[The Human Factor] OK, I'll byte.
Originating from the demented mind of some bemused induhvidual, the "Page 23 Meme" has been spreading wildly. I was fascinated by memetics, when I first encountered it, so I'll participate in the experiment. However, the real meme I am spreading is the meme of memetics, itself! Oh, and I just recognized that I also seem to be heavily propagating one or more Google memes, as well. Do notice that I have not merely propagated "Page 23." I have also added some sort of content that took some sort of thought. Whenever I become conscious that I am spreading some meme, I usually try to add value.
Call to action
There is a meme making the rounds of blog-space. Here are the steps to take if you want to follow it.
- Grab the nearest book.
- Open the book to page 23.
- Find the fifth sentence.
- Post the text of the sentence in your blog along with these instructions.
My entry:
- Book: Tufte, Edward R., _Envisioning Information_
- Sentence: "(As statisticians explain, marginal distributions are not wholly informative with regard to joint distributions.)
Note: Instructions are never quite good enough, are they? Tufte's page 23 starts with part of a sentence carried over from the previous page. Should that be counted? Should it be counted if over half of the sentence is on the target page? Oh, and that partial sentence was part of a block quotation. Should material from a block quotation be considered or only original sentences contributed by the author? I decided to skip that sentence and start with the first sentence that began on the page. Oh, and the sentence I selected, you may have noted, is parenthesized. Should I have skipped that and gone on to the next non-parenthetical sentence? When we give instructions to computers, we must be really careful. Perhaps we should exercise the same caution when ordering people around!
BTW, I caught this meme from this post.
PS, if you got this far: Did you notice that my meme links in this post were all different? Have a look at the URLs.