How to cope with very difficult people.

People are willing to be helpful if approached in the right way. There are lots of cantankerous people in this world who are perfectly agreeable in many situations but are chronically difficult much of the time because they inadvertently force people to approach them in the wrong ways. The question becomes how do we bring out the best in people around us and avoid tripping the annoyance button on naturally irritable people? There are many factors effecting aggressive behavior but one of the basic ones is known as testosterone poisoning. That hormone creates an irritable sensitivity in people, and is more usual with males, because they are more loaded with it. These hormones can often be spotted at a distance and we are probably programmed to see it and avoid confrontations. It is one of those automatic things like easily spotting eyes looking at us. Most of the time normal people just avoid these people and try to ignore them when they come near. But that isn’t always possible.

Cesar Millan, the Dog Whisperer, shows how to deal with dogs with attitudes similar to these problems. With dogs Cesar would remain focused erect, calm firm but not aggressive and not make any eye contact at all for several seconds by looking to the side and beyond the individual at the horizon. This makes one appear assertive without being aggressive. At first, it’s “No touch. No talk. No eye contact.” This is dog etiquette but it is probably good human etiquette too when dealing with a potentially aggressive person.

Police when they come to these types of people do something very similar and I suspect it is part of their training. They tend to take on a blank but alert facial expression as if they are mentally practicing their take-down procedure for this individual. Cesar will put a dog down into a laying on his side position to gain dominance over an aggressive dog but it seems cops prefer face down with hands behind the back. This is probably because of the anatomy of the two species but it achieves the same effect because a calm submissive state is soon adopted when held down. Cesar will have a firm grip on the back of the neck of a dog, in that condition, for a few seconds.

I never have confrontations of this type but have seen them several times.

How can a world of debauched people be saved?

Yesterdays post was about the book State Secrets: An Insider’s Chronicle of the Russian Chemical Weapons Program by Vil. S. Mirzayanov which was about the development of chemical weapons and nerve gasses. The whole subject is distasteful and the worst part wasn’t the perfecting the techniques for killing — that has been going on since the very beginning of life itself. What was most disturbing to me was the keen intelligence of the author and yet his willingness, even eagerness to participate in this kind of research and development. It saddens me because I have encountered it time and time again when meeting with famous scientists. What bothers me is what fine people they are and how dedicated they seem to be in trying to make the world a better place. The people I have known have been associated with designing and deploying H-bombs and not nerve gasses but the end results of their works are going to be the same — lots of human beings dieing agonizing deaths.

These scientists were not doing their creative work for the money! The author of this book, Dr. Mirzayanov when in prison tells the story of a conversation with a murder who claimed to spend more on women every night, before entering prison, than this world-class research scientist earned in a month.

I don’t believe these brilliant scientists were evil and that their motivation was in the least motivated by wanting to destroy other human beings. The ones I have met have been some of the most pleasant people one could hope to meet. And yet …

It isn’t because these extraordinarily intelligent men haven’t thought about the outcomes of their research and development. J. Robert Oppenheimer famously said on seeing his first atom bomb explode at Alamogordo,  ”Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” And yet he went on developing weapons until forced to quit because of his suspected possible loyalties to communists. I met privately with him at his house in Princeton and we talked for half an hour. I found him to be one of the friendliest and most considerate, of my personal feelings about things, of anyone with whom I have ever spoken. You can convincingly fake being nasty much easier than fake being a really decent person and he was a decent person.

One would doubt that their motivation be, the gaining of respect of the other people in their chosen fields of science, when so many of these companions end up treating them so very badly? Dr. Mirzayanov’s book gives many examples, in his book, of ugly behavior by those with whom he supposedly is on the best of terms. He is photographed with looking as comfortable with some of these others as a couple of lovers and yet they easily get ugly and deceitful. Oppenheimer had very similar problems with his companions, such as with Edward Teller.

Perhaps they were seeking public fame. This seems unlikely because most scientist types, and certainly the ones mentioned in this post were reputed to be very private people. Perhaps they wanted some personal self adulation and the public adoration was only some sort of proof of their self aggrandisement.

Is it, as I wrote a couple of days ago in Is a perfect world possible? 

Perhaps unlimited debauchery is the natural human condition.

 Each human being is only seeking their own form of debauchery and for these scientists it is found in research. That their work is destructive of humanity doesn’t compute in their equations for unlimited satisfaction for their personal form of debauchery.

State Secrets: Russian Chemical Weapons – review

State Secrets: An Insider’s Chronicle of the Russian Chemical Weapons Program by Vil. S. Mirzayanov is for me a very scary book for several reasons. (1) You can’t trust a nation’s leadership to tell the truth even when they are making solemn international agreements. (2) You can’t expect the legal processes to reliably release innocent people. (3) You can’t expect the formal powers that are in control to follow clearly stated laws when it conflicts with their own self-interest. (4) You can’t expect scientists to keep secret their success in creating novel new ways of killing people. (5) You can’t expect the details of how to create these new ways to be kept secret from other governments. (6) You can’t expect that the exact methods for creating these horrible new war gasses from becoming common knowledge easily available on the internet.

My take home message after reading this book: This book is a must read for all policy makers of the world because it illustrates why it is so important to have verifiability of instituted agreements. Making fine sounding laws written up into eloquent text and spoken by refined  politicians with perfect idealistic rhetoric means absolutely nothing and in fact may be counterproductive without a mechanism for checking to make sure everyone is obeying the agreements. This requires numerous parties with conflicting interests traveling into the mutually antagonistic situations with different supporters to be able to check everywhere and at any time for compliance. Furthermore, there must be built-in instantaneous punishments for noncompliance. This can be done by having each independent party having something of great value already submitted to a holding authority and held in common by the other parties which can be taken away immediately.

If one of the parties can circumvent the agreed upon conventions then they have an advantage and if they can keep it a secret they have a double advantage, if they can keep the other from developing the parallel advantage they have a triple advantage and if they end up deploying the item, such as a super poison gas weapon, they have an ultimate advantage. That is why the inspecting teams must already have in their possession the power to punish the transgressors instantly. Punishment after thoughtful deliberations for transgression is futile because there is always plenty of weasel room in post negotiations.

This all seems obvious but the book shows that even as major chemical warfare agreements were being drawn up between the USSR and the Western Powers there were cunning efforts to write out of the negotiations subtle precursor war chemicals which could easily be hidden in standard agricultural insecticide production. Thus there could be developed a vast weapons program which could easily be hidden. Apparently thousands of tons of these precursor chemicals were stockpiled for near instant use even though the chemicals themselves were relatively benign. The contending countries were developing what are called binary weapons which mixed the relatively safe precursor chemicals in special artillery shells after they had been fired from a standard gun. Thus relatively safe “agricultural chemicals” could be transported to a battle field without violating the carefully negotiated conventions. This is a policy of evil hypocrisy carried to the ultimate chagrin and destruction of common humanity.

At great risk to his life Dr. Mirzayanov had worked for years helping to develop these chemical weapons and then at what appeared to be even greater risk to his life he became a whistle-blower on the hypocrisy of their development. He published an article called A Poisoned Policy which exposed the Russian political duplicity on this issue. He was brought before the judicial system of the old USSR with a recent veneer of a new more democratic constitution but the enforcers of this new system were still of the old mentality. Although eventually declared innocent of the charges he was subjected to months of prison confinement before and during a secret trial so brutal it can only be thought it was intended to sicken and kill him.

In my proposed beautiful new world of the distant future Weapons of Extermination ( WOEs ) must not only be unavailable they must he absolutely hidden and those who seek them or the knowledge of how to make them must be eliminated. That may be harsh to these few intentionally evil people but it is kind to the vast numbers of innocent ones.

In the future world we may have peace— in the present world, never.

A common language of the future.

What language will people be speaking 5000 years from now? That is a silly question and my linguist friends will no doubt get upset. They want to study languages in their native state and luxuriate in the various ways humans have found to communicate ideas. They are chagrined because human languages are being lost at an alarming rate and they are making efforts to record the vestiges of the thousands of languages which were once in common use in isolated areas. It is a losing battle because for most people it is more economically valuable for them to speak one of the major languages. And even most major languages are congealing into a limited few mostly moving toward English.

Mandarin Chinese has the almost a 1000 million native speakers with Spanish second  with 329 and English third with 328 but English has the most people chosing to learn it as a second language. Over a vast period of 5000 years of time postulated none of these languages might still be intelligible to anyone as a first language. And yet, languages which have been written down have still been recognizable and useable a thousand years later, Latin for example. With popular media such as recorded TV a popular language with an abundance of interesting content might last even longer. A top quality HDTV now delivers a satisfactory story telling medium and that seems to be what people want most, at least for now. Even more interactive media can be transmitted directly to these audio / video devices and it doesn’t seem that improving the quality of the media ten times over would do much to improve the human experience. So the mediums of screens and internet and improved input devices would not change the language used but would instead tend to stabilize it over the whole world.

What would be improved might be linking together of people to those other people with whom they would most enjoy communicating in a more instantaneous interactive way. This of course is what is being implemented more fully as I write. It is unknowable how far that will go but my question is, will it change the language. New words will come and go but as a general rule writing that uses many newly popular words dates itself and is soon thought of as out of fashion and old. The basic language, which is the simplest and the most commonly used is what persists the longest. With a whole world of people speaking the same language there would be great inertia to any changes to the basic language. At the moment English has the greatest assemblage of readily accessible human knowledge because spoken Chinese is not intelligible to all its people and even its written language has several related but not totally interchangeable forms, which may be seen on the Chinese Wikipedia. China is definitely on the rise but even there they are moving toward an English style for their writing and speaking. Americans and the rest on the non-chinese world are not moving toward learning the Chinese language. What access there is to that vast culture is mostly through translation.

Language tends to follow those who the controlling political power and for the last couple of hundred years that has been English-speaking peoples. Language also follows the money, like much else, and that has also been largely controlled by English-speaking peoples. If the current trend of the Chinese people choosing to learn English then even if they do control the military and monetary power the language of the future may still remain English.

When everyone is watching the same TV and other media there is a smoothing out of basic inconsistencies even though local dialects create new ones. But the local ones are transient in this context like popular specialized words. That will tend to make the universal English drift toward a tighter basic language but with a greater number of new words for describing local events and things. These words function more like personal identifying names do for individual people and are not part of the basic language.

Some simplified universal language like Esperanto might become popular but English has so much inertia that it will be difficult to displace until there is a mass of good literature and TV and other media. Some simplifications of the words in the English might be introduced such as the Probaway Numbers system which are more easily spoken numbers with unique single syllable sounds which are easier to use and to remember. This system was created because if anything is easier to use it becomes more useful. It simply replaces difficult to pronounce number-words with similar single syllable number-words.

There will probably arise many other simplifications of the standard spoken English. These undiscoved things may be similar to: the decimal notation system, or the Metric measurement system, or even the alphabet system of notation system, which are easier to use and eventually permeate the whole society. With a one world society, which we now have because of the internet, there are forces of convergence moving society towards the easiest and best way to do things — even speaking. Shakespeare’s local London-English is still easily understood after 400 years with only the written word to stabilize the language. Now, with a vast amount of knowledge in English, to stabilize it, there is much more inercia to drag us ten times longer into the future.

Current spoken English will be recognizable in 5000 years.

Is a perfect world possible?

What to do now? The eternal question which people usually have answered for them by the necessities of their life situation. Most of our efforts are made trying to satisfy some demand placed upon us because we have chosen to do something which in most cases could have been easily avoided. Most people find themselves in some sort of debt to other people usual monetary and so they have to work to have the money to pay off the debt which they voluntarily contracted. Servicing these self-imposed debts consumes quite a bit of people’s time and energy but then what to do with the remaining time? Unfortunately it appears that most go to the mall and find something else to buy and thus to incur more debt so they haven’t any time.

When they have even more freedom to behave as they wish and find real meaning to their life they, likely as not, get involved in some unresolvable political turmoil and if that fails there is always some religion to take away one’s time and excess money. This all gives grander meaning and structure to their otherwise out of control  and individually trivial life. 

All of this was a prologue to my continuing quest for a year 7000 world. Which comes with some special problems. I have been assuming that the Doomsday wars have come and gone and either the remnants of humanity has been reintroduced to uncivilized savagery or it has found answers to my two primal problems (1) how to stabilize population at some number which the Earth can support and (2) the extermination of the knowledge of Weapons of Extermination. Assuming that has been done, what will the people of Earth be doing with their time? Is a perfect world now possible?

5000 years in the future scientific questing will be over because everything that can be experimented upon will have given what ever answers can be found, that humans are capable of understanding. Technology will have been developed to the point whatever can be manufactured will be available to everyone. All knowledge that people need to know will be readily available and all of the needs of daily life will be easily fulfilled. World travel will be cheap and easy but without cheap fuel for jet airplanes a little slower than at present. But the need for travel will  be less demanding because almost everything will be experienced remotely on the supernet so there will be less need to travel.

What will be entertaining? Certainly everyone would get bored with the 5000th World Series, or 5000th Superbowl, or the 10 millionth variation on some musical theme or the billionth rerun of Seinfeld. So much of what we find engaging today is based on some sort of unexpected quality but after so very many repetitions even a very dull intelligence would get bored and want something more. What ever it is someone will find some way to provide it.

What could possible be the meaning of life for people who have all of their basic necessities and most of their whims readily fulfilled? Perhaps — it would simply be debauchery or some sort of gaming the system which would give people’s lives some continuing thrills. For example, this week the big news event is the nuvo-billionaire golfer, Tiger Woods was spending $20 thousand a day on sex partners.  All too frequently we are astonished by some well-known politicians having similar sex scandals or their talking ecology while personally jetting about to their twenty expensive houses sprinkled around the world. To me those activities are the craziness of sane people. It just doesn’t seem to satisfy a normal need, or does it? Perhaps that behavior is normal. I have never had unlimited access to these things and maybe I would like them and wouldn’t now be puzzling over them.

Maybe human beings are insatiable and no matter what they have they will want more. But that, it seems to me, is a slippry road into despair. People need a deeper meaning for their lives than screwing other people, don’t they? Perhaps helping other people is the most satisfying thing for people to spend the time and energy. Or perhaps not helping but competing with other people. I wonder if Tiger was having a more fulfilling life with his paid women than he was with his legitimate family.  Only he knows, but because he was willing leading a debauched life that would ruin his normal life perhaps it was what he wanted. He wanted it because it was better in some way. This has been reported to have been the life style of other rich and famous people. To me it seems empty. Arnold Scwartznegger, who has had access to unlimited power and money appears to be living a much more meaningful and satisfying life.

Back on our families peppermint farm where for several summers I worked personally distilling hundreds of gallons of pure peppermint oil there was a simple experiment one could easily perform. Take a stick, dip into some pure peppermint oil and sniff it. It smells wonderful. Now get it closer to your nose and sniff it and it is even better but it burns the sinus a bit. Get it closer and closer and it always smells better and better but there comes a time when the pain becomes so great you just can’t endure it and so you are forced to terminate the pleasure to avoid the pain. Evolution has had the time to balance some of  these pleasurable things for us but not debauchery — not yet.

Perhaps unlimited debauchery is the natural human condition.

How to make big stone domes cheaply.

Large storage containers are needed when preparing for the year 7000 CE. When planning for things which will last for 5000 years there are some constraints that ego driven modern architecture ignores and that is permanence. The 5000 year time frame was chosen because that is how old civil culture is — it’s the age of the Egyptian pyramids. Those structures and some Roman ones have survived for thousands of years which proves that permanent buildings can be made. Most construction of modern civilization will vanish in 5000 years unless continually maintained on a yearly basis. Properly built stone structures which do not depend on any degradable parts like wood or iron can easily last much longer. Some massive concrete structures might last if they are never stressed too much but even as massive as dams are they are not built to last that long.

Some 2000 year old Roman arch bridges are still in use and the Coliseum would still be a good theater if it hadn’t been used as a mine for rock used in the construction other buildings. The Pantheon of Rome which is of the same age is made of concrete and so it can not be easily mined for its construction materials and is still in good condition. The lesson here is that our permanent storage containers should be made of a permanent rock like granit which cannot be easily used for another purpose. They should be useful in their constructed state without any modification and where modifications would decrease its usefulness. It should be almost indestructible and yet have a large protected volume. It seems that cheaply constructed Pantheon type structures would be ideal. Because this is a long-term structure quick building methods are not a requirement nor a large work force but always safe and solid structure is needed during construction is needed.

Construct a spiral of stones, not cylindrical courses, starting from ground level which slowly curves inward to form a dome could be done by a few workers. The stones are place one upon another and after the first base stones the others are always abutting another one to the side and always abutting on the bottom. As the dome rises the base of each block should be cut so the eventual stress of the completed dome is perpendicular to the surface of the stone benieth it. At the top this angle will be almost vertical but the pressure exerted by the leaning stones will be much greater than the weight of the cap stone and even without any friction would be held in place by the balancing of forces. That is the completed condition but the stones being placed in the last several courses would be seemingly almost hanging in mid-air held in place only by two near vertical surfaces. This can’t happen and must be compensated for. That is usually done by temporary scaffolding holding the whole dome up. In this plan that isn’t necessary if cables are attached to each stone and the cables are pull back with the same force and direction which the stone will have when the dome is completed. There would be a  cable needed from each individual stone of the top course stretched down along the outside to near the base and one on the inside to preserve balance forces on the stone also going back to an anchor near the base. A balancing cradle would be temporary installed at the interface between the stones and their cables. From the moment a stone is placed in position it has the same forces placed upon it as when the dome is completed.

A standard self erecting derrick would be erected in the middle of the dome to lift the stones up to their final positions and when finnished could leave an open decorative annulus at the very top after the derick was removed, as was done in the Pantheon. A closeable window could cover the whole.

There are other quicker ways to make big domes but they require more scafolding and workers. The guiding idea was to minimize cost and effort by stretching out the sequences. This was an excercise in trying to find construction techniques which are cheap but very long lasting so the ultimate cost would be quite cheap.

Living antifreeze compounds may save species.

Upis ceramboides has a biologically tolerated antifreeze.

 

Nature magazine 03Dec2009 page 546 had a brief article about a non-freezing beetle. This beetle can survive temperatures as low as – 60°C. Most creatures including humans tissues explode when their temperatures go below 0°C as the water inside the cells expands when it converts into ice. (This article was a report on Pro, Natl Acad. Sci. USA 106, 20210-20215 (2009)). Previous animal based antifreeze compounds have all been proteins but this Upis ceramboides is using something else. 

These antifreeze compounds may become important for The EarthArk Project because many living seeds cannot be frozen and remain viable. This inability to endure freezing is true of tropical seeds which never encounter freezing weather although high latitude seeds which have routinely encountered freezing have evolved mechanisms for coping and can be sent directly to the EarthArks. The temperate ones are intermediate. The EarthArk Project places materials into soil covered storage containers at altitudes of 3500 meters or more in the mountains of Antarctica where the subsurface temperature a few meters down never varies from about -45°C. The area near Mt. Vinson Massif ( at -78.5 -85.6 ) at 3800 meters altitude should be one of the most consistently cold locations on Earth. In those cold storage conditions the seeds should remain fertile indefinitely, that is in excess of a few thousand years. At the moment there is no way of knowing how biological antifreeze will function in these other species. 

If the antifreeze could be introduced into the freeze sensitive creatures, plants and seeds, perhaps while still living, it might be more likely to recover them thousands of years in the future and then be able to reintroduce them into appropriate environments. Many species are being lost at present and this would be a way to recover them later when the Earth is restabilized. Great efforts are being made at present by various ecological organizations to save these species but these efforts probably cannot be maintained during times of great wars when every nation will expend their uttermost energy just to survive. And during a truly devastating Doomsday type of all out thermonuclear war a great many species will be lost forever. 

The EarthArk Project will have some strange answers to as yet to be asked questions.

Jack the Ripper was Arthur Conan Doyle

This blog has posted unequivocal clues pointing to the identity of Jack the Ripper for several months. No one has come forth with his name so having said the name time and again in very thinly disguised code here it is in plain text. Jack the Ripper was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. There I have said it publicly on the internet for everyone to see. With that simple revelation you can now easily decipher why each of the clues point to one and only one person, Conan Doyle.  

On April 15, 2009 I wrote, … I am going to go sort of slow on these clues to the identity of Jack, about one a week or so, because they are so obvious that once you see them there isn’t much of a game anymore. It is going to be all of the usual stuff, it’s just that once you know what clues to look for Jack’s identity becomes glaringly obvious. By the way his name is NOT on the usual list of suspects. That will soon be upgraded.  

There may be more representations of the fictional character portrayed below than any other fictional character except perhaps Dracula. More on that later. For our Christmas present 2009 Hollywood is about to have yet another screen representation of his quirky sleuth Sherlock Holmes.   

Homeless - A suspicious Character - 13 Oct 1888 Illustrated London News

 

  Jack the Ripper pursued by Sherlock Holmes and Dr. James Watson
Must it be spelled out to you? Homeless = Holmes S or would you prefer a picture of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. James Watson printed in the newspaper with Sherlock in his iconic deerstalker hat with his companion Watson in his bowler hat. The picture above was published before they would be recognized by the public even by Doyle’s own artists which at that time did the picture seen below. Without the magnifying glass and Rache  Sherlock would be unrecognizable 

Do you recognise the 1888 image of Sherlock Holmes?

 

Why is Jack the Ripper still famous? This seems like a foolish question until you think about for a minute. Once you Ripperologists start thinking clearly about some of the clues it becomes obvious who this very unusual person had to be. Here it is more than one hundred and twenty years after his murders and yet, Jack the Ripper is still famous. That simple fact is very informative. Why. Because it is the sign of a world-class good story-teller. There have been tens of millions of homicides, including military ones, since 1888 but we still remember these five.   

A photograph of the Jack the Ripper in the victim’s eye.  Who in the world would come up with such a ludicrous suggestion for discovering a killer except for someone giving clues—whose first and last name both refer to the eye. Conan as in con to look—as in conning tower of an airport. And Doyle which in the french language means of the eye. Or perhaps someone who had published many articles about photography or perhaps a budding eye doctor.   

Dear Boss – Jack the Ripper It is unquestionable that with the publication of this Dear Boss letter this serial killer became known as Jack the Ripper.   

   

Dear Boss letter - page 2

 

  It is self consciously challenging, funny, and cute. It is clear that the author wants to be known and respected and is seeking this rather desperate way to gain fame. Of course he didn’t want to be buckled or he would be executed for these crimes so he couldn’t sign his personal name. Or could he? Perhaps with a slight code — ha ha   

Note the name Jack the Ripper easily converts into the initial letters of Ignatias Arthur Conan Doyle, Doctor. Doyle’s name and title. He was a practicing medical doctor at the time. The English letters I and J are often interchangeable as in the spelling of John as Ian and thus his initials JAC becomes Ignatius Arthur Conan. The Ripper becomes D ripper and medical surgeons are sometimes jocularly called rippers.    

This letter is known as the Dear Boss letter and once you are looking for Arthur Conan Doyle’s name it become easy to find.   

Dear Boss = De as in of or by — ar as in Arthur — and Boss as in a lump a bump a condyle. Thus we have — by ar condyle = By Arthur Con Doyle.  The very first words in the letter is the proper name of the sender of the letter and the self-proclaimed killer. 

The two most well-known things about this letter are thus found to be Conan Doyle’s name lightly encoded.  There are more, for example: 

The concluding letters, ha ha lean towards his famous political cartoonist grandfather who used the secret identity HB for decades without being caught.   

Jack the Ripper had a chameleon personality.  Today I want to emphasize that Jack had a chameleon like personality. He was able to compartmentalized his thoughts and behavior and to present the personality which suited his purpose at the moment. Therefore he was a consummate actor as well as being a cold-blooded killer and skilled butcher. London in late 1888 was in a state of panic about the previous murders and the helplessness of the police. Yet, even at this time when everyone, especially women at night, would be desperately cautious he had such highly developed acting abilities that he was able to lure women into a place where he could not only kill them but immediately butcher their dead bodies. It takes a very unusual person with unusual motives to do all of those things and do them well. One curious item was that not only did Jack do reasonably commendable surgery on these women who were living and laughing only a few short seconds before but he did it in the dark and very quickly because the patrol policeman was coming by any minute. Jack was a very talented man with morbid courage and abundant experience with swift killing and butchery. All of that is obvious but these are also obvious clues to his identity because so very few people possess them.   

Doyle spent nine months on a whaling ship, his last year in medical school, where he was the doctor. In his biography he says he spent a lot of time killing seals and skinning them immediately. He said it was difficult at first killing these cute little creatures but he got used to it and skilled at it. A handy set of traits for Jack to be able to kill cute women and then skillfully cut out particular organs — in the dark, with the police looking for him. There wouldn’t be many surgeons or butchers who could do that, in the dark, without removing their own fingers.   

Jack the Ripper was a consummate doer of evil.  With this post I gave away Conan Doyle’s initials plus a vowel in the title. A CONsummate DOer of evil. Who in the world could and would commit the evil acts which Jack the Ripper committed? The only possible answer is a consummate doer of evil. How can one claim otherwise? This man reveled in evil deeds and is famous for it and for making the evil of the deeds interesting to the public. In this case he was so evil that he chose women for his attacks that had done very little that was criminal or even more than slightly immoral. 

Why should Jack have brought about these exotic attacks? The reasons are pretty obvious: he wanted to be famous and he was willing to take real risks to gain that fame. He wanted to gain personal fame for the murders but he didn’t want to be identified just yet or he would be hung. He wanted his personal name to be revealed long after he had died when the fame associated with his personal name might be fading. He wanted a way to revivify his name and fame. This post is the beginning of fulfilling Doyle’s wish. He wanted to commit the perfect crime, to make the crime famous and to have his personal name associated with that perfect crime to expand and retain his fame. He wanted to be famous not just for a few weeks but for his entire lifetime, long beyond that and even into an after life. He wanted to reveal his name a long time after he had died a normal physical death in old age so that the getting away with murders for such a long time would enhance his reputation and fame even more. Jack the Ripper is screaming his name at YOU and I! Even though he died physically July, 7 1930 and is lying peacefully in his grave he wanted you to know who he was and to revere him even more than you already do.   

Why can’t people trust their own senses? One of the strangest phenomena I have observed about human beings, at least the ones I know personally, is their inability to trust the observations of their own senses. That quality becomes very apparent when I discuss something so obvious as the various clues in the series of crimes labeled, “Jack the Ripper”. The fact is that the perpetrator of those crimes signed them with his own personal name and it can be readily seen by anyone who knows that person’s name and yet when ordinary people see the name they will quickly say, it isn’t there. That I am imagining it, even though they see it and they will say that I am projecting my preconceived thoughts onto this 121 year old piece of paper. Oh, yes they will say, it is there but that is just a strange coincidence and it doesn’t really mean anything. Yes it is there but if you look around you can find any person’s name on the document, if you look hard enough. Perhaps that is true, but I say, this isn’t just a random picking out of letters helter-skelter from around the document it is picking out the most famous words in the document. It is like picking out the most famous word in a famous novel of the time, say, Dracula and then saying that that exact word is the clue word to who wrote that exact book, (it is generally acknowledged by Bram Stoker authorities that he didn’t write it) that that word is the unknown person’s personal public name known to everyone. Shortly after the Jack the Ripper murders there was a famous fictional killer who lived in exactly the same address location as the most famous Ripper victim, Mary Kelly, and his name was Dracula. It’s like implying that Dracula is the murderer of Mary Kelly.   

Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, Jack the Ripper and Vincent Van Gogh What a famous bunch of cut-ups all doing pretty much the same thing at the same time. Here it is some 121 years later and those folks are still famous for their sharp “wits”. Van Gogh used his upon himself and cut off his left ear and gave it to a hard-working girlfriend Rachel for a Christmas present. Now that’s a weird gift to find under your tree! Sherlock Holmes, a fictional character like Dracula, seems unrelated until you notice that the very first word of this entire canon of sixty stories is pictured in the word Rache which is linked early in the story by the not too bright police detective to the word Rachel. The first edition of the book Study in Scarlet was in the bookstores at the same time these other events were in play. The blood on the wall forming the word Rache was taken from the slashed throat of the victim, Enoch (James) Drebber (You should now be suspicious of I am es D Repper) — Jack the Ripper was slashing throats for his Rache at the same time. And so was Vincent for his Rachel.   

“Jack the Ripper left no clues”?! Ha! Ha! What a joke !!! Here it is 121 years after the Jack the Ripper events in London’s Whitechapel district and millions of man-hours have been wasted in searching for him and still the authorities claim they have no clues. The simple truth is that the murder left an absolute blizzard of clues and these millions of sleuths have been too dull-witted to see what is placed before their eyes, in plain sight. It’s rather similar to The Purloined Letter by Edgar Allan Poe. 

There is a long list of Jack the Ripper suspects in the Wikipedia. That is the current state of the Ripper art and it is unfortunate that there are so many decent people being accused of these vicious crimes. What is particularly sad is that all of these Jack the Ripper suspects have had their memory egregiously sullied but they are all innocent.  

Now you know how to spot the tell-tale clues. You know my methods, now apply them. Apply them to the prime suspects of the Jack the Ripper murders who themselves had mysterious deaths. 

Jack the Ripper was A Conan Doyle ~ !

Reducing NOx pollution a little bit

My car consistently gets fabulous gas mileage on the highway. On trips, where I can cruise at 67 mph and use a whole tank full with only one stop, my 1996 Geo Prizm (Toyota Corolla clone) gets 51 mpg, consistently . That is approximately double what an average car on the American roads gets and even Corolla’s are generally considered to be in the 34 mpg range. 

My 96 Geo Prizm overlooking Lake Tahoe CA - ( at +38.8202 -120.0273 )

 I have wondered why this car gets such great mileage but barely passes the famously strict California smog tests. Actually, it does great on all the tests but one, the NOx test but on that one test it almost fails. I have suspected that high NOx was because it was running hot and at high-compression even though it never has shown hot on the temperature gauge or had pings when I accelerated. I do accelerate rather conservatively but cruise with the traffic in lane two on four lane roads, which is generally about 67 mph.
Earlier today I was asking my auto mechanic friend John if enlarging the combustion chamber with a thicker head gasket would make any difference in my NOx rating. He didn’t know for sure but because my car is so close to failing a percent or two might make the difference between pass and fail. So, I thought about some alternatives and chased down this emission chart put out by the Department of Energy and Climate Change. 

Generic air/fuel ratio combustion zone curves

 Assuming this chart is applicable to my standard 1600 cc gasoline engine it appears that my car’s engine is operating over on the right side near the pink zone. Perhaps a previous owner shaved the heads for some reason and didn’t install thicker head gaskets to compensate for the removed material which gives my car more compression and higher operating pressures and efficiencies. Generally for most people operating at overly high compression is bad because it puts more demand on the driver, of a 5-speed stick shift, not to over stress the engine by lugging it at slow rpm. That lugging might result in pinging and dieseling and blow out the engine’s cylinder walls. That was an engineering compromise that somehow, in my used car, got overridden. I like the great gas mileage but because it has come close to failing the NOx test I am trying to figure a cheap fix for picking up a percent of NOx improvement. I think I have one. Remove the spark plugs and put a second gasket on each one. That seems like a tiny amount but it is ten times bigger than the simple volume because where this counts most is when the piston is under full compression and that is about ten times atmospheric pressure. 

A 1600 cc engine has about 400 in each of its four cylinders and when that is compressed ten to one the volume we are actually concerned with is only 40 cc. Spacing the spark plug back with a gasket 2mm thick in a hole about 12mm wide gives 2 x 3.14 x 6 x 6 =224 cubic millimeters or .224 cc. That divided into the 40 cc of compressed fuel air mixture gives about 177 or about one half of a percent. So, if there were a linear relationship of compression to NOx in that situation then there would be about a half a percent improvement in NOx production. Since my car’s engine is within about a percent of failing a half a percent might make it into a pass. I said in the title it was a little bit of improvement but sometimes that is enough.

Who will be the most hated person in history?

The intent of this post is to continue looking back at the present year 2010 CE  from 5000 years in the future at 7010 CE. We will try and estimate who will be the most hated person in history at that future time. The starting point is with a Google search - most hated person in history -  which finds the current favorites but they are almost entirely about the current media-hyped people of recent killers and surprisingly of the Octomom: The Most Hated Person In American History

Top 10 most Evil Men Google search gets a much better list for the purpose of a future search being more historical in orientation. During 1974, visitors to Madame Tussaud’s internationally famous wax museum in London were handed questionnaires that asked, “What person do you most hate and fear?” Results of that and a check of similar internet polls are approximately as shown in the chart which follows. It was made by simply mashing together of several other lists to made up the following composit one:

1. Adolf Hitler - Germany - Started WWII, genocide Jews
2. Jack the Ripper - London - Most infamous serial killer
3. Moshe Dayan - Israel – Administered a difficult area
4. Muammar al-Gaddafi - Libia - Lockerbie airliner crash
5. Osama bin Laden - Arabia - Destroyed World Trade Center
6. Pol Pot - Cambodia - Civilian genocide
7. Saddam Hussein - Iraq - Genocide Kurds
8. Timothy McVeigh - USA - Terrorist bomber
9. Vlad Tepes - Dracula - Rumania – Exemplary homicides
10. Ivan The Terrible - Russia - Founder Russia
11. Alexander The Great - Greece - Captured Near East
12. Attila The Hun – Russia – Terrorized Europe
13. Napoleon - France - Successful tyrant
14. Josef Stalin - USSR -Ukrainian genocide, gulags
15. Leopold II - Belgium - Genocide Congo
16. Idi Amin Dada - Uganda - Genocide
17. Ruholla Khomeini - Persia - Islamic revivalist
18. Maximilien Robespierre - France – Organized Terror
19. Ramesses the Great - Egypt - Enslaved people
20. Henry VIII - England - Legaly murdering wives
21. Nero - Rome - Extravagant and tyranical
22. Tomas de Torquemada - Spain - Inquisitor
23. Adolph Eichmann -  Germany – Genocide
24. Mao Zedong - China - Genocide China
25. Genghis Khan -  Mongolia – Genocide Asia
26. H. H. Holmes - Chicago USA - Serial killer
27. Gilles de Rais -  France – Child murder
28. Micolae Ceausescu - Romania – Ethnic strife
29. Basil the Bulgar Slayer - Central Europe - Emperor
30. Heinrich Himmler - German – Genocide Jews
31. Talat Pasha - Turkey - Genocide of Armenians
32. Christopher Columbus - Spain - Genocide America
33. Oliver Cromwell - English - Genocide Ireland
34. Fransico Pizarro - Span - Genocide South America
35. Julius Ceasar - Roman - Genocide Europe
36. Hernan Cortes - Spanish - Genocide Mexico
37. Lyndon Johnson - USA - Genocide Viet Nam
38. Harry S Truman – USA - Genocide Japan
39. Richard M. Nixon - USA – Genocide Viet Nam
40. Nadia Suleiman - ( Octomom ) - USA – Genocide Earth

This is an interesting list and many of the people are truly evil but many where great heros of their native country. It is difficult to put a patriot attempting to fulfill the needs of his native land as a person worthy of hate from the stand point of 5000 years in the future. Under that venu a lot of people who did really horrible things recently might slip past my postulated future hatred.
However, when observed from the distant future we would be looking through the eyes of people who were living in the remnants of a world subjected to repeated Doomsday wars. Those H-bomb wars are far beyond the levels which we presently consider really bad. Those future wars will be where billions of people are killed in a short time by Hydrogen bombs and the immediate after effects. These are wars which will totally degrade the whole planet for all future time. They are much worse events than the destruction of some nationality because not only will it do that it will destroy the health of the whole planet forevermore.
These future people will see the most evil people as those responsible for bringing about the Doomsday disasters. The individuals seen as responsible will be those who brought those weapons into existence and those whose judgements brought about their use.
My list of the people most hated in the year 7010 CE would then include:

First – Those who helped create the bomb:

1. Albert Einstein - Father of Modern Physics
2. Einstein–Szilárd letter - Forced USA to build A-bomb
3. Franklin D. Roosevelt - Ordered A-bombs construction
4. J. Robert Oppenheimer - Built first A-bombs
5. Glenn Seaborg - Furnished Plutonium for bombs
6. Edward Teller - Created first H-bombs
7. Alfred Nobel - Encouraged development with prizes

Second - Those people who deployed the 1st bombs:

1. Harry Truman - First to use A-bombs & ordered H-bombs
2. Curtis LeMay - Called for A-bomb & H-bomb attacks

Third – The people who are now responsible for these Weapons Of Extermination (WOEs). They are still only at high risk of becoming the most hated people in history. Those presently threatening to use these weapons may set off an unstoppable chain reaction precipitating massive weapons use.

1. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - Claims he will bomb Israel
2. Benjamin Netanyahu - Preventive strike against Iran
3. Barak Obama - Support of the preventative strike
4. Overpopulation - Supporters of unlimited fecundity
5. Nadia Suleiman – The population bomb exploding

From the distant future most those people who found their way to the top list will be historical figures remembered fondly like Alexander the Great. The people from the bottom lists are now thought of highly by their respective nations but after Doomsday they will hated by the survivors. My take home message:

To believe that H-bombs will never be used is hallucination.

To hope they are never used is overly optimistic.

To plan for their use is pessimistic and morbid.

The builders of the EarthArks gives humanity a second chance and will be remembered fondly the builders of the A-bombs will be hated.