Instant Bibliomancy!

Caught a link through PLSJ to a little fun with instant bibliomancy (the art of foretelling the future by reading random passages from books). Here’s what you do:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

Here’s mine:

“The point is that the profit motive was combined with other motives that were self-serving and altrusitic, and even evangelistic, at times.”

– E. Eisenstein, The printing press as an agent of change.

This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged , . Bookmark the permalink. Trackbacks are closed, but you can post a comment.

4 Comments

  1. Posted 4/15/2004 at 2:02 pm | Permalink

    First, membership has risen in some type of organizations and fallen in others.

    Democracies in Flux: The Evolution of Social Capital in Contemporary Society. 2002 Edited by Rober D. Putnam.


    i figured putting it here was better than there.

  2. stefanos
    Posted 4/15/2004 at 6:03 pm | Permalink

    (Nonetheless, nonetheless, up until 1924 there were complaints about numerous escapes, the low state of discipline amoung the personnnel-probably there were drunkeness and carelessness-thier only interest lay in getting thier wages.)

    The Gulag Archipelago vol two
    The destructive Labor Camps
    By Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

    I think this is what steve mann is worried about

    stef

  3. Posted 4/16/2004 at 9:37 am | Permalink

    “Labour historians and sociologists have investigated the relationship between social change and the shaping of production processes in great detail and have also been concerned with the influence of technological form upon social relations.” Judy Wajcman – Feminism Confronts Technology

  4. Posted 5/14/2004 at 2:17 pm | Permalink

    Artifacts can’t be defined by their shape and function, only by what they can do and by what someone, somewhere, wants them to do.

    From “The art of looking sideways” but actually from Steven Pinker, How the mind works.

One Trackback

  1. By Fragments on 4/16/2004 at 8:15 am

    Bibliomancy/Memery
    Alex points to a fun meme on Long Story Short Pier. Here’s what you do: Grab the nearest book.Open the book to page 23.Find the…

Post a Reply to Matt

Your email is never published nor shared. Required fields are marked *

*
*

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>