Where to begin?

[Hypnotic]

Originally Posted By: Dantius

Originally Posted By: Hypnotic

Since there is no Day/Night in Geneforge, how do we now hours arn't passing while training?

There is some kind of arbitrary day counter on the map. I've never been able to figure out how it worked, though. I think it has something to do with the number of times you switch zones...

Hence why I said hours not days. Even if the day did pass, it would be hard to prove since you would be switching zones anyway.

I think its every 3 or 4 zones you pass through changes the day by +1. Mabey even 5.

[Randomizer]

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity

I haven't written any books yet.

I thought all professors wrote books so they could make their students buy them.

[cfgauss]

Did you know the guy who wrote the "standard" intro calculus book everyone uses bought a huge freakin mansion? With a god damned concert hall in it. It's disgusting. His book is overpriced and terrible. The man deserves a beating, not money.

[Dantius]

Originally Posted By: cfgauss

Did you know the guy who wrote the "standard" intro calculus book everyone uses bought a huge freakin mansion? With a god damned concert hall in it. It's disgusting. His book is overpriced and terrible. The man deserves a beating, not money.

This is a little concept called "capitalism". Basically, it reasons that the consumer is the best judge of quality, not an expert, and that the consumer votes for the quality of a product by buying it. Thus, the people who write the best books as judged by the common people get to roll around in giant piles of flaming diamonds, while the people who write the best books as judged by the experts usually get nowhere near as much $$$ as people who can write books that people like and buy.

Case in point, Dan Brown.

[Student of Trinity]

You can get rich by writing a text that gets very widely adopted, but that's like winning the lottery. The chances that your textbook will make you rich are very low, and if it's on a topic that doesn't have any huge-enrollment freshman courses, they're zero.

 

In my field, writing textbooks is kind of dubious. Time is precious, and you need to be writing research articles in journals, not textbooks explaining stuff for the Nth time. Even writing a review article is something you really think twice about, because it will probably cost more time than it will be worth in terms of acclaim. Sometimes overachieving young hotshots manage to fit in review articles and even books without much noticeable effect on their research output, but for normal people, writing books is pretty much a confession that you're out of new ideas. Those who can, do, and all.

 

As to the voice of the people: the market is not perfectly efficient, or at least, it's not efficient in the way you may want. A bad book is unlikely to become popular, but a good enough book that has achieved widespread acceptance can probably retain its predominance against books that really are slightly better.

 

If a guy's calc text made him a mint, I'd have to agree that it can't really be such a bad book. But it might well not be the best book.

 

[cfgauss]

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity

You can get rich by writing a text that gets very widely adopted, but that's like winning the lottery. The chances that your textbook will make you rich are very low, and if it's on a topic that doesn't have any huge-enrollment freshman courses, they're zero.

Yeah, I don't know of any other intro text authors who've made millions.

Quote:

In my field, writing textbooks is kind of dubious. Time is precious, and you need to be writing research articles in journals, not textbooks explaining stuff for the Nth time. Even writing a review article is something you really think twice about, because it will probably cost more time than it will be worth in terms of acclaim.

Yeah, that's true, but it's very unfortunate. I've found the few texts by the top people I have (e.g., Weinberg, MTW, etc) are way better than the average text.

Quote:

As to the voice of the people: the market is not perfectly efficient, or at least, it's not efficient in the way you may want.

I would say in this context, it's "perfectly not efficient."

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A bad book is unlikely to become popular, but a good enough book that has achieved widespread acceptance can probably retain its predominance against books that really are slightly better.

I really don't believe popularity has anything to do with how good a book is. Remember, the only people who can judge the book's quality are professors. The average student isn't really capable of determining if a book is good or not (without, e.g., comparing it to others).

Not that that really matters, because the students don't have a choice in what textbooks they get. The professors, who are the only ones who can really tell you if a book is good don't really read the texts carefully enough to determine if it's a good book or not. (After all, if you already know a subject, why would you spend your time doing this?) This results in a lot of professors judging books by opening them up to a random page and saying "yes, yes, I do recognize this equation" and then putting it back on their bookshelf, never to look at it again .

Not that that matters, either, because (well, depending on universities; this is more true for larger ones, state ones (iirc), and particularly for intro classes) the professor has no choice at all in the text. Some administrator or department head who had lunch with a publisher chose the book. (cf, "Feynman and the school board", it's not much different for many universities, apparently).

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If a guy's calc text made him a mint, I'd have to agree that it can't really be such a bad book. But it might well not be the best book.

It's bad, I read it. I used a combination of two other books to learn it in high school, and used this one later in college classes, and it was terrible in comparison.

I can further quote the fact that I have a two bookshelves right next to me with like ~150 books on them. Of the maybe 20 or so that are from classes, about half aren't very good, the other half are okay. Of the rest, I'd say about 75% are very good, 25% are okay, and maybe one or two are bad. I also have about 20 other books from classes sitting in a closet that are so terrible they don't deserve a space on my bookshelves . [This may sound like a lot of books but it's a physics + astro + math undergrad + physics grad school + research + fun stuff, which adds up.]

So based on my empirical evidence, classroom texts are systematically much worse than books I choose for myself based on actually being good (and, typically, sophisticated).

edit:

Originally Posted By: Dantius

You play chess? Sweet! I love chess. PM me if you'd like a quick game.

Actually I really suck . I never really put in the time to be good. Although, when I play against good people it can be amusing when they think I'm using some amazing clever strategy that they've never seen before, but it turns out that, no, I just suck .