Slashdot Mirror

Yup. There's a book on it.

Fadiman had a second collection called The Mathematical Magpie, though it hasn't been reprinted since 1997. It's probably worth noting that Fantasia Mathematica includes the story "A Subway Named Mobius" which someone above recommended.

I assume you mean The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and other poems? Only the first two poems are actually about the title character. But the only reason the original anthology is out of print is that it's been incorporated into larger compilations; the current one is Tales from the Perilous Realm.

I'm not currently in the US, the book isn't for sale here, nothing by him is in any library in the country (as far as I can tell from a couple searches), and Amazon wouldn't ship his book here.

Lots of Slashdot readers are non-US, myself included. Strangely I don't find that any limitation.

I am not personally familiar with regards to South America or the Middle East and Africa, but I'm guessing it's available via South Africa at least. Otherwise in 2 minutes I found new copies available from UK, Germany, and Australia. Hint, try meta-search sites for books such as http:www.bookfinder.com, AddALL, www.abebooks.com and www.Alibris.com.

Your accusations of vitriolous seem very harsh of someone, whom by Slashdot standards is being mature and respectful in his criticism. Other than in some no-fault divorce states or provinces, the law does seem to place an a priori burden on male (husband) in regards to both financial settlement and parental access/rights. I agree that divorce is something that is always emotional ugly as like most civil or family court manner, both sides view themselves as having been wronged, and too often there is little or nothing in the way of unbiased confirmation of either parties' claims.

Then maybe you are in the wrong tax bracket. Try being in mine for a while.

If you were more productive, maybe you would be in a higher tax bracket.

How many books have you written? Ever start a food company?

No. You just sit around and wish you made more money.

A "fucking cartoonist"?

How many books have you written? Have you started your own food company yet?

Wealthy people don't get that way by being lazy, son.

There is also AddAll, a international search engine for new and used books. :)

I predict that we will see Border's web site saying: You can order this book and it will be delivered in x days, OR you can drive y miles and have it today!

• White House on Pandemic Flu
• PandemicFlu.gov
• FluWikie

Say hello to my little friend.

Price Comparison Table

Buy.com has it for $2 cheaper than Amazon.

Professor of Physics at the Univ. of Conn., Dr. Ron Mallett shared his concept for a time machine, based on Einstein's two theories of relativity. Tests with atomic clocks have shown that speed and gravity can slow time down, said Mallett, who noted that if a person was near enough to a black hole for an hour or so, due to its massive gravity, a hundred years could have passed further away.

Gravity, which can be thought of as a "bending of space," can be manipulated locally, using a circulating light beam with a series of mirrors, that can swirl up empty space, he outlined. Such a device could be used for a time machine (see graphic below) by twisting space into a loop that connects the future to the past, Mallett proposed.

Interestingly, he suggested the past a person travels to wouldn't be the one they came from, but that of a parallel universe in which they'd live in co-existence with their younger self. The traveler would not be able to return to their normal timeline, and from our point of view, they'd simply disappear from the world. Mallett also commented that we wouldn't begin to see time travelers until such a device came into use in our time frame.

How much less support will you get if we hit AddAll or BookPool [1] and get the book+shipping for the price of Amazon?

_________________________________
[1] Although it's out of stock at BookPool.

Personally I find the general purpose comparison shopping sites like Pricegrabber and Froogle very poor at getting relevant results for most products. They are usually not able to differentiate different products and either group unrelated products together or don't group related products together. Luckily there are lots of sites where you can comparison shop for very specific products, like Compare Cartridges for printer ink cartridges, AddAll for books, DVD Price Search for movie, Cheap-Subscription for magazines, etc.

How about prices which include shipping and are less than Amazon's cover price?

(there are online bookstores other than Amazon and B&N)

Yes, it's needed, but the people who need it aren't going to be the ones who read it and take it to heart. Isn't always that way?


p.s.

It's cheaper here

As far as sale prices go, it's always amusing to watch everyone flock to Amazon and B&N. My general advice is to go to AddAll Book Shopping Bot . Now, if Amazon happens to float to the top, so be it, but I'm a comparison shopper.

If you want to see sad, go to the first site listed for the Potter #6 book. (Overstock) and look at the "reviews". Yes, there are "reviews" (believe it or not). Here's one of them <snicker>: Reviewer: lara from connecticut -- Harry potter is back again..on his 6th year...this book is bound to be... AMAZING!!!! Harry is coming closer and closer to his last year in Hogwarts, now we all await what surprises JK Rowling has waiting for us. This book is going to be the best!!!!</snicker>

WRT the marketing angle, if you aren't going to the book store to pick up a copy, turn on the local news - and you'll see what everyone else sees when they're picking up a copy: A Harry Potter FreeForAll Party.

I always thought the tv coverage of Star Trek conventions showed a lot of sad geeks, generally adults. With the Potter Parties, you've got entire families (sometimes nuclear and extended). All that's left is a Rocky Horror-like script to act out, props to throw around, and a dance ala The Time Warp. By the time they get this put together, the 7th, and final novel will be out and it will be for naught.

Several weeks ago, someone in the media was [supposedly] offered a printed, bound copy of Potter #6 for $90k/US but they didn't take them up on it. I was rather disappointed. I figured they'd do it to expose a security leak. I wonder if they'd bought it for $90k, then put it on eBay, would they cover their original expense?

There is some overlap between the two, but AddAll.com comparison-shops a bunch of bookstores and will calculate shipping rates for you (for pretty much any country on the planet) and is primarily useful for looking for new books. It also includes the 3rd party sellers going through Amazon and the like.

If looking for used books, head to used.addall.com, but here you'll have to deal with shipping costs yourself.

There is some overlap between the two, but AddAll.com comparison-shops a bunch of bookstores and will calculate shipping rates for you (for pretty much any country on the planet) and is primarily useful for looking for new books. It also includes the 3rd party sellers going through Amazon and the like.

If looking for used books, head to used.addall.com, but here you'll have to deal with shipping costs yourself.

I'm not sure if I trust all those redirects...
http://www.addall.com/New/BestSeller.cgi?isbn=1587 201364&dispCurr=USD If you want to give a quick peak to see where all the prices are at a bunch of places.

I am a partner in a small specialty by-appointment bookstore in Los Angeles with a strong web presence and average internet sales of about $75 per. We charge 8.25% for orders sent to California addresses even if they're in San Diego (7.75%), San Francisco (8.5%), or Salida (7.375%). Every year without fail we battle some library or museum that insists on paying their local sales tax. They're generally slow payers (not nearly as bad as film studios though) but when we fill out the tax forms in January they ask for 8.25% and we have a healthy fear of audits. Whether a California customer calls, writes, faxes, emails or orders through our website we charge the same as if they were in the store.

The majority of books offered for sale (although not necessarily the most prominently placed) on these mega online bookstores are owned, shelved and shipped by small independent booksellers. They collect the money and deposit it into our account minus their commission and we drop-ship the orders. An order can be shipped across town without the big boys ever seeing the book and without depositing a dime into the state's coffers. Our sale is to the ethereal, tax sheltered Amazon not John Doe.

WARNING - RANT It amazes me that perfectly rational geeks will allow themselves to be fleeced by these online Wal-Marts when they can go to a site like http://addall.com/ or http://bookfinder.com/ and pay up to 25% less for the same books often from the same seller. Our websites might not be as fancy but why order from an ethically questionable corporation when you almost as easily get the exact same thing and pay a little less dealing with an independent bookseller. Plus I think it's nice to get a personal email from a human being thanking me for an order.

I tote Instant HTML around with me when I need a reference. There may be better books, but it's got what I need. It's for 4.0 and while there are changes I don't have with me, it gets me by when I need it. And while it doesn't list Opera or Firefox, it's got charts for the various tags, showing which ones are supported in IE and NN - and in which versions. Again, it's not perfect, but if I see something across the board for IE, I figure it must be IE-only and I know to avoid it. Besides, I'm willing to wager the HTML in use is restricted to a pretty significant set of tags - not much esoterica.

I buy my own books. Then they are mine to do with what I please and go with me as I move along. So I choose to buy what I like.

I got it five years ago (original print date 1997, reprint 2000) so I've gotten my money's worth. As far as killing trees, I figure this is part of a tree I saved from one of the annual forest fires in the Sierras.

I figure most of the publishers trying to come out with new flavors of HTML books are doing so for a lack of imagination & creativity for other books which should be published. There are tons of those. The problem is that most of of the people who work on publishing staffs would not be customers of their own products if they didn't work there. And that's why so many topics are overlooked or misunderstood.

First things first. There's a "Rich Dad" series: "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" - the advice rich fathers give their children vs. what most fathers tell their kids. Why do which people work for whom? Who owns the company and who works for the owner of the company? There's an entire series - advice for teens, investment advice...
Free tip for saving money (from me): Use Amazon to do your research about books - finding out a hardback book also has a paperback version, which you are willing to buy, the reviews, what books everyone else bought with it, etc.
Then: go to AddAll and use a book shopping 'bot to scan (40?) online book stores. Frequently, you'll find you can get a book and shopping for less than the book from B&N or Amazon. And occasionally, you can beat the number of days required to ship it|them. It's no different than using Froogle or PriceWatch to shop.
I was taught: go first class, then find the lowest price.

Now - a perfect example wealth and what the market (of 1) will bear in a clash of wealth vs. rich (or middle class)[1] in an episode of Taxi: Cooking for Two . Reverend Jim torches Louie's apartment and Jim's dad says he'll pay whatever Louie tells Jim on the phone (Jim's dad is extremely wealthy, as we see in another episode. Alex points out the danger of doing that - that Louie would fill it out for $1M and Louie tells him that's where they are different. Louie says there's a value low enough that (Louie shrugs his shoulders and makes a quick cheep) and high enough to make him (shudder). And Louie sets about to work through his body motions to find the right value. What happens? Louie $30,000 and Jim's dad okays it. Louie is overjoyed until he learns that Jim's dad was expecting the amount to be more like $200k.


[1] Years ago, "middle class" was a defined value. It seems now as though there's upper class and everyone else.

Shopping bot for China Mieville books which stand a good chance of being less expensive than Amazon or B&N

interesting links
guy with the money
http://biz.yahoo.com/e/040819/vlnc8-k.html
http://biz.yahoo.com/t/76/5086.html
guy with the credibility
http://www.addall.com/author/10355549-1

Rand's focus is how to develop this automatizing conciously. Some of it happens on it's own and can be incorrect. EG - fearing a parent yelling at you when you try something unusual/new.

Re: Hume/Descarts, Rand disagrees with both of them and says that knowledge comes from both the mind and experience. She is not a pure empiricist nor a pure... whatever Descarts is.

Anyway, I'd encourage you to get her book "Philosophy: Who Needs It?" You can buy it for $5.90 shipped right here.

And after that, you can complete the fourth and final referral for the link in my signature.

Whoops - not sure why I put the world "Highly" in the title. Either way, the link works. Grab the ISBN number off of Amazon.com and go buy it from the cheapest site you can from www.addall.com (cheap book search, searches 36 sites or so)

I like Amazon, but I (almost) never use it for technical books. I use addall to find the cheapest price. It saves me maybe a couple of hunderd dollars a year. It even finds books internationally, which are sometimes spectacularly cheaper than domestic.

While the book is great, the parent copied his "review" from http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/item.asp?Item=978059 600787&Catalog=Books&N=35&Lang=en&Section=books&zx ac=1 and also links to a has a amazon.com referer account.

If you want it cheap, addall.com (the book search engine) lists bookpool.com with the lowest price.

No publishers have ever taken much interest in writing specific books for it.

You mean like this one, this one, this one, even this one or any of these?

Sure, probably lots of those are re-treads from other Unix books and somewhat dated, but many books about other versions of Unix are like that too.

...is that through resources such as Ebay, half.com, your local public library, garage sales and thrift stores, you can still get manuals for such things -- AND CHEAP! I found a PDP-11 technical programming textbook at my local Goodwill for a buck.

The Net is awesome for finding any used or out-of-print books or manuals of any kind - it used to take months to find something unusual, now it can be in your hands in a couple of days. Here are two valuable resources:

http://www.bookfinder.com/
http://used.addall.com/

You can do your own shopping at thrift stores and yard sales, finding the occasional RCA Receiving Tube Manual and such (I've done that a lot and now have about 10k books, including 20 tube manuals) but this is hit-or-miss for something specific. For a few more bucks per book, you can often find exactly what you want at one of the metasearch sites above or (if it has an ISBN number) used on amazon.com.

If you still don't find it, you can subscribe to this list:
http://www.bibliophilegroup.com/ ($30 per year subscription, two week free trial)
and send a WTB: (Want To Buy) post, where hundreds of used book dealers have large portions of their inventories they've yet to enter online, but may have it for you.

Computer manuals before 1970 or so are actually in demand and worth something (maybe $10-$25).

Why does everyone insist upon Amazon and B&N? (see suggestive sell above: You can buy...")
They aren't the only stores in town and they aren't the least-expensive stores in town, either
Pay attention to where they rank with the suggestions below:
When one is tempted to buy from Amazon or B&N first, try going here: Moving to Linux via AddAll
or,
plug the ISBN into Froogle.Google. On top of that, look in the right margin of the Froogle search - it suggests "Buy 0321159985 for less" at a site named "www.chambal.com".

Whenever I see a suggestive "buy this book here" link next to a review or announcement and it's B&N or Amazon, it reminds me of those who have 'fessed up and admitted they get a kickback if purchases are made via that link. So either people are ignorant and settle for Amazon and B&N (only) or they are looking to steer some of your ca$h you could be using for Doom 3 into their pocket. (if this is the case, why don't they volunteer this up front?)

Meant to go alongside Minix (most of the source code is printed in the back) and written by Tanenbaum. We used it in my operating systems class, and I think it's one of the best resources to understand what's going on. Install the code in BOCHS under Windows/Linux and tinker away.

Why does everyone insist on considering Amazon and B&N to be the only online bookstores? I have news for you folks: it's almost always cheaper to go to AddAll or BookPool and get a book cheaper including shipping than Amazon and B&N.

In the case of this book, I've taken the liberty of making your life easier by providing you with urls which will take you directly to the price list for the book. For future reference: AddAll is a shopping 'bot, looking at thirty-six stores. AddAll Results and BookPool

Now, if you insist upon paying Amazon and B&N prices, let me know. You can PayPal the money to me and I'll order the book for you from AddAll or BookPool and have it shipped to you. (Of course, I'll keep the difference. After all, you were willing to pay the extra price!) If you're willing to waste your money, I'd rather collect the waste than Amazon or B&N.

p.s. Remember this the next time you see someone post a message saying, "it's -this price- at Amazon!"

p.p.s.
Here's the listing from Froogle (just in case you haven't used it yet)

And here's the same reference, but $20 cheaper and avoiding abusive patents.

it's hard to beat good ol' AddAll.

Sometimes Amazon actually does have the cheapest price (once shipping is figured in) -- who knew? And those random quotes from Rabindranath Tagore are cool too.

Tyler

I use addall for finding cheap books. They have the best search and price comparison(which includes shipping) that I have seen. Their search includes Hamilton as well as Powells, Alibris, and quite a few other rare/used dealers in addition to B&N, Amazon, etc.

--

What follows is a pretty good list for buying books. The top ones are pretty much 'bots such that by the time you get to Amazon, BN, and Half, you'll have already seen the prices as part of the 'bot output. Also, it builds in any discounts, coupons, and shipping. It's also handy for providing retorts in the discussions when people say, "Amazon's cheaper!" or "BN is cheaper!" because they only check those two sites.

BookPool
AddAll - Compare & Shop
Best Book Buys - Compare many sites & Shop
Barnes & Noble
Amazon
Half - mostly used books

I found Rosemary Sassoon's Teach yourself better handwriting very useful. It is specifically targeted at ppl who are trying to fix up their handwriting and not at child first time learners. Rosemary states in the book that very different approaches are required for these two different pedagogical needs.

An interesting part of the book is where Rosemary addresses pen-grips and suggests a rather radical option of holding the pen between index and middle finger. I've switched over to this and enjoy it as I never felt comfortable with the oppositionary tension between index and thumb of the standard grip.

Here is an addall link to the book (2nd edition) so you can compare prices.

Here is a link to the publisher's page on the book (2nd edition)

Here is a link to some information about the author Rosemary Sasson

That's one of the things I love about the addall.com book price search engine -- it also checks prices of non-US stores. On a number of occassions I've purchased books from the UK or Canada at a fraction of the US price, and after I took the course, managed to resell it for more than I bought it for!

My personal favorite is addall.com, which searches several bookstores for a particular book and gives you back the lowest prices (including shipping). Incredibly handy.

Movies: RottenTomatoes, imdb, and MetaCritic have saved me dozens of hours of time I might have wasted on crap (like Matrix Revolutions, or TimeLine).

Books: Amazon, despite its evils (patents/privacy), is a very nice filter (with a few shills and idiot-reviewers). I [ab]use amazon as a filter, and then buy them cheaper new or used.

News: Popular Daily News Tidbits, Blogdex, Daypop, and slashdot.

Music: iRATE radio, and word of mouth. Need more Collaborative Filtering in this area to root out the Clearchannels/RIAAs function as a giant pusher of "cool"

Ads (aka: mental engineering): I use PopFile to filter SPAM, and Privoxy to filter out slow-loading, privacy-invading, all-around-annoying ADS. I'm still missing a proxy for my eyeballs in the real world. Soooon. :)

Cheap Products: Not a quality filter exactly, but a quantity filter: PriceWatch, PriceGrabber, Froogle, Anand's Hot Deals ...

Phew, that's a lot of linkage. Anyway, I couldn't function without these and other filters; I'd really be info overloaded.

Collaborative filtering in general has a very bright future IMO.

--

I believe that there is value in reading the originals. The best way to do this is to checkout or buy various collected works such as Alan Turing's collected works. One great collected works is a book called From Frege to Godel.

In truth, it is a math book, but this is the part of math that gave birth to modern computer science. It was a branch of mathematics known as "metamathematics" or "proof theory", and it dealt with things such as completeness, consistency, and effective procedures. This programme of math failed to achieve its originals goals as people like Turing and Godel proved the goals were impossible.

However, metamathematics succeeded in that it gave rise to modern computer science. "From Frege to Godel" is such a great book because it is a collection of the original papers of the great mathematicians who lived the field of metamathematics. You will learn the problems and solutions as the great mathematicians figure them out through scholarly discourse.

You will gain real insight into what math is, how it is practiced, and the true genesis of computer science.

Not only that, but you will also read a few things that will send your mind into a state of mathematician's nirvana. Something everyone should experience at least once in their life :)

Follow up "Frege to Godel" with a book called The Undecidable, which contains the selected original works of Church, Turing, and others.

After that, I would look into algorithms papers by people like Dijkstra,
whose works are available on the net.

The utility of this is to see how new problems are dealt with and how new ideas are made.

Check AddAll.com

Or you could use a good meta-search instead to find the book faster &/or cheaper but more importantly with the ability to spurn evil patents.

For $23.50, at AbeBooks, as found by AddAll.com

Ref: AddAll Search shows where to buy it for $6 cheaper than Amazon, plus doesn't support annoying affiliate trolls.

Before the morons start quoting prices from B&N vs. Amazon, let's remember there are more than those two online. Try shopping at AddAll. It's a shopping bot for books. Prices: Overstock: $21.99, BooksAMillion: $27.44, Amazon: $27.93. Switching to BestBookBuys we get BookPool at $22.50, along with (click for the results, see Amazon in 5th place!: results. And finally, we go to BookPool with a price of $22.50. Now, can we quit using B&N and Amazon ONLY? Jeez. http://www.bestwebbuys.com/books/search?isrc=b-hom e-search&q=1590592344&t=ISBN&x=16&y=13

Before we all start blaming the bookstores for this, let me make it clear that I have worked with shipping/receiving/pricing textbooks, and I know that the publishers set the prices. My campus bookstore has about at 23% margin on textbooks, which basically covers paying rent to the Union, paying employees, and paying for the shipping costs to get the books. They are fortunate enough to be under the Division of Student Affairs, which means that they have a mandate to get as many used books as possible. They also pay well for used books that are needed.

OK, so now we get to the blame part. I, too, have purchased several texts from the UK (usually Blackwell's, but I always search AddAll first to find the best price. I don't know why the publishers can afford to sell things for 50% of the US price overseas, but it's atrocious. There's a comment on here about International Editions, the cheap paperback reprints sold in the Asian market, and I should be clear that the ones from the UK are the same quality hardbacks (with the exact same content) as the US editions. However, publishers have started catching onto the fact that US students are importing the books, and now there are some books that they won't let UK retailers export (e.g., Haviland's Anthropology ). The publishers are a bunch of money-grubing bastards, and most of them aren't even US-owned, so it makes it even more fun.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. BLAME THE PUBLISHERS, not your campus bookstore. The best thing you can do is to search for these deals and take advantage of them. Be warned that the shipping time to the interior of the US (say, North Dakota) can be a little long, even with Air Mail, since it's no longer Air Mail when the USPS gets its hands on it.

I refer my students to addall.com. Instead of paying nearly $100 for one of the best CS books ever, they paid about $30 per copy. I hope the authors still get their share.