For Centuries, Know-It-Alls Carried Beautiful Miniature Almanacs | Hacker News Reader

For Centuries, Know-It-Alls Carried Beautiful Miniature Almanacs

atlasobscura.com

101 pointspepys20 comments

This article reminded me of Alan Kay's essay Our Human Condition "From Space" [1], which starts with a discussion of pocket globes:

My favorite examples of early science, and a wonderful general metaphor for what science does, are the attempts at highly accurate map-making started by the Greeks, then lost for a thousand years, and then taken up again starting in the 15th century. By the end of the 1700s, people delighted in being able to buy a pocket globe of "The World As Seen From Space". 200 years later, we went out into space, looked back at the world, took pictures of it, and saw just what the 18th century map makers had already found out.

[1] http://www.vpri.org/pdf/m2003001_human_cond.pdf

Reminds me of the Pocket Reference. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pocket_Ref

One of the greatest signs of human progress is that now we know enough facts to fill our pocket almanacs with them instead of making up prognostications.

One could argue that it’s a sign of the human condition that we’ve been able to compensate for the new technology with an even greater tendency to prognosticate.

The tendency to prognosticate without any real evidence will increase in the future.

Actually the outlook for prognostication is-- wait let me check-- it's "ask again later". Huh, oh well.

Pears Cyclopaedia is one i grew up with. It was a tiny book with ~1000 tissue paper thin pages that seemed to always have everything i needed. From logarithmic tables and maths/physics functions to a periodic table.

I went to school before wikipedia and this book helped a lot.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pears%27_Cyclopaedia

I have a copy of this from the turn of the century (last century) which says (in paraphrase) Physics: some recent developments from physicists such as Dr Einstein & Prof. Bohr suggest there may be further changes in our understanding of this field -It's pre quantum mechanics classical physics admitting its on the cusp of a significant change..

I think the most meta-thing here is instead of using almanacs, we’re here linking to a Wikipedia article on a pocket reference.

To be fair that pocket reference is amazing.

> Smartphones are equally as portable, too—but it’s hard to argue that they’re even half as lovely.

Actually, why not? You could find an endearing custom printed case, and to an extent personalize the software in a lovely and unique way.

Is the problem that they're not rare/irreproducible enough to be a collector's item? If so, will we eventually see collectors obsess over out of production phones?

I smiled the other day when I saw an iPhone 3G and remembered I keep a 2G in some box for collection purposes

Just bad writing, just like when people automatically say "the old times were better" without even analyzing if it's true

Here is a modern version of Know-it-all, instead of looking things up, the answer looks for you.

It works by adding a monetary incentive to any type of question you might encounter, for example:

We all look up answers on our phones, but what are some questions which you have not been able to look up and wish you can get answers to? Answer with Obyte and earn up to 34,196 bytes: https://particiate.net?#@208

Last comment was four years ago...

I've always preferred the Junior Woodchucks Guidebook.

Looks like an ancient version of the PDG review booklet

http://pdg.lbl.gov/index.html

And now-a-days we have a smartphone and Wikipedia

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