In theory quantum cryptography is unbreakable with giving away the fact that you are intercepting the data. But in practice…
Quantum cryptography has been used by some banks to protect data, and even to hide election results in Switzerland last year. But it has been discovered that shining bright light into the sensitive equipment needed makes it possible to hijack communications without a trace.
Ted Briggs, last survivor of the HMS Hood, dies at 85.
Every now and again I get reminded that I will soon be living in world that has no surviving veterans of World War II. Sometimes it feels as if time is rushing by too fast and erasing the memory of things that we really need to remember.
In this rant, Derek gives all the demagogues in his profession a stern lecture. The storm of comments that follow make for fascinating reading.
There is a difference between being a method of inquiry and a source of authority. And as this week’s essay of the week shows, the more science becomes a source of the authority, the less it works as a method of inquiry.
I got into a discussion the other night about China’s milk scandal. I was arguing that China’s dairy farmers were unlikely to be responsible for the contamination of the milk. As best as I understand it, China’s Dairy farm’s are all small low budget affairs. In my view, the types of people who run those farms are unlikely to have the accesses to melamine or have the kind of knowledge that it takes to understand how to use melamine to fool milk testing equipment.
This article from the New York Times strengthens my view. Especially this part….
Sanlu, which is 43 percent owned by the New Zealand-based Fonterra Group, one of the world’s largest dairy companies, controls the only milk station in Nantongyi village, giving it monopoly pricing power in the area. Every day farmers guide their cows to the village milking station, pump milk directly into the station tanks and then return home, waiting to hear how much they will earn, if their milk passes quality inspections.
In the first place this shows how poor China’s dairy farmers are. They don’t even own their own milking equipment. In the second place, it makes hard to understand how the farmers could have contaminated their own milk when they sold the milk straight from the cow to the company.
If the article is to be believed, third parity milking stations are quite common in China.
But something fishy seems to be going on here. For one thing, melamine is not all that easy to dissolve into milk. For another, there’s been a worldwide shortage of melamine for some time now. Its price has shot up to more than $1,750 per tonne from $1,100 a few years ago.
So why use an expensive industrial chemical that’s in short supply to dilute a dirt cheap product like milk? The answer can only be that either some flaw rendered the melamine industrially worthless, or it wasn’t melamine at all. The first suggestion is scary enough; the second is even more ominous.
The only thing your correspondent can imagine that would render melamine industrially worthless is if it were reclaimed waste from the production process.
Industrially, melamine is usually made by heating urea in the presence of a catalyst. Because large amounts of ammonia and carbon dioxide are given off in the process, most modern plants now combine melamine production with urea production, which uses ammonia and carbon dioxide as feedstocks. As the two processes feed off one another, a combined plant is considerably more efficient than two separate ones.
But the final stage—washing the melamine and turning it into crystal form—produces lots of effluent that needs treating before releasing into the environment. The usual way to do that is to filter the waste water and pipe that away, and then dispose of the concentrated solids separately.
Those accumulated solids are around 70% melamine, with the rest being made up of various by-products, including our old friend cyanuric acid. As mentioned before, a mixture of melamine and cyanuric acid can be a nasty witches’ brew, especially when ingested by infants.
But what if it’s not melamine that’s being used to spike China’s diluted milk? Urea may be not as rich in nitrogen, but it’s certainly a whole lot cheaper (around $650 per tonne). Sprayed into the milk at the temperature used to create a powdered product for baby food and confectionery, enough of the urea would be converted into melamine to show up in tests.
Strange Maps is a good blog to keep an eye on. Most of the maps on that blog are so ridiculous they are of interest only those people who have a fetish for maps (though as a web site that has its own map maybe we should not cast stones). But amongst the dross there are quite a few gems.
For example, this map charting how people ask for a “soda” is pretty fascinating.
Also worth checking out is this map comparing the population of China’s various provinces to the population of various nations.
And last but not least is this map of genetic variation in Europe.
This week’s poem of the week is the Woman in the Forest by G.K. Chesterton.
The great tragedy of this poem is that few today can understand it because they do not know their history. And they do not know their history because modern society does not really think that we can learn anything from history. At best, history is taught to teach people how evil the old ideals are.
References are made to the Great Depression everyday now. But few people seem to know very much about the Great Depression. This does not stop people from sagely declaring that we have forgotten the lessons of the Great Depression or blaming our current problems on the dismantling of regulations that were put into place during the Great Depression. It is for this reason we are making Great Myths of the Great Depression essay of the week.
This essay is not without its flaws. The biggest flaw is that the author is too much an ideologue. Also, the essay is too simplistic to satisfy those who already have a good understanding of the history of the Great Depression.
But these flaws are balanced by the fact that the essay is written in a clear non-academic language that is easily understood and it is full of facts about the Great Depression that everyone should know. For the majority of our audience, it will be something of an eye opener.
You can read the essay piecemeal in html format here if you want to (Clicking on the embedded hyperlink above will take you to a PDF of the Essay).
I came across this courtesy of the Policeman’s Blog. Just goes to show what drugs can do to you.