No bullshit guide to math and physics

The Bible, for example, uses fractions. In Lev. 5:16 - "He must make restitution for what he has failed to do in regard to the holy things, add a fifth of the value to that and give it all to the priest, who will make atonement for him with the ram as a guilt offering, and he will be forgiven."

But I'm with pflats' judgement. I see text like "Indeed, on computers systems which don’t have a hardware multiplication circuit, every time you write ab the computer will repeatedly add the number a for a total of b iterations." and wonder first, won't the target audience be confused by "hardware multiplication circuit", and second, is this actually true? I'm pretty sure they use shift-and-add.

Or, there's a use of "=" to say that "a/b = ... = one bth of a" then on the same page there's a triple bar "≡" used for the same thing. Will your target audience understand the notation shift?

The language "It is worth clarifying what" and "It is interesting to note that" and "We will now illustrate how the equations of kinematics are used to solve physics problems" are part of the same stultifying language you complain about. There's a bunch of places where you can simplify text like "the expression 5×32 +13 is to be interpreted" to "the expression 5×32 +13 is interpreted" -- the "to be" is useless. And the voice changes from "we get" to "you get".

Why is x-1 different from f-1 ? That is, the first is 1/x and the second is the function inverse. As far as I see, you don't explain that those "-1"s mean different things. Nor do you say that "f" is another type of variable naming pattern, which describes a functions.

Suppose your student wants to actually do the Moroccan example as an experiment. It will fail, because of air friction. Yet friction isn't brought up here. Newton's laws are not intuitive, because we are used to a world which is full of friction, and frictional forces aren't easy to describe. But the text assumes that the clarity of Newton's laws will be self-apparent, even if it doesn't match expectations.

The Moroccan example also uses "44.145[m]". Who measures their balcony height down to the millimeter? The precision was chosen so the answer would be exactly 3[s], but other examples aren't that fussy. In any case, the answer should be 3.00". Significant figures are hard for students to understand, and I don't see any guidance that a fall of 44 meters should not be answered 2.9950690022496134[s], even if that's what the computer gives.

Finally, good on you for using SI for the file size instead of base 210 units. However, [Mb] is megabit, not megabyte. You should use [MB].

This is the third iteration of the book, so I think I have gotten the typos-per-page down to an almost non-existant level. I am sure there are some left, but it is definitely not a first draft.

Why this is on Hacker News, while the download rate in his example would follow f(t)=k\cdot t^2? Mine only follows f(t)=C+k\cdot rand().

We need better, deeper, broader understanding of math and physics. This fast food-styled stuff is really not for us. Why? Think you're going into approximated algorithms without knowing the wonderful essentials of constant e? Think you're going into pattern recognition without a throughout understanding of linear/quadratic/etc systems?

A thick textbook only to charge you $150? That sounds like "6-pack abs the quick way" advertisement... XD

Guys! Please stop joking!

I'm taking the Serway and Jewett physics right now, and I actually hate it. Their explanations of tricky concepts kind of suck. For example, it doesn't even try to explain why a hot gas is less ordered than a cool one (it's the same amount of information, the same number of real numbers, right?). I only got a vague understanding after scouring Wikipedia and later portions of the chapter. Stewart is pretty decent though, AFAICT.

OK cool but, Khan Academy.