The Book Exercise

Via danah boyd:

  1. Grab the nearest book.
  2. Open the book to page 23.
  3. Find the fifth sentence.
  4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

The lawyers wanted to know if the plaintiffs, the black children in Clarenden County, would show the same result as those we had tested earler.

– from ‘Eyes on the Prize, America’s Civil Rights Years 1954 – 65’ by Juan Williams

(hat tip to Tim Oren)

37 thoughts on “The Book Exercise”

  1. Each outcome in a sample space is called an element or a member of the sample space, or simply a sample point.

    Probability and Statistics for Scientists and Engineers, 7th Ed., Walpole, Myers, Myers, and Ye.

    (Huh, huh, he said member!)

  2. David has posted a rather famous example of why this doesn’t work. I’ve seen it a dozen times. 🙂

  3. “LITERATURE: T.G. Pinches, The NT in the Light of the Historical Records and Legends of Assyria and Babylonia; Stephen Langdon, Building Inscriptions of the Neo-Babylonian Empire.”

    The International Standard Bible Encyclopaeda, Volume 4, Naarah-Socho, article: Nebuchadnezzar, by R. Dick Wilson, page number 2129 (however, it’s 23 pages in from the first page of this volume).

    Mr. Pinches? Unfortunate name.

  4. “A generalized definition of slope then is the number of feet of fall or rise in a horizontal distance or S = DE/L, where S is the slope and DE is the difference in elevation between the end points of a line of which the horizontal or map distance is L (Fig. 2.9).”

    from ‘Site Engineering for Landscape Architects’ by Steven Strom & Kurt Nathan

  5. “Who is truly happy and content in this world?”
    Mesillat Yesharim, or Paths of the Just by Moshe Luzzato, a classic of early mussar literature by an eminent kabbalist.

    Unfortunately this is a short sentence in a paragraph of short sentences, in a book where most of the sentences are longer and more interesting, with many subordinate clauses. But fortunately this page is in English – the even-number pages are the original Hebrew.

  6. “I found that my boss was a sergeant with an IQ of 90.”

    I reached out and picked up the nearest book within reach.

  7. Why do people kill black rhinos? For the same reason they sell drugs or cheat on their taxes.

    Naked Economics by Charles Wheelan.

  8. But from the dog’s point of view, all he’s saying is “blah blah GINGER blah blah blah blah GINGER blah blah blah.”

    –Don’t Make Me Think, by Steve Krug

  9. Now that they were closed she could see the way the skin puckered up across the lids and dropped down to meet the creases at the corner.

    –Brick Lane, by Monica Ali

  10. The rituals of the ceremony were as elaborate and abstruse as any in the royal crowning at Reims.

    –A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, by Barbara Tuchman

  11. “The carved wooden owl shown in the top photo on p.24 became a symbol of the owner’s land, which was frequently visited by an owl, and of their first house, which had burned to the ground.”

    Sarah Susanka, The Not So Big House

  12. First, if the property width has a value of auto, replace it with the intrinsic width of the element.

    Cascading Style Sheets 2.0 (well, you asked for the closest book at hand…)

  13. I’ve set attendance records and been close to bankruptcy.

    Veeck as in Wreck, Bill Veeck with Ed Linn

  14. Ray Guy of Oakland punted a football which hit this display causing the management to raise the device.

    David F. Griffing, The Dynamics of Sports

  15. The answer to the second question depended on the answer to the first.

    — Citizen Soldiers, Stephen Ambrose

  16. Hey, htom!

    I too am in the process of reading Susanka’s “The Not So Big House.” 😀

    Are you building a house?

  17. “After Abraham’s death, God blessed his son Isaac, who then lived near Beer Lahai Roi.”

    – Genesis 25:11 from The Holy Bible, New International Version, Pocket Edition

    or, for the religion-averse:

    “When trying to convert a binary number, such as 10001001, to a decimal number, all you need to do is look at the positions of the 1s.”

    – from “A+ Complete Study Guide, second edition,” by David Groth and Dan Newland

  18. “The system management framework fits into the X/Open reference model and is
    built on top of an OMG CORBA 1.1 foundation.”

    Troubleshooting Tivoli Using The Latest Features

  19. It was only at the age of twenty that it had occured to Marija to try her strength, when she had risen up and nearly murdered the man, and then come away.

    – The Jungle, Upton Sinclair

  20. “This is a disorder characterized by physical tics aand twitches that may involve any part of the body, as well as vocal symptoms such as grunts and barks, echolalia (involuntary repitition of the words of others), and coprolalia (compulsive repetition of obscene words).” Keith Stanovich, How to Think Straight about Psychology, 7th edition.

  21. “In NG FP3 Checkpoint has launched “smart” clients.”

    Checkpoint NG VPN-1/Firewall-1, Advanced Configuration and Troubleshooting by Jim Noble, Doug Maxwell, et al.

  22. Some masculine nouns become feminine in the plural: il braccio (arm) -> le braccia, il ciglio (eyelash) -> le ciglia.

    Insieme 2nd Edition. Habekovic & Mazzola.

  23. “During the whole of the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth, a great many enlightened and progressive thinkers had supposed that a main danger, perhaps the principal danger, to modern civilization came from a single political tendency, which was the extreme right, and mostly from a single country, which was Germany, the sworn foe of the French Revolution.” Paul Berman – Terror and Liberalism

    Actually, there were a couple of books that were closer, but because they were on a lower shelf they didn’t catch my eye: The Bible (KJ version) and Public Finance and Public Choice, by James Buchanan and Richard Musgrave.

  24. Damned be the soil on your account, with painstaking-labor shall you eat from it, all the days of your life.

    — The Five Books of Moses (A New Translation by Everett Fox)

  25. _He couldn’t remember, but at all events she was the loveliest creature you ever saw._

    The Toll-Gate, by Georgette Heyer.

  26. (To “snap up” is to detect a submarine, and an “Akula” is a very capable Russian nuclear attack submarine.)
    – The Complete Idiot’s Guide To Submarines

  27. ” When I looked up through the web of trees, the night fell over me, and for a moment I lost my boundaries, feeling like the sky was my own skin, and the moon was my heart beating up there in the dark.”

    The Secret Life of Bees, Sue Monk Kidd.

Leave a Reply to Eric Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published.