Customer Reviews

Scientific American's "The Amateur Scientist" : The Complete 20th Century Collection on CD-ROM

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

For the record, I wrote "The Amateur Scientist" column for over 5 years and I put this CD collection together, as well as several printed compendiums from the column. So, of course, my 5-star rating, while shared by many reviewers, is clearly biased. I am posting this note to rebut the false and defamatory charges made by an un-named reviewer in N. Easton, MA who insists that I secretly abridged the articles by leaving out key text and illustrations.

The reviewer's claims of missing information paint with broad strokes. However, he mentions only one column-- the November 1958 article (a favorite of mine, by the way) that describes a wonderful device known as the Hilsch vortex tube. He says "...the original article contained [the information on the CD] as well as building and testing instructions for an amateur built version, two detailed construction drawings, and two performance data graphs - including one for Rudolph Hilsch's original results."

As I write this, next to my left hand sits a photostatic copy of the original text of C. L. Stong's article as it appeared in Scientific American magazine. I have just completed a careful comparison of that text against the article on the CD-ROM and they are, as near as I can tell, absolutely identical. The original text contains one and only one illustration of the famed device, and every single paragraph that is present in the original is also present on the CD.

The reviewer no doubt owns a copy of Stong's much sought-after book that presents a small number of projects from "The Amateur Scientist". Magazines always impose restrictions on length that books do not. Just as I expanded and commented on articles in my own printed compendiums from the column (see, for instance "The Amateur Biologist", available on Amazon), so Stong also expanded on the columns he originally published. The N. Easton reviewer made the serious error of assuming that Stong's book contained only pristine reproductions of the original text. Had he gone to the library to check the original columns, he would have discovered this not to be the case. That error led him to a totally erroneous conclusion.

I want everyone to be clear on this point. The reason why I didn't use the word "abridged" on the CD is because it is not abridged in any way. To the very best of my knowledge the CD contains every single word and illustration of every single Amateur Scientist article that EVER appeared in Scientific American. (If someone ever discovers any omission, not matter how small, I will fix the master at once!) That's over 72 years worth of material. The CD also contains over 1,000 pages of additional technical how-to material that never appeared in Scientific American.

Why did I faithfully reproduce all this material? Because the reviewer is right about one thing. This material IS important. It is part of the heritage of scientific thought. I grew up with the column. And I added it to. That's why I stuck so religiously to the original text. I look at this compendium as a central part of my own legacy to science and science literacy.

You bet your life it's complete!

Shawn Carlson, PhD
The Amateur Scientist-- last columnist

If you have been trying to locate one of the hard to find copies of "The Amateur Scientist" by C. L. Stong then look no further. Carlson and Greaves have put together a tremendous anthology on one CD of ALL the Amateur Scientist columns ever published from Nov 1999 back to the 1920s! So you get articles by Albert G. Ingalls, C. L. Stong, Russell Porter, Roger Hayward, Jearl Walker, Forrest Mims and others. That means you might be "Falling into Chaos" (11/1999) one day or reading about the "Growing Hobby of Amateur Telescope Making, with Some Examples" (5/1928) The viewing software (Java + HTML documents) is flawless and easy to use. It includes the ability to search by content, subject or date. Thats because the articles weren't merely scanned in. You get actual text and pictures for each article. (Some of the pictures are a little grainy but you can blow them up to view greater detail.) The CD is absolutely addictive. Do not take it to work because you will get nothing done. (It ruined my whole day when it arrived. :-) Each project is carefully ranked on cost, difficulty, danger and utility to faciliate locating experiments suitable for all ages and capabilities. The companion CD also has a large number of shareware, freeware and demoware software titles relating to math, physics, biology and the like.

The Tinker's Guild has made a serious mark with this compilation and it was well worth the money to me. I simply can't recommend it highly enough.

Make no mistake about it, the articles here are wonderful; and since they're in straight HTML you ought to be able to extract what your're after by exploring the disk by hand. Every article is included, from 1928 on.

Unfortunately, it comes with a very lame and very broken Java based search mechanism. Heaven knows why they did not just provide a text file with a list of the article titles.

The additional disk of demo software is extremely modest, and adds little to the package.

The CD contains all the texts in a not elegant HTML format. So they are quite difficult to read and printer not-very-friendly. All the small images need to be clicked to be enlarged. The search engine works but I would have preferred all the contents to have been presented in a pdf format too.

I fell in love with Stong's book back in Junior High in the mid-70's. I eventually found my own copy (in better condition than the one I remember) and have enjoyed it tremendously. I always wondered why they didn't update it and re-issue it. It is such a classic.

Well, now they have. Although the Stong book is not so hard to find as some think (there are nine copies for sale over at Abebooks right now), they can be expensive (Abebooks lowest price: 25 dollars. Next lowest: 60 dollars. Highest: 250 dollars. Not many at the low end). Here is the perfect solution: for a mere 40 dollars, you get all the original great articles that Stong included, plus everything else! It is so wonderful to have modern articles using modern items. It makes the projects so much more accessible.

If you love science or love tinkering with projects, or just love reading about the clever things you COULD do, then this item is for you. Another instant classic, if you don't buy it now, you may regret it later.

I have found the interface easy to use, too. In every way, this item takes it's place as one of the more treasured items on my book-shelf (or CD rack!). Buy it now, it is the right thing to do.

This CD contains an unbelievable amount of content. Anyone who is looking to do a science project or who just likes science will love this. I found it easy to use and well-organized. The search engine is very slick and the index lists are also very helpful. These aren't just the "cute" science projects like a vinager-baking soda fire extinguisher. They've got projects (over 1,000!) like detecting earthquakes, looking for cosmic rays, a particle accelerator (way cool!), among others, plus tons of extra info that will help you through the project and make good use of it when you're done. Anyone contemplating a science fair project should get this CD. If you do science as a hobby, this CD will keep you busy for years.

This review is based on using the Amateur Scientist CD on my ancient Fedora Core 5 Linux machine. (I have not tried the other CD of "science software" that comes with the product.)

I suppose commenting on the Amazon product description is fair game when reviewing an item. The current description doesn't tell the customer exactly what kind of files he is buying. As one critical reviewer said, these are HTML files. To use these files in a naive fashion, you would figure out the folder that contained the column you wanted to read and then figure out which file is the "parent" of all the files in the column. If you open a random file in the directory you might find yourself looking at a single diagram or equation. One way to organize a cd of HTML files would be to have a home page that could serve as a starting point to navigate to all the other pages. There is such a page (home.html) on this CD, but you cannot use it unless you first run a file (Open1st_Linux) that starts a local webserver.

I copied the CD to my hard drive. I run Open1st_Linux from a terminal. It prins a message saying that it has started a webserver on port 1594. When I click on my hard drive's version of home.html (from the file browser) then the Firefox web browser opens on a functional html page [...] with search and browse features. I get all of them to work except "browse by topic", which gives me an error about a file not being found. I suspect that this problem is fixable but I haven't tried to fix it. You can search the columns for keywords or look them up by publication date.

In summary, you are buying is the columns in HTML format but you must run a program to have an effective way to navigate these pages. The program provided for Linux works to my satisfaction but it was not documented in the directions provided on the CD.

It would be nice if an expert in dealing with HTML files would write review that mentions how some general purpose HTML software could be used on the collection of HTML files on this CD.

Information added Jan 23, 2010: I received an email from another Steve, who advises:

---------------
I'm no HTML expert, however I did open up a couple of the top level index pages in an HTML editor, & noticed that in the file

/Library/The Amateur Scientist/content/amsci01/index.htm

[where "/Library/The Amateur Scientist" is where I copied the CD to], that if you look closely at the code from lines 38 to 56,

you'll see a number of lines such as

<option value="indexes/Indecies/arch-fs.html">Archeology</option> etc.


Note carefully that the indecies directory should actually start with LOWER-CASE i, to match the directory structure copied across from the CD.
Change the "I" to "i" for each line, save as the new index.htm, reload the search-page, & that should do the trick.

----------

(Now using Fedora Core 12) I followed those directions. I replaced "indexes/Indecies" by "indexes/indecies" (9 occurences). After that, opening index.htm with the Firefox browser gave me the functionality of navigating all the pages. The search engine feature didn't work. (The "sponsored ads" on the margins of the articles didn't work, but who cares?)

If you decide to make a Cd containing a copy of the corrected version, use the command line "mkisofs" to make the *.iso image and then burn it. On Fedora Core 12, the gui driven "Brasero" burner pops up hundreds of screens asking "Do you really want to add the file...." when you try to make a cd from the files instead of an .iso.

This is the perfect thing for the do-it-yourself scientist. The variety of projects is huge. Something for everyone. I especially loved the great physics projects. Everything is carefully spelled out making is easy to complete what would otherwise be pretty difficult tasks. Love it!

From the moment I had the conversation w/ Shawn years ago, suggesting a compendium of the Amateur Scientist articles, he and sheldon worked tirelessly to locate, get the copyright release's and put together in one spot everything we'd come to love and remember about Sci Am's articles. Although I never had time to help w/ the project they carried it off with such dedication and perserverance that i gladly endorse the fruits of their efforts.. Now we have everything from the atom smasher and x-ray machine to the C02 lasers all in one spot. Can't thank you guy's enough for doing it, and for you all thinking of buying it, it's a must have item!

If you have been trying to locate one of the hard to find copies of "The Amateur Scientist" by C. L. Stong then look no further. Carlson and Greaves have put together a tremendous anthology on one CD of ALL the Amateur Scientist columns ever published from Nov 1999 back to the 1920s! So you get articles by Albert G. Ingalls, C. L. Stong, Russell Porter, Roger Hayward, Jearl Walker, Forrest Mims and others. That means you might be "Falling into Chaos" (11/1999) one day or reading about the "Growing Hobby of Amateur Telescope Making, with Some Examples" (5/1928) The viewing software (Java + HTML documents) is flawless and easy to use. It includes the ability to search by content, subject or date. Thats because the articles weren't merely scanned in. You get actual text and pictures for each article. (Some of the pictures are a little grainy but you can blow them up to view greater detail.) The CD is absolutely addictive. Do not take it to work because you will get nothing done. (It ruined my whole day when it arrived. :-) Each project is carefully ranked on cost, difficulty, danger and utility to faciliate locating experiments suitable for all ages and capabilities. The companion CD also has a large number of shareware, freeware and demoware software titles relating to math, physics, biology and the like.

The Tinker's Guild has made a serious mark with this compilation and it was well worth the money to me. I simply can't recommend it highly enough.