Timema males, in sexual species of Timema, show a consistent pattern of courting behavior.
"There's a historic pattern of the court's being hostile to civil rights statutes and Congress stepping in to overturn those narrow court rulings," said Deborah L. Brake, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh.
If the pattern of principled court rulings continues today, the hand counts will produce a reliable vote and a presidency that will not have a cloud over it when claimed by either Mr. Bush or Mr. Gore.
"Those people aren't having fun," Golub said, "and isn't that what we're supposed to be, a fun business that brings people together?" It was typically that way in Portland, a one-team town swept up in Blazermania until a pattern of off-court transgressions earned the offending players a collective national reputation.
The voting pattern of the Rehnquist court over the last nine years "shows that the court acts as if composed of 4.68 ideal justices," says Dr. Lawrence Sirovich, a mathematician at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in Manhattan whose day job is figuring out how the visual system works.
Nor had female farmers proved a pattern of bias, the court found.
The influence of Hoby's translation in England was enormous, not only on the social pattern of life at court but on such writers as Shakespeare and Sir Philip Sidney.
The second half of the show, when the designer turned for inspiration to that most fluffy of females, Marie Antoinette, was much easier to understand: full-skirted, decorative dresses more familiar in Ms. Katrantzou's work, with the patterns of royal court slippers.
Still, "the pattern of outcomes from the courts is very hard to understand except in terms of corruption, and probably incompetence, in the court system," Mr. Baird said.
Mr. Baird, known for sympathetic views of the country, said, "The pattern of outcomes from the courts is very hard to understand except in terms of corruption, and probably incompetence".
