In the spirit of Bullwinkle, I think that all blog entries should be required to have two titles. . . .
Anyway, Seth linked to this amusing note by Preston McAfee.
P.S. In a comment to my earlier entry, somebody linked to McAfee’s free introductory economics textbook. I started reading it, and it seems great so far. Maybe if I’d read a book like this thirty years ago I would’ve become an economist. Or maybe not, I dunno. It’s not like my statistics textbooks were so delightful; I just liked the subject. And I’ve never read a poli sci textbook in my life.
Sadly, even if you accepted such a bribe, the money would not be enough to purchase Chemical Shifts and Coupling Constants for Silicon-29. Now there's a book price that cries out for explanation! (Read the reviews — they're hilarious.)
Academic books go out of print relatively quickly — I think publishers make money on the initial (library) run, and then get it off their books. So I retrieved the copyright from two of my books (on recidivism and crime mapping), scanned them, and made them available on my website under a Creative Commons (some rights reserved) copyright. Of course, they're not textbooks, so the economics are different.
A Pie chart we can all love:
http://maryandmatt.net/store/cpc.html
(I don't recall where I learned about this, don't think it was you).
There has been an update to this story
http://www.mcafee.cc/Bin/NSSP.html