Weird News

[Lamplighter]

Aerialized spores from the drums is likely, but this article doesn't
really incriminate the lettuce. But so be it, CDC may have good evidence for it.

It does remind me of my first (1960's) and worst (potentially) career mistake.

As a graduate teaching assistance for a course in Medical Microbiology,
one of my first assignments was to set up a class exercise to demonstrate "virulence".
That is, how one strain of a pathogenic microorganism can
produce severe disease while another strain does not.

So I wrote a letter on university stationery to Fort Detrick, MD,
the US Army's Center for Biological Warfare, asking for
one culture of virulent- and one of avirulent- B.anthrasus.
Within a few days, the cultures arrived, along with a letter giving the LD50 .
This is the dose (number of cells/spores) it takes to kill 50% of the animals infected.

The LD50 for avirulent strain was something like billions.
In other words, you could not inject enough to kill 50% of the mice.
The LD50 for that virulent strain of anthrax was 1.

This so scared the bejesus out of me and I immediately
autoclaved the entire package for several hours.

It also gave me a lifelong fear of what the military was capable of
doing to "prevent and protect" the US from biological warfare.

[glatt]

Funny how times change. They just mailed that shit to you.

My dad as a physics prof had an underground closet in his old lab that was full of radioactive samples. Dangerously radioactive samples. About 20 years ago, as various regulation were getting tighter, he started worrying about the stuff and worked really hard to get rid of all of it through quickly disappearing appropriate channels. If he had waited any longer, he would have had to devote the entire department budget to paying to get rid of the stuff. He had pulled one sample out of there once to show me, and the sample actually glowed in the dark. Very cool. Actually, now that I think about it, he took my grandmother's radium clock up there to get rid of it. That clock was cool. Its hands would glow in the dark too.

[Lamplighter]

I hope the hackers were also smart enough to get
the movie rights to this scheme.
It smacks of George Clooney and Julia Roberts

NY Times
MARC SANTORA
Published: May 9, 2013
In Hours, Thieves Took $45 Million in A.T.M. Scheme

It was a brazen bank heist, but a 21st-century version in which
the criminals never wore ski masks, threatened a teller or set foot in a vault.

In two precision operations that involved people in more than two dozen
countries acting in close coordination and with surgical precision,
thieves stole $45 million from thousands of A.T.M.’s in a matter of hours.

In New York City alone, the thieves responsible for A.T.M. withdrawals
struck 2,904 machines over 10 hours starting on Feb. 19, withdrawing $2.4 million.
<snip>
The hackers, who are not named in the indictment, then raised the withdrawal limits
on prepaid MasterCard debit accounts issued by the National Bank of Ras Al-Khaimah,
also known as RakBank, which is in United Arab Emirates.
<snip>
With five account numbers in hand, the hackers distributed the information
to individuals in 20 countries who then encoded the information on magnetic-stripe cards.
On Dec. 21, the cashing crews made 4,500 A.T.M. transactions worldwide,
stealing $5 million, according to the indictment.

While the street crews were taking money out of bank machines, the computer experts
were watching the financial transactions from afar, ensuring that they would
not be shortchanged on their cut, according to court documents.
<snip>

[glatt]

We live in interesting times.

[Lamplighter]

The Columbian
PDX stripper fights $1K federal fine
5/10/13

PORTLAND — John Brennan, who stripped naked last year
to protest a security check at Portland International Airport,
said he expects to lose the first round of his legal fight against a $1,000 fine.

Still, he plans to press his free-speech argument in an appeal
and push for effective security checks that aren't as invasive.
"I totally support airport screening," Brennan said.
"I just don't want it to be at the expense of my constitutional rights."<snip>

In April 2012, as Brennan started a business trip to California,
he declined to step into a Transportation Security Administration body scanner.
He was asked to walk through a metal detector and submit to a pat-down.
A screener said traces of nitrates, which could indicate an explosive, were detected.
Brennan took off his clothes to show he wasn't carrying anything explosive
and to get the security check over quickly, he said.<snip>

In July, a judge in Multnomah County found Brennan not guilty
of violating a Portland ordinance that forbids exposing genitals in public
and in the presence of the opposite sex.
The judge said Brennan was acting in protest and his strip was protected speech.

A few weeks later, Brennan said, he was told he'd be fined for violating
a rule that forbids passengers to interfere with, assault, threaten or intimidate the screeners.