history – Page 3 – GranneBlog

The cochineal insect’s gift of red

business, history, religion, science / Scott Granneman / 8 March 2009

From Allen Abel and Madeleine Czigler’s “Scandal, communism, blood” (National Post: 27 June 2008):

The blood-red allure of lipstick is a gift of a parasitic insect that infests cactus plants, principally in Mexico and Peru. It has been known since Aztec and Mayan times that, when boiled, the body of the cochineal insect dissolves into a deep crimson dye. France is the leading importer. Cochineal dye, which is neither Kosher nor Halal (since it is forbidden for Jews or Muslims to consume any insect) also is used in thousands of foods and beverages, ranging from sausages and gelatin desserts to some Cheddar cheese.

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Bush, rhetoric, & the exercise of power

history, language & literature, politics / Scott Granneman / 6 February 2009

From Mark Danner’s “Words in a Time of War: Taking the Measure of the First Rhetoric-Major President” (Tomgram: 10 May 2007):

[Note: This commencement address was given to graduates of the Department of Rhetoric at Zellerbach Hall, University of California, Berkeley, on May 10, 2007]

…

I give you my favorite quotation from the Bush administration, put forward by the proverbial “unnamed Administration official” and published in the New York Times Magazine by the fine journalist Ron Suskind in October 2004. Here, in Suskind’s recounting, is what that “unnamed Administration official” told him:

“The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…. and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'”

…

It was the assumption of this so-called preponderance that lay behind the philosophy of power enunciated by Bush’s Brain [Karl Rove] and that led to an attitude toward international law and alliances that is, in my view, quite unprecedented in American history. That radical attitude is brilliantly encapsulated in a single sentence drawn from the National Security Strategy of the United States of 2003: “Our strength as a nation-state will continue to be challenged by those who employ a strategy of the weak using international fora, judicial processes and terrorism.” Let me repeat that little troika of “weapons of the weak”: international fora (meaning the United Nations and like institutions), judicial processes (meaning courts, domestic and international), and…. terrorism. This strange gathering, put forward by the government of the United States, stems from the idea that power is, in fact, everything. In such a world, courts — indeed, law itself — can only limit the power of the most powerful state. Wielding preponderant power, what need has it for law? The latter must be, by definition, a weapon of the weak. The most powerful state, after all, makes reality.

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Gottman on relationships

science / Scott Granneman / 6 February 2009

From THE MATHEMATICS OF LOVE: A Talk with John Gottman (Edge: 14 April 2004):

So far, his surmise is that “respect and affection are essential to all relationships working and contempt destroys them. It may differ from culture to culture how to communicate respect, and how to communicate affection, and how not to do it, but I think we’ll find that those are universal things”.

…

Another puzzle I’m working on is just what happens when a baby enters a relationship. Our study shows that the majority (67%) of couples have a precipitous drop in relationship happiness in the first 3 years of their first baby’s life. That’s tragic in terms of the climate of inter-parental hostility and depression that the baby grows up in. That affective climate between parents is the real cradle that holds the baby. And for the majority of families that cradle is unsafe for babies.

…

So far I believe we’re going to find that respect and affection are essential to all relationships working and contempt destroys them. It may differ from culture to culture how to communicate respect, and how to communicate affection, and how not to do it, but I think we’ll find that those are universal things.

…

Bob Levenson and I were very surprised when, in 1983, we found that we could actually predict, with over 90 percent accuracy, what was going to happen to a relationship over a three-year period just by examining their physiology and behavior during a conflict discussion, and later just from an interview about how the couple viewed their past. 90% accuracy!

…

That was surprising to us. It seemed that people either started in a mean-spirited way, a critical way, started talking about a disagreement, started talking about a problem as just a symptom of their partner’s inadequate character, which made their partner defensive and escalated the conflict, and people started getting mean and insulting to one another. That predicted the relationship was going to fall apart. 96% of the time the way the conflict discussion started in the first 3 minutes determined how it would go for the rest of the discussion. And four years later it was like no time had passed, their interaction style was almost identical. Also 69% of the time they were talking about the same issues, which we realized then were “perpetual issues” that they would never solve. These were basic personality differences that never went away. She was more extroverted or she was more of an explorer or he was more punctual or frugal.

Some couples were caught by the web of these perpetual issues and made each other miserable, they were “grid locked” like bumper-to-bumper traffic with these issues, while other couples had similar issues but coped with them and had a “dialogue” that even contained laughter and affection. It seemed that relationships last to the extent that you select someone whose annoying personality traits don’t send you into emotional orbit. Once again conventional wisdom was wrong. The big issue wasn’t helping couples resolve their conflicts, but moving them from gridlock to dialogue. And the secret of how to do that turned out to be having each person talk about their dream within the conflict and bringing Viktor Frankl’s existential logotherapy into the marital boxing ring. Once people talked about what they wished for and hoped for in this gridlock conflict and the narrative of why this was so important to them, in 86% of the cases they would move from gridlock to dialogue. Again a new door opened. Not all marital conflicts are the same. You can’t teach people a set of skills and just apply them to every issue. Some issues are deeper, they have more meaning. And then it turned out that the very issues that cause the most pain and alienation can also be the greatest sources of intimacy and connection.

Another surprise: we followed couples for as long as 20 years, and we found that there was another kind of couple that didn’t really show up on the radar; they looked fine, they weren’t mean, they didn’t escalate the conflict — but about 16 to 22 years after the wedding they started divorcing. They were often the pillars of their community. They seemed very calm and in control of their lives, and then suddenly they break up. Everyone is shocked and horrified. But we could look back at our early tapes and see the warning signs we had never seen before. Those people were people who just didn’t have very much positive connection. There wasn’t very much affection — and also especially humor — between them.

…These sorts of emotionally disconnected relationships were another important dimension of failed relationships. We learned through them that the quality of the friendship and intimacy affects the nature of conflict in a very big way.

…

One of the major things we found is that honoring your partner’s dreams is absolutely critical. A lot of times people have incompatible dreams — or they don’t want to honor their partner’s dreams, or they don’t want to yield power, they don’t want to share power. So that explains a lot of times why they don’t really belong together.

Psycho-physiology is an important part of this research. It’s something that Bob Levenson brought to the search initially, and then I got trained in psycho-physiology as well. And the reason we’re interested in what was happening in the body is that there’s an intimate connection between what’s happening to the autonomic nervous system and what happening in the brain, and how well people can take in information — how well they can just process information — for example, just being able to listen to your partner — that is much harder when your heart rate is above the intrinsic rate of the heart, which is around a hundred to a hundred and five beats a minute for most people with a healthy heart.

At that point we know, from Loren Rowling’s work, that people start secreting adrenalin, and then they get into a state of diffuse physiological arousal (or DPA) , so their heart is beating faster, it’s contracting harder, the arteries start getting constricted, blood is drawn away from the periphery into the trunk, the blood supply shuts down to the gut and the kidney, and all kinds of other things are happening — people are sweating, and things are happening in the brain that create a tunnel vision, one in which they perceive everything as a threat and they react as if they have been put in great danger by this conversation.

…

Because men are different. Men have a lot of trouble when they reach a state of vigilance, when they think there’s real danger, they have a lot of trouble calming down. and there’s probably an evolutionary history to that. Because it functioned very well for our hominid ancestors, anthropologists think, for men to stay physiologically aroused and vigilant, in cooperative hunting and protecting the tribe, which was a role that males had very early in our evolutionary history. Whereas women had the opposite sort of role, in terms of survival of the species, those women reproduced more effectively who had the milk-let-down reflex, which only happens when oxytocin is secreted in the brain, it only happens when women — as any woman knows who’s been breast-feeding, you have to be able to calm down and relax. But oxytocin is also the hormone of affiliation. So women have developed this sort of social order, caring for one another, helping one another, and affiliating, that also allows them to really calm down and have the milk let-down reflex. And so — it’s one of nature’s jokes. Women can calm down, men can’t; they stay aroused and vigilant.

…

Physiology becomes really critical in this whole thing. A provocative finding from Alyson Shapiro’s recent dissertation is that if we take a look at how a couple argues when the woman is in the sixth month of pregnancy, we can predict over half the variation in the baby, the three-month-old baby’s vagal tone, which is the ability of the vagus nerve, the major nerve of the parasympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system, which is responsible for establishing calm and focusing attention. That vagus nerve in the baby is eventually going to be working well if the parents, during pregnancy, are fighting with each other constructively. That takes us into fetal development, a whole new realm of inquiry.

…

You have to study gay and Lesbian couples who are committed to each other as well as heterosexual couples who are committed to each other, and try and match things as much as you can, like how long they’ve been together, and the quality of their relationship. And we’ve done that, and we find that there are two gender differences that really hold up.

One is that if a man presents an issue, to either a man he’s in love with or a woman he’s in love with, the man is angrier presenting the issue. And we find that when a woman receives an issue, either from a woman she loves or a man she loves, she is much more sad than a man would be receiving that same issue. It’s about anger and sadness. Why? Remember, Bowlby taught us that attachment and loss and grief are part of the same system. So women are finely tuned to attaching and connecting and to sadness and loss and grief, while men are attuned to defend, stay vigilant, attack, to anger. My friend Levenson did an acoustic startle study (that’s where you shoot of a blank pistol behind someone’s head when they least expect it). Men had a bigger heart rate reactivity and took longer to recover, which we would expect, but what even more interesting is that when you asked people what they were feeling, women were scared and men were angry.

So that’s probably why those two differences have held up. Physiologically people find over and over again in heterosexual relationships — and this hasn’t been studied yet in gay and Lesbian relationships — that men have a lower flash point for increasing heart-rate arousal, and it takes them longer to recover. And not only that, but when men are trying to recover, and calm down, they can’t do it very well because they keep naturally rehearsing thoughts of righteous indignation and feeling like an innocent victim. They maintain their own vigilance and arousal with these thoughts, mostly of getting even, whereas women really can distract themselves and calm down physiologically from being angered or being upset about something. If women could affiliate and secrete oxytocin when they felt afraid, they’s even calm down faster, probably.

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A single medium, with a single search engine, & a single info source

business, education, social software, tech in changing society, technology / Scott Granneman / 5 February 2009

From Nicholas Carr’s “All hail the information triumvirate!” (Rough Type: 22 January 2009):

Today, another year having passed, I did the searches [on Google] again. And guess what:

World War II: #1
Israel: #1
George Washington: #1
Genome: #1
Agriculture: #1
Herman Melville: #1
Internet: #1
Magna Carta: #1
Evolution: #1
Epilepsy: #1

Yes, it’s a clean sweep for Wikipedia.

The first thing to be said is: Congratulations, Wikipedians. You rule. Seriously, it’s a remarkable achievement. Who would have thought that a rag-tag band of anonymous volunteers could achieve what amounts to hegemony over the results of the most popular search engine, at least when it comes to searches for common topics.

The next thing to be said is: what we seem to have here is evidence of a fundamental failure of the Web as an information-delivery service. Three things have happened, in a blink of history’s eye: (1) a single medium, the Web, has come to dominate the storage and supply of information, (2) a single search engine, Google, has come to dominate the navigation of that medium, and (3) a single information source, Wikipedia, has come to dominate the results served up by that search engine. Even if you adore the Web, Google, and Wikipedia – and I admit there’s much to adore – you have to wonder if the transformation of the Net from a radically heterogeneous information source to a radically homogeneous one is a good thing. Is culture best served by an information triumvirate?

It’s hard to imagine that Wikipedia articles are actually the very best source of information for all of the many thousands of topics on which they now appear as the top Google search result. What’s much more likely is that the Web, through its links, and Google, through its search algorithms, have inadvertently set into motion a very strong feedback loop that amplifies popularity and, in the end, leads us all, lemminglike, down the same well-trod path – the path of least resistance. You might call this the triumph of the wisdom of the crowd. I would suggest that it would be more accurately described as the triumph of the wisdom of the mob. The former sounds benign; the latter, less so.

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How it feels to drown, get decapitated, get electrocuted, and more

1 Comment / history, science, weird / Scott Granneman / 8 December 2008

From Anna Gosline’s “Death special: How does it feel to die?” (New Scientist: 13 October 2007):

Death comes in many guises, but one way or another it is usually a lack of oxygen to the brain that delivers the coup de grâce. Whether as a result of a heart attack, drowning or suffocation, for example, people ultimately die because their neurons are deprived of oxygen, leading to cessation of electrical activity in the brain – the modern definition of biological death.

If the flow of freshly oxygenated blood to the brain is stopped, through whatever mechanism, people tend to have about 10 seconds before losing consciousness. They may take many more minutes to die, though, with the exact mode of death affecting the subtleties of the final experience.

…

Drowning

Typically, when a victim realises that they cannot keep their head above water they tend to panic, leading to the classic “surface struggle”. They gasp for air at the surface and hold their breath as they bob beneath, says Tipton. Struggling to breathe, they can’t call for help. Their bodies are upright, arms weakly grasping, as if trying to climb a non-existent ladder from the sea. Studies with New York lifeguards in the 1950s and 1960s found that this stage lasts just 20 to 60 seconds.

When victims eventually submerge, they hold their breath for as long as possible, typically 30 to 90 seconds. After that, they inhale some water, splutter, cough and inhale more. Water in the lungs blocks gas exchange in delicate tissues, while inhaling water also triggers the airway to seal shut – a reflex called a laryngospasm. “There is a feeling of tearing and a burning sensation in the chest as water goes down into the airway. Then that sort of slips into a feeling of calmness and tranquility,” says Tipton, describing reports from survivors.

That calmness represents the beginnings of the loss of consciousness from oxygen deprivation, which eventually results in the heart stopping and brain death.

Heart attack

…

The most common symptom is, of course, chest pain: a tightness, pressure or squeezing, often described as an “elephant on my chest”, which may be lasting or come and go. This is the heart muscle struggling and dying from oxygen deprivation. Pain can radiate to the jaw, throat, back, belly and arms. Other signs and symptoms include shortness of breath, nausea and cold sweats.

Most victims delay before seeking assistance, waiting an average of 2 to 6 hours. Women are the worst, probably because they are more likely to experience less well-known symptoms, such as breathlessness, back or jaw pain, or nausea, says JoAnn Manson, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School.

…

Even small heart attacks can play havoc with the electrical impulses that control heart muscle contraction, effectively stopping it. In about 10 seconds the person loses consciousness, and minutes later they are dead.

Bleeding to death

People can bleed to death in seconds if the aorta, the major blood vessel leading from the heart, is completely severed, for example, after a severe fall or car accident.

Death could creep up much more slowly if a smaller vein or artery is nicked – even taking hours. Such victims would experience several stages of haemorrhagic shock. The average adult has 5 litres of blood. Losses of around 750 millilitres generally cause few symptoms. Anyone losing 1.5 litres – either through an external wound or internal bleeding – feels weak, thirsty and anxious, and would be breathing fast. By 2 litres, people experience dizziness, confusion and then eventual unconsciousness.

Fire

Long the fate of witches and heretics, burning to death is torture. Hot smoke and flames singe eyebrows and hair and burn the throat and airways, making it hard to breathe. Burns inflict immediate and intense pain through stimulation of the nociceptors – the pain nerves in the skin. To make matters worse, burns also trigger a rapid inflammatory response, which boosts sensitivity to pain in the injured tissues and surrounding areas.

…

Most people who die in fires do not in fact die from burns. The most common cause of death is inhaling toxic gases – carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide and even hydrogen cyanide – together with the suffocating lack of oxygen. One study of fire deaths in Norway from 1996 found that almost 75 per cent of the 286 people autopsied had died from carbon monoxide poisoning.

Depending on the size of the fire and how close you are to it, concentrations of carbon monoxide could start to cause headache and drowsiness in minutes, eventually leading to unconsciousness. According to the US National Fire Protection Association, 40 per cent of the victims of fatal home fires are knocked out by fumes before they can even wake up.

Decaptitation

Beheading, if somewhat gruesome, can be one of the quickest and least painful ways to die – so long as the executioner is skilled, his blade sharp, and the condemned sits still.

…

Quick it may be, but consciousness is nevertheless believed to continue after the spinal chord is severed. A study in rats in 1991 found that it takes 2.7 seconds for the brain to consume the oxygen from the blood in the head; the equivalent figure for humans has been calculated at 7 seconds.

…

It took the axeman three attempts to sever the head of Mary Queen of Scots in 1587. He had to finish the job with a knife.

Decades earlier in 1541, Margaret Pole, the Countess of Salisbury, was executed at the Tower of London. She was dragged to the block, but refused to lay her head down. The inexperienced axe man made a gash in her shoulder rather than her neck. According to some reports, she leapt from the block and was chased by the executioner, who struck 11 times before she died.

Electrocution

In accidental electrocutions, usually involving low, household current, the most common cause of death is arrhythmia, stopping the heart dead. Unconsciousness ensues after the standard 10 seconds, says Richard Trohman, a cardiologist at Rush University in Chicago. One study of electrocution deaths in Montreal, Canada found that 92 per cent had probably died from arrhythmia.

Higher currents can produce nearly immediate unconsciousness.

…

Fall from a height

A high fall is certainly among the speediest ways to die: terminal velocity (no pun intended) is about 200 kilometres per hour, achieved from a height of about 145 metres or more. A study of deadly falls in Hamburg, Germany, found that 75 per cent of victims died in the first few seconds or minutes after landing.

The exact cause of death varies, depending on the landing surface and the person’s posture. People are especially unlikely to arrive at the hospital alive if they land on their head – more common for shorter (under 10 metres) and higher (over 25 metres) falls. A 1981 analysis of 100 suicidal jumps from the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco – height: 75 metres, velocity on impact with the water: 120 kilometres per hour – found numerous causes of instantaneous death including massive lung bruising, collapsed lungs, exploded hearts or damage to major blood vessels and lungs through broken ribs.

Survivors of great falls often report the sensation of time slowing down. The natural reaction is to struggle to maintain a feet-first landing, resulting in fractures to the leg bones, lower spinal column and life-threatening broken pelvises. The impact travelling up through the body can also burst the aorta and heart chambers. Yet this is probably still the safest way to land, despite the force being concentrated in a small area: the feet and legs form a “crumple zone” which provides some protection to the major internal organs.

Some experienced climbers or skydivers who have survived a fall report feeling focused, alert and driven to ensure they landed in the best way possible: relaxed, legs bent and, where possible, ready to roll.

…

Hanging

Suicides and old-fashioned “short drop” executions cause death by strangulation; the rope puts pressure on the windpipe and the arteries to the brain. This can cause unconsciousness in 10 seconds, but it takes longer if the noose is incorrectly sited. Witnesses of public hangings often reported victims “dancing” in pain at the end of the rope, struggling violently as they asphyxiated. Death only ensues after many minutes, as shown by the numerous people being resuscitated after being cut down – even after 15 minutes.

When public executions were outlawed in Britain in 1868, hangmen looked for a less performance-oriented approach. They eventually adopted the “long-drop” method, using a lengthier rope so the victim reached a speed that broke their necks. It had to be tailored to the victim’s weight, however, as too great a force could rip the head clean off, a professionally embarrassing outcome for the hangman.

Despite the public boasting of several prominent executioners in late 19th-century Britain, a 1992 analysis of the remains of 34 prisoners found that in only about half of cases was the cause of death wholly or partly due to spinal trauma. Just one-fifth showed the classic “hangman’s fracture” between the second and third cervical vertebrae. The others died in part from asphyxiation.

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Lethal injection

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Michael Spence, an anthropologist at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada, has found similar results in US victims. He concluded, however, that even if asphyxiation played a role, the trauma of the drop would have rapidly rendered all of them unconscious. “What the hangmen were looking for was quick cessation of activity,” he says. “And they knew enough about their craft to ensure that happened. The thing they feared most was decapitation.”
Lethal injection

US-government approved, but is it really painless?

Lethal injection was designed in Oklahoma in 1977 as a humane alternative to the electric chair. The state medical examiner and chair of anaesthesiology settled on a series of three drug injections. First comes the anaesthetic thiopental to speed away any feelings of pain, followed by a paralytic agent called pancuronium to stop breathing. Finally potassium chloride is injected, which stops the heart almost instantly.

Each drug is supposed to be administered in a lethal dose, a redundancy to ensure speedy and humane death. However, eyewitnesses have reported inmates convulsing, heaving and attempting to sit up during the procedure, suggesting the cocktail is not always completely effective.

…

Explosive decompression

In real life there has been just one fatal space depressurisation accident. This occurred on the Russian Soyuz-11 mission in 1971, when a seal leaked upon re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere; upon landing all three flight crew were found dead from asphyxiation.

Most of our knowledge of depressurisation comes from animal experiments and the experiences of pilots in accidents at very high altitudes. When the external air pressure suddenly drops, the air in the lungs expands, tearing the fragile gas exchange tissues. This is especially damaging if the victim neglects to exhale prior to decompression or tries to hold their breath. Oxygen begins to escape from the blood and lungs.

Experiments on dogs in the 1950s showed that 30 to 40 seconds after the pressure drops, their bodies began to swell as the water in tissues vaporised, though the tight seal of their skin prevented them from “bursting”. The heart rate rises initially, then plummets. Bubbles of water vapour form in the blood and travel through the circulatory system, obstructing blood flow. After about a minute, blood effectively stops circulating.

Human survivors of rapid decompression accidents include pilots whose planes lost pressure, or in one case a NASA technician who accidentally depressurised his flight suit inside a vacuum chamber. They often report an initial pain, like being hit in the chest, and may remember feeling air escape from their lungs and the inability to inhale. Time to the loss of consciousness was generally less than 15 seconds.

How it feels to drown, get decapitated, get electrocuted, and more Read More »

A Russian man with perfect memory

history, science / Scott Granneman / 4 December 2008

From Jonah Lehrer’s “Hell is a Perfect Memory” (The Frontal Cortex: 2 December 2008):

This isn’t the first case report of a person with perfect memory. In the masterful The Mind of A Mnemonist, the Soviet neurologist A.R. Luria documented the story of a Russian newspaper reporter, D.C. Shereshevskii, who was incapable of forgetting. For example, D.C. would be bound by his brain to memorize the entire Divine Comedy of Dante after a single reading. Audiences would scream out random numbers 100 digits long and he would effortlessly recount them. The only requirement of this man’s insatiable memory was that he be given 3 or 4 seconds to visualize each item during the learning process. These images came to D.C. automatically.

Eventually, D.C.’s memory overwhelmed him. He. struggled with mental tasks normal people find easy. When he read a novel, he would instantly memorize every word by heart, but miss the entire plot. Metaphors and poetry – though they clung to his brain like Velcro – were incomprehensible. He couldn’t even use the phone because he found it hard to recognize a person’s voice “when it changes its intonation…and it does that 20 or 30 times a day.”

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A woman who never forgets anything

history, science / Scott Granneman / 4 December 2008

From Samiha Shafy’s “An Infinite Loop in the Brain” (Der Spiegel: 21 November 2008):

Price can rattle off, without hesitation, what she saw and heard on almost any given date. She remembers many early childhood experiences and most of the days between the ages of 9 and 15. After that, there are virtually no gaps in her memory. “Starting on Feb. 5, 1980, I remember everything. That was a Tuesday.”

…

“People say to me: Oh, how fascinating, it must be a treat to have a perfect memory,” she says. Her lips twist into a thin smile. “But it’s also agonizing.”

In addition to good memories, every angry word, every mistake, every disappointment, every shock and every moment of pain goes unforgotten. Time heals no wounds for Price. “I don’t look back at the past with any distance. It’s more like experiencing everything over and over again, and those memories trigger exactly the same emotions in me. It’s like an endless, chaotic film that can completely overpower me. And there’s no stop button.”

She’s constantly bombarded with fragments of memories, exposed to an automatic and uncontrollable process that behaves like an infinite loop in a computer. Sometimes there are external triggers, like a certain smell, song or word. But often her memories return by themselves. Beautiful, horrific, important or banal scenes rush across her wildly chaotic “internal monitor,” sometimes displacing the present. “All of this is incredibly exhausting,” says Price.

…

The scientists were able to verify her autobiographical data because she has meticulously kept a diary since the age of 10. She has filled more than 50,000 pages with tiny writing, documenting every occurrence, no matter how insignificant. Writing things down helps Price organize the thoughts and images shimmering in her head.

In fact, she feels a strong need to document her life. This includes hoarding every possible memento from childhood, including dolls, stuffed animals, cassette tapes, books, a drawer from dresser she had when she was five. “I have to be able to touch my memories,” Price explains.

[James McGaugh, founder of the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory at the University of California in Irvine,] and his colleagues concluded that Price’s episodic memory, her recollection of personal experiences and the emotions associated with them, is virtually perfect. A case like this has never been described in the history of memory research, according to McGaugh. He explains that Price differs substantially from other people with special powers of recall, such as autistic savants, because she uses no strategies to help her remember and even does a surprisingly poor job on some memory tests.

It’s difficult for her to memorize poems or series of numbers — which helps explain why she never stood out in school. Her semantic memory, the ability to remember facts not directly related to everyday life, is only average.

Two years ago, the scientists published their first conclusions in a professional journal without revealing the identity of their subject. Since then, more than 200 people have contacted McGaugh, all claiming to have an equally perfect episodic memory. Most of them were exposed as fakes. Three did appear to have similarly astonishing abilities. “Their personalities are very different. The others are not as anxious as Jill. But they achieve comparable results in the tests,” McGaugh reports.

The subjects do have certain compulsive traits in common, says McGaugh, especially compulsive hoarding. The three others are left-handed, and Price also showed a tendency toward left-handedness in tests.

…

In neurobiological terms, a memory is a stored pattern of links between nerve cells in the brain. It is created when synapses in a network of neurons are activated for a short time. The more often the memory is recalled afterwards, the more likely it is that permanent links develop between the nerve cells — and the pattern will be stored as a long-term memory. In theory there are so many possible links that an almost unlimited number of memories can be permanently stored.

So why don’t all people have the same powers of recollection as Jill Price? “If we could remember everything equally well, the brain would be hopelessly overburdened and would operate more slowly,” says McGaugh. He says forgetting is a necessary condition of having a viable memory — except in the case of Price and the other three memory superstars.

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Ted Williams’ fishing story

history / Scott Granneman / 1 December 2008

From Richard Ben Cramer’s “What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now?” (Esquire: June 1986):

Few men try for best ever, and Ted Williams is one of those. There’s a story about him I think of now. This is not about baseball but fishing. He meant to be the best there, too. One day he says to a Boston writer: “Ain’t no one in heaven or earth ever knew more about fishing.”

“Sure there is,” says the scribe.

“Oh, yeah? Who?”

“Well, God made the fish.”

“Yeah, awright,” Ted says. “But you have to go pretty far back.”

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Protected: Students, schools, civil rights, & the f-word

education, history, language & literature, law, politics / Scott Granneman / 30 November 2008

Protected: Students, schools, civil rights, & the f-word Read More »

One group files 99.9% of all complaints about TV content

business, language & literature, law, politics, tech in changing society / Scott Granneman / 30 November 2008

From Christopher M. Fairman’s “Fuck” (bepress Legal Series: 7 March 2006):

The PTC [Parents Television Council] is a perfect example of the way word taboo is perpetuated. The group’s own irrational word fetish – which they try to then impose on others – fuels unhealthy attitudes toward sex that then furthers the taboo status of the word. See supra notes 119-121 and accompanying text (describing this taboo effect). The PTC has even created a pull-down, web-based form that allows people to file an instant complaint with the FCC about specific broadcasts, apparently without regard to whether you actually saw the program or not. See, e.g., FCC Indecency Complaint Form, https://www.parentstv.org/ptc/action/sweeps/main.asp (last visited Feb. 10, 2006) (allowing instant complaints to be filed against episodes of NCIS, Family Guy, and/or The Vibe Awards). This squeaky wheel of a special interest group literally dominates FCC complaints. Consider this data. In 2003, the PTC was responsible for filing 99.86% of all indecency complaints. In 2004, the figure was up to 99.9%.

One group files 99.9% of all complaints about TV content Read More »

Protected: American courts and government and the f-word

business, history, language & literature, law, politics / Scott Granneman / 30 November 2008

Protected: American courts and government and the f-word Read More »

Protected: Taboo acts and language and how they work together

art, education, history, language & literature / Scott Granneman / 30 November 2008

Protected: Taboo acts and language and how they work together Read More »

Protected: Etymologies & the dictionary definitions of the f-word

education, history, language & literature, religion / Scott Granneman / 30 November 2008

Protected: Etymologies & the dictionary definitions of the f-word Read More »

Protected: FCUK, a special trademarked logo

business, history, language & literature / Scott Granneman / 30 November 2008

Protected: FCUK, a special trademarked logo Read More »

Denver International Airport, home to alien reptilians enslaving children in deep dungeons

1 Comment / art, history, politics, religion, security, weird / Scott Granneman / 30 November 2008

From Jared Jacang Maher’s “DIA Conspiracies Take Off” (Denver Westword News: 30 August 2007):

Chris from Indianapolis has heard that the tunnels below DIA [Denver International Airport] were constructed as a kind of Noah’s Ark so that five million people could escape the coming earth change; shaken and earnest, he asks how someone might go about getting on the list.

…

Today, dozens of websites are devoted to the “Denver Airport Conspiracy,” and theorists have even nicknamed the place “Area 52.” Wikipedia presents DIA as a primary example of New World Order symbolism, above the entry about the eyeball/pyramid insignia on the one-dollar bill. And over the past two years, DIA has been the subject of books, articles, documentaries, radio interviews and countless YouTube and forum board postings, all attempting to unlock its mysteries. While the most extreme claim maintains that a massive underground facility exists below the airport where an alien race of reptilian humanoids feeds on missing children while awaiting the date of government-sponsored rapture, all of the assorted theories share a common thread: The key to decoding the truth about DIA and the sinister forces that control our reality is contained within the two Tanguma murals, “In Peace and Harmony With Nature” and “The Children of the World Dream of Peace.”

…

And not all these theorists are Unabomber-like crackpots uploading their hallucinations from basement lairs. Former BBC media personality David Icke, for example, has written twenty books in his quest to prove that the world is controlled by an elite group of reptilian aliens known as the Babylonian Brotherhood, whose ranks include George W. Bush, Queen Elizabeth II, the Jews and Kris Kristofferson. In various writings, lectures and interviews, he has long argued that DIA is one of many home bases for the otherworldly creatures, a fact revealed in the lizard/alien-faced military figure shown in Tanguma’s murals.

“Denver is scheduled to be the Western headquarters of the US New World Order during martial law take over,” Icke wrote in his 1999 book, The Biggest Secret. “Other contacts who have been underground at the Denver Airport claim that there are large numbers of human slaves, many of them children, working there under the control of the reptilians.”

On the other end of the conspiracy spectrum is anti-vaccination activist Dr. Len Horowitz, who believes that global viruses such as AIDS, Ebola, West Nile, tuberculosis and SARS are actually population-control plots engineered by the government. The former dentist from Florida does not speak about 2012 or reptiles — in fact, he sees Icke’s Jewish alien lizards as a Masonic plot to divert observers from the true earthly enemies: remnants of the Third Reich. He even used the mural’s sword-wielding military figure as the front cover of his 2001 book, Death in the Air.

“The Nazi alien symbolizes the Nazi-fascist links between contemporary population controllers and the military-medical-petrochemical-pharmaceutical cartel largely accountable for Hitler’s rise to power,” Horowitz explained in a 2003 interview with BookWire.

…

Although conspiracy theories vary widely, they all share three commonalities. “One is the belief that nothing happens by accident,” [Syracuse University professor Michael Barkun, author of the 2006 book A Culture of Conspiracy] points out. “Another is that everything is connected. And a third is that nothing is as it seems.” [Emphasis added]

…

[Alex] Christopher is a 65-year-old grandmother living in Alabama.

…

Christopher, on the other hand, was open to hearing anything. A man called her and said he had found an elevator at DIA that led to a corridor that led all the way down into a military base that also contained alien-operated concentration camps. She detailed this theory in her next book, Pandora’s Box II…

And the scale of DIA reflected this desire: It was to be the largest, most modern airport in the world. But almost as soon as ground was broken in 1989, problems cropped up. The massive public-works project was encumbered by design changes, difficult airline negotiations, allegations of cronyism in the contracting process, rumors of mismanagement and real troubles with the $700 million (and eventually abandoned) automated baggage system. Peña’s successor, Wellington Webb, was forced to push back the 1993 opening date three times. By the time DIA finally opened in February 1995, the original $1.5 billion cost had grown to $5.2 billion. Three months after that opening, the Congressional Subcommittee on Aviation held a special hearing on DIA in which one member said the Denver airport represented the “worst in government inefficiency, political behind-the-scenes deal-making, and financial mismanagement.” …

And what looked like a gamble in 1995 seems to have paid off for Denver. Today, DIA is considered one of the world’s most efficient, spacious and technologically advanced airports. It is the fifth-busiest in the nation and tenth-busiest in the world, serving some 50 million passengers in 2006.

Denver International Airport, home to alien reptilians enslaving children in deep dungeons Read More »

CopyBot copies all sorts of items in Second Life

art, business, history, security, tech in changing society / Scott Granneman / 29 November 2008

From Glyn Moody’s “The duplicitous inhabitants of Second Life” (The Guardian: 23 November 2006):

What would happen to business and society if you could easily make a copy of anything – not just MP3s and DVDs, but clothes, chairs and even houses? That may not be a problem most of us will have to confront for a while yet, but the 1.5m residents of the virtual world Second Life are already grappling with this issue.

A new program called CopyBot allows Second Life users to duplicate repeatedly certain elements of any object in the vicinity – and sometimes all of it. That’s awkward in a world where such virtual goods can be sold for real money. When CopyBot first appeared, some retailers in Second Life shut up shop, convinced that their virtual goods were about to be endlessly copied and rendered worthless. Others protested, and suggested that in the absence of scarcity, Second Life’s economy would collapse.

…

Instead of sending a flow of pictures of the virtual world to the user as a series of pixels – something that would be impractical to calculate – the information would be transmitted as a list of basic shapes that were re-created on the user’s PC. For example, a virtual house might be a cuboid with rectangles representing windows and doors, cylinders for the chimney stacks etc.

This meant the local world could be sent in great detail very compactly, but also that the software on the user’s machine had all the information for making a copy of any nearby object. It’s like the web: in order to display a page, the browser receives not an image of the page, but all the underlying HTML code to generate that page, which also means that the HTML of any web page can be copied perfectly. Thus CopyBot – written by a group called libsecondlife as part of an open-source project to create Second Life applications – or something like it was bound to appear one day.

…

Liberating the economy has led to a boom in creativity, just as Rosedale hoped. It is in constant expansion as people buy virtual land, and every day more than $500,000 (£263,000) is spent buying virtual objects. But the downside is that unwanted copying is potentially a threat to the substantial businesses selling virtual goods that have been built up, and a concern for the real-life companies such as IBM, Adidas and Nissan which are beginning to enter Second Life.

Just as it is probably not feasible to stop “grey goo” – the Second Life equivalent of spam, which takes the form of self- replicating objects malicious “griefers” use to gum up the main servers – so it is probably technically impossible to stop copying. Fortunately, not all aspects of an object can be duplicated. To create complex items – such as a virtual car that can be driven – you use a special programming language to code their realistic behaviour. CopyBot cannot duplicate these programs because they are never passed to the user, but run on the Linden Lab’s computers.

As for the elements that you can copy, such as shape and texture, Rosedale explains: “What we’re going to do is add a lot of attribution. You’ll be able to easily see when an object or texture was first created,” – and hence if something is a later copy.

CopyBot copies all sorts of items in Second Life Read More »

An analysis of Google’s technology, 2005

business, history, science, security, tech in changing society, technology / Scott Granneman / 28 November 2008

From Stephen E. Arnold’s The Google Legacy: How Google’s Internet Search is Transforming Application Software (Infonortics: September 2005):

The figure Google’s Fusion: Hardware and Software Engineering shows that Google’s technology framework has two areas of activity. There is the software engineering effort that focuses on PageRank and other applications. Software engineering, as used here, means writing code and thinking about how computer systems operate in order to get work done quickly. Quickly means the sub one-second response times that Google is able to maintain despite its surging growth in usage, applications and data processing.

The other effort focuses on hardware. Google has refined server racks, cable placement, cooling devices, and data center layout. The payoff is lower operating costs and the ability to scale as demand for computing resources increases. With faster turnaround and the elimination of such troublesome jobs as backing up data, Google’s hardware innovations give it a competitive advantage few of its rivals can equal as of mid-2005.

…

How Google Is Different from MSN and Yahoo

Google’s technologyis simultaneously just like other online companies’ technology, and very different. A data center is usually a facility owned and operated by a third party where customers place their servers. The staff of the data center manage the power, air conditioning and routine maintenance. The customer specifies the computers and components. When a data center must expand, the staff of the facility may handle virtually all routine chores and may work with the customer’s engineers for certain more specialized tasks.

Before looking at some significant engineering differences between Google and two of its major competitors, review this list of characteristics for a Google data center.

1. Google data centers – now numbering about two dozen, although no one outside Google knows the exact number or their locations. They come online and automatically, under the direction of the Google File System, start getting work from other data centers. These facilities, sometimes filled with 10,000 or more Google computers, find one another and configure themselves with minimal human intervention.

2. The hardware in a Google data center can be bought at a local computer store. Google uses the same types of memory, disc drives, fans and power supplies as those in a standard desktop PC.

3. Each Google server comes in a standard case called a pizza box with one important change: the plugs and ports are at the front of the box to make access faster and easier.

4. Google racks are assembled for Google to hold servers on their front and back sides. This effectively allows a standard rack, normally holding 40 pizza box servers, to hold 80.

5. A Google data center can go from a stack of parts to online operation in as little as 72 hours, unlike more typical data centers that can require a week or even a month to get additional resources online.

6. Each server, rack and data center works in a way that is similar to what is called “plug and play.” Like a mouse plugged into the USB port on a laptop, Google’s network of data centers knows when more resources have been connected. These resources, for the most part, go into operation without human intervention.

Several of these factors are dependent on software. This overlap between the hardware and software competencies at Google, as previously noted, illustrates the symbiotic relationship between these two different engineering approaches. At Google, from its inception, Google software and Google hardware have been tightly coupled. Google is not a software company nor is it a hardware company. Google is, like IBM, a company that owes its existence to both hardware and software. Unlike IBM, Google has a business model that is advertiser supported. Technically, Google is conceptually closer to IBM (at one time a hardware and software company) than it is to Microsoft (primarily a software company) or Yahoo! (an integrator of multiple softwares).

Software and hardware engineering cannot be easily segregated at Google. At MSN and Yahoo hardware and software are more loosely-coupled. Two examples will illustrate these differences.

Microsoft – with some minor excursions into the Xbox game machine and peripherals – develops operating systems and traditional applications. Microsoft has multiple operating systems, and its engineers are hard at work on the company’s next-generation of operating systems.

…

Several observations are warranted:

1. Unlike Google, Microsoft does not focus on performance as an end in itself. As a result, Microsoft gets performance the way most computer users do. Microsoft buys or upgrades machines. Microsoft does not fiddle with its operating systems and their subfunctions to get that extra time slice or two out of the hardware.

2. Unlike Google, Microsoft has to support many operating systems and invest time and energy in making certain that important legacy applications such as Microsoft Office or SQLServer can run on these new operating systems. Microsoft has a boat anchor tied to its engineer’s ankles. The boat anchor is the need to ensure that legacy code works in Microsoft’s latest and greatest operating systems.

3. Unlike Google, Microsoft has no significant track record in designing and building hardware for distributed, massively parallelised computing. The mice and keyboards were a success. Microsoft has continued to lose money on the Xbox, and the sudden demise of Microsoft’s entry into the home network hardware market provides more evidence that Microsoft does not have a hardware competency equal to Google’s.

…

Yahoo! operates differently from both Google and Microsoft. Yahoo! is in mid-2005 a direct competitor to Google for advertising dollars. Yahoo! has grown through acquisitions. In search, for example, Yahoo acquired 3721.com to handle Chinese language search and retrieval. Yahoo bought Inktomi to provide Web search. Yahoo bought Stata Labs in order to provide users with search and retrieval of their Yahoo! mail. Yahoo! also owns AllTheWeb.com, a Web search site created by FAST Search & Transfer. Yahoo! owns the Overture search technology used by advertisers to locate key words to bid on. Yahoo! owns Alta Vista, the Web search system developed by Digital Equipment Corp. Yahoo! licenses InQuira search for customer support functions. Yahoo has a jumble of search technology; Google has one search technology.

Historically Yahoo has acquired technology companies and allowed each company to operate its technology in a silo. Integration of these different technologies is a time-consuming, expensive activity for Yahoo. Each of these software applications requires servers and systems particular to each technology. The result is that Yahoo has a mosaic of operating systems, hardware and systems. Yahoo!’s problem is different from Microsoft’s legacy boat-anchor problem. Yahoo! faces a Balkan-states problem.

There are many voices, many needs, and many opposing interests. Yahoo! must invest in management resources to keep the peace. Yahoo! does not have a core competency in hardware engineering for performance and consistency. Yahoo! may well have considerable competency in supporting a crazy-quilt of hardware and operating systems, however. Yahoo! is not a software engineering company. Its engineers make functions from disparate systems available via a portal.

…

The figure below provides an overview of the mid-2005 technical orientation of Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.

The Technology Precepts

… five precepts thread through Google’s technical papers and presentations. The following snapshots are extreme simplifications of complex, yet extremely fundamental, aspects of the Googleplex.

Cheap Hardware and Smart Software

Google approaches the problem of reducing the costs of hardware, set up, burn-in and maintenance pragmatically. A large number of cheap devices using off-the-shelf commodity controllers, cables and memory reduces costs. But cheap hardware fails.

In order to minimize the “cost” of failure, Google conceived of smart software that would perform whatever tasks were needed when hardware devices fail. A single device or an entire rack of devices could crash, and the overall system would not fail. More important, when such a crash occurs, no full-time systems engineering team has to perform technical triage at 3 a.m.

The focus on low-cost, commodity hardware and smart software is part of the Google culture.

…

Logical Architecture

Google’s technical papers do not describe the architecture of the Googleplex as self-similar. Google’s technical papers provide tantalizing glimpses of an approach to online systems that makes a single server share features and functions of a cluster of servers, a complete data center, and a group of Google’s data centers.

…

The collections of servers running Google applications on the Google version of Linux is a supercomputer. The Googleplex can perform mundane computing chores like taking a user’s query and matching it to documents Google has indexed. Further more, the Googleplex can perform side calculations needed to embed ads in the results pages shown to user, execute parallelized, high-speed data transfers like computers running state-of-the-art storage devices, and handle necessary housekeeping chores for usage tracking and billing.

…

When Google needs to add processing capacity or additional storage, Google’s engineers plug in the needed resources. Due to self-similarity, the Googleplex can recognize, configure and use the new resource. Google has an almost unlimited flexibility with regard to scaling and accessing the capabilities of the Googleplex.

…

In Google’s self-similar architecture, the loss of an individual device is irrelevant. In fact, a rack or a data center can fail without data loss or taking the Googleplex down. The Google operating system ensures that each file is written three to six times to different storage devices. When a copy of that file is not available, the Googleplex consults a log for the location of the copies of the needed file. The application then uses that replica of the needed file and continues with the job’s processing.

…

Speed and Then More Speed

…

Google uses commodity pizza box servers organized in a cluster. A cluster is group of computers that are joined together to create a more robust system. Instead of using exotic servers with eight or more processors, Google generally uses servers that have two processors similar to those found in a typical home computer.

Through proprietary changes to Linux and other engineering innovations, Google is able to achieve supercomputer performance from components that are cheap and widely available.

…

… engineers familiar with Google believe that read rates may in some clusters approach 2,000 megabytes a second. When commodity hardware gets better, Google runs faster without paying a premium for that performance gain.

…

Another key notion of speed at Google concerns writing computer programs to deploy to Google users. Google has developed short cuts to programming. An example is Google’s creating a library of canned functions to make it easy for a programmer to optimize a program to run on the Googleplex computer. At Microsoft or Yahoo, a programmer must write some code or fiddle with code to get different pieces of a program to execute simultaneously using multiple processors. Not at Google. A programmer writes a program, uses a function from a Google bundle of canned routines, and lets the Googleplex handle the details. Google’s programmers are freed from much of the tedium associated with writing software for a distributed, parallel computer.

…

Eliminate or Reduce Certain System Expenses

Some lucky investors jumped on the Google bandwagon early. Nevertheless, Google was frugal, partly by necessity and partly by design. The focus on frugality influenced many hardware and software engineering decisions at the company.

…

Drawbacks of the Googleplex

…

The Laws of Physics: Heat and Power 101

…

In reality, no one knows. Google has a rapidly expanding number of data centers. The data center near Atlanta, Georgia, is one of the newest deployed. This state-of-the-art facility reflects what Google engineers have learned about heat and power issues in its other data centers. Within the last 12 months, Google has shifted from concentrating its servers at about a dozen data centers, each with 10,000 or more servers, to about 60 data centers, each with fewer machines. The change is a response to the heat and power issues associated with larger concentrations of Google servers.

The most failure prone components are:

Fans.

IDE drives which fail at the rate of one per 1,000 drives per day.

Power supplies which fail at a lower rate.

Leveraging the Googleplex

…

Google’s technology is one major challenge to Microsoft and Yahoo. So to conclude this cursory and vastly simplified look at Google technology, consider these items:

1. Google is fast anywhere in the world.

2. Google learns. When the heat and power problems at dense data centers surfaced, Google introduced cooling and power conservation innovations to its two dozen data centers.

3. Programmers want to work at Google. “Google has cachet,” said one recent University of Washington graduate.

4. Google’s operating and scaling costs are lower than most other firms offering similar businesses.

5. Google squeezes more work out of programmers and engineers by design.

6. Google does not break down, or at least it has not gone offline since 2000.

7. Google’s Googleplex can deliver desktop-server applications now.

8. Google’s applications install and update without burdening the user with gory details and messy crashes.

9. Google’s patents provide basic technology insight pertinent to Google’s core functionality.

An analysis of Google’s technology, 2005 Read More »

Richard Stallman on why “intellectual property” is a misnomer

business, language & literature, law, tech in changing society / Scott Granneman / 28 November 2008

From Richard Stallman’s “Transcript of Richard Stallman at the 4th international GPLv3 conference; 23rd August 2006” (FSF Europe: 23 August 2006):

Anyway, the term “intellectual property” is a propaganda term which should never be used, because merely using it, no matter what you say about it, presumes it makes sense. It doesn’t really make sense, because it lumps together several different laws that are more different than similar.

For instance, copyright law and patent law have a little bit in common, but all the details are different and their social effects are different. To try to treat them as they were one thing, is already an error.

To even talk about anything that includes copyright and patent law, means you’re already mistaken. That term systematically leads people into mistakes. But, copyright law and patent law are not the only ones it includes. It also includes trademark law, for instance, which has nothing in common with copyright or patent law. So anyone talking about “quote intellectual property unquote”, is always talking about all of those and many others as well and making nonsensical statements.

So, when you say that you especially object to it when it’s used for Free Software, you’re suggesting it might be a little more legitimate when talking about proprietary software. Yes, software can be copyrighted. And yes, in some countries techniques can be patented. And certainly there can be trademark names for programs, which I think is fine. There’s no problem there. But these are three completely different things, and any attempt to mix them up – any practice which encourages people to lump them together is a terribly harmful practice. We have to totally reject the term “quote intellectual property unquote”. I will not let any excuse convince me to accept the meaningfulness of that term.

When people say “well, what would you call it?”, the answer is that I deny there is an “it” there. There are three, and many more, laws there, and I talk about these laws by their names, and I don’t mix them up.

Richard Stallman on why “intellectual property” is a misnomer Read More »

Matthew, the blind phone phreaker

history, law, security, tech in changing society / Scott Granneman / 28 November 2008

From Kevin Poulsen’s “Teenage Hacker Is Blind, Brash and in the Crosshairs of the FBI” (Wired: 29 February 2008):

At 4 in the morning of May 1, 2005, deputies from the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office converged on the suburban Colorado Springs home of Richard Gasper, a TSA screener at the local Colorado Springs Municipal Airport. They were expecting to find a desperate, suicidal gunman holding Gasper and his daughter hostage.

“I will shoot,” the gravely voice had warned, in a phone call to police minutes earlier. “I’m not afraid. I will shoot, and then I will kill myself, because I don’t care.”

But instead of a gunman, it was Gasper himself who stepped into the glare of police floodlights. Deputies ordered Gasper’s hands up and held him for 90 minutes while searching the house. They found no armed intruder, no hostages bound in duct tape. Just Gasper’s 18-year-old daughter and his baffled parents.

A federal Joint Terrorism Task Force would later conclude that Gasper had been the victim of a new type of nasty hoax, called “swatting,” that was spreading across the United States. Pranksters were phoning police with fake murders and hostage crises, spoofing their caller IDs so the calls appear to be coming from inside the target’s home. The result: police SWAT teams rolling to the scene, sometimes bursting into homes, guns drawn.

Now the FBI thinks it has identified the culprit in the Colorado swatting as a 17-year-old East Boston phone phreak known as “Li’l Hacker.” Because he’s underage, Wired.com is not reporting Li’l Hacker’s last name. His first name is Matthew, and he poses a unique challenge to the federal justice system, because he is blind from birth.

…

Interviews by Wired.com with Matt and his associates, and a review of court documents, FBI reports and audio recordings, paints a picture of a young man with an uncanny talent for quick telephone con jobs. Able to commit vast amounts of information to memory instantly, Matt has mastered the intricacies of telephone switching systems, while developing an innate understanding of human psychology and organization culture — knowledge that he uses to manipulate his patsies and torment his foes.

…

Matt says he ordered phone company switch manuals off the internet and paid to have them translated into Braille. He became a regular caller to internal telephone company lines, where he’d masquerade as an employee to perform tricks like tracing telephone calls, getting free phone features, obtaining confidential customer information and disconnecting his rivals’ phones.

It was, relatively speaking, mild stuff. The teen though, soon fell in with a bad crowd. The party lines were dominated by a gang of half-a-dozen miscreants who informally called themselves the “Wrecking Crew” and “The Cavalry.”
…

By then, Matt’s reputation had taken on a life of its own, and tales of some of his hacks — perhaps apocryphal — are now legends. According to Daniels, he hacked his school’s PBX so that every phone would ring at once. Another time, he took control of a hotel elevator, sending it up and down over and over again. One story has it that Matt phoned a telephone company frame room worker at home in the middle of the night, and persuaded him to get out of bed and return to work to disconnect someone’s phone.

Matthew, the blind phone phreaker Read More »