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7 Quick Takes (5/9/14)

7 Quick Takes (5/9/14)

Last updated on: May 9, 2014 at 1:55 am by Leah Libresco

7 Quick Takes (5/9/14) 2014-05-09T01:55:05-04:00 Leah Libresco

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Here’s the most fun you’ll have since slime molds mapped your public transit. Scientists are using ants to model stampedes and other chaotic ways humans move around. It turns out that ants (and probably also people) exit more quickly and safely when the doors are partially obstructed. If an exit is partially blocked, people tend to wind up in more of a queueing pattern than when they all rush a wide open door in unison.

— 2 —

More enjoyable problem solving: a stat guy did survival curve modelling to see how long after a criminal is placed on the most wanted list s/he is expected to be apprehended. Turns out there’s a fifty-fifty chance you’ll be caught within 2.7 months. I’ve chosen suitable background music below for you to play while reading the author’s analysis.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Igi62qTHTGk

— 3 —

And in one other fun data + legal system mash up, there’s a project that feeds descriptions of literary characters into a police sketch program.

In terms of image-construction itself, Davis used the forensic software program Faces ID, which gives users (creepily, incredibly) about 10,000 individual facial features to choose among. He then used the authors’ descriptions of their characters as guidelines in his selections, selecting the most true-to-text facial features, Identikit-style. For the inevitable gaps in the characters’ descriptions (noses and ears, Davis discovered, were often ignored by authors), he did some educated guesswork, considering factors like the era the author was writing in and other elements of the story that might inform its characters’ appearance.

There’s a cool Dracula, but, when I was paging through to figure out who to feature, there was an obvious choice.

Certain police officers have a peculiar physiognomy, which is complicated with an air of baseness mingled with an air of authority…The human face of Javert consisted of a flat nose, with two deep nostrils, towards which enormous whiskers ascended on his cheeks. One felt ill at ease when he saw these two forests and these two caverns for the first time. When Javert laughed,—and his laugh was rare and terrible,—his thin lips parted and revealed to view not only his teeth, but his gums, and around his nose there formed a flattened and savage fold, as on the muzzle of a wild beast. Javert, serious, was a watchdog; when he laughed, he was a tiger. As for the rest, he had very little skull and a great deal of jaw…Between his eyes there was a permanent, central frown, like an imprint of wrath; his gaze was obscure; his mouth pursed up and terrible; his air that of ferocious command…This singular composite of the Roman, the Spartan, the monk, and the corporal.

— 4 —

And speaking of reimagined literary figures, a college friend of mine has just started a really fun project called “What Werther Went Through” inspired by Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther. I’ll let him explain it:

I read Werther in German when I was twenty-one and, honestly, it freaked me out. I’d come to it expecting something impressive but stuffy; instead I found…this guy, this disturbingly recognizable guy, tearing himself to pieces over this girl he was obsessed with, borderline manic-depressive, bouncing from rhapsodic exultations about nature and rambling arguments about art and philosophy to hopeless, frenzied grasping at straws on the level of “She looked at everyone in the room but ME! Does that mean she LIKES me?!”

And the whole time, I kept thinking, This is from 1774? This could be happening right now! I mean, this IS happening right now! (I…might maybe have been coming off two rounds of obsessive crushes myself.) This is important. This is special.

Now, since I’m a good Millenial, when I find something special I want to share it. But most of my friends don’t speak German. And the only free translations online right now are the very first English translation from 1779 and the Project Gutenberg one which I’m guessing is from the 19th century.

So I figured, hey. I’m Goethe’s age. I’m young and I get this. I’m going to write a translation in updated English that my friends could read as if this were someone we knew going through this. And the idea snowballed from there: I’m going to use contemporary slang. I’m going to update the setting (changing as little as possible). I’m going to post the letters on the days they were “written”. Ah! I’m going to email the letters on the days they were written! The 1774 novel claims to reproduce letters written from 1771-72; I’ll claim these letters are from 2011-12…finally it all came together.

— 5 —

If my friend’s project takes off and he moves to Mexico, he might be able to pay his taxes by submitting the modernized translation of another novel. You see, under Mexican tax law, artists are sometimes allowed to pay their tax bill in paintings.

The program is simple—donations are made according to reported sales. If an artist sells between one and five pieces of art in a given year, he or she donates one piece to the federal government. If the artist sells between six and eight pieces, he or she donates two, and so on, with an annual cap of six donations. Only painters, sculptors, and graphic artists can participate, though program administrators are currently considering whether to include performance art as an acceptable means of payment. A committee of artists and curators oversees the donations process to ensure that the art received meets certain quality standards. If the art is of a particularly high caliber, it becomes part of the “national-heritage collection,” which is displayed in a permanent exhibit in Mexico City. All other pieces are divided up and shipped across the country to fill public museums and administrative buildings.

— 6 —

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the world of artsblogging, Rod Dreher is working his way through Dante’s Paradiso, and this part of his meditation really struck a nerve for me:

Thinking about Piccarda as I’ve been writing this piece, I’ve thought of a few folks in my life that I’ve been struggling to figure out how to deal with. The last time I was in confession, I told my priest, “It’s not fair the way [this particular person] behaves towards me.” My priest said, “Who are you to expect justice?”

I thought I understood what he was getting at, but I really didn’t. I couldn’t make much sense of the question, to be honest, because I was so hurt and angry by the unjust way this person behaved towards me. Meditating on Piccarda this evening, I’m starting to get it … and I’m starting to understand what I have to do next, whether I want to or not. It just about kills me to think about letting go of this stuff, but, well, that’s the point of dying to oneself to live in Christ, isn’t it? Piccarda is free in a way that I am not — and the door is locked from the inside.

Man, when you can immediately think of the grudge you’re holding that could easily be answered by “Who are you to expect justice” it’s probably time for me to make amends to that person.

— 7 —

And finally, also on the justice/forgiveness beat, The Texas Observer profiles a prosecutor and the way his reasoning about when to seek the death penalty has changed over the course of his career.

Castellano would plead guilty to a host of charges other than capital murder, including three counts of sexual assault, so that he’d be sentenced to prison for the rest of his life. There wouldn’t be a trial—just a quick plea hearing, and Castellano would head to prison for good. Reis agreed. He still stands behind his call but admits that “there were plenty of people who think I made the wrong decision.” Those people felt that Reis shouldn’t have robbed a jury of the ability to decide Castellano’s punishment.

And Reis indulged that line of reasoning. “What makes me think that I’m God and can take that decision away from somebody?” he said, summarizing what might go through a juror’s mind. “One elected guy, who never won a jury trial ever, who has a history of working as a deckhand on a tugboat, a janitor, a reporter, a loan shark, who is a failure at real estate, who finally becomes a lawyer and doesn’t like it, becomes a prosecutor and doesn’t win a case, and he’s going to decide whether I get to kill this guy? Who the hell is he?”

For more Quick Takes, visit Conversion Diary!

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