Month: November 2006

Are Bulletproof Books the Answer to School Shootings?

Bill Crozier, a candidate for Oklahoma State School Superintendent, has a bizarre idea to make schools safer — he wants to make textbooks bulletproof.

According to WBIR.Com, Crozier and some colleagues videotaped themselves shooting several different textbooks with rifles and pistols. WBIR quotes Crozier as saying,

Both of the pistols were stopped about two thirds of the way through the book, and of course the rifle shot went all the away through, so there are some things that could be improved on.

One of the possible “improvements” Crozier suggests is having book cover made out of Kevlar.

What a waste of money that would be given how safe schools are even without bulletproof books. SchoolSecurity.Org, which tracks school violence, estimates the following non-suicide deaths from gunshots in schools,

Year Deaths
2005-06 19
2004-05 26
2003-04 29
2002-03 5
2001-02 11

Sources:

Candidate says bulletproof books could save lives in school shootings. WBIR.Com, October 24, 2006.

School Deaths, School Shootings, And High-Profile Incidents Of School Violence. National School Safety and Security Services, Accessed: October 30, 2006.

Neverball

Neverball is an open source, freely downloadable clone of Sega’s Super Monkey Ball (which is, of course, name-checked in a WoW quest),

Like Super Monkey Ball, you have a ball that you roll around by tilting the floor in different directions. There’s also a game called Neverputt included which uses the same physics engine, but is a miniature golf game.

Definitely worth downloading and giving a whirl.

CongressIn30Seconds.Com

CongressIn30Seconds.Com is an amazing site that lets users create their own 30 second political ads. The site has an interface that allows users to combine stock video and audio (all in the public domain) and customize the ad further with text overlays.

There are some fairly clever ads given the relatively rudimentary choices available. It’d be cool to see a much-expanded version of something like this for the 2008 election.

Why Vampires Haven’t Taken Over the Earth

Some silly professor is claiming that vampires cannot possibly be real based on simple logic. According to WMTW,

The professor [University of Central Florida physicist Costas Efthimiou] took out the calculator to prove that if a vampire sucked one person’s blood each month, after a couple of years there would be no people left, just vampires. He started his calculations with just one vampire and 537 million humans on Jan. 1, 1600 and showed that the human population would be down to zero by July 1602.

But that’s assuming there’s no predation of the vampires by humans. Um, yeah:

It also assumes that every vampire bite leads to the creation of another vampire, but this is not a universally held view of vampires. In fact Brian Thomas, PhD candidate in ecology at Stanford, already covered this in his paper, Vampire Ecology in the Jossverse which outlines how the human and vampire populations can co-exist and reach a stable equilibrium given relatively high predication by a kick-ass slayer and a vampire mythos where vampires only rarely produce additional vampires (on average each vampire creates only one additional vampire per year in the Buffyverse).

Maybe the only way to resolve this is to turn the folks on Mythbusters into vampires and see if they can give a definitive answer.

Sources:

Vampire Population Ecology. Brian Thomas, Accessed: October 31, 2006.

Vampires, Ghosts Aren’t Real, Says Physicist. WMTW.Com, October 27, 2006.