FragmentedCurve

It's not unreasonable. You asking that is what made me curious about it's validity. As I said, what made me post this thread originally was contradictory anecdotes. Possibly the belief that technical books from the mid 1900s were smaller developed at a time in my life when I was frequently being exposed to larger technical books due to life events such as undergrad. This is why I agreed to actually answer your question. Now the question is, how do we figure out if the increase did occur? My view of you has improved a little. That is such an epistemological interpretation. What matters to me is, did someone measure this data and make it available in a usable form. It doesn't matter in this context, if it can be collected. I'm not willing to spend more than a couple weekends of coding and/or making empirical measurements. Early into this discussion I sent out emails to the Library of Congress and archive.org, asking the former for methods of uniquely identifying a book and the former for data. This is slightly unfair. @Peterkin's post was productive and brought up an important issue which would require further thought if this task is even worth doing. I have some experience with this because I worked on software for a bookstore that was responsible for automating the categorization of used books. The problem @Peterkin is getting is, if the scope of the dataset is restricted to some technical subject such as math books, we don't want to accidentally include layman books. Anyway, as an end result, would a table of each decade and it's mean and median dimensions be sufficient?

This thread is disappointing. If I've learned anything here, it's a thread about the value of anecdotal experience needs to be created. I'm going to wrap this up just for the sake of not leaving this thread hanging. First, I'll descibe what actually motivated me to post this which was initially avoided because I assumed it too verbose and unecessary . A common experience between me and my peers is that the size of technical books have increased. None of us have had hard evidence for it. It was just a common experience with the books we would read and were interested in. I had an hour to kill before I went to the airport and spent that time browsing a bookstore. While there, I looked through the computer books and noticed the publisher "No Starch" printed a copy of "Cyberjutsu: Cybersecurity for the Modern Ninja" that was smaller than their typical books. The experience of finding small books in math, computer science, and physics seems to be increasing. Some of the books even advertise the fact they're "smaller" in their preface. I doubt listing examples will be helpful... So, I made this thread, wondering why did the types of books I read get big; especially if authors are intentionally trying to publish smaller books. Obviously, all of this is anecdotal. I never tried to assert it was anything more than that. Some of you insisted I need to provide evidence that my premise, that newer technical books are larger than older books, is true. Maybe I should've defined "newer" and "older" so that the context would be clearer. You're pushing back against your imagination. You wanted hard evidence that the size of technical books has increased, I started thinking about how we could practically collect that data. I never said it can't be objectively answered. If you're looking for people that want to make you accept some belief or bias, go to a church or political rally and get off science forums. You would've been more productive if you asked for clarification on miscommunications or details that weren't clear. You've added nothing but distraction to the discussion. I think you have a screw lose. You bring up some important points, but I'm not in the mood to continue this at the moment. With respect to Schaum's and Dover, it's the same on my shelves. In fact, my copy of Naive Set Theory by Paul Halmos shrunk because Dover published a reprint which I bought. How and why do you know this?

The thought of getting it from publishers crossed my mind. I was thinking maybe there's a way to have the data come to us. If there's a way to uniquely identify a printed book, then crowds can submit data with all the data points that would allow us to uniquely identify the book they're measuring. If uniquely identifying printed books over the past century is impossibly, then as you said, anecdotal we'll remain.

Please don't assume details that weren't discussed. Obviously, huge amounts of data for the number of pages in books exist. You can easily scrape that from Google's book API, the Library of Congress API, Amazon, and many other sources. We didn't discuss what data points are worth collecting. The general question that's being asked is, have the (average) physical dimensions of technical books changed over time? There are many ways to look at this, right? We can break it down into different categories that might be worth looking at individually. Such cateogies might be, high school textbooks, undergrad textbooks, professional software engineering books, math & computer science monologues. This is totally ancedotal, but those categories feel like they have different characteristics. The obvious data points to collect are length, width, height, mass and page count (as you mentioned). Off the top of my head, I don't know of any source that provides those other data points.

Right. You're taking this way more seriously than me and now you're making me curious. I was originally going to say: I'm almost certain there's a bias in my collection of books, so if everyone added to the data, I was hoping to help soften that bias. I'm not claiming that we would be able to conclude something definitively from this nor would it be good data. But a collection of ancedotes can offer suggestions. But now I'm wondering, if we actually wanted a real answer to this question, does this data exist? If not, maybe we can passively collect enough data. This would probably be eaiser if we limit outselves to books that aren't older than the library of congress. The LCCN or ISBN combined with a print date will provide a unique identifer for a physical book. I'm thinking...

No, it's totally anecdotal. That's why I said "seem". I return home from vacation on Jan 5th. When I get back, I'll start measuring books from my personal library. I was thinking I can put up a spreadsheet on google docs or something so others can contribute their own data.

My original question was broader in scope than just high school or college textbooks. If we're restricting the discussion to high school and undergrad textbooks for the moment, it's easy to see that the increase in dimensions is not from us collectively learning more. Calculus has been calculus for a very long time. There's nothing new in an undergrad calculus textbook. The only difference I can find, is the introduction of calculators and the use of vectors in multi-variable calculus. (The older calculus textbooks didn't focus so much on vectors.) Most math books rarely need to be updated; despite this, their length and width seem to have increased.

One of the main reasons I use old books these days is because I'll get a different perspective. The presentation of and feeling for a subject changes over time. A student can learn whatever he needs to pass a test from a class textbook. But if a student wants to develop a deep intuition for a subject, it helps to see the difference in emphasis and techniques between then and now. I have no complaints about better diagrams, I just don't think the size of a page has to increase much for printing a better diagram.

My library consists of books ranging from around 1910 to today. Over the past 2 years I've slimmed down my library. I discarded many of my newer books (especially my computer books from around 2000 to 2010 and the 80s). However, I kept most of my older books because they're harder to replace. The older books I've discarded were ones I'll never reference again. When I was a teenager, I couldn't afford new books so I would go to used book stores to find math books. For example, I wanted/needed a copy of William Fellers' probability book but couldn't buy it new, but eventually found it for a couple dollars at "The Bruised Apple". Back then I use to literally walk 5 miles to browse through "The Bruised Apple" bookstore. I loved that place. Anyway, I ended up keeping the habit of studying subjects from old books in addition to using newer ones. So, I have a decent amount of old books, especially old math books.

I have enough from that time period to measure.

This doesn't make any sense. Those "cartoons" and "fun facts" were such an annoyance. Color pictures don't lead to larger pages and I haven't actually measured it but the font size doesn't seem larger in newer books. Plus, it's not just school textbooks, it's professional books in general such as UNIX programming books. I'm on vacation right now, when I return after the holidays, I'll measure some of the books I own. That'll give me something more concrete to talk about.

Something that doesn't make sense to me is the size of textbooks and technical books. If you look at technical books from the mid-1900s, they were human friendly sizes. For example, the 2nd edition of University Physics by Sears & Zemansky which was published in the 1950s is split into 2 volumes and it's lighter and smaller than the modern editions. (However, the content remains mostly the same.) Unlike it's modern version, it was clearly meant to be held by a human. Any speculations on why this trend occurred?

I don't really know how to answer your questions because they don't really make sense. From what I can gather, the important thing is you want [math]x>q[/math]. Below I give your conjecture with a simpler function that has the same property along with a proof. Conjecture Given the function [math]f(x)=\frac{x^2}{N}[/math], if N=pq is a semiprime and p>q , then p>x>q when f(x)=1 . Proof [math]1=\frac{x^2}{N} \implies \sqrt{N}=x[/math] Given that p>q , then [math]p^2>N>q^2 \implies p>\sqrt{N}>q \therefore p>x>q[/math].

I'm coming to this thread late and trying to make sense of it. @Trurl, your writing style is difficult to parse. You should also learn [math]\LaTeX[/math] which will make it easier for others to read your math. @Trurl correct me if I'm wrong about your work and motivation. This is what I understand you're trying to do. The motivation is to find a method of approximating the smaller prime factor of a semi-prime. So, if [math]N[/math] is a semi-prime and [math]p[/math] and [math]q[/math] are primes such that [math]q<p[/math] and [math]N=pq[/math], then you want a function [math]f(x)[/math] such that there exists a point [math](n, f(n))[/math] where [math]f(n) \approx q[/math]. And the reason you want such a function is so if [math]n[/math] is known or easy to find, then you limit the search space to find [math]q[/math] and you also approximately know the lower bound for [math]p[/math] because it must be greater than [math]q[/math]. I don't think he gets the number 3, it's a counter example.

This was actually very helpful. It lead me to some real world examples I can look at.

I haven't seen this before. This looks interesting. Free is always good but I'm looking for either of them. I own a license for Mathematica; so add-ons for Mathematica (or sagemath) are welcomed. I was trying to cast a wide net. Anything that is applicable to the physics and molecular construction of materials is desirable. Also, software for simulating the mechanics of materials is good. For example, I had an idea about canceling out wave propagation across a series of rigid structures of different material. In this situation, I'd hook up some sensors to a raspberry pi. Setup a structure to control the possible variables. Produce a wave through the structure. In this situation, I'd also be writing software for the raspberry pi. I'd like to move the structure(s), the sensors, and the wave generation into software. Instead of the software on the raspberry pi collecting data directly from the sensors, it would get the output from the software simulation. Any software that can simulate the physics & chemistry for the molecular structure of materials, the thermodynamics of materials, the Newtonian mechanics of materials, and fluid dynamics. I'd like workflow of the simulation software to work on first principles rather than being heavily designed with a specific engineering application. Is this narrow enough to be helpful? I'd like to take Menlo Park laboratory and put it in a RAD software environment.

I'm an outsider to the physical sciences. My only real skill sets to date are math (of the pure kind) and CS. But I seem to have an undying desire to pursue goals and ideas in the physical sciences. (I say "physical sciences" because I don't want to limit myself to physics, chemistry, or material science.) Many of my goals sit at the intersection of research and invention. Nobody is going to give me a lab and I don't have the means to build my own. Because I lack the means, I started gravitating towards existing hackerspaces (and possibly starting my own). COVID has put using hackerspaces to a halt. So, I started looking into using software simulations to experimentally test hypotheses. Now, this kind of brings me into a world I'm more familiar and comfortable with. While researching the tools of the trade, it was obvious there's a lot various tools & techniques and they vary by niche. Each niche is a world of tools, techniques and jargon. Navigating these established communities only for the purpose of surveying what they have, for the sake of finding an application to a specific problem is time consuming. Can the experts here pull together a list of software tools, books, papers and advice on the topics of computational physics, computational chemistry, and computational material science? Keep in mind, the context is the lone capable scholar using these tools and skills as a substitute for a lab.

I get the feeling you'd be interested in the recent work of Stephen Wolfram and his crew if you haven't already been looking at it. He builds up geometry from just nodes and edges (graph theory) with the goal of deriving what we know about physics already. https://www.wolframphysics.org/technical-introduction/basic-form-of-models/ From what I understand, when he published his big book NKS approximately 20 years ago, he knew cellular automata (and graphs) was too limiting for his purposes because it imposed structure. In recent years, a colleague of his Jonathan Gorard put together the piece Wolfram was originally missing which was building his models with hypergraphs. After that collaboration they feel they've made a great deal of progress. I haven't been following their work closely, so I might be off with the details. Anyway, you might be into it.

The top protocol might be useful to you. It's p2p and encrypted. It's intended as a instant messaging protocol but there's nothing stopping you from building an application on top of it instead. https://tox.chat/ Also, you might find it useful to play around with tox using the ratox client. https://ratox.2f30.org/

Let's be a little more rigorous. It's not entirely accurate to say findComputerMove is not returning values. The problem is it's not returning a tuple and is instead returning the None type. Python is strongly typed. Let's go back and rewrite a previous code snippet: # Original code # a, b, c = self.findComputerMove(foo, bar, something) result = self.findComputerMove(foo, bar, something) a, b, c = result The first assignment is just a normal variable value assignment. At this moment, Python doesn't assert that the type returned by findComputerMove be a specific type. It will accept an integer, float, string, and even a tuple. Whatever type that findComputerMove returns, defines the result's type. However, the second assignment isn't the same as the first. It's a tuple assignment. The = symbol is a tuple assignment and it expects the right side to be a type that is iterable. And it must be the same length as the left. It's short for the following: result = self.findComputerMove(foo, bar, something) a = result[0] b = result[1] c = result[2] Here's some code about types for you to look over and think about: >>> def do_nothing(): ... pass ... >>> foo = do_nothing() >>> bar = None >>> type(foo) <class 'NoneType'> >>> type(bar) <class 'NoneType'> >>> foo is bar True >>> foo is None True >>> foo == bar True >>> foo == None True >>> def do_none(): ... return None ... >>> do_none() is do_nothing() True >>> do_none() == do_nothing() True >>>

In your OP, findComputerMove is defined as: def findComputerMove(self, row, column, pieceStr): print("Inside find Computer Move") I don't see 3 values being returned. I don't see anything being returned. When you write a line of code like the following: a, b, c = self.findComputerMove(foo, bar, something) the assumption is that findComputerMove returns a tuple of length 3. Is that clear?

import numpy as np class Board: # ... def findComputerMove(self, row, column, pieceStr): print("Inside find Computer Move") def computerModule(self, pieceStr): n = 8 row = -1 column = -1 pName = "" row, column, pName = self.findComputerMove(row, column, pieceStr) # This is the problem return True def main(self): # ... if __name__ == "__main__": objBoard = Board(8) objBoard.main() In computerModule you're calling findComputerMove. What does findComputerMove return? (Your code has more problems after you answer that and solve the problem.)

If that's true, do we know why they'd prefer one species over another? And what would make them prefer one host over another within the same species?

No. It was an impromptu hike into the woods behind my house -- a nature walk. We didn't have any kind of bug repellent. However, I don't know if he was wearing deodorant or cologne. The reason we did the experiment was because I've had so many anecdotal experiences like this with ticks, I wanted a real measurement. Especially with this particular friend. We'd walk the same path through tall grass or in the woods and I'd come out with ticks on me while he'd have none. On that day, I took the opportunity to have a somewhat controlled experiment, since I had the living tick. I should point out, if anyone tries to repeat this, I'd really like to know the results.

I see where the miscommunication is -- how I got the tick. In this particular case, my friend saw it on my neck/shoulder area before it bit me. I just picked it up. The result could've been a coincidence. We only did 11 "trials". I thought it was enough to suggest that something is going on with how a tick finds a body.