Re: Information & Power (was: RE: Einstein's Brain on the internet)

Spike Jones (spike66@ibm.net)
Wed, 28 Apr 1999 22:47:37 -0700

Karsten Bänder wrote:

> Oh well, I'm looking forward to the day when finally all information is
> available online.

Me too. Karsten, I was at Yale a few years ago with a friend who was an alumnus of that establishment. He showed me a library there which houses a collection of books, most of which were published in the 18th century. I was astounded there were so many of them, in the days before automatic typesetting. As it turns out, one cannot browse these books, as they are too delicate. I asked the librarian if there is any effort to download their contents into ascii files, and as it turns out, there is no such effort, nor most likely ever will be.

Reason: the information found therein is perfectly useless. There is some scientific speculations perhaps, useful only to the historian, some historical information, same as above, but the overwhelming majority of the information found in all those old books: (have you guessed?) sermons! If that is not bad enough, they are all heavily dependent upon each other. With the more lax standard of those times regarding intellectual property rights, we have jillions of versions of a very few sermons.

I now suspect that within 20 years, *all* the information currently found in print-only format will be no more useful in that form than the collection of mostly sermons in the stacks at Yale. spike