Download Scientific American's "The Amateur Scientist" : The Complete 20th Century Collection on CD-ROM fb2

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:

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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.

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(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 a collection of articles from Scientific American from the 1920's to the 2000's. The articles are scientific experiments from several scientific disciplines including Astronomy, Chemistry, Biology, Physics, Archeology, Earth Science, and Mathematics. There is also some supplemental information (tools and techniques).

The experiments are generally not laid out step-by-step - one may have to create their own procedure from the guidelines in the article. There are illustrations of varying quality. There articles are generally concise. Each article has a difficulty level and a danger level associated with it, so that one can make informed decisions on what kind of experiments they are willing to perform. There are safe, easy experiments as well as difficult, dangerous ones - a good indication of the quality of the science in this CD.

I have found many fascinating experiments here for all levels of amateur scientists. Most recent amateur science publications have removed experiments that have a any hint of danger - fear of litigation and criminal prosecution has caused authors/publishers to censor their own material, and has a dangerous side effect of "dumbing down" science. This CD has several decades of information, most of which was written before censorship took hold. It is likely that many of the experiments found here cannot be found anywhere else, yet they are quite fascinating and useful. Be aware that some of the older experiments may involve electronics and materials that are now obsolete (i.e., vacuum tubes).

The CD uses some kind of search engine that has to be run, and then it loads the main web page under Microsoft Internet Explorer. One can then search by articles discipline, decade, or search term. The software is claimed to work in Windows, Linux, and Macintosh. I was not able to get it to work under Ubuntu Linux, only Windows (I could not test the Mac version). This was the only reason I gave the item 4 stars - they author should have used something that works a little better across platforms (like Python/Java), and is less cumbersome to use. It still gets the job done, and I am able to find what I want.

In summary, I feel that the information in this CD is a must for any REAL amateur scientist, and was money well spent for me.

This product does NOT run on modern versions of OS X!!! It won't run on any version of OS X newer than 3 or maybe 4 years old.

I'm not saying that because "I couldn't get it to work". I'm a software engineer. The software, which is essential to the working of the product, was designed for older versions of OS X and will not work on version after about 10.7 (several years ago).

When I explained this to the seller, he did offer me a refund if I shipped it back (which I declined because I have a copy of Windows I can run it on, though I really wanted to run it on my Mac). However, the seller ALSO wrote me that he would change the wording of the ad to remove mention of OS X. It is much later now, and at the time of this writing, he has still not done so.

I have copies of the emails to show this is true.