Comments for An Ergodic Walk

Comment on Charity bleg by Anand Sarwate

Anand Sarwate — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 17:20:08 +0000

I’ll probably make a small stack and send them media mail — you’re right in that it doesn’t make as big a difference as getting rid of most of my books. I’ve been slowly divesting myself of books over time but I might do what you did if I move from Chicago.

Comment on ITA Workshop 2012 : More Talks by ITA 2012: some evanescent reflections « The Information Structuralist

ITA 2012: some evanescent reflections « The Information Structuralist — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 19:25:32 +0000

[...] was held at a new location, Catamaran Resort on Mission Bay. Anand has already blogged about some talks; this is my selection, which is disjoint from his. I will follow Cosma’s example and just [...]

Comment on ITA Workshop 2012 : Talks by ITA 2012: some evanescent reflections « The Information Structuralist

ITA 2012: some evanescent reflections « The Information Structuralist — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 19:25:30 +0000

[...] ITA was held at a new location, Catamaran Resort on Mission Bay. Anand has already blogged about some talks; this is my selection, which is disjoint from his. I will follow Cosma’s example and [...]

Comment on Charity bleg by rif

rif — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 16:28:32 +0000

Shipping paper books is pretty cheap, so maybe. I remain skeptical of the marginal value of individual copies of 10+ years old textbooks in the age of the internet.

When I moved from SF to California, I got rid of about roughly 2/3 of my books because it would’ve cost $1000 more to move them and I would’ve needed more space for them. The best I could find was a for-profit organization that would come to my house get all the books [I boxed them], go through them, sell the ones that were worth anything, and *they* keep all the money. So the real service they provided was coming to my house to get stuff, and the knowledge that they were a relatively efficient organization at knowing which books somebody would want.

Your books do seem to meet the requirements for Books For Africa. They mention that it’s going to cost them 50c/book to get them to Africa, and you have to mail them the books. It feels marginal to me.

I’ll be curious if you do it.

Comment on Charity bleg by Anand Sarwate

Anand Sarwate — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 18:26:33 +0000

http://www.booksforafrica.org/

Comment on Charity bleg by Anand Sarwate

Anand Sarwate — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 18:07:01 +0000

I wasn’t thinking of donating to a US university — as you said, the edition thing would cause them to be obsolete. But a library in a less resource-laden place (e.g. Africa) might be able to use some older (but in good condition) textbooks, at least for the library. Or maybe not. I don’t think most of the things I have to donate have too much resale value, so if nobody wants them I might just recycle them, which seems pretty sad.

Comment on Charity bleg by rif

rif — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 06:56:46 +0000

I don’t want to get your hopes down, but I think most 10 year old textbooks are unlikely to be very useful. Actual university courses are in cahoots with textbook publishers to change up the books every year or so. If it’s actual material, I think the proliferation of free web books is changing physics and math pretty fast.

There are exceptions; if your book is Griffith’s Electrodynamics for instance, it’s clearly still quite valuable. I actually wonder whether the most effective way to turn it into charity would be to sell it back to Amazon for the $75 gift card and then donate that to any charity you like.

Comment on The post office is winning at programming by errhode

errhode — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 19:17:19 +0000

At least they don’t obfuscate their variables!

Comment on Banach spaces, super-reflexivity, and martingale type by Anand Sarwate

Anand Sarwate — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 16:21:25 +0000

Ah thanks for this correction! I guess what I should do is post incorrect math in the hopes that someone will come and correct me. Are James spaces in a sense pathological (like some counterexamples in topology)? In the end the paper I was reading is proposing some algorithms to be used for computations in Banach spaces and I get the sense that most “nice” reflexive Banach spaces are isomorphic to their double dual.

Comment on Banach spaces, super-reflexivity, and martingale type by philipbrooker

philipbrooker — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 03:39:41 +0000

It is not always true that a Banach space is reflexive when it is isomorphic to its double dual; the definition is that it is reflexive if the canonical embedding into the double dual is surjective (in other words, it is isomorphic to its double dual via the canonical embedding in particular). A key example of a nonreflexive Banach space that is isomorphic to its bidual was given by R.C. James (the same guy as in your reference list above), and it is commonly known as the “James space” or “James’ quasireflexive Banach space”, et cetera. By the way, quasireflexive means that the space is of finite codimension in its double dual; as it turns out, there are quasireflexive Banach spaces that are not isomorphic to their double dual.