PZ Myers. 2005 Feb 19. We are all lemmings, we bloggers. <http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/we_are_all_lemmings_we_bloggers/>. Accessed 2008 Aug 29.
Posted on M00o93H7pQ09L8X1t49cHY01Z5j4TT91fGfr on Saturday, February 19, 2005
We are all lemmings, we bloggers
I obey the ProfGrrrrl:
- Grab the nearest book.
- Open the book to page 123.
- Find the fifth sentence.
- Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
- Don't search around and look for the "coolest" book you can find. Do what's actually next to you.
As you command.
The book is Concepts of Genetics by WS Klug and MR Cummings (definitely uncool, it's the text for my course this term.) Page 123 is the end of chapter 5, "Quantitative Genetics." The magic sentence is:
That the allele for small fruit is partially dominant to the large fruit allele suggests that the genetic alteration between the two alleles is involved in the regulation of floral development, ultimately determining carpel number.
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I tried the first book, but it didn't have 123 pages. The second only had two sentences on page 123. The third book finally gave me my sentence. It is the AutoCAD LT 97 Getting Started Guide. The fifth sentence is from the sixth chapter "Drawing with Precision" and it says "This is a good way to specify a line length quickly."
Am I even uncooler than you? Horrors!#: Posted by on 02/19 at 09:24 AM -
And, coming from a different academic field, we find:
"Institutional environments are, by definition, those characterized by the elaboration of rules and requirements to which individual organizations must conform if they are to receive support and legitimacy."
(an essay by Dick Scott and John Meyer in The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis, Powell and DiMaggio, eds.)
I think it's funny that all three of these in this thread so far are about "determinants" of one sort or another.#: Posted by on 02/19 at 10:00 AM -
Tim Krabbe's The Vanishing only goes up to 115 :(
#: Posted by on 02/19 at 10:04 AM
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Remember that by the associative and commutative properties for addition, we may add numbers in any order that we want. Prealgebra, 4th edition, K. Elayn Martin-Gay.
It was either that, or the Word 2003 book. There are no cooler books on my computer desk right now.#: Posted by on 02/19 at 10:07 AM -
In practice, when a sorting algorithm permutes the keys, it must permute the satellite data as well.
From Introduction to Algorithms, 2nd Ed by Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest and Stein#: Posted by on 02/19 at 10:10 AM -
"New Syon House was some sort of government office." From Kage Baker's The Graveyard Game, the fourth in her series of novels about Dr. Zeus, Inc.
#: Posted by on 02/19 at 10:41 AM
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Who knew I had such power! ;)
I could play again, here at the airport. One book in my bag.
Interactive Qualitative Analysis.
Page 123 puts us in the middle of some description of waht appears to be an evaluation of a classroom environment (??? This is a methods book and has examples)
Emotional environment represented the affinity that the group said they needed in order to succeed in the class.#: Posted by profgrrrrl on 02/19 at 10:45 AM - Klug and Cummings? Why would you select that textbook when colleagues (Michael Simmons and Pete Snustad at the St. Paul campus) in your system have routinely put out a high quality intro text though perhaps not as 'simplistic' as K and C. My comparison is, admittedly, based on recollection of an older version of K and C that I taught from as a grad student at the U of M though.
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In a box carted home from work (otherwise the nearest books would be in my library; the nearest case contains my collection of antiquarian Oz books and Oziana) is a book in transit back to its lender: Shunryu Suzuki's Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind.
"Comparing it to other religions, they appreciate how satisfying Buddhism is intellectually." - We've been using K&C for some time, so one reason is inertia; another, though, is that it is a good match for the content of the course, which has emphasized classical transmission genetics. We're beginning to rethink our curriculum, though, and want to go more molecular in our treatment…I'm favoring switching to the Griffiths text, myself.
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Since G-Do already has quoted Introduction to Algorithms by Cormen et al, I'll choose the book 2nd closest to me.
Accounting issues are technical enough to confuse many juries; expensive lawyers make the most of that confusion; and if all else fails, big-name executives have friends in high places who protect them.
Paul Krugman The Great Unraveling, paperback edition.#: Posted by on 02/19 at 11:22 AM -
"Skipping breakfast, Dave"?
Mystic River by Dennis Lehane
This is the only sentence I have ever read from this book (it's my wife's), but now I am intrigued. -
"The doors fly back, the figures enter--
It's Lensky... with Eugene!"
From Alexander Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, translated by James Falen; this is chapter 5, stanza 29.#: Posted by on 02/19 at 11:46 AM -
"Why do you think hares have evolved to reproduce as rapidly as possible, while lynx appear to have intrinsic or social growth limits?"
It's actually a review question at the end of a chapter. From my Environmental Biolog text book titled Environmental Science, 8th ed. by Cunningham, Cunningham, and Saigo.#: Posted by WolverineTom on 02/19 at 11:51 AM -
"How could the Perfect One, from whom everything ultimately emanates, permit this kind of imperfection to exist among human beings?"
-From Philosophy: History and Problems, Stumpf and Fieser.
BTW, thanks for the link to Horowitz' witch hunt site. Makes my decision b/t NC State and UNC Chapel Hill easier, since UNC-CH made it on his shit list. But NCSU has the veterinary school, but UNC-CH has cool bio research . . . but Duke made it on the list too, and they have some great philosophs . . . dammit dammit dammit.#: Posted by on 02/19 at 12:38 PM -
"Go back three thousand years, not to speak of and indefinitely more recent period, there was no knowledge of assembly of facts, discovered by careful processes of induction; nor any persistent exploration of nature." William George Ward (1812-1882), "Philosophy of the Theistic Controversy" (1882), in The Ethics of Belief Debate, McCarthy ed. (1986).
#: Posted by on 02/19 at 12:50 PM
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' I was the Queen o' bonnie France,
Where happy I hae been.'
The Works of Robert Burns#: Posted by on 02/19 at 01:05 PM - This game will grind to a halt once it reaches the Christian blogs. They will all post the very same sentence from the only book they have. I have a large personal library (est. 4000-5000 depending on the inclusion of cookbooks and kids' books) but I do not own a Bible. Can someone check out what is the sentence that all Xtian bloggers will post?
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Hey James, what kind of research are you interested in? NCSU has recently become a confident top-tier research university (i.e., shed its A&T complex and started hiring the best). For a small sample, look at these people:
http://www.cals.ncsu.edu/beh_bio/researchfaculty.html -
From Antipode: seasons with the extraordinary wildlife and culture of Madagascar, by Heather E. Heying.
"Earlier, a tanker had spilled oil in the bay, and for a week I went to sleep in my tent with the acrid taste of oil in my nostrils."
Taste in nostrils? Oh, well.
coturnix:
different formats and versions of the bible will have different text on page 123#: Posted by on 02/19 at 01:23 PM -
From Neil Gaiman's Stardust:
The lady in the scarlet kirtle stood up then and placed the bowl which had contained her portion of hare into the fire.#: Posted by paperwight on 02/19 at 01:51 PM - Coincidence! If I'd done this in my bedroom, I'd have had the same sentence: I was reading Stardust just last night.
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From A Conspiracy So Immense, by David M Oshinsky (about Joe McCarthy):
This mindless probing allowed Kenyon to restate her strong anti-Communist beliefs.
I'm not actually reading this, but I moved recently, and did a rather random unpacking job. This is the first book my eye fell on here in my office.#: Posted by on 02/19 at 03:34 PM -
Oh dear. I hope that people aren't reading a version of Stardust without the illustrations by Charles Vess that lit up the original 4 part edition from Vertigo.
If we're going to use the book we've been carting around with us and left by the nightstand, then the sentence that's a bit of a punchline for this crowd comes from Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon:
"Of particular interest has been the subject of just how much information can be extracted from seemingly random data." -
"The HOMO of the allyl cation (phi 1) is the one which has the coefficient on the central atom larger than those at the other two."
from page 124 of "Frontier Orbitals and Chemical Reactions" By Ian Fleming (no not that one). Page 123 didn't have 5 sentences on it, so I counted to the fifth sentence from the start of page 123.
Happily I am revising for a job interview, so the book to hand was an intelligent one when I nipped in here for a quick skive. Had it been any other time the sentence might well have read "So I thought I'd write to you guys at Penthouse and let you know what happened.". I do wish my wife would stop leaving those around!#: Posted by on 02/19 at 04:05 PM -
From the first page of Ch. 5 in Microwave Horns and Feeds, "Numerical analysis of small axisymmetric feeds":
"For instance, in prime-focus reflectors the feed blocks the reflector aperture and its size must be small."
I think I'm contractually obligated to point out that this ought to be intuitively obvious to the casual observer.#: Posted by on 02/19 at 04:21 PM -
Well, the first time I did this, I got a page with a big picture and only three "sentences" (the caption). Now I am sitting an equal distance between a dictionary and a book on yoga.
For your amusement and edification:
"Press your elbows into the floor."
-----B.K.S. Iyengar, Yoga: The Path to Holistic Health.
and
"Nearby, on December 2, 1805, Napoleon decisively defeated the Russian and Austrian armies of Czar Alexander I and Emperor Francis II."
-----From the definition for Austerlitz, in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 3rd edition.
(I decided to mix this up by counting only complete sentences, ecluding any commands to "See X.")
Why yes, I do like to overcomplicate things. Why do you ask? -
Hmm - the nearest book is the prepublication draft of Paul Houston's _Chemical Kinetics and Reaction Dynamics_. Its page are not numbered sequentially throughout, but only within each chapter, so there is no page 123. As a substitute, I turn to page 1-23 (i.e. page 23 of chapter 1) and find sentence 5 to be pretty dull:
"The flux of molecules is defined as the number of molecules crossing a unit area per unit time."
If instead I go for the nearest book that actually has a page 123, that turns out to be Sam Tanenhaus' biography of Whittaker Chambers. That gives me :
"Reiss had broken with the regime and circulated a letter in which he called Stalin a traitor to the revolution."
The immediately preceding sentence is much more striking:
"In September police found Ignace Reiss, the NKVD rezident in Switzerland, sprawled on a a highway outside Lausanne, his well-dressed corpse perforated with bullet holes."#: Posted by on 02/19 at 05:41 PM -
"Und mir erzählte noch vor einigen Tagen ein Arzt der Heil- und Pflegeanstalt von einer verheirateten Frau, die sich mit einem lebendigen Aal befriedigen wollte."
-- Günter Grass, Die Blechtrommel. (The narrator relates a report he has heard describing some marine-biology fieldwork.)#: Posted by Mrs Tilton on 02/19 at 05:50 PM -
Reaching out blindly to the bookcase...
"You couldn't even find out which ones you couldn't get, because the list of proscribed books was itself a secret"
[author and title proscribed]#: Posted by on 02/19 at 05:54 PM -
Le Cordon Bleu at Home Cotes De Porc Flamande
Peel, rinse and slice the potatoes 3mm (1/8 inch thick).
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James P. Hogan, "Voyage from Yesteryear" reads (I kid you not): "Now, tell us where this stuff came from" Sentence six is "I want the truth". Jokes about mutant squid doing Jack Nicholson impersonations sprang to mind when I read that.
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People, it's so much more fun when you don't identify what you're reading from:
"That's the case with everyone," Wyzer said. -
The nearest book to me is the National Geographic Road Atlas. Page 123 has a map of Alberta, but no complete sentences.
#: Posted by on 02/19 at 09:35 PM
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"The seeds are ripe when they fall out of the seedheads easily if disturbed." <b>The Homebrewer's Garden</b
#: Posted by on 02/19 at 11:42 PM
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Mrs. Tilton, which part of The Tin Drum is that, exactly? I don't speak German, so unfortunately I had to rely on the book's English translations.
#: Posted by on 02/20 at 04:55 AM
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"They stared up."
From the story "Here There be Tygers", by Ray Bradbury, in "R is for Rocket", published by Pan sometimes in the 60s. (It's missing the page w. copyright information etc.)#: Posted by on 02/20 at 05:15 AM -
The crust is pushed together along reverse faults.
Earth Story: The Forces That Have Shaped Our Planet, Simon Lamb and David Sington, BBC Worldwide, ISBN 0-563-48707-0.
(This is an indirect means of making a book recommendation, I think. This one isn't for specialists, but is a good introductory Earth Sciences text for high-school students and lay readers. The series of TV programmes which it accompanies is great, too - I wish it were obtainable on DVD. A pity that Chapter 7 wasn't chosen; that's about palaeontology and evolution.#: Posted by on 02/20 at 05:34 AM -
Alon,
it's in chapter 12 of Book I, which I imagine is called something like 'Good Friday Fare' in English. It's a paragraph about eels you are looking for, and it begins something like, 'Matzerath thought it right that eels should be made to writhe in salt.'#: Posted by Mrs Tilton on 02/20 at 06:07 AM -
Thanks, Mrs. Tilton. In my version it's, "Matzerath thought it was only fair to let the eels wriggle in salt," and your fifth sentence is "And a few days ago one of the doctors here in the hospital told me abotu a married woman who tried to to take her pleasure with a live eel."
#: Posted by on 02/20 at 06:50 AM
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first book had one sentence on page 123. second book is (i am sorry to say) the book of mormon: "And now I, Jacob, spake many more things unto the people of Nephi, warning them against fornication and lasciviousness and every kind of sin, telling them the awful consequences of them." please don't ask why i am reading the book of mormon.
#: Posted by on 02/20 at 12:40 PM
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I did this one on my LJ... but since it was mentioned above, I thought I'd help out...
The Holy Bible, KJV:
Deuteronomy 9:5 Not for thy righteousness, or for the uprightness of thine heart, dost thou go to possess their land: but for the wickedness of these nations the LORD thy God doth drive them out from before thee, and that he may perform the word which the Lord sware unto thy fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
Full disclosure: Atheist. Book was on top of stack to be handy in case I needed to look up biblical references for Moby Dick. Yes, really.
Second book in stack: 絶対儷奴, vol. 26
p. 123, sentence 5: 待って兄さん！イヤだーっ -
From Aftermath by Susan J. Brison
"The wonder is that we've managed, once again, to winter through and that our hearts, in spite of everything, survive"#: Posted by on 02/20 at 01:48 PM -
coturnix
Thanks for the link. I somehow missed the Keck Center despite much exploration of NCSU here lately (hope that doesn't say something about my research capabilities, yikes!). Looks like they have some interesting stuff going on there now, and I do intend to scam my way into their vet program anyway. I can't help but laugh when I hear the derisive, if humorous, moniker given to NCSU of "Moo-U," usually by those who are averse to biology.
I'm leaning towards avian evolution, esp. sexual selection and dimorphism, though avian communication and social behavior are interesting too. But at this point, I'd be pleased with any school that encourages undergrad research. Or more to the point, a school that at least gives the kind of hard-ass exams that PZ described earlier. Anything less would be a disservice to students, and an insult, really (esp. to those of us nontraditionals who are paying tuition out of our own pocket).
-a dissatisfied community college student.#: Posted by on 02/20 at 03:07 PM -
"The balance sheet is clearly a pro-Israel strategy, amounting to complicity in human rights atrocities."
Inflammatory, hey?#: Posted by on 02/20 at 05:22 PM -
Page 123 of "The Dilbert Future" consists mostly of reprinted comics. The single prose paragraph on the page is only four sentences.
If I count the comics on the page, the fifth sentence is "What about 'Yellow Pages' ads?"#: Posted by on 02/20 at 09:50 PM -
"These two electrical properties of a membrane, capitance and conductance, can be represented by an equivalent circuit in which an electrical conductor is connected in parallel with a resistor (see Figure 5-10)."
from Animal Physiology: Mechanisms and Adaptations by Randall, Burggren, and French.
Of course, the subtitle is obviously a misnomer because as we all know <url="http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/comments/how_often_do_biologists_talk_about_this_evolution_stuff_anyway/">evolution is completely irrelevant to understanding biology</url>. -
Sadly, the bound copy of Moore & Gibbons' Watchmen which I keep on my desk (for emergencies, you understand) keeps the original per-issue page numbers intact, and I'm not about to count them by hand.
Thus, I give you sed & awk, 2nd ed, by Dougherty and Robbins.
"This script extracts index entries from one or more files and automatically generates a sed script consisiting of a substitute command for each index entry." -
"Scalered is the default case and indicates that the individual bits of a vector (i.e. a multibit net) may be accessed using bit- and part- selects."
The Verilog Hardware Description Language by Thomas & Moorby's.#: Posted by on 02/21 at 10:08 AM -
"Mrs. Cake motioned Knobby to sit down." Jingo, by Terry Pratchett. Rather appropriate for these times.
#: Posted by on 02/21 at 07:52 PM
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the nearest book was a dictionary!!!
#: Posted by on 02/22 at 05:59 AM
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The book is the Pelican edition of The Odyssey, translated by E.V. Rieu.
"He prophesied that some day the god would wreck one of our fine vessels on the misty sea as she came home from such a journey, and would surround our city with a wall of mountains." (Book 8: 566-570)
It's from the speech of the Phaeacian King, who is describing Poseidon's jealousy of the Phaeacian ships --which, being sentient and psychially linked to their crews, would "make their swift passage over the sea's immensities with no fear of damage and no thought of wreck".
What am I doing with Homer on my shelf? I taught Paradise Lost the week before break, and took in Homer and Vergil as illustrations of Epic form.#: Posted by on 02/22 at 03:27 PM -
'A form is an HTML element that uses a variety of field types to collect information from a user and pass it along, usually to a CGI application or ASP, JSP, or CF page that takes the data and does something with it.'
Dreamweaver MX: The Complete Reference, Ray West and Tom Muck, Osborne
If I had been at home it would have been from Collapse by Jared Diamond, which I have quite completed reading yet.#: Posted by on 02/22 at 04:26 PM -
Here it comes from "the c++ programming language" from Bjarne Stroustrup;
"Unfortunately, most do not."
Well, its a success for me to have this sentence out of a 1020 paged book full of c++ code. so be it!#: Posted by umut celenli on 02/24 at 01:34 AM -
From Michael Pollan's "The Botany of Desire":
"No, he chuckled, firewood was just a sideline, that and plowing driveways in the winter." -
The TriangleMesh shape is one of the shapes that can compute a better world space bound than can be found by transforming its object space bounding box to world space.
#: Posted by on 02/25 at 09:06 PM