Hell as the Here-and-Now

HELL AS THE HERE-AND-NOW: IMAGES OF HUMAN TRAVAIL IN TWELFTH-CENTURY EMAKI AND KUROSAWA'S RANAKIRA KUROSAWA'S last major epic film, Ran (translatable as "chaos"), begins in media res with the moment of precipitous decline of the seventy-year-old Hidetora, a medieval-period daimyo. Hidetora gathers together his three sons and two lesser daimyo, lords Fujimaki and Ayabe, for first a hunt, then to issue an edict: Though he will retain his banner and ceremonial title of Great Lord, his oldest son, Taro, will henceforth act as the clan's leader. Hidetora hopes to spend his remaining years as a doting and beloved father. But, as Hidetora's son Saburo warns, such familial peace and bliss is hardly achievable within a world of warriors and their competing ambitions, a world that Hidetora himself helped to create through his many ruthless acts. This meeting of hunter-warriors is both sequel to the violent episodes in..

Flanking numbers and its application to arankings of cyclic graphs

Given a graph G with a ranking function, f: V(G) --\u3e {1,2,...,k}, the ranking is minimal if only if G does not contain a drop vertex. The arank number of a graph, [psi]r(G), is the maximum k such that G has a minimal k-ranking. A new technique is established to better understand how to analyze arankings of various cyclic graphs, Cn. Then the technique, flanking number, is used to describe all arank properties of all cyclic graphs fully by proving the following proposition: [psi]r(C_n) = [floor]{log₂(n+1)[floor] + [floor]log₂(n+2/3)[floor] + 1 for all n \u3e 6

Acoustic measurement differences on trees and logs from hardwoods in wet and dry condition

peer-reviewedAcoustic velocities measured on standing trees using time-of-flight (TOF) devices have been found to be between 7% and 36% higher for softwoods than those in logs using resonance techniques based on longitudinal frequencies. This effect was explained in three different ways: (1) TOF devices on standing trees measure outerwood containing more mature wood while resonance methods assess the whole crosssection, (2) the variation in the velocity is due to loading conditions in standing trees, while logs are free of loads and (3) the acoustic waves are dilatational waves in the case of TOF measurements on standing trees and one-dimensional longitudinal waves in the case of resonance on logs. This is an important topic considering the fact that resonance methods are considered more accurate for predicting mechanical properties and it has been proposed that correction factors should be applied on TOF measurements. In the present work, four hardwoods from Irish forests were studied and, on average, TOF velocities measured in the forest above fibre saturation point (FSP) were 19.8% higher than those from resonance measurements taken on logs immediately after felling. However, this difference reduced to 5.4% when the measurements were repeated at a moisture content (MC) of about 18% in the laboratory. Therefore, there is a MC effect on the velocity differences. Furthermore, higher differences were systematically found in older specimens in wet condition. However, this age effect was small in most cases