{"id":552,"date":"2011-04-27T07:56:36","date_gmt":"2011-04-27T07:56:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/?p=552"},"modified":"2011-04-27T07:56:37","modified_gmt":"2011-04-27T07:56:37","slug":"now-thats-what-i-call-inflation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/2011\/04\/27\/now-thats-what-i-call-inflation\/","title":{"rendered":"Now that&#8217;s what I call inflation!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A great <a href=\"http:\/\/news.sciencemag.org\/scienceinsider\/2011\/04\/the-23-million-textbook.html?rss=1\">snippet from Science Insider<\/a> on an out-of-print book that was advertised on Amazon for $23,698,655! The book was <em>The Making of a Fly<\/em> by Peter Lawrence (from MRC&#8217;s Lab Molecular Biology at Cambridge, not University of Cambridge as Science Insider had it). The book was published in 1992 but is now out-of-print, however there were a number of second-hand copies available on Amazon ranging in price from $35 &#8230; up to that incredible $23m figure. <\/p>\n<p>It appears that many sellers on Amazon use algorithms to set book prices, automatically adjusting their prices when the price of another copy of the book is adjusted. I don&#8217;t quite understand how it got up to such a crazy figure but it shows how things can go wrong if the algorithm is faulty and there are no human checks. <\/p>\n<p>It reminds me of one chemistry assignment that I got badly wrong, by quite a few orders of magnitude.  My tutor wrote on my paper (probably in red ink) &#8220;Your answer is more than the total amount of energy that the sun has emitted since the universe began!&#8221; and enjoined me to switch on my brain before submitting my next answer. <\/p>\n<p>Peter Lawrence notes that the fact people still want to order a copy of the 1992 handbook suggests that, despite 2 decades of breathtaking advances in developmental biology, he succeeded at his intention to &#8220;write a book that lasts.&#8221; <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A great snippet from Science Insider on an out-of-print book that was advertised on Amazon for $23,698,655! The book was The Making of a Fly by Peter Lawrence (from MRC&#8217;s Lab Molecular Biology at Cambridge, not University of Cambridge as &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/2011\/04\/27\/now-thats-what-i-call-inflation\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[53,54,55,56],"class_list":["post-552","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","tag-algorithms","tag-book-prices","tag-developmental-biology","tag-lmb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/552","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=552"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/552\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=552"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=552"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=552"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}