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Royal Society Opens Free Online Archive
greenechidna writes "The Register reports that the Royal Society has put its archives online. From the article:
'One of the world's most important historical records will be made available online for the first time today. All the Royal Society's journals are free for two months and include stone-cold scientific classics going back to 1665 and the foundations of modern inquiry.'"
You can set up your own account at the Royal Society; if you follow the link in the Reg article, you get logged in to some random account.
The early materials are the real-life achievements of Neal Stephenson's real characters in his "Baroque Cycle" (the novels starting with Quicksilver ), so if you liked the books, this should be exciting news for anyone wanting to know more about science in that period.
Small correction: Edmund Stone's work described in this article is not the discovery of aspirin (acetylsalycilic acid), but salycilic acid. Salycilic acid has about the same therapeutic effects as aspirin, but is much harder on the stomach. Aspirin was first synthesized by Bayer chemists in the late 1800s.
Now will their Egyptian counterpart step up and one up them, offering free online access to 3000 years of archived research? Where's the URL for "What the stars look like 180 days before the Nile overflows its banks"?
Unfortunately much of the contents of the library of Alexandria burned centuries ago.
Just the opposite - terminal s looks like f - the character is in most font sets: & #383; (slashcode garbles things up), and is called typically called a long s.
Period internal s's are similar to the modern s, unless it's being used as part of an 'es' group that some writers perfered to style as a long s, or when preceding a 't', but not starting the word.
-Ashmoore, grad student lingist.
Actually, the Alexandria Library loss is largely myth. Sure, the library was burned. But ancient libraries, much like today's, did not house only unique copies. The ancient tradition of transcription was not solely to preserve "books" (usually scrolls and decks of leaves) serially in time, but also in parallel in space. There were many ancient libraries holding many of the same books.
Moreover, many of the Alexandria books weren't burned. They were "put into general circulation", both into the hands of centuries of attackers like the Arabs from whom European Crusaders (and their campfollower merchats) brought them to the rest of Europe for the first time, and throughout the area many times when security was breached. And of course there are the really ancient works written in stone monuments, artifacts and jewelry.
Ancient Egypt's working civilization lasted for thousands of years, inspiring its culture of actual immortality. Essential to it was a system of info transfer that would survive all kinds of unexpected disasters. If one burning library could wipe it out, we'd never have heard of it.
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make install -not war
The article says it's going to be open for 2 months. Why not longer? Information doesn't want to be public?
Library of Alexandria was established by Greek dynasty and has little to do with ancient Egyptian civilization, about which, btw, we indeed knew very little before Napoleon's Egyptian Expedition.
"Blah blah blah." - [citation needed]
For the last couple of weeks, I have been going through these extremely good scientific lectures at the Royal Society here: Archive - complete list of webstreams. They are available in Real and Microsoft Media Player formats.
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