I love stuff like this. Just plain incredible!
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4cX2EPt2zE]
via Icy Finger of Death | Frozen Planet Premieres March 18 on Discovery – YouTube.
Category: Science
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TSA Nude Body Scanners Don’t Work
Controversial nude body scanners used at U.S. airports have come under fire again – after a blogger claimed he could easily smuggle explosives through them onto a plane.
Engineer Jonathan Corbett has published a video where he shows how he took a small metal case through two of the TSA’s $1billion fleet in a special side pocket stitched into his shirt.
This is because, he suggests, the scanners blend metallic areas into the dark background – so if an object is not directly placed on the body, it will not show up on the scan.
The metallic box, he claims, would have set off an alarm had he passed through the old detecting system.
His revelation comes just weeks after Europe banned the ‘airport strip-searches’ over fears the X-ray technology could cause cancer.
via Daily Mail (UK).
A fascinating article about how the TSA is basically only creating the illusion of security.
[Corbett] added: ‘Now, I’m sure the TSA will accuse me of aiding the terrorists by releasing this video, but it’s beyond belief that the terrorists haven’t already figured this out and are already plotting to use this against us.
‘It’s also beyond belief that the TSA did not already know everything I just told you, and arrogantly decided to disregard our safety. The nude body scanner program is nothing but a giant fraud.’
There are only two options:
- Either the TSA was already aware of this serious flaw in these machines; in which case they have been snapping naked images of U.S. travelers needlessly and possibly giving them cancer without providing any increase in security, or
- the TSA was un-aware of this serious security flaw in these machines; in which case they are all bumbling idiots and this is just another example of government intrusion into our private lives run amuck.
This calls for a congressional investigation.
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Himalayan Glaciers Lost No Ice in 10 Years
The authors of the U.N.’s climate policy guide were red-faced two years ago when it was revealed that they had inaccurately forecast that the Himalayan glaciers would melt completely in 25 years, vanishing by the year 2035.
Rajendra Pachauri, head of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and director general of the Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) in New Dehli, India, ultimately issued a statement offering regret for what turned out to be a poorly vetted statement.
A new report published Thursday, Feb. 9, in the science journal Nature offers the first comprehensive study of the world’s glaciers and ice caps, and one of its conclusions has shocked scientists. Using GRACE, a pair of orbiting satellites racing around the planet at an altitude of 300 miles, it comes to the eye-popping conclusion that the Himalayas have barely melted at all in the past 10 years. …
Some previous estimates of ice loss in the high Asia mountains had predicted up to 50 billion tons of melting ice annually, said Wahr, who is also a fellow at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences. Instead, results from GRACE pin the estimated ice loss from those peaks — including ranges like the Himalayas and the nearby Pamir and Tien Shan — at only about 4 billion tons of ice annually.
Bristol University glaciologist Jonathan Bamber, who was not part of the research team, told the Guardian that such a level of melting was practically insignificant.
“The very unexpected result was the negligible mass loss from high mountain Asia, which is not significantly different from zero,” he told the Guardian.
via Fox News.
What the?! This is the problem with some (not all) scientists. There is the whole scientific method which is appropriate; but too many of these global warming folks seem to forget that you must rely on the results of testing (a/k/a observations) to enforce your conclusions. When the results (i.e. observations) are not in-line with your hypothesis (i.e. conjecture) then your hypothesis WAS WRONG.
i.e. Why is this guy — who was so clearly wrong years ago — still working at the U.N.? And how much are we paying him to be wrong all the time?
The problem with society and the media that they continue to give attention to these “scientists” who are wrong, and then wrong, and then wrong, again and again. We should not pay any attention to their their kooky ideas.
How this news story should read is:
Disgraced scientist, Rajendra Pachauri, once the former head of the U.N.’s IPCC and who was also the director of TERI has officially been proved wrong by actual scientific observations. Mr. Pachauri, once a prominent raising star in the scientific community is now selling cars in southern Kentucky. When contacted he stated, “I now realize I was wrong for many years issuing false reports based on bogus data but there can be no doubt that now is the time to get into a new Ford Feista which is both cute and gets great gas mileage.”
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Fermilab’s Tevatron Shutting Down
The Tevatron at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory will be shut down later this year after the Batavia-based lab failed to win additional funding from the Obama administration.
Once the world’s largest atom smasher — technically, a proton-antiproton collider — the Tevatron was scheduled to cease operations this year with the recent startup of a much more powerful accelerator known as the Large Hadron Collider, which straddles the border of France and Switzerland.
But with Tevatron running glitch-free and still producing useful research on the elementary building blocks of matter, Fermilab sought an additional $35 million a year to keep it going another three years, a proposal endorsed last year by a U.S. Department of Energy advisory panel on high-energy physics research.
However, the Energy Department last week notified the University of Chicago, which runs the lab for DOE, that the additional funding would not be included in the soon-to-be-released White House budget request for the fiscal year starting Oct. 1.
This is very sad. A long (LONG) time ago I took a series of Saturday classes out at Fermilab and learned about high energy physics and the Standard Model. It was fascinating.
This is a huge loss for the area, including Chicago. Fermilab employs some of the smartest people on the planet. People who were good to have in the neighborhood to work on things like solar power, new batteries for cars, LED lighting, improved windmill design, and the like. Many of these people will now leave the area. Dreadfully, many will head to Silicon Valley or Texas.
It’s sad Obama, our home town hero, couldn’t find a mere $35 million in the entire federal budget to keep this place running for another three years.
I say we fire half the aldermen thus saving more than enough to keep the Tevatron going.
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The Body Scan Scam
Let the dance begin. Security gurus versus privacy rights advocates are starting the new year off with a very loud public argument on the use of millimeter wave body scans at U.S. airports. The problem is that they’re not even debating the right question. Like many things, this would be funny it not for the potential deadly implications of the debate’s outcome.
Here’s the rub: the body scans which make your naughty bits visible to some TSA employee (and who knows where the images get stored or for how long) are worthless at detecting low density items like the explosive carried by the attempted Detroit Christmas bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. But because the Obama administration, Homeland Security, the TSA, and a whole bunch of other folks who have initials instead of names know this already that debate cannot be had. Why? Because it would scare the American people who might stop flying thus leading to another whole series of bailouts which are politically unpopular.
Choice quote from article:
Tests by scientists in the team at Qinetiq, which Mr Wallace advised before he became an MP in 2005, showed the millimetre-wave scanners picked up shrapnel and heavy wax and metal, but plastic, chemicals and liquids were missed.
Uh oh.
Kevin Murphy, product manager for physical security at Qinetiq, admitted this SPO system would also not have picked up the Christmas Day bomb, but insisted that it could be used as part of a “layered approach” to security in mass transportation, which would also include monitoring people’s behaviour.
But don’t worry, TSA just spent $165 million on these machines to provide you, the traveler, with the added cost, inconvenience, and potential humiliation just so that you can be provided with the illusion of security.
Please tell me that I’m not the only one who thinks we need to take a long hard look at air travel security in the country and come up with some real solutions instead of these stupid toys.