Serendipity

Just a bit of a rant today. I’m getting more than a bit tired of hearing from reasonably intelligent people that they can’t find a given piece of research because they tend to have this odd belief that the entire universe is but 20 years old. Twenty years old? What, are you nuts? I’m sure that’s what some of you are thinking. Hardly. 20 years ago is when the first web page went up. Some seem to think that anything before that time period simply doesn’t exist, especially if it can’t be located by Google, Bing, or some other search engine. Some organizations, like the IEEE and ACM, strive to get their older archives online but many don’t have the resources. And so I am faced with folks who simply can’t seem to comprehend the notion that a lot of research was done “back in the paleolithic”, as my kids tend to say (i.e., before the 90s). A bit of searching in a library or a good online index of articles for journals would assist even the dullest of researchers in determining what’s out there. Similarly, I tired of supposed researchers who simply give a new name to an idea

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