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Amateur Scientist
Oct. 25th, 2013 11:06 amI just now received my Amateur Scientist CDROM. It contains every one of the Amateur Scientist columns printed in Scientific American from 1928 to 2001 -- 73 years!!! When I was a kid this was the part I most looked forward to in each new issue of Scientific American. Now I have them all!!! Woo hoo!!
This CD used to cost hundreds of dollars, but is now just $30. I think perhaps in trying to sell them at a few hundred dollars each they must have merely accumulated dust. Now they are being sold at a sensible price by Surplus Shed in USA.
The Amateur Scientist CD at The Surplus Shed:
http://www.surplusshed.com/pages/item/m2071.html
A feast of delights was waiting for me on the CD. What I didn't expect is a wealth of bonus supporting information too. About a hundred articles and lists that never appeared in Scientific American but which are extremely useful for many of the experiments. For example, there are lists of the density and optical qualities of different materials, articles on the preparation and preservation of marine algae, DNA fingerprinting, glass blowing, what to do in case of electric shock, casting metal, coating materials using sputtering and evaporative techniques... and much much more. It is a real treasure chest.
I am sooo happy. Yay!
One tiny problem is that the disk was obviously prepared on a Microsoft Windows machine which is blind to the difference between uppercase and lowercase in filenames. This is a problem when copying it to the hard drive for use on Linux or any of the other operating systems that do see the difference. The most common problem is pictures not showing up. There is a fairly easy workaround however: it can either be used from the CD (but I prefer to keep the CD somewhere safe as a backup), or it can be copied to a FAT32 formatted drive (most thumbdrives come preformatted as FAT32) as Microsoft's FAT32 filing system can't distinguish upper/lower case. One day I'll write a small program to go through all the html pages and fix all the errors automatically.
This CD used to cost hundreds of dollars, but is now just $30. I think perhaps in trying to sell them at a few hundred dollars each they must have merely accumulated dust. Now they are being sold at a sensible price by Surplus Shed in USA.
The Amateur Scientist CD at The Surplus Shed:
http://www.surplusshed.com/pages/item/m2071.html
A feast of delights was waiting for me on the CD. What I didn't expect is a wealth of bonus supporting information too. About a hundred articles and lists that never appeared in Scientific American but which are extremely useful for many of the experiments. For example, there are lists of the density and optical qualities of different materials, articles on the preparation and preservation of marine algae, DNA fingerprinting, glass blowing, what to do in case of electric shock, casting metal, coating materials using sputtering and evaporative techniques... and much much more. It is a real treasure chest.
I am sooo happy. Yay!
One tiny problem is that the disk was obviously prepared on a Microsoft Windows machine which is blind to the difference between uppercase and lowercase in filenames. This is a problem when copying it to the hard drive for use on Linux or any of the other operating systems that do see the difference. The most common problem is pictures not showing up. There is a fairly easy workaround however: it can either be used from the CD (but I prefer to keep the CD somewhere safe as a backup), or it can be copied to a FAT32 formatted drive (most thumbdrives come preformatted as FAT32) as Microsoft's FAT32 filing system can't distinguish upper/lower case. One day I'll write a small program to go through all the html pages and fix all the errors automatically.