Jo (Japanese Short Staff) is a martial art practiced in conjunction with Aikido. It’s movements are based on that of spear work and one of it’s basic movements is thrust, called tskui (pronounced ’skee.’) Twilight Ninja Girl, seen here without her ninja uniform and without any sheep eye parts, studies aikido and does jo and … she has a science fair project due.Hypothesis That music with a strong beat will facilitate body movement, increasing accuracy, but that heavy metal will be too distracting to help. Methodology Multiple strikes at a small hanging target (10 at a time) while listening to no music heavy metal classical music a simple drum loop For heavy metal she chose the original version of AC/DC’s “Shook Me All Night Long.” For classical, she used Krommer’s “Clarinet Concerto in E flat major op. 36.” For the drum loop she used a medium rock beat loop generated by Garage Band. For no music she used, well, no music. Results After Eight trials (80 thrusts) of each kind of music her accuracy rate was as follows No music: 37.5 % Heavy Metal: 41.25 % Classical: 35.0 % Drum Beat: 35.0 %

Conclusion

Heavy metal Rocks.

---

Maureen has been examining another aspect of Ninja Science. The Dude (Warren Spector) has hooked her on the Japanese television show Sasuke (or in English, Ninja Warrior). She blogs about it here. You’ve got to watch the video clip. This competition has been running for eight years and in that time only 2 people have finished all four stages. The clip is of the second champion, Nagano Makoto, the 2006 winner, a commercial fisherman before this–now a superstar.

In Eric Frank Russell’s classic SF novel, Wasp, he starts with a description of a wasp, in a moving automobile, killing four grown men and reducing something ten-thousand times its own weight into scrap. This tiny little insect kills not because it is so potent, but because of the driver’s fear.

Something like this just happened in Boston with the now infamous Aqua Teen Hunger Force guerrilla marketing plan. Ten blinking LED signs of a carton figure extending its middle finger brought Boston to a standstill.

Now, as many people have pointed out, this was also done in nine other American cities and none of them had this ridiculous overreaction, but Boston did.

As pointed out on BoingBoing, could this have been what they were thinking?

---

Like Rory, I will follow with my definitive Monday post, Ninja Science, later.