Wedding Realities

Wholesale Poisoning at a Wedding Feast

at the wedding and sat down to the banquet in the afternoon ; of these 110 fewer than forty were subsequently seized with symptoms of irritant poisoning, the time of onset varying from four to sixteen hours after the meal. Five of the persons so attacked had died up to the date when the facts were placed 011 record, and as that was only some ten days after the occurrence, it is possible that ot...

AvMA's silver wedding, and a funeral.

Synchronized Realities

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) promises future environments that support the well-being of their inhabitants through comfort and assistive environments. For the elderly users, ambient assisted living (AAL) scenarios are targeting safe and independent living at home. Especially the integration of home automation components, such as intelligent light, window, and climate controls seem promising for s...

Constructing Wedding Seating Plans: A Tabu Subject

This paper examines an interesting combinatorial optimisation problem that generalises both the graph colouring and k-partition problems. The problem has an interesting practical application in the construction of wedding seating plans, where we seek to assign equal numbers of guests to tables such that they are sat near friends and, perhaps more importantly, kept away from their enemies. We de...

Hyena Myths and Realities

Hyenas, first of all, were regarded as scavengers and consumers of carrion. In his Natural History, Pliny the Elder (A.D. 23-79) spoke of them as the only animals that dig up graves in search of corpses (ab uno animali sepulchra erui inquisitione corporum). Conrad Gesner, the great sixteenth-century cataloger of natural history, reported that they gorge themselves so gluttonously after finding ...