You're it!

(Cross-posted to The Core 4.)

I've been tagged by the estimable James at The Mahatma X Files with one o' them interweb meme thingies. Like him, I usually don't take part in them (in fact, I did only one time before that I can recall now), but this one is kind of interesting and so, again like James, I said what the hell.

Here's the deal:
1. Grab the nearest book (that is at least 123 pages long).
2. Open to p. 123.
3. Go down to the 5th sentence.
4. Type in the following 3 sentences.
5. Tag five people.

Now, I cheated a little bit on the book because the nearest books to my computer are my wife's nursing reference books and her textbooks for her master's degree courses and I don't think three sentences of biochemical babble about interactions between two drugs of which I've never heard really fits the idea of the meme.

Instead I popped into the next room for the nearest book that I read - which turned out to be not the one I expected. I had just finished Bill of Wrongs by Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose, which I thought was on the table - but my wife had taken it to read, so it was gone. My copy of The New Media Monopoly by Ben Bagdikian, which I'd just started to re-read, is on my bed table, too far away.

So I just grabbed from the bookshelf the volume nearest to my computer chair. It turned out to be a 1961 translation and reprint of Relativity by Albert Einstein, originally published in 1916, a book I got so long ago that the cover price is 95 cents. These are the sentences:

But this point of view by no means embraces the whole of the actual process; for it slurs over the important part played by intuition and deductive thought in the development of an exact science. As soon as a science has emerged from its initial stages, theoretical advances are no longer achieved merely by a process of arrangement. Guided by empirical data, the investigator rather develops a system of thought which, in general, is built up logically from a small number of fundamental assumptions, the so-called axioms.

Happily, because there was no guarantee, the sentences made a coherent thought. Whew.

Okay, I'm going to tag Kevin at The American Street, JayV at Blazing Indiscretions, anybody at LeanLeft who cares to take it up, Len at The Existentialist Cowboy, and, even though this is different from what he usually posts, Tim at Green Left Infoasis just 'cause he's a cool guy.