I just bought a new $148 physics textbook, Fundamentals of Physics, Extended, 8th Edition, by Halliday, Resnick, and Walker. Upon opening the cover, the very first page one sees is an advertisement for the publisher’s product “Wiley Plus”:
The first person to invent a car that runs on water…
… may be sitting right in your classroom!”
Wiley’s web site has a PDF of the page.
Apparently Wiley has also put this in one of their calculus textbooks.
This seems right up there with the “energy makes it go” in a grade school book that Feynman complained about. Don’t the editors of the textbook look at this stuff? Or do the marketing people get to insert it after the editors are done?
Bleh.