EBlogger

Sometimes I get the feeling that there are orgies going on all over new York City, and somebody says, `Let’s call [jazz saxophonist Paul] Desmond,’ and somebody else says, ‘Why bother? He’s probably home reading the Encyclopedia Britannica.”

Paul Desmond was a member of Dave Brubeck’s quartet. Lavrenti Gaavareetz provides a nice writeup about him at The Seberg Boyfriends - Paul Desmond

The Britannica.com homepage now includes headlines from SBS World News Australia (in addition to headlines from the New York Times, which has been available for quite some time). G’day mates!

Presumably illegally, “The Deep Butter Index” links to a copy of Encyclopædia Britannica’s Touch the Sky, Touch the Universe in RAR format.

Those that prefer a legal copy can find it in the Minds on Science and Technology CD Pack, together with two other titles: My Body, Myself and The Wonderful Language of Nature.

theshadowboxer has posted an artfully composed photograph of the Britannica Centre. As he notes, soon this building will be converting to condos and will be known as the Straus building (once again).

At Over The Sea Sartorias quotes a quirky defintion of “Novel” from the 1771 edition of Encyclopædia Britannica:

NOVEL, in matters of literature, a fictitious history of a series of entertaining events in common life, wherein the rules of probability are or ought to be strictly observed.

The modern Britannica article on Novel describes the term as:

NOVEL, an invented prose narrative of considerable length and a certain complexity that deals imaginatively with human experience, usually through a connected sequence of events involving a group of persons in a specific setting.

While the modern description is more complete, I quite like the expression “a fictitious history of a series of entertaining events in common life”.

Over at the Olin Reference Blog, Lynn mentions that a student was “looking for books or articles” on the mathematician Madhava, and that various specialized and general reference sources weren’t helpful, including Britannica.

While there’s not a lot of coverage of Madhava the mathematician at Britannica.com, a a quick search yielded a brief mention of Madhava the mathematician in the analytic trigonometry section of the trigonometry article and a suitable internet link at Madhava of Sangamagramma, which includes a number of good references in the bibliography.

Lynn, if your patrons have access to school.eb.com or search.eb.com, they’ll find similiar information there.

Also, Wikipedia currently has about a paragraph on Madhava and points to the same internet link that Britannica does. The Wikipedia text on Madhava seems largely cribbed from that article.

Although the new Editorial Board of Advisors held their first meeting some time ago, the story has been picked up in various news sources and blogs recently because of EB’s press release from last Thursday and a story in the Boston Globe.

Some have suggested that the board is “primarily a PR effort” in “response to Wikipedia”. (A similiar response can be found here.) While not personally invovled in the deliberations that led to this iteration of the editorial board of advisors, I doubt that either of these statements are quite accurate. Britannica has convened a number of editorial boards in the past, and I doubt one wastes the time of these people too rashly.

Drs. Fernette and Brock Eide note the remarkable educational history of Mortimer Adler:

He dropped out of high school at age 14 and began working as a copy boy at the New York Sun. Taking night classes, he became impressed by reading that John Stuart Mill (tutored by his dad) could read the dialogues of Plato in Greek at the age of 5. So at age 14, he bought a set of Plato and was hooked. John Cuddily would refer to him later as the “the only Ph.D. in America with no B.A., no M.A., not even a high school diploma.” […]

Who was this? This was of course Mortimer Adler, University of Chicago professor, founder of the Great Books of the Western World program, American educator, philosopher and author or editor of more than 50 books including the Encyclopedia Britannica and How to Read a Book.

[Via Eide Neurolearning Blog]

Casey Abell blogs the praises of Erasmus’ Encomium moriae (In Praise of Folly), one of Britannica’s Great Books of the Western World.

John Wilson’s 1688 translation of Encomium moriae is available for free.

Blogger Stefanos Evangelou complains that certain apps aren’t available on Linux and that that makes him unable to free himself from Windows tyranny. The Britannica encyclopedia is one of the apps he mentions (although he doesn’t specify what version).

While it doesn’t quite say so on the box, the fact is that the Britannica CD products run quite well on Linux. You can find instructions for running the Britannica CD/DVD on Linux at http://support.britannica.com/linux/linux.htm, although it looks like those need to be updated for the 2006 edition which became available eariler this month.