Isegoria

72-Hour Party People argues that meth is “not just for the white-trash crowd” anymore:

It comes wrapped in red foil and purple tissue, this intricate figurine molded in the form of a Japanese demon, with clawed feet, a mane of fire and a thick tongue jutting from a bloodthirsty smirk. Transparent, the size of a child’s fist, it looks like a tiny ice carving or a statuette of glass. It is neither. In fact, it is 25 grams (a little less than one ounce) of nearly 100 percent pure crystallized methamphetamine hydrochloride, known on the streets of Asia as “Shabu.” It was almost certainly manufactured in a clandestine laboratory in China, then shipped to the Philippines and on to Hawaii, and finally to Denver. Here it was purchased on the black market for $5,500 — nearly five times the street value of an equivalent amount of cocaine and ten times that of low-grade, powdered crystal meth.

It almost seems glamorous — until you read on and see what a 72-hour party really looks like.

Formula for Panic: Crowd-motion findings may prevent stampedes discusses what physicists found when they studied human crowd dynamics:

In normal conditions, pedestrians tend to spontaneously fall into ordered patterns, such as lanes going in opposite directions, previous research had shown. As crowds get denser, stop-and-go patterns begin to propagate in waves, as is typical for cars on heavily trafficked highways. But in critical situations — as when cars get into gridlock — people can break out in panics that result in random patterns of motion, similar to the turbulence of water in the wake of a boat. Crowd members can get squeezed and asphyxiated or fall and be trampled.

Some call “metabolic ecology” the maverick theory that might explain life:

Big animals have relatively slower metabolic rates — this is why a shrew must eat more than its body weight each day to survive, but an elephant eats only one-50th of its bulk per day. The net result is that both species share the same number of heartbeats in a lifetime.

This remarkable phenomenon can be expressed mathematically as a scaling law, which states that the metabolic rate of a species is proportional to its mass raised to the power of three-quarters.

This formula holds true for almost every living organism. From whales to trees, the relationship is the same — but no-one understood why.

Then, in 1997, Geoffrey West, a physicist at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, working with ecologists Jim Brown and Brian Enquist, published a theory. They argued that the scaling is the result of the fractal-like structure of the network of blood vessels that supply nutrients to the cells in an animal’s body. A similar fractal geometry can be seen in plant veins.

West, Brown and Enquist believe that metabolic rate is the conductor of life’s orchestra, setting the tempo for a host of other processes. Understand it, and we can predict many other things about a creature — how quickly it will grow and how many offspring it will have. They argue that their theory can predict the properties of large-scale ecological networks, such as forests.

The latest Dr. Dobb’s looks at Algorithmic Trading — but it doesn’t present a very sophisticated picture of what’s being done out there.

Steven Pinker opens A History of Violence with an evocative example of how things have changed over the years:

In sixteenth-century Paris, a popular form of entertainment was cat-burning, in which a cat was hoisted in a sling on a stage and slowly lowered into a fire. According to historian Norman Davies, “[T]he spectators, including kings and queens, shrieked with laughter as the animals, howling with pain, were singed, roasted, and finally carbonized.” Today, such sadism would be unthinkable in most of the world. This change in sensibilities is just one example of perhaps the most important and most underappreciated trend in the human saga: Violence has been in decline over long stretches of history, and today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species’ time on earth.

(Emphasis mine.) For example:

At the widest-angle view, one can see a whopping difference across the millennia that separate us from our pre-state ancestors. Contra leftist anthropologists who celebrate the noble savage, quantitative body-counts — such as the proportion of prehistoric skeletons with axemarks and embedded arrowheads or the proportion of men in a contemporary foraging tribe who die at the hands of other men — suggest that pre-state societies were far more violent than our own. It is true that raids and battles killed a tiny percentage of the numbers that die in modern warfare. But, in tribal violence, the clashes are more frequent, the percentage of men in the population who fight is greater, and the rates of death per battle are higher. According to anthropologists like Lawrence Keeley, Stephen LeBlanc, Phillip Walker, and Bruce Knauft, these factors combine to yield population-wide rates of death in tribal warfare that dwarf those of modern times. If the wars of the twentieth century had killed the same proportion of the population that die in the wars of a typical tribal society, there would have been two billion deaths, not 100 million.

He notes two important books on violence:

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651). “And the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” This pithy description of life in a state of nature is just one example of the lively prose in this seventeenth-century masterpiece. Hobbes’s analysis of the roots and varieties of violence is uncannily modern, and anticipated many insights from game theory and evolutionary psychology. He also was the first cognitive scientist, outlining a computational theory of memory, imagination, and reasoning.

Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, Homicide (1988). This is the book that sold me on evolutionary psychology. Daly and Wilson use homicide statistics as an assay for human conflict, together with vivid accounts from history, journalism, and anthropology. They select each of the pairings of killer and victim — fratricide, filicide, parricide, infanticide, uxoricide, stepparent-stepchild, acquaintances, feuds & duels, amok killers, and so on — and test predictions from evolutionary theory on their rates and patterns. The book is endlessly insightful and beautifully written.

Discover magazine notes The Upside of Color Blindness:

Observations of capuchins foraging for surface-dwelling insects showed that color-blind capuchins made nearly 20 insect-capture attempts per hour, compared with only about 16 for those with normal color vision.

One possible explanation for the color-blind advantage is that a reduction in color signals makes the differences in texture and brightness more apparent, so it’s easier to see past color camouflage, says Melin.

The image is of earth, with red-green color-blindness and without.