For the handful of my readers who don’t read FARK, here’s cell phone video of the explosion. You may find this disturbing – not so much for the actual explosion video as for the aftermath.
Waco Herald-Tribune (link goes to front page). HouChron. Statesman. Dallas Morning News (as far as I can tell, the DMN does not have their coverage behind a pay wall).
I wonder who was there first.
Noted: Tuesday was the anniversary of the 1947 Texas City explosion.
So here’s the latest on Travis County DA Rosemary Lehmberg: she says she plans to plead guilty to the DWI charge and accept whatever punishment the court gives her. No word on whether she’s going to hire a lawyer or act as her own attorney.
But. There’s a catch.
“anyone who has lived in Travis County for six months” and “is not currently under indictment”. You don’t say.
And I said “What about ‘Breakfast At Tiffany’s’?”
And Patrick Healy said “Closing on Sunday.”
Edited to add: Joe Huffman, the man behind Boomershoot and someone who knows his way around explosives, has some informed speculation on what might have been used. Short version: it doesn’t look like a commercial or military grade explosive.
Speaking of crimes, remember the Kaufman County DA killings? Remember how people were suggesting the Aryan Brotherhood was involved? Yeah. About that.
The University of California and Dr. Patrick Harran, a chemistry professor at UCLA, have been charged with three felony counts of “willfully violating occupational health and safety standards”. Yes, you read that right: the University itself is being charged with felonies.
The charges stem from the death of Sheri Sangji in December of 2008. Ms. Sangji was employed in Dr. Harran’s lab:
She died 18 days after the incident.
I’m kind of hoping Derek Lowe will have some comment on this, and I’m willing to listen to arguments on the subject. My gut feeling is that the felony indictments are appropriate: Ms. Sangji should not have been working without a flame-resistant lab coat, and it isn’t clear to me that she was provided with appropriate equipment, training, or supervision. This is what trials are for, of course, and details may come out during the trial that will change my mind. But:
But the required corrective actions were not taken before the fatal fire, the records showed.
Edited to add: Many thanks to Chemjobber both for pointing us to Derek Lowe’s commentary, and for providing a link to an article from Chemical and Engineering News summarizing the incident in more detail.
Also, thanks to Lawrence for a somewhat related link, which we had missed: the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board report on the Texas Tech lab explosion in January of 2010. I swear that I covered the explosion at the time, or shortly afterwards, but I can’t find the link now. In any case, the report is pretty much what you’d expect: “the physical hazard risks inherent in the research were not effectively assessed, planned for, or mitigated; the university lacked safety management accountability and oversight; and previous incidents with preventative lessons were not documented, tracked, and formally communicated”.
(Short summary: the lab was working on a government project involving detection of explosives. Part of their work involved making something called nickel hydrazine perchlorate, which goes bang rather easily. The lab had been making small amounts (100 milligrams) but the students involved in the production of NHP that day decided, for various reasons, to scale things up and produce about 10 grams. The NHP went bang while one of the students was trying to break up “clumps” in a mortar and pestle.)
This week in TMQ: the Chronic-what-les of Narnia?
No, we’re not kidding. And we’re not going to call Gregg Easterbrook Aaron Burr, either. After the jump…
“Welcome and the Making of the DEF CON 19 Badge”: didn’t bother going. I don’t care much about the making of this year’s badge.
“WTF Happened to the Constitution?”: perfectly fine talk. Except for some of the case law theprez98 referenced, pretty much everything he covered was already familiar to me from “The Agitator” and “Hit and Run”. That’s not his fault, though, and I’m sure a lot of what he covered was new to the rest of the audience. I was also previously unaware of The Assault on Privacy, and will have to add that to my blogroll.
“From Printer To Pwnd”: This was a fun little talk, covering multi-function printers and the vulnerabilities they introduce into networks. Basically, people get sloppy with these devices and fail to do things like change default passwords; also, many of these devices have bugs in the embedded firmware. The presenter, Deral Heiland, demonstrated some interesting attack vectors: “malformed” URLs which allow you to bypass authentication on certain devices, “information leakage” attacks which allow you to get useful information (like passwords) out of the web admin pages, “forced browsing” attacks which allow you to grab device address books (which may also contain passwords), and “passback attacks” which trick the device into communicating with an attacker (for example, using LDAP configuration script testing). All of this culminated in the release of Praeda, an automated toolkit for attacking multi-function devices. The latest version can be found here: I don’t have a link to the slides, but will add one when I do.
“Black Ops of TCP/IP 2011“: You know how people talk about wanting the old funny Woody Allen back? This was the old funny Dan Kaminsky back; the guy who does deep arcane magic with TCP/IP packets and DNS.
His talk broke down roughly into three parts:
“And That’s How I Lost My Eye“: the funniest panel I went to today. Deviant Ollam, Bruce Potter, and Shane Lawson wanted to see if it was possible to destroy a hard drive in less than 60 seconds such that the data was unrecoverable, without setting off alarms or damaging any nearby humans, and without spending a lot of money on something like the SEMShred.
Ollam took the explosives/incendiary part of the equation. His results can be summarized as: it might be possible to use explosives, especially the popular “boomerite” type explosives used in exploding targets, to destroy a hard drive. But playing around with explosives, especially when you’re activating them electronically, is a good way to attract the attention of unpleasant people with badges. Apparently, those same people have no problems with explosives triggered by a rifle bullet, so if you want to affix an M1A above your server with a ton of “boomerite” below, go ahead…
Chemical methods didn’t work out very well either. Cobalt isn’t highly reactive, and the type of acids that can quickly dissolve a hard drive platter aren’t easily available at Home Depot and don’t play well with people and other living things. There were a lot of slides of vats of acid doing nothing to hard drive platters.
It’s also hard to destroy a drive physically. Hole saws, spade bits, and grinders did nothing.
The presenters did discover that a combination of a salt solution and electricity could strip the plating off of ceramic platter drives. But that didn’t work on aluminum platter drives.
What finally did work was fire. Propane and MAPP gas (which you can’t get in the US any more) will melt aluminum, but it’s hard to apply those to a spinning drive and have it melt; the spinning drive tends to dissipate heat. The presenters were working on an automated solution involving a glow plug, propane, and an Arduno, but ran out of time before they could finish that project.
However, you don’t have to melt a drive to render it unreadable; you only have to heat it to the Curie point. That’s not quite as spectacular as a spinning drive throwing off chunks of molten aluminum, but it will work. (However, if I understand Wikipedia right, the Curie point of colbalt is 1100 degrees C, and the melting point of aluminum is 660 degrees C. So I’m not sure what that buys you.) I wonder:
“Key Impressioning“: I can’t give this panel a fair evaluation. In brief, impressioning consists of sticking a blank key into a lock, moving the blank up and down, removing it, noting where the lock pins hit the key, filing down the contact points, and repeating the process until all the pins reach the proper depth and you have a working key. The presenter gave a live demo of this process, and was impressively quick at it.
The problems I had with this panel were:
I haven’t done any explosives blogging in a while, and a conversation over the weekend reminded me that I had two links pending:
Derek Lowe’s latest “Things I Won’t Work With”: chlorine azide.
A while back, Joe Huffman (of Boomershoot fame) exchanged emails with a gentleman named Lawrence Johnston. Dr. Johnston worked at Los Alamos during the war: specifically, he worked on designing the detonation mechanism for the implosion bombs. Mr. Huffman has a link to a presentation Dr. Johnston gave in 2006, on his experiences at Los Alamos.
In particular, the material about designing the detonators is fascinating stuff. The problem with the implosion device is that, in order to get it to work, they had to set off 32 separate explosions (in explosive lenses arranged around the core of the bomb) and all of those explosions had to take place within 1/10th of a microsecond. Using conventional detonation mechanisms gives you a timing of several tens of microseconds, which won’t work when you’re trying to get a bunch of explosive fronts to converge into one spherical wave. So how do you solve this problem? Dr. Johnston developed the exploding bridgewire detonator for this purpose, and there’s some great stuff in his presentation about things like the D’autriche test for detonator timing, determining the blast yield of the early bombs, and what daily life at Los Alamos at the time was like. I commend Dr. Johnston’s presentation to your attention, and regret not blogging it sooner.
Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong: guilty.
You may remember her for such roles as the bizarre pizza delivery bank robbery/bomb plot in Pennsylvania.
I’ve been involved in a discussion over at Jay G’s site about famous mass murders that didn’t involve guns. As part of that, I went over to Wikipedia to refresh my memory about a couple of famous incidents and discovered the following interesting bits of information.
The Happy Land social club fire:
Found guilty on August 19, 1991, of 87 counts of arson and 87 counts of murder, [Julio] González was sentenced to 174 twenty-five year sentences, to be served consecutively (a total of 4,350 years) . It was the most substantial prison term ever imposed in the state of New York. He will be eligible for parole in March 2015.
Of the three employees accused of the fire, only one, Héctor Escudero Aponte, is still in prison. Armando Jimenez and José Francisco Rivera Lopez were released from federal prison in 2001 and 2002 respectively.
(And if you want to read about something both horrible and forgotten, look up the Bath School disaster.)
The City of Austin has flushed the low-flow toilet rebate program. However, you can still get a free low-flow toilet: you just have to fill out an application and, if you’re approved, pick up your toilet from an approved toilet vendor.
The 2010 Bulwer-Lytton contest results are out.
Edited to add 1: Oh, what the heck. By way of Ace of Spades, a WP review of the greatest concert ever. Where “greatest concert ever” is defined as “complete disaster”.
Edited to add 2: Derek Lowe has a new post up in the “How Not To Do It” series. It appears that a lab at the University of Missouri underwent explosive renovations after some hydrogen and oxygen got together for a hot date. Photos of the aftermath at the link.
Edited to add 3: The HouChron has interrupted their “WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE!” watch to let us know that Dr. Demento is ending his radio show. Why, yes, this is the same story that Slashdot and Lawrence brought you almost a month ago.
Edited to add 4: As I’ve noted in the past, my newspaper reading during the weekends can be spotty. So I missed this Ben Wear article in the Statesman about the MetroRail ridership figures. (Hattip: Blue Dot Blues, by way of Battleswarm.)
Edited to add 5: Headline from the HouChron: “Dear Abby says what to do when grandma spoils the kids”. Somehow, I suspect Dear Abby’s answer does not involve a Taser.
Speaking of Popehat, I think this is a great post by Patrick, but I’m a very bad person; whenever I read the phrase “Res Ipsa Loquitur”, all I can think of is “Ipsa this, you p—y little b—h!“
In order to save other folks the difficulty I had finding the actual paper (as opposed to references to it in the NYT and elsewhere), here’s a link to Milo Nordyke’s paper, “The Soviet Program for Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Explosions“, which includes discussion of the Soviet use of nuclear weapons to extinguish gas well fires (pages 34-36).