Today in the morning, moments before 9 a.m., a gunman opened fire at the 6th floor of the main library of University of Texas in Austin, the Perry-Castaneda Library (PCL). It's the quietest floor, usually dedicated to people who do some serious research, where you can nicely see their local Capitol.I have been to Austin once.
The gunman - a white male student with a suit, dark tie, black ski mask, AK-47 (wow), and 6-feet-2 tall - shot around 8-10 times and then he shot himself. Unfortunately, it seems that they have good reasons to be afraid that there exists a second gunman who remains at large. So the police had to lock the university down, cancel the classes for the whole day, and so on. You're told not to visit the campus if you're outside, and if you're in a room, don't open the door to anyone. I hope that this emergency will stop in a safe way for everyone whois at the campus.
Update: There is no #2, police argues now. "Al clear" but lockdown continues.
If you care, it's trivial to find 6-feet-2 tall confused white men in Austin, Texas whose head is drowning in blood and gore, for example Mr Baal of Confusion. :-)
The reason why I observe this story is that the most frequent hostile TRF commenter - who has used about 10 different nicknames - has been connecting from about 10 IP addresses of the University of Texas in Austin. You don't know him - or them - because they were always instantly banned but he is - or they are - very real (or were real?).
This person has clearly been an unhinged madman, with every single comment being an obscenity or a sort of death threat: most of these threats have even religiously defended Mr Smolin and Mr Woit along the way. ;-/ Of course, all the IP addresses were banned from the first moment and I haven't read a vast majority of the comments - that's something that happens when an IP address is banned. Needless to say, I could never answer anything to that person because I had no contacts and any answers in the comment section would mean to approve his comment.So I am waiting for some signals that it was him - which is not certain (there are 50,000 students at UT Austin!) but which is not quite impossible (there are not too many super-loons among 50,000 people!), as you can imagine. I can't tell you anything about my candidate person except for nicknames - Edward, Albert, Rick, Tim, and others - for the trivialities above and the IP addresses. If the conjecture is right, however, I can give you the subleading predictions for the 5 next places where similar shootings will occur in the future. ;-)
On the other hand, as soon as I "hear" from the candidate who tries to post another comment, the hypothesis will be ruled out.
Update, 10 pm Pilsner time: Too bad, my hypothesis is gone. The jerk, also known as Tibbles, is alive and kicking: 10 junk comments within a few minutes. Just adding another IP address to the black list.
Update, Wednesday: The shooter was a 19-year-old mathematics sophomore, Colton Tooley. Some people have described his being a mathematics sophomore as the motive.
