Spikey Pillow

Milk that tastes almost not quite like Homo. Does it come from specially selected cows? Or perhaps they are milked by particularly effeminate farm hands? So what does Homo taste like? Well, I was disappointed to discover it tastes just like Hetero milk.

Recently Amazon.ca was selling Lisp in Small Pieces for $4 Canadian. I ordered a copy, along with enough other people to put it at the top of the bestseller list, ahead of Harry Potter.

However, Amazon has cancelled the $4 orders for Lisp in Small Pieces, along with several other books which were also priced at $4. The guy from customer service I spoke to says they will be sending out mails telling people about this later today. They claim there were "pricing mistakes", (LISP is now priced at $94.40). Their pricing policy allows them to cancel any orders which haven't shipped and were incorrectly priced. So, no LISP for you!

I find the pricing mistake story suspect as I've seen how good amazon's monitoring software is at predicting orders. And something as anomalous as an obscure programming book outselling Harry Potter would have raised alarm bells long before they repriced it.

This pricing mistake also applies to a couple of other books that were selling for $4 around the same time:

Probability Theory : The Logic of Science by E. T. Jaynes, cancelled due to pricing mistake
Numerical Methods of Statistics by John F. Monahan, cancelled due to unavailability of stock.

Update Amazon has issused $10 vouchers to everyone who tried to order the $4 books. Apparently, some people who ordered a couple of months ago actually received the books.