greygirlbeast tagged me for a meme:
1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 4 sentences on your LJ along with these instructions.
5. Don't you dare dig for that "cool" or "intellectual" book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest.
The closest fiction book was Norm Partridge's 'Mr Fox and Other Feral Tales' from SubPress. Page 123, fifth sentence, and following four:
Chet laughed. "Hey, Stevie, where
do lifeguards go after summer vacation?" Steve didn't answer. He hadn't told Chet and Pete about the awful things that lifeguards had to do. He wasn't going to tell them now.
Actually, the closest book was the Genetics text, written by Rob Brooker, that I'm using with my undergraduate class this semester. Page 123 and 124 are full-page diagrams; the fifth to ninth sentences on 125 are, fittingly enough given my research topics, concerned with using recombination frequencies to determine map distance:
As mentioned, a tetratype contains 50% recombinant chromosomes, a nonparental ditype 100%. Therefore, the map distance is computed as: Map distance = [(NPD + (0.5 x T)) / Total number of asci] x 100. Over short map distances, this calculation provides a fairly reliable measure of distance. However, it does not adequately account for double crossovers. When two genes are far apart on the same chromosome, the calculated map distance using this equation underestimates the actual map distance due to double crossovers.
By a funny coincidence, that section is from the lecture that I'm just finishing up for Monday's class...