The Public Domain Review

Two suggestions to add to the many excellent ones already here:

Arthur Wesley Dow’s Composition: A Series of Exercises Selected From a New System of Art Education [0] is a wonderful, wonderful book in the public domain – recently submitted here but didn't get much attention. It is well worth spending a lot of time studying its exercises and examples.

[0] https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/dow-composition/

My second suggestion is more general but it worked wonders for me. I had a teacher years ago whose take-home assignments consisted of extremely rudimentary drawing exercises, starting with drawing a series of straight lines in parallel across a page, then moving on to squares, circles etc but always basic geometric shapes. His point was that drawing is, at its most basic level, a physical skill like many others which require physical and neurological adaptations that can only be improved with practice. In addition to the creating these lines and shapes, one was obliged to pay strict attention to their relation to other marks on the page – your circles could not overlap, for example, and your straight lines must run parallel and start and end at the same page border. The lines had to start and end very definitely at the correct point. He was also keen to examine and correct each student's physical stance in relation to the easel, the light, and the subject, and insisted we draw from the shoulder, not the elbow or wrist, as much as possible. The goal was to train…

Checking out the French ideas from 1899-1910 on what 2000 would be like :

http://publicdomainreview.org/2012/06/30/france-in-the-year-2000-1899-1910/

"The New-Fangled barber" isn't quite there yet, but we do have electric razors and trimmers. Then again, the electric trimmer is fairly old at this point.

"An Arial battle" and "Torpedo planes" bombers, ground attack aircraft and fighters. I'm not surprised the first use ideas for aircraft are in war.

We have "Aviation police" of sorts, except they're a combination of air traffic controllers and the FAA. And the near-collisions in "Aero-Cab station" are eerily similar to what has already happened. We also have air-mail, but "Rural Postman" with his own flying machine hasn't quite happened yet.

We don't have "intensive breeding" machines per-se, but the poultry industry is pretty automated these days.

We have drones today except they don't have a guy with a looking glass. We have "electric floor cleaners" that don't involve a maid.

Am I the only one shocked that the maid uniform has essentially stayed exactly the same (maybe with shorter skirts). I mean, look at military uniforms. The helmets in particular have changed a great deal. Same with police uniforms.

The "well trained orchestra" is basically a synthesizer. "House rolling through the countryside" is real today and we call them Dollies (http://hmrsupplies.com)

"At school" knowledge download is not quite what we have, but Wikipedia and Google come close. After…

I'm sorry, but that sounds like something that Athanasius Kircher[1] (who created a fascinating but completely off-the-wall translation system for Egyptian hieroglyphics[2]) would say.

As far as I know, Chinese writing likely followed the same path as Sumerian and Egyptian hieroglyphs (both of which, IIRC, have well-attested archaeological evidence): originating as markings for inventory-like purposes (a drawing of two penguins => this shipment contains two penguins) and then expanding into recording spoken language.

There is a complicating factor, AFAIK, in that the earliest known form of Chinese writing, the oracle bone script used to write on bones for divination purposes, already has clear meaning as words and is possibly traceable through to modern characters.[3][4]

On the other hand, as well, "had only very vague meanings" seems to be the initial take on every untranslated writing system: Chinese, hieroglyphics, Mayan, Minoan/Mycenaean, etc.

If you're interested in this sort of thing, I recommed Umberto Eco's book, The Search for the Perfect Language.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athanasius_Kircher#Egyptology

[2] https://publicdomainreview.org/2013/05/16/athanasius-kircher-and-the-hieroglyphic-sphinx/

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_characters#History

[4] http://www.ancientscripts.com/chinese.html

Edit: I just got to digging around and remembered that the cover of John DeFrancis' The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy has the same phrase in…

I'm not the person you asked but I try to keep my gems in bookmarks, would love to share some. Obviously I don't know your interests so take it for what you will. I have many more than I'll post here if you want some.

Some of this came from HN, some from elsewhere.

This website lists the first references to some cultural icons on Usenet (for example the first time AIDS was ever discussed, first mention of a new TV cartoon "The Simpsons", etc.)
http://www.eightyeightynine.com/culture/80susenet.html

The Public Domain Review, a collection and analysis of interesting stuff in the public domain
https://publicdomainreview.org/

David Rumsey Historical Map Collection. I have spent many hours browsing the incredible content here.
https://www.davidrumsey.com/

Artvee. Free, high quality art.
https://artvee.com/

Restoration Mustang. A high quality long term journal of the restoration of a classic Mustang. Think like an /r/diy project but with way more detail and over a longer time scale.
https://restorationmustang.com/

The Renegade Gardener. Highly opinionated no-bullshit gardening advice. I especially love the "Don't Do That" section.
https://renegadegardener.com/

Garden Myths. There's a lot of misinformation and old wives' tales in gardening, this website cuts the crap.
https://www.gardenmyths.com/

Million Short is a search engine that lets you cut out the million (or 10,000 or 100,000) top results from a search, really good for finding gems. It also has an option for…

> The very fact people think they need to read (fiction) books released this year more than ones released before is baffling.

Do they really?

I was comparing rates of production vs consumption. It doesn't follow that what is being consumed on a given year is this year's production.

My guess is that most of the books written are read by hardly anyone. A few authors have a faithful following that will read their books as soon as it's out (which isn't too baffling). Reviewers and critics may indeed be more likely to review new books, which might impact people's decisions (again, not necessarily baffling). Book shops also put new books forward, but all those books tend to be the ones by trendy authors.

Other than the few fashionable books that come out each year you'll find reviewers like the one described in the article who don't seem to focus on new books (e.g. they talk about Dostoïevski), so it is not obvious that people feel that compelled to read new books.

> the backlog of books spread across millennia, not a century.

How much I agree with this! Plus, time does such a great job at filtering out the good from the bad (or the exceptional from the mundane). That's where lists of books entering the public domain, like this one [0], are important. Or the reviews [1].

Ultimately, the fact that there is more available to read than is possible even to the most voracious of readers means that most people will rely on guidance on what to read.

[0]…

>It turns out that, aside from their common interest in antagonising Isaac Newton, Hooke and Leibniz also shared an interest in mechanising scientific reasoning through the invention of a universal language for science. Leibniz called his project the "Characteristica Universalis".

I'm surprised it doesn't mention Leibniz's famous "Let us calculate" quote:

>>In a 1679 letter to one of his patrons, Johann Friedrich, he described his project of the universal language as “the great instrument of reason, which will carry the forces of the mind further than the microscope has carried those of sight”. Later he wrote:

>>>The only way to rectify our reasonings is to make them as tangible as those of the Mathematicians, so that we can find our error at a glance, and when there are disputes among persons, we can simply say: Let us calculate, without further ado, to see who is right.[1]

I'm also kind of surprised that Hooke wrote the letter in English, since I assumed all academic communication across language barriers back then would have been in Latin. But ChatGPT tells me Leibniz was unusually multi-lingual.

[1] Sorry, ad-heavy site but I wanted one that gave context: https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/let-us-calculate-leibniz-llull-and-the-computational-imagination/