Alright, I’ll admit it. This week it has been a challenge to come up with a topic, and I have let the deadline approach and ultimately pass as I stare blankly at the blinking cursor on my computer monitor. So I’ll just ramble and I hope you’ll come along.
For those of you who’ve ever wondered, “How does a rotary engine work?” or “What is Creationism?” the place for you is www.howstuffworks.com. This site does a great job of explaining things in understandable terms, and often the explanation is accompanied by an animated graphic. It is the animated graphics that really make things clear for me, being a visual person. I am also something of a gear head, and therefore naturally inclined to read about automotive topics. The HowStuffWorks feature topic this week highlights the Bugatti Veyron, a million dollar two passenger car with 1000 horsepower, a 16 cylinder engine that consumes 80 gallons of fuel per hour and goes 250 mph. Just the thing – I’ve been looking for a 250 mph car. HowStuffWorks takes you to the Bugatti website, where you can watch an animated graphic of those 16 cylinders pumping away in slo mo – pure nirvana for some (and me).
In the olden days (I actually lived in the olden days according to my grown-up niece and nephew), there were encyclopaedia salesmen who would wander door to door selling encyclopaedia sets, which were horrendously expensive; the salesman would kindly offer you a three year payment plan; by the time you paid it off, the encyclopaedia was three years out of date. In just over a decade it has become an obsolete model; I searched on the internet for a book set, and the best I could do was a 1994 leather-bound edition on eBay. In our modern times, encyclopaedias are mostly online or CD-based like Microsoft Encarta, but Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.com) is in my opinion the most interesting. Started in 2001, the content in Wikipedia is collaborative, meaning that the all-free content is contributed by anybody who knows something. Anyone with a computer can edit, correct or improve the information throughout the site, and membership is free. Wikipedia makes heavy use of hyperlinks, making it easy to jump to related articles. It also makes it easy to meander to a completely unrelated topic to the one you were initially interested in, but that is more a symptom of ADD than anything else. Wikipedia is huge, it has more information than the book set ever had, it is always current, and best of all it’s free.
The internet is like a giant brain organism, there is so much knowledge freely contributed and freely available that it blows one’s mind. The venerable Encyclopaedia book set is dead for good. I hope that books in general never go away, because there is something to be said for reading a good paperback in bed, or on the sunny porch, or on the bus, or at the airport. I wonder if the computer will eventually usurp the book, and provide us with some kind of electronic book device… At this time, I sincerely hope the trusty book is never made obsolete, but then again – I know I’ll never again own an Encyclopaedia book set.
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