Today as I was doing cosmology homework, I found myself wondering, as I often do, how people did anything before the internet. (And yes I know in theory there are libraries and phone books.)
How cool is it that when I type Silk Damping into Google I get several papers and a couple of websites explaining exactly what I wanted to know.
As I was doing my homework I noticed that I’d forgotten the most important textbook in my office and so was stuck without a place to look up some important equations. To the rescue came:
There are few mathy things that I can come up with at the top of my head that MathWorld doesn’t at least have some entry on. It’s a really very useful resource when you don’t have your Math or even Physics text handy. (Of course Google knowing popular constants such as the conversion between parsecs and cm is also awesome!)
If we are talking about cool things the internet gave us, Simbad really also has to be mentioned. (Simbad is an astronomical search engine, which lets you search the sky for known objects by position. It also provides references associated with the objects.) I feel that a lot of planning of observations must have been much more painful before Simbad existed.
0 Responses to “An Ode To Mathworld and Simbad”