Amazing that how much basic knowledge society is leaving behind - it never is needed for the common guy and so we never know it. To that extent this is a huge first step in preserving those "long forgotten" bits.

Ironically this relies on world's communication systems being intact and no one person knows how it all works end to end!

Someone should do a similar archive for world's commonly used communication systems. I have frequently wondered if telecommunications systems, Internet systems and Satellites all break and have to be rebuilt from scratch - how many people know how it all works end-to-end? To that effect, those who know the parts should collaborate to consolidate that knowledge.

I've often wondered how long it would take us to rebuild computers from scratch, in case of a world catastrophe (nuclear war, zombie invasion...). Of course, we would have other, more urgent needs (food, shelter, healthcare...), but it's an interesting thought experiment.

I use a computer every day, but I wouldn't know where to start to rebuild one from scratch. There are books like "Linux from scratch", but it is far from enough: we would need to "re-invent" electricity, silicon, assembly languages, operating systems... With the division of labour, nobody has the knowledge to build all this.

I think it would take centuries to re-create what we have now. The cool thing is, we wouldn't need to care about backward compatibility / legacy apps, and we could skip C++ and immediately standardize on Lisp ;)

It wouldn't take centuries and the division of labor isn't worse than that you don't need more than 6 or so people with the right skills to build the equivalent of a 1985 computer.

The problem is that they would get killed once the security of the world (police and the military) disappear and humanity decent into chaos.

I think the intent is for it to be downloaded.

I randomly chose an entry to look at:

UNDERSTANDING POULTRY MEAT AND EGG PRODUCTION

By Dr. H.R. Bird

A guide to chicken production by Dr Bird? I had a double-take to check that this whole thing wasn't a giant joke. But I guess it's just a case of names guiding careers.

Or "nominative determinism", as New Scientist calls it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism

apparently it's a collection of statistical flukes: http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/2011-02000-001/

The best paper title I've seen to this date was "Sexing Baby Chicks" (translated from Japanese). It was a seminal paper in its field, too.

This reminds me of a greatly expanded version of Ryan North's "Time Traveler Essentials Shirt":

http://www.topatoco.com/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_C...

The very first time I heard about Wikipedia, this is pretty much what I imagined it to be.

No society would be complete without banana beer: http://www.cd3wd.com/cd3wd_40/ITDG/BANBEER/EN/index.htm

There are some interesting/strange "startupy" type ideas on this page: http://www.cd3wd.com/ideas/index.htm

for example: "Sms classified advertising for the 3rd world and developed countries" and "Democracy Promotion - Hit-man funds for elimination of internationally-designated dictators "

"Hit-man funds for elimination of internationally-designated dictators"

Where is the donation button?

You wouldn't want that. But OTOH it exists already: economic hitmen and the jackals.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Confessions_o...

btw: maybe this is to be torrented on meshed freedomboxen?

I randomly chose an entry and found 'Women and Graphics'. Not only was I disappointed, I was confused.

I, too, randomly chose a topic (building water tanks from bamboo and food-grade plastic film), and its image links were broken. Kind of worrying for the future.

'A plough, and animals to pull it.'

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6H-w9Rm46o#t=4m

This reminded me of Isac Aasimov's foundation.