The Age of Knowledge

[I switched to writing this in Emacs mid-way, a warning that this will be really long!]

I've been an autodidact all my life, at least for the subjects I'm interested in. It's not a rare skill, nor a very difficult one, but it is one that requires a careful environment in which to grow to its full potential. I've been lucky enough to have it in the form of wonderful support from my parents, an especially generous book allowance and the complete lack of nagging about my academic record.

Like most autodidacts, I began with books. Especially for computers. While I had excellent teachers and guides in those years for when books failed me or just to speed me up, it became very clear early on that it was very difficult to find the right people in the right place at the right time for what I wanted to learn. Incidentally (and ironically) for a person who found and used the best books for computing, I discovered quite late (after I had read through Resnick and Halliday) that if I had done the same for my school subjects I might have had walked a very different path, but by the time this realization dawned, it was too late.

Books aren't the easiest forms of information to digest, however. First of all, not every expert can write books. Secondly, there is a large variance in the quality of writers. Not every expert can explain their knowledge well. Thirdly, not every autodidact can read books well. I've always had problems, for example, reading detailed mechanical descriptions or steps to follow. I've improved, but I could do better. Fourthly, it's not easy to find books, especially on the niche subjects I seem to like. One of the best book for a subject I'm learning right now is a treatise written in 1896! And lastly, it's hard to be satisfied by one book whose author may have chosen to omit or gloss over some subject matter. Therefore, I like to own a large number of books on a single subject (all of them proudly proclaiming to be the "Complete Book of So-and-So"!) and will often thumb through new books looking for points of distinction and discrimination on part of the author.

Books, of course, aren't the only sources of knowledge, but videos, audio, charts and other forms suffer even more in terms of lack of standardization, large variance in quality, lack of availability and generally higher expense. But this situation is changing. Fueling this change has been the Internet.

I hopped onto the 'Net in 1999 or so on a friend's borrowed modem. The fact that the stream of new books to my collection had been reduced to a trickle should've alerted me. Dial-up was then, as it is now, painful, and my occasional forays were largely restricted to MSDN which I soon received on a DVD set as a gift. It was, as they like to call it, the time of Web 1.0.

By the time I had hopped on to a DSL line, YouTube (and Web 2.0) had arrived and dismissed by me as "useless". I couldn't have made a worse judgement. Beneath that morass of "useless" stuff was pure gold. In 2006, fueled by an unlimited pipe at the Institute, I decided to try my autodidactic skills at running. I half-feared failure, since running was a physical activity, but I succeeded beyond my wildest dreams. This spurred me on to try my luck at swimming and after an initial month of coaching, I pored through books and YouTube videos trying to hone my technique. And that was when all those maneuvers that were so hard to read in the books became so easy when demonstrated on video. Add the fact that YouTube usually has dozens of videos on the same subject, and you see why I consider YouTube to be a very valuable resource now.

Recently I've been dabbling in a number of mechanical things, and YouTube just wasn't enough. Then I discovered Instructables.com. Billed as the world's biggest "Show and Tell", this site is the motherlode for seeking inspiration. As each article demonstrates something, it has text, photographs and videos and even if I haven't built too many things from that site, it's hard to say that I haven't been inspired by the techniques, tools and ingenuity demonstrated on that site! If you can demonstrate something, you'd probably find it on Instructables. As a kid who wanted to build things but never had the patience to fight gravity and the other countless rules of the real world (and therefore turned to programming), Instructables.com has given my appreciation for all things mechanical a new lease of life.

The Internet has given books a new lease of life too. There are authors now who put their out-of-print books online, as well as a large number of sources of "pirated" books which otherwise would not be available here simply because we aren't a large enough market. But it's the efforts of Google, Microsoft and others to scan and put online the millions of books on the shelves of libraries that excites me the most. Millions of books long dead and gone are now coming back!

Like that 1896 tome I was looking for. After scouring the real world -- it was republished by MIT Press in 1971 and again in 2001 by Dover -- and failing to locate it, I found it in the archive.org text collection. It was part of the Americana collection, and scanned by Google from the libraries of Harvard University. There are literally hundreds of thousands of other still useful books in that collection. All for free.

And this is why this age is the Age of Knowledge. Knowledge spreads at the speed of information transfer, and the Internet moves information faster than anything we've ever known -- roadblocks such as idiotic bandwidth and download-limiting ISPs notwithstanding. The knowledge of a million teachers around the globe is within my reach (thanks to Web 2.0), and can sometimes make me feel that I can know everything there is to know. Never before has an autodidact has it so good.

Now if only there were an immortality pill.