Mar 22, 2020, 4:19 PM
I mean, seriously, I used to think of a question, go to the library, go thru the card catalog, read through tables of contents, read through bibliographies, use microfilms to search newspapers and articles, and fking write people letters to get information. I had multiple encyclopedias, dictionaries, biographical encyclopedias. I would go to college bookstores, sneak into university libraries. Spend countless hours going through the monthly publications.
Today when I can’t remember something I just type it in and ‘oh yeah, that’s right, so…’. It’s fking magic. Seriously. And pretty soon we’ll be able to recursively search within the current topic. Today I get emails from economists and social scientists when they publish. it’s… awesome.
They keep taking the good search criteria away like ‘scholarly’ articles etc so I can’t filter out idiot stuff. Otherwise it’s just …utterly amazing.
Then talk about libgen? I mean, if there is a book worth reading the russians publish it and they have almost everything. It’s a gold mine. Russians are an international treasure for that reason alone. (For their movies too, but that’s for another discussion).