07:31 – Yet more evidence, as if any more was needed, that really smart people sometimes do incredibly stupid things. Dr. Robert Ferrante, a University of Pittsburgh medical researcher, is accused of murdering his wife, neurologist Dr. Autumn Klein, by poisoning her with cyanide.
I mean, come on. Conventional wisdom has it that physicians make the most dangerous murderers. (I’d put them fourth, behind toxicologists, biologists, and organic chemists/biochemists.) But the point is that any of those people should be able to figure out how to murder someone without being caught. Dr. Ferrrante moronically decided to use cyanide, which is trivially easy to detect both from the symptoms exhibited by the victim and in the body after death. To top it all off, having decided to use cyanide, rather than synthesizing it himself–which is trivially easy even without access to a lab–he actually ordered 250 grams of the stuff on his university credit card, the only item he ordered that had no place in his research activities.
Barbara is off on a day trip with her friend Bonnie Richardson. She’s been working very hard lately and needs a break. I’ll be working on science kits, as usual.
11:37 – I just got email from AmEx saying that they believed an unauthorized charge had been made on my card. Indeed it was unauthorized, which I told the lady on the phone. She’s canceled the current card and issued me a new one, which is supposed to arrive Monday. This is getting annoying. It seems to happen about once a year, although my record was only two or three months between new cards. Each time, it takes an hour or so of my time to get the new card issued and update sites like Amazon, Netflix, PhonePower, GoDaddy, Dreamhost, and the many others with whom I have recurring transactions set up. They really need to bring back the death penalty for scammers.
12:48 – Has technology ruined handwriting?
Who cares? Teaching schoolchildren to write cursive is a waste of time. Other than my signature, I haven’t used cursive in more than 40 years, and I’ve barely used it in 50. Like everyone else at the time, I was required to learn cursive in elementary school, but I used it only when forced. Otherwise, I printed, which I could do faster and more legibly. In junior high-school, we had one required course each year in a “practical” subject. Girls took home economics and the like; boys took mechanical drawing, wood shop, and so on. Mechanical drawing emphasized neatness and, yes, printing. I don’t think I ever used cursive after that other than for those few teachers who required reports be done in cursive. Then in 10th grade I started computer programming, and that really put a nail in cursive. Well, that and the fact that I also took a typing course in 10th grade, taught by Brenda Spanish, who was an extremely attractive young woman but, alas, married to Dan Spanish, our ex-DI gym teacher.
So, I just checked. For the first time in at least 40 years, I just wrote a sentence in cursive. (Now is the time for all good men…) Not surprisingly, it was relatively neat and quite readable, if I do say so myself. Even after 40 years, muscle memory abides. I wonder if that means I could still hit the cover off a tennis ball. I also tried writing cursively left-handed, which made an unreadable mess; interestingly, I can print left-handed, albeit not as neatly as I can right-handed, but I can’t write cursively at all.
Again, I wonder why anyone cares about the decline and eventual death of cursive. Teach elementary school kids to print and to use a keyboard. Spend a little bit of time teaching them to make a reproducible cursive signature. That’s all they need.
I’ll admit that at one point I wondered whether cursive might be useful in teaching young children fine muscle control, but we now have many people in their 30’s and 40’s who never learned cursive. If they lack fine muscle control, that’s not evident from any data I’ve seen.
In The Mechanic (1972) Steve McKenna poisons Arthur Bishop with brucine, which he claims causes death indistinguishable from a heart attack. Would that still work or are pathologists on the alert for that now?
Heart attack? Not even close. Brucine is structurally similar to strychnine and yields similar symptoms (extreme nausea, vomiting, muscle spasms, seizure) including the characteristic arching of the body until it rests on the heels and crown of the head.
If it were me, I’d probably consider various fungal toxins first. Animal toxins like tetradotoxin are all well and good, but they’re much harder to come by, at least for those of us who don’t live in Australia.
As to detecting brucine, the rule among toxicologists is that if you don’t look for it, you won’t find it, particularly for poisons that are lethal at very small dosages. That is, toxicologists and pathologists depend on reported pre- and perimortem symptoms and postmortem features to narrow down the range of likely poisons, and then look specifically for those. In theory, nearly any poison can be detected by NMR, GC/MS, and other instrumental techniques, but in practice it can be almost impossible to sort the poison out from all the noise down there near the baseline.
My office mate and I both feel a bit of pride being ranked as deadlier than a doctor (we are biochemists). But after 25 years working in immunologic and enzymatic testing methods my poisoning skills are probably rusty.
Methinks the biochemist doth protest too much…
I also point out that–even considering their relative numbers–many, many more physicians are known to have committed murders than have toxicologists, biologists, or organic/biochemists. Now, I suppose it’s possible that the latter group are simply more law-abiding, but I think that’s unlikely. The latter group is also (typically) brighter than the average physician, and, I suspect, simply better at getting away with murder.
Well, Japan has come to the realization that being the world’s largest importer of LNG is bad for their economy. They are slowly rebuilding their tsunami destroyed coal power plants which were all on the coast for coal imports from Indonesia. And they are restarting their nuclear power plants. Reason does eventually triumph over irrational fear:
http://www.hydrocarbonprocessing.com/Article/3235091/Latest-News/Japan-reports-falling-demand-for-imported-LNG.html
“Japan’s demand for imported natural gas, which ballooned after the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, is falling — and may deflate a lot further if the government succeeds in getting dozens of idled nuclear reactors restarted.”
“Imports of liquefied natural gas in the first half of 2013 were down 2.7% to 43.4 million tons, the first half-yearly decline since the nuclear accident more than two years ago, the ministry of finance reported Wednesday. Last year, imports were up 11%, to 87.3 million tons, after a 12% rise in 2011. “
They really need to bring back the death penalty for scammers.
I am OK with that.
The last time I got my Amex card scammed, Amex did not want to replace my card. It took a rather heated conversation to get it done. Plus the scammer had Amex convinced that I agreed to pay $700/month for his website in The Netherlands. It was quite unusual. And Amex would not tell me what the website URL was.
She’s canceled the current card and issued me a new one, which is supposed to arrive Monday.
Yes, it is annoying. Had that happen to one of my cards that I rarely use. Charged some show tickets at a resort in Pigeon Forge. That night I get a text alert from the bank indicating that my card had attempted to be used, but was blocked, in Bulgaria. I canceled the card immediately.
I went to the resort manager and told her she had a problem with employees stealing credit card numbers. She denied it. I told her that I had only used that card in the last 6 months, one time, at the resort she managed. She still denied any problem. Since the resort is part of a chain I contacted the corporate headquarters and gave them the details.
Within an hour the manager of the resort called me back, very apologetic, and refunded my ticket prices and gave me coupons good for 50% off my next stay.
I did have to cancel my Discover card late one Friday night because someone busted my car window and took my wife’s purse. All they got was $2.00 in change. No charges had been attempted before I blocked all the cards. The purse was eventually found on the roof of a building two miles away. Everything was in the purse, including the $20.00 in a hidden compartment, but the $2.00 in coins was gone.
What was impressive about Discover is that a new card was delivered the next morning (Saturday) by Fedex. The other two card companies took over a week to get me a new card. The other companies were willing to get me a card overnighted by Tuesday (they don’t do cards on weekends) if I was willing to pay $25.00. I declined their, ahem, generous offer. Hat’s off to Discover for providing the service at no charge.
I would have given the cretins that broke the window $5.00. Well, not really unless I was at gun point. It cost me over $1,000 dollars to repair the window, change the door locks, reprogram the other vehicle’s security system, and get a new driver’s license. Cretins.
I just got email from AmEx saying that they believed an unauthorized charge had been made on my card. Indeed it was unauthorized
Oh, and one thing I do to further protect my cards is I have a text message sent to my phone for each charge that is made regardless of the amount. I know immediately if something is wrong. Email is too slow and is a deferred form of communication. A text is immediate.
Oh, and one thing I do to further protect my cards is I have a text message sent to my phone for each charge that is made regardless of the amount. I know immediately if something is wrong. Email is too slow and is a deferred form of communication. A text is immediate.
How do you do this and is it only a certain type of card?
I carry an Amex (business use only) and two Mastercards. One of my Mastercards gets me ten cents/gallon gasoline discount at Shell stations.
Actually, I would love ro see the credit cards eliminated. Totally insecure, but they undermine and destroy alternative metheds of payment before they have a chance. There is a huge amount of collusion behind the scenes, especially between Mastercard and Visa, that ought to lead to antitrust action.
Here, at least for face to face payment, debit cards (unconnected to MC/Visa) are common, but there is just no way to use them for online payment.
I learned printing pretty much the same way you did. But my wife observed yesterday that I needed at least an acquaintance with cursive to read the old land patent documents I had just downloaded. I deal with old documents of one sort or another quite a bit in my business.
How do you do this and is it only a certain type of card?
I went to the cards issuer website and signed up for the service. It is the same site that I can use to access my account, pay the bill, etc. I know that VISA and Discover have the feature and I would be surprised if AMEX does NOT have the service.
Actually, I would love ro see the credit cards eliminated. Totally insecure
Not with Discover. When I make an online purchase I log in to my account and generate a one-time use card number. Once that number has been used it cannot be used again. That way if the vendor gets compromised any card numbers associated with my account are no good.
Checks are more insecure than any credit or debit card. With electronic transactions you have regulate E in your favor. The bank has to prove you did the transaction otherwise they have to give the money back. Inconvenient as hell at times but still better than checks.
With checks you have to prove it was not you and even if you do the bank does not have to give your money back as it is considered theft from you, not the bank. If I were to send anyone here a check for $1.00 within a week of depositing that check I would have your checking account drained. The check when deposited probably got endorsed with your account number and the ABA number of the bank. That comes back to me on a cancelled check. I have all the information I need to print checks drawn on the account.
When depositing a check NEVER write your account number on the check. Just endorse with “FOR DEPOSIT ONLY”. Nothing else is legally required.
Some banks and CU’s are providing two account numbers. One is the actual account, the other is only used for depositing funds. Any attempt to withdraw using the deposit account number will fail with an invalid account.
The feds can’t keep up with scammers. Similarly with cold callers, not a chance to stop it. Article in paper and reporter talked to a fed in Washington who mentioned 2,200,ooo on so called “Do Not Call List”. Absolutely impossible to comply even if one moral business wanted to. Perform a query on an average length of 1 million for each outgoing call? The cognizant federal bureaucracy initiates action against one violator per week.
How can one expect federal minions to control spammers when these are the one who insist on staffing airplanes with pilots who crash on landing in San Francisco and train drivers who crash in Spain by going to fast and north of LA while texting,
Realization that 90+% of these accidents are operator caused, as opposed to mechanical failure, should mandate 100% automation.
Perform a query on an average length of 1 million for each outgoing call?
That is trivial to achieve. An index on a 10-digit key in any good RDBMS is very, very fast. 1 million rows is not a lot, nor is 10 million.
I also tried writing cursively left-handed, which made an unreadable mess…
On a steamed up window or mirror my brother could write cursive with both hands at once, starting in the center and moving out in opposite directions.
[snip] What was impressive about Discover is that a new card was delivered the next morning (Saturday) by Fedex. [snip]
When my brother in law worked for a large credit card issuer, he had an option on his computer screen for ‘Next Flight Out’. It had to be approved by a higher up, but for really high dollar volume folks they would hand a replacement card to a courier to bring directly to you, anywhere in the world.
but for really high dollar volume folks they would hand a replacement card to a courier
I certainly don’t qualify for that level. But I do charge about $2,000 a month on the card, pay off the balance each month (they may not like that as they get no interest), have had the card for 27 years, never paid late, maybe they considered getting me a card quickly good customer service.
Here’s one use for cursive: note taking. In my freshman year at college, I tried to learn a form of shorthand, then found after a couple of months that I couldn’t read my notes. I then paired down my cursive, eliminating all the flourishes I’d learned in grade school, substituted printed letters for capitols, and ended up with a system that could get the gist of lectures as fast as they were delivered, but which could be reviewed much faster. So what’s wrong with printing? Too slow, at least in my hand. Removing pen from paper and putting it back down takes too long—this is why cursive was invented in the first place. I can’t imagine computers being as effective, but then I was a chem major, so much of my notes were structures, and if it wasn’t structures, it was formulas. When I taught I was amassed at how badly students were at taking notes—- they seemed to mainly just duplicate what was written on the board.
I used to have an AmEx card, never had this sort of problem. Did she say anything about how your number was picked up by scammers?
I don’t think that’s quite right. I think it was because of liquid ink on quill-type pens. You want a smooth, continuous flow of strokes to avoid flicking ink droplets all over everything.
I’d like to see a touchscreen tablet with appropriate software for note taking. I, too, needed a lot of non-textual notes in engineering school. A tablet which let me seemlessly switch between typing (on a virtual or real keyboard) and sketching would have been a marvel. MathCad might suffice for everything I needed, if it ran on a tablet.
Other than that, I agree with your condemnation of many people’s note-taking skill. I suspect at least some of it comes from pathetic instruction in secondary school. For instance, both of my teenage sons, going to different school districts, were given “note sheets” with the important points already written down, with just a few blanks to fill in to make sure the student pays attention as the teacher reads the master copy and shows a video or provides other filler. This method probably does well in cramming in specific facts for a specific test, but does jack for teaching the kids any broadly useful skills.
I don’t think I’ve ever had a fraudulent claim against any of my credit cards. If I ever have, it was rare and long ago.
My wife, on the other hand, is constantly having to dispute charges and get new cards. I don’t know what she’s doing differently than I, but there’s obviously something going on.
I also was forced to learn cursive in primary school, and also stopped using it as soon as I possibly could. I was upbraided by a teacher in, I think, Year 11 for printing, but just politely ignored her.
Sometimes letters are joined together when I write, such as adjoining “ch” and “new”, I don’t know if that counts as cursive. When I filled out coding sheets for others to create punch cards I was pretty strict about one letter per box, but, as I said, sometimes letters within a word run together a bit. And sometimes not, for example when I write down usernames and passwords.
An annoying thing about cursive is that different countries write some letters in cursive in a way that makes no sense to me, and I have to guess what the letter is from the context.