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

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

#291

Post by mauvehaus »

sizzzzlerz wrote: post #278

At a garage sale, I bought a bagful of books, sight unseen, for a dollar. When I got it home and starting looking at what was there, I found a first edition of Edward Abbey's The Monkeywrench Gang. Inside the book was an envelope addressed to the original purchaser, I suppose. Inside that was a letter from Abbey, written in response to a letter the purchaser had sent him, thanking him for his kind words. I had the ha…

As an Abbey fan, I'm turning green with envy here. I'm still hoping to someday read Jonathan Troy without going to the considerable expense of buying it, not least because Abbey himself thought it was crap. Maybe I should buy more random bags of goodwill books...

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

#292

Post by jonnycomputer »

fffrrrr wrote: post #188
jonnycomputer wrote: post #24

I wrote about this once before, but I had a very similar situation, except with family photos instead of books. The story was that someone's apartment was cleared out after they were evicted. Well, after a few years of the stuff sitting in storage, I got around to looking through it, and with a bit of sleuthing, I tracked down the person who the family photos belonged to and gave them a call. The call did not go well…

In the 80's my family lost a suitcase of family photos and letters. Literally fell of a truck in the middle of Siberia. a few year later they were reunited with them thanks to a stranger who found them and tracked my family down (obviously this was pre-internet). My family was very grateful.

I'm glad!

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

#293

Post by Flankk »

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…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIVAC

The term is "dynamic storage allocation." We're talking about something so old I'm afraid I can't explain beyond that. I am a mere programmer and I don't wear a lab coat.

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

#294

Post by neilv »

acomjean wrote: post #74
jnovek wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want this story to continue, and for each of the five twenties that you spend, some increasingly elaborate and unlikely good thing happens.

I went through a couple years where I was finding cash kind of a lot. Not life changing amounts, but something. At work in the secure area when locking up I found a 10 inside the door. I didn't know what to do with it so I tacked it on the bulletin board by the door. Really obvious. Nobody took it for 2 weeks (which is kind of remarkable), so I took it back to buy lunch. I found a twenty in the snow on the street in…

> I found a twenty in the snow on the street in cambridge.

The most money I've found was in Cambridge (USA), in Harvard Square.

There was an envelope/paper on the ground of a traffic island, and in it was a bunch of cash. I couldn't see anyone around who might've just dropped it, so, on a hunch, I walked into the nearest bank. I waited in line, got to the teller, and said, this is a long shot, but did they happen to know who dropped this money. As I was saying that, someone off to the side spoke up and said it was them. They'd been making the deposit for the nearby small store where they worked. They offered me a big discount in the store.

Other than that, I track found pennies in GnuCash, to have an accurate accounting of my luck and/or sidewalk germ exposure.

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

#297

Post by iancmceachern »

I bought my brother a book as a gift. A book I love called "powers of 10" which is a series of pictures each taken from an order of magnitude greater distance. It starts with atoms and goes all the way up to the milky way. It's such a good way to understand the relative size of things in our universe.

I bought it used on Amazon. It was an old library book that still had the sleeve and index cards with the date stamps of when it was last checked out.

This particular book, that I bought sight unseen from Amazon, used, for my brother's birthday had only been checked out once in its life at the library. It was last checked out on my brother's exact birthday. The book I randomly bought him had a stamp of his exact birthday, only.

Talk about going from thinking we're so small in the universe to that kind of coincidence.

Edited to fix a misspelling

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

#298

Post by teptoria »

massysett wrote: post #75
daviddaviddavid wrote: post #40

I realize it is not the same as finding a friend, but I recently found five crisp $20 bills in a used logic text book at an Amvets thrift store. I opened the book because it was written by Irving Copi, who wrote my undergrad logic text. I was paranoid it was counterfeit, but it was very much real money. To make things better, the first $20 I spent was to get a pizza and the employee said a mistake happened at the piz…

I was with my girlfriend at a restaurant whose decor was filled with a bunch of old furniture and knickknacks. Next to our table was a stack of books. My girlfriend opened the top one and inside the cover was a bunch of money - maybe $200 in twenties? Over dinner we talked about what to do about this, and ultimately she added $20 more to the stash and left it in the book. That restaurant is now gone.

taking 'leave a place nicer than you found it' to a whole new level

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

#299

Post by wrp »

Cerium wrote: post #275
tshaddox wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So my version of that story is less analog and arguably less academically honest. I had a somewhat challenging mid-level math class in college where after each homework assignment and test the professor would give us a URL to a PDF of his scanned handwritten completed version of the work. The URL path was something like /math-321/2019/fall/test-1.pdf, and the professor diligently made sure that each file wasn't avail…

My chapter of Tau Beta Pi (engineering honor society) got so tired of how unfair it was that people would share around old tests and decided to do something about it. Since there is no way to stop people from doing this, we got permission from the dean to start a test and study sheet bank and made it publicly accessible on a website.

Over his whole career as a professor, my father was so concerned about test sharing that he kept a file of every test he ever gave and was careful to never ask the same question twice.

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

#300

Post by teptoria »

somat wrote: post #97
garyrob wrote: post #52

The wonderful book Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind by Shunryu Suzuki contains a page which is blank except for a drawing of a fly in one corner. Nowhere else in the book is it mentioned or any explanation provided. Having practiced Zen for 10 years, I have an idea that might explain it. But on the surface, it is completely strange and inexplicable.

Porpoise http://www.thecodelesscode.com/case/66

love this :) thanks for sharing
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