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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?

#401

Post by brazzy »

beeboop wrote: post #393
gostsamo wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, I agree with lots of the stuff said by the reviewer, but most of them are not such dealbreakers for me as they are for him. At least I read the book as having fun with all the gaps in the wizard world and the personal fantasies of the author are on the back burner.

The reviewer is seemingly an extremely bright and well educated person and also seems to be more familiar with most of the concepts introduced in the books than the original author. The reviewer also an educator and it makes sense that Eliezer's ham-fisted attempts to teach through writing would be annoying to him.

The critique goes deeper. This is where it's most on point:

"So I wonder- is this story ACTUALLY teaching people things? Or is it just a way for people who already know some of the material to feel superior to Hariezer’s many foils?"

Actually that's exactly what rubs me wrong about the entire "rationalist community". A lot of it is convoluted ways for people to congratulate themselves how much smarter than everyone else they are.

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

#402

Post by jstx1 »

mecha_ghidorah wrote: post #357
cafeinux wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

God I thought that was such a weird book. It attempts to build loads of tension around the idea that an old textbook has gasp prewritten notes in it. I know that it tries to imply it might be Voldemort's textbook but even if it was... would that be a huge deal unless it had something useful/interesting specifically about Voldemort? For me at least that part of it fell spectacularly flat

Actually Harry dismisses the idea about it being Voldemort very early in the book because Voldemort would never call himself half-blood.

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

#403

Post by atmosx »

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…

Hahaha sounds like the “half-blooded” Prince’s book!

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

#404

Post by adrianh »

satisfice wrote: post #310

A book I found in a design store in Helsinki consisted of an entire novel (one of Dickens’, I think) that had been sorted, word by word, into alphabetical order. For example, all the “the’s” were grouped together. I guess the artist who made it was trying to say something, but I couldn’t tell what. Order matters? Books are a fraud? Maybe the punchline for a joke, “here is the book you ordered! Get it? Ordered!”

Related: the Well-Sorted Version (https://www.wellsortedversion.com/) does this for the King James Bible. It's each word, alphabetized.

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

#405

Post by pliuchkin »

I worked in a room next to a public library in the late 2000s and since the work was not that demmanding, I had plenty of time to read and explore the library. Someday I found a room full of old books that were not catalogued, it was a donation from the family of the town`s main doctor that had recently died. I spent a few weeks exploring his collection and when I went into a science fiction book, I dont remember exactly but I think it was Arthur C Clarke Profiles of the Future, I found a receipt dating beginning 60`s, it was a receipt from an airplane company. The doctor had been the mayor in that time and had paid the company just to have a plane flying low over the town.

I could never exactly figure out his motivations but I like to think that there was some sort of commemoration going on in town and he hired the flight just to have people know what a plane was like. It happened in a very rural area of Brazil, in a town that by time that had not more than 1000 habitants, no television, no paved roads, almost nothing.

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

#406

Post by atmosx »

wrp wrote: post #299
Cerium wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah. Tests are broken :-)

Oral examination is way superior but you need a healthy “students to prof” ratio for that

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

#407

Post by blippage »

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…

> slightly changing constants

As a maths lecturer once said: some of the problems will be similar with some of the numbers changed. Pi, however, will remain the same. ;)

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

#409

Post by Q6T46nT668w6i3m »

When I was a college student I loved reading older books from the library because, for a time, whoever donated the book could write an inscription on the front matter. The inscriptions varied. Some were about the book. Some were about personal experiences at my college. Sometimes you’d even find doodles or poems.
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