OT: Electronic vs. Traditional Information Sources

Why could that not happen with successive editions of a paper book?

It would be possible, although arguably heroic, to have paper copies of successive editions, and manually compare entries.

Or are you failing to make a different point?

I like hardcopy for many purposes, and would hate to see it disappear.

It will always have value to historians, since, for example, historians of Trump's past know how difficult it is to foretell the past.

Cursitor Doom claims that because the Keeling curve is available on on-line

the university collecting the data can change it any time they like.

Of course there are loads of books about climate change, and pretty much ev ery one of them has printed copy of the Keeling curve as it was when they w ere published. George Monbiot's "Heat" published in 2006 isn't one of them. but it does put the 2006 CO2 level at 380 ppm, as does the on-line curve.

This rather restricts the opportunities to play with the data on a day to d ay basis.

I've described Cursitoer Doom as a gullible twit from time to time, but her e he is just being a fatuous twit.

That's just a matter of the CURATOR of the information, whether it is Britannica, or Funk & Wagnalls, or Microsoft. The case in science, is that the SOURCE is intended to be published and available in a variety of archives, so that scholarly perusal of the sources is possible.

Other than looking up the signature authors, one cannot get such information from a Britannica article, and cannot revise misinformation, appending a clear reference to the source. The revision is (like the source) peer-reviewed, and you can FIND the reviews and revisions by a citations index. Ignoring revisions means ignoring corrections and comments by the experts who use the 'peer-reviewed literature'.

Cursitor Doom apparently is the only judge who finds the 'no change' carbon dioxide model to be credible, and he's outside the peer-review model entirely when he does so. That's not good science practice.

He's not the only judge who purports to find it credible.

There are branches of the climate change denial propaganda machine who make this sort of claim. They probably don't actually find it credible, but they do find that can sell it to particularly gullible twits, of whom Cursitor Doom is a prize example.

The aim is to sow enough fear, uncertainty and doubt to put off the day when you won't be able to make pots of money by digging up fossil carbon and selling it as fuel, and so far it has worked.

I've gone full-circle.

Nowadays, I find myself downloading the PDF for some new chip or app-note. Then, I have it professionally printed and spiral bound at TheBookPatch.com

It's just easier for me to have the paper. I can make notes in the margins, etc...

Yes, I know you can annotate PDF's -- and I do that too on some stuff. But for maybe 10% of new, complicated (to me) circuits - that I have to get right the first time -- I'll often opt for a printed copy of the datasheet.

As has been already established here, you're a damn fool. This matter is not confined merely to science, but to the sum total of human knowledge. Imagine some future dystopia where the neo-Liberal-Globalists are no longer calling all the shots. Your Farenheit 451 attitude to printed sources means future generations have only online sources to consult when researching matters such as history for example. That would be God's gift to a willing army of Revisionists. I wonder how your pal, Bill Sloman, would feel if someone like David Irving was in charge of peer-reviewing submissions for a subject such as the Holocaust? Our children would be learning a very different narrative indeed, and those who forget the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them.

You are aping the tedious Sloman third-person droning-insult peer-review climate-nonsense thing. I hope you're being ironic.

But you forgot to mis-apply "it's" .

Britannica, or Funk & Wagnalls, or Microsoft. The case in science, is tha t the SOURCE is intended to be published and available in a variety of arch ives,so that scholarly perusal of the sources is possible.

John Larkin doesn't read anything that doesn't flatter him. Climate change denial literature regularly praises it readers for being acute enough not t o fall for the inconvenient view of reality laid out by the peer-reviewed l iterature, and John Larkin doesn't realise that he is being lead up the gar den path.

He doesn't know enough about science to realise how peer-review works, whic h doesn't help.

I did notice that myself. I suspect Sloman is using a couple of his cronies on this group as sock puppets to pass on his infantile scribblings in order to overcome the barrier that I have him in my killfile.

Cursitor Doom flatters himself. I couldn't care less whether he reads my co mments. He's even less likely learn anything from them than John Larkin.

What he fails to understand is that reasonable people share a common stock of generally agreed information, and use essentially the same reasoning pro cesses to decide that he's a half-witted troll.

That's the peer-review process, that he knows even less about than John Lar kin.

I'm sure that neither of them have been tapped to review an article offered to a peer-review journal. Phil Hobbs probably gets more invitation to do t his than he'd have the time to honour. I happen to have once suggested Geor ge Herrold as a potential referee, and I'd be surprised if Win Hill hadn't been invited to do it pretty regularly. There are others who have almost ce rtainly done quite a bit.

Oh, there's plenty of past knowledge available, if one knows where and how to look for it. You call up the example 'some future dystopia' from imagination, as Plato told us to expect from sophists.

Alas, if you READ Plato's works on sophistry, and Aristotle's comments, you'd know that is an intellectual garbage pit. Wash yourself off and try again.

Jim Thompson was dead right about you.

Excellent. Soon he'll just be talking to himself :)