When books are overkill...

[DixieGal]

I have 2 suggestions:

1. Pick an era that interests you
Like Shakespeare? Study up on the Elizabethan period.
Jane Austen movies? Queen Victoria and her period were fascinating.

2. Subscribe to National Geographic every year.

My personal favorite historical eras are the early Roman Empire and the 1920's Lost Generation poets and writers.

[phenomshel]

Originally Posted by amward

When I was at school I was always being held up as an example for my general knowledge.. I got it from reading and mostly reading fiction. It's amazing what you can learn from someone else's research. So now I have this brain full of (mostly) useless facts, although these days it's getting harder to recall them. Trivial Pursuit anyone?

Same here, Anne. I know a little about lots of things (otherwise known as knowing just enough to be dangerous). I tried to put together a list of topics I learned about by reading JUST one author's novels once. It included jewelry design, rose rustling, antique sewing, writing a dissertation, diving, vintage clothing, politics, Egyptian artifacts, the Oriental Institute in Chicago, architecture, the Underground Railroad, demon worship, schizophrenia, ghosts, sea monsters, hynotism/mesmerism, and Revolutionary war history.
The author? Barbara Michaels.

Now, I'm not saying I got a comprehensive education on all these subjects by reading only those titles, but I sure learned more than I ever needed to know on a few of those subjects (like rose rustling). And like you said, most of it sure comes in handy for Trivial Pursuit!

[taosaur]

I haven't been able to rouse more than a passing interest in history-in-general, and have gathered a lot more information from historical fiction and encylo/wiki-pedia articles than in-depth sources, but a couple of more in-depth works I can recommend to increase your overall understanding of the discipline are Montaillou, a detailed survey of daily life in a small, heretical French village in the 1300s, based on the obsessively detailed records of the Inquisition, and Son of the Morningstar, a beautifully written study of General Custer. Both are great books to set on the back of the can, or elsewhere that you'll dive into them whenever you're ready for a bit more, rather than declaring it What I'm Reading and plowing through.

[amward]

Originally Posted by phenomshel

Same here, Anne. I know a little about lots of things (otherwise known as knowing just enough to be dangerous). I tried to put together a list of topics I learned about by reading JUST one author's novels once. It included jewelry design, rose rustling, antique sewing, writing a dissertation, diving, vintage clothing, politics, Egyptian artifacts, the Oriental Institute in Chicago, architecture, the Underground Railroad, demon worship, schizophrenia, ghosts, sea monsters, hynotism/mesmerism, and Revolutionary war history.
The author? Barbara Michaels.

Now, I'm not saying I got a comprehensive education on all these subjects by reading only those titles, but I sure learned more than I ever needed to know on a few of those subjects (like rose rustling). And like you said, most of it sure comes in handy for Trivial Pursuit!

Rose Rustling????? As in stealing rosebushes, or new varieties of them?

[b0ned0me]

Originally Posted by Assassin

Not at all. Think back thirty years.

Thirty years ago is 1981. The tech in use at the time might be a little clunky relative to what we have today, but got the job done. Radar, sonar, radio, TV, digital computers etc. had all had decades of refinement. Even GPS satellites had been in orbit for 8 years or so.
There is very little that is brand new since then, mostly it is just a matter of making it cheaper and smaller out of superior materials. That's a significant achievement in and of itself, but if you showed a 1981 electronics engineer a modern textbook I doubt they would find it much of a leap forward from a pure electronics perspective.

[DMB]

Just because you now have to know how to press various buttons doesn't mean that you now have to know more now. It simply means that you have to know different things. Go back a few hundred years to a time with no electricity, running water, packaged foods, etc. You would have had to know how to build and keep fires going, how to make soap, bread, beer or wine. Possibly how to spin and weave as well as making clothes, furniture, tools and so on. How to preserve food when there were no cans or firdges. The list is endless.

What is really different is that now we have a much greater choice of entertainment and much greater access to sources of information. We also have higher literacy rates, and some of us make use of these opportunities.

[DiapDealer]

When books are overkill...

... ignore those ones.

Seriously, you can read as much--or as little--as you want about subjects that you find fascinating (mildly interesting). What could be better?

[tubemonkey]

Originally Posted by ficbot

I guess I feel like there is just too much out there I want to read to spend years of reading time reading about what Pepys had for breakfast. Am I missing something here?

Nope, you did the right thing - you went to Wikipedia. That's more than enough to fill in the gaps. If you want more, there are links at the bottom.

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by Assassin

Not at all. Think back thirty years. Tube TVs, minimal electronics in autos, personal computers just getting started, (my first PC had a 750 meg hard drive, how much memory does your cell phone have today?, radar and sonar were playthings compared to what is used by the military today just in the guidance systems. The original cell phones we had at work were carried in a small overnight bag. It's startling to think where technology will be in another twenty years.
Yes technology was there but in its infancy compared to today.

OK, so you were not joking, but you are not even close to being correct. b0ned0me provided a rebuttal already, but ...

You seem to tie the commercial availability of electronic devices to the existence of the electronics field, so let's start with that. Thirty years ago, the telephone, an electronic device had been in commercial use for over 100 years and voice radio for over 70 years. Both devices were developed far more between their inception and 30 years ago than between 30 years ago and today. AM had been improved with Single Side Band for over 60 years and SSB with suppressed carrier for decades. FM was well over 40 years old 30 years ago and commercial FM stations and receivers had been ubiquitous for over 10 years. Spread spectrum and frequency hopping were already in use by the military. Radio receivers had long since gone from crystal detectors, to vacuum tubes to transistors. Telephone switching had gone from manual to rotary dial to touch tone. Not only had home microwave ovens been around for over 20 years, but it had already been well over 10 years since people could buy a kit and build their own. All these devices did not spring into existence by someone just building a factory to turn them out, they needed to be designed by practitioners in an already well developed electronics field. Maxwell's work on electromagnetics was already over 100 years old 30 years ago.

Tube TVs had almost disappeared by 30 years ago. It is true that the CRT was still the dominant television display 30 years ago and quite a few years after that, but the rest of the electronics had been first transistorized, then most of the transistors were built into integrated circuits. Flat panel displays already existed 30 years ago, but CRTs still had massive cost and performance advantages because of all the development by the already thriving electronics field. You might as well claim that the computer field barely exists today because we still have rotating magnetic platters for storage. Two large companies that built electronics devices exclusively for use in designing, building, and testing electronics devices, Hewlett-Packard and Tektronix had been around for decades (1939 and 1946). Those devices, such as multimeters, oscilloscopes, and signal generators had already been around for over 80 years 30 years ago.

Not only had transistors long gone from invention to commercial use, to integrated circuits and integration from small scale to medium scale to large scale, but it was decided pointless to keep assigning new names for the ever increasing scale.

Electronic warfare had long had measures, counter measures, counter counter measures, etc.

I could go on and on, but I hope that you can see my point.

[voracious71]

Originally Posted by amward

When I was at school I was always being held up as an example for my general knowledge.. I got it from reading and mostly reading fiction. It's amazing what you can learn from someone else's research. So now I have this brain full of (mostly) useless facts, although these days it's getting harder to recall them. Trivial Pursuit anyone?

No such thing as useless facts. I once won a free lunch at a cafe because I got the daily trivia question correct.

[Phogg]

Originally Posted by Assassin

Not at all. Think back thirty years. Tube TVs, minimal electronics in autos, personal computers just getting started, (my first PC had a 750 meg hard drive, how much memory does your cell phone have today?, radar and sonar were playthings compared to what is used by the military today just in the guidance systems. The original cell phones we had at work were carried in a small overnight bag. It's startling to think where technology will be in another twenty years.
Yes technology was there but in its infancy compared to today.

Funny.

I seem to remember Akihabara being full of all sorts of interesting shops in the early eighties. Though not as capable as today there was a heady feel of rapid advancement, especially in fields that are mature and taken for granted now. Music reproduction for example was years away from achieving perfectly flat frequency response across a twenty hertz to twenty kilohertz range with a hundred and six decibel dynamic range, but they got closer every year.

Those systems had mechanical parts as well, and some did indeed still use tubes...but tubes are electronic components rather than mechanical ones.

[Namekuseijin]

Welcome to the Information Age.

History is for historians and Music is for musicians. Only they can appreciate it to its fullest.

I don't like opera, but I dig Mozart (and other classics). And surely enough, some of his very best works are in the opera genre.

[Conor]

Originally Posted by Assassin

Yes technology was there but in its infancy compared to today.

Which is what he said. It was quite advanced in the 1960s. I can even recall one 1950s book with a design of an electronic gadget that could distinguish a man from a woman.

[applesauce]

wilkki is the way to go jump from person to person until somebody really peaks your interest then look for a good book on them. I know a lot of people hate wikki but I find it great for stirring my interest in things I never put a thought to before. It has lead me down some amazing paths which where nothing like the start of the search.

applesauce

[Ekaros]

Electronics and underlying principles has not have much new, but a lot of refinement and new technologies. Still how they are used has gone massive leaps in past 20 years. Moving from analog to digital and from digital circuit switched to packet switched. Whole development of Internet and small hand held devices. Increase in computing power, storage and transfer has had quite massive effects.

Key thing to notice is how apparent change might be small, but underlying technology is massively complex. You get some new devices and the look and functions increase. But how it's done and what is under the cover is hidden. Information needed to make most modern things is quite massive...