Halfway through my college experience (around 2002 or so), the university started putting up blinders in the bookstore while they stocked shelves and wouldn't let you buy your books until basically the first day of class, specifically in an attempt to stymie students finding their books, looking them up, and buying them at 1/10th the price online. I mean, it wasn't my first experience with the university prioritizing…
Some book publishers also release new versions that change nothing other than make slight changes and reorderings of the exercises so that you can't easily use an old version for your homework assignments.
I remember we had a forum group where 1 person each assignment would go to library to find out which question matched the one in the old book so his or her fellow peers all went out and bought the old one
The books were worth tens of thousands of dollars (sold individually on the second-hand book market, after being carefully catalogued etc.), but nobody interested in buying books happened to be at the auction and the auctioneer set a $1 minimum bid because he didn’t know anything about books and was more interested in disposing of the books than making money from the sale. The auction house could surely get significa…
Like most used things these days, book buying/selling/collecting was way easier 20 years ago, before smart phones. Nowadays half of the market is flippers and scalpers, prices have shot up, and nobody is getting a pallet of good books for a dollar anymore.
I mostly agree, but there are exceptions. For my birthday a couple years ago my son showed up with a couple cardboard boxes full of books. Turned out to be a complete set of "Great Books of the Western World," worth well over $1,000. He had picked it up for about $30 at an estate sale a couple days before.
reminds me, in the mid 80s, of my friend and I who made a lot of gun powder when we were young, we pretty much got all the things we needed out of the encyclopedia. The potassium nitrate was easily available, in bulk, at the garden store, as well as Sulphur. We'd use lumps of charcoal on sandpaper and got a fantastically fine powder. We made various kinds of fireworks, then we started putting it in pipes and folding the ends over and we started getting "booms". We kept doing this until we made things that we started getting too scare to set off. We had quite a few close calls where pieces of shrapnel went wizzing by. We did this in my backyard, it was odd my parents were kind of ok with this (up until a point....) my dad who was a research physicist worked at a large scientific institute and must of talking to his friends at work about our adventures, and someone there gave him all these old chemicals, metals, and all kinds to take home. Things like magnesium which makes for great fireworks like things. Some iodine, which we turned into a super shock sensitive explosive (by mixing it with ammonia). Then there was a can of sodium pellets. Our experience with sodium had been what we had seen in class, you put a bit in water, and you get this pretty good fizz/fire reaction. Sort of was expecting this, these pellets were much bigger than anything we'd seen been put in water, so we just popped one in a bucket of water expecting a massive fizzing and buzzing around of the pellet..... but ..... nope, it did a bit of fizzing for half a second before it exploded sending burning sodium all over the back yard....luckily it didn't set anything on fire, but my parents weren't at impressed at this experiment and banned all further experiments. Now looking back on it, I just keep thinking... WHAT THE HELL WERE MY PARENTS THINKING?
I once took a critical thinking course and bought the textbook 2nd hand from the college bookstore. A week or two in, I noticed half of a sentence written in the margin. As the professor started teaching the topic from that page, he rhetorically asked a question, did not get an answer, and then answered himself with the sentence from the book. I filliped ahead and found that the entire book was annotated with all of…
In a similar vein, I also found a 1950's guide to a happy marriage that had been thoroughly annotated by the husband. He was so honest that it was like finding someone's therapy session notes at a thrift store. The inside cover had a pro-con table, with 'appearance' as the first entry in the con section. Inside the back cover was a game-plan that seemed to indicate that he wanted to strengthen his marriage, so I guess that's nice. I just hope that his wife didn't crack it open before it ended up in the donate pile.
A few years ago, at Goodwill, I found a lovely 1930s copy of Eve Curie's biography of her mother Marie Curie. The book had been well-preserved in a homemade mylar jacket. In the flyleaf were two inscriptions: one a woman's name with "Dr", dated in the 1970s; the other dated in the early 2000s with another woman's name, also a doctor. When I flipped through the pages, a "Congrats grad" card fell out. Dr. A was Dr B's mother and had given her this book from her own library upon Dr B's graduation from med school.
Not the strangest thing in the world, but I'm currently on a Mark Twain reading binge. He's absolutely amazing - if all you've read of his is Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn, you need to read his non-fiction travelogues. His observations were prescient almost beyond belief, and his acerbic humor is laugh out loud funny. Here's the strange bit: His book "Roughing It" is about his experience as a young man of moving to…
Coming back to the thread later, I apparently totally misunderstood the assignment. Sorry for the wall of text, I was over eager to share.
I once took a critical thinking course and bought the textbook 2nd hand from the college bookstore. A week or two in, I noticed half of a sentence written in the margin. As the professor started teaching the topic from that page, he rhetorically asked a question, did not get an answer, and then answered himself with the sentence from the book. I filliped ahead and found that the entire book was annotated with all of…
I took an intro econ course in college in 1999. The professor gave us his past tests to use as practice and some of them dated back to the late 1950's.
I took an OS course in 2005. The professor told us we wouldn't have to consider certain classes of scheduler because "none of the real computers the university bought had 'dynamic resource allocation'". I asked what he meant by that, and he said "requests for additional (or free'ing) memory, file handles, and other non-compute resources". I asked which machines had such features, and he replied with something weird like "UNIVAXEN". It was a ridiculous course.
A couple years ago I was trying to get ahold of Michael Spivak's Differential Geometry series. It was impossible to find copies of the book without paying 4 figures on sketchy listings off eBay, Craigslist, Amazon, or AbeBooks. Eventually I decided to dig around and see if I could contact him directly. When I found his contact info, I kindly wrote him an email, to which he took several months to respond. After severa…
A few weeks back I took a book to a nearby Little Library. I hadn't opened the book since 1987, when I was in college, but held onto it for reasons. Right before I dropped it off in exchange for another I wanted, I thumbed through for some unknown reason. Inside was a note from a girl I knew in high school, who I'd drifted apart from somewhat. It was agreeing to my plan to: Have her move 2000 miles to where I was goi…
Now that you’ve got all of HN on tenterhooks what happened since?
I looked her up. She married someone in 1989, divorced, married another, divorced.
Still a looker. Yes, we messaged a bit on FB.
Oddly, we've both moved around the country a bit, and actually nearly bumped into each other. I interviewed at a place she was working in 2002. I live now, five states from there, but five miles from where she lived in the early 90s.