What amazes me is that it took until now for the idea to catch on. I was expecting this back in the early '90s.
Wednesday, 27 October 2010
Cheaper, but no good as a door stop.
What amazes me is that it took until now for the idea to catch on. I was expecting this back in the early '90s.
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My all-time favorite memory of my college days is my Stochastic Logic class. Originally taught by a highly intelligent man who claimed he was an atheist on purely "logical" grounds. When he needed prostate surgery, he was replaced by a Berkeley retread who opened the first day of class by stating that logic had no place in the real world.
My response? "I'm sure that would come as a hell of a surprise to Aristotle."
He didn't get it. Not that I expected him to.
As for textbooks, I also remember it fondly as the only class I didn't need to shell out $50+ for the textbook in- because there wasn't one. As opposed to the trigonometry class with a $90 text that the teacher liked... because it had balloons on the cover.
Most of the text's contents, and that of the teacher, was hot air, too. (How the student "feels" about functions, etc.)
cheers
eon
On the other hand, you can doodle/take notes in the margins of paper books. And the format, printed text, will never become obsolete, no matter where your life takes you.
True story. My undergrad diffy-q textbook was not the best, so I borrowed my father's (also an engineer) copy of Piskunov, which he'd used at Kiev Polytech. Neighbor, who was not the brightest guy in the engineering school, and a semester behind me in the math area, walks in. "What are you reading?" "It's the new diffy-q textbook. You'll get it next semester." Dude's jaw drops to the ground, bounces, and drops again. Later, after smelling salts were administered, etc., he looked at the thing: "You know? Greek letters look the same in Russian!"
He was a manager, last I heard of him. Naturally.
I agree about the superiority of text and am a confirmed bibliophile of the paper persuasion, though I do confess to relying more these days on the electronic variety for workaday books in the interests of reserving space for more beloved tomes.
When it comes to textbooks, however, twenty years of experience as student and teacher at the university level has left me regarding textbooks as incredibly expensive ephemera. The only one I've held onto is a logic text printed in 1935 and never surpassed since.
Graphing calculators are also a big ripoff. The same calculator with the same features and the same display and the same amount of RAM that cost $120 in 1990 still costs $120 today. Oh, it's got a USB port now and a removable face plate but it's still the same damned calculator.
Bryan;
Agreed. Not being an engineer, I get by with the TI-50 calculator I bought thirty years ago. $50, and it still works. Being solar powered, I don't need to buy batteries for it, either.
Of course, my back up (besides pencil, paper and a log table) is my even more ancient Pickett N902-T slide rule. Belt plus suspenders.
cheers
eon
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