Saw this over on Capitalist Pig vs. Socialist Swine. It’s been making the rounds of my favorite blogs:
- Grab the nearest book.
- Open the book to page 123.
- Find the fifth sentence.
- Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
- Don’t search around and look for the “coolest” book you can find. Do what’s actually next to you.
The book is: How The World Was One, Beyond the global village, by Arthur C. Clarke.
The sentence is: “Unfortunately, one cable could only carry a single conversation for such a distance and this made the project uneconomic.”
The meme says not to pick the “coolest” book but I did a little cherry-picking from those piled on my desk, which included (left to right)…
- Red Hat Linux 9
- Roy H. Williams, The Wizard of Ads
- Howe, Genius Explained
- Clarke, How The World Was One
- Ravitch, The Language Police
- Moorman, How To Make Your Science Project Scientific
- Mallory, Cooke, Loughmen, 1941, Using Arithmetic VI
- Ben Ray Redman, Viking portable library, Voltaire
- Bentley Pub., Volkswagen Service Manual, Type 1, 1966 through 1969
- Kornfield, Teachings of the Buddha
- Economist ref. library, World In Figures
- Dalai Lama, Ethics for the New Millennium
- Standage, The Victorian Internet
- a phone book
- Andrew, The CSS Anthology, 101 essential tips, tricks & hacks
It’s kind of fun to skip around blogs and see what people are reading (especially when I have less agreeable tasks I should be doing.)
The book is David M. Goldschmidt, Algebraic Functions and Projective Curves. Sentence five on page 123 reads: “Proof: Because they lie in $\tau(K)$, the coordinate functions $\tau(\phi_{0}),…,\tau(\phi_{n}))$ define a map $\phi^{\prime}: \tau(K)\to \mathfrak{P}^{n}$.”
I had to write the math parts in a text-formatting language called TeX.
I suppose I cheated a bit, because I had to move a CD which was on top of the book. The closest accessible book is David S. Connery, Convicting the Innocent. “The middle should represent the picture, and the person should tell what happened before that and after.” (He’s describing something called the Thematic Aptitude perception Test (TAT)).
I really like this meme so I’m taking the opportunity to participate in it again!
Today the book in front of me is:
Cocaine by Dominic Streatfeild.
The 5th sentence on page 123 is:
“The quantity of cocaine absorbed by the body depends on the size of the membrane across which it has to travel: in terms of toxicity, snorting cocaine is comparatively safe because the surface area of the inside of the nose is relatively small.”
The next sentence is far better though:
“The vagina and anus, meanwhile, have considerably greater areas than the interior of the nose, so a dose that is safe when snorted may probe dangerous, and even lethal, when packed into another orifice.”
I’m surprised that it would occur to anyone to take illicit drugs anally or vaginally….
I don’t see why it wouldn’t occur to people. It occurs to them to take drugs intravenously with dirty needles, or to take random pills with god-knows-what in them. Taking a relatively safe (compared to meth or herion) and pure (compared to MDMA, meth and other synthetics) drug like cocaine anally seems much more sane.
Really? It would never occur to me to take drugs anally…. Especially when there are other dosing modalities that have proven themselves to be effective.
It was a joke, predicated on the ridiculousness of taking most street drugs at all.
However, it wouldn’t surprise me if some people take cocaine anally if they’re unwilling to use needles. Cocaine usually sells for $50/gram at the lower end of its retail price. A cocaine addict can use more 4 grams in one day. This can produce a significant budgetary problem, one which can be partially solved by finding a more efficient method of ingestion than insuffulation. I’m sure it’s occured to many people that the membranes in the anus are much larger than those of the sinus, and not prone to the “drips” problem. This is where cocaine drips down the back of the troat into the stomach. Cocaine is not very active orally, since the stomach acid hydrolyzes much of the cocaine to ecogine and benzoic acid (both inactive). This wastes something like 40% of the cocaine, and the amount of waste increases the more cocaine that’s used (since the extra irritation causes more drips).
Alcoholics have been known to drink mouthwash when they run out of booze, anal absorption of cocaine wouldn’t surprise me a bit.
I actually had a friend in highschool who used to drink Scope because he thought it tasted good. I’m not even sure he even knew it had alcohol in it. He always had minty fresh breath.