Re: Guessing?

Gene Wirchenko wrote:
> paul c <toledobysea_at_ac.ooyah> wrote:
>
> [snip]
>

>> (Here on the west coast of Canada, there must be a couple of hundred 
>> thousand students attending degree-granting institutions within a 30 
>> mile radius from where I live.  Only one of the big universities here 
>> has any edition of that important book in its library, just one copy at 
>> that and apparently it has rarely if ever been signed out.  What does 
>> that tell you?)


> 

>      That you probably live in Vancouver?  Or Greater Vancouver.


> 

>      Hello from Kamloops.

Hello yourself. I think I passed through there in '68, had some fun but seem to remember the summer was hot and I guess the winters are cold. Anyway, I was wrong about only one school around 'lesser' Vancouver having the book, another (UBC) has the second edition only. Obviously nobody there read that one either, otherwise they would have obtained the third edition, presumably they could have got it free. The public libraries here have mostly the 'dummies' books, same as bigger cities like Toronto, just fewer in total. Somehow it seems telling that Vancouver was one of the few canuck cities to get a Carnegie library, maybe the only one, of course there are no books in it anymore so it has come up a notch in worldliness, in sort of the way Kiwis say that when somebody emigrates to Australia the average IQ of both countries goes up.

Some other half-baked conclusions besides your excellent one:

1. your 'elites' don't use public libraries anymore.
2. CS is now too 'big; a subject for one person to master, possibly DB too and neither is perceived as 'elite'. whether this is legit is another question - in the face of all the bumpf likely it's the rare student who'll have the courage to broaden themselves by reading other stuff, say Plato's Republic or learn to master enough English to make themselves understood. i knew dozens of people with multiple CS or Math degrees who had never heard of predicate calculus, couldn't spell, let alone express one idea in a five hundred words which Codd could do even if he was wrong here and there.
3. since cities and schools have only crap libraries now, I may as well go live in a trailer park, nothing against Kamloops but my crummy circulation prefers to be near the coast.