Library Meme
From Pipsqueak at the Common Room. The rules:
1.grab the book closest to you
2.open it to page 161
3. find the fifth full sentence
4.post the text of the sentence to your blog
5.don't search around for the coolest book you have, use the one that is really next to you.
Unfortunately, the closest book to me was Kwang-Bok's Elite English-Korean Dictionary. This book has no full sentences, and most of the writing is in Korean. The fifth entry on page 161 says, "Cordelia n. Shakespere 작 King Lear에 나오는 Lear왕의 효녀 막내딸."
Since most of you probably can only guess what that means, I decided that I could play the game again. The only other books in the room were on the bookshelf, and that didn't seem like a fair way to pick a book (I would be too tempted to just pick the coolest book), so I went to the other side of the house and picked up the first book I saw on my way back. This book is entitled Treasury of World Masterpieces, Jane Austen (which is currently being used as a doorstop in our bedroom, I'm sorry to say...), and if you can't guess which book in the treasury it's from based on the fifth sentence on page 161... well. Then you obviously don't know much about Jane Austen. ;)
"An express came at twelve last night, just as we were all gone to bed, from Colonel Forster, to inform us that she was gone off to Scotland with one of his officers; to own the truth, with Wickham!"
Categories:
randomnimity
The closest book to me wasn't exactly a literary masterwork. I picked up "A Parent's Guide to First Aid"! Do you think anyone REALLY wants to know what sort of first aid advice is on the page of 161?
I don't have a blog, but here's mine:
"This text occurs in the Gospel of John, a Gospel more than any of the others that made it into the New Testament already goes a long way into identifying Jesus himself as divine."
bet you can't guess what book THAT came from :)
I'm at work, and I think the closest book was George Stimson's Introduction to Airborne Radar, 2nd Edition.
Fifth sentence on page 161 reads as follows:
"Each additional PRF not only reduces the integration time - hence reduces detection range - but increases the complexity of mechanization." PRF = pulse repetition frequency.
Closest book to me is on the far right end of my bookshelf in the (new!) livingroom, which bookshelf, I am sorry to say, is not currently organized. Were that not the case, this book would be sandwiched between other books of similar subject matter, and even those probably wouldn't be on the end. So I admit that it is fully my fault that the sentence I must give you is:
"Thus, for each y [not a member of] B, the number of pairs (x,x') with (y, x, x') [member of] J, is at most
[summation from i=1 to q+1] l_i*(l_i - 1) = ... [I'm skipping about four lines of arithmetic so I don't drive away your blog audience] ...
<= (m - q - 1)(m - q)."
I think this trumps junkmale's for nerdiness. ;-) It's from "Extremal Combinatorics" by Stasys Jukna, a book I've kept from that semester when I dropped combinatorics and should have dropped a different class. I have never quite reconciled this with myself; it was a fun class, and I always kind of thought I'd end up taking it again eventually. Now I just have the book. *sigh*