Making the best of a bad situation?

Sunday, March 13, 2005

Brilliant idea for a tattoo. Thanks to missmanners for sending it in…


LOVE… No Room for Hate

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How to (anally) hijack an airplane

Sunday, March 13, 2005

In the past two weeks I have taken thirteen separate flights on six different airlines on three continents and eight countries, and cleared security at ten different airports. Security is an interest of mine both personally and professionally, and at every one of those points it could easily be breached — and no reasonable measures could be put in to stop it. With virtually no effort I could have brought loaded firearms and explosives onto any of the flights, and I have come to the conclusion that the two main reasons we don't have more hijackings and suicide attacks with airplanes are:
  1. When it comes right down to it, not many groups or people actually want to do such a thing. It's like serial killing — the reason that we don't have more serial killers isn't because it's inherently difficult, but because it's simply not something that most people do more than fantasize about.
  2. Extremist Muslims and others who may have a terrorist streak in them are not interested in putting large objects up their ass. Suicide attacks? Sure, but don't touch my butt!

But take my second point seriously. The average person can easily anally accept an object an inch and a half across without any real training*.

* Funny story about that… a business partner of mine knew he was about to be spending some time in jail so he shoved some money up his ass before going in. On credit, he bought cigarettes and other goods upon his arrival, promising to repay the debt as soon as the money was “released”… problem was, the stress of being back in prison (and having to use a public toilet in front of others) made him totally unable to pass it, and the constant threats of “if you don't get me my money, I'm going to go in there and get it myself” weren't making things easier.

With a few months of training, objects three or four inches in diameter can be accepted without pain or stress — and that's just the “bottleneck”. The actual cavity is much larger. A dismantled and latex coated gun (ceramic and plastic to bypass the mag-gates) could easily be inserted along with magazine and ammunition, and never be detected. Several grenades can be shoved up there and emerge as deadly explosive eggs.

I'm mentioning this not as a recommendation, but to once again point out the obvious — breaching airline security is not difficult. This isn't the same as pulling a bank heist or some other form of security breach that requires finesse, nor is it entry into prison where searches involving personal violation are acceptable. If one's singular goal is moving weapons through a security checkpoint in order to take control of a situation, then success can be made certain with a little proctological thinking.

I wonder… when the “shoe bomber” scare was going on, they spent the next six months or so forcing everyone to have their shoes x-rayed. If someone actually pulls this stunt, I'm not looking forward to having a speculum shoved up my rump every time I fly.

Anyway… I took some pictures from the window of the airplane between Los Angeles and Mazatlan, Mexico (I have some from the second leg, but that's another entry). The photos above are all of the Baja Peninsula and the accompanying coastline on the mainland (note the second last one — something is on fire). My flight is delayed so I'm actually writing this entry from the Mazatlan airport in advance…

Other than that I've lost my voice from all the flying and can hardly talk right now!

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Where's the Johnson?

Sunday, March 13, 2005

All the flights to La Paz were full so I got stranded in Los Angeles. I had a reservation at the Howard Johnson because our original route back (via Cabo) required an overnight stop-over. I'd just missed the shuttle bus to the hotel so I decided just to hop in a cab and get there quickly so I could rest after sixteen hours of traveling.


Where to?
To the Howard Johnson please.
 You want a cheap hotel?
Yeah, the Howard Johnson is a pretty cheap hotel.
 So I take you to a cheap hotel?
You can take me to the Howard Johnson.
 Johnson? I don't know that hotel.
You've never heard of the Howard Johnson?
 I don't know this Johnson. What is the address?
I have no idea. It's the Howard Johnson, here by the airport.
 I take you to a cheap hotel? I recommend one.
No, I'm going to the Howard Johnson. I have a reservation.
 I have never heard of this Johnson hotel.
No. Howard Johnson. You know, HoJo?
 You should really write down the address of this Johnson hotel.
Look, just let me out and I'm going to take the shuttle bus instead.
 Wait, wait, I call.

At this point he calls his dispatch, and they speak intermittently in English and in Russian. The dispatch is eventually able to explain to him that the Howard Johnson does in fact exist and provided the address, although I think even he was unable to transform it from simply “The Johnson”. Am I assuming to much that an airport cabbie should know the major hotels around the airport? It's not as if it's an unusual or unheard of hotel. It's one thing to not know the exact address, but not knowing it exists?

I was going to go out for dinner, but time shift caught up to me and I didn't wake up until about 3 AM. Since direct flights to La Paz appear to be full, in a few hours I'll be headed off to a very brief stop in beautiful Mazatlan and then take a second flight into La Paz via Aero California.

I still have lots and lots of photos that I haven't posted, but I wanted to include a couple more from the stop-over in Amsterdam. I think if I moved to Amsterdam, I'd like to live on a houseboat, but I don't think I'd enjoy it for more than six months or so. They're fairly expensive too… the ones I've seen online are sitting in the quarter-million Euro range, which makes them more expensive than many apartments!

One of the things that's always funny to me is all the half-sunk little boats that line the canals. I'm not sure if it's just temporary swamping from the wake of many tour-boats, or if they're truly derelict and abandoned. In either case, the ducks prefer them.

I already miss Africa… That said, I miss working as well, and while I did work on this trip, I wasn't putting in my usual hours — and given the backlog that has developed, I'll certainly have that wish fulfilled for probably a little longer than I can handle.

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Heading back home

Saturday, March 12, 2005

I'm on my way back now (writing this from the Admiral's Club at Heathrow). I was thinking about all the places I've been and lived over the last decade and decided to list them in order of favorite to least favorite, in terms of whether I'd like to go back and whether I'd like to live there. While it does change from day to day as my mood shifts, here's my list right now…


Maui, Hawaii, USA
Jost van Dyke, BVI
Tweed, ON, Canada
Tortolla, BVI
Antigua
La Paz, BCS, Mexico
Big Island, ON, Canada
La Have, NS, Canada
Toronto, ON, Canada
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Philadelphia, PA, USA
Durban, South Africa
Chicago, IL, USA
Miramichi, NB, Canada
Windhoek, Namibia
London, UK
Johannesburg, South Africa
Basel, Switzerland
Liel, Germany

What's your favorite place? (42)

I may be forgetting a few places. Maui is at the top of the list because it's got an ideal mix of size (great connectivity for a tropical island), climate, people and politics, beautiful sunsets, and ocean (and it generally smells nice there). But I'm too poor to buy a nice house there. The Caribbean is up there for me as well, and I still want to buy the little house on Jost van Dyke… One day…

In Canada I really liked living in Tweed — it just needs better connectivity. I'm not a city person at all, and get depressed after a few days in one. That said, Canada is artificially inflated because I like the politics a lot, but given my lifestyle and the nature of the projects I'm involved in, it's favorable politics that have kept me out of prison (and continue to). No moving to China for me!

Africa was amazing, but its politics are deeply messed up and need to grow up before I'd move there (that said, I'm sure it's a hell of an investment). I don't just mean race relations and foreign meddling — I include just the bureaucracy of doing business, and the penalties that I could face as a fringe publisher.

Anyway, I'll be back in La Paz either this evening or tomorrow morning depending on if I can catch the right connecting flight in time… and then I've got mountains of work to get caught up on (and I'll have an article for BME on the whole experience as well written in the next week).

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Geoinformatics and spellcasting

Thursday, March 10, 2005

Keith wrote recently on geoinformatics (essentially the inclusion of location information in a data set, and the subsequent use of that data). I wrote a script a while ago that I'd intended to use as the basis for a short film that (not so seriously) declared that the real power of geo-informatics is in sacred geometry and magic. I may have mentioned it here before but I can't remember. I even partially built it into IAM as a proof-of-concept (or at least to generate real-world screen shots).

If you take a look at satellite maps of Europe and many other regions of this world, you'll see that it's far from “my” idea — the Knights Templar arranged their churches to appear as holy symbols (most often the five pointed star) from orbit, and landscape geometry permeate many cultures, and as David Miller points out, it's not that uncommon in most data sets and the analysis is a little dubious.

I've been working with geolocation data since the early 90s when it was relevant to phone dating systems (which I used to develop), so as you know it's always been an integral part of IAM as well. Below is a world map of all users online on IAM as I currently write this entry.

Anyway, the core of the story was writing software to identify moments in time when sacred symbols existed based on these location points (and the routes between them). Because each of these computers (and their human users) were accessing the same website, what the user was viewing — and thinking — could be controlled… by simultaneously displaying holy symbols in what they were viewing, spells were cast by involving individuals laid out over huge distances, all fixated on the same symbol, all located on the symbol itself, and all being electrically bombarded by the symbol as well.

Above is a zoom of this morning's map as well.

Don't worry if you're one of the datapoints, no spell was cast. ;-)

But seriously, I suspect that the power of advertising and capitalism — another area that geoinformatics shines — easily outdoes the magic. But really, what is advertising and capitalism if not a way to consolidate power and control into the hands of the minority? What is it but a way of taking the work of a group and ensuring that only a small number collect its blessings? Perhaps capitalism, born and nurtured with the help of major religions, is simply the next step in a multi-millennium long spell.

If you want to really see something scary, plot a map of all the Wal-Mart stores… you'll see that they've all been carefully placed in accordance to the laws of sacred geometry — immense Maltese crosses hundreds of miles across, Pentagrams spanning continents, and more. As to why or what it means or the power it's given them, I'll leave that up to you.

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