I am seeing reports that John McAfee has committed suicide in a jail in Spain. I have not been able to confirm those reports: they currently trace back to one Spanish newspaper.
Edited to add: the NYPost has the story, but they are crediting it back to that same Spanish newspaper.
George Stranahan, colorful figure.
His family owned the Champion Spark Plug company, so he had family money. He got a PhD in physics, and spent a lot of time doing physics in the late 1950s.
So he did:
The Aspen Center for Physics was born. It proved pivotal in the development of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, for a long time the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, and the formulation of string theory, regarded by many physicists as the most promising candidate for a “theory of everything” that would explain all the universe’s physical phenomena.
Sixty-six Nobel laureates have visited. “I’m convinced all the best physics gets done there,” Tony Leggett, one of those Nobelists, wrote on the center’s website. Another, Brian Schmidt, called the center “the place I have gone to expand my horizons for the entirety of my career.”
He cut back on his involvement in physics in 1972.
He went on to found Stranahan’s Colorado Whiskey (which I have heard good things about, but never been able to find) and Flying Dog beer.
He also did some ranching:
In 1990, Mr. Stranahan’s Limousin bull Turbo was declared grand champion at the 1990 National Western Stock Show, a highly regarded trade show. The price for a shot of Turbo’s semen rose to $15,000.
He quit the business not long after. Even with Turbo, Mr. Stranahan estimated that he lost $1 million during 18 years of ranching.
Going back for a minute, if the Woody Creek Tavern rings a bell with you, yes, that was Hunter S. Thompson’s hangout. Mr. Stranahan and Hunter were close friends.
Mr. Thompson either leased or bought the land he lived on from Mr. Stranahan. The details of the arrangement, intended to be easy on Mr. Thompson, appear to have been lost in a haze of friendship and misbehavior. The first time the two men met, Mr. Stranahan told Vanity Fair in 2003, they took mescaline that hit him “like a sledgehammer.”
“We talked a lot, drank a lot and dynamited a lot,” Mr. Stranahan said about their friendship in a 2008 interview with The Denver Post. “If you’re a rancher, you have access to dynamite.”
For the historical record: NYT obit for Frank Bonner.
Science Sunday!
For the final Science Sunday, I thought I’d go back to one of my favorite topics – computing history and computer science – and cover two companies whose machines I find fascinating.
“Cray Research at Chippewa Falls – A Story of the Supercomputer”.
I apologize for the quality on this one: it is from 1976, but I think it is worthwhile because…Seymour Cray introduces the Cray-1.
Bonus: During this week’s episode of one of the podcasts I listen to, one of the hosts made a reference to the Connection Machine. The other two hosts had never heard of the Connection Machine, so they were part of that day’s lucky 10,000.
For those of you who fall into the same boat, this is a fairly recent (so higher quality) talk by a guy named Dan Bentley about the Connection Machine and the concept of “Data Parallel Algorithms”.
Science Sunday!
I thought I’d do a sampler platter today. Roughly from short to long:
“The Creation and Behavior of Radio Waves”. This is a 1942 Army Signal Corps film: I guess technically this could be MilHisMonday, but it is more about the theory of radio than specific military radio usage, so I feel like it qualifies here.
“The Nuclear Look”, a pro-nuclear power propaganda film from Westinghouse.
And speaking of nukes, “Medical Aspects of Nuclear Radiation”.
In the light of more current science, the film seems woefully incomplete and misleading.
Finally: I know this was just posted recently, and I’m trying to avoid using anything that’s not older than at least a month. But I haven’t done any space science recently, I haven’t done anything from the Soviet perspective, and we’re moving towards closure here, so: “Conquerors Of the Universe”, a documentary about the Soviet space program. Don’t worry, it’s narrated in English.
Science Sunday!
My paternal grandmother was a teacher. There were always books and magazines around the house, many of which were appropriate for the younger set.
One book that I vividly remember (and wish I could find today) was a book published by Scholastic about the coelacanth: specifically, about how it was thought to be extinct, until a museum curator found one in the daily catch of a local fisherman.
I was fascinated by this. Still am: I haven’t found the original Scholastic book, but Samantha Weinberg’s A Fish Caught in Time: The Search for the Coelacanth (affiliate link) is a pretty swell book, and is targeted more at the adult reader. And I think my grandmother would have endorsed this (ditto).
(I was hardly a “reluctant reader”, but I believe the kids she taught sometimes fell into that category.)
“Diving With Coelacanths”. Be warned: the people in this video are doing highly technical diving at great depth. Which means mixed gasses. Which means they sound like Donald Duck. There are subtitles: but as some of the comments point out, what’s in the subtitles doesn’t always match up with what’s actually being said.
Bonus: Another one of the Scholastic books she had lying around was a biography of Clyde Tombaugh and how he discovered Pluto.
“Reflections on Clyde Tombaugh” from NASA.
And here’s an approximately 30 minute interview with Dr. Tombaugh from 1997, shortly before his death.
Bonus #2: This is borderline science and/or technology, but I have a reason for posting this. A week ago Saturday, for some reason, we got into a discussion of auto racing and racing technology. I mentioned, but could not recall the details at the time, that there was a gas turbine powered car that competed in the Indianapolis 500, back when you could still do stuff like that. You know, before everything became standardized and homogenized and experimentation was limited…
“The Silent Screamer”, a short-ish (17 minutes) documentary about Andy Granatelli’s turbine powered car at the 1967 Indy 500.
This popped up in my feed, and you know I had to post it here: “TRS-80 Color Computer: Radio Shack’s $399 Micro from 1980!”
It me. Mine had 4K of memory: not 4 GB, or 4 MB, but 4,096 8-bit bytes of memory, and used cassette tape for storage.
Bonus #1: I’m marginal about using this one, but it calls back to an earlier blog entry: “The Norco Shootout, 40 Years Later”.
Not officially part of the content here, but: the “Behind the Badge” channel posted the Norco documentary in one (54 minute) chunk. I linked to that in my previous Norco post, but that version divides the video up into three chunks.
Bonus #2: Here’s something we hope you really like (especially you, RoadRich): a video on “Use of Force” from the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (FLETC).
Bonus #3: This is short, but I thought it was worth putting up here. Simon Sinek on “The Most Toxic Person In The Workplace”.
Science Sunday!
Have you ever asked yourself, “Self, I wonder how light bulbs are made?” Specifically, incandescent lights, not LED bulbs: the latter are probably also interesting, but that’s not today’s subject.
Really, how often do you think about light? I’ve been thinking about it a fair amount recently: throughout the whole history of man, we have really only had the ability to control lighting for about 150 to 170 years now. If you want to get an idea of what things were like in the days before, pull a Samuel Pepys. Go into the smallest windowless room in your house (a bathroom is fine) with a book and a candle. Light the candle: just one candle, because candles cost money in Pepys day. Now try to read the book. Now imagine doing that every night for the rest of your life.
This is a vintage GE documentary about the making of their “Mazda” brand light bulbs.
Bonus #1: Perhaps I am fudging the definition of “science” a bit here, but you’ve heard the expression “build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door”, right?
“West Germany vs. East Germany Mouse Traps. Mousetrap Monday”.
Also, this gives me a chance to retell the classic Soviet joke (which I think was used in “Chernobyl”): “What’s as big as a house, burns 20 liters of fuel every hour, puts out a shitload of smoke and noise, and cuts an apple into three pieces? A Soviet machine made to cut apples into four pieces.”
Bonus #2: Let’s get back to something that is at least a close approximation to science. Plus bonus fun!
“Shaking Buildings Over a Mile Away!” from “Tech Ingredients”. Basically, this involves igniting decently large amounts of hydrogen mixtures.
“Let’s bring everything in soon so if the cops come there’s nothing here.” That’s my kind of science.
Bonus #3: I wanted to do some biology last week, but compromised. Here’s something that comes closer to what I wanted to do: a 1954 film about the virtues of antibiotics.
Michael Collins, Apollo 11 astronaut.
When the lunar module Eagle, descending from Columbia, touched down on the moon on July 20, 1969, Colonel Collins lost contact with his crewmates and with NASA, his line of communication blocked as he passed over the moon’s far side. It was a blackout that would occur during a portion of each orbit he would make.
“I am alone now, truly alone, and absolutely isolated from any known life,” he wrote in recreating his thoughts for his 1974 memoir, “Carrying the Fire.”
“If a count were taken, the score would be three billion plus two over on the other side of the moon, and one plus God only knows what on this side,” he added. “I like the feeling. Outside my window I can see stars — and that is all. Where I know the moon to be, there is simply a black void.”
Ole Anthony, one of those interesting characters you may never have heard of.
Mr. Anthony was trained in electronics, and in 1958 he was sent to an island in the South Pacific, where he was supposed to watch a small nuclear test many miles away. But the explosion was much larger than expected, and the radiation left him with scores of knobby tumors throughout his body.
He left the military in 1959 and took a job with Teledyne, a defense contractor. In a 2004 profile in The New Yorker, he told the journalist Burkhard Bilger that he had continued his work for the Air Force, sneaking behind the iron and bamboo curtains to install long-range sensors to detect Chinese and Soviet nuclear tests, though a later investigation by The Dallas Observer, a weekly newspaper, called that claim into question.
He went on to become active in Republican politics and became rich. Then in 1972, he found Jesus, but with a twist: he built his own religious community and specialized in taking down scam evangelists.
He specialized in what he called garbology — rooting through dumpsters for evidence of legal or spiritual fraud by televangelists like Robert Tilton, Benny Hinn and W.V. Grant, just three of the more than 300 he went after during his nearly 35-year campaign.
He compiled the results in long reports that he fed to reporters, and he made frequent appearances on shows like “Primetime Live” and “Inside Edition.” His work was largely responsible for the implosion of Mr. Tilton’s $80 million-a-year empire and Mr. Grant’s 1996 imprisonment for tax evasion. In 2007, he worked with the U.S. Senate Finance Committee in its own investigation into televangelists.
…
At first, Mr. Anthony tried to gather his flock among the Republicans and Rotarians of wealthy Dallas. But his abrasive style — he talked about his sex life in Bible study and was permanently barred from Pat Robertson’s “700 Club” TV show — turned off the well-to-do.
Mr. Anthony didn’t seem to mind. With no religious training, he was teaching himself theology, and he became obsessed with the austere mysticism and doctrinal fluidity of first-century Christianity. He incorporated Jewish practices into Trinity’s evolving creed: The group celebrated Passover and insisted on having a minyan (at least 10 people) for Bible study.
As word about Trinity got around, it began to attract disciples from the margins of Dallas society: addicts and ex-hippies, disaffected students and people who otherwise found themselves at a dead end — as well as the occasional curious blow in.
I cannot tell a lie: “permanently banned from the ‘700 Club'” is what hooked me. (And “often obscenity-laced, sometimes violent Bible study sessions”. And “a Trinity member who, like Mr. Anthony, had taken a vow of poverty before acquiring a private investigator’s license”.)
Among those “margins of Dallas society” he attracted: Joe Bob Briggs.
Noted: DEFCON is holding an online memorial for Dan Kaminsky on 2021/05/02 at 12 PM PDT. Link to the Discord is at the top of the DEFCON page.
The NYT has published an obit for Dan Kaminsky that’s both respectful and timely.
His childhood paralleled the 1983 movie “War Games,” in which a young child, played by Matthew Broderick, unwittingly accesses a U.S. military supercomputer. When Mr. Kaminsky was 11, his mother said, she received an angry phone call from someone who identified himself as a network administrator for the Western United States. The administrator said someone at her residence was “monkeying around in territories where he shouldn’t be monkeying around.”
Without her knowledge, Mr. Kaminsky had been examining military websites. The administrator vowed to “punish” him by cutting off the family’s internet access. Mrs. Maurer warned the administrator that if he made good on his threat, she would take out an advertisement in The San Francisco Chronicle denouncing the Pentagon’s security.
“I will take out an ad that says, ‘Your security is so crappy, even an 11-year-old can break it,’” Mrs. Maurer recalled telling the administrator, in an interview on Monday.
…
Les McKeown, of the Bay City Rollers.
I have not found a mainstream source for this yet, but it seems to have been confirmed in various places: Dan Kaminsky, noted security researcher.
His politics were not mine, and he was not a personal friend or even acquaintance of mine. But I was lucky enough to see him speak at DEFCON and Black Hat a few times, and the guy was wicked smart. Especially when it came to TCP/IP and DNS: man probably forgot more about DNS than I’ll ever know. (One of my favorite talks involved him demonstrating how he could run streaming audio, in real-time, over the Internet…by embedding data in DNS queries. I believe this was that talk.)
There’s a good Hacker News thread here, and an obit from The Register here.
The Reg obit also includes a link to a playlist of Mr. Kaminsky’s talks on YouTube.
Science Sunday!
I wanted to do some biology today. Specifically, I wanted to do some stuff about malaria, as that would give me an opportunity to work in a couple of (appropriate!) videos about the gin and tonic.
But I couldn’t find any real science videos about malaria that I liked. I might do the G&T videos another day, if I decide to do a day of mixology.
Anthropology is kind of close to biology, though, and is science: “The Natural History of our World: The Time of Man”. I apologize for the naked man a-s early on, but you can safely fast forward past that. Also: narration by Richard Basehart!
Bonus: “How Does Forensic Anthropology Help Solve Crimes?”, with Dame Susan Margaret Black.
Bonus #2: I find something kind of soothing in Dame Black’s voice, so how about another lecture from her?
“Forensic anthropology in the real world – this is not CSI!”
“So if I do nothing else this evening but remind you to switch off the television when ‘CSI: Fleetwood’ or whatever it is comes on next, can we please not?”
(And I quote Dame Black as a person who actually has a certain amount of affection for “CSI: Original Recipe”, at least the first eight or so seasons. I also say this as a person who can distinguish TV from reality, which I guess means I need to “check my privilege” or something.)
(I also say this as someone who is interested in forensic anthropology, but has never studied it formally.)
Another one of my half-baked book ideas is a book on this subject.
What do I mean by this? What I’m thinking about is: businesses that are built on, and depend on, another business to exist, and would not exist without that business.
The first time I started thinking about this was in the early days of widespread Internet adoption, and specifically in the context of eBay. There were several businesses that sprung up in the early days: escrow services, payment processors, and even places where you could take your stuff. In the days before digital cameras and fast Internet access being common, it was often easier to take your items to somebody’s storefront: they’d list the items for you on eBay, handle shipping and receive payment, and take a cut of your proceeds, as well as an upfront fee for the listing. (At least, I assume that was how it worked: I never actually used any of those services.)
Zynga is perhaps another good example of this, but with a twist. They were, at one point, massively tied to Facebook:
But Facebook ended that “special relationship”, and Zynga’s pivoted towards mobile gaming. Though I’ve never used Facebook, I almost want to argue (based on what I’ve heard from others) that Zynga’s games were more “parasitic” than “symbiotic”, in the sense that they possibly did some damage to Facebook and drove people away.
Which raises the question: are app developers in a symbiotic economy? Arguably, they wouldn’t exist without the Google and Apple app stores, and it’s easy for a change in policy, or a change in operating system, to wipe out a specific app. At least with Android, you (theoretically) have the option to “sideload” your app. On the other hand, eliminating third-party apps would hurt the stores as much, or more, as it would hurt the developers.
I’m not sure what the conclusion, or overarching theme, of this book would be. Other than: if you’re going to put all your eggs in one basket (like Facebook) watch that basket. And have a Plan B. And a Plan C.
What brings this to mind? Two fairly recent articles:
1. There’s this device called “Kytch”. It is targeted at a highly specific market: McDonald’s franchises. The Kytch device sits inside the notoriously finicky and often broken McD’s soft-serve and milkshake machines, connects to WiFi, and provides enhanced diagnostic information on what exactly has gone wrong with the machine.
McD’s corporate is not entirely happy with this idea, though apparently lots of the franchises who have used Kytch like it.
…
Another franchisee’s technician told me that, despite Kytch nearly doubling its prices over the past two years and adding a $250 activation fee, it still saves their owner “easily thousands of dollars a month.”
McD Truth confides that Kytch still rarely manages to prevent their ice cream machines from breaking. But before they used Kytch, their restaurants’ harried staff wouldn’t even notify them nine out of 10 times when the ice cream machine was down. Now, at the very least, they get an email alert with a diagnosis of the problem. “That is the luxury,” McD Truth writes. “Kytch is a very good device.”
2. Sports cards are big business. I think everyone knows this, even if you don’t follow sports or collect cards.
The big dog in the business is Professional Sports Authenticator. They do condition grading and authentication of cards.
Putting it into my own terms, it is kind of like having a history letter from Smith and Wesson: at the very least, having a letter will probably pay for itself if you ever go to sell your gun. If you hit the lottery – if you find out your gun was shipped to someone like Annie Oakley – your $300 gun might become a $50,000 gun.
(On a side note: $300 for a .22/32 Heavy Frame Target? This guy got a screaming deal, and it would have been one even if it wasn’t Annie Oakley’s gun.)
But I digress. As the big dog in grading and authentication, PSA was doing a land office business. Business, as a matter of fact, was too good:
So, effective March 30th, PSA suspended most of their grading services.
Uh, didn’t the Post Office kind of do that this past Christmas? (Okay, not really, but it did seem like they were coming close.)
PSA is still going to process their backlog, and hopes to resume service by July 1st. And there are other authentication and grading services, but none with the level of acceptance and prestige that PSA has. And the people with cards sitting in backlog have issues, too:
Who?
As interesting as I find this story, I have a lot of trouble shedding any tears for Ja Morant Guy.