Friday, November 16, 2007

Weight Control

How do we add material to each edition without making Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biology a lot larger? Answer: The web. We no longer need the tables that occupied many pages in the Appendices of earlier editions. You can now find all that data online, for instance at http://physics.nist.gov/PhysRefData/XrayMassCoef/t ab2.html. Also, we deleted sections of previous editions that we did not feel were essential. Deleted text—some dating back to the first edition—is available on the book web site: https://sites.google.com/view/hobbieroth.

For the curious, the 1st (1978) edition had 557 pages and the 2nd (1988) edition had 623 pages. After the 2nd edition the page size became larger making comparisons difficult. The 3rd (1997) edition had 575 pages and the 4th (2007) edition has 616 pages. Like many Americans our weight is creeping up, but we fight a constant battle to keep the book from becoming super-sized.

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