death

The difficulties in establishing time of death

law, science, technology / /

From Jessica Sachs’s “Expiration Date” (Legal Affairs: March/April 2004):

More than two centuries of earnest scientific research have tried to forge better clocks based on rigor, algor, and livor mortis – the progressive phenomena of postmortem muscle stiffening, body cooling, and blood pooling. But instead of honing time-of-death estimates, this research has revealed their vagaries. Two bodies that reached death within minutes of each other can, and frequently do, show marked differences in postmortem time markers. Even the method of testing eye potassium levels, which was recently hailed as the new benchmark for pinpointing time of death, has fallen into disrepute, following autopsies that showed occasional differences in levels in the left and right eye of the same cadaver. …

And the longer a body is dead, the harder it is to figure out when its owner died. In their book The Estimation of Time Since Death in the Early Postmortem Period, the world-renowned experts Claus Henssge and Bernard Knight warn pathologists to surrender any pretensions of doing science beyond the first 24 to 48 hours after death.

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Court acceptance of forensic & biometric evidence

history, law, science, security / /

From Brendan I. Koerner’s “Under the Microscope” (Legal Affairs: July/August 2002):

The mantra of forensic evidence examination is “ACE-V.” The acronym stands for Analysis, Comparison, Evaluation, and Verification, which forensic scientists compare with the step-by-step method drilled into countless chemistry students. “Instead of hypothesis, data collection, conclusion, we have ACE-V,” says Elaine Pagliaro, an expert at the Connecticut lab who specializes in biochemical analysis. “It’s essentially the same process. It’s just that it grew out of people who didn’t come from a background in the scientific method.” …

Yet for most of the 20th century, courts seldom set limits on what experts could say to juries. The 1923 case Frye v. United States mandated that expert witnesses could discuss any technique that had “gained general acceptance in the particular field in which it belongs.” Courts treated forensic science as if it were as well-founded as biology or physics. …

In 1993, the Supreme Court set a new standard for evidence that took into account the accelerated pace of scientific progress. In a case called Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, the plaintiffs wanted to show the jury some novel epidemiological studies to bolster their claim that Merrell Dow’s anti-nausea drug Bendectin caused birth defects. The trial judge didn’t let them. The plaintiff’s evidence, he reasoned, was simply too futuristic to have gained general acceptance.

When the case got to the Supreme Court, the justices seized the opportunity to revolutionize the judiciary’s role in supervising expert testimony. Writing for a unanimous court, Justice Harry Blackmun instructed judges to “ensure that any and all scientific testimony or evidence admitted is not only relevant, but reliable.” Daubert turned judges into “gatekeepers” responsible for discerning good science from junk before an expert takes the stand. Blackmun suggested that good science must be testable, subject to peer review, and feature a “known or potential rate of error.” …

There are a few exceptions, though. In 1999, Judge Nancy Gertner of the Federal District Court in Massachusetts set limits on the kinds of conclusions a handwriting expert could draw before a jury in United States v. Hines. The expert could point out similarities between the defendant’s handwriting and the writing on a stick-up note, the judge said, but she could not “make any ultimate conclusions on the actual authorship.” The judge questioned “the validity of the field” of handwriting analysis, noting that “one’s handwriting is not at all unique in the sense that it remains the same over time, or unique[ly] separates one individual from another.”

Early this year, Judge Pollak stunned the legal world by similarly reining in fingerprint experts in the murder-for-hire case United States v. Plaza. Pollak was disturbed by a proficiency test finding that 26 percent of the crime labs surveyed in different states did not correctly identify a set of latent prints on the first try. “Even 100 years of ‘adversarial’ testing in court cannot substitute for scientific testing,” he said. He ruled that the experts could show the jury similarities between the defendants’ prints and latent prints found at the crime scenes, but could not say the prints matched. …

… the University of West Virginia recently offered the nation’s first-ever four-year degree in biometrics …

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In Search of Lost Crime

history, language & literature, law / /

From Caleb Crain’s “In Search Of Lost Crime” (Legal Affairs: July/August 2002):

… the 1860 Brooklyn divorce case of Beardsley v. Beardsley. …

Richard Busteed, the lawyer for Mrs. Beardsley’s aggrieved husband, denounced her in his closing arguments as “the harlot of the nineteenth century,” and his showy performance brought tears to the eyes of many in the courtroom. In a final flourish, Busteed appealed to whatever yearning the jurors might have had for literary immortality:

If the record of this case shall be preserved in some substantial form, men and women of other generations will recur to it when they tire of Dombey and Copperfield, and drop to sleep over Kenilworth and Ivanhoe. In the glow of this extraordinary drama of real life, the highly wrought pictures of the novelist will pale their intellectual fires. Long after the romance of Bardell against Pickwick shall be musty with forgetfulness, the sad truths of Beardsley against Beardsley will rise up as sorrowing witnesses of the frailty of a woman who deliberately sacrificed the holiest relations of life upon the altar of a roving and unhallowed lust. …

… the popular 1846 trial of Albert John Tirrell … Tirrell’s case was a particularly hot item: A young man from a respectable family, he murdered a prostitute in Boston and set her brothel on fire, but his ingenious lawyer convinced the jury that he had been sleepwalking. …

Consider the prolixly titled 1871 pamphlet Life, Trial and Execution of Edward H. Ruloff, The Perpetrator of Eight Murders, Numerous Burglaries and Other Crimes; Who Was Recently Hanged at Binghamton, N.Y. A Man Shrouded in Mystery! A Learned Ruffian! Was He Man or Fiend, published by E.E. Barclay of Philadelphia.

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Gender, murder, & knots

history, law / /

From Caleb Crain’s “In Search Of Lost Crime” (Legal Affairs: July/August 2002):

… the 1833 trial of Rev. Ephraim K. Avery … discovered Sarah Maria Cornell’s body hanging from a stake among his haystacks …

Consider, as a final example of the pleasures to be had in trial pamphlets, the knot in the rope around Sarah Maria Cornell’s neck.

A coroner’s jury inspected Cornell’s body the day after its discovery. “At first I did not observe the cord about her neck, it was so imbedded,” testified Williams Durfee, who served on the jury. “On looking closer, I observed the knot under her right ear. The cord passed twice round the neck. It was what farmers call two half hitches, and sailors, a clove hitch…. To tighten a clove hitch, the ends must be drawn apart horizontally. If the ends be drawn upwards it will not tighten.” If Durfee was correct about the kind of the knot and the way it tightened, Cornell could not have hanged herself unassisted.

The witness Benjamin Manchester also considered this knot to be a damning clue. Cornell had been a weaver. And yet the knot at her neck seemed to be an unusual one-more typical of a sailor, in Manchester’s opinion. According to Durfee’s testimony, a farmer would also have been familiar with the knot. But in both men’s comments, the implication is that a woman would not have known how to tie it.

The implication stood, unchallenged, until the defense called Louisa M. Whitney, its final witness before the rebuttal phase. Like the late Cornell, Whitney worked in a textile factory, and she performed a remarkable demonstration in the courtroom. She showed “the jury a harness knot and how it is made.” As the impressed stenographer noted in brackets, “It proves to be the same as a clove hitch”-the kind of knot around Cornell’s neck. Whitney testified that weavers tied such knots routinely in the course of mending their harnesses: “We call them harness knots. I never heard any other name.”

In other words, factory women knew how to tie the same knots that farmers and sailors did, but because men and women used different terms and did not work together, the men had underestimated the women’s rope-handling knowledge. The prosecution scrambled to find weavers who mended their harnesses with simpler knots and were willing to swear ignorance of clove hitches, but the damage was done. The moment a woman tied a clove hitch before the jury’s eyes, an important part of the case against Avery unraveled.

The clove-hitch testimony hardly proved Avery’s innocence. While it was easy for his lawyers to discredit much of the evidence against him, the note in Cornell’s bandbox and a few letters she received from him cast a long shadow. Not guilty? In the best trial pamphlets, the lapse of a century and a half has done nothing but sharpen the doubts.

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When newspapers began to cover trials

business, history, language & literature, law / /

From Caleb Crain’s “In Search Of Lost Crime” (Legal Affairs: July/August 2002):

In American cities in the 1830s, 1- and 2-cent newspapers for the working class abruptly challenged 6-cent newspapers published for merchants and political parties. As Patricia Cline Cohen explains in The Murder of Helen Jewett, an account of the 1836 killing of a New York City prostitute, the penny papers transformed the reporting of murder trials. To satisfy their unsqueamish readers, editors for the first time actively investigated crimes. James Gordon Bennett of The New York Herald pioneered by visiting Jewett’s brothel and tracking down witnesses who had not yet found their way to the police station or the courtroom. While the Herald was running the Jewett story on its front page, circulation tripled.

For a sensational trial, the penny papers sent reporters to the courtroom every day. During the trial they published daily installments, which they collected and issued as a pamphlet once it was over. The trial pamphlet blossomed. The most vivid and novelistic pamphlets are of trials that took place between 1830 and 1875: the trial of Richard P. Robinson for the murder of Helen Jewett, the court-martial of Alexander Slidell Mackenzie for his role in the so-called Somers mutiny (1843), the trial of the Harvard professor John Webster for the murder of a Harvard benefactor named George Parkman (1849), and the trial of the Lincoln assassination conspirators (1865), among others.

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Clarabell the Clown’s final – and only – words

commonplace book, history / /

From The New York Times‘ “Lew Anderson, 84, Clarabell the Clown and a Bandleader, Dies“:

Lew Anderson, whose considerable success as a musician, arranger and bandleader paled before the celebrity he achieved as Clarabell the Clown, Howdy Doody’s sidekick on one of television’s first children’s shows, died on Sunday in Hawthorne, N.Y. …

“Well, his feet are big, his tummy’s stout, but we could never do without,” Buffalo Bob Smith and the Kids of the Peanut Gallery sang in appreciation of his character, in a baggy, striped costume, who communicated by honking a horn for yes and no, Harpo Marx style.

Other times, Clarabell the Clown made his feelings known by spraying Buffalo Bob with seltzer, or playing a trick on him that everybody but Bob figured out immediately.

Before there was Big Bird, Barney or SpongeBob, there was Howdy Doody and his friends in Doodyville. Baby boomers grew up with “The Howdy Doody Show,” which began in December 1947 at a time when only 20,000 homes in the country had television sets. It was the first network weekday children’s show, the first to last more than 1,000 episodes and NBC’s first regularly scheduled show to be broadcast in color.

When it ended on Sept. 24, 1960, after 2,243 episodes, it was Clarabell who had the show’s last words. Since until then he had only honked, they were also his first words.

The camera moved in for a close-up of Mr. Anderson, who had a visible tear in his eye. A drum roll grew louder and then died. With quivering lips, Clarabell whispered, “Goodbye, kids.” …

In the late 1940’s, he joined the Honey Dreamers, a singing group that appeared on radio and early television shows like “The Ed Sullivan Show.” The group appeared on a musical variety television show Mr. Smith produced for NBC.

When the Clarabell part opened up on Mr. Smith’s other show, “Howdy Doody,” Mr. Smith and the other producers asked Mr. Anderson if he could juggle. “No.” Dance? “No.” Magic tricks? “No.” What can you do? “Nothing.”

“Perfect, you start tomorrow,” Mr. Smith said.

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Human life & wasted time

commonplace book / /

From Paul Graham’s “The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn“:

We take it for granted most of the time, but human life is fairly miraculous. It is also palpably short. You’re given this marvellous thing, and then poof, it’s taken away. You can see why people invent gods to explain it. But even to people who don’t believe in gods, life commands respect. There are times in most of our lives when the days go by in a blur, and almost everyone has a sense, when this happens, of wasting something precious. As Ben Franklin said, if you love life, don’t waste time, because time is what life is made of.

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Surveillance tools to detect drowning swimmers

security, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Technology Review‘s “Big Brother Logs On“:

Consider the benefits of the “computer-aided drowning detection and prevention” system that Boulogne, France-based Poseidon Technologies has installed in nine swimming pools in France, England, the Netherlands and Canada. In these systems, a collection of overhead and in-pool cameras relentlessly monitors pool activity. The video signals feed into a central processor running a machine perception algorithm that can effectively spot when active nonwater objects, such as swimmers, become still for more than a few seconds. When that happens, a red alarm light flashes at a poolside laptop workstation and lifeguards are alerted via waterproof pagers. Last November, a Poseidon system at the Jean Blanchet Aquatic Center in Ancenis, Loire-Atlantique, France, alerted lifeguards in time to rescue a swimmer on the verge of drowning. Pulled from the water unconscious, the swimmer walked away from a hospital the next day.

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Laws & enforcement in virtual worlds

commonplace book, politics, social software, tech in changing society, technology, writing ideas / /

From James Grimmelmann’s “Life, Death, and Democracy Online“:

… The necessity of a ‘Quit’ option is obvious; no adventure game yet invented can force an unwilling player to continue playing. She can always give the game the three-finger salute, flip the power switch, or throw her computer in the junk heap. …

Banishment is the absolute worst punishment any multi-player online role-playing game can impose on a player. Which is to say that a painless execution is the absolute worst punishment any game society can impose on the characters who are its citizens. Torture is not an option. Imprisonment and fines can be imposed, true, but as soon as the player behind the character finds that these punishments are too onerous, she can simply terminate her account and stop logging in; the rest of the deterrent value of the punishment evaporates. It’s hard to hold characters accountable.

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Grant’s optimism

history / /

From Wikipedia’s “Battle of Shiloh“:

The evening of April 6 was a dispiriting end to the first day of one of the bloodiest battles in U.S. history. In the Civil War, medics were not sent into the field to collect and treat wounded soldiers. Hence, many soldiers were abandoned to bleed to death, or in the case of Shiloh, be eaten alive by scavenging animals as a thunderstorm went through the area. The desperate screams of soldiers could be heard in the Union and Confederate camps throughout the night. As the exhausted Confederate soldiers bedded down in the abandoned Union camps, Sherman encountered Grant under a tree, sheltering himself from the pouring rain, smoking one of his cigars, considering his losses and planning for the next day. Sherman remarked, “Well, Grant, we’ve had the devil’s own day, haven’t we?” Grant looked up. “Yes,” he replied, followed by a puff. “Yes. Lick ’em tomorrow, though.”

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A burning quilt brings revenge

history, security / /

From Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: Fort Sumter to Perryville (287-288):

[At the Battle of Pea Ridge,] they saw the rebels coming, yelling and firing as they came, hundreds of them bearing down to complete the wreckage their artillery had begun. As the Federals fell back from their shattered pieces an Iowa cannoneer paused to toss a smoldering quilt across a caisson, then ran hard to catch up with his friends. Still running, he heard a tremendous explosion and looked back in time to see a column of fire and smoke standing tall above the place where he had fuzed the vanished caisson. Stark against the twilight sky, it silhouetted the lazy-seeming rise and fall of blown-off arms and legs and heads and mangled trunks of men who just now had been whooping victoriously around the captured battery position.

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Risk compensation & homestasis

commonplace book, security / /

From Damn Interesting’s “The Balance of Risk“:

What’s happening is a process known as risk compensation. It’s a tendency in humans to increase risky behavior proportionately as safeguards are introduced, and it’s very common. So common, in fact, as to render predictions of how well any given piece of safety equipment will work almost useless.

… Why would we do such a strange thing? Dr. Gerald Wilde of Queens University in Ontario proposes a hypothesis he calls risk homeostasis. In a nutshell it proposes that human beings have a target level of risk with which they are most comfortable. When a given activity exceeds their comfort level, people will modify their behavior to reduce their risk until they are comfortable with their level of danger. So far, that’s not exactly a controversial observation. But risk homeostasis proposes another half to that continuum – according to Dr. Wilde, if a given person’s level of risk drops too far below their comfort level, they will again modify their behavior. This time though, they will increase their level of risk until they are once again in their target zone.

… Fortunately for us, risk homeostasis does not seem to apply in all cases. Safety innovations that are invisible tend not to provoke changes in behavior – for example changing windshields to safety glass does not alter most peoples’ driving behavior. The difference in the windshield is effectively invisible to the driver, and so doesn’t affect the driving.

… An additional complication for the already beleaguered safety engineers is that risk homeostasis is dependent not upon actual danger, but rather the perception of risk. Much of the gender and age differences in risk-taking behavior appear to stem less from differing desires for risk, and more from the individual’s different evaluation of risk. Young people, and particularly young men, tend to evaluate their level of risk as much lower than older people would, even in identical situations. This implies that promoting safer behavior depends more upon altering the perceptions of the target population, rather than improving the safety of the environment – a much trickier proposition.

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How terrorists use the Web

politics, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Technology Review‘s “Terror’s Server“:

According to [Gabriel] Weimann [professor of communications at University of Haifa], the number of [terror-related] websites has leapt from only 12 in 1997 to around 4,300 today. …

These sites serve as a means to recruit members, solicit funds, and promote and spread ideology. …

The September 11 hijackers used conventional tools like chat rooms and e-mail to communicate and used the Web to gather basic information on targets, says Philip Zelikow, a historian at the University of Virginia and the former executive director of the 9/11 Commission. …

Finally, terrorists are learning that they can distribute images of atrocities with the help of the Web. … “The Internet allows a small group to publicize such horrific and gruesome acts in seconds, for very little or no cost, worldwide, to huge audiences, in the most powerful way,” says Weimann. …

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Good will to everyone … with a few exceptions

history, language & literature / /

From Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: Fort Sumter to Perryville (132-133):

Two days after the first-Wednesday election an insurrection exploded in the loyalist mountain region of East Tennessee. Bridges were burned and armed men assembled to assist the expected advanced of a Union army through Cumberland Gap. … Resistance was quashed and a considereable number of Unionists arrested. … Five were so hanged, and others were held, including that William G. Brownlow who earlier had said that he would fight seccession on the ice in hell. … An honest, fearless, vociferous man who neither smoked nor drank nor swore, he had courted only one girl in his life “and her I married.” Though he was mysteriously absent from home on the night of the burnings, his actual complicity could not be established. He was held in arrest – for a time, at least, until his presence proved embarassing … Davis directed that the parson-editor be released to enter the Union lines. Though he was thus denied the chance to recite the speech he had memorized for delivery on the gallows, Brownlow went rejoicing. “Glory to God in the highest,” he exclaimed as he crossed over, “and on earth peace, good will toward all men, except a few hell-born and hell-bound rebels in Knoxville.”

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Russian anti-tank dogs

commonplace book, history, security / /

From Damn Interesting’s “Let Slip the Dogs of War“:

Nary does a modern movie depict the way the Romans used mastiffs with razored collars in battle, nor the fully armored Death Hounds … that the medieval knights would loose on a field to snap at the legs of opponents and dispatch the wounded that littered the ground. In fact, dogs have fought alongside their masters through most of history. At the eve of World War II, the Soviets had a fully operational four-legged fighter division, and a dog with a bomb is a potent foe.

The Soviets were unable to address the looming tank problem with any new technologies right away, thus they were forced to contemplate tackling the issue with the means at hand. Landmines were a viable option, but because one couldn’t count on the Nazis seeking out the mines, they had to figure a way to make the mines seek the tanks.

The answer laid in the dog division. The trainers would starve the dogs, then train them to find food under a tank. The dogs quickly learned that being released from their pens meant to run out to where the training tank was parked and find some vittles. Once trained, the dogs would be fitted with a bomb attached to the back, and loosed into a field of oncoming German Panzers. When the dog climbed underneath the tank – where there was no armor – the bomb would detonate and gut the enemy vehicle.

Realization of that plan was a little less successful. The dogs had been trained to look under a Soviet tank for food, and would sometimes be loosed into a battle just to turn around and find a friendly tank to climb under. Sometimes the dogs would spook at the rumble of a running diesel engine and run away from the battle. Sometimes the dogs just decided they didn’t want to go.

Despite the problems, the Anti-tank dogs were successful at disabling a reported 300 Nazi tanks. It was enough of a problem to the Nazi advance that the Germans were compelled to attempt measures at stopping them. The top mounted machine gun proved ineffective due to the relatively small size of the attackers, the fact that there were low to the ground and hard to spot, and that dogs just don’t want to die when they think they’re close to food. … Eventually the Germans began using flame-throwers on the tanks to ward the dogs away, and they were much more successful at dissuading the attacks – but some dogs would stop for neither fear of the fire nor actually being burned.

However, in 1942 one use of the Anti-tank dogs went seriously awry when a large contingent of anti-tank dogs ran amok, thus endangered everyone in the battle and forced the retreat of the entire Soviet division. Soon afterward the Anti-tank dogs were pulled from service.

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Dead for 3 years

commonplace book, true stories / /

From The Telegraph‘s “Skeleton woman’ dead in front of TV for years“:

A woman’s skeleton was discovered in her flat three years after she is believed to have died, it emerged today.

Joyce Vincent was surrounded by Christmas presents and the television and heating in her bedsit were still on.

The 40-year-old’s body was so decomposed that the only way to identify her was to compare dental records with a holiday photograph.

Police believe she probably died of natural causes in early 2003, and was only found in January this year when housing association officials broke into the bedsit in Wood Green, North East London.

They were hoping to recover the thousands of pounds of rent arrears that had piled up since her death.

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The great divider

commonplace book, religion / /

From Richard Dawkins’ “Time to Stand Up“:

It is time for people of intellect, as opposed to people of faith, to stand up and say “Enough!” Let our tribute to the dead be a new resolve: to respect people for what they individually think, rather than respect groups for what they were collectively brought up to believe. …

My point is not that religion itself is the motivation for wars, murders and terrorist attacks, but that religion is the principal label, and the most dangerous one, by which a “they” as opposed to a “we” can be identified at all. …

Parenthetically, religion is unusual among divisive labels in being spectacularly unnecessary. If religious beliefs had any evidence going for them, we might have to respect them in spite of their concomitant unpleasantness. But there is no such evidence. To label people as death-deserving enemies because of disagreements about real world politics is bad enough. To do the same for disagreements about a delusional world inhabited by archangels, demons and imaginary friends is ludicrously tragic.

… Is there no catastrophe terrible enough to shake the faith of people, on both sides, in God’s goodness and power? No glimmering realization that he might not be there at all: that we just might be on our own, needing to cope with the real world like grown-ups?

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Zombie ships adrift off the shore of Africa

business, weird, writing ideas / /

From “Happiness: The Chinese zombie ships of West Africa“:

We’re in the big African Queen inflatable, cruising alongside an anchored trawler. It’s more rust than metal – the ship is rotting away. The foredeck is covered in broken machinery. The fish deck is littered with frayed cables, and the mast lies horizontally, hanging over the starboard side. A large rusty Chinese character hangs on railings above the bridge, facing forward. It reads ‘happiness’. …

Moff turns the boat, taking us to another of the rusting fishing vessels, 70 nautical miles (130km) off the coast of Guinea, West Africa. We had been told this was where old pirate fishing boats were left at anchor, abandoned. We didn’t expect to find living people on board the dying ships. …

We head away, going with the current, which was purple and green with the dregs of spilled fuel. Throughout the afternoon, I keep noticing just how dirty the water is, with oil and fragments of plastic.

We arrive at Long way 08, which is in line for refuelling. This trawler is in a poor state, with the hull covered in masses of good-sized shellfish.

Four young Chinese crewman meet us with smiles and welcomes. They tell us that some of them have been on board for 2 years, non-stop. The trawler itself has been out here for eight years, and would probably be kept going for another six or so, or as long it lasted.

Here’s the thing – these ships seldom, or ever, visit a port. They’re re-supplied, refuelled, re-crewed and transhipped (unloaded) at sea. The owners and crews don’t seem to do any basic maintenance, apart from keeping the engine and winches running. There’s no glass in the portholes, and the masts are a mess of useless wiring. These floating deathtraps don’t carry any proper safety gear – on one boat, I saw the half-barrel case of an inflatable liferaft being used to store a net. …

We move to the second ship, where again, a bunch of friendly young guys have been sitting at anchor for two months, waiting technical help and a new crew. Their engine doesn’t work, and they no safety gear or radio. They can, however, run their watermaker, for desalinating seawater. Lines of drying fish hang over the deck, but they’re running out of other food, and are often forced to signal other fishing boats for help. Like everyone else, their future is uncertain. …

… we talk to the chirpy Guinean fisheries observer on their vessel. He’s very chatty, and tells us what is going on – that the other trawler was basically being dumped here. He says that the Chinese boats were in poor shape generally, and that last year, one had sunk, taking 14 crew with it. What are conditions like on this boat? He shrugs: “Not good. But I have to have a job.” …

Later, as we drop some supplies to the engine-less trawler, we see one of the crew hauling himself along on a rope, while standing on a small raft. It’s bizarre sight, but this is how they get between the two decrepit vessels. …

Earlier in the day – before the graveyard of zombie trawlers, fisheries inspectors had told us of where the fish actually goes. Caught by the Chinese and other trawlers, it’s transhipped to several different vessels. ‘High value’ stock goes to Las Palmas, in the Canaries and off to the dinner tables of Europe. The ‘dirt’ fish is transhipped to Africa. The Chinese fishermen, it seems, barely get a look in. ‘Happiness’ indeed.

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How to fake an anthrax scare

science, security, writing ideas / /

From Bruce Schneier’s “White Powder Anthrax Hoaxes“:

Earlier this month, there was an anthrax scare at the Indonesian embassy in Australia. Someone sent them some white powder in an envelope, which was scary enough. Then it tested positive for bacillus. The building was decontaminated, and the staff was quarantined for twelve hours. By then, tests came back negative for anthrax.

A lot of thought went into this false alarm. The attackers obviously knew that their white powder would be quickly tested for the presence of a bacterium of the bacillus family (of which anthrax is a member), but that the bacillus would have to be cultured for a couple of days before a more exact identification could be made. So even without any anthrax, they managed to cause two days of terror.

… In an interesting side note, the media have revealed for the first time that 360 “white powder” incidents have taken place since 11 September 2001. This news had been suppressed by the government, which had issued D notices to the media for all such incidents. So there has been one such incident approximately every four days — an astonishing number, given Australia’s otherwise low crime rate.

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A living story, tattooed on flesh

commonplace book, cool stuff, fiction, language & literature, on writing, weird / /

From The New York Times Magazine‘s “Skin Literature“:

Most artists spend their careers trying to create something that will live forever. But the writer Shelley Jackson is creating a work of literature that is intentionally and indisputably mortal. Jackson is publishing her latest short story by recruiting 2,095 people, each of whom will have one word of the story tattooed on his or her body. The story, titled ‘Skin,’ will appear only on the collective limbs, torsos and backsides of its participants. And decades from now, when the last of Jackson’s ‘words’ dies, so, too, will her tale.

As of November, Jackson, the Brooklyn-based author of a short-story collection called ‘The Melancholy of Anatomy,’ had enrolled about 1,800 volunteers, some from such distant countries as Argentina, Jordan, Thailand and Finland. Participants, who contact Jackson through her Web site, cannot choose which word they receive. And their tattoos must be inked in the font that Jackson has specified. But they do have some freedom to bend and stretch the narrative. They can select the place on their bodies they want to become part of the Jackson opus. In return, Jackson asks her ‘words’ to sign a 12-page release absolving her of liability and promising not to share the story with others. (Participants are the only people who will get to see the full text of the story.) They must also send her two photographs — one of the word on their skin, the other a portrait of themselves without the word visible — which she may later publish or exhibit.

… Mothers and daughters are requesting consecutive words. So are couples, perhaps hoping to form the syntactic equivalent of a civil union. For others, the motives are social: Jackson is encouraging her far-flung words to get to know each other via e-mail, telephone, even in person. (Imagine the possibilities. A sentence getting together for dinner. A paragraph having a party.) …

… when a participant meets his or her demise, Jackson vows, she will try to attend that person’s funeral. But the 41-year-old author understands that some of her 2,095 collaborators, many of whom are in their 20’s, might outlive her. If she dies first, she says, she hopes several of them will come to her funeral and make her the first writer ever to be mourned by her words.

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