Re: Deep Rescue: Will a shuttle float?

Pat Flannery (flanner@xxxxxxxxxx) writes:
Andre Lieven wrote:

Is there as good a web source about, say, the Soviet programme
as Asif Siddiqi's book ?

Well, there's Asif Siddiqi's book It's out there somewhere, as I
downloaded it.

Point being, it started life as a book. The notion of on line
sources being " as good " would suggest that said on line sources
should be original works.

If all they're doing is repubbing books, well, we already have
the books...

And, even if there were, can I read it
in bed, and not need batteries or a plug ?

On the other hand, the cover of the pdf isn't liable to wear out and
fall off. ;-)

No, but the reader can get busted pretty easily. I've dropped a lot
of books on the floor, over the decades...

And, I dare say that I treat my books well enough that no hardcover
copies of mine have had that problem.

As I think it was Isaac Asimov who once said it, whenever someone
wants to predict the doom of books, for whatever reason, they
first... write a book about it. <g>

In our town the library is quite small, and the ability to find what you
are interested in quite limited.

Thats an issue of small townness, not the greater suitability of
on line sources.

The real advantage is speed- I can look up pretty much anything I want
on the web in a mater of a couple of minutes at most, which is a lot
faster than driving down to the library, checking the catalog, and then
trying to find the info I'm after in the books I find.

Sure. Whats the reliability rates ? The big problem of the web is that
stuff can be put up without peer review, without fact checking, and
without editing.

Brad Guth is a good case study in what the web can offer... <g>

Of course the flip side of this is that if anything ever happens to the
internet (like a EMP attack), and there aren't any libraries left, we,
to put it in a nutshell, are fucked.

Sure.

The same holds true about doing math with scientific calculators rather
than by hand or slide rule.
"Do you know how to find the square root of 9,567,281?"
"Sure, I just tap the number in and hit the square root key... piece of
cake." :-\

Thats another example of skills lost by way of modern tech. Its a trade
off.

Andre
.