a very, very good book (for example, "Relativity for the Layman"
Re:wow.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't make me laugh. While in some specialized areas there might be a few librarians who are useful (mostly to scholars who share their narrow field of expertise) for the most part librarians view users pretty much the same as sysadmins do: nasty people who want to get their dirty hands all over their nice pristine books/systems.
I'm a physicist, and I have never met a "trained librarian" who can tell a neutron from a neutrino.
Re:wow.. (Score:3, Interesting)
As a librarian(not in Academic library, but workstudied in one during my undergraduate days.) I find it's hard to believe. Most libraians are addicted to the detailed usage statstics provided by modern intergrated library systems.
In these days of diminishing resources, most subject-matter/faculty liaison librarians do all they can to inc
Re:wow.. (Score:2, Interesting)
b) Most physics profs, in my experience, view students the same way sysadmins view their users: as clueless idiots who ask a lot of dumb questions and get in the way of doing their real work (ie, in the profs' case, research)
And, a library can be a lot more in depth.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Not like a series of books. There might be entire volumes of study and materials on very obscure subjects, whereas on the Internet, the popular and common prevails.
Until all that work is freely available and searchable online, and I mean ALL of it, it'll never replace the library.
Re:And, a library can be a lot more in depth.. (Score:2)
In my area of study (US SSBN and SLBM history and technology), not one single page on the 'net has it right. Not one. There's probably around 3 books that get it right, plus another half-a-dozen or so with useful and important information.
Re:And, a library can be a lot more in depth.. (Score:2)
Anyone can put anything on a web page. Wikipedia is neat, but it's NOT a reputable source. Google only shows you what other people put out there.
Books, encyclopedias, and research papers found in libraries are often very well researched and credited - it takes a lot more time, effort and money to put out printed materials and there's a lot more review, fact pro
Re:And, a library can be a lot more in depth.. (Score:1)
Typing one of those ISBN numbers into my local library's catalog search page yielded th
Re:wow.. (Score:2)
I used to work at a public library in high school, it was amazing how well that system worked. If you would walked into our library, between about 10 am and 4 pm, you essentially had the whole staff at your disposal. You would ask someone for information about a subject and they would hand you off to t
Re:wow.. (Score:1)
Many people, including myself, would dispute your use of the word "research" here. In fact the entire phrase "off-hand research" looks pretty suspect.
Would your week of "off-hand research" include spending several years working with a colleague who blew his hand to pieces melting the TNT out of a WWII shell? Or talking to your grandfather one night trying to persuade him to get up to see th
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As an older scamp, I find it hard to believe anyone gets anything done given that the internet can be such a time-sink.
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I can help answer this question.
The only things I can think of are 1) wade through a bunch of books at the library, *praying* that one contained the tiny piece of knowledge that you needed, or 2) to find an expert in that subject. Jeez that must have sucked.
Before the internet, we largely relied upon option #3
3.) Make shit up.
Seriously. The unavailability of ready data on all subjects was a two-edged sword, just as the ready availability is today. Sure, you might not know the answer, but the odds
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"...and I would have been successful, too, if it wasn't for that meddling Wikipedia..."
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Please share with us what college you graduated from, so that I and the wife know not to send any potential offspring there.
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Kind of like saying in the early 1960's the United States and the Former Soviet Union almost started Nuclear War with the Cuban Missle Crisis. Actually that would be the Soviet Union, thanks.
Re:wow.. (Score:2)
As a young scamp of 21, I find it hard to believe that anyone got anything done [...] before the [...] internet.
[...] say I wanted to know why some people have two different colored eyes.
As a not-much-older-scamp of 30, I agree with your sentiment. Yet, in these terms, what the internet (and particularly the web) has done is more to make information accessible, not necessarily to improve general productivity (i.e., make it easier to get things done, as you write). Before the web, you probably woul
Re:wow.. (Score:1)
Re:wow.. (Score:1)
Conan the Librarian says:
"Don't yoo know dah dewey decimal sistahm?
(Never miss an opportunity to quote the Great Classics of Hollywood cinema.)
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Re:wow.. (Score:2)
not that I did smoke though. yikes... filthy !
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I know its fashionable to lament the passing of the educated age, but I doubt it. A hundred years ago? Except for the upper classes, I suspect most people were too busy working in the coal mines or harvesting cotton to become lay scholars. And forget about 300 years ago.
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For lots of stuff you just remained ignorant.
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Huddled around the fire in the cave as the mammoths thundered outside, chanted the sacred songs, and waited for the effects of the sacred mushrooms to take hold.
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Go figure............
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That's strange. Ever since the internet became popular, I have been wondering - why do people waste so much time looking up obscure information, rather than getting stuff done in a reasonable amount of time?
Re:wow.. (Score:1)