Lotto Rules Probe Key To Payoff In Virginia

Representatives of an Australian syndicate came to Virginia lottery headquarters to claim their $27 million jackpot, but lottery officials told them they might not be paid.

The International Lotto Fund, which includes more than 2,500 investors from Australia, confirmed that it held the winning ticket from the Feb. 15 Lotto drawing, ending a two-week mystery that has attracted national attention.

The fund also confirmed that it used another Australian firm to work out the logistics of buying the millions of lottery tickets and hired a Richmond accounting firm as a courier to purchase them.

Lottery officials say it is the first time a foriegn corporation has tried to corner an American lottery, and the first time any corporation has claimed a prize in Virginia.

The Lotto Fund reportedly spent about $5 million on lottery tickets. Its winning ticket would entitle it to $1 million a year for the next 20 years.

The Australians also claim to have a substantial number of smaller winners from the same lottery drawing-tickets with three to five correct numbers. Lottery  Director Kenneth Thorson said the payoff for those could exceed $500,000.

But before it pays anything, the lottery and the  attorney general`s office will investigate whether the syndicate broke lottery regulations, Thorson said. They will decide in a few days whether the Australians will be paid.

The investigation will be separate from other probes into the bulk sales launched by Virginia State Police, the FBI and Australian authorities.

Thorson suggested that if the ticket was declared invalid, the lottery could refund the Australians as little as $1, the cost of a ticket. No winning ticket in Virginia has ever been declared invalid.

Two representatives of the Australian firms, Joseph Franck and Robert Hans Roos, and two Richmond attorneys showed up at lottery headquarters Thursday to meet with lottery officials and representatives of the attorney general.

Stefan Mandel, a reputed numbers wiz who once cornered a $1.1 million Australian lottery and who Thorson said was affiliated with the syndicate, could not be reached for comment. An aide from Mandel`s Melbourne office, who would not give her name, said, ``The meeting went very well. We`re looking forward to payment.``

At a press conference, Thorson described the meeting as ``quite cordial.`` He said the men provided information about how they had tried to buy enough tickets to cover all 7.1 million possible six-number Lotto combinations. But it was still unclear, he said, whether the purchase of the winning ticket violated any lottery rules.

``The regulations have always been applied to the letter`` of the law, Thorson said. ``And the question here is what . . . does that letter require. ``It is just as likely that we will honor the claim as that we won`t,``

he said. ``The lottery is not reneging on anything. If the person has a valid ticket they get the prize.``

The lottery requires that tickets be bought at a licensed location. But the Australian firm, using cashiers` checks, paid for $2.4 million worth of lottery tickets at the Farm Fresh supermarket chain`s central headquarters in Norfolk, which Thorson said was not licensed to sell tickets.

The winning ticket was picked up at one of the chain`s Chesapeake stores, which was licensed to sell the ticket.

Thorson acknowledged the lottery was uncertain where the winning ticket itself was paid for and might never determine the location. The lottery knows some tickets were paid for at the headquarters. In other instances, tickets were purchased at the stores, he said.

One gambling law expert said Friday that the Australians were likely to receive the prize money, even if rules were broken when the group bought the ticket.

``If they`ve got a winning ticket, I`m assuming they`re going to get the money,`` said I. Nelson Rose, a professor at Whittier College School of Law in Los Angeles.

Rose said if the ticket holders purchased the ticket and followed what they thought were proper procedures, it would be difficult for the Virginia Lottery to invalidate the ticket.

Reference:

Virginia Lottery

Lotteries Virginia

Publications & Products: Homicide Trends In The United States

Product Type	Title (and Summary)	Date	Product Number
	Homicide in the U.S. Known to Law Enforcement, 2011 Presents data on homicide trends from 1992 to 2011. Part of the Homicide Trends in the United States Series	12/30/2013	NCJ 243035
	Homicide Trends in the United States, 1980-2008 Presents findings from data on homicides that occurred in the United States from 1980 through 2008. It also includes overall homicide rates for 2009 and 2010. Part of the Homicide Trends in the United States Series	11/16/2011	NCJ 236018
	Homicide Trends in the United States, 1980-2008 HOMICIDES FALL TO LOWEST RATE IN FOUR DECADES Part of the Homicide Trends in the United States Series	11/16/2011	NCJ 236018
	Homicide Trends in the United States This report contains a series of charts that describe homicide patterns and trends in the United States since 1976. Part of the Homicide Trends in the United States Series	7/1/2007
	Homicide Trends in the United States: 2002 Update Outlines the primary findings from the updated section of the BJS website about homicide patterns and trends since 1976. Part of the Homicide Trends in the United States Series	11/1/2004	NCJ 204885
	Homicide Trends in the United States: 2000 Update This BJS Crime Data Brief outlines the primary findings from the updated section of the BJS website about homicide patterns and trends since 1976. Part of the Homicide Trends in the United States Series	1/1/2003	NCJ 197471
	Homicide Trends in the United States: 1998 Update This BJS Crime Data Brief outlines the primary findings of and new additions to the section of the BJS website about homicide patterns and trends since 1976. Part of the Homicide Trends in the United States Series

Candle clock

A candle clock is a thin candle with consistently spaced markings (usually with numbers), that when burned, indicate the passage of periods of time. While no longer used today, candle clocks provided an effective way to tell time indoors, at night, or on a cloudy day. A candle clock could be easily transformed into a timer by sticking a heavy nail into the candle at the mark indicating the desired interval. When the wax surrounding the nail melts, the nail clatters onto a plate below.

It is unknown where and when candle clocks were first used. The earliest reference to their use occurs in a Chinese poem by You Jiangu (520 CE). Here, the graduated candle supplied a means of determining time at night. Similar candles were used in Japan until the early 10th century.

You Jiangu's device consisted of six candles made from 72 pennyweights of wax, each being 12 inches high, of uniform thickness, and divided into 12 sections each of one inch. Each candle burned away completely in four hours, making each marking 20 minutes. The candles were placed for protection inside cases made of a wooden frame with transparent horn panels in the sides. Similar methods of measuring time were used in medieval churches and earlier, famously by King Alfred the Great of England, first by counting the number of candles of a specific size burnt, and later by use of a graduated candle.

Al-Jazari

The most sophisticated candle clocks known to date, however, were those of Al-Jazari in 1206.^[1] It included a dial to display the time and, for the first time, employed a bayonet fitting, a fastening mechanism still used in modern times.^[2] Donald Routledge Hill described one of al-Jazari's candle clocks as follows:

The candle, whose rate of burning was known, bore against the underside of the cap, and its wick passed through the hole. Wax collected in the indentation and could be removed periodically so that it did not interfere with steady burning. The bottom of the candle rested in a shallow dish that had a ring on its side connected through pulleys to a counterweight. As the candle burned away, the weight pushed it upward at a constant speed. The automata were operated from the dish at the bottom of the candle.^[1]

References

Turner, Anthony J. The Time Museum, Volume I, Time Measuring Instruments; Part 3, Water-clocks, Sand-glasses, Fire-clocks

1. Donald Routledge Hill, "Mechanical Engineering in the Medieval Near East", Scientific American, May 1991, pp. 64-9 (cf. Donald Routledge Hill, Mechanical Engineering)
2. Ancient Discoveries, Episode 12: Machines of the East, History Channel, retrieved 2008-09-07

Count von Count Suffers From Real Arithmomania

By Adam Wears

“One friend from Sesame Street, plus one friend from Sesame Street, equals two friends from Sesame Street! Ah, ha, ha!” —Count von Count

In A Nutshell

As one of the stars of Sesame Street, jolly vampire Count von Count has been teaching children how to count for over 40 years. His obsession with counting harks back to traditional legends which state that vampires suffer from Arithmomania, a variant of OCD which causes sufferers to fixate on numbers.

The Whole Bushel

Of all the characters to appear on Sesame Street, one of the most famous is undoubtedly Count von Count. With his Bela Lugosi-esque looks, foreboding castle (complete with squeaky door), and pet bats, he’s been teaching kids to calculate responsibly ever since his first appearance on the show in 1972.

However, the Count’s love of counting isn’t just an invention of the show: It’s a key aspect of classical vampire folklore. In pre-modern times, when vampires were commonly believed to exist, it was commonplace for people to scatter poppy seeds and other types of grains (such as rice or wheat) on the floor of their houses in order to prevent themselves from becoming prey to these nightmarish bloodsuckers. This was because on entering the abode, the vampire would be compelled to count the grains, allowing time for either the occupants to escape or the sun to rise and kill the creature. As a way of pre-emptively thwarting any deceased relatives from rising from the grave, family members would sprinkle their corpses with seeds.

Count von Count’s trademark habit of counting everything that he encounters in Sesame Street—including bats, ducks, and apples—is simply a nod back to these legends, albeit one in a more child-friendly form.

Even more surprisingly, this obsession to count is a real disorder. Known as arithmomania, it’s closely associated with sufferers of obsessive compulsive disorder. According to the (surprisingly) sparse amount of research into this condition, it causes sufferers who are faced with a set of numbers or objects to endlessly add, subtract, multiply, and divide them. How little research? One paper, two papers, three papers . . . was that thunder and lightning we just heard?

Show Me The Proof

Encyclopedia of the Vampire: The Living Dead in Myth, Legend, and Popular Culture, S.T. Joshi
Telegraph: Quite interesting facts about vampires
Obsessive-compulsive Disorder Spectrum: Pathogenesis, Diagnosis, and Treatment, Jose A. Yaryura-Tobias, Fugen A. Neziroglu

The bird and the bees

Forget about man and his dog. A small brown bird called the honeyguide lays claim to one of the oldest relationships between humans and animals, says Mark D Anderson.

SPOTTING THE HONEYS. The male greater honeyguide is identified by its pink bill, black throat and white ear patches. The female has no bold facial markings and she has a blackish bill.

Kingdom:	Animalia
Phylum:	Chordata
Class:	Aves
Order:	Piciformes
Family:	Indicatoridae Swainson, 1837

In the old days, people would follow a honeyguide to a wild bee nest, where they would smoke out the bees and rob the nest. The bird’s reward for leading humans to honey would be a feast of beeswax and bee larvae. Scientists suggest that this relationship goes back to prehistoric times when we all still had to forage for our sugar fix. In modern times, honey­guides are still so tuned in to human behaviour that they will even attempt to guide boats and motor vehicles to bee nests.The honeyguide is the only bird species able to digest beeswax, and it has a tough skin to protect it against bee stings.

Honey, I’m here…
If you’re in the bush and notice a small brown bird chattering away to attract your attention and then flying ahead of you, only to land on a nearby bush, you may well have met a greater honeyguide (the one species in South Africa known to interact with humans in this way). Once the bird has got your attention, it will flick its tail, fly to the next bush and wait for you to follow, gradually leading you to a bee nest.

Honey hex
In African folklore there’s a belief that if you fail to reward the honeyguide, it will bring misfortune upon your head, and next time it will show you the way to a black mamba instead of a sweet treat.

Honey who? 
In Kenya, the Boran people still actively use the honeyguide to find honey. The Boran are, however, gradually being excluded from game reserves, leading some scientists to argue that people follow­ing this tradition should be allowed to collect wild honey just to keep this ancient relationship going.

Honeyguides and honey badgers
There is a popular fallacy that honey badgers (and perhaps baboons and mongooses) are also guided to beehives by greater honeyguides. The idea came from early traveller and naturalist Anders Sparrman, who wrote about this in 1785 based on what he had been told. But in the more than 200 years since, no biologist or naturalist has observed this behaviour. So keep your camera and notebook handy – you could be the first person to document teamwork between this bird and an animal other than humans.

References:

• Friedmann, Herbert (1955). The Honeyguides. U.S. National Museum (Bulletin 208).
• Short, Lester, and Jennifer Horne (2002). Toucans, Barbets and Honeyguides. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-854666-1.

Videos:

• YouTube Video: HONEY GUIDE BIRD Guiding ratel/honey badger to a beehive
• YouTube Video: Honey Guide Bird (Amazing Partnership) Guiding humans to Beehive
• YouTube Video: BBC Talking to Strangers: honey birds
• YouTube Video: Lesser Honeyguide (Indicator minor)