I saw F this weekend. Spent the night on the floor in her dorm room. (She offered her bed, but she has the top bunk and I didn't want to risk having to climb over her roommate if I had to go to the bathroom in the night.) We had a good visit. She's really looking forward to the semester being over and coming home the first week of May.

We talked about the Virginia Tech thing, of course. F said there was a lot of discussion about it on campus. I had sent this article (via Lady-Light) and she had passed it around to her friends, and they to theirs.

And I reminded F of a study that was done some time ago, don't remember where. Some people volunteered for this thing. They were walked down a hallway past a maintenance worker on a ladder, into a classroom, and put in front of a computer to take a test. The computer test wasn't the study, though. While they were taking the test, they heard a sound as of someone falling from a ladder, and then a single cry for help. The subject of the study was to see how they reacted to this.

The people who were alone in the room when they heard the sound looked up - the camera caught a blank look on their faces as they internally processed the sounds they had heard and the probable cause - and then they abandoned their computer tests and went out into the hall to check on the maintenance man. But the people who were put into the room with others, who were in on the real subject of the study and had been instructed to go on with the test as if nothing had happened, looked at those other people and saw that they did not react, so they went on with their tests too.

I could see how all that would happen, and I made up my mind right then that I would not be a sheep.