Damn Memes
* Grab the nearest book.
* Open it to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
* Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.
Result “From PS we can determine P uniquely; in fact, we can obtain the original tableau P from PS, by applying exactly the same algorithm - but reversing the order and the roles of italic and regular type, since PS is a dual tableau.”
I didn’t cheat, this really was the closest book to me. Extra marks if you can guess what it was…
Tags: meme
November 13th, 2008 at 12:09 pm
This is easy: The Art of computer programming: Fundamental Algorithms
by Donald E. Knuth
November 13th, 2008 at 12:13 pm
@sven: very *very* close, but still no biscuit…
November 13th, 2008 at 12:19 pm
[…] reference to Damn memes. A english explanation here and a german one […]
November 13th, 2008 at 1:14 pm
Sven: easy? you mean easy as searching at books.google.com? X-)
November 13th, 2008 at 2:17 pm
Knuth, Sorting and Searching, Second Edition.
November 13th, 2008 at 2:18 pm
@Nicholas Urfe: We have a winner!
November 13th, 2008 at 2:22 pm
Great!
Closest to me was Knuth’s Concrete Mathematics.
November 13th, 2008 at 11:50 pm
Most.boring.meme.ever
(and thats saying something)
November 15th, 2008 at 10:41 am
Alberto: I used books.google.com, but only to verify the quote. The reason my guess was that book is that I read it a short while ago and remembered that part (for whatever reason). So it seems Knuth has the very same sentence in two different books at (almost) the same page.