Haber’s dead wife

commonplace book, history / /

From “The Invention of Modern Gas Warfare“, at Ockham’s Razor:

[Dr. Fritz] Haber [inventor of modern gas warfare] was a very patriotic German and so when the war began he looked for ways to assist the military effort. His first major critic was his childhood sweetheart and wife, Clara. She was a talented chemist herself. She was appalled at the use of science to kill people. A few days after the first use of gas, she used his army pistol to commit suicide.

This did not deter Haber. He went off to supervise the use of gas warfare on the Eastern front and he left others to handle her funeral arrangements.

When the war ended in 1918, Haber donned a disguise and fled temporarily into Switzerland. The use of gas warfare had been so controversial that he was afraid that he would be tried by the Allies as a war criminal. About 1.3 million people had been wounded by gas, with 91,000 being killed.

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Walking dead man

commonplace book, history / /

From “The Invention of Modern Gas Warfare“, at Ockham’s Razor:

One of Haber’s [Dr. Fritz Haber, inventor of gas warfare] victims was a British soldier named Fred Cayley. He was gassed in 1917. He had poor health for the rest of his life and he had to visit a doctor every week until his death in 1981. The coroner recorded that Cayley had been ‘killed by the King’s enemies’. This is the statement that would have appeared on his death certificate if he had been killed outright 64 years earlier. As far as the coroner was concerned, Cayley was as good as dead back in 1917, it was simply that he did not get buried until 1981.

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Self-sacrifice in plague time

commonplace book, history, security / /

From The Plague in Britain, on The Science Show:

Outside London, the disease spread wherever the plague flea travelled, and it is thought to have reached the village of Eyam in Derbyshire that September of 1665 in a box of tailor’s samples and old clothing sent to Edward Cooper, a village trader. … by mid-summer 1666 over seventy of the village’s 360 inhabitants had succumbed.

It was [Rev. William] Mompesson, a married man with two children, who took the step that made Eyam famous – he urged his congregation to follow Jesus’s words in the Gospel of St John: ‘Greater love hath no man that this, that a man lay down his life for his friends’. Rather than fleeing the village and spreading the infection around the Peak District, argued the young rector, the community should stick together and help their fellow-men. This, clearly, was to risk their own lives in an act of extraordinary self-sacrifice. The congregation agreed, and for more than a year Eyam became effectively a huge plague house, shut off from the world. Their neighbours, meanwhile, who included the Earl of Devonshire at nearby Chatsworth House, responded to their gesture by leaving food and other provisions at the outskirts of the village. Derbyshire was spared further plague, and Eyam paid the price, losing more than 260 inhabitants, some three-quarters of the population. Among the last to die was Mompesson’s wife Catherine, who had gone from house to house during the outbreak, ministering to the sick.

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Absolute integrity

commonplace book / /

From “John Dalton – The Father of Chemistry“, on The Science Show:

[Dalton] had the usual Quaker concern with integrity. When a good student of his needed a note to say he had attended every lecture, although he had missed one, Dalton is reported as saying, ‘If thou wilt come tomorrow, I will give the lecture thou hast missed’. He was prepared to go to the trouble to repeat the lecture for one student so he could honestly say that the student had attended every lecture.

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How to sell your book … 200 yrs ago

commonplace book, on writing / /

From “John Dalton – The Father of Chemistry“, on The Science Show:

In an age when science was often the hobby of the wealthy, Dalton made his living by private tutoring and lecture tours. Two famous French scientists came to visit him and were astonished to find him humbly teaching a small boy to read. It has been suggested he was one of the first professional scientists. To one questioner, after a lecture, he is reported to have answered, “I have written a book on that subject, and if thou wishest to inform thyself about the matter, thou canst buy my book for 3/6”.

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Dalton, father of chemistry … & meteorology

commonplace book / /

From “John Dalton – The Father of Chemistry“, on The Science Show:

In Kendal[, England, around 1781], Dalton started to keep a metrological journal, he made his own thermometers, barometers and other instruments. He kept this journal for the next 57 years and is an acknowledged pioneer of this science. The journal contained 200,000 observations; it was destroyed in an air raid on Manchester in the 2nd World War.

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Cringely on patents, trademarks, & copyright

commonplace book, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Robert X. Cringely’s “Patently Absurd: Patent Reform Legislation in Congress Amounts to Little More Than a ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ Card for Microsoft“:

There are several forms of intellectual property protected by U.S. law. Among these are patents, trademarks, and copyrights. The goal of all three forms of protection is to encourage hard work through the granting of some economic exclusivity, and thereby helping the nation by growing the economy and through the good works made possible by new inventions. Trademarks reduce ambiguity in marketing and promotion. Copyrights protect artistic and intellectual expression. And patents protect ideas. Of these three categories of intellectual property, the ones recently subject to reform efforts are copyrights and patents, and each of these seems to be headed in a different direction, though for generally the same reason.

Copyright law is being tightened at the behest of big publishers and especially big record and movie companies. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, for example, makes it a crime to defeat copy protection of CDs and DVDs, thus helping to preserve the property rights of these companies. At the end of some artistic productivity chain, it is supposed to protect the rest of us, too, most notably by encouraging the record and movie companies to make more records and movies, which we will in turn be discouraged from copying illegally.

Patent reform works the other way. Where we are tightening copyrights to help big companies, we are loosening patents, also to help big companies. Certainly it isn’t to help you or me.

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Zombies! 100s of 1000s of zombies!

security / /

From The New York Times‘ “An Army of Soulless 1’s and 0’s“:

Officials at the F.B.I. and the Justice Department say their inquiries on the zombie networks are exposing serious vulnerabilities in the Internet that could be exploited more widely by saboteurs to bring down Web sites or online messaging systems. One case under investigation, officials say, may involve as many as 300,000 zombie computers …

In one recent case, a small British online payment processing company, Protx, was shut down after being bombarded in a zombie attack and warned that problems would continue unless a $10,000 payment was made, the company said. It is not known whether the authorities ever arrested anyone in that case. …

More than 170,000 computers every day are being added to the ranks of zombies, according to Dmitri Alperovitch, a research engineer at CipherTrust, a company based in Georgia that sells products to make e-mail and messaging safer. …

Mr. Alperovitch said that CipherTrust had detected a sharp rise in zombie computers in recent months, from a daily average of 143,000 newly commandeered computers in March to 157,000 in April to 172,000 last month.

He said that the increase was attributable to two trends: the rising number of computers in Asia, particularly China, which do not use software to protect against zombies and the worldwide proliferation of high-speed Internet connections.

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Social engineering via celebrities

security / /

From PC World’s “Britney Spears Ranked Top Virus Celebrity“:

Researchers combed through the seven years of virus-laden messages stored in Panda’s malware database to determine which celebrities most often had their names involuntarily used in association with malicious spam. …

The top ten list of celebrity virus rankings (in descending order) is: Britney Spears, Bill Gates, Jennifer Lopez, Shakira, Osama Bin Laden, Michael Jackson, Bill Clinton, Anna Kournikova, Paris Hilton, and Pamela Anderson.

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Short story idea #43

fiction / /

Defense attorney for dictators.

It’s a tough business, being the lawyer that dictators call when they fall on hard times. They never bother to ring my phone when life is all castles and ice cream for every meal. No, they wait until they don’t really have a pot to piss in, and then they get on the horn to me and expect me to come running.

And you know what? I always do. There’s just something about a former dictator that gets my legal juices flowing. And hell, most of ’em aren’t such bad guys once you get to know ’em. Noreiga, for instance. That guy could tell a knee-slapper, let me tell you.

But you still need to be careful. Like any client, they’ll try to pull little stunts here and there to cheat you if you’re not careful. But I’m always careful. “Mr. Sableman don’t work for free,” I always say, “and he sure didn’t just fall off the turnip truck.”

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What are portmanteau words?

commonplace book / /

From Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass:

‘You seem very clever at explaining words, Sir,’ said Alice. ‘Would you kindly tell me the meaning of the poem called “Jabberwocky”?’

‘Let’s hear it,’ said Humpty Dumpty. ‘I can explain all the poems that were ever invented — and a good many that haven’t been invented just yet.’

This sounded very hopeful, so Alice repeated the first verse:

‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

‘That’s enough to begin with,’ Humpty Dumpty interrupted: ‘there are plenty of hard words there. “Brillig” means four o’clock in the afternoon — the time when you begin broiling things for dinner.’

‘That’ll do very well,’ said Alice: and “slithy”?’

‘Well, “slithy” means “lithe and slimy.” “Lithe” is the same as “active.” You see it’s like a portmanteau — there are two meanings packed up into one word.’

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The largest library fine … ever.

true stories / /

I was an undergraduate at Washington University in St. Louis from 1985-1989, and a graduate student in English Lit. from 1989-1996. During that time, I racked up my share of library fines (not hard to do when the fines were $0.10 a day, per book), a couple of times into three digits. In fact, I always said that Olin Library was one day going to name an extension room after me: the Granneman Procrastination room.

Recently I started teaching at Wash. U. Desiring a library book, I walked into Olin Library for the first time in seven years and tried to get the volume. The student behind the desk told me that there was a problem with my account, but he was puzzled as to what it actually was. He told me that he would talk to his supervisor, who would send me an email once everything was straightened out.

A couple of days later, I received this email:

From: Lisa W—
To: scott@granneman.com
Subject: Olin library Privileges
Date: Tue, 24 Dec 2002 09:40:40

Sir,

Your record has been updated to show current status as a faculty member of UCollege. As to the fines, I looked them up in our archive and there seems to be some disagreement between our archives and your library record. We are showing fines of $714. I’ve showed this to my supervisor, letting her know that you have material you want to put on reserve for a class, and she decided to simply ignore the $714 fine and reduce the $81.60 fine to $20. If this is a bit confusing, we do have the archive printout available for you to look at. The fines seem to date from around 1989 to 1995. The $20 can be paid at the circulation desk. From that point your record will be completely current. If you do have any questions, please let me know.

Thank you.

Wow. This has to be a record!

Needless to say, I paid the $20. Gratefully.

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