Contriving

Was the lack of weapons really a limiting factor in their ability to find and arrest terrorists? That seems odd.

With all of the arrests, raids, and seizures going on in France…I'm left to wonder, why are they able to do this now after the attacks rather than before?

Did they not know about these terrorists before and the first arrests after the attacks led them to more information, which led to more, which led to more?

how surprising

Reshared post from Kaj Sotala

> Suicide terrorism is rising around the world, but the most common explanations do not help us understand why. Religious fanaticism does not explain why the world leader in suicide terrorism is the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, a group that adheres to a Marxist/Leninist ideology, while existing psychological explanations have been contradicted by the widening range of socio-economic backgrounds of suicide terrorists. To advance our understanding of this growing phenomenon, this study collects the universe of suicide terrorist attacks worldwide from 1980 to 2001, 188 in all. In contrast to the existing explanations, this study shows that suicide terrorism follows a strategic logic, one specifically designed to coerce modern liberal democracies to make significant territorial concessions. Moreover, over the past two decades, suicide terrorism has been rising largely because terrorists have learned that it pays. Suicide terrorists sought to compel American and French military forces to abandon Lebanon in 1983, Israeli forces to leave Lebanon in 1985, Israeli forces to quit the Gaza Strip and the West Bank in 1994 and 1995, the Sri Lankan government to create an independent Tamil state from 1990 on, and the Turkish government to grant autonomy to the Kurds in the late 1990s. In all but the case of Turkey, the terrorist political cause made more gains after the resort to suicide operations than it had before. Thus, Western democracies should pursue policies that teach terrorists that the lesson of the 1980s and 1990s no longer holds, policies which in practice may have more to do with improving homeland security than with offensive military action.

CircleCount I just started messing around with CircleCount and after it got done analyzing my account (I got the notification saying it was done), my dashboard and various pages are just blank.  Like the following image shows.

Hypocycloid

We present an algorithm for automatically detecting and visualizing small non-local variations between repeating structures in a single image.

http://goo.gl/hjWwzk