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.
-
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.
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
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
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.