The operator of the Wayback Machine allows Wikipedia's users to check citations from books as well as the web. //

Wikipedia is the arbiter of truth on the internet. It's what settles arguments at bars. It supplies answers for the information snippets you see on your Google or Bing search results. It's the first stop for nearly everyone doing online research.

The reason people rely on Wikipedia, despite its imperfections, is that every claim is supposed to have citations. Any sentence that isn't backed up with a credible source risks being slapped with the dreaded "citation needed" label. Anyone can check out those citations to learn more about a subject, or verify that those sources actually say what a particular Wikipedia entry claims they do—that is, if you can find those sources.

It's easy enough when the sources are online. But many Wikipedia articles rely on good old-fashioned books. The entry on Martin Luther King Jr., for example, cites 66 different books. Until recently, if you wanted to verify that those books say what the article says they say, or if you just wanted to read the cited material, you'd need to track down a copy of the book.

Now, thanks to a new initiative by the Internet Archive, you can click the name of the book and see a two-page preview of the cited work, so long as the citation specifies a page number. You can also borrow a digital copy of the book, so long as no else has checked it out, for two weeks—much the same way you'd borrow a book from your local library. (Some groups of authors and publishers have challenged the archive's practice of allowing users to borrow unauthorized scanned books. The Internet Archive says it seeks to widen access to books in “balanced and respectful ways.”)

So far the Internet Archive has turned 130,000 references in Wikipedia entries in various languages into direct links to 50,000 books that the organization has scanned and made available to the public. The organization eventually hopes to allow users to view and borrow every book cited by Wikipedia, with the ultimate goal being to digitize every book ever published.

“Our goal is to be a library that’s useful and reachable by more people,” says Mark Graham, director of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine service. //

Of course, the Internet Archive hasn’t scanned all the books cited by Wikipedia yet. It’s working hard to digitize collections from libraries around the world, along with donations from companies like Better World Books. Graham says the organization scans more than 1,000 books per day. But it has plenty more work to do.

ELWA - A Voice Under Every Palm Tree

One of the most confusing areas of the trade continues to be bonding and grounding. Mike Holt's Illustrated Guide to NEC Requirements for Bonding and Grounding belongs in the hands of every Electrician, Inspector, and Engineer who needs to understand the seemingly conflicting information of how to properly apply these particular NEC rules. The extensive graphics show current flow in both normal and fault conditions, which completely illustrate just what is happening, so you can better understand why the Code rules are what they are and how they are applied.

This new edition continues to expand on the great graphics that have set the standard for the industry. The text beautifully clears up misconceptions about bonding versus grounding and breaks down each of the Code articles that deal with this topic. Mike's ability to explain these rules and their practical application in real-world settings will help you to fully understand the "why" behind these rules, helping to ensure you know how to apply the NEC every day. More than any other topic in the Electrical industry, bonding and grounding is at the core of most power quality, and safety issues, making this book a must-have for everyone at every level of the industry.

Product Code: 20NCT2
ISBN: 978-1-950431-03-8
Pages: 368
Illustrations: 685
Practice Questions: 611
Price: $49.00

My book The Elements is based on photographs I've been collecting at my website periodictable.com for many years. The website includes not just pictures, but also more detailed descriptions than we could fit in the book, and most importantly, it includes full 360-degree rotating videos of almost all the objects. You really won't find this kind of resources anywhere else for any other subject, so please enjoy.

If you don't have the book yet, please don't think this is page is a substitute for the real thing. Aside from the fact that people buying the book (and my other photo periodic table products) is what pays for me being able to continue hosting the website, there's really no substitute for a paper book in your hands. The book also makes a fabulous gift, and you can't give a website as a gift!

Asimov did not have a bar mitzvah, which he attributed to his parents choosing to raise him without religion and not, as some suspected, “as an act of rebellion against Orthodox parents.” However, he said, he “gained an interest” in the Bible as he got older, although he eventually realized that he preferred the type of fictional books that would one day make him famous: “Science fiction and science books had taught me their version of the universe and I was not ready to accept the Creation tale of Genesis or the various miracles described throughout the book.”

Having the first name “Isaac,” in the 21st century, isn’t necessarily a certain giveaway that a person is Jewish. But in Asimov’s time, it almost always was. And while Asimov sometimes faced pressure to change his name for professional reasons, he always stuck with his given name.

“I would not allow any story of mine to appear except under the name of Isaac Asimov,” he wrote. “I think I helped break down the convention of imposing salt-free, low-fat names on writers. In particular, I made it a little more possible for writers to be openly Jewish in the world of popular fiction.” //

As for Israel and Zionism, Asimov was something of a skeptic. In his final book “Asimov Laughs Again,” published around the time of his death, Asimov stated that he had never visited Israel and didn’t plan to, although he attributed that in part to his habit of not doing much traveling.

“I remember how it was in 1948 when Israel was being established and all my Jewish friends were ecstatic. I was not,” he wrote. “I said: What are we doing? We are establishing ourselves in a ghetto, in a small corner of a vast Muslim sea. The Muslims will never forget nor forgive, and Israel, as long as it exists, will be embattled. I was laughed at, but I was right.”

"I remember James Cameron just looked at me and said, 'That one's hard'," Goyer tells BBC Culture in a video call. If the director of epics including Aliens, The Terminator, Titanic and Avatar tells you a project is difficult, it tends to give you pause for thought. //

There have been several attempts to bring Foundation to the screen, but the series of books was long held to be unfilmable because the saga weaves together so many plotlines and spans centuries. Indeed, the writing of it spanned half a century. But now the "unfilmable" has finally been filmed and this week an adaptation of Foundation starring Jared Harris and Lee Pace premieres on Apple TV+. //

So, when Goyer was told four years ago that the rights were once again in play, he took the night to think about it but his answer was never really in doubt. He pitched it to Apple TV+ as "a 1,000-year chess game between Hari Seldon and the Empire… All of the other characters are being utilised as pawns by one side or the other. But in chess, if a pawn makes it to the opposing side, it becomes a queen, and those shifting power dynamics can happen in our story." And part of the solution to the problems presented by the complexity and scale of the work is to tell the story via long-form television – the first season has 10 episodes – rather than to try to compress it into a movie or even a trilogy of movies, as previous attempts have done. //

But now, after four years of hard work there are 10 episodes of visually stunning, emotionally engaging, thought-provoking drama. They have already been made available to critics and are so richly layered that they bear an instant rewatch.

Michael Richardson, a special collections librarian at the University of Bristol, found the parchment pieces glued into a 15th-century book in 2019, reports Sarah Durn for Atlas Obscura. Since then, Campbell and colleagues Leah Tether and Benjamin Pohl, both medieval historians at Bristol, have concluded that the pages made their way to England about 80 years after they were written. //

“We know it was in England by that point [because] someone has written ‘my god’ in the margins in English,” Campbell tells Atlas Obscura. “From the handwriting, we’ve dated that to the early 14th century.”

By 1520, the pages had ended up in a scrap pile at a British bookshop, where they were used as binding materials for a French philosophy text. That book found its way to the Bristol public library sometime after the collection’s establishment in 1613. As the scholars explain in a statement, the book’s “likely route to Bristol” was Archbishop of York Tobias Matthew, who co-founded the library and collected many books in Oxford. Matthew left his collection to the library after his death in 1628.

The text probably remained at the library until Richardson discovered the pages in 2019. Now, the scholars have published the translation, as well as their study of the manuscript fragments, in a book titled The Bristol Merlin: Revealing the Secrets of a Medieval Fragment. //

The team found that the account differed from other versions of the story in several key ways. A sexual encounter between Merlin and Viviane, also known as the Lady of the Lake, is “slightly toned-down,” Tether tells the Guardian. //

Merlin’s image has changed dramatically over the centuries. In more modern versions of the King Arthur legends, he is a wise advisor to the king. In the earliest iterations of the story, however, Campbell says he was a “morally dubious” magical seer or even a “creepy little boy [whose] father is a devil.”

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. Download the eBook here.

POOR PEOPLE'S MOVEMENTS: WHY THEY SUCCEED, HOW THEY FAIL

Author: Frances Fox Piven | Richard Cloward

His latest, which attests to his status as one of the most intellectually game writers of our time, is a totalized counterfiction of post-1492 world history.

“Civilizations” opens as a heroic Norse legend about the exploits of Freydis Eriksdottir. In Binet’s telling, she leaves behind her father, Erik the Red, to lead a 10th-century crew of loyal Greenlanders to Lambayeque, in northern Peru, where they settle peaceably with the locals. Moving ahead 500 years, Binet works up entries from Christopher Columbus’s God-besotted and misery-filled diary after he and his men cross the Atlantic and begin exploring the Caribbean, only to be fatally outmaneuvered by Taíno royals and warriors. //

Then come the life and exploits of the early-16th-century Incan emperor Atahualpa. According to the established historical account, he was executed in Cajamarca, present-day Peru, by the Spanish not long after defeating his own brother, Huáscar, in a continent-spanning civil war. In Binet’s version, young Atahualpa faces only his brother in this conflict and manages to escape Huáscar’s forces by boat. His companions: a pet puma, a small group of fellow Quitonians and the multilingual Cuban princess Higuénamota, his most beloved and politically astute wife. Inspired by distant memories of the otherwise forgotten Columbus, they sail east, eventually arriving in a strange new place: “All of them — men, women, horses, llamas — had survived the great sea. They had reached the land of the rising Sun,” otherwise known as Portugal.

Righteous Gentiles: How Pius XII and the Catholic Church Saved Half a Million Jews from the Nazis

A relentless band of propagandists has convinced much of the world that Pope Pius XII and the Catholic Church, in the face of the great moral crisis of the twentieth century, were little more than Nazi lapdogs. The myth of ?Hitler's pope, ? however, is grounded not in the facts of history but in the ideological agenda of Pius's detractors. Given unprecedented access to Church archives?including a confidential Vatican report on Pius XII?Ronald J. Rychlak documents the heroic response of the Holy Father and countless other Catholics to the plight of Jews under Nazi rule. From the end of World War II until well after his death, Pius XII was universally respected for his leadership in t

Was Pope Pius XII a Nazi Sympathizer?

For almost fifty years, a controversy has raged about Pope Pius XII. Was the Pope who had shepherded the Church through World War II a Nazi sympathizer? Was he, as some have dared call him, Hitler's pope? Did he do nothing to help the Jewish people in the grips of the Holocaust?

In a thoroughly researched and meticulously documented analysis of the historical record, Ronald Rychlak has gotten past the anger and emotion and uncovered the truth about Pius XII. Not only does he refute the accusations against the Pope, but for the first time documents how the slanders against him had their roots in a Soviet Communist campaign to discredit him and, by extension, the Church.

"This remarkable book will change the way you look at intelligence, foreign affairs, the press, and much else besides." -- R. James Woolsey, former director of U.S. Central Intelligence Agency

The highest-ranking Soviet bloc intelligence official ever to defect to the West, Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa is at it again. A quarter century ago, in his international bestseller "Red Horizons," Pacepa exposed the massive crimes and corruption of his former boss, Romanian President Nicolae Ceausescu, giving the dictator a nervous breakdown and inspiring him to send assassination squads to the U.S. to find his former spy chief and kill him. They failed. On Christmas Day 1989, Ceausescu was executed by his own people at the end of a trial wherein accusations came almost word for word out of "Red Horizons."

Today, still living undercover in the United States, the man credited by the CIA as the only person in the Western world who single-handedly demolished an entire enemy espionage service --Ì´å the one he himself managed -- takes aim at an even bigger target: the exotic, widely misunderstood but still astonishingly influential realm of the Russian-born "science" of disinformation.

Primitive Technology
A SURVIVALIST'S GUIDE TO BUILDING TOOLS, SHELTERS, AND MORE IN THE WILD
By John Plant

From the craftsman behind the popular YouTube channel Primitive Technology comes a practical guide to building huts and tools using only natural materials from the wild.

John Plant, the man behind the channel, Primitive Technology, is a bonafide YouTube star. With almost 10 million subscribers and an average of 5 million views per video, John’s channel is beloved by a wide-ranging fan base, from campers and preppers to hipster woodworkers and craftsmen. Now for the first time, fans will get a detailed, behind-the-scenes look into John’s process. Featuring 50 projects with step-by-step instructions on how to make tools, weapons, shelters, pottery, clothing, and more, Primitive Technology is the ultimate guide to the craft. Each project is accompanied by illustrations as well as mini-sidebars with the history behind each item, plus helpful tips for building, material sourcing, and so forth. Whether you’re a wilderness aficionado or just eager to spend more time outdoors, Primitive Technology has something for everyone’s inner nature lover.

The best stories are the ones which are told the best, with all those wonderful literary keystones fitted neatly together. They are the ones we learn of in creative writing: can we see ourselves in the characters, are they flawed, do they make the right choice or the easy one, can we relate to their difficulties?

Tolkien and his characters reflect, whether he would like them to or not, how the times during which one lives tend to vacuum them up, obscuring thoughts of the future or of the past. COVID-19 has been compared to many great crises, sometimes fairly, sometimes comedically, but we can learn from the great writer and his characters that the correct way out of a crisis is to never believe the current disaster is somehow unique in its dreadfulness. //

Tolkien became a man in perhaps the worst single moment in history to do so, around 1914, at the dawning of World War I.

“In those days chaps joined up, or were scorned publicly,” he wrote in a letter to his son Christopher later in life. “It was a nasty cleft to be in for a young man with too much imagination and little physical courage.”

He was a junior officer at the Battle of the Somme, one of the most tragic events in human history, notable for the sheer empty-headedness of it all. Catching trench fever, he was shipped back to England, after which nearly every young man in his battalion was killed. Talk about a Hobbit’s luck.

Because you can't sell cars that have a 1 in 150 chance of randomly going boom.

Superb Educational Results.....with far less teacher time

From phonics to physics, these 22 CDs and a set of Saxon math books are all that you need to give your children a superior education. You can use this curriculum to supplement your children's current schooling or as a stand-alone education using the included self-study methods.

The Robinson children teach themselves (as do the 60,000 children now using this system) ­ so well that their 11th and 12th grade work is equivalent to high quality 1st and 2nd year university instruction in science, history, literature, and general education.

They also teach themselves study habits that do not depend upon planned workbooks, teacher interaction, and other aids that will not be available later in life.

They teach themselves to think.

Many home schools are limited by the burden of teaching that is placed on parents. Dr. Robinson spent less than 15 minutes per day teaching his six children ­ from ages 6 through 18. Yet, all of his students received excellent educations. Three of them even skipped the first two years of college with advanced placement exams.

Teach your children to teach themselves and to acquire superior knowledge as did many of America's most outstanding citizens in the days before socialism in education. //

Robinson Self-Teaching Curriculum
$ 195.00