Charles sent me the link to the Grand Central of adhesives — a quite remarkable resource whenever one needs to stick “this” to “that other stuff”.
For those seeking a real adhesive challenge, consider the non-destructive crayfish gluing problem.
…What we need to do is glue the carapace of live adult crayfish to the inside of a plastic Nalgene centrifuge tube, which will then be placed inside a tiny (3.7cm) custom-made fMRI coil. We have to glue them in because if the animal moves at all, the image will be blurred. We might also be gluing the animals’ eyestalks in place because if they move, the brain moves.
Here’s the catch: because adult crayfish of the biggest size are difficult to grow, expensive to obtain, and rather endearing once you get to know them, we’d like to be able to dissolve the glue once we’re done so that the crayfish can be re-used, go on living their little crayfish lives, etc. So we need a glue that dries fast, won’t dissolve in water, is relatively nontoxic, and can be dissolved by a relatively nontoxic solvent. Any ideas?
A comment from Roger Pielke on the previous post:
Bob Herbert’s column today in the NYT is “climate porn”:
“As I’m writing this, the lights have been dimmed in much of The New York Times Building . . .”
His solution? Elect Al Gore.
Al Gore was on a Boulder radio station yesterday, asked what people can do about global warming, he replied, “See my movie, buy my book . . .”
OK, then what?
Roger Pielke, Jr. offers some serious comments [and some BBC humour]. Recommended:
…I very much agree with these views, but I do have two quibbles with the overview of the report. First, missing here is a discussion of the role of the climate science community, within which many have taken on as a personal mission the task of convincing people not only that climate change is real, but that anyone who deviates from the “consensus” should be vilified or silenced. Yes, there is a scientific consensus on climate change as described by the IPCC, but it offers little prospect of compelling a political consensus. Consequently, efforts to use science to force political action are in my view one of the driving factors behind “climate porn.”
Second, Retallick suggests a focus on “large actions” like hybrid cars or insulation instead of “small actions” like turning down the thermostat. From where I sit hybrid cars and wall insulation are “small actions” when compared to the challenge of stabilizing atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations. The report does not go far enough in discussing the complete transformation of the global energy infrastructure needed to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations at anything close to today’s levels. Where is the discussion of nuclear energy, vast investments in energy R&D, or even air capture? The report does not apparently acknowledge that solutions will unlikely to be motivated by climate concerns alone (as I discussed in my recent testimony before the U.S. Congress, PDF), which further underscores the pathological role played by climate porn.
If you’ve only gotten your news about Hurricane Katrina from the mainstream media, everything you think you know about Katrina flooding New Orleans is probably wrong. On this first anniversary of the tragedy, while the networks congratulate themselves on their often wildly inaccurate reporting in the days following Katrina, there’s a far more important story not being told.
I wouldn’t have seen Kevin Aylward’s analysis without Captain Ed’s referral and commentary. Kevin’s opening quoted above is a true statement. Read on for a succinct summary of what we now know.
Surprisingly, the video gives us every indication that New Orleans was doomed with or without Katrina. The amount of water in the canal was not unusual and, in fact, that wall had held far more water on previous occasions; that was before it was undermined for the better part of a year.
All this leads to the even more shocking conclusion that Hurricane Katrina probably saved 50,000 lives.
That levee was doomed. While Katrina was the last straw, it was destined to fail. Studies done before the storm indicated that if a major hurricane overwhelmed the city’s levees, as many as 100,000 people would die as a result.
If the levee had failed without warning, there would have been no evacuation, no preparation, no state/federal support, no Coast Guardsmen in helicopters etc. If you think Katrina was bad with governmental preparations, consider an event half that size without it.
Captain Ed wrote
The same bad reporting that happened when the eyes of the nation were fixed on New Orleans — do you recall news reports of cannibalism, roving bands of rapists, hundreds of homicides, toxic flood waters that would kill on contact — persisted in the weeks afterwards. The news agencies seemed so intent on scoring points off of the Bush administration that they neglected to research the real problems in New Orleans: the lack of any coordinated local response, the refusal of Louisiana to authorize military intervention, and the real reason for the levee failure.
Incredibly, the evidence was available almost from the start. A video taken by firefighters at the start of the collapse showed the water levels behind the levees as far below what had been assumed, and far below water levels in the past. This led investigators to look further into symptoms of an engineering failure — and they discovered that residents had warned for months about seepage under the levees, a sign that the walls had already begun to catastrophically fail.
LONDON, Aug. 27 — On Aug. 9, in a small second-floor apartment in East London, two young Muslim men recorded a video justifying what the police say was their suicide plot to blow up trans-Atlantic planes: revenge against the United States and its “accomplices,” Britain and the Jews.
“As you bomb, you will be bombed; as you kill, you will be killed,” said one of the men on a “martyrdom” videotape, whose contents were described by a senior British official and a person briefed about the case. The young man added that he hoped God would be “pleased with us and accepts our deed.”
As it happened, the police had been monitoring the apartment with hidden video and audio equipment. Not long after the tape was recorded that day, Scotland Yard decided to shut down what they suspected was a terrorist cell. That action set off a chain of events that raised the terror threat levels in Britain and the United States, barred passengers from taking liquids on airplanes and plunged air traffic into chaos around the world.
The ominous language of seven recovered martyrdom videotapes is among new details that emerged from interviews with high-ranking British, European and American officials last week, demonstrating that the suspects had made considerable progress toward planning a terrorist attack. Those details include fresh evidence from Britain’s most wide-ranging terror investigation: receipts for cash transfers from abroad, a handwritten diary that appears to sketch out elements of a plot, and, on martyrdom tapes, several suspects’ statements of their motives.
There are details here, including indications that the plot-launch date was “not imminent”. One perspective is too view the timeing of the rollup positively “they stopped the carnage — maybe left some blokes yet to be uncovered”.
[#1] Inform drivers of the spread of commute time options. [#2] Offer the drivers real-time routing options at market prices [you can only take the superfast route if you have paid the tariff]. This is good work by UT Austin researchers — drivers will adapt to “congestion pricing” to cut commute times by choosing off-peak times.
Kockelman says such simple market mechanisms can solve traffic problems without requiring the construction of new roadways. “Meeting travel needs is largely a function of sending appropriate pricing signals to travelers,” she says. “We can allow them to make their own decisions, rather than having to expand capacity in our nation’s already extensive roadway networks.”
I worked on similar traffic optimization schemes when at Carnegie Mellon grad school in the 1960’s. Our simulations indicated possible slashing of commute times by offering real-time route-timing data to drivers with real-time route-pricing elections. I think the Kockelman study indicates that a usefully-largish segment of the commuter population will pay for minimizing commute time.
Security guru Bruce Schneier examines some of the security flaws, concluding that RFID should be the last technology to be considered:
The State Department downplayed these risks by insisting that the RFID chips only work at short distances. In fact, last week’s publication claims: “The proximity chip technology utilized in the electronic passport is designed to be read with chip readers at ports of entry only when the document is placed within inches of such readers.” The issue is that they’re confusing three things: the designed range at which the chip is specified to be read, the maximum range at which the chip could be read and the eavesdropping range or the maximum range the chip could be read with specialized equipment. The first is indeed inches, but the second was demonstrated earlier this year to be 69 feet. The third is significantly longer.
…But the State Department’s contention that they need an RFID chip, that smartcard-like contact chips won’t work, is much less convincing. Even with all this security, RFID should be the design choice of last resort.
Technorati Tags: RFID
They can steal your smartcard, lift your passport, jack your car, even clone the chip in your arm. And you won’t feel a thing. 5 tales from the RFID-hacking underground.
Technorati Tags: RFID
So far I’ve not been able to find a single source who thinks the RFID passports are safe, or can be made safe. The RFID content can be cloned:
A German computer security consultant has shown that he can clone the electronic passports that the United States and other countries are beginning to distribute this year.
The controversial e-passports contain radio frequency ID, or RFID, chips that the U.S. State Department and others say will help thwart document forgery. But Lukas Grunwald, a security consultant with DN-Systems in Germany and an RFID expert, says the data in the chips is easy to copy.
…Grunwald says it took him only two weeks to figure out how to clone the passport chip. Most of that time he spent reading the standards for e-passports that are posted on a website for the International Civil Aviation Organization, a United Nations body that developed the standard. He tested the attack on a new European Union German passport, but the method would work on any country’s e-passport, since all of them will be adhering to the same ICAO standard.
In a demonstration for Wired News, Grunwald placed his passport on top of an official passport-inspection RFID reader used for border control. He obtained the reader by ordering it from the maker — Walluf, Germany-based ACG Identification Technologies — but says someone could easily make their own for about $200 just by adding an antenna to a standard RFID reader.
He then launched a program that border patrol stations use to read the passports — called Golden Reader Tool and made by secunet Security Networks — and within four seconds, the data from the passport chip appeared on screen in the Golden Reader template.
Grunwald then prepared a sample blank passport page embedded with an RFID tag by placing it on the reader — which can also act as a writer — and burning in the ICAO layout, so that the basic structure of the chip matched that of an official passport.
As the final step, he used a program that he and a partner designed two years ago, called RFDump, to program the new chip with the copied information.
The result was a blank document that looks, to electronic passport readers, like the original passport.
There are weaknesses in the encryption:
“I was really surprised we were able to open about 75 percent of all the cards we collected,” he says.
And the chips can be read at a significant distance without the owners knowledge [69-ft is easy, several hundred feet is, or will be, possible], says Bruce Schneier:
The issue is that they’re confusing three things: the designed range at which the chip is specified to be read, the maximum range at which the chip could be read and the eavesdropping range or the maximum range the chip could be read with specialized equipment. The first is indeed inches, but the second was demonstrated earlier this year to be 69 feet. The third is significantly longer.
Technorati Tags: RFID
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