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.

Via Winds of Change, we get this wonderful story:

COPENHAGEN, Denmark - A Danish biotech company has developed a genetically modified flower that could help detect landmines and it hopes to have a prototype ready for use within a few years. …

The genetically modified weed has been coded to change color when its roots come in contact with nitrogen-dioxide, or NO2, evaporating from explosives buried in soil.

Within three to six weeks from being sowed over landmine infested areas the small plant, a Thale Cress, will turn a warning red whenever close to a landmine.

If trials are successful, this plant could be one of the greatest humanitarian achievements of the century, helping to clean up minefields quickly, cheaply and with a minimum of effort.

Of course, the flower in question is a genetically modified organism. But I’m certain that forward-thinking organizations such as GreenPeace will be able to see the obvious benefit of such a plant, right?

Greenpeace is campaigning for a ban on all imports and exports of GE seeds and commodities such as soybeans, maize, rapeseed, potatoes, tomatoes and cotton. As the protocol has not yet entered into force, unilateral national emergency measures need to be taken. — GreenPeace GMO Campaign Overview

Once again, DARPA’s Information Awareness Office has come up with a wonderful idea to fight terrorism. Unfortunately (and also, once again) the same office has demonstrated such an incredible lack of public relations skills that the same brilliant idea has been canned.

By now, I’m sure that you’ve heard of the proposed Policy Analysis Market, which was designed to create a sort of futures market for terrorist attacks and other such events. To quote from the website’s homepage (which is now only available through the Google cache).

Analysts often use prices from various markets as indicators of potential events. The use of petroleum futures contract prices by analysts of the Middle East is a classic example. The Policy Analysis Market (PAM) refines this approach by trading futures contracts that deal with underlying fundamentals of relevance to the Middle East. Initially, PAM will focus on the economic, civil, and military futures of Egypt, Jordan, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Turkey and the impact of U.S. involvement with each.

The contracts traded on PAM will be based on objective data and observable events. These contracts will be valuable because traders who are registered with PAM will use their money to acquire contracts. A PAM trader who believes that the price of a specific futures contract under-predicts the future status of the issue on which it is based can attempt to profit from his belief by buying the contract. The converse holds for a trader who believes the price is an over-prediction Ð she can be a seller of the contract. This price discovery process, with the prospect of profit and at pain of loss [sic], is at the core of a marketÕs predictive power.

At its core, the idea being proposed here is that of using a genetic algorithm to attempt to predict regional instability. (Genetic algorithms have actually been used to simulate stock markets before.) The basic idea behind a genetic algorithm is simple: You take a shotgun approach to predicting the answer to a question. Those rules (or genes) that do a better job of predicting the answer are weighted more heavily than those which don’t, and the process is repeated with the weighting in place. In a market, the feedback is equivalent to how much money each trader has to invest in futures. If you’re right, the amount of influence you have over the market goes up. If you’re wrong, the amount of influence you have goes down. Thus, most of the control over the market is given to those individuals who have the best track record in predicting events.

Unfortunately, DARPA decided to put this plan out on the internet, and to use real money. Both of these ideas have merit in an abstract, academic sense — using the internet opens the market to a wider range of perspectives, and using real money ensures that traders take the market seriously. Unfortunately, those ideas combine to form a public relations nightmare, which we saw explode today. Nothing kills a project like the phrase “Betting on Terror” splashed across every newspaper in the country.

Sadly, this is an almost exact repeat of what happened to the Terrorism (formerly Total) Information Awareness program. What started out as a very logical approach to identifying suspicious behavior using statistical patterns got demonized into visions of a 1984-esque police state.

Much of the problem is very, very bad PR management on the part of DARPA and the Information Awareness Office. The IAO in particular seems not to have realized that any proposal placed on the Internet is instantly subject to public scrutiny, and that using language that may be appropriate in an academic environment may cause a firestorm in a non-academic environment. The result of this political shortcoming is that potentially useful terrorism-fighting systems are getting the axe, and it is doubtful that any of the axed systems will be viable in the near future. Hopefully, DARPA can get its act together before another good idea hits the fan.

Update

The New York Times has exhibited a wonderful degree of schizophrenia on this issue. Yesterday they presented an editorial Poindexter’s Follies, an editorial calling for the immediate firing of John Poindexter and the closure of the “wacky intelligence operation” he runs at DARPA. Today, a separate piece in the business section argues that the futures market was actually a good idea killed by bad press. Determining which section of the paper might know more about how a futures market works is left as an exercise for the reader.

Markets do not always operate perfectly in the larger world of stocks and bonds. The idea that they can reliably forecast the behavior of isolated terrorists is ridiculous. — Editorial staff, New York Times, July 30

Similar markets have been organized to predict shifts in Federal Reserve monetary policy, the outcome of political conventions and sales of consumer products. The results are that markets typically perform at least as well, and generally better, than feasible alternatives, and they are much cheaper to organize. — Hal R. Varian, New York Times, July 31

This post was slightly delayed due to work on the new site layout and other ongoing projects. The events mentioned in this post took place on April 18. - ZH

Burt Rutan has just moved up several notches in my book - which is saying a lot, considering his prior status. Apparently he got bored with building airplanes that travel around the world without refueling, and wanted something a little more interesti ng. That’s why this past Friday, he unveiled his newest engineering project.

A spaceship.

Yes, you read that correctly. Burt Rutan has gotten into the race for the X-Prize. And he did it in style - he rolled out operating hardware. The project, SpaceShipOne, has two components - an aircraft (the White Knight) designed to carry the space capsule (SpaceShipOne) to a high altitude for launch, and SpaceShipOne itself. In true Rutan fashion, neither one looks like anything you have seen before. SpaceShipOne is straight out of Amazing Stories, and the White Knight looks like a hybrid of a P-38, a Learjet, and a sailplane. Also, in true Rutan fashion, the system is stunningly elegant. The White Knight, which has been operating since August of 2002, has all of the same avionics and the same cockpit design as SpaceShipOne. In fact, it even has the same landing profile. Rutan wasn’t just content with building a carrier aircraft, he built a flying simulator of a spaceship at the same time.

As icing on the cake, Rutan provided some Rumsfeldian quotes about the entire project. (Editor’s note: If no one has coined “Rumsfeldian” yet, I’m taking it. Definition: A statement that is direct to the point of being tactless, but also right on the money.) He has said that he is “tired” of waiting for others to provide affordable human space access. As if that wasn’t enough for NASA, he also provided this lovely gem: “We seem to be making acronyms for engineer welfare instead of having the courage to fly something.” Ouch. Now let’s see if Rutan has the techno logy to back that up. Rutan has done some impressive work before, but this will mark a new feat if he pulls it off.

I would like to do a manned spaceflight before the Wright Brother’s anniversary. – Burt Rutan in

This just in from InstaPundit: A new summit of proponents of space travel has called for setting human settlement of space as the major goal of the United States’s space program. We’ve seen calls like this one before, but it is worth noting the sheer variety of groups involved in this particular declaration - from longtime space activists such as Jerry Pournelle (see previous entry on Fallen Angels for more) to CEOs of space corporations to the X-Prize foundation to punch-happy astronaut Buzz Aldrin. To quote from the proposal:

The human settlement of space is a noble cause that deserves the attention and support of people throughout the world for the following reasons:

• To enhance prosperity for all people and make use of the abundant resources of outer space;
• To fulfill the drive for discovery and exploration, which is an innate human quality at the core of progress and thriving civilizations;
• To ensure the survival of human civilization and the biosphere, and protect them from natural and man-made disasters.

Expanding boundaries to this new frontier is a pursuit of freedom, a fundamental element of progress essential to the fulfillment of human potential.

I’ll be quite frank and say that the space program is right up there with national defense as one of the issues that I think are absolutely vital. To those who would argue that we are wasting our money in space, I would suggest first considering the short term, direct results of the space program, such as GPS, global communications, and accurate weather prediction. How many lives have been saved because satellites let us track hurricanes days before they strike land?

It is also necessary to consider the long term impacts of the space program - specifically as relating to the third point in the list above. The solar system has a large but finite lifespan. Sooner or later, the Sun will begin to cool and die. Furthermore, if current predictions of stellar evolution are correct, it will expand as it cools - an event that will probably boil away the oceans of Earth and render the surface of the planet sterile. (Yes, the sun will cool - but it will be cool for a star.) In the shorter term, there is always the chance of an asteroid strike or mass calamity. Every major geological age has ended with a mass extinction - some wiping out up to 90 percent of species on earth. We are high up enough on the food chain that there is a fair chance that such a major calamity will exterminate the human race on Earth.

The qualifier about “on Earth” is added deliberately. Obviously, catastrophes within our ecosystem will not affect other ecosystems - other ecosystems which can only be created or populated through human settlement in space. The key to settling these other ecosystems is starting now. Expanding towards space will be a technological and societal struggle possibly greater and more difficult than anything we have attempted before, and will require both resolve and foresight. Furthermore, we will need to start early, and work persistently at the problem for years, if not decades, if not centuries. Hollywood aside, major space flight initiatives do not get built in a day. Technology is cumulative - fifty years ago, the laptop I am typing this entry on would have not only been ridiculously expensive but technologically impossible. Now, a private citizen can easily carry more computing power than was possessed by the Manhattan project. Likewise, interstellar travel cannot start from scratch, but must build upon interplanetary travel, which must build upon lunar travel, which in turn must build upon cheap orbital launch systems, which must in turn build upon something like the level of technology we currently have.

Although the task will be long and difficult, we can accomplish the goal of interstellar travel and human space settlements given time. It will simply require foresight and resolve. The very same foresight and resolve that has led us to our current bold strategy to deal with the finite nature of oil reserves. Yes, in the face of the certain eventual failure of every oil reserve discovered or undiscovered, we gritted our teeth, made the hard choice, and built SUVs.

It’s a good thing that Buzz Aldrin chaired this summit. He’s got experience beating sensibility into the ignorant.

My wings are made of tungsten, my flesh of glass and steel,
I am the joy of Terra for the power that I wield.
Once upon a lifetime I died a pioneer,
Now I sing within a spaceship’s heart,
Does anybody hear?
-Julia Ecklar, Phoenix