On 13/02/13 10:41, David Gerard wrote:
On 12 February 2013 23:05, Carcharoth
<carcharothwp(a)googlemail.com> wrote:
PS. You might find that the page(s) you chose to
read had been
protected for years, or was in the middle of an edit war. Or that the
entire encyclopedia had been 'checked' and published and was
'finished'? Would that be a cause for celebration or not? OK, I
suppose this is all missing the point of the question...
It's interesting. If you were in 1890, and you got ten minutes' access
to an Encyclopedia Britannica from 1990 - what would you look up?
Maybe some disease of local concern. Water-borne diseases like typhoid
or cholera would be a lucky choice, since ten minutes would just about
give you time to follow a q.v. to "chlorination" and make the relevant
discovery some 4 years early. Calcium hypochlorite was already widely
available, all you've got to do is mix it with your drinking water.
-- Tim Starling