Today's Stichomancy for Noah Wyle

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Criminal Sociology by Enrico Ferri:

that social reforms

and other measures suggested by a study of the natural factors of crime are most effective in preventing crime, legislators, employing the _a{sic} priori_ method of the classical school, have for many years past been discussing proposed penal codes, whilst they permit criminality to make steady progress. It is another case of _Dum Rom consulitur, Saguntum expugnatur_.

And when the legislators find their Byzantine discussions on the ``juridical entities'' of crime and punishment broken in upon by a recrudescence of crime, or by a serious manifestation of some phenomenon of social pathology, then all they can do in their

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Sesame and Lilies by John Ruskin:

And in languages so mongrel in breed as the English, there is a fatal power of equivocation put into men's hands, almost whether they will or no, in being able to use Greek or Latin words for an idea when they want it to be awful; and Saxon or otherwise common words when they want it to be vulgar. What a singular and salutary effect, for instance, would be produced on the minds of people who are in the habit of taking the Form of the "Word" they live by, for the Power of which that Word tells them, if we always either retained, or refused, the Greek form "biblos," or "biblion," as the right expression for "book"--instead of employing it only in the one instance in which we wish to give dignity to the idea, and

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from U. S. Project Trinity Report by Carl Maag and Steve Rohrer:

o The TR-4 Group, responsible for meteorology

o The TR-5 Group, responsible for spectrographic and photographic measurements

o The TR-6 Group, responsible for the airblast-airborne condenser gauges

o The TR-7 (Medical) Group, responsible for the radiological safety and general health of the Project TRINITY participants.

Each of these groups was divided into several units. Individuals were also assigned special tasks outside their groups, such as communications and tracking the TRINITY cloud with a searchlight (3).

1.4 MILITARY AND CIVILIAN PARTICIPANTS IN PROJECT TRINITY

The fourth excerpt represents the element of Earth. It speaks of physical influences and the impact of the unseen on the visible world, and is drawn from Ferragus by Honore de Balzac:

the prefect of police. Besides, there is no law giving a husband any legal right to the body of his wife, nor to fathers those of their children. The matter is serious. There are questions of public utility involved which will have to be examined. The interests of the city of Paris might suffer. Therefore if the matter depended on me, which it does not, I could not decide /hic et nunc/; I should require a report."

A /report/ is to the present system of administration what limbo or hades is to Christianity. Jacquet knew very well the mania for "reports"; he had not waited until this occasion to groan at that bureaucratic absurdity. He knew that since the invasion into public

Ferragus