Saturday, September 20, 2008
Prizes from recent book sale
I now have:
The winter, 2003, issue of The American Scholar, with Dana Gioia's "Nice to Meet You, Mr. Dickey," a brief essay about the author's chance encounter with James Dickey (whose novels I adore. I also bought an autographed book of his poetry while in Nashville last week. Happy!)
Brief Course in Plane and Spherical Trigonometry by Davis and Chambers. 1933. Not much has changed since then, except the style of teaching math has become more convoluted. I think I have a chance at actually learning and remembering trig with this. First page has the definitions of sine through cotangent. I'm not sure what to think about the 60 pages on spherical trig. Previously courses never enough touched on it.
Nicholson Baker's The Size of Thoughts. He wrote Double Fold, on libraries' emphasis on reducing amount of paper in favor of microfiche and digitalization. This book has essays on getting rid of paper card catalogs and on books as furniture (not furniture physically made of books, like books bolted together like lumber to make tables or shelves. These books are decoration on shelves, chosen to be decoration, to define the feel of a room, not for reading).
Lessig's Code and other laws of cyberspace.
T. Sundara Row's Geometric Exercises in Paper Folding. It seems like a Euclid's Elements kind of collection of proofs, all done with folding paper.
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