I bought an encyclopedia
optoutproject.net
optoutproject.net
As a beginner looking to start with minimal infrastructure, he does some of his restorations outside his shop, often in borrowed personal garages of subscribers. Project Salt Lake City is a good example [1]. For someone looking to do a more advanced repair (arguably the most advanced possible) there are some good engine rebuilding videos, especially with Project Frankfurt[2].
One thing I find surprising is that he still uses a lot of 3rd party services. AC dis/charging, wheel alignment, tire mounting and balancing, dynamo measurement, block reconditioning, head and supercharger refreshes, and even car detailing (which he seems to be actively trying to avoid doing despite his instincts because it is a huge time sink). He is a dynamic, adaptable node in a fascinating, specialized capital network.
0 - https://www.youtube.com/@M539Restorations
1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_a9rCI2zfPM&list=PLBcFoVFuPC...
2 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyqZoNwKeOM&list=PLBcFoVFuPC...
I also recommend ChrisFix, especially for new DIY driveway mechanics as the videos tend to be more general tutorials using hand tools (e.g. "how to do an oil change", "how to replace brake discs + pads").
Wowzer.
I am still contemplating between buying book about car or buy pc games called Car Mechanic Simulator.
Great drawings, useful for non-motor-heads. The Sub version has info like resuscitating a drowned lizard :)
Avoid if You hate R. Crumb style drawings and hippies.
Try entering 1566913101 as the search in Amazon, currently USD23.00
Edit, adding: you don't need a specific one to gain great knowledge.
Yeah, that copy earned its keep. Think it still has some of the grime...
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 exceptions. 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 or persons or goods.
"Country-specifically" -> "jurisdiction-specific definitions of mopeds".
"in this convention" -> "in the convention"
"the term motor vehicle" -> "the term 'motor vehicle'"
The final sentence makes no sense to me and is certainly missing a comma.
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.
Seems about as difficult to parse as typical highly technical writing.
The degree to which my children's teachers actively don't care about this is hard to overstate. I was able to trivially catch this by googling phrases from papers my daughter had "written" and when I showed it to her English teacher the response was roughly: "Yeah, it sucks that all kids are doing that these days."
Saw the same daughter doing homework by using C-f to search the textbook for keywords in the question and pasting the answer. Sometimes this yielded nonsensical answers because the keywords appeared in multiple places. She got a high A in that class (including perfect scores on the homework).
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.
What is the educational goal of such an assignment?
Certainly researchers and graduate students need to perform literature searches to understand the state of the art (as well as the research frontier) and also to uncover related work (so-called "novelty" being important for publication, etc.)
But for most of K-12, isn't the subject matter fairly well established and written up in a more useful, tutorial format, in textbooks?
I suppose there could be exceptions, perhaps current events or popular culture, or maybe developments in particularly fast-moving fields. But in this case I think students would be well served by a curated collection of sources rather than being cast off in the deep end without guidance. If the goal is to expose students to primary sources (which can be very interesting) I think a curated collection would also work well.
Encyclopedias are great though, for both random and focused reading. Both subject-based and alphabetic organization can be good for browsing and discovery.
Now some parts of the case mentioned above obviously aren't great, but there are absolutely good justifications for this from an educational perspective.
Unfortunately, as dang has noted, fact checkers tend to find facts that support their position and to ignore or discredit those that do not. It's even a problem for scientists and researchers.
I still like the idea of a curated collection of sources.
I would spend hours and hours on some nights, just reading through the books. They fascinated me.
By the time I was in sixth grade, I was reading at college level. The teachers didn’t know what to do with me. One time that year, I took Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy as my subject for a book report. I couldn’t understand why the other kids and the teachers didn’t feel the same way about those books.
By the time I was in high school, the dedicated bookcase for them got moved into my bedroom. I was well above average for my academic performance in high school.
In college, I helped pay my way through school by working at the main library on campus, shelving books and various other tasks. I ended up working there for over five years, as I took a lighter class load to try to help keep my grades up. And I was on the Dean’s List, with a GPA above 3.5, etc….
Encyclopedias taught me how to read, and how to study, and how to organize my writing.
I think I probably owe much of who and what I am today, to those encyclopedias.
Where are you? In the US, education is "free to play"; to win, you need to pay to live in a good school district.
(ancient china worked similarly, if the anecdote about Mencius' mother is to be believed)
In other neighbourhoods —maybe (perhaps often?) not so affluent— the priority is education, and people tend to move there with either the explicit or implicit idea that in paying a premium for their house, they are helping to guarantee that the parents[2] of their children's likely friends, having paid a similar premium, also value education.
Maybe things have changed; I haven't been in the Old Country for a couple of decades, but in the XX the easy way to spot "the good district" was that all the real estate ads (by way of explaining the premium on the ask) explicitly mentioned "${DISTRICT} schools".
[0] the least interested person in her children's education I knew was a horsy friend, but even she hoped, that upon finishing their senior year and should they have learned nothing else, her children would be capable of reading and understanding a contract.
[1] southern california examples, which may be horribly dated (cf supra): Thousand Oaks, Westwood, Newport Beach, Rancho Mission Viejo
[2] I owe the start of my tech career to this correlation in the reverse direction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40531987
> At first they lived near a cemetery, and Mencius amused himself with acting the various scenes which he witnessed at the tombs. “This,” said the lady, “is no place for my son;”—and she removed to a house in the market-place. But the change was no improvement. The boy took to playing the part of a salesman, vaunting his wares, and chaffering with customers. His mother sought a new house, and found one at last close by a public school. There her child’s attention was taken with the various exercises of politeness which the scholars were taught, and he endeavoured to imitate them. The mother was satisfied. “This,” she said, “is the proper place for my son.”
I also Google'd around a bit on this topic and it looks like there is an alternative set of tooling, wiki2book, focused on doing the same thing, but generating EPUBs that look good on e-reader devices. It also smartly doesn't require a modified/extended MediaWiki server, handling the quirks of the live Wikipedia instance specifically. Here is the info on that:
https://www.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/189qqxe/wiki2boo...
There is an app for Android called Kiwix that lets you download the whole of Wikipedia for viewing offline. I keep meaning to do it but never got around to it, though.
Good tips.
I need to try this.
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 yellow flag! And which country uses pesos?
The original versions of the games literally shipped with a copy of the World Almanac: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Almanac.
Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if the whole point of the game was to teach kids how to use that reference work.
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.
https://www.routledge.com/CRC-Handbook-of-Chemistry-and-Phys...
As long as they can keep up with curation, that is.
Paper encyclopedias may be fun, but let's point out that he bought one for the kids to play a 20 year old game in an emulator. So they only need information from 20 years ago.
* along with cat photos, obviously.
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.
The why: Knowing how to research and assess points of view, axes to grind, etc. is essential for the kinds of college work she was going to be doing. And, it would help her in life.
You can order new ones direct from World Book, and they offer steep discounts on ones that are a year or two old.
It still serves as an excellent stabilizer for a set of freestanding bookselves.
If you actually can't afford one, I wholeheartedly endorse this. But if you can afford a new set, please buy a new set. They only still print them because a minimum number of people buy them new. I can't imagine this will last forever, so, support World Book.
https://www.worldbook.com/encyclopedias.aspx
The previous years set is often discounted, if the full price is a little too much for you.
Not sure I have that much faith in the world anymore to trust that to be true.
I wouldn't want to make that bet for an encyclopaedia published in 2027 though.
In general tech workers on HN tend to overestimate how familiar with technology non-tech workers are.
I also don't think you actually read the articles you linked to. The first one says that the publisher is planning on using AI, it doesn't say that they have already. As I said in the initial comment:
> I wouldn’t expect a publisher of encyclopedias to implement AI tools for years.
Meaning, an encyclopedia bought today won't be using these tools. Which is what the grandfather comment was about.
May 16th: Wiley shuts down journals over AI use: https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/16/wiley_journals_ai/
June 13th: Wiley book series is going to be using AI: https://qz.com/for-dummies-books-publisher-john-wiley-sons-a...
My interest in Wiley is that my late uncle helped them to "go digital" decades ago, and remained remotely as a proofreader, editor and fact-checker for physics titles. He would be spinning in his grave if he weren't cremated. Honestly depressing to see it happen.
Ten bucks says there's LLM-generated content in encyclopedias today because LLMs have been mainstream for a few years now, and even prominent scientists and experts have been caught out "writing" with LLMs.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.01268
Why wouldn't there be LLM-generated content in encyclopedias today if it's been (ab)used for several years now? Seems a little naive, especially when even Wiley (wow) is openly embracing AI now with a sudden heelturn.
As I said, I wouldn't be surprised if these companies start using LLMs in the near future, but as I said in another comment, I think the average tech person vastly overestimates how much the average person keeps up-to-date on the latest LLM developments. They also tend to overhype how much society will be transformed by tech, largely because getting VC dollars depends on that hype.
These things are still in their infancy and I'd expect them to be used soon, but the people running encyclopedias are not so up-to-date on the latest LLM developments to have already incorporated them into publications planned years ago.
Two opposite and equally nonsensical reasons to dismiss physical books. The more confused people get the higher the value of clarity of mind.
A childhood memory I have is that my friends who had one at home had a much easier time doing their homework. I had to go to the library, and was never sure to find information on the topic I was looking for, whereas they had everything at their fingertips.
(Thinking back, I'm not sure why the library did not have an encyclopedia...)
Different libraries often have very different collections, depending on the community they're serving.
A university library might have 10 copies of the same undergraduate introductory physics textbook, a copy of a few dozen other undergraduate introductory physics textbooks, and a load of more advanced texts in the same area.
A community library might have a large selection of children's books and romance novels, crime novels, mystery novels, some popular science, audio books, travel guides, local history, but no college-level physics books.
A high school library might have plenty of young-adult novels and high-school-level textbooks, but no children's books or advanced physics texts.
Perhaps you were in a community library and they didn't get many kids doing homework?
(Of course, libraries can almost always get any book you ask for on inter-library loan so that community or high-school library could get an advanced physics textbook if someone asked for one)
In Canada, neighborhood libraries are a tiny fraction of the size of university research libraries, so they can't possibly carry anything remotely approximating the content of a university research library.
We do have a central public library, with perhaps a million odd books, but is not a replacement for research library in any sense, and isn't intended to be one. Compare that to the library in my alma mater university which contained about 2.5 million books.
For what it's worth, for most of my life, I've had the option of visiting my local university library so that I could crawl through the shelves looking for particular journal articles, or searching through the 3 feet of shelves on other side of a relevant book that I found in the card stacks. Sadly, that's no longer the case. The vast majority of content in modern university libraries is now available only in digital form, accessible through terminals that are not usable by members of the public, which provide access to otherwise-paywalled journals. And the last time I visited my local university library, they no longer allowed members of the general public to enter. For most of the my lifetime, one of the conditions of government funding for university libraries was that they had to provide at least limited access to the general public. I'm not sure what happened.
Thankfully, there are now other ways to access research material. Pre-prints are often available, and open-access journals are increasingly prevalent. And for those that are desperate, there are, of course, various dubiously legal sources.
Btw in Germany and the UK it’s like in the USA
But people don't understand what I'm talking about; they are so used to the pre-digested information from traditional media that they don't question how much truth there is in a news story. The funny thing about this is that a couple of years ago I contacted a very prestigious publisher in my country to ask for information on how to get their encyclopedia, and well, the salesperson almost treated me like I was crazy.
Anyway, let's see what this new rise of AI brings, and I'll keep trying to find an encyclopedia XD.
I read the entire thing, and I'm still not sure why he bought an encyclopedia. It seems like the stated main reason is so he can talk to his kids about how different sources are written and constructed. A noble goal, but it seems like a paper encyclopedia is pretty incidental to that goal.
Quite frankly, it seems like the real reason is the author has nostalgia for his encyclopedia growing up, and wants his kids to experience what he experienced as a child.
Our information literacy project must start somewhere, preferably far enough from the meandering blather of generative systems that when we encounter them, we have the tools under our belt to evaluate their results.
And that, ultimately, is why I bought an Encyclopedia.So he bought an encyclopedia to prevent his kids from using generative AI even though they weren't using it in the first place? It makes no sense.
You'll see that the impetus for his purchase was a tangle with an AI-generated youtube video about kung fu.
Teach your kids critical thinking instead.
And teaching the kids to trust the source that cannot give them facts and changes the answer every time you ask the same question is good?