the smedley log - suburban scrawl

Her sister didn’t work and had never married.

What’s that title about? Actually, it’s the result of the following low-effort meme from Bob’s blog:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don’t search around and look for the “coolest” book you can find. Do what’s actually next to you.

Bob thought it would be cooler if he didn’t tell you which book he found his sentence in, but I wanted to reveal the book I found mine in, only because I’ve enjoyed so much of it. It’s a book I received for Christmas last year called, The Best American Essays 2004.

Oddly enough, since I’ve been reading it intermittently (which is made so much easier by the anthological nature of the book), this is the first time I’ve seen page 123, much less been aware of even one sentence on the page. But maybe now I’ll read that particular essay.

“We use the equivalence of Friedel pairs in the anomalous scattering data to establish phases of reflections in the heavy-atom data, and we use the phased heavy-atom derivative structure factors to establish the native phases.” – from CrystallographyMade_Crystal_Clear_

BTW, this meme reminds me of old-school copy protection schemes for computer games (like Prince of Persia).

“The one you longed for will be ready, the one you wailed for ready, just as soon as you plow an adder-infested field, turn over a snake-ridden field without the plow proceeding, the plowshare shaking.” – from Poem 19, The Kalevala

Thanks for sharing guys.

Funky, the sentence you quote might as well be Latin to me (meaning that I understand about every fifth word or so). Has to be technical or of a specialized academic nature I suppose.

Cziltang, poetry is the kind of nonsense I can relate to—thanks for going easy on me (by noting that I don’t post memes of the “what are you a bowl of” variety).

“However, it was recently suggested by Chizhik and Gans [3] that when the energy arriving at a linear array has a distribution in angle which is Gaussian, the spatial correlation function can be parameterized by 2*pi*d/lambda * sigma where d is the distance, lambda is the carrier wavelength, and sigma is the standard deviation of the angular distribution.”

Funny, this is a from paper in a conference proceedings that happens to have been written by a friend and former colleague of mine.

Results would’ve been way different at home….

You mean you don’t have that one sitting around on the coffee table—I’m sure the kids would enjoy it

“Mix together the cumin, cloves, cardamom, black peppercorns, allspice, and fenugreek seeds.”

Yep, I skipped over the list of ingredients, but that was the 5th sentence in the Berbere Sauce (Ethiopian) recipe in “The Frugal Gourmet On Our Immigrant Ancestors” cookbook.

“Deal with the Soul
As with Algebra!”

Is that Emily Dickinson? I’m too lazy to Google right now, or God forbid, go over and pick up a book to find out…