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If that's something which interests you then you should read The Knowledge: How to Rebuild our World from Scratch.
by VBprogrammer 7y ago
If that's something which interests you then you should read The Knowledge: How to Rebuild our World from Scratch.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 7y agoI'd love it if there were something like a 10 volume version of that.
- kragen 7y agoNot a reliable source.
- jasoncrawford 7y agoWhy not?
- VBprogrammer 7y agoBecause it's written as an entertaining book presumably. I don't know why anyone would even consider it reference material.
- kragen 7y agoThe author doesn't maintain an errata site, and it has potentially fatal errata.
- jasoncrawford 7y agoSuch as?
- kragen 7y agoI don't remember all of them, but one was that the dude left out the part of the alcohol-distillation procedure where you dump the liquid that comes over first, which contains most of the methanol. A lot of blues singers went blind from someone skipping that step, and people have died from it, too. In general, he doesn't provide adequate information about safety precautions. The book is like an Anarchist's Cookbook for bootstrapping—anybody who tries its recipes without further information is likely to end up dead. It should be called The Misinformation. The thing that got me was that when I told him that there were potentially fatal errata and where to look to see if they were already known problems, he said there was no public list; I should just take the time to write up the problems without knowing whether he already knew about them or not, and there was no way for readers to find out what errors had already been reported in the version of the book they already had. I think that says more about his attitude about accuracy than any particular error in any particular version of the book.