Impulse Buy…Almost

I usually have problems spending more than a few dollars on anything non-functional.  For example, art or posters (which to my wife’s chagrin, leaves most of the walls in our house bare).  However — for a moment — I actually considered if I would be willing to go all out and buy a hand written letter from Einstein:

A letter being auctioned in London this week adds more fuel to the long-simmering debate about the Nobel Prize-winning physicist’s religious views. In the note, written the year before his death, Einstein dismissed the idea of God as the product of human weakness and the Bible as “pretty childish.”

The letter, handwritten in German, is being sold by Bloomsbury Auctions on Thursday and is expected to fetch between $12,000 and $16,000.

I dunno…$16,000 seems like a bargain for a piece of history that seems almost priceless. A hand written letter by one of the greatest scientific minds in human history on one of the most oft debated aspects of his personal life?  $16,000 is a downright steal.

Which reminds me, I should pick up a print of the cover of Newton’s Principia Mathematica one of these days.