The Book Is a Time Machine | Hacker News Reader

The Book Is a Time Machine

publicbooks.org

60 pointsdiodorus27 comments

97 writers sent letters in 1971 to celebrate the opening of the new library in Troy, MI., including Isaac Asimov, who had this to say: "Congratulations on the new library, because it isn't just a library. It is a space ship that will take you to the farthest reaches of the Universe, a time machine that will take you to the far past and the far future, a teacher that knows more than any human being, a friend that will amuse you and console you --- and most of all, a gateway, to a better and happier and more useful life."

Go through 5+ year old bookmarks to find all of them dead, this will show how permanent books seem compared to digital publications. They truly are "time machines" for how temporal information is today.

That's why you should also bookmark with the Wayback Machine, not only urls.

This is why you should bookmark by copying important information into your own knowledge database.

Do you have a recommendation for "my own knowledge database", and also, do you have a recommendation for one that benefits everyone, not just me? When appropriate, of course.

Personally, I use zotero to archive, tag, index, and comment on page snapshots

- For you: Depends on what your software preferences are. Evernote is the obvious choice for most consumers, but I personally use org-mode in emacs + recoll for indexing.

- "one that benefits everyone": probably wikipedia+scihub, but I think you would have already guessed that. A knowledge database that benefits everyone looks a lot like the internet, minus the serving issues. So probably something closer to ipfs.

Would be great if we could download a webpage and guarantee it will always work. These days, however, I imagine lots of pages require runtime fetching of data via javascript. The alternative is whole-page screenshots but you lose the accessibility of the text within. I kind of miss the days when the web was just HTML.

Right click > Save as... in chrome is pretty good.

There's also the issue of plugins compatibility.

Back in the days when the web was just Flash, it wasn't as easy as Ctrl+S to save content you wanted to keep. In a few years, you may need to spin a VM with an older OS to launch a flash-able browser. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash#End_of_life)

I wonder if it's easier with java applets.

It's not much easier with Java applets since Oracle tightened applet security (requiring everything to be signed, which the old applets aren't), and deprecating the plugin altogether.

I had to jump through hoops to get an applet I wrote only 10 years ago running.

You can save the current dom you're viewing no matter how interactively it got there, to something like maff / mhtml, or print to pdf and you'll have access to the text & images.

I personally prefer mhtml, though with the recent breakage with firefox, I've been doing PDF.

Archiving something interactive.. that's a different story.

For some URLs given one of their old Wayback Machine entries it would be nice to be able to render those in their contemporaneous browser environments (e.g., going way back maybe Mosaic 3.0 or IE 10) to maybe then have a chance of working with some close facsimile of the original interface and functionality.

It's the same with photographs. We take more photos than ever before, but we lose more photos than ever before.

iCloud is not archival or long term storage, people lose access, or accidentally delete photos or whatever. Meanwhile, all my childhood photos are safely stored as negatives. Of course, my parents' house could burn down and all my childhood photos could be lost, but that's unlikely.

That's one reason that I've been enjoying film photography. I know that my negatives will easily last 50+ years if stored with some care.

We really need a solution for long term file storage for the average person. I plan on putting my digital photos onto archival DVDs at some point and storing them with my negatives. But even archival DVDs have problems, namely that it assumes we'll have DVD readers in 50 years. Meanwhile, we'll still be able to scan photographic negatives in 50 years, and to circle back to books, we'll be able to read books in 50 years.

As for the "time machine" aspect, I find old magazines to be even more evocative. The Internet Archive has a bunch of old computer magazines available and reading those I feel like I'm transported back to the 1980s.

"The Book" or The Book? https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B005LALG9S/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_...

"When we are not actually holding them, books are things over which we like to wring our hands. They stand, in their very solidity, for what might be precarious and endangered in our brave newish world."

Definitely an off topic question, but why is this kind of writing style so common? This super academic style that uses the most complicated and unnatural phrases, and likes to use esoteric definitions of otherwise normal words. It's hard for me to read and it just gives off a vibe of show-off-y-ness.

Compensation per word?

Apart from being a functional mechanism for communicating ideas, writing can also be artistic and stylistic. Writing can be a form of self expression. Like drawing, writing can express itself in both imitative and impressionistic forms. Or anywhere in between.

Sure. But when the stylistic goes overboard, it can get in the way of actually communicating ideas. If the author wants to express their style more than they want to communicate, that's their choice, but it is at the price of communication. In particular, I'm not going to bother to read very much of it...

It's as if different people have different preferences.

I've observed that many people don't like Faulkner, and others don't like Hemingway. I aim for Hemingway with my technical writing, but I love reading Faulkner for pleasure.

Sure, that's true. This article wasn't fiction, though.

And I know that non-fiction can still have style (in fact, the best does), and people can still have different preferences for that style. And fiction can still communicate ideas.

But for me, personally, if you're trying to communicate an idea, tell me the idea. Stop trying to dress it up in fancy writing, and making me guess whether there's something profound there, or whether it's just fancy. Have style if you want, but don't let the style get in the way of actually communicating the idea.

Some modern artists sacrifice communication when they produce works that I don't understand and don't find aesthetically pleasing enough to study. I guess taste is just one of the pitfalls of style.

It's funny: I was actually prepared to _defend_ this article based on the first line you quoted above. But the rest of it is much, much worse.

I have no objection at all to long, complex sentences. Not everything needs to be (or can be) distilled into bullet points. But I'm struggling to find enough substance in this book review to merit the epic academic writing.

I'm not saying there _isn't_ an interesting idea buried in there somewhere, but:

> "Rather than seeing time as a scarce, homogeneous resource to be economized or optimized, Lupton invites us to follow her in seeing books as things that introduce difference, discontinuity, and even plasticity into time itself."

Statements to this effect are made several times as if merely repeating it in different, increasingly obfuscated ways makes a stronger point. It does not.

And:

> "Lupton defines the literary, which is the category to which she remains professionally tethered, as a mode of thought characterized by refusing linear or instrumental time use."

Really?

Agreed. The headline is much bolder and more engaging than the actual article.

I'll take a moment to sputter about the phrase "even plasticity." It sounds stark and assertive. But then I check the dictionary and discover that plasticity is really just a $10 word for the more mundane "malleable."

In that case, the sentence is wrongly constructed. If it's trying to take us up a crescendo from small changes to big ones, it should read "introduce plasticity, difference and even discontinuity into time itself."

I'm being cranky to make a larger point. A lot of academic writing isn't just obscure. It's intellectually sloppy in the way that a badly constructed sermon can be, too. Words are sloshed into place mostly because of the way they sound, rather than careful consideration of their exact meaning.

What? No! One is a noun and the other is an adjective. Do you really want to replace "plasticity" with "malleability"? Or maybe you prefer "malleableness"?

But yes I agree that the writing doesn't flow well. This required a great deal of editing, which it didn't receive. In this particular sentence, the worst offender is "itself". We know we're talking about time; it dominates the first clause of the sentence.

I don't like the sentence and I'm not even sure what it means to introduce difference into time. But to me the idea of malleable time is the bigger, more surprising concept compared to mere discontinuity which is commonplace.

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