To the cliffs!

Starting at Profgrrrrl and proceeding to Pharyngula::We are all lemmings, we bloggers:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don’t search around and look for the “coolest” book you can find. Do what’s actually next to you

Directly underneath the laptop is Untangling Ecological Complexity : The Macroscopic Perspective by Brian A. Maurer. The appropriate sentence is:

The observed distribution of total biomasses was more negatively skewed than the random expectation.

Underneath the table is Granta 87: Jubilee! The 25th Anniversary Issue (Granta: The Magazine of New Writing) edited by Ian Jack. In “A New World” by Jeremy Treglown:

This silence of the month was a mark on everything.

The New Yorker next to me offers:

And an investigation by the Bosnian government turned up no confirmation that the calls to Zubaydah were made at all, according to the men's American lawyers, Rob Kirsch and Stephen Oleskey.

Just at arm's length are:

• The Path to Power (The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 1) by Robert Caro:
• The Federalist Papers (Penguin Classics) by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay:
• Niche Construction : The Neglected Process in Evolution (MPB-37) (Monographs in Population Biology) by F. John Odling-Smee, Kevin N. Laland, Marcus W. Feldman
• The New Oxford Annotated Bible: The Holy Bible edited by Herbert G. May, Bruce Metzger

And yes, I do know that lemmings don't make a habit of jumping off cliffs. That's for another time.

“Pressed in a Book” by The Shins from the album Oh, Inverted World (2:55).