3 ms·

I wonder why there are no tables in places there could be one - like in the list of metal expansion coefficients or gravitational acceleration by location.

mhh__ 6y ago
People had books for that stuff back then, so I imagine it wasn't worth the considerable effort typesetting them. I also have a book of data from way back, and since its still fairly accurate, it's still alarmingly easier just to look something up than Google it i.e. there doesn't seem to be one repository for (say) resistivity coefficients in one place alongside magnetic moments.
- nicoburns 6y ago
  WolframAlpha tends to be pretty good at looking up this kind of stuff.
  - mhh__ 6y ago
    Seems to struggle with asking for the second ionisation energy of copper, and takes a while. The book is a better than the phone in this case. The only issue with that is that getting multiple pieces of data in machine readable form is annoying - even now you might have to OCR a graph from a PDF :(
- jcrawfordor 6y ago
  There's a bit of a cult classic book, "Pocket Ref" by Thomas Glover, and its big brother "Desk Ref." They're just books that attempt to provide reference tables for most of the things you'd need to look up throughout a wide variety of technical fields, but especially mechanical trades. A random selection of the contents includes "Densities of Gases," "Plywood & Panel Grading," "Canada & Mexico Postal Abbreviations & Capitals," "Solid Figure Formulas," "Commonly Available Pumps," "Welding Electrode Amperages," etc. Sort of a monument to what's possible in a reference work, and cheap insurance to throw in your toolkit or vehicle if you do any kind of field work for when there's no cell coverage. I also have a book of mathematical tables, mostly for historic interest, but I think there's also some value in working from trig or log tables as I find looking at the table a few times helps you develop an intuition for estimating the function a lot faster than the attempts some textbooks make.

mhh__ 6y ago

People had books for that stuff back then, so I imagine it wasn't worth the considerable effort typesetting them. I also have a book of data from way back, and since its still fairly accurate, it's still alarmingly easier just to look something up than Google it i.e. there doesn't seem to be one repository for (say) resistivity coefficients in one place alongside magnetic moments.

nicoburns 6y ago
WolframAlpha tends to be pretty good at looking up this kind of stuff.
- mhh__ 6y ago
  Seems to struggle with asking for the second ionisation energy of copper, and takes a while. The book is a better than the phone in this case. The only issue with that is that getting multiple pieces of data in machine readable form is annoying - even now you might have to OCR a graph from a PDF :(
jcrawfordor 6y ago
There's a bit of a cult classic book, "Pocket Ref" by Thomas Glover, and its big brother "Desk Ref." They're just books that attempt to provide reference tables for most of the things you'd need to look up throughout a wide variety of technical fields, but especially mechanical trades. A random selection of the contents includes "Densities of Gases," "Plywood & Panel Grading," "Canada & Mexico Postal Abbreviations & Capitals," "Solid Figure Formulas," "Commonly Available Pumps," "Welding Electrode Amperages," etc. Sort of a monument to what's possible in a reference work, and cheap insurance to throw in your toolkit or vehicle if you do any kind of field work for when there's no cell coverage. I also have a book of mathematical tables, mostly for historic interest, but I think there's also some value in working from trig or log tables as I find looking at the table a few times helps you develop an intuition for estimating the function a lot faster than the attempts some textbooks make.