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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?

#331

Post by cafeinux »

lostlogin wrote: post #314
ortusdux wrote: post #78

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…

This is like the Harry Potter book where Harry gets Voldemorts old potions notebook. It made him a star pupil too. Do you have a scar on your eyebrow?

That's the sixth book, "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince". But if I recall correctly, the original owner of the book, the Half-Blood Prince, was none other than Snape, not Voldemort.

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

#332

Post by idontwantthis »

tshaddox wrote: post #192
ortusdux wrote: post #78

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…

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 digital logic professor was so lazy he reused previous year homework questions on exams and exams were completely open notes. The old questions were available with answers on old versions of the course website that were still online. Everyone just brought the answers to each exam.

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

#333

Post by thangalin »

iancmceachern wrote: post #297

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…

> It starts with atoms and goes all the way up to the milky way.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEHCCsFFIuY

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

#334

Post by robbintt »

idontwantthis wrote: post #332
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 digital logic professor was so lazy he reused previous year homework questions on exams and exams were completely open notes. The old questions were available with answers on old versions of the course website that were still online. Everyone just brought the answers to each exam.

He may not have been lazy; he may not believe in the system.

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

#335

Post by BarryMilo »

MikePlacid wrote: post #329
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…

> he didn’t know anything about books and was more interested in disposing of the books than making money from the sale. This reminds me of one of the strangest things I ever read in the books: My Arabic Library About eighteen months before I arrived in Iraq, one of my predecessors had ordered My Arabic Library, $88,000 worth of books, an entire shipping container. My Arabic Library was a Bush-era, US government–wide…

> And the thought that somebody could just waste my yearly taxes on nothing - was very strange and disturbing.

I've been told the US military is a veritable cornucopia of waste.

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

#336

Post by cafeinux »

selimthegrim wrote: post #213
ipaddr wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience they run out of books

All the students in a course I was teaching apparently were using Chegg for the previous year’s textbook so I decided to use as a supplement (to Strang [which was not the previous year’s book but had all the answers online anyway]) an old Mir publishers book on Diff Eq which I can’t remember exactly how I got (either a bookstore in the French quarter or maybe a library remainder sale). At any rate it turns out the En…

Did you put it on libgen?

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

#338

Post by superchroma »

floren wrote: post #123
acomjean wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. When I've worked in secure areas, I've never had the slightest concern about theft. We even did an experiment where we left a couple $1 bills out on the tab…

Kind of related, I had some instant noodles that I didn't much care for, so I taped some money to them and left them with a note in a common area anonymously saying that I would pay someone to take them. I had to add more money a few times before someone did. It's amusing to invert the system.

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

#339

Post by jacobolus »

shakethemonkey wrote: post #287
Amezarak wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Did you look at the picture? https://i.imgur.com/0qiTKSQ.jpg Books I commonly buy secondhand that look roughly like those pictured are anywhere from $10–$200 each (depending on how common the particular book/edition is); we’re talking about pretty ordinary old academic books, nothing fancy or extremely rare. A pallet of books is ~500–1000 books (there are maybe 400 in the picture, but the blog author claims that is a "sampling").

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

#340

Post by mmorearty »

kyleblarson wrote: post #165
ortusdux wrote: post #78

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.

A joke I heard around 1988:

A young man went back to visit his old economics professor, under whom he had studied many years earlier. He took a look at the final exam the professor was preparing to give the students. He said, "Professor, this exam is identical to the one you gave us year ago!"

The professor replied, "That's okay, all the answers have changed."

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