Port 80

This morning, a piece has been making the rounds of the blogosphere claiming that a member on a terrorist forum has posted instructions for how to make a hydrogen bomb. This naturally piqued my interest, so I followed Michelle Malkin’s link to Internet Haganah, who linked to the actual forum post.

Five minutes later, I almost fell out of my chair laughing.

This forum post is priceless. It is one of the best pieces of scientific satire I have ever seen. I can only hope and pray that terrorist groups attempt to construct an atomic bomb using these instructions - if they survive the attempt, they’ll have at least wasted months of effort.

Perhaps the high point of this instructions is the author’s advice on enrichment of uranium hexaflouride:

First transform the gas into a liquid by subjecting it to pressure. You can use a bicycle pump for this. Then make a simple home centrifuge. Fill a standard-size bucket one-quarter full of liquid uranium hexafluoride. Attach a six-foot rope to the bucket handle. Now swing the rope (and attached bucket) around your head as fast as possible. Keep this up for about 45 minutes. Slow down gradually, and very gently put the bucket on the floor. The U-235, which is lighter, will have risen to the top, where it can be skimmed off like cream. Repeat this step until you have the required 10 pounds of uranium. (Safety note: Don’t put all your enriched uranium hexafluoride in one bucket. Use at least two or three buckets and keep them in separate corners of the room. This will prevent the premature build-up of a critical mass.)

There are two primary problems with these instructions:

1. The difference in mass between an molecule of uranium hexaflouride with U-235 and a molecule of uranium hexaflouride with U-238 is precisely 3 neutrons. Since these substances are chemically identical, they will tend to mix with currents in the bucket, and not separate “like cream.” Thus, the force exerted by a spinning bucket will not even begin to produce enriched U-235. Real centrifuge enrichment processes use thousands of extremely high speed centrifuges, one feeding the next, to create highly enriched uranium.
2. At room temperature and pressure, uranium hexaflouride is a solid.

The instructions also feature these gems, which are but a meager sample of the hilarities in this post:

• Michio Kaku, the noted string theorist, is a nuclear physicist.
• Edward Teller will be interested to know that, once you have an A-bomb, building an H-bomb is merely “frosting on the cake.”
• The difference between a gun-barrel and implosion bomb is not worth mentioning in the article.

The article then finishes up with a quiz on whether you, the reader, are “emotionally eligible to join the H-bomb club.”

Clearly, this article was written as a satire piece. But where did it come from? A little Googling on key phrases (try “casing of an old Hoover”) reveals that this set of “instructions” has been around for a long time - the oldest online appearance I can find is a 1994 posting to the USENET group rec.humor.funny. The introduction to that posting, along with the text of the article, suggest that these instructions were copied from the alternative national magazine Seven Days. Unfortunately, I can’t provide a link to Seven Days, as it was folded into The Nation in 1980. These “instructions” have been in circulation for at least 25 years.

The fact that this article is a satirical piece is not an indication that we don’t need to worry about nuclear terrorism. (Although we probably don’t need to worry about nuclear terrorism from the members of that particular forum.) It is a reminder that we ought to take “instructions” of this nature with a very large grain of salt. Building nuclear weapons is, to use an engineering euphemism, “non-trivial.” In the 1940s, it took the top physicists in the world years and a crash government program to pull it off. Today, atomic weapons are within the reach of most nations which can supply sufficient funding. However, we still have a long way to go before uranium enrichment becomes an afternoon kitchen chemistry project.

Today, we’re going to learn how to make plutonium from common household items. — Philo on Secrets of the Universe, UHF

Update: Welcome, Michelle Malkin readers! If you’re curious as to what else I’ve written, this post has a few good starting points.

…if in the research for a previous post, you search the Flyer News website for articles mentioning your name, and find an old editorial you wrote last year. Nothing unusual about that, right?

Unless, of course, you have to read the editorial a couple of times not only to remember what you were writing about, but to remind yourself that you actually wrote it.

In the absence of other evidence, I’m blaming the pernicious effects of secondhand Beast. The University of Dayton is to cheap beer consumption what South Carolina diners are to tobacco use.

See, the third can of Beast is the best, because by then you can’t taste it. — a UD student on the virtues of UD’s designated cheap beer

Lycos "spokesperson" Malte Pollmann is a strong contender for the 2004 Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf awards with this comment on the "Make Love, Not Spam" screensaver:

Contrary to some reports, the service never launched a ‘distributed denial of service attack’. Rather, a centralized database ensured all known spammers’ sites were left with at least 5% of bandwidth. The idea was simply to slow spammers’ sites and this was achieved by the campaign.

With all due respect, Malte, the use of the screensavers was distributed, and the stated goal was to deny the spammers the ability to effectively offer their services on the web. If this isn’t a Distributed Denial of Service Attack, then what on Earth is?

The possibility of electronic counterstrike systems deserves serious consideration - it may very well be an idea whose time has come. However, it is becoming clear that Lycos failed to give the possible consequences of their DDoS campaign even the most cursory evalation.

Consider Symbiot, a company that made headlines by launching a counterstrike security system. Symbiot’s page discussing the possible counterstrike options available to customers is filled with cautions on the legal ramifications of deploying such systems. Other links on their website will take you to extensive white papers discussing the subject. The legal and ethical questions accompanying counterstrike systems are unresolved, and Symbiot recognizes this fact. (Although, as a vendor of such systems, they do have a well-established viewpoint.)

Lycos, on the other hand, doesn’t even appear to have prepared a coherent argument to defend their decision to launch a massive, multinational DDoS. Instead, we get this:

The aim of the campaign was to ignite a debate about anti-spam measures. We feel that we have achieved this through our activity and will now continue that debate with others in the email industry. We hope that this will lead to further new and innovative solutions to the problem of spam.

Igniting the debate on solving the problem of spam would involve writing a provocative whitepaper on the possibilties of an anti-spammer DDoS attack. What Lycos actually did is akin to "igniting a debate" on gun control by handing out free revolvers on a city sidewalk.

I previously wondered what case law might emerge from this Lycos campaign, and I hoped that this case law might help better define the legal liabilities of counterstrike systems. At this point, I’m mostly wondering what heads will roll at Lycos for this fiasco.

I now inform you that you are too far from reality. — Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, Iraqi Information Minister (Retired)

Here in Dayton, we have a chain of tire stores known as Tire Discounters. Recently, they’ve been running radio ads offering a special on “Nitrogen Tire Inflation,” which demonstrate just how low the American education system has fallen in the hard sciences. Heard in a commercial on the radio today:

Customer: So it’s safe to mix air with nitrogen?

Spokesman: It sure is!

I can’t decide whether to laugh, cry, or incorporate.

Heaton’s All-Natural Nitrogen Tire Inflation: For far less than the cost of industrial nitrogen inflation, we’ll inflate your tires with 78% all-natural nitrogen! Stop by today, and learn how all-natural nitrogen inflation is affordable, environmentally friendly, and can help extend tire life far longer than is possible with pure oxygen inflation! Get all-natural nitrogen inflation, and save!

Someone in the Bush administration’s public relations staff, who is clearly not am expert on the Middle East, has made a truly hilarious error on the White House web page describing operations in Iraq. The banner graphic proudly advertises “Renewal in Iraq,” and even features an image of Bush speaking before a banner that reads “Renewal in Iraq.”

This hapless staffer needs to be quietly taken aside, and someone has to explain to him or her exactly what the origin of the name “Arab Baath Socialist Party” is. I thought the goal was to get “Renewal” out of Iraq…

I’m back at the University of Dayton for another school year, and I’m gradually getting used to the mass of incongruities that is college. I think a recent bookstore purchase summed it up well for me: On top of a $130 textbook (with no used copies available), some reseller had taken the care to place a small gold sticker: Free CD-ROM inside!

If this isn’t irony, I don’t know what is.

Reader’s Note: This is what comes of thinking too hard about Zen koans, memes, and complex numbers. I assure you that no mind-altering substances were used in the creation of this post.

This post begins with the famous Zen koan: “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” The koan poses an interesting puzzle, as two hands are required to clap. However, the riddle specifies that only one hand is doing the clapping - in other words, the question is self-contradictory. Although the question is a perfect sentence in English (or in any other language), the rules of that same language prevent that question from ever being answered.

This familiar puzzle is of interest because of the existence of an almost parallel problem in mathematics: What number times itself is equal to -1? Alternately, and more commonly, what is the square root of -1? Again, the problem makes perfect sense in mathematical terms, but that same system of mathematics prevents an answer — any number multiplied by itself must be positive. Period.

Those readers who have studied more advanced algebra already know that the mathematical question has an answer: i, the imaginary number, which is defined as the square root of -1. With the introduction of imaginary numbers, the familiar number line becomes a plane: Some numbers are real, some numbers are complex, and some numbers are a little bit of both.

This is where the interesting pontificating begins: Mathematics is a sort of language, in a sense. It is a language designed to very accurately describe quantities, and to allow for easy manipulation and examination of those quantities. English is also a language, designed to accurately and conveniently describe the interaction of humanity with the rest of the world. However, because English (or whatever your native language is) is so pervasive in our daily lives, it’s easy to forget that the language is only a description of a system. Just as a tire does not have 35 psi, but rather a certain amount of molecular motion which we like to describe as 35 psi, so are physical objects, such as “hands,” by no means tied down by the language we use. A “hand” is simply a arbitrarily defined portion of a larger discrete organism.

The point of all this circumlocution is thus: If there are numbers not described in mathematics, such as imaginary numbers, that do in fact exist, what is there to say that there are not concepts which are not defined in language that do in fact exist? What if the sound of one hand clapping is an imaginary concept in the mathematical sense?

Certainly there is precedent for this sort of thing. Consider descriptions of higher spatial dimensions: Although they may very well exist, we don’t deal with them every day. Our language — and more to the point, our minds — are not adapted to deal with their existence. Like the sound of one hand clapping, they are imaginary concepts as far as our language is concerned. We can name them, certainly, just as we can name i. But try to visualize them — and likewise, tell me if i apples are more or less than two apples.

What are the possible applications of imaginary concepts (or imaginary memes, although it stretches the definition of meme a bit)? Aside from simply describing the divorce between our conceptions and the limits of what can be conceived, imaginary concepts such as these can serve a test for the limits of logic and reason. Consider the age-old philosophical debate about whether God (typically a Judeo-Christian God) exists. According to most Christian theologies, God existed before time, exists throughout all time, exists in all locations simultaneously, knows all, and is all-powerful. The idea of “existing before time” alone is clearly self-contradictory, not to mention the endless possibilities for self-contradiction arising from “all-powerful” (how many fifth-graders have asked if God could make a rock He couldn’t move?). Clearly, a Judeo-Christian God is an imaginary concept.

Unfortunately for those atheists reading this, I haven’t just sealed God’s fate. Rather, I am simply stating that the idea of God is beyond the comprehension of language and reason, just as imaginary numbers lie beyond the real numbers. This is why every philosophical attempt to prove the existence or nonexistence of God has always been blown to pieces — the task faced by these philosophers is similar to the task of a mathematician who tries to find two real numbers which add to i. Although God may or may not exist (I have my own views, or course), neither philosophy or science nor any rational expression of religion has the ability to prove or deny His existence.

Those who are familiar with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainence are likely to notice a striking similarity between the “imaginary concept” and Robert Pirsig’s definition of Quality. Pirsig likened Quality to the Tao: Although it exists, it exists before any intellectual comprehension. In fact, Pirsig stated that no definition of Quality was possible, as any definition would be bounded by the limits of intellectual thought and unable of capturing the true essence of Quality.

The only catch is that Pirsig thought his undefinable Quality was unique. Now, we are faced with a whole bevy of imaginary ideas. I will let this concept rest for now, but may come back and play with it later. And, as always, feel free to leave a comment or send an e-mail if you’ve got anything on your mind.

Herbal, I’m no stranger to stoner logic, but… — “Sketchy”, Dark Angel

Bill Amend, in one of his occasional internet-oriented installations of FoxTrot, paints a chilling prophecy of the playground taunts of tomorrow. Read, and wonder at the depths of PageRank’s inhumanity to man.

Following a link from the Creative Commons website (I’m considering putting this entire site under their license), I discovered this little gem. It’s a collection of MP3s put out by the “Evolution Control Committee”, which feature “American newsreader Dan Rather rapping violent rhetoric over a plodding beat of collaged AC/DC riffs.” It’s quite possibly the oddest song I’ve listened to in a while, and it’s completely free for your enjoyment.

On a side note, the quote from the song that I’m closing this entry with should make me show up in some really odd places in Google.

Wild and woolly semi-automatic truck bomb. Emergency anti-fatal-shooting rampage. Notorious negative police brutality. Fear of the hidden Nazis next door. - Dan Rather, “Rocked by Rape”

Kids: Don’t try this at home.

The above sequence of JPEGs show what happens when the boom of a Link Belt crane accidentally comes too close to a 46 kV power feeder. – Bert Hickman, “High Voltage Sparks and Arcs”