Re: Deep Rescue: Will a shuttle float?

Henry Spencer <henry@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In article <BoGnEzKe8JcEFwYJ@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Jonathan Silverlight <jsilverlight@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
For about the thousandth time, I'm trying to remember how people did
things before the Web was invented!

I was just reading a news item in Science about the restoration of the
Mount Stromlo Observatory in Australia, after it was largely destroyed by
a massive brushfire three years ago. Staff and grad students went back to
work in the surviving buildings soon after the disaster, but not before
technicians had installed generators... and a microwave link. "We could
do without toilets, and we could bring in our own water, but we had to
have Internet."
--

And this is probably more true of astronomy than any of the other
traditional scientific disciplines. Our refereed literature is of
manageable volume (half a dozen journals gets about 95% of
citations), and NASA funding for the Astrophysics Data System
underwrote scanning of all these back to their inception as
a wonderful, cross-linked complement to the online recent
journals. Larry Smarr wrote in the 1980s that it was the fate of
astronomy to become the first all-digital science, what with
massive simulations, digital detectors, and upcoming sky surveys.
With more money, other disciplines eventually pulled ahead,
but not by much. (And astronomers had the brains to standardize
on data-exchange formats in about 1978, before it became the
nightmare that some fields still have to deal with).

Actually, as I think about it, the manageble number of journals means
that other disciplines stood to benefit even more deeply from
such searchability. You could actually do a literature search
in an afternoon using annual abstract collections, but (say)
paleontologists often discover gems of papers in journals
they've never heard of. Only once did I get something useful
from the Publications of the Alma-Ata City Observatory...

Bill Keel
.