It’s a book meme (or two)! YAY!

Meme #1!
1. Collect the book that you have most handy
2. Turn to page 161
3. Find the 5th complete sentence
4. Site the sentence on your blog

My book is Julian Faraway’s Extending the Linear Model with R (yes, I’m aware of how sexual that sounds). It was sitting on my desk because I needed to look up how to access the logit and probit link functions in R.
The fifth sentence on the 161st page is: “In a model with random effects, the αs are no longer parameters, but random variables.”

Now meme #2!
The book that’s been on your shelves the longest:
Seeing, Saying, Doing, Playing by Taro Gomi. It’s a picture book from my little kid days. There are about twelve scenes depicted within, each containing hundreds of little people going about their days with a little verb hovering around them, describing what they’re doing. I apparently loved this book as a kid. Which, I guess, is obvious by the fact that I’ve still got it on my shelf.

A book that reminds you of something specific in your life (a person, a place, a time, etc.):
Analyzing Multivariate Data, the course book for Multivariate Analysis taught by Dr. Lee. Yeah, I know, dork fest. This book reminds me of my final semester at the U of I when I was living with the guys in the house and taking noting but philosophy, statistics, and writing classes. This was the best little period of my life thus far. My love affair with factor analysis helped.

A book you acquired in some interesting way (gift, serendipity in a used bookstore, prize, etc.):
I have two vocabulary workbooks from the aptitude testing facility I went to back in 2005. They’re levels 7 and 8, purple and yellow.

The most recent addition to your shelves:
The blog archive. Yes, I know it’s not a book, but a) technically my most recent addition was the entirety of my statistics book collection. I moved them from my office at UBC to my apartment, and b) the blogs sit with the rest of my books ‘cause there’s not really any other place for them.

The book whose loss would traumatise you the most:
My stats notes from the last few years. Again, not a book, but something that sits alongside the rest of my library in a massive binder. I would be extremely upset if I were to lose those notes. They contain my initial affair with factor analysis, I mean, come on.

A book that’s been with you to the most places:
I’d have to say Dewey Sadka’s The Dewey Color System. The Color System is a color personality theory with which I was totally obsessed in high school. I actually used it to conduct my first ever major statistical analysis (though it lacked any integrity). I took it to school, I took it to restaurants to read to my parents, I wrote my analyses in it…it’s pretty beat up, haha.

A bonus book that you want to talk about but doesn’t fit into the other questions:
I have to plug Herman Wouk’s novel The Caine Mutiny. It’s my favorite book EVAR and the fact that it’s relatively unknown baffles me. It won the Pulitzer Prize, people! Read it!