Meme sheep

[auntiemeesh]

slightlytookish did the book meme and then put it up for grabs. So I grabbed.

o1. Grab the nearest book.
o2. Open the book to page twenty-three.
o3. Find the fifth sentence.
o4. Post the text of the next five sentences in your journal along with these instructions:
--Don't dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.
--Tag five other people to do the same.

So, I'm at the computer at work, in the resource room, without a single work book anywhere near me. So I had to dig into my bag, and this is what I pulled out.

***

With your voluntary posing of that question, sir, I have been authorized to give you this.

He withdrew from his shirt pocket a packet of letters in lavendar envelopes, tied around with a silver riband of shimmeringest gossamer. A faint waft of gardenia greeted me, the preferred scent of Glorious Jones.

I reached for these blessed reminders but with a lawyerly trick Hap Martin snatched them away.

Ah, ah, ah, he said.

------Awesome, by Jack Pendarvis

It's a weird book, really funny, difficult to place into any specific genre. There's an element of scifi (which is mainly in that the main character, a giant named Mr. Awesome, is able to craft out of random garden tools, pretty much any sort of advanced technology he needs, whether it's yet been invented or not), some really exaggerated romance themes (as can be seen in the quoted section above), and a certain Paul Bunyan-esque element of tall tales. Only more-so. And instead of a big blue ox, Mr. Awesome has a robot ward named Jimmy.

Comments

[eve11]

That sounds... interesting...:D

Mine is exactly what you'd expect (I'm at work):
-----------
The regressions were performed independently for each infant using ordinary least squares, and the results are shown in Figure 2.2.

The distribution of the 106 estimated intercepts $\{\hat{\alpha_i}\}$ in Figure 2.2 appears reasonably Gaussian apart from the single negative value associated with infant '*' as mentioned above. The distribution of hte estimated gradients $\{\hat{\beta_i}\}$ also appears Gaussian apart from a few high estimates, particularly that for infant '*'. Thirteen (12%) of the infants have a positive estimated gradient, while four (4%) have a 'high' estimated gradient greater than 2.0. Plotting estimated intercepts against gradients suggests independence of $\alpha_i$ and $\beta_i$, apart from the clear outlier for infant '*'
---------------
--- Gilks, Richardson, and Spiegelhalter: Markov Chain Monte Carlo in Practice


Thrilling!

[auntiemeesh.livejournal.com]

Markov chain Monte Carlo sounds like some sort of new gambling thing - like, if you can make the longest Markov Chain, you win big bucks!

[lyda-pearl.livejournal.com]

fascinating.

[lyda-pearl.livejournal.com]

sounds fun!

[auntiemeesh.livejournal.com]

It's an interesting book. I don't know if I'd read another one by the same author or not, though.