Olympic athletes use a huge amount of sponsor money — not to mention legal and illegal performance aids — to reach gold. Soon we will have genetically engineered physiology to reach even greater records. Schools compete for an annual #1 ranking. They spend more and more money to bid for the best professors and build the best facilities, driving up tuition. Coding theorists run massive simulations to find the best code to compete for the one spot in standards. But is the second place athlete, school, and code that much worse? No, usually they are nearly as good as #1.

I’ve often wondered whether many problems in the world are not variations of attempting “exact optimization” — this being the only way to guarantee success in a winner-take-all reward system.
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Imre Csiszar and Janos Korner are two Hungarians with very Hungarian names. But more importantly, they wrote a thrilling page-turner called, Information Theory: Coding Theorems for Discrete Memoryless Systems. It is a book most difficult to obtain. It seems that the book has been out of print ever since the day it was in print. Academiai Kiado of Budapest and Academic Press of New York (same thing?), I’m looking in your general direction(s). Hmm. I wonder if the cost structure of running a printing press is akin to that of running a chip foundry?

Anyway, forget the publishers. There is one copy in the library, permanently checked out, on hold, or requested. Almost never seen in online stores, it sells for several times the list price when scalper123 occasionally trots it out on YahooMazonBay. Worst of all, nobody has bothered to make and distribute a pdf of it for the good of the masses. Er, wait, I mean, nobody has bothered to make a Fair Use copy for personal use.

And accidentally leave the pdf on an unprotected public server. (Please?)

Well, that was last week, and this is now. I am to this day amazed that Kazoo Books still had one (1) old, used, but perfectly good copy at list price. I wrote “had.” Good service and fast delivery, too. No fraud committed against me despite there being a phone transaction with a credit card. Highly recommend. Wait, this isn’t eBay, why am I writing this?

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