I got booktagged

I got tagged by AradhanaD at Leftist Looney Lunchbox.

The instructions:
Find the nearest book.
Turn to page 123.
Go to the fifth sentence on the page.
Copy out the next three sentences and post to your blog.
Name the book and the author, and tag three more folks.

This was a little difficult.   I had three nearest books, and one of them was a dictionary.  I chose one of the other two.  Here's the quote:

Theorem 6.4 can be quite useful in conjunction with upper bounds on the binomial distribution, such as Lemma 6.1.

A bound on the right tail can be determined similarly.

Corollary 6.5
Consider a sequence of n Bernoulli trials where success occurs with probability p.

The book is the first edition of Introduction to Algorithms by Cormen, Leiserson, and Rivest.  This book should be familiar to anybody who has spent more than a couple of years studying computer science at a university level. It's a giant tome and one of the most useful "theory" books in computer science.  It was a little hard to pick out what was the "fifth sentence" because prior to what I quoted, there were several equations.

The quote comes from chapter 6, "Counting and Probability," which is one of the introductory chapters giving background/remedial mathematics.  (The book is about 1000 pages or so.)  It's basically talking about what happens at the far ends of the so-called "bell curve."

Anyway, I usually don't do this to people, but I'll make an exception: I tag skdadl, Craig, and Violet, since they are all so literate.

Comments

[Craig]

Nearest on the left or right?! Or behind or below? They all appear equidistant. (I assume my "sessional instructors' manual" for Carleton doesn't count as a "book.")

[skdadl]

Ye gods. :eek:

[Mandos]

Craig: You can safely ignore any Qarleton literature. Perform your own disambiguation re: equidistance.

[Mandos]

skdadl: Oh come now, you *must* have a book near you.

[Craig]

Because I am opposed to these things on principle (and I'm not posting to my blog until I do a particular post), I'll leave it here. The following are roughly equidistant:

Behind me: Fred Nietzsche, "Third Essay," Geneaology of Morals (Ansell-Pearson edition): "Its noblest claim nowadays is that it is a mirror, it rejects all teleology, it does not want to 'prove' anything anymore; it scorns playing the judge, and shows good taste there, - it affirms as little as it denies, it asserts and 'describes' ... All this is ascetic to a high degree; but to an even higher degree it is nihilistic, make no mistake about it! You see a sad, hard but determined gaze, - an eye peers out, like a lone explorer at the North Pole (perhaps so as nont to peer in? or peer back? ...)."

Left of me: Frank Pearce, The Radical Durkheim (2nd ed.): "True he agrees that Weber is open to criticism for underestimating the role of material sanctions and the exercise of economic and other forms of power in maintaining a system, but he does not integrate these factors into his own analysis. Fatalism and slavery Let us explore the complexity of these issues by a brief discussion of slavery, a phenomenon mentioned by Durkheim in his cryptic footnote on fatalism. Although the societies within which slavery has been important have been heterogeneous (as have the forms of slavery), most have used naked coercion as one of their mechanisms for controlling the slaves."

Right of me: Lorna Weir, Pregnancy, Risk and Biopolitics: On the Threshold of the Living Subject: "By the fictio legis Corneliae the last moment of a testator's life occurred at the very moment of captivity, when the soldier was still a citizen. The fiction of the extra moment permitted the wills of captured soldiers to be recognized as valid. Concern for Ancient Roman property relations gave rise to temporal creativity."

The book under my desk doesn't have a page 123.

[Mandos]

"Because I am opposed to these things on principle (and I'm not posting to my blog until I do a particular post), I'll leave it here."

I'm kind of neither here nor there about it. Raising my link and hit count presently outweighs any discomfort I have. What's *your* reason, if I may ask?

[Craig]

Mickey died on Saturday and my next post was going to be about him. In terms of the principle, I find these things generally silly - especially when they are called "memes."

[Mandos]

Oh, I'm very sorry to hear about Mickey. I remember him prominently on Blythe's election campaign materials. That's very sad.

[AradhanaD]

Hey Mandos... That sounds like a really fun book to read!!! lol I thought you might have something a 'tad' bit edgier!!!

Thanks for playing.

The first two books near me didn't have a 123 either...

And so I had to pull one out of my bag.

[Mandos]

Oh, are you a science/tech person too, AD?

I was doing the meme from work and that book was sitting on the shelf. Otherwise I just have scientific papers around me and they're all not more than 16 pages long, usually. If I were doing it at home, it would likely have been Iain Banks' SF novel, The Algebraist, which is quite edgy at times.

Sorry to disappoint :)

[Mandos]

Here's what I would have quoted from home, and yes it is The Algebraist:

"If I'm in there in a gascraft, even with Colonel Hatherence riding shotgun, I should be effectively untraceable," Fassin told them.

"Unless," Paggs said, "she's supposed to be in constant touch with her superiors."

"And that might be the real reason we are all expected to stay together on Third Fury, delving remotely," Ganscerel said, sighing.

[AradhanaD]

Nopes, not a science/tech person. Lol, thanks for the 'edgier' quote!

[Mandos]

No, it's not that "edgy". There are parts of the book that are kind of fictionally avant garde, but not page 123.

[Polly Jones]

I like memes...there's nothing wrong with silly. Next time there's a geeky meme right up my alley, tag me!!!