Strangest thing you have read in a textbook

[NFuller]

What are the most poorly worded sentences or oddest figures that you have come across in a textbook? It could be something in the general text or in the practice problems.

Please cite the book if you can so others can find it!

 

[NFuller]

I will start this off with a odd passage from The Physics of Stars by A.C. Phillips. On page 35 it says

It is denoted by a letter O,B,A,F,G,K, or M, a sequence which largely reflects a steady decrease in surface temperature from 30000 K to 3000 K. The sequence is remembered by a mnemonic which these days is considered sexist.

 

[Hawksteinman]

What are the most poorly worded sentences or oddest figures that you have come across in a textbook? It could be something in the general text or in the practice problems.

Please cite the book if you can so others can find it!

I know of several paragraphs in my A-Level Physics books that were poorly worded, and I had to read them over 10 times to understand them.

It would try to explain things in a way that I found bizarre, and even the Physics teacher did not like its explanations and told us never to use the textbook...

This is from the AS textbook

Looking back at these textbooks after more than a year, they do seem to make much more sense than they did when I first read them...

There are paragraphs that were very difficult to understand, but I can't seem to find them anymore

 

[f95toli]

I will start this off with a odd passage from The Physics of Stars by A.C. Phillips. On page 35 it says

It is denoted by a letter O,B,A,F,G,K, or M, a sequence which largely reflects a steady decrease in surface temperature from 30000 K to 3000 K. The sequence is remembered by a mnemonic which these days is considered sexist.

Why do you think the passage is odd? It is fairly basic information about how stars are classified.
That said, I am not actually sure why the mnemonic would be considered sexist since either "Girl" or "Guy" can be used for the G.
.

 

[wukunlin]

That was in high school and I don't remember the exact edition. Basically it was an exercise question about using Gaussian distribution. It gave us the date the husband left home for a navy mission, mean and standard deviation of the pregnancy period, and asked us to calculate the probability of the newborn being a biological child of the said husband. The correct answer was like 0.03%.

 

[NFuller]

Why do you think the passage is odd?

You don't think the author's sudden interjection about the mnemonic being sexist is odd? I remember first reading this and thinking if the author found this offensive, then why did he even bring it up? The chapter then abruptly ends with that sentence.

 

[NFuller]

Here's another one I just remembered. In the textbook Modern Atomic and Nuclear Physics by Fugia Yang this picture is inserted into the chapter with almost no context or description other than "A car rushes into the parlor" below it. I'm also confused as to what is happening to the people in the image...

 

[DS2C]

The sequence is remembered by a mnemonic which these days is considered sexist.

Ridiculous.

 

[George Jones]

You don't think the author's sudden interjection about the mnemonic being sexist is odd? I remember first reading this and thinking if the author found this offensive, then why did he even bring it up?

Why do you think the passage is odd? It is fairly basic information about how stars are classified.
That said, I am not actually sure why the mnemonic would be considered sexist since either "Girl" or "Guy" can be used for the G.

From a footnote on page 341 of "Foundations of Astrophysics" by Barbara Ryden and Bradley Peterson:

The traditional mnemonic for this sequence is "Oh Be A Fine Girl; Kiss Me." However, if you prefer kissing guys (or goats or gorillas), feel free to make the appropriate substitution.

 

[Ibix]

A friend rescued a nuclear physics textbook from the "free to a good home" pile in his university library solely because it went out of its way to (in 1920s genteel academic fashion) trash-talk theoreticians who were proposing some mysterious neutral particle in the nucleus. It was published the year before experimental confirmation of the neutron's existence.

Unfortunately I've lost touch with the friend and am not able to provide a reference. I suspect it doesn't really qualify as a valid source under PF rules anyway.

 

[stoomart]

Here's another one I just remembered. In the textbook Modern Atomic and Nuclear Physics by Fugia Yang this picture is inserted into the chapter with almost no context or description other than "A car rushes into the parlor" below it. I'm also confused as to what is happening to the people in the image...
View attachment 210655

The car driving out of the fireplace was startling enough to knock over the very short chair with the human-size doll sitting in it. Quantum tunneling?