Grab the nearest book
As far as I know, no one has tagged me with this blog meme, but I’m still going to participate as it looks fun.
Instructions:
1. Grab the nearest book (that is at least 123 pages long).
2. Open to p. 123.
3. Go down to the 5th sentence.
4. Type in the following 3 sentences.
5. Tag five people.
Nearest book as I sit at my coffee table at home: The Chocolate Connoisseur by Chloé Doutre-Roussel. Page 123 is in the middle of Chapter 6 on The Cream of the Crop under the Reading the Ingredients List subheading. Here we go:
There are several grades of chocolate, and these figures show the European Union and US regulations for standard (S) as well as fine (F) chocolate.
* Dark chocolate (S) must contain at least 35% dry cocoa solids (but 15% for “sweet chocolate” in the US), while dark chocolate (F) must contain at least 43%.
* Milk chocolate (S) must contain at least 25% dry cocoa solids (but 20% in the UK, and 10% in the US), while fine milk chocolate must contain at least 30%.
The fun continues in the 4th sentence so allow me to add that: “Bars such as Cadbury Dairy Milk, Galaxy or Hershey must be labelled ‘family milk chocolate’ in the EU, as they don’t contain enough chocolate to count as chocolate under these rules!”
So yes, it’s worth noting that chocolate is not immune to policy considerations. It may sound silly, but it’s obviously a huge industry and what gets to be labelled chocolate does have regulations attached to it, ones that vary from one country to the next. There are also lobbying efforst involved. I don’t follow this area closely, but when a related news story pops up, I do find it intriguing to check out.
Since I wasn’t tagged for this meme, I guess I don’t have to tag anyone else either although I invite people to grab the nearest book and post the specified three sentences here or on their own blogs.
February 11th, 2008 at 9:57 am
Eszter: I was very close to tagging you, but I figured you were too busy for such frivolity. I retro-tag you :).
February 11th, 2008 at 10:04 am
[…] Update: I also retroactively tag Eszter Hargittai. These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. […]
February 11th, 2008 at 10:19 am
[…] Since i woke up well before should be humanly possible, i feel like it’s almost time for lunch. As such, a brief break to follow Eszter’s lead: Instructions: 1. Grab the nearest book (that is at least 123 pages long).* 2. Open to p. 123. 3. Go down to the 5th sentence. 4. Type in the following 3 sentences. 5. Tag five people. […]
February 11th, 2008 at 12:54 pm
Ha… So I just read this post and decided to do it and since I don’t really have a blog I will do it here. The closest book to me was “Introduction to Probability” by Bertsekas and Tsitsiklis. Just because I fell asleep with it after working on homework. Not very interesting I know, but wait until you see my 3 sentences… It is a problem about a chocolate factory. 🙂
“Problem 20. As an advertising campaign, a chocolate factory places golden tickets in some of its candy bars, with the promise that a golden ticket is worth a trip trough the chocolate factory, and all the chocolate you can eat for life. If the probability of finding a golden ticket is p, find the mean and the variance of the number of candy bars you need to eat to find a ticket.”
February 11th, 2008 at 2:20 pm
Alex, the busier I am, the more opportunity I seem to find for things of this sort.:)
Biliana, that is really funny! Go chocolate!
February 17th, 2008 at 2:35 pm
I want to participate, but these sentences are hard to type!
plus 2 times (the inverse logit of ((x minus c1.5) over sigma) minus the inverse logit of ((x minus c2.5) over sigma)) plus
plus three times the inverse logit of ((x minus c2.5) over sigma),
where inverse logit of x equals e to the x over (1 plus e to the x) is the logistic curve displayed in Figure 5.2a on page
Thanks for letting me play, even though my book is not as much fun as the others. (Though now that I did this, I notice there is an extra plus in the book, at the end of the first line entered above.)
_Data Analysis using regression and multilevel/hierarchical models_ gelman and hill