Sunday, July 1, 2012

Amazon is trying to tell us something


If one goes to the Humour section of the Books department at www.amazon.co.uk, and does a search for "phylogeny", one gets the following search results:

Inferring Phylogenies by Joseph Felsenstein
Advances in Sponge Science: Phylogeny, Systematics, Ecology edited by Mikel Becerro
Mathematics of Evolution and Phylogeny edited by Olivier Gascuel

If one goes to the Humor & Entertainment section of the Books department at www.amazon.com, and performs the same search, one gets the following search results:

Computational Paleontology edited by Ashraf M.T. Elewa
Evolutionary Biology: Concepts, Molecular and Morphological Evolution edited by Pierre Pontarotti
Lecture Notes in Computer Science 1075 - Proceedings of CPM 1996
Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics 2066 - Proceedings of JOBIM 2000
Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics 2452 - Proceedings of WABI 2002
Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics 3678 - Proceedings of RECOMB-CG 2005
Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics 4205 - Proceedings of RECOMB-CG 2006
Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics 4751 - Proceedings of RECOMB-CG 2007
Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics 5267 - Proceedings of RECOMB-CG 2008
Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics 5817 - Proceedings of RECOMB-CG 2009
Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics 6398 - Proceedings of RECOMB-CG 2010
Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics 5542 - Proceedings of ISBRA 2009
Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics 7292 - Proceedings of ISBRA 2012

None of these books is in any way humorous (at least not intentionally), and so either (i) the cataloguing schemes used by the various Amazon stores leave something to be desired, or (ii) Amazon is telling us that we look funny to the rest of the world.

Perhaps the difference between the two lists has something to do with the British Amazon insisting that "Humour" is also "Entertainment"? I guess that we should be grateful that there are not more books on these lists.

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