What item caused this problem? My brother's toy railway set. It had metal tracks and if you stacked the track segments on top of each other you ended up with what appeared to be very suspicious parallel metal plates.
Fortunately the Australian guys were very professional and just let us go when they'd found out what it was. There was no nonsense about confiscating anything that looks odd.
]]>Meanwhile, the idea of outlawing false positives also extends to drug testing (and other, medical tests). Every few years you read about another poor sap sent back to prison for eating poppyseed bagels. And although there's no judicial sanction, your doctor will be quite displeased with you if you eat or drink prohibited items before diagnostic tests.
]]>Kawasaki and some other companies use this method to impregnate cylinder walls with harder-wearing metals. The sacrificial wire is run axially down the semifinished bore, then whacked with a bazillion or so amps. The impinging metal is supposed to be a plasma when it hits the wall.
> banned shapes
Though currently newsworthy due to "zero tolerance" policies in schools, *pictures* of banned shapes go way back, in the forms of banned religious or political symbols, gang tags, etc.
]]>What if it had been a Golf ball?
As this was the name (supposadly) given to the initiator at the core of the sphear.
However I then thought back to times when I suffered the durance vile of security and "Clear Desk Policy" and I remember a write up I got for a chocolate bar, (which they did not give back which annoyed me more). What had happened was I'd cleared my desk for the day and whilst searching my pockets to check I had not put my keys wallet in my desk by mistake, I put the chocolate bar down on the desk next to my bag, picked the bag up whilst turning to go I left the bar. Thus a simple mistake actually caused by the security policy (ie once you'd left the building you could not get back in till the following morning, so checking personal items like keys etc was important) caused me to break another part of the security policy.
But importantly for this post was the write up of the security misdemeanor, in the appropriate box it gave the reason as "left mars bar on desk". That is they named the object...
So the thought occured maybe this "orange" incident was not about the shape of the object but just a description of the object left on a desk in a clear desk policy area and it was actually written up as "left orange on desk".
Oh and when you think about the TSA/school/etc security policy of banning something that looks like a banned object it actually makes sense from an overall perspective.
If an indistinct outline of what looks like a prohibited item is seen then the object needs to be further checked to see if it is a prohibited item. This causes considerable disruption and thus cost of resources. They cannot "not investigate" because that opens a security hole, but they also (I know it sounds strange) don't want to cause disruption either due to the delay and cost to others. It's "Dammed if they do and dammed if they don't" or "Catch 22" for them. Thus banning items that look like prohibited items doess make some sense. However because of the further "Catch 22" potential of giving either discretion to agents or spelling out each and every Go/Nogo on look alike items you get what for them is the safe route of a blanket ban which includes T-shirt images.
For the TSA it's a "Fail Safe" policy and when the occasional bit of bad news happens over a T-Shirt issue or a "Velvet cup cake in a jar" it is not realy the public ire they are woried about, it's that of their PayMasters think.
And it's easy when the paymaster says,
"Why did you allow this to happen?"
to say,
"Well the rules you approved say this, the agent followed the rules, OK they were being a bit over vigilent, but with those sneaky journalists always trying to make us look bad, do you realy want the agent to be undervigilant?"
To which the only answer can be "No"...
]]>This being bluntly obvious, I should patent it.
J.
Which, in fact, is hard. Modern warheads don't need many detonators to fire at the same time. They need exactly two -- by using the right combinations of slow and fast explosives, and an oblate primary, they achieve a near perfect implosion using only two, rather that thirty-two detonators. And getting two, rather than thirty-two, detonators to fire simultaneously is easy -- use the same (large) current source, two current lines of identical length, and slapper or exploding bridgewire detonators.
The problem with this is "what if one goes off accidentally?" Thus, the many "single point detonation" tests conducted in the 1980, most of which resulted in fizzles, but a couple of the early ones resulted in 18-25kt detonations.
Two point primaries have another advantage. They're not spheres, they're sharply oblate spheroids, which fit much better into a conic reentry shield, with a spherical or cylindrical secondary behind them. See the W-88 design, where the very oblate, possibly asymmetrical oblate (read, peanut shaped) primary rides in the point of a a reentry shield, with a spherical secondary behind, where the cone shaped reentry shield is widest. End result, ~500kt out of a throw weight under 400kg.
Slapper/Exploding bridgewire detonators are a classic example of "hit something hard enough and it will blow up". You charge a low inductance, high voltage, and high capacitance capacitor, and dump that power though a very fast switch, like a spark gap, thyratron, or krypton, through a very low impedance and low resistance lead, into a very thin wire in contact with a secondary explosive. When the fast rising and high current pulse hits the detonator bride wire, it literally explodes. A slapper detonator has a sheet of metal that focuses that explosion into the secondary explosives, but fundamentally, they work exactly the same way -- ram enough current in a short enough time through anything, and it will blow up hard enough to set off a less sensitive explosive.
]]>And this is exactly the irrational mindset and approach being employed and proposed by hoplophobes around the U.S., and unfortunately, in Congress. Those who know little about firearms (cf. "the shoulder thing that goes up") and history have no solution to the problem of violence, but to ban, ban, and ban some more, despite substantial evidence (and logical thought) which demonstrate that such laws have no effect. Of course, this process is driven by the mistaken notion that the govt. must do something about every problem of society, which we all know is a fool's errand at best.
]]>wg
]]>I note that in today's (Jan 3) Washington Post is a report that a six year old was suspended for "pointing his finger like a gun and saying "pow"". Where is the reasonableness in this, what lessons are we teaching by such theater?
]]>It is just institutionalized paranoia. All security men are the same, drawn to the work by their own insecurities and fears. They may be sincere patriots, but their sickness is what makes them demonstrate their patriotism in this manner.]]>
("Those scientists buy plenty of bananas but no apples or oranges. Perhaps they're working on something apple-shaped?")
]]>After running my bags through, The scanner operator called over a supervisor and his assistant, then started asking a bunch of pointed questions about what exactly was in a specific compartment in my bag.
Turns out a plastic bag with a bunch of Angry Birds 'stress balls' looks really suspicious. At the time I was thinking that it might look like a drug stash, now I'm reconsidering...
]]>
The same thing happens medically. I can't give blood or donate organs here in Canada because I grew up in the UK and so have BSE/JCD. But I can't give blood in the UK because on the way here I stopped in the USA and so - having spent a day in Newark Airport - have West Nile Virus.
My family in the foreign country got me several gifts. One of which was a lava lamp. Another was a toy with concentric metal rings that span on their own axis, which was itself connected to the next outermost ring.
The boxes these came in happened to be the same size. So I made the sensible choice of packing them one on top of the other in my luggage.
...
The Australian customs scanner people freaked the hell out.
It was okay though - chuckles all around once they'd opened the suitcase and inspected the toys.
When I asked what bothered them the customs officer was nice enough to show us the image as they'd seen it... And yeah, I can see why that freaked them out so badly. It was totally a fair call to search my luggage in those circumstances.
It helped that the Australian customs people were very professional during their freak-out and very sweet and friendly about it immediately afterwards. My experience with US airline service is limited... But even so, I suspect that my customer experience at an American airport would have been somewhat different.
]]>The reason is to make abuse more difficult - if it was a perfect sphere, you "merely" would need to set off all detonators around the sphere at the same instant. Instead, there's a tamper resistant control mechanism that will send the detonation signals at precisely timed intervals so that those explosives furthest out will detonate first.
If done out of sequence, the implosion will not achieve criticality, or at least have a reduced yield.
]]>