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Comment by david927 | Hacker News Reader

My wife's and my

Nice looking site. It missed what I searched for (quantum mechanics) but it looks very nice.

I object to the site's notion that there is a "best" intro book in many areas, but I'd like to see listed on the site:

Griffiths' _Introduction to Quantum Mechanics_ is quite commonly used, even though it's a bit calculation-heavy. Beyond that or for more theory, perhaps Ballentine, or Dirac's original monograph, although neither is a very common text (if that's what someone's looking for, then Shankar [mid-level-ish], Cohen-Tannoudji, or Sakurai); Ballentine because it's new (relatively... 1998), and Dirac because it's old and it's what a lot of the mid-to-late 20th-century physics giants started from. Feynman's Quantum Mechanics and Path Integrals is also a no-brainer because it's been republished and it's now a $12 Dover edition.

(NP and NP)'s sounds more natural to me than (NP's and NP's). We say "Jack and Jill's story", not "Jack's and Jill's story"

Grammar girl has an explanation [1] of the rule I've heard elsewhere and always followed---splitting it into "Jack's and Jill's" if they have separate and distinct things (so "Jack's and Jill's stories") and attaching the possessive to the compound entity if they share the item (so "Jack and Jill's story"). So in this case you're definitely correct about not splitting up the possession.

I haven't been able to find anything authoritative to explain what to do when there is a pronoun involved, though I believe the correct form would be "my wife and my..." and not "my wife and I's".

[1] http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/grammar-compound-posses...

How do you differentiate between saying the project was a combined effort vs. talking about two distinct entities. eg., My wife and my projects were casualties of the war. Did the projects the two of you were working on destroyed in the war, or did you lose your wife and your projects?

I rewrite to avoid the ambiguity:

My wife and I worked on projects that became casualties of the war.

My rule of thumb is to say them out loud separately:

My wife's weekend project

My weekend project

so...

My wife's and my weekend project

My wife and my. Correcting grammar isn't cool.

Any chance there'll be a `Best free intro book` link of sorts to curate all the textbooks available in PDF form? Sometimes it's hard to find quality free content like `Linear Algebra Done Wrong.`

> Correcting grammar isn't cool.

I find it helpful to see grammatical corrections; they make me marginally less likely to make the same mistakes myself. ("The key to learning is repetition, repetition, repetition, ...")

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