What I meant is that I'm not being pedantic for the sake of being pedantic.
103 karma · joined February 28, 2019
The argument is that it makes it easier for the professors/teachers to grade homework when they're submitted electronically. Of course, that's a stupid argument since part of a professor's job is teaching students, and that inevitably involves grading things. Few professors would be convinced by such an argument though.
I can also understand why publishers push for digital subscriptions. Introductory physics textbooks have hardly changed in the past 30-40 years (I would even say they were less distracting and had better problems 30 years ago than now), and it should be obvious for the execs at Pearson and MacMillan that their business model is not going to survive unless they introduce subscription based textbooks. You really don't need anything more than an old (SI-units based) copy of Halliday & Resnick to learn introductory physics.
[1]: https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/24533/find-the-aver...
* Problems for Children from 5 to 15: http://jnsilva.ludicum.org/HMR13_14/Arnold_en.pdf
* A mathematical trivium pt. 1: http://www.physics.montana.edu/avorontsov/teaching/problemof...
* A mathematical trivium pt. 2: https://www.latroika.com/mathoman/exos/arnold-exos-math-engl...
1. "What Is Mathematics? An Elementary Approach to Ideas and Methods" by Courant and Robbins -- a general book on mathematics in the spirit of Feynman lectures.
2. Strogatz's "Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos" -- it's a bit narrow in scope (mostly dynamical systems with a little bit of chaos/fractals thrown in) but very good nonetheless.
3. Tristan Needham, "Visual Complex Analysis", beautiful introduction to complex analysis.
4. Cornelius Lanczos, "The Variational Principles of Mechanics" -- this is a physics book, but one of the classics in the subject, and as Gerald Sussman once remarked, you glean new insights each time you read it.
5. Cornelius Lanczos, "Linear Differential Operators" -- an excellent treatment of differential operators, Green's functions, and other things that one encounters in infinite-dimensional vector spaces. This book has some very intuitive explanations, e.g., why d/dx is not self-adjoint (i.e., Hermitian), whereas d^2/dx^2 is.
For chemistry, I would recommend "General Chemistry" by Linus Pauling, even though it's a bit outdated.
> the FSF needs to focus on the algorithms that change people behavior
Is this satire or does the author really want the FSF to engage in mind control? This is such low-effort tripe and obvious personal attack.
> I also loved Louisa Gilder’s The Age of Entanglement and Kip Thorne’s Black Holes and Time Warps. That one was slow for me, but it was like being in the kind of physics class I always dreamed of taking. At Harvard I had taken a class, Physics for Poets. The professor said in an impatient way, “If you can’t follow the math, then you don’t have to, but I can’t really explain it without the math, so just do the best you can.”
And this is true. You can't learn physics by listening to a physicist talk or by reading popular science books. The title of the article gave me the impression that the author picked up a university-level book in physics and worked through it. As far as reading popular science goes, I think a lot of SF authors do that. And there are also SF authors who dig deeply into the science they write about (e.g., Greg Egan, Peter Watts, etc.).
You fail to see that nonprofit publishers (IEEE, AIP, APS, AMS, etc.) also typeset and copyedit articles just like Elsevier, and that too at a much smaller price. The point is that you don't have to charge customers exorbitantly if the only thing they are gaining on publishing with Elsevier is neatly typeset articles. Further, Elsevier outsources the production of its papers to companies [1] in India. If it's production quality that one wants, those companies can probably do it at a fiftieth of the price Elsevier finally charges the customer.