While doing some research, I found an interesting source of classic literature. I am already familiar with Project Gutenberg, but I noticed that the MIT collection had been lost to a hard drive failure. Apparently, theirs was more severe than mine, as it resulted in the loss of all their data.

Even more interesting, Google came to their rescue, restoring a majority, if not an entirety, of their collection. Google maintains cached copies of all the web pages it has crawled, and uses them in their searches. (It can also convert PDFs to HTML, as well as Word and Excel documents.)

It's kinda staggering to think about—the vast majority of all human knowledge, and its online creations of the past decade or so, contained within one company. Or perhaps a single server, or a hard drive even. It's also worth noting that the computers themselves, outside of their core functions, cannot yet make sense of any of it. What do the teachings of Aristotle mean to a computer, which sees only a jumble of binary bits, a stray piece of code here and there?