From Oliver Sacks’ “The Case of Anna H.” (The New Yorker: 7 October 2002: 64):
I was reminded of a blind woman, a contemporary of Mozart and a most remarkable pianist, who, it is said, could no longer play after she regained some sight.
Lost her ability to play piano after she regained sight Read More »
From Oliver Sacks’ “The Case of Anna H.” (The New Yorker: 7 October 2002: 64):
I recently received a letter from Howard Engel, a Canadian novelist, who told me that he had a somewhat similar problem following a stroke: “The area affected,” he relates, “was my ability to read. I can write, but I can’t read what I’ve just written … So, I can write, but I can’t rewrite …”
After a stroke, he can write, but can’t read Read More »
From Celeste Biever’s “Language may shape human thought” (New Scientist: 19 August 2004):
Language may shape human thought – suggests a counting study in a Brazilian tribe whose language does not define numbers above two.
Hunter-gatherers from the Pirahã tribe, whose language only contains words for the numbers one and two, were unable to reliably tell the difference between four objects placed in a row and five in the same configuration, revealed the study.ÂÂ
…
For one, two and three objects, members of the tribe consistently matched Gordon’s pile correctly. But for four and five and up to ten, they could only match it approximately, deviating more from the correct number as the row got longer.
The Pirahã also failed to remember whether a box they had been shown seconds ago had four or five fish drawn on the top. When Gordon’s colleagues tapped on the floor three times, the Pirahã were able to imitate this precisely, but failed to mimic strings of four or five taps.
Language shapes thought Read More »
From Steven Pinker’s “What the F***?” (The New Republic: 9 Octobert 2007):
The mammalian brain contains, among other things, the limbic system, an ancient network that regulates motivation and emotion, and the neocortex, the crinkled surface of the brain that ballooned in human evolution and which is the seat of perception, knowledge, reason, and planning. The two systems are interconnected and work together, but it seems likely that words’ denotations are concentrated in the neocortex, especially in the left hemisphere, whereas their connotations are spread across connections between the neocortex and the limbic system, especially in the right hemisphere.
A likely suspect within the limbic system is the amygdala, an almond-shaped organ buried at the front of the temporal lobe of the brain (one on each side) that helps invest memories with emotion. A monkey whose amygdalas have been removed can learn to recognize a new shape, like a striped triangle, but has trouble learning that the shape foreshadows an unpleasant event like an electric shock. In humans, the amygdala “lights up”–it shows greater metabolic activity in brain scans–when the person sees an angry face or an unpleasant word, especially a taboo word.
What in our brains invest memories with emotion? Read More »
From Atul Gawande’s “Final Cut: Medical arrogance and the decline of the autopsy” (The New Yorker: 19 March 2001):
The Roman physician Antistius performed one of the earliest forensic examinations on record, in 44 B.C., on Julius Caesar, documenting twenty-three stab wounds, including a final, fatal stab to the chest.
Earliest recorded autopsy Read More »
From John D. Barrow and John K. Webb’s "Inconstant Constants: Do the inner workings of nature change with time?" (Scientific American: 23 May 2005):
One ratio of particular interest combines the velocity of light, c, the electric charge on a single electron, e, Planck’s constant, h, and the so-called vacuum permittivity, 0. This famous quantity … called the fine-structure constant, was first introduced in 1916 by Arnold Sommerfeld, a pioneer in applying the theory of quantum mechanics to electromagnetism. It quantifies the relativistic (c) and quantum (h) qualities of electromagnetic (e) interactions involving charged particles in empty space (0). Measured to be equal to 1/137.03599976, or approximately 1/137, has endowed the number 137 with a legendary status among physicists (it usually opens the combination locks on their briefcases).
How to open a physicist’s briefcase Read More »
From Wikipedia’s “Clarke’s three laws” (2 November 2006):
Arthur C. Clarke formulated the following three “laws” of prediction:
1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Clarke’s three laws of prediction Read More »
From Erica Goode’s “Incompetent People Really Have No Clue, Studies Find: They’re blind to own failings, others’ skills” (The New York Times: 18 January 2000):
Dunning, a professor of psychology at Cornell, worries about this because, according to his research, most incompetent people do not know that they are incompetent.
On the contrary. People who do things badly, Dunning has found in studies conducted with a graduate student, Justin Kruger, are usually supremely confident of their abilities — more confident, in fact, than people who do things well. …
One reason that the ignorant also tend to be the blissfully self-assured, the researchers believe, is that the skills required for competence often are the same skills necessary to recognize competence.
The incompetent, therefore, suffer doubly, they suggested in a paper appearing in the December issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
“Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it,” wrote Kruger, now an assistant professor at the University of Illinois, and Dunning.
This deficiency in “self-monitoring skills,” the researchers said, helps explain the tendency of the humor-impaired to persist in telling jokes that are not funny, of day traders to repeatedly jump into the market — and repeatedly lose out — and of the politically clueless to continue holding forth at dinner parties on the fine points of campaign strategy. …
Unlike unskilled counterparts, the most able subjects in the study, Kruger and Dunning found, were likely to underestimate their competence. The researchers attributed this to the fact that, in the absence of information about how others were doing, highly competent subjects assumed that others were performing as well as they were — a phenomenon psychologists term the “false consensus effect.”
When high-scoring subjects were asked to “grade” the grammar tests of their peers, however, they quickly revised their evaluations of their own performance. In contrast, the self-assessments of those who scored badly themselves were unaffected by the experience of grading others; some subjects even further inflated their estimates of their own abilities.
“Incompetent individuals were less able to recognize competence in others,” the researchers concluded.
Incompetent & they don’t know it Read More »
From Charles Platt’s “The Profits of Fear” (August 2005):
Sam Cohen might have remained relatively unknown, troubled by ethical lapses in government and the military but unable to do anything about them, if he had not visited Seoul in 1951, during the Korean war. In the aftermath of bombing sorties he witnessed scenes of intolerable devastation. Civilians wandered like zombies through the ruins of a city in which all services had ceased. Children were drinking water from gutters that were being used as sewers. “I’d seen countless pictures of Hiroshima by then,” Cohen recalls, “and what I saw in Seoul was precious little different. . . . The question I asked of myself was something like: If we’re going to go on fighting these damned fool wars in the future, shelling and bombing cities to smithereens and wrecking the lives of their surviving inhabitants, might there be some kind of nuclear weapon that could avoid all this?”
Here was a singularly odd idea: To re-engineer the most inhumane and destructive weapon of all time, so that it would _reduce_ human suffering. Cohen’s unique achievement was to prove that this could in fact be done.
His first requirement was that wars should be fought as they had been historically, confining their damage to military combatants while towns and cities remained undamaged and their civilian inhabitants remained unscathed. …
Ideally he wanted to reduce blast damage to zero, to eliminate the wholesale demolition of civilian housing, services, and amenities that he had witnessed in Seoul. He saw a way to achieve this if a fusion reaction released almost all of its energy as radiation. Moreover, if this radiation consisted of neutrons, which carry no charge, it would not poison the environment with residual radioactivity.
The bomb would still kill people–but this was the purpose of all weapons. _If_ wars were liable to recur (which Cohen thought was probable), soldiers were going to use weapons of some kind against each other, and everyone would benefit if the weapons minimized pain and suffering while ending the conflict as rapidly as possible.
Cohen came up with a design for a warhead about one-tenth as powerful as the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. If it was detonated at 3,000 feet above ground level, its blast effects would be negligible while its neutron radiation would be powerful enough to cause death within a circle about one mile in diameter. This was the battlefield weapon that came to be known as the neutron bomb.
Such a weapon obviously would be more civilized than large-scale hydrogen bombs, and would also be more humane than conventional bombs, because it would create an all-or-nothing, live-or-die scenario in which no one would be wounded. A stream of neutrons cannot maim people. It will not burn their flesh, spill their blood, or break their bones. Those who receive a non-lethal dose will recover after a period of intense nausea and diarrhea, and Cohen estimated that their risk of subsequent cancer would be no greater than the risk we experience as a result of exposure to second-hand cigarette smoke. As for the rest, death would come relatively quickly, primarily from shock to the central nervous system. As he put it in his typically candid style, “I doubt whether the agony an irradiated soldier goes through in the process of dying is any worse than that produced by having your body charred to a crisp by napalm, your guts being ripped apart by shrapnel, your lungs blown in by concussion weapons, and all those other sweet things that happen when conventional weapons (which are preferred and anointed by our official policy) are used.”
After assessing every aspect and implication of his concept, he reached his modest conclusion: “The neutron bomb has to be the most moral weapon ever invented.”
The neutron bomb as the most moral weapon possible Read More »
From Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Imagining Abrupt Climate Change : Terraforming Earth” (Amazon Shorts: 31 July 2005):
This view, by the way, was in keeping with a larger and older paradigm called gradualism, the result of a dramatic and controversial paradigm shift of its own from the nineteenth century, one that is still a contested part of our culture wars, having to do with the birth of geology as a field, and its discovery of the immense age of the Earth. Before that, Earth’s history tended to be explained in a kind of Biblical paradigm, in which the Earth was understood to be several thousand years old, because of genealogies in the Bible, so that landscape features tended to be explained by events like Noah’s flood. This kind of “catastrophism” paradigm was what led Josiah Whitney to maintain that Yosemite Valley must have been formed by a cataclysmic earthquake, for instance; there simply hadn’t been time for water and ice to have carved something as hard as granite. It was John Muir who made the gradualist argument for glacial action over millions of years; and the eventual acceptance of his explanation was part of the general shift to gradualist explanations for Earth’s landforms, which also meant there was another time for evolution to have taken place. Gradualism also led by extension to thinking that the various climate regimes of the past had also come about fairly gradually.
The birth of Geology & gradualism as a paradigm shift from catastrophism Read More »
From Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Imagining Abrupt Climate Change : Terraforming Earth” (Amazon Shorts: 31 July 2005):
… paradigm shifts are exciting moments in science’s ongoing project of self-improvement, making itself more accurately mapped to reality as it is discovered and teased out; this process of continual recalibration and improvement is one of the most admirable parts of science, which among other things is a most powerful and utopian set of mental habits; an attitude toward reality that I have no hesitation in labeling a kind of worship or devotion. And in this ongoing communal act of devotion, paradigm shifts are very good at revealing how science is conducted, in part because each one represents a little (or big) crisis of understanding.
As Thomas Kuhn described the process in his seminal book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, workers in the various branches of science build over time an interconnected construct of concepts and beliefs that allow them to interpret the data from their experiments, and fit them into a larger picture of the world that makes the best sense of the evidence at hand. What is hoped for is a picture that, if anyone else were to question it, and follow the train of reasoning and all the evidence used to support it, they too would agree with it. This is one of the ways science is interestingly utopian; it attempts to say things that everyone looking at the same evidence would agree to.
So, using this paradigm, always admitted to be a work in progress, scientists then conduct what Kuhn calls “normal science,” elucidating further aspects of reality by using the paradigm to structure their questions and their answers. Sometimes paradigms are useful for centuries; other times, for shorter periods. Then it often happens that scientists in the course of doing “normal science” begin to get evidence from the field that cannot be explained within the paradigm that has been established. At first such “anomalies” are regarded as suspect in themselves, precisely because they don’t fit the paradigm. They’re oddities, and something might be wrong with them as such. Thus they are ignored, or tossed aside, or viewed with suspicion, or in some other way bracketed off. Eventually, if enough of them pile up, and they seem similar in kind, or otherwise solid as observations, attempts might be made to explain them within the old paradigm, by tweaking or re-interpreting the paradigm itself, without actually throwing the paradigm out entirely.
For instance, when it was found that Newtonian laws of gravitation could not account for the speed of Mercury, which was moving a tiny bit faster than it ought to have been, even though Newton’s laws accounted for all the other planets extremely well, at first some astronomers suggested there might be another planet inside the orbit of Mercury, too close to the Sun for us to see. They even gave this potential planet a name, Vulcan; but they couldn’t see it, and calculations revealed that this hypothetical Vulcan still would not explain the discrepancy in Mercury’s motion. The discrepancy remained an anomaly, and was real enough and serious enough to cast the whole Newtonian paradigm into doubt among the small group of people who worried about it and wondered what could be causing it.
It was Einstein who then proposed that Mercury moved differently than predicted because spacetime itself curved around masses, and near the huge mass of the Sun the effect was large enough to be noticeable.
Whoah! This was a rather mind-bogglingly profound explanation for a little orbital discrepancy in Mercury; but Einstein also made a new prediction and suggested an experiment; if his explanation were correct, then light too would bend in the gravity well around the sun, and so the light of a star would appear from behind the sun a little bit before the astronomical tables said that it should. The proposed experiment presented some observational difficulties, but a few years later it was accomplished during a total eclipse of the sun, and the light of a certain star appeared before it ought to have by just the degree Einstein had predicted. And so Einstein’s concepts concerning spacetime began to be accepted and elaborated, eventually forming a big part of the paradigm known as the “standard model,” within which new kinds of “normal science” in physics and astronomy could be done. …
Paradigm shifts explained Read More »
From American Association for the Advancement of Science’s “The Effects of Patenting in the AAAS Scientific Community” [250 kb PDF] (2006):
Forty percent of respondents who had acquired patented technologies since January 2001 reported difficulties in obtaining those technologies. Industry bioscience respondents reported the most problems, with 76 percent reporting that their research had been affected by such difficulties. In contrast, only 35 percent of academic bioscience respondents reported difficulties that affected their research.
Of the 72 respondents who reported that their work had been affected by the technology acquisition process, 58 percent of those reported that their work was delayed. Fifty percent reported that they had to change their research, and 28 percent reported abandoning their research project as acquisition of the necessary technologies involved overly complex licensing negotiations.
Patenting is hurting scientific research & progress Read More »
From Laura Miller’s “Everybody loves Spinoza” (Salon: 17 May 2006):
Goldstein’s description [of Spinoza’s conception of God] reminds me of a passage in Neal Stephenson’s historical novel Quicksilver, in which a fictional character has an intimation about a friend, a real genius and contemporary of Spinoza’s: “[He] experienced a faint echo of what it must be like, all the time, to be Isaac Newton: a permanent ongoing epiphany, an endless immersion in lurid radiance, a drowning in light, a ringing of cosmic harmonies in the ears.”
Neal Stephenson on being Isaac Newton Read More »
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.
The difficulties in establishing time of death Read More »
From Popular Mechanics‘ “How far can you drive on a bushel of corn?“:
It is East Kansas Agri-Energy’s ethanol facility, one of 100 or so such heartland garrisons in America’s slowly gathering battle to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels. The plant processes about 13 million bushels of corn to produce approximately 36 million gal. of ethanol a year. “That’s enough high-quality motor fuel to replace 55,000 barrels of imported petroleum,” the plant’s manager, Derek Peine, says. …
It takes five barrels of crude oil to produce enough gasoline (nearly 97 gal.) to power a Honda Civic from New York to California. …
Ethanol/E85
E85 is a blend of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline. … A gallon of E85 has an energy content of about 80,000 BTU, compared to gasoline’s 124,800 BTU. So about 1.56 gal. of E85 takes you as far as 1 gal. of gas.
Case For: Ethanol is an excellent, clean-burning fuel, potentially providing more horsepower than gasoline. In fact, ethanol has a higher octane rating (over 100) and burns cooler than gasoline. However, pure alcohol isn’t volatile enough to get an engine started on cold days, hence E85. …
Cynics claim that it takes more energy to grow corn and distill it into alcohol than you can get out of the alcohol. However, according to the DOE, the growing, fermenting and distillation chain actually results in a surplus of energy that ranges from 34 to 66 percent. Moreover, the carbon dioxide (CO2) that an engine produces started out as atmospheric CO2 that the cornstalk captured during growth, making ethanol greenhouse gas neutral. Recent DOE studies note that using ethanol in blends lowers carbon monoxide (CO) and CO2 emissions substantially. In 2005, burning such blends had the same effect on greenhouse gas emissions as removing 1 million cars from American roads. …
One acre of corn can produce 300 gal. of ethanol per growing season. So, in order to replace that 200 billion gal. of petroleum products, American farmers would need to dedicate 675 million acres, or 71 percent of the nation’s 938 million acres of farmland, to growing feedstock. Clearly, ethanol alone won’t kick our fossil fuel dependence–unless we want to replace our oil imports with food imports. …
Biodiesel
Fuels for diesel engines made from sources other than petroleum are known as biodiesel. Among the common sources are vegetable oils, rendered chicken fat and used fry oil. …
Case For: Modern diesel engines can run on 100 percent biodiesel with little degradation in performance compared to petrodiesel because the BTU content of both fuels is similar–120,000 to 130,000 BTU per gallon. In addition, biodiesel burns cleaner than petrodiesel, with reduced emissions. Unlike petrodiesel, biodiesel molecules are oxygen-bearing, and partially support their own combustion.
According to the DOE, pure biodiesel reduces CO emissions by more than 75 percent over petroleum diesel. A blend of 20 percent biodiesel and 80 percent petrodiesel, sold as B20, reduces CO2 emissions by around 15 percent.
Case Against: Pure biodiesel, B100, costs about $3.50–roughly a dollar more per gallon than petrodiesel. And, in low temperatures, higher-concentration blends–B30, B100–turn into waxy solids and do not flow. Special additives or fuel warmers are needed to prevent fuel waxing. …
Electricity
Case For: Vehicles that operate only on electricity require no warmup, run almost silently and have excellent performance up to the limit of their range. Also, electric cars are cheap to “refuel.” At the average price of 10 cents per kwh, it costs around 2 cents per mile. …
A strong appeal of the electric car–and of a hybrid when it’s running on electricity–is that it produces no tailpipe emissions. Even when emissions created by power plants are factored in, electric vehicles emit less than 10 percent of the pollution of an internal-combustion car.
Case Against: Pure electric cars still have limited range, typically no more than 100 to 120 miles. In addition, electrics suffer from slow charging, which, in effect, reduces their usability….
And then there’s the environmental cost. Only 2.3 percent of the nation’s electricity comes from renewable resources; about half is generated in coal-burning plants.
Hydrogen
Hydrogen is the most abundant element on Earth, forming part of many chemical compounds. Pure hydrogen can be made by electrolysis–passing electricity through water. This liberates the oxygen, which can be used for many industrial purposes. Most hydrogen currently is made from petroleum.
Case For: Though hydrogen can fuel a modified internal-combustion engine, most see hydrogen as a way to power fuel cells to move cars electrically. The only byproduct of a hydrogen fuel cell is water.
Case Against: … And, despite the chemical simplicity of electrolysis, producing hydrogen is expensive and energy consuming. It takes about 17 kwh of electricity, which costs about $1.70, to make just 100 cu. ft. of hydrogen. That amount would power a fuel cell vehicle for about 20 miles.
What can we use instead of gasoline in cars? Read More »
From Christer Hamp’s “Archaeoacoustics“:
By archaeoacoustics I mean the recovery of sounds from the time before the invention of recording. This implies that such sounds would have been recorded inadvertently, while intending to do sometring else. Not much has been written about this subject and only very few experiments have been made, but I find the subject fascinating enough to dare the deep waters of the unproven and often scorned.
So far no ancient sound has been heard, and the experiments conducted have been attempts to reproduce the conditions at which such recordings would have been produced, successful attempts, according to the papers published.
What is probably the first publication on the subject appeared in 1969, when Richard G. Woodbridge, III related four experiments in a letter in the Proceedings of the IEEE1. In the first experiment, he could pick up the noise produced by the potter’s wheel from a pot, using a hand-held crystal cartridge (Astatic Corp. Model 2) with a wooden stylus, connected directly to a set of headphones. The second experiment yielded 60 Hz hum from the motor driving the potter’s wheel. More interesting were the following experiments, with a canvas being painted while exposed to sounds. In the third experiment the canvas was painted with a variety of different paints while exposed to martial music from loudspeakers. Some of the brush strokes had a striated appearance, and “short snatches of the music” could be indentified. For the fourth experiment, the painter spoke the word “blue” during a stroke of the brush, and after a long search the word could be heard again when stroking the canvas with the stylus.
Recover sounds from the ancient world Read More »
From Salon’s “Religious belief itself is an adaptation“, an interview with Edward O. Wilson:
Religious belief itself is an adaptation that has evolved because we’re hard-wired to form tribalistic religions. Religion is intensely tribalistic. A devout Christian or Muslim doesn’t say one religion is as good as another. It gives them faith in the particular group to which they belong and that set of beliefs and moral views. …
You cannot explain the patterns of diversity in the world, the geography of life, the endless details of distribution, similarity and dissimilarity in the world, by any means except evolution. That’s the one theory that ties it together. It is very hard to see how traditionalist religious views will come to explain the meaning of life on this planet. …
Religion & evolution Read More »
From Bertrand Russell’s “How I Write“:
Until I was twenty-one, I wished to write more or less in the style of John Stuart Mill. … I had, however, already a different ideal, derived, I suppose, from mathematics. I wished to say everything in the smallest number of words in which it could be said clearly. … I would spend hours trying to find the shortest way of saying something without ambiguity, and to this aim I was willing to sacrifice all attempts at aesthetic excellence.
At the age of twenty-one, however, I came under a new influence that of my future brother-in-law, Logan Pearsall Smith. He was at that time exclusively interested in style as opposed to matter. His gods were Flaubert and Walter Pater, and I was quite ready to believe that the way to learn how to write was to copy their technique. He gave me various simple rules, of which 1 remember only two: “Put a comma every four words”, and “never use ‘and’ except at the beginning of a sentence”. His most emphatic advice was that one must always re-write. I conscientiously tried this, but found that my first draft was almost always better than my second. This discovery has saved me an immense amount of time. I do not, of course, apply it to the substance, but only to the form. When I discover an error of an important kind I re-write the whole. What I do not find is that I can improve a sentence when I am satisfied with what it means.
… In fact, all imitation is dangerous. Nothing could be better in style than the Prayer Book and the Authorized Version of the Bible, but they express a way of thinking and feeling which is different from that of our time. A style is not good unless it is an intimate and almost involuntary expression of the personality of the writer, and then only if the writer’s personality is worth expressing. But although direct imitation is always to be deprecated, there is much to be gained by familiarity with good prose, especially in cultivating a sense for prose rhythm.
There are some simple maxims-not perhaps quite so simple as those which my brother-in-law Logan Pearsall Smith offered me-which I think might be commanded to writers of expository prose. First: never use a long word if a short word will do. Second: if you want to make a statement with a great many qualifications, put some of the qualifications in separate sentences. Third: do not let the beginning of your sentence lead the reader to an expectation which is contradicted by the end.
Bertrand Russell on writing well Read More »
From “New search engine to help thwart terrorists“:
With news that the London bombers were British citizens, radicalised on the streets of England and with squeaky-clean police records, comes the realisation that new mechanisms for hunting terrorists before they strike must be developed.
Researchers at the University of Buffalo, US, believe they have discovered a technique that will reveal information on public web sites that was not intended to be published.
The United States Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) are supporting the development of a new search engine based on Unintended Information Revelation (UIR), and designed for anti-terrorism applications.
UIR supposes that snippets of information – that by themselves appear to be innocent – may be linked together to reveal highly sensitive data.
… “A concept chain graph will show you what’s common between two seemingly unconnected things,” said Srihari. “With regular searches, the input is a set of key words, the search produces a ranked list of documents, any one of which could satisfy the query.
“UIR, on the other hand, is a composite query, not a keyword query. It is designed to find the best path, the best chain of associations between two or more ideas. It returns to you an evidence trail that says, ‘This is how these pieces are connected.'”
Tracking terrorists with Unintended Information Revelation Read More »
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.
How to fake an anthrax scare Read More »