Textbooks only evolve slowly — that's why the classics age so well.

What's your favourite textbook? The bulky undergraduate text that brings back memories of all those exams that you had to sit, or the slim and expensive monograph for grappling with more esoteric slices of chemistry? Do you prefer the dusty black and white classic or the full-colour, DVD-appended latest release? Wavefunction at The Curious Wavefunction (http://bit.ly/BhPhm) confesses to having “long been addicted to classic textbooks”. He goes on to regret that many people regard them as outdated, and bets that “no modern undergraduate that I [have met] has browsed Pauling's classic The Nature of the Chemical Bond”. Its significance is underlined not only by its 16,000 citations in the first ten years after publication, but by “constantly finding new papers in journals like Science and Nature that still cite it”.

On the same topic, Thomas Sutton Hall of Sabbatical Epistles (http://bit.ly/rg7Qn) posts about his impressive collection of chemistry texts, which date back to the 1790s. He focuses on those books that themselves focus on organic chemistry — his speciality — and finds that even after 130 years they're very similar. Apart from the increased use of figures and colour, Hall says that the “only major change in my opinion was the introduction of mechanism into the texts”. Although hot topics come and go, the functional group approach has stood the test of time. He suggests that it could be possible to track the half-life of past Nobel Prizes, and the likelihood of future awards, by their coverage in organic texts.

Worried about an upcoming PhD defence/viva? Have you ever wondered what a graph of the resulting mood swings would look like? No? Well, Female Science Professor (http://bit.ly/ezQh8) did, and plotted the “dimensionless mood number” over the 50 days leading up to the big day one of her student. There are more lows than highs, but it stops short of plotting the final high of passing.