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ATPM 7.03
March 2001

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About This Particular Web Site

by Paul Fatula, pfatula@atpm.com

The On-Line Books Page

Looking for something to read? From this site you can find over 13,000 different titles, and better yet they’re all free. You can search by author, title, or subject, or just browse through the list until something catches your eye. Of course you won’t find the latest commercial releases on here, but texts that have entered the public domain, such as classic works of literature, are abundant.

Applefritter

This site has a great collection of Mac-related oddities that you probably haven’t seen before, including clones, prototypes that never made it to market, and lots of…shall we say, after-market modifications? Can’t afford a cube and want one anyway? You can make an LC Cube instead! Think those old After Dark fish are too wimpy? Turn your Mac into a real MacQuarium by following the instructions on the site.

Advanced Book Exchange

Looking for an original print edition of a book you found online? Hunting down rare, long out-of-print editions by your favorite author? There’s no better place to look than the Advanced Book Exchange, a gigantic searchable site with listings from independent used/rare book sellers from around the world. While many of these booksellers also list their wares in the used books areas of places like amazon.com and bn.com, the prices on those sites tend to be quite a bit higher, for the same book from the same bookseller. bibliofind.com and alibris.com are also good places to look for hard-to-find titles.

Twenty Questions

Yes, its the classic game of twenty questions, but this time it has a purpose greater than amusing small children during a long car ride. The questioner in the game is a computer, which by asking questions and recording responses, learns characteristics of everyday objects. If the computer fails to guess your object (its record is maybe 1 in 3 against me), it asks you what you were thinking of, and incorporates your answers to questions into its knowledge base for use in future games.

Journal of Mundane Behavior

Exasperated with the exciting and pleading for some pedantic? The Journal of Mundane Behavior prints academic papers about the unremarkable. Articles in the latest issue include “Squat Toilets and Cultural Commensurability: Two Texts, Plus Three Photographs I Forgot to Take” (“It concludes that while one favorite site of anthropological analysis—rituals, ritual meals in particular—highlight cross-cultural similarities, more mundane sites—such as the bathroom—underscore cross-cultural differences.”) and “The Gap in Being—Phenomenology Goes Shopping” (“By means of phenomenological description of the perceptual experience of shopping and especially of stores as shopping environments, we attempt to reveal how these experiences carry a certain significance.”).

appleCopyright © 2001 Paul Fatula, pfatula@atpm.com.

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Reader Comments (1)

chappell · April 3, 2001 - 04:31 EST #1
In listing the Advanced Book Exchange web site (www.abebooks.com) for finding books you mentioned alibris and bibliofind... but you left out Add All Books (www.addall.com) which is the most comprehensive of the four listed! I often have to search rare and out of print titles and add all always gives me the most choices on just about every title. Try it sometime, I'm sure you'll agree!

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