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Guess What Book I Am Currently Reading

Wowbagger

The Infinitely Prolonged
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This book was officially released in the U.S. on Tuesday, Jan 21, 2020; though it had been released in a couple of other countries some time before then.

The main body of the book is about 311 pages long (or maybe 314, depending on how you count). However, the Index begins on page 4,294,967,292.

What book am I reading?

More hints will come, if needed.
 
How thick would a book with four million pages be?!?

And (and this might be obvious) what's between page 312 and page four million and something??
 
Googling that page number comes up with a lot of references to computer memory errors. In binary, it's 11111111 11111111 11111111 11111100. It's 232.
 
shopping
 
I haven't read it yet (or even seen a copy, for that matter, since the nearest book store is 35 miles away, which makes it a 3 1/2 hour bike ride to get there -- and it's raining today, not the greatest bike-riding weather) but I'm going to guess

Humble Pi: When Math Goes Wrong in the Real World

It's listed as being 336 pages rather than 311 or 314, but that would be the actual number of pages in the book. 311 is obviously not the actual number of pages, so I assume that's the number of pages containing the book's contents -- so if there are 25 pages of copyright information, content information, blank spaces, and whatever else, then a 336 page book could easily be what you're referring to.
 
Nova Land said:
but I'm going to guess
Click to expand...

Your guess is correct! We have a winner!!

Nova Land said:
It's listed as being 336 pages rather than 311 or 314, but that would be the actual number of pages in the book.
Click to expand...
Though, Googling for information isn't exactly fair. But, whatever.


Another clue I could have offered is...

...that the author once spoke at a TAM.


Anyway, it's a very good book, though a little below my level since I'm a computer programmer and most of the stuff in here is stuff I already heard before, and am already trained to avoid. I still recommend it, so far, to anyone who appreciates the history of things going wrong.

ETA: The thing about the index starting on 4,294,967,292 is a joke about binary integer rollovers.

...And, for that same reason all the pages numbers from 314 to 0 go backwards.
 
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Wowbagger said:
Your guess is correct! We have a winner!!

Though, Googling for information isn't exactly fair.
Click to expand...


I didn't exactly Google for it. (I considered Googling for "books Wowbagger has read recently" but decided that would be cheating.)

What I did was go to BookRiot, which lists books which were released this past week, since you'd made a point of telling us the book was released January 21. I then read through the list of titles. It's a moderately long list, but I had a good idea of roughly what the title I was looking for would look like, and when I spotted the title in the list I knew immediately that was it.

But to be sure, I clicked the link which took me to the Amazon listing for the book. Since the other piece of information you had made a point of telling us was the number of pages, it seemed to me that a good way to confirm I had the right book was to see if the number of pages listed for the book was something a little larger than 311. It was. And the book title provided a good explanation of the number for the page where the index starts.

Date of publication, number of pages in the book. If we weren't supposed to use that information to find the answer you shouldn't have provided it. :p
 
Wowbagger said:
This book was officially released in the U.S. on Tuesday, Jan 21, 2020; though it had been released in a couple of other countries some time before then.

The main body of the book is about 311 pages long (or maybe 314, depending on how you count). However, the Index begins on page 4,294,967,292.

What book am I reading?

More hints will come, if needed.
Click to expand...

Good book.

I'd bought my copy in march, last year and gave it to Youngest after I finished it (he's studying Applied Maths).
Strange it took so long for the US to have it released there.
 
Wowbagger said:
...that the author once spoke at a TAM.
Click to expand...

That author being, since he hasn't yet been named in this thread, the excellent Matt Parker.

(I've seen him a few times; he was, IIRC, the first speaker at Reading Skeptics in the Pub, and I've also seen him at QEDCon and Festival of the Spoken Nerd and Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless People. )
 
Nova Land said:
Date of publication, number of pages in the book. If we weren't supposed to use that information to find the answer you shouldn't have provided it. :p
Click to expand...
Good enough.

zooterkin said:
That author being, since he hasn't yet been named in this thread, the excellent Matt Parker.
Click to expand...
Yup. He was part of a version of Festival of the Spoken Nerd at TAM13, the final TAM.
 
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