Abstract
Any white powder will do
Since the September 11 terrorist attacks and the subsequent flurry of anthrax cases, hoaxers have been out in force, and not just in the United States. From Scotland to Australia, Greenland to Denmark, Germany to Norway, and Denmark to Bulgaria, faux anthrax letters have kept the public on edge and emergency services working overtime. As Scotland's October 18 Herald put it: “It was open season for the loonies of the world to hit the kitchen and look for that handy white powder. The hoaxers had struck pay dirt. They must have thought they'd died and gone to heaven. By Tuesday it was an international sport.”
October 23, 2001: Checking out a hoax in Nanticoke, Pennsylvania.
We've been down this road before. According to Leonard Cole (“Anthrax Hoaxes: Hot New Hobby?” July/August 1999 Bulletin), the first major anthrax hoax occurred on April 24, 1997. In that incident, a petri dish labeled “anthrachs” and filled with a red, gelatinous material was sent to the Washington, D.C., offices of B'nai B'rith, a Jewish organization. In reaction, police sealed off the area, rerouted traffic, and quarantined more than a hundred B'nai B'rith employees.
Over the next two years, an epidemic of hoaxes gathered steam, with nearly one a day being reported by May 1999. During that period, says Cole, there was a confluence of events that may have given anthrax particular cachet: The Clinton administration, citing popular novels about bioterrorism, started wringing its hands over chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction, and the Defense Department made the controversial decision to vaccinate troops against anthrax. Then, in late 1997, then-Defense Secretary William Cohen held up a five-pound bag of Domino sugar on a TV program, claiming that a similar amount of anthrax could wipe out half of Washington, D.C.
Normally, it only takes one incident to get the hoaxers going. After the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, 364 phony bomb calls were made during a four-day stretch, and during the six-month period following the massacre at Columbine high school, U.S. schools reported 5,000 bomb threats (Los Angeles Times, September 21, 2001).
But knowing when hoaxes are likely to occur is one thing, identifying potential hoaxers is another. According to Jason Pate, director of the Monterey Institute for International Studies' Weapons of Mass Destruction Terrorism Project, of the 171 hoaxes his group has documented, 67 were aimed at abortion clinics. The rest of the hoaxers seemed to be “your everyday person,” Pate told the Washington Post (October 26, 2001). Some were pranksters simply trying to have fun at someone else's expense, while others were desperate people attempting to get out of a bad situation. (One Los Angeles man phoned in an anthrax threat to avoid appearing in bankruptcy court.)
Most experts feel it is possible to come up with a generic and generally reasonable hoaxer profile. As Park Dietz, a psychiatrist from Newport Beach, California, put it in the Los Angeles Times: “If you put a thousand of them in a room, some patterns would emerge.”
However, as the Bulletin began scouring recent media stories in search of the perfect profile, a pattern never emerged. But here are some expert opinions that might help you zero in on the would-be hoaxer down the street:
Gregg McCrary, a retired FBI agent who ran the bureau's behavioral science lab, told the Los Angeles Times: “These people make threats primarily for the thrill of it, for the sense of control and power they get from being able to evacuate a building. They are the cranks and losers in life.”
Robert Fein, a University of Massachusetts forensic psychologist, told the October 26 Washington Post, “Of course, people who do this aren't normal, whatever that means…. There are a lot of unhappy, angry people in the world who look for a way to channel that, and probably an anthrax hoax is one way.”
Ian Stephen, one of Scotland's leading forensic psychologists, told the Herald that hoaxers tend “to be men because it is essentially a power thing. You find the occasional woman hoaxer, but in those cases it is more a vindictive act, trying to get back at someone…. It's almost like a weak person's form of violence. Abusing people without being strong enough to do it to them directly.”
On October 22, Paul Mathias, a psychologist and retired British police detective, offered this advice on the BBC: “They like to feel that they can control the lives of others, that they can communicate but can't be identified. Often they may do it for their own sense of self-esteem. They are keen to identify themselves as somebody who controls lives, which is something they can't do in their everyday lives.”
Alan Stewart, a psychology professor at the University of Florida, told the Atlanta Journal and Constitution (October 15): “There's a certain group of people out there, sociopaths, antisocial sorts, who get their particular deviant needs by, if not perpetrating a crime, then by sending talcum powder or foot powder. These are the types of people who … don't care about the effects of their behavior on others. They're cold-hearted.”
Also quoted in the Journal and Constitution was Stephen Cimbala, a political scientist at Penn State University, who offered a traffic analogy: Hoaxers “appear as normal, middle-class, adult Americans with workaday jobs and typical family lives. But deep within their psyches is a trigger which, if activated by the right sequence of events, brings to the surface latent pathologies…. If this analysis sounds farfetched, closely observe the behavior of your fellow citizens the next time they are stranded in traffic, denied a parking space, or forced to wait too long in lines at checkout counters.”
Where's Dick?
Administration officials have publicly and repeatedly urged Americans to shop, fly, and otherwise lead normal lives. But privately, it's a different story.
Vice President Dick Cheney is spending “close to 80 percent” of his time in a “secure and undisclosed location” (New York Times, November 26), and comedians are making jokes about his whereabouts. But keeping Cheney under wraps is only part of the administration's plan to ensure the continuity of government in the event of terrorist attack (see “This is Not a Test,” in the November/December 2001 Bulletin).
According to U. S. News and World Report (November 5), officials with 24 government agencies were told to continue working from their emergency relocation facilities indefinitely. On November 26, Newsweek reported that Cheney's hideout, where he often spends the night, was chosen because it is “believed to be outside the fallout range of a small nuclear weapon.”
Everybody makes mistakes
In the United States, a stamp marking the hundredth anniversary of Enrico Fermi's birth shows him standing at a blackboard. But as a letter to Science (October 5, 2001) points out, there is a noticeable error in a notation that Fermi wrote on the upper left of the board. Letter writer Greg Huber, a physicist at the University of Massachusetts, points out that Fermi has got the expression for alpha, the fine-structure constant, “screwed up.” Why? Fermi was probably just having a bad day, Huber concludes.
Meanwhile, in Britain, the Royal Mail has issued six new postage stamps commemorating the hundredth anniversary of the Nobel prizes (Nature, September 27, 2001). No problem with that, but the accompanying brochure included a quote from Cambridge University physicist Brian Josephson, claiming that developments in quantum physics “may lead to an explanation of processes still not understood within conventional science, such as telepathy–an area in which,” Josephson brags, “Britain is at the forefront of research.”
The formula in the upper left corner of the board is wrong.
Other British physicists, who regard the “paranormal” as more crock than science, are angry that the Royal Mail should endorse the idea that physics and telepathy are somehow connected.
But Royal Mail spokeswoman Kathryn Hollings-worth responded to their criticism by noting that the fact that Josephson was a Nobel winner in 1973 “should give him some credibility.”
Enduring capitalism
According to the company's web site, these new “picture cards presents (sic) the New War on Terrorism in a format that children understand. Not included are the disturbing images shown repeatedly on national newscasts.”
Although 10 cards feature President George W. Bush engaged in crisis-related activities (No. 5, “Bush Calls NYC Mayor Giuliani”; No. 6, “Bush Embraces New York's Rescue Workers”; No. 9, “Bush Comforts Giuliani and Pataki”; No. 25, “Bush Rebukes AntiMuslim Sentiment in U.S.”; and so on), it is reassuring to know that cards numbered 30 through 45 feature other U.S. leaders. No. 34, “Defense Secretary Rumsfeld Makes a Point”; No. 35, “Condoleezza Rice, National Security Advisor”; and No. 42, “Congressional Leaders Lott, Hastert, Daschle” are particular standouts.
The “Defending Freedom” section, the final 43 cards of the series, introduces the serious business of military hardware, featuring a broad selection of U.S. bombers and jet fighters, aircraft carriers, paratroopers, sailors, and marines, and one lone picture titled “Britain's HMS Cornwall Heads to Oman.”
The debut of the series was the subject of particular merrymaking at plastic.com, where readers are invited to comment on stories in the news. As one reader wrote: “What? No Paul Wolfowitz card?”
The back of card No. 29 in the “Enduring Freedom” series.
Another predicted that “the No. 19 Osama Bin Laden Rookie card will be worth a hundred No. 31 ‘Rangel, Schumer, Clinton Meet With Bush.’”
Other readers suggested additional cards–for instance, one titled “Andrew Sullivan Excoriates ‘Fifth Column’ Left on his Website.”
Another reader wrote that if you “get kids hooked on these, it won't even matter what you put in the history books anymore.” He added that he'd like to see an “Iran-contra card No. 123, ‘American hero Lt. Col. Oliver North Bravely Shreds Deadly Documents.’”
Another plastic.com contributor noted that the release of the Enduring Freedom trading cards was reported on November 6 on the news crawl that runs at the bottom of the screen on CNN. That was not particularly surprising, he wrote, “But what followed really ticked me off: There was a hyphen, then the words ‘collect all 90.’”
In Brief
When Russia announced in October that it was closing a base in Lourdes, Cuba, from which it had eavesdropped on the United States for 38 years, the action was heralded in Washington as yet another sign that the Cold War was over. But Cuba, which faces the loss of $200 million a year in rent, was not pleased, calling the closing “a special present” from Vladimir Putin to George W. Bush. According to a Cuban government statement, Russia did not have permission to close the base: “The agreement for the Lourdes radio-electronic center is not canceled, as Cuba has not given its approval” (BBC, October 18, 2001).
More than a year ago, the British army began testing boots made by Britain's Electric Shoe Company. These boots used the mechanical energy of walking to produce about 3 watts of electrical energy–enough to power the British fighting forces' military phones (Bulletin, September/October 2000). Now the U.S. Defense Department has contracted with SRI International, a company in Menlo Park, California, to create an American-made electricity-producing boot. Already outdone by the British boot, this one generates about half a watt of power–enough to power a U.S. cell phone. According to ABC News (October 12, 2001), the Defense Department's longer-term plan is to produce enough energy to power electronic gun sights and navigation aids as well.
In late July, an article in the New England Journal of Medicine (volume 345, number 4) by Arjun Srini-vasan et al. pointed out potential dangers as an increasing number of laboratories conduct research on diseases that can be used as bioweapons. The authors based their conclusion–that such research might lead to new epidemics–on a single case of human glanders (the first in 50 years) contracted by a microbiologist at the army's infectious disease lab at Fort Detrick, Maryland, who, they mentioned, “did not routinely wear latex gloves.” The authors concluded: “This case may serve as a harbinger of the resurgence of nearly forgotten diseases such as glanders, plague, smallpox, and anthrax.”
On September 7, 2001, just four days before the United States declared war on terrorism, the U.N. General Assembly voted to establish an annual “International Day of Peace” on September 21. The “Peace One Day” organization (www.peaceoneday.org) is asking organizations everywhere to “recognize the inherent practical value” of the day by developing practical ways to participate in the first celebration on September 21, 2002.
It was odd enough that one of the many government agencies that closed early and sent workers home on September 11 was the National Security Agency (NSA). Then in November the agency decided to cut its payroll and contract out the work of more than 400 long-time employees–technicians who kept the agency's mountains of monitoring and data collection equipment working (Baltimore Sun, November 15, 2001). Angry workers–told in a November 7 memorandum that they would not get the benefits package or placement help offered to NSA's laid-off information technology workers–began leaving repair and maintenance calls unanswered and using up hundreds of hours of accumulated sick leave. If systems stopped working, they suggested, that was just a taste of what would happen when their jobs were contracted out. And if NSA's computer systems overheated, one technician suggested, “they will shut down, and then the agency will shut down.”
Baltimore is one of many U.S. cities that has decided to refurbish an old fallout shelter to serve as its emergency operations center (Las Vegas Sun, November 15, 2001). Burrowing underground gained new respectability after New York City's emergency operations center, which was on the 23rd floor at 7 World Trade Center, was destroyed during a crisis it would otherwise have been involved in handling. The Baltimore facility will house about 50 civil servants who, according to Richard McKoy, Baltimore's director of Emergency Management, would direct operations from the bunker in case of biological attack. No word on how ordinary citizens would manage in a biological emergency, but McKoy says of the bunker, “It's a lot better being in here than being out there.”
The International Project of the Year award for 2001 may have gone to the builders of an aluminum smelter in Mozambique, but the runner-up was CH2M Hill, the company that brought under control the thick toxic crust that had formed on nuclear waste in tank SY-101 at the Hanford Reservation in Washington state (Hanford News, November 14, 2001). Thanks to their work, gases no longer build up under the crust, and the tank, filled with millions of gallons of waste, is no longer expected to explode.
Debunkers dot com
A few days after September 11, several e-mails to the Bulletin quoted an alleged 1654 Nostradamus prophesy describing the attack on the World Trade Center: “In the city of God there will be a great thunder/Two brothers torn apart by chaos/While the fortress endures/The great leader will succumb.”
Funny, but I thought the Nostradamus prophesies had run out. On a hunch I turned to snopes.com, also known as the Urban Legends Reference Pages, for a lead. There I read that this particular “prophesy” had actually been written in 1997 by a Canadian college student trying to show that any vaguely worded enough prediction would eventually come true.
Snopes also reported that a convicted Israeli terrorist did not participate in the bombing, that there was no letter written by a missing Afghan boyfriend warning that there would be attacks in U.S. malls on Halloween, that there was no un-burned Bible found at the Pentagon crash site, and that CNN did not use old footage to fake images of Palestinians dancing in the street after the terrorist attacks.
As reported November 26 on newsweek.com, snopes.com is run by Barbara Mikkelson, a Los Angeles-area housewife, and husband David Mikkelson, a computer programmer. (The couple met online in a discussion group devoted to urban legends.) Between September 11 and November 26, the Mikkelsons tracked more than 60 post-attack rumors.
Find answers at Snopes.com.
Through Internet searches, phone calls, analysis of submitted photographs (much of their material is e-mailed to them), and old fashioned gumshoeing, the couple track down and examine stories that sound too good to be true and post their results as a public service.
When the Mikkelsons cannot identify statements as true or false, they classify them as either “statements of undetermined or ambiguous veracity” or “items of indeterminate origin.”
Since its inception six years ago, the site has focused on stories like “Woman is Impregnated with Octopus Eggs” (false) and “Dog Leads Wife to Home of Husband's Lover” (indeterminate origin). But the September 11 attacks have given the Mikkelsons a different set of rumors to track down.
So take pause before running naked in the streets to fight terrorism, or boycotting Snapple because it's owned by Osama bin Laden, or ironing your mail to kill the anthrax spores inside. According to snopes.com, all these suggestions are based on false information.
Don't make this mistake
After Canadian Peter Dant died in June at the age of 90, it was revealed that his will was rife with errors. It seems that Dant, who was “deeply disappointed with the decline in written and spoken English,” had decided to make the correction of his will a contest. An expensive piece of jewelry would be the prize for the lucky winner who could correct 12 errors found in each of 12 excerpts to be published in Canada's National Post over a 12-day period (Chemical & Engineering News, July 16).
Admiring as we are of Mr. Dant's ingenuity, we'd rather you just remembered the Bulletin in your will.
Just like an Epson
A high-tech weapons firm in Australia is giving new meaning to the phrase “hail of bullets.” The Brisbane-based company, aptly named Metal Storm, is developing weapons that can fire more than a million rounds per minute.
Instead of relying on mechanical firing pins to fire bullets, the technology uses an “electronically controlled delivery system,” a completely solidstate apparatus in which the only moving parts are the bullets.
Stacked into a barrel and separated by tiny charges, bullets are fired electrically in sequence. Barrels of differing sizes can be grouped according to need and loaded with different kinds of “cargo”–lethal or non-lethal bullets, armor-piercing bullets, flares, smoke grenades, or even miniature cameras, for example.
Metal Storm's technology isn't so much frightening or deadly as it is like inkjet printing. Just as a printer precisely and quickly spits out ink droplets, Metal Storm barrels fire bullets. In fact, according to Metal Storm, “whatever the application, the principle of the print head still applies.” For example, a pilot will one day locate his target. “Then, just like ordering a printer to print, he presses ‘Enter’” to “print the target with grenades.”
Artist's rendering of Metal Storm's million-round-a-minute weapons.
Despite the relentless printer comparisons in company literature and on its web site, one of the selling points of the technology is that, unlike printers, the weapons won't jam.
The company already has secured millions in funding from the U.S. and Australian governments. In 2000, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency gave the firm more than $10 million to develop a demonstration advanced sniper rifle.
Metal Storm envisions a world teeming with its wares. Farmers will spread fertilizer and herbicide, firefighters will put out blazes, explorers will look for oil and minerals–all using its technology.
If it seems a little farfetched, company founder and resident inventor Mike O'Dwyer deserves credit for prescience in hiring. In October 1999, the then-five-year-old company appointed retired Gen. Wayne Downing, an expert on terrorism, to its board. In the months before September 11, Downing helped the company open a U.S. office. After the attacks, he was handpicked by President George W. Bush to be the national director for combating terrorism.
“After this brief, cheerful message, we'll be back with more of man's inhumanity to man.”
Reinventing the wheel
The 2001 Ig Nobel prize ceremony (the eleventh) took place October 4 at Harvard University. As at all Ig Nobel ceremonies since 1996, attendees were treated to a mini-opera. But this year's opera, “The Wedding Complex,” was followed by the real wedding of scientists Lisa Daniel-son and Will Stefanov–both Arizona State University geologists. Danielson and Stefanov had to agree beforehand, however, to a characteristically goofy Ig Nobel stipulation: The wedding could be no longer than 60 seconds.
The Ig Nobels, organized each year by the tongue-in-cheek Annals of Improbable Research, honor scientific research of the humorous, impractical, and often dubious variety.
This year's award in physics went to David Schmidt–an engineering professor at the University of Massachusetts with way too much time on his hands–for his “partial” solution to the question of why shower curtains billow inward. Armed with $28,000 worth of computer software, Schmidt, an expert in spray dynamics, debunked those who credit the clammy-calf-shower-phenomenon to the Bernoulli principle (lift, and a sucking curtain, is generated by the acceleration of shower droplets) or the buoyancy theory (hot air inside the shower rises, leading the outside cooler air to push the curtain in).
Balderdash, says Schmidt.
He began his study by drafting a computer image of his mother-in-law's bathtub, then “filled” it with 50,000 tetrahedral cells that sense velocity and pressure. After turning on his virtual shower for 30 seconds, he handed off number crunching to his home computer. Two weeks and 1.5 trillion calculations later, Schmidt discovered that aerodynamic drag on the shower's water droplets creates conditions similar to those in hurricanes. And like a tropical storm, the pressure at the center is low, which causes curtains to be sucked inward.
Some of the other awards went to: Buck Weimer (biology) for inventing smell-filtering underwear; Jack and Rexella Van Impe (astrophysics) for their discovery that black holes fulfill all the technical requirements of hell; John Richards (literature) for his efforts to protect, promote, and defend the proper use of apostrophes; Chittaran-jan Andrade and B. S. Sri-hari (public health) for their discovery that nose picking is common among adolescents.
Two awards bear special mention. The Ig Nobel prize for peace went to Lithuanian Viliu-mas Malinauskus for creating the amusement park “Stalin World.” And John Keogh took the technology prize for patenting–in 2001–the wheel.
Remembering S Site
In August 1944, facing a fast-approaching deadline, Los Alamos brought together a crisis team of managers, explosives experts, theoretical physicists, mathematicians, and engineers to fashion the first implosion device. The group worked six miles from the main Technical Area, in a hastily erected cluster of wooden buildings dubbed “S Site” after an old saw mill. For most of the next year, the team worked around the clock.
Young men with technical training–usually in engineering, electronics, physics, or chemistry–were recruited by the army for the Special Engineering Detachment, or SED. By the middle of 1944, one-third of the scientific staff at Los Alamos belonged to SED. As military recruits, they lived in barracks, ate in an army mess hall, and endured early morning calisthenics. But on the job they were apprenticed to some of the world's most brilliant scientists.
Navy recruits who worked at S Site.
After the explosive lenses for the Trinity test were made at S Site, they were assembled here at V Site.
Those working at S Site used candy kettles to heat molten high explosives and then poured the material into metal production molds to form “explosive lenses” (so called because they were designed to focus the detonation waves).
One of the scientists these young men were privileged to work with was George Kistiakowsky, on leave from the chemistry department at Harvard, who directed the newly created Explosives Division.
“Kisty” quickly demonstrated that he was a fearless leader. Once, while using a chisel to pound on a high-explosive lens that he was holding wedged between his legs, Kisti-akowsky was asked if he was afraid the lens would detonate in his lap. “If it explodes,” he replied, “I will never know it.”
Among the young recruits was McAllister Hull, who went on to earn a doctorate in physics and serve as a professor and provost of the University of New Mexico. He was just 21 when he reported to work at S Site in August 1944.
One of Hull's early assignments was to figure our how to eliminate air bubbles in the explosive lenses. Remembering his experience making milk shakes as a waiter at college, he devised a stirrer that could be drawn up through the molten mixture, effectively bringing the bubbles to the surface.
Hull also remembers the day that J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of Los Alamos, brought Gen. Leslie Groves out to the lab. While looking at the mold for the lens, Groves accidentally stepped on and disconnected a hot water line. A stream of extremely hot water came out of the socket behind him, hitting him squarely in the rear.
Hull succeeded–just barely–in stifling his laughter, but only until Oppenheimer turned to him and remarked that the incident “just goes to show you the incompressibility of water.” There was no way Hull could contain himself after that. (Hull was relieved that Groves did not recognize him at the Trinity test several months later.)
Handful of Soldiers is being shown in tandem with an exhibit about Los Alamos's “V Site,” which opened at the capitol building in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on December 18.
A symposium on the Manhattan Project–also sponsored by the Save America's Treasures program, in cooperation with the Carnegie Institution of Washington, the American Institute of Physics, and others–will be held on April 26 and 27 in Washington, D.C.
Proceeds will go toward matching the Save America's Treasures federal challenge grant to preserve historic Manhattan Project properties like V Site.
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Correction
Len Ackland, author of “Closing in on Closure” (November/December Bulletin), was misled by an informant who told him that it would cost in the thousands rather than in the millions to remediate the soil in a 50-acre area at the Rocky Flats weapons plant near Denver, Colorado. We regret the error.
