The price of progress

Wanting to find out a bit more about our nervous systems than can be easily acquired from Wikipedia and his friends, I thought to get myself a copy of what looks like the standard text, that is to say, reference 1. With the lead author now being a Nobel laureate.

The latest edition, say £75 plus postage and packing, was far too strong for my modest purposes, but £15 including postage and packing from Germany for the fourth edition seemed fair enough.

Now arrived and weighed in at 7lbs 12oz, so postage must have been a fair proportion of the total price. And it looks new, so presumably one of the many copies of the fourth edition remaindered on arrival of the fifth. And a quick peek tells me that I will be getting my monies worth - probably from the diagrams alone - which have come on a long way since I did O level Biology.

All seems terribly wasteful, but if one wants a print book, which I do, given the pace of change it is hard to see how it can be avoided.

PS: I can also report a further purchase of cherries, having not bought any in the Isle of Wight, despite their being grown there. Prompted by a comment in yesterday's Guardian from a Tesco's cherry buyer, I popped into M&S in Epsom High Street, where they could do me a kilo of dark red cherries from somewhere in Kent for a fiver. Plastic box rather than the extravagant cardboard box I got at some point last year, but the cherries are fine - with M&S being rather more reliable on that score than the market stall outside.

Reference 1: Principles of Neural Science - Eric R. Kandel, James H. Schwartz, Thomas M. Jessell - fourth edition, 2000.

Reference 2: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/07/cherries.html. MDF not cardboard. Which perhaps explains why these cherries were rather dearer than today's.