You want an assignment; I see no concession

[austin_dern]

And the word has come down! Long after I'd assumed the proposal had gone off into that gentle sort of rejection where the editor pretends he just didn't hear the question, the publishers from my first coauthored textbook have agreed they think there'll be enough to justify a second edition.

It's not just the proposal sent in way back whenever it was, I should point out. We've been doing some new research and that's going to add several substantial new chapters. Probably if we didn't have that the proposal would have been left in its un-answered, don't-worry-about-it nothingness. But we have the new content, which is already one paper and should expand to several more, and all works out.

I'm really looking forward to this. Writing is fun, but looking at it on paper made me really see its sins, some of them minor (badly edited paragraphs, for example), some of them unforgiveable (pulling together disparate sources meant we had to have one symbol mean something different the last chapter from what it meant the rest of the book). I'm very looking forward to getting that cleaned up.

Trivia: Waxy maize (or waxy corn), used for providing cooking starch, was bred for seed from a 1908 Chinese import during World War II, when the Southeast Asian supply of tapioca was cut off from the West. Source: Twinkie, Deconstructed Steve Ettlinger.

Currently Reading: Living Dangerously: The Adventures of Merian C Cooper, Creator of King Kong, Mark Cotta Vaz. And, uh, wow. So the guy was shot down in World War I, presumed dead, but captured by the Germans, and then joined the Kosciusko squadron in the Polish-Soviet War, was shot down again, presumed dead, but captured by the Soviets, and made an escape on foot back to the west. And then he started having adventures like, well, Carl Denhan.

[ Miscellaneous oddities: at the end of The Price Is Right the weather reporter, talking about the beautiful weather, said it was going to change soon and he teased, ``We'll talk about the risk of fires, maybe some snow.'' Risk of fires? Of course, that's where the Tivo cut off. ]

Comments

[xolo.livejournal.com]

NWS shows fire risk in Virgina and North Carolina: http://www.nws.noaa.gov/

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

All right, that makes sense then. I suppose that'd be tossed to the weather guy, but it was presented as though he were talking about conditions likely to be faced in the New York City broadcast area.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

Ahh good! I hoep that the second edition indeed shall be a nice improvement for readers,a profitable release for you, and won't make for too many college students griping about the new one being adopted next semester making their books worth 1% of the purchase price instead of 3%.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Ah, perhaps more's the pity, the book isn't really suitable as a textbook unless you put together one of those quirky special-topics classes. (That's by design; it is the intersection of two fields not usually put up against each other.) But I hope with a year to rewrite it we'll be able to make it better suited for class use.

For profitability, well, I don't mean to brag but this sort of thing could pull in hundreds of dollars by 2013 alone, if you can imagine.

[lexomatic.livejournal.com]

Congratulations! Will you need beta readers for the new edition? And if so, at what level of mathematical skill? (I'm guessing you skipped a link to the book or publisher to avoid identifying yourself, inasmuch as you maintain plausible anonymity here on LJ.)

My experience with college math (PDE, group theory) shows that I'm usually able to understand the concepts presented, even if I fail to successfully apply them to the problem sets afterward. And more fundamentally, with my carefully-honed pattern-matching capabilities I can spot inconsistencies and incompletely-explained sections, even if I'm vague on their import.

(Actually, it wasn't just college-level. Starting in ninth-grade geometry I had trouble with proofs. Same problem as with transforming PDEs into solvable forms: which rules do I apply, in which order? It's a matter of strategy. Which is odd, because I have no trouble when it's a software algorithm.)

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I likely will need beta readers, yes. We didn't have much of a chance for them in the first draft, other than the publisher's review and the pause we had between the original manuscript and the copy-editing-level changes before publication, and I'm confident some of the things which bother me about it would have been caught if we had suitable test victims.

The mathematics level is somewhere around senior-level math or physics student. I think the most specialized stuff is you need to be comfortable with volume integrals (from the fluid flow stuff) and with statistical mechanics (energy/entropy, phase changes) ... some more specialized stuff comes up but given that part of my motive behind writing this was that I couldn't find a clear explanation of what (eg) the saddle point method was in this context, not knowing what that is isn't a disadvantage.

All the problem with this level of mathematics really is one of picking the strategy; what do you use as a simplification scheme and why? Of course, that's almost the definition of being an expert in a subject. The filler text which goes between equations at least tries to get at the why-this-rather-than-that material. In the best sections it even succeeds.