Slashdot Mirror
Before Google There Was the Chemical Rubber Company (hackaday.com)
szczys writes: The CRC Handbook is one great example of how access to information has changed over the years. Now, you open up Google and find your answers. In decades past, hard data needed to solve engineering problems was embodied in volumes of text known as Databooks. One of the best known was the Chemical Rubber Company Handbook. Don't let the name fool you, the CRC Handbook contained traits, properties, equations, and much more on all kinds of materials and techniques for using them. It's still around today and has one big advantage over our searchable digital lives: you know you can trust the accuracy of the information in those books at face value while online information requires validation.
Why would you nescesarily trust the accuracy of a refernce book over the internet? I have found mistakes in both.
As a chemist, that was the one resource that everyone had.
Unlike software, you never needed to know whether it was the latest version.
However, this is a prime example of bloatware. The thing was so big and fat, it ceased to be a pocketbook. I think the last one I used had a version in the 70s.
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Add pubmed to many of your google search terms.
I still have my copy of the 1980 Rubber Bible, which I was awarded as the top science student in my school when I graduated.
As an electrical engineering undergraduate I had a professor who gave an assignment to build a filter. All semester long we had been using trusted tables from a published source for filter parameters. He asked for filter parameters that would lead us into a portion of the published table that was wrong. The point of this assignment wasn't to design yet another filter, it was to understand that errors occur everywhere. Even in trusted sources.
AKA The Rubber Bible as it was known when I was in Engineering School. Almost everyone had at least one edition.
Machinery's Handbook.
Passionately Indifferent
The Machinery handbook, the CRC Handbook, and the Radio Amateur's Handbook are the three classics. Encyclopedia Britannica was even larger but often considered to be authoritative. CRC publishes an entire series including The CRC Handbook of Avian Body Masses. It's overstating that they were so authoritative that you could take them at face value. Hand typesetting is an expensive process and when small errors came up, the publishers had to consider the cost of correction before implementing fixes. There is also the fact that many of these works arose from the work of just a few eccentric authors (neurotypical people don't write reference works) and they weren't universal experts.
Bruce Perens.
you know you can trust the accuracy of the information in those books at face value
Nope.
information requires validation.
Correct (but verify for yourself that I am right about this).
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
And why should I not trust the accuracy of an Atmel part if I get the datasheet file from the Atmel website?
compare it to something like thousands of reference books instead of just one? I am sure there are errors in some of them...
Chemists have also found The Merck Index, Beilstein (Beilstein's Handbook of Organic Chemistry, founded in 1881), as well as Chemical Abstracts (CAS) published by The American Chemical Society to be incredibly useful and necessary. All are either available on the Internet or other computer databases. Before computer accessibility, a year's subscription of CAS in paper would occupy something like a yard or more of bookshelf.
I'm sure other professions have their necessary references they could not do without.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
Can't forget Gray's Anatomy.
I keep an old CRC Handbook on a shelf in the kitchen next to all the cook books. Its just there make guest nervous...
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
vlads flying over us in their starship? vegas vibrating (they likely like it?)? never mind... only 1 day of shopping left...
Lived by this tome for much of my education and a substantial portion of my career.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Just yesterday, I put an ancient CRC Math Handbook in a pile to donate to my local public library. One sign of its age is that it's pretty small. I don't know how much use it is at this point: the library might put it on the shelves, sell it, or trash it - who knows?
Although these things arguably are made obsolete by the Internet, the humble printed handbook still has its value. My favorite in the math-table genre has always been Schaum's Outline of Mathematical Handbook of Formulas and Tables, which is very handy for browsing and for refreshing yourself on your favorite page of formulas via another paper gadget, the humble sticky note.
I am an avid collector of handbooks. They embody so much information, so much detail. So much effort into compiling them. They were often the life's work of an individual expert. On the shelves immediately above my desk we find, "Drafting for Engineers" by Svensen. "The Making, Shaping, and Treating of Steel" bu the United States Steel Company, "Th Vertebrate Visual System" by Poliak, "The Retina" by Poliak, "Van Nostrand's Scientific Encyclopedia" (I used to sit and just read random entries as a kid), "CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics", "Halsey's Handbook" (the one with a beautiful screed against the metric system), "The Merk Manial", "Machinery's Handbook" along with "Machinery's Handbook Guide", "Physician's Desk Reference" (although out of date), etc.
One of my greatest pleasures in graduate school was to visit the local used bookstore that, given it's location could draw on the libraries of many professional engineers, machinists, and mathematicians as they retired, and thus had a huge technical section that was both broad and deep with information.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
That's the one I have. I used it just last week. Sometimes taking a book off the shelf is more convenient than wading through the flood of information the Internet throws at you.
I bought mine from a used bookstore in 1974. It hasn't degraded and for the most part still works quite well.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But then I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain
It is a great big book. Lots of pages of log and trig tables. The section on the elements is a good read if I recall correctly.
Have not seen it lately, hope the wife did not throw it out...
$153 for the dead tree and $135 for the e-book version??!! then again, for most people a version a couple years old is just as good and those are under $50
my 1983 one is very cheap I see, under $8
Every technician worth anything has an RD book in his truck:
http://www.scte.org/documents/...
Everything you need to spec, design, build and maintain a cable system.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
CRC Standard Math Tables, 28th edition. Old, but still works.
Haven't used in years, but I'm not getting rid of it, either.
Replying to my own posting ... I'm reminded now of the one book I regret not purchasing. It was an electrician's handbook and the one page I recall (which has influenced the way I join to wires to this day) show various different splicing techniques, including the Western Union splice. Doing a quick search online now shows it was probably "Practical electrical wiring," by Sharp, which Google appears to have digitized.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Holy crap! I have used CRC products so many times and had no idea that CRC stood for "chemical rubber company." I've never even thought to try to figure it out.
CRC Press is a major publisher in the STEM area. The handbooks have historically just been one part of that.
online tools and wikipedia are not bad at the moment. Who tells that this will remain so? Organizations like wikipedia needs money and there is no long term guarantee that not at one point in the future, a "sponsor" will jump in, and searches or articles will be "internally vetted". Like for anything, it is good to have many independent sources. And yes, I keep as many copies of old encyclopedias and handbooks as possible, so that if needed, things can be double checked. Even in math software (like computer algebra systems) it can be healthy from time to time to check results with old handbooks or other systems, like integration tables. And of course be able to look up the original sources or reproduce things yourself. Never trust one source alone.
I can't find my copy for the exact name. It was published, I think, by the HAM radio organization. Incredibly useful for both the amateur and professional. Not sure if it's been updated for the digital world. That tells you how old my copy must be as well as me and my need to use it.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
>> Before Google There Was the Chemical Rubber Company
And before Nokia, there was the chemical rubber company called Nokia
aaaaaaa
Give numbers you can truss.
[citation needed]
so if you put this book online, then you'll have to validate the info?
Finding useful technical information on the internet is like sifting through horse shit looking for pony.
The search engines all assume that you meant 'Beiber' when you typed in 'Becquerel'. They all deliver results of what they think you want, vs. what you actually asked for. Often you're steered toward pay sites. A lot of information controlled by technical journals is behind paywalls.
If you actually find anything related to what interests you, you'll often find that 1) it is all copied from Wikipedia, and 2) it's wrong at worst or, at best, is insufficiently detailed to assist you. If the information exists in a fundamentals textbook, I already have that. If I'm searching for information, I'm looking for more than the fundamentals.
Nothing beats a good dead-tree technical reference that has stood the test of time. A well-thumbed CRC Handbook sits on my desk, and it had served me a hell of a lot better than the whole of the internet. If the Internet imploded tomorrow, the only thing I would mourn would be the loss of email. The rest of it is utter crap. "Information Highway" it is not.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
Still got my 1949 31st edition, next to my Henley's book of formulas and Grays Anatomy
- Introduction to Algorithms by Cormen/Leiserson/Rivest
- Intel 64 and IA-32 Architecture Software Developer's manuals
Just to bring up something really obscure ;)
Did you discuss the revert on the article's talk page? Because that's the next step after being reverted.
As a mathematician who predates Google, Wikipedia, et al, of course I owned a CRC handbook of Mathematics. Of course, these days the more advanced calculators would have the equivalent data built in - and so would any computer algebra system.
Seems almost ironic the way a rubber manufacturer is more famous for its handbooks, though I suppose you could compare it to an Irish brewery which is better known elsewhere for their book of world records. (Yes, Guinness.)
Two sets of distributed-on-dead-trees tables, which were central to engineering industrial civilization, were discovered, in this cybernetic era, to have substantial errors.
One was the table of integrals that was an appendix to just about every calculus book known to man. When the first symbolic math programs were being developed, one of the intended uses of them was to calculate, on the fly, good analytical solutions to the integrals of various functions. So of course the authors tested them against all those published (and believed to be gospel) table entries, to be sure they'd come up with correct solutions in useful forms.
But the number of mismatches was appalling. Some high two-digit percentage of the functions not only solve to the form in the books, they solved to a form that couldn't be converted to the form in the books - because they were just different. The authors tried debugging the program - and found the program was providing correct solutions! It turns out the books had publishing incorrect information for decades and it had not been caught (hopefully because the functions and their erroneous integrals that were not used often enough for important things for the errors to have mattered).
The behavior of water at various temperatures and pressures is horrendously complicated, practically impossible to calculate from the physics of the deceptively simple molecule, and extremely important in the design of many classes of powerful (and potentially dangerous) industrial devices - starting with steam engines and continuing with power plants (including fossil fuel and nuclear), chemical processing and refinery machinery, and so on. It shows up in all sorts of odd corners, too. So this very strange and very important behavior rated a large effort of measuring and publishing it. The result of these massive projects was "The Steam Tables", whole chapters of measured results that described this complex behavior. Again we had a printed gospel which was used for the foundation of industrial design.
For decades, scientists and computer programmers tried to come up with a set of equations and/or algorithms that would accurately compute the entries of this table. Even if it were pages of code, such a plugin could be the basis of wonderful computer-aided-design (CAD) programs, enabling complex projects, raising efficiency, and avoiding dangerous failure modes. Each component of such an algorithm would represent some physical pheomenon of water's behavior, potentially enabling new science and/or engineering functionality, new inventions. The benefits would be enormous.
But for all those decades such a compact description was elusive. Equations that fit part of the tables very well would blow up in other regions, fixes there would break things elsewhere, and so on. Eventually some formulations were found that worked VERY well for much of the space. So the authors looked closely at the regions where it missed. Maybe there was some interesting physics there.
Then somebody got the bright idea to ACTUALLY TAKE SOME NEW MEASUREMENTS OF REAL WATER, rather than just trusting the tables, to try to get better numbers to give an insight into what might be going on as the models and the tables began to diverge.
SURPRISE! The Steam Tables, on which industrial civilization was built, had great chunks that were JUST PLAIN WRONG! Fortunately, a century of engineering practice, fudge factors, and overdesign margins, along with a tendency to avoid the problematic temperature/pressure operating regimes, had mostly kept the world safe from industrial-scale disaster.
If you've lived for a few decades, you may have noticed that stuff these days "just works" - a LOT better than it used to. More reliability, more efficiency, and far less wear-out and breakdown. There were a lot of both breakthroughs, and incremental design and methodology improvements, better materials, and so on from decades of invention and experiment piling up knowledge. But things like those two big corrections have certainly had an impact in the smooth running of modern technology.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Like a lot of people here, I have a lot of nostalgia for my oldschool CRC handbook. I have many fond memories of poring over its extensive listings of mathematical formulas and scientific tables.
But in a Slashdot discussion of nostalgia over the Chemical Rubber Company, we should not forget the MathWorld debacle. MathWorld was an online math encyclopedia in the mid 90s. It was one of the earliest proofs of the power of the web's collaborative processes for publishing, predating Wikipedia by almost a decade. It started out as Eric's Treasure Troves, hosted by Eric Weisstein on his UVA account page when he was an undergraduate. But with hundreds of submissions by collaborators, it grew into a comprehensive listing of almost any branch of mathematics, a resource which many math students relied on on a daily basis. It eventually got a book deal, and was published into a paper encyclopedia by CRC. After publication, CRC decided that the ongoing web resource infringed its copyright, and shut it down, including content that had never been part of the published work.
Eventually a deal was reached between Weisstein/Wolfram and CRC and the website was restored, but the damage had been done. MathWorld would never recover its status as the premier home on the web of mathematical knowledge. The MathWorld community was shattered and a new GPLed math encyclopedia was started, PlanetMath. And eventually in the mid 2000s Wikipedia exploded, including much mathematical content. CRC's reactions was one of the earliest and most egregious examples of old media companies responding to the rise of the internet in the worst way possible. CRC should no longer be regarded as responsible stewarts of mathematical knowledge.
The Bible. Totally awesome.
Forty years later, I still have my beloved CRC math handbook. Offered it to my son when he followed me into physics, but he was using wikipedia for derivatives and integrals. I still like browsing databooks, which were like baseball card collections back in the day. They were often like unobtainium, but - I made time for a TI factory rep, and he sent me everything they had. Likewise, I returned a woman's call at Motorola, and she was so happy I received two large boxes a couple days later. Doesn't hurt to be nice once in a while.
A really comprehensive, albeit very expensive book of every biologically active chemical known so far, is the "Merck index". Expensive.. I paid , I think, $300 for it new, back in the mid 80's. But wow, it had EVERY chemical ever created, their chemical formulae, and everything known to date about them so far.. A very high percentage of them were psychoactive drugs. and most had never been tested on anything yet.. Nor were most regulated either. It was a basement chemist's dream...;-) Unfortunately many that were made and tested in the street were highly dangerous and/or caused irreperable damage. You still see what can happen only recently with "bath salts". ;-)
Actually I think there's no way the average joe can buy the book as it's now regulated (I think it may have been even then).. I suppose if you can still find a dusty old bookstore with lots of little rooms (God I miss those!!) you could find an old copy there in one of the lesser visited shelves.
Even though the internet has "everything", that's certainly not the case for these kinds of things. You'd have to go underground to a "black site" on the "invisible web". Sure there's plenty. But searching through a book is so much more secure though
[citation needed]
Is that a logical "short circuit"?
Sorry, it was too good a line to waste! 8-)