Bookshops and procrastination

Each month, I allow myself one visit to a "significant" bookshop - ie one where I am seriously likely to spend money. Lately it has been the charity bookshop which sells the books that the Brisbane City Council library has removed from their collection - from which I have obtained some great books at awesome prices (like the 1994 edition of the McGraw-Hill Concise Encyclopedia of Science and Technology for A$2.50).

Today I found a new (to me) secondhand bookshop, which will no doubt be re-visited. I found it after making half a dozen phone calls to bookshops this morning looking for one which sold Analog Science Fiction / Science Fact magazines - it seems that most Brisbane used bookshops don't bother stocking secondhand magazines of any sort nowadays. I now have 11 magazines from the 1980s full of "hard" science fiction stories to peruse (and the knowledge that there are dozens more which are even older still sitting on their shelves).

I also found a book called The World Treasury of Physics, Astronomy and Mathematics, which is an anthology of modern science writing, including authors such as Richard Feynman, Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, Max Planck, Isaac Asimov, Bertrand Russell, Roger Penrose, Stephen Hawking, Edwin Hubble, Steven Weinberg, Benoit Mandelbrot, James Gleick, Alan Turing, John Archibald Wheeler, Paul Dirac, C P Snow, Thomas Kuhn, Karl Popper, etc, etc, etc (ie lots of people that I've heard of). As well as the expected articles on physics, astronomy and maths, it includes articles on philosophy and science, and also about the scientists' lives and works. I'm hoping that dipping into it occasionally will help renew my flagging morale and energy when I get stuck in my maths and physics studies, and remind me why I'm doing this.

And yes, in case you were wondering, as of today, I have spent the last two weeks actively avoiding trying to write summary notes of the last maths book I completed - it's the last of four that were written in-house by the college through which I'm studying, and it's so riddled with mistakes (especially the chapter on statistics) that I'm really going to struggle to make enough sense of it to write useful notes. Once that's done and I've sent off the tutorial assignments, I have a test to do and then, assuming all that goes OK, I need to register for the first exam. Then I will have completed the equivalent of Year 11 Maths B in Queensland (we have 12 years of high school here).

Luckily the Year 12 Maths B is done using one of the textbooks that the schools use, so I should no longer be tripping over mistakes in the book all the time - although I admit to some fears over the Physics course, which I hope to enrol in sometime in December or January, which is written completely in-house.

Tomorrow, I will go back to the maths, I promise – that is, unless I find something else more interesting to do, or I’m too tired, or I get distracted, or ………….