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- Grab the nearest book.
- Open the book to page 23.
- Find the fifth sentence.
- Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
What a great idea. Blogs are in a way about self discovery, and what better way to discover yourself than to ponder over text taken completely out of context. I looked forward to the challenge.
I grabbed the nearest book I could find, and embarassingly Extreme Programming Installed only had three sentences on page 23. Caterina wasn’t too clear on what to do when there’s no fifth sentence, or even no fourth sentence, so I made an educated guess, and decided that books in this category are in fact anomalies and therefore invalid.
However, there was a diagram at the bottom of page 23, of a book with the title User Stories, which was an interesting coincidence, because the next nearest book was the classic Writing Effective Use Cases by Alistair Cockburn. Page 23, sentence 5 is…
Let’s first look at a use case purely in the way it captures interactions between actors with goals.
Uhuh… I was waiting for the penny to drop. Technically, sure, the classic definition of a use case, but I wasn’t picking up any particular personal insight. It seemed all pretty superficial to be honest.
So I figured perhaps the problem was that it was not a complete digression from the original book which didn’t have a 5th sentence, which means that it was, in a relational and perhaps philosphical kind of way, the same book. I tossed aside Cockburn.
At this stage I started to wonder whether relevency, or in fact irrelevancy if you like, was important. I mean the nearest and next nearest books would most likely be related in some way, certainly if they weren’t on the shelf at the time. So, seeking randomness, perhaps somewhat ironically reflecting life, I skipped the next 14 books, and grabbed the 17th nearest, which was actually the first on this particular bookshelf. I figured that this would accurately reflect Caterina’s original intention, and quickly thumbed through to page 23.
Page 23, sentence 5 of the classic Unified Modeling Language User Guide, by Booch, Rumbaugh and Jacobson says… well that’s where I started to have problems. Not only was the first sentence actually the end of a sentence from the previous page, but I wasn’t sure whether bullet lists and headings actually counted as sentences. I decided that this was an extremely rare case, and that I’d be best off ignoring the problem for now, and grabbing the next book instead.
The 18th nearest book, page 23, sentence 5 says…
For more details, see the subsequent chapters that outline the UML semantic views, as well as the detailed reference material in the encyclopedia chapter.
About the only insight that gave me, was that for The Unified Modeling Language Reference Manual, Rumbaugh must have done much of the work, because the authors are now listed as Rumbaugh, Jacobson and Booch. Interesting, perhaps even amusing, but not in the least particularly relevant to the metaphorical road to self discovery. I mean, it’s not even a closed off culdesac hidden at the back of the self discovery street directory. It took me a few minutes to realise that my bookshelf was sorted by technology, with a subhierarchy of author surname. Again, a logical ordering would seem to contradict Caterina’s original intention.
I left what I effectionately call “the work room”, and went to the lounge bookcase. Although Caterina’s requirements weren’t exactly clear, I grabbed the nearest book to my right hand, assuming that distance would in this particular case be the appropriate objective measure of nearness, and would probably be measured between the two points of contact between me and the book.
Rough Magic, A Biography of Sylvia Plath, while not technically a novel, isn’t exactly a reference book either, so I turned to page 23, and found that old classic sentence breaking across a page again. I knew I should have clarified that the first time, because then I wouldn’t have had to choose between the two classics:
Still, Sylvia cried on the day Aurelia left.
…and…
On April 27, 1935, Aurelia traveled back across the harbor into Boston, checked into Jamaica Plain’s Faulkner Hospital, and, after going into labor, gave birth — again three weeks early — to a boy, whom she and Otto named Warren Joseph.
I put Sylvia back on the shelf, and decided that by sentence, while the technical, and most useful in this context, definition would be a complete sentence with a beginning middle and end, that a spanning sentence is in some way still in fact a sentence. I instead grabbed Dibs: In Search of Self, by Virginia Axline, and turned to page 23. Counting the spanning sentence, which by the fact that it is called a sentence, is still considered a sentence, I read out sentence number 5.
Life, for him, was a grim business.
Indeed.