What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book? • Hacker News Board

Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?

#281

Post by dredmorbius » Thu, Aug 04, 2022, 12:45 AM UTC

computator wrote: post #135

In the late 1990s, after watching the movie WarGames (1983), I saw a scene where Matthew Broderick's character is researching the computer scientist Stephen Falken to try to guess his password. There was a brief glimpse of a Scientific American magazine cover[1] titled "Falken's maze: Teaching a machine to learn". That sounded fascinating and I went to the university library to find that issue of Scientific American…

Watching the film The Last Emperor I noted the scene in which a TIME photographer was present for the Emperor's coronation (as a Japanese puppet). The thought occurred that this quite probably was an actual occurrence, and that there should be an article corresponding to the story. My uni library had a collection of back issues, and sure enough, I found the article and read it ... an interesting corroboration, counterpoint, and expansion to what was shown in the film (remarkably true to life as best as I could tell).

Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?

#282

Post by dredmorbius » Thu, Aug 04, 2022, 12:47 AM UTC

My favourite graffito of all time was a marginalia note in a book of Jane Jacobs, from my uni library, following some comment or another she'd made regarding architecture and/or urban planning:

"God bless you, Jane!"

I couldn't have agreed more, and found the defacement entirely justified.

Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?

#283

Post by grepLeigh » Thu, Aug 04, 2022, 12:54 AM UTC

A morgue toe tag used as a bookmark.

Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?

#284

Post by Aeolun » Thu, Aug 04, 2022, 12:56 AM UTC

fezfight wrote: post #258

gtk40 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of over a decade ago I was in a high school AP course. At the start of the course, the teacher recommended we get a AP prep book to study throughout the year, and recommended 2 brands. She specifically said not to get one brand, noting that it was of inferior quality. I had already got the prep book she didn't recommend as I had found it on sale before that remark was made. I later learned that she used th…

Similarly, with a slight twist, a prof I had used to recommend we read the entire text book, not just the chapters required for the class. It was an open book exam so people figured they could annotate the pages or whatever and didn't bother to follow his adcice. He would often say, 'everything [we] ever want to know is in that book!' He was right. The final exam was verbatim the practice exam given at the end of the…

That’s a fun anecdote, but horrible teaching.

Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?

#285

Post by shannifin » Thu, Aug 04, 2022, 12:56 AM UTC

I found a book full of four-leaf clovers, five-leaf, six-leaf, even a few seven-leafs. Hundreds of them, a really impressive collection.

Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?

#286

Post by afloyd » Thu, Aug 04, 2022, 1:03 AM UTC

thechao wrote: post #248

kyleblarson wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

sounds like a weird portmanteau of unix and vaxen, a term I have heard used for the old dec vax machines, which did indeed run unix. so, not entirely gibberish, just mostly gibberish.

Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?

#287

Post by shakethemonkey » Thu, Aug 04, 2022, 1:03 AM UTC

Amezarak wrote: post #114

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a far stretch to "tens of thousands of dollars." A valuable second-hand book can be $50.

A lot of older books that are now out of print often run many hundreds of dollars, if not more. For example, I've been trying to find a complete unabridged edition of Fraser's Golden Bough, which isn't that niche - you'll find it cited somewhere in any work on mythology- and it seems to run in the high-hundreds to low thousands. A quick look shows a first edition selling for 12k all by itself. Similarly, I'm looking…

But a pallet of old academic books is unlikely to be composed of such books. It is probable that most of the books are worth less than the cost of shipping, and some of the books will have some value but not tremendous value. It is astonishing the number of wonderful, high quality books that can be bought on Abebooks for $1.

Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?

#288

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Aug 04, 2022, 1:11 AM UTC

tomcam wrote: post #131

1. I bought a 500 year-old book full of engravings that turned out to have pictures of UFOs in it 2. I became obsessed with Luna Park, an influential proto-Disneyland based in Coney Island 100+ years ago. It was so popular they ran light rail out there and hundreds of thousands of people went there every weekend until it burned down about a decade later. Took a book about it on vacation to Paris. Went to a random pla…

[deleted]

Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?

#289

Post by ironmagma » Thu, Aug 04, 2022, 1:12 AM UTC

I went to the Orlando Public Library once, science section. Saw a book titled, "Combustion." I open the pages to take a look which unveils pieces of weed pressed between the pages. I wonder just how long that had been sitting there.

Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?

#290

Post by Spooky23 » Thu, Aug 04, 2022, 1:20 AM UTC

asciimov wrote: post #180

jacobolus wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Lol. No.

I bought a bunch of architecture books a few years ago at an estate sale for $5. Flipped through them and my son looked them up on eBay - we sold the collection for several thousand dollars.