June 1955 Astounding Science Fiction

Take a look at the June 1995 cover of Astounding Science Fiction. It is a cover that librarians will find interesting. In this issue of Astounding their is an article by Isaac Asimov about information overload. It is called “The Sound of Panting” and is republished in the book “Only a Trillion”. Interesting article because if you remove 1955 and replace it with 2004 it sounds like today.

December 12, 2004 by Libraries

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4 Responses

  1. Fang-Face says:
    December 12, 2004 at 8:26 pm

    Asimov short story
    Asimov wrote an amusing little tale one time, I don’t recall when or where it was published, about a interview by a psychiatrist of a patient who got fed up with all the electronic leashes he had on him and who stomped his cell phone into the ground and walked away from his computer and land line. His wife was positively frantic because she couldn’t get a hold of him all day long, and the shrink couldn’t understand why the guy would cut himself off from all communication like that. The story ends with the shrink spending the rest of his day in his office dictating notes and going from telephone, to cell phone, to e-mail, to telephone, to cell phone, to e-mail. . . .

    As for the information thing, I’m rather partial to Heinlein’s postulation:

    CRISIS OF THE LIBRARIAN: The greatest crisis facing us is not Russia, not the Atom bomb, not corruption in government, not encroaching hunger, nor the morals of the young. It is a crisis in the organization and accessibility of human knowledge. We own an enormous “encyclopedia” — which isn’t even arranged alphabetically. Our “file cards” are spilled on the floor, nor were they ever in order. The answers we want may be buried somewhere in the heap,
    but it might take a lifetime to locate two already known facts, place them side by side, and derive a third fact, the one we urgently need.

    Call it the crisis of the Librarian.
    –Robert Anson Heinlein, Introduction to The Worlds of ~, pg 23

    This was some twenty years before the internet.

  2. Bibliofuture says:
    December 13, 2004 at 12:16 am

    Thiotimoline
    If you need something interesting for a information literacy presentation Asimov’s book, “Only a Trillion” has something you might be able to use. In the book there are two fake scientific articles about “thiotimoline”. Thiotimoline was created by Asimov to show how scientific language can be used to make something look impressive even if it does not exist. Because of “The Sound of Pating” article and the “thiotimoline” articles I believe that every librarian should have a copy of “Only a Trillion”.

  3. Bibliofuture says:
    December 13, 2004 at 12:23 am

    Trillion
    In the intro to “Only a Trillion” Asimov tells how he came up with the title. He was discussing a element that was very rare on earth. He told his wife that there was only a trillion atoms of the element on earth. Compared to the number of atoms in the earth, a trillion truly is a small number.

    In the intro Asimov goes on to tell an antidote of how big a trillion is to the human scale. He ask how many days do you have to live to live a million seconds. The answer is about 11.5 days. He then ask how long you have to live to live a billion seconds. That is around 31 years. (I think everyone should have a big party on their billion second birthday.) When is your trillion second birthday? You have to live 31,000 years to make it to a trillion seconds.

  4. Fang-Face says:
    December 13, 2004 at 6:18 am

    Re:Trillion
    Well, I’ll be flummoxed. I don’t have any quotations from Only A Trillion in my quotations files. Strange. I guess I’ll have to sign it out of the library again. I hope they still have it.

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