terror warnings

Like foghorns the early warning sirens wail out across the landscape. Like monsters in the mist, they respond, echo...

But it seems ridiculous to me. Terror level upgraded to "orange" because of a muslim holiday? Early warning sirens? Nevermind that none of these precautions would have been the slightest bit of help on Sept 11, 2001. Nevermind that they wouldn't have prevented the first WTC bombing, either; nor the Oaklahoma City bombing; nor the Nairobi Embassy Bombing; nor the attack on the U.S.S. Cole. Nevermind, in fact, that these measures wouldn't have helped a whit against any terrorist activity on record.

Mind neither that we had no forewarning of any of these events, yet now we think we can have some terrorist-danger indicator lamp. Condition Orange. Tell me, if you were a terrorist, wouldn't you just wait for that light to turn Green, and then attack? (In the same way that our fancy new airport screening systems make it easier for a terrorist to board a plane?) These silly systems actually endanger us by creating a false sense of security.

Why are textbooks so expensive?

To: Editors, Academic Press
Subj: Why are books so expensive?

I've recently been wondering what it is that makes mathematics textbooks so expensive. For example, Enderton's book Elements of Set Theory, far from the most egregious example, costs more than $100 in our campus book store. It can't be printing an d distribution alone that account for this enormous cost -- similarly sized books often cost less than $20. The typesetting is more complex than books in many other fields (such as those books that contain only prose) yet even this must have been paid for long ago -- the book was originally published in 1977. I wonder if you could estimate, for my own curiosity, how much of the $100 textbook cost goes to the reseller, how much goes for distribution, how much for the direct publication costs, what percent goes to the author as royalty, etc.

thank you,
Tobin Fricke

EDIT: They responded!