Isegoria

If this one-act play is in fact one of the Virginia Tech Killer’s Violent Writings, he was (a) troubled and (b) a terrible writer:

The college student responsible for yesterday’s Virginia Tech slaughter was referred last year to counseling after professors became concerned about the violent nature of his writings, as evidenced in a one-act play obtained by The Smoking Gun. The play by Cho Seung-Hui, a 23-year-old English major, was submitted last year as part of a short story writing class. Entitled “Richard McBeef,” Cho’s bizarre play features a 13-year-old boy who accuses his stepfather of pedophilia and murdering his father. A copy of the killer’s play can be found below. The teenager talks of killing the older man and, at one point, the child’s mother brandishes a chain saw at the stepfather. The play ends with the man striking the child with “a deadly blow.”

Addendum: AOLNews appears to have two of his plays — although it is hard to imagine that they were produced by a senior English major.

In Feeling Safe, Jesse Walker points out a grim irony by citing the Roanoke Times from January 31, 2006:

A bill that would have given college students and employees the right to carry handguns on campus died with nary a shot being fired in the General Assembly….

Virginia Tech spokesman Larry Hincker was happy to hear the bill was defeated. “I’m sure the university community is appreciative of the General Assembly’s actions because this will help parents, students, faculty and visitors feel safe on our campus.”

And that’s renaissance magic … describes the first known book of magic tricks:

After lying almost untouched in the vaults of an Italian university for 500 years, a book on the magic arts written by Leonardo da Vinci’s best friend and teacher has been translated into English for the first time.

The world’s oldest magic text, De viribus quantitatis (On The Powers Of Numbers) was penned by Luca Pacioli, a Franciscan monk who shared lodgings with Da Vinci and is believed to have helped the artist with The Last Supper.

It was written in Italian by Pacioli between 1496 and 1508 and contains the first ever reference to card tricks as well as guidance on how to juggle, eat fire and make coins dance. It is also the first work to note that Da Vinci was left-handed.
[...]
Pacioli was born in Tuscany in 1445 and was a travelling mathematics tutor. He is often called the father of modern accountancy because his book The Summa (1494) contains the first published description of double-entry bookkeeping, accountancy’s basic technique.

He lived with Da Vinci in Milan from 1496 for several years and taught maths and geometry to the painter, scientist and inventor. They collaborated on many projects including a book, De Divina Proportione (1509), which Da Vinci also illustrated.

De viribus quantitatis is divided into three sections: mathematical problems, puzzles and tricks, and a collection of proverbs and verses.

The global glass ceiling varies from country to country, with 50 percent of senior management roles occupied by women in the Philippines, down to about 6 percent in Japan.

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.

When I returned from Tokyo, I described it as “New York, but clean, with more neon, and full of polite people.” Evidently I’m not alone in that assessment. From Lost in translation:

Ask the average Westerner to tell you what they know about Tokyo, and it’s a pretty safe bet you will get a sentence or two about the “New York of Asia”; streets full of neon signs but no graffiti or litter; the trains running on time and a crime rate so low as to be almost invisible. And that most men go out most nights and get drunk.

I guess I’m a fairly average Westerner.

This sounds very … 1980s to me:

To understand the duality of Japanese society — the strait-laced conformity, on the one hand, combined with what we might consider almost reckless abandonment — it is necessary to get to grips with two Japanese concepts: honne and tatemae. Honne means your true feelings, which you normally keep to yourself. Tatemae is the face you present to society, the way society expects you to behave. Japanese people always understand, when someone says or does something, that they may be merely expressing tatemae. It may well not be what they really think or feel.

Shannon Love presents “an old parable [that] explains why the professional subcultures of articulate intellectuals, such as academics in the humanities, artists and journalists, all experience such enormous pressures to conform to the same viewpoint” — the parable of the Parliament of Clocks:

In the parable, a king wants to buy some clocks and travels to the Bavarian village were the ten best clockmakers in the world keep their shops all along one street.

As he enters the street all the clocks in all the shops strike 1 o’clock in one massive group chime. The king marvels at the great accuracy of the clockmakers of the village, but a few moments later he hears another group chime. After investigating he finds that all the clocks in 9 of the 10 shops show the same time but that all the clocks in the 10th shop show a different time by several minutes. Puzzled, the king calls all the clockmakers together and ask why the clocks in the 10th shop do not chime at the same time as all the clocks in all the other shops.

The owner of the odd shop out immediately steps forward and says that due to his unusual skill and innovation his clocks keep more accurate time than the clocks of the other shops. The other shop owners protest loudly. The king is at a loss. The town lacks a master town clock or sundial, so he has no means of determining which clocks keep the best time. Confused, he decides not to buy any clocks and leaves town. Angered, the owners of the 9 agreeing shops burn down the shop of the odd man out to prevent such confusion from arising again. Now when someone comes to town, all the clocks will chime at the same instant. Customers will not become confused and everyone will sell more clocks.

The clockmakers destroy the nonconforming clockmaker among them because they know that as a practical matter we judge the accuracy of clocks by consensus.

If you value their safety, steer your daughters away from Pompoms, Pyramids and Peril:

Emergency room visits for cheerleading injuries nationwide have more than doubled since the early 1990s, and the rate of life-threatening injuries has startled researchers. Of 104 catastrophic injuries sustained by female high school and college athletes from 1982 to 2005 — head and spinal trauma that occasionally led to death — more than half resulted from cheerleading, according to the National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research. All sports combined did not surpass cheerleading.
[..]
In 2005, the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s Catastrophic Injury Insurance Program found that 25 percent of the money spent on claims for student-athletes since 1998 resulted from cheerleading. That made it second only to football. The ratio of cheerleaders to football players is about 12 to 100.

Every Navel Orange comes from the same tree — sort of:

A single mutation in 1820 in an orchard of sweet oranges planted at a monastery in Brazil yielded the navel orange, also known as the Washington, Riverside or Bahia navel. The mutation caused each fruit on the tree to develop as a set of “siamese twins”, with a smaller orange embedded in a larger one opposite the stem. From the outside, the smaller, undeveloped twin left a formation at the bottom of the fruit, looking similar to the human navel.

Because the mutation left the fruit seedless and therefore sterile, the only means available to cultivate more of this new variety is to graft cuttings onto other varieties of citrus tree. Two such cuttings of the original tree were transplanted to Riverside, California in 1870, which eventually led to worldwide popularity.

Today, navel oranges continue to be produced via cutting and grafting. This does not allow for the usual selective breeding methodologies, and so not only do the navel oranges of today have exactly the same genetic makeup as the original tree, they can even be considered to all be the fruit of that single, now centuries-old tree.

Oprah chooses McCarthy’s “The Road” as book pick:

Winfrey called the book “haunting and inspiring” with a lasting affect on the reader. “It is a quick read and a journey well worth taking,” she added.

I wouldn’t expect Oprah to pick for her book club a post-apocalyptic tale from a scribe of grim and gritty westerns.