Clive Robinson • May 17, 2020 7:01 AM

@ Rachel,

But I do immediately think of John le Carre and ways to detect covert entry for example the hair over the keyhole

As I am still convalescing after my adverse run in with clarithromycin antibiotics, I’m doing a little light reading so I thought I would tackle “The Long Earth” series by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter this weekend as holding a paper back requires little muscular effort which is where the pain still arises.

Any way in the first book at the begining of chapter ten, there is a section about a confidential secretary “Hermione Dawes” to the UK Prime Minister and a little note about her security precautions about security service intruders.

“Nobody she worked with new her, she felt. Not even the gentlemen who, periodically, when she was known to be working, broke into her flat and searched it, always very carefully, no doubt sharing a little smile as they carefully replaced the tiny sliver of wood she pushed between the front door and it’s frame every day. Very similar to her own little smile when she noted that their big flat feet had once again crushed the scrap of meringue that she always dropped on the carpet just inside the living room door, a scrap they never ever noticed.”

What is sauce for the goose can also be sauce for the gander 😉

For a carefully prepared mind such “tell tales” can be myriad especially if the are happy to be thought of as either “not houseproud” or a “messy liver”. Whilst most are wise to the “James Bond” hair and talcum powder tricks and the placing of pens and other objects on computer keyboards and the like there are other things, like cloths apparently casually thrown in a laundry basket with say a sock leaning against it and the floor with the basket just in the way of a wardrobe door etc. Whilst they might put the basket back and put the sock back, will they get the folds in the crumpled blouse/shirt right or the angle it hangs?

Then there are “piano key books” on a shelf. That is if you have books on a shelf, you don’t push them all the way back, you then build a binary pattern or music cords in which books are a little further back than others. You know the tune or number sequence, will they not just not understand it but also not get it right? Probably not, will they photograph it correctly again probably not, their time is limited.

Then there are less visable tricks, a small piece of egg shell from a hard boild egg under a rug, will not get seen or photographed untill the rug is moved. Often rugs will not get moved because of the tassles or fringing could be set up in a pattern. Thus experienced intruders will also tend to avoid walking on rugs unless they have to. Obviously there are ways you can make them do so just by aranging other furniture and an “interesting object” that can not be reached except by crossing the rug.

Such games can be endless for those who have secrets to protect or find…

Clive Robinson • May 17, 2020 1:08 PM

@ Bruce, ALL,

It’s beyond Beyond Meat.

For over a hundred years vegitarians in America have been making “Thanksgiving Turkey” out of “beyond meat” products such as “nut meat” in something called “Mock Turkey”…

http://www.theoldfoodie.com/2009/11/thanksgiving-food-mock-turkey.html

During WWII due to meat shortages a similar moulding style was used but as pasta was even harder to get than meat parsnips were used to fake the legs and wings of a “Christmas bird” with the body made with sausage meat adulterated with other things. This two was called Mock Turkey,

http://calmlycreative.blogspot.com/2012/10/mock-turkey.html

Of the two recipies I would very definitely give the over a century old vegitarian recipe a miss, because it is realy realy not good for you.

As for the WWII recipe one of the comments mentioned using any left overs as “sandwich filling”… I’m not sure if the writer of that comment has ever eaten “National loaf” basically the flour has everything in it including the bran and probably grit from the millstones (atleast that’s what it tastes like). So even burnt black bits would improve the flavour of such bread, especially as it would be unlikely that you had butter or any other kind of fat to lubricate it with. I’ve been told that the only good use anyone found for such bread was to extract the dye from “agricultural petrol” so it could be dyed a different colour and sold on the blackmarket…

Interestingly at this time of “national crisis” the “National Loaf” has reappeared, although with slightly less bran in it,

https://www.msn.com/en-us/foodanddrink/other/british-bakers-reintroduce-world-war-ii-bread-in-coronavirus-fight/ar-BB12tahp

Mind you I still make a WWII dish from time to time, it acts as a filler/warmer soup prior to serving other food that is in short supply…

You need one quite large potato, (think baking size) two large white onions, one large can of corned beef, two tins of chopped tomatoes, one to two cans of water, one or two spoons of sugar, salt, pepper and either flour or digestive biscuits to thicken if required, though you can use porridge oats (oatmeal) as well. The thicker you make it the less other food will be eaten. An important consideration if you are rationing or having to “carry food in on your back” to a distant camp site etc. Oh if you cook it over a wood fire that is not made from pine or other conifers you can “stir in the smoke” for more flavour.

In a large pan add butter or oil, finely chop onions and potato and sweat them off untill they start to take colour thus taste. Finely chop corned beef and add to pan stir it in so it melts in add sugar and stir for a while so it takes a little more colour thus flavour. Add the two tins of chopped tomatoes and stir in add one or two cans of water and bring back to a gentle simmer. Taste and add seasoning. Using a hand blender liquidize the soup untill smooth. If it’s too thin then add a thickening agent I tend to use a crushed to powder wholemeal digestive biscuit or two when out camping as this is less to carry and thickens by just stiring in without excessive heating. Serve to as many cold and hungry people as required to take the edge off of their appetite before serving other food.

Clive Robinson • May 22, 2020 12:32 PM

@ Trudi Fenster-Klotz,

The use of “non thermal plasma” to decrease the viability of virii, is kind of new but not new.

Obviously if a plasma exists there must be energy involved with striping the atoms to form ions. That is known science in K12 level science classes.

The real question is what happens to that energy?

That is as either the ions recombine or the striped atoms combine to form molecules energy is given up to the environment, but in what form?

We know for instance with mercury strip lights the plasma gives out various frequencies of UV including UV-C which renders many pathogens not just virii unviable, as well as causing major surface level cellular damage in amongst many other living creatures mammals of which humans are a subset. This is because UV-C in it’s own right is ionizing.

Thus the question arises “does the energy released have to be ionizing?” Well the answer to that is as we know with microwave ovens “no”. These work by making OH groups on larger molecules vibrate very rapidly, thus create highly localised thermal energy. We know from cooking eggs and meat that protein actually starts to depolarize and thus become nonviable from a little over 40C. With sous-vide –waterbath–
cooking meat becomes perfectly cooked at as little as 60C and by 80C most pathogens we find in food have ceased to be viable[1].

Thus high intensity RF energy that can be made with plasmas could easily heat aby pathogen beyond being viable. However this would be quite energy intensive.

It’s at this point we need someone who does “plasma physics” to chime in with other suggestions as to a viable method.

However as “the laws of physics” and “the laws of thermodynamics” do alow this and potentially quite efficiently, I would say it is something that would be more interesting to find out about.

[1] As always there are exceptions some are plain weird[2]. A common bacteria spore of Bacillus Cereus found in dirt and excrement is often transfered to raw food. It can be found contaminating uncooked rice. Unfortunately the spores need to be heated by steam to over 140C to kill then (which is why you should never try to make your own “cooked rice pouches” etc and perhaps avoid making “egg fried rice” unless you have rapid chillers and steam cookers.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2130471/

The spores exist in many other foods than rice, however most foods get effectively destroyed by steam at more than 105C. So the food industry tried using a process that first gerninated the spores then killed the unprotected bacteria in an ordinary cooking process. As always there is a problem which is “superdormant spores” that don’t get easily germinated by the process but will go on to germinate after the food is cooked ans not stored correctly.

[2] Then of course there is the weird stuff, that is life around “black smokers” (one type of hydrothermal vent) that are in effect deep sub sea volcanos first discovered in the late 1970’s. Imporyantky the water preasure at 2000m 7000ft stops steam being easily formed and water tempratures can exceed 400C, but life exists in this weird lightless environment, ranging from micro pathogens such as bacteria all the way up to creatures that look like large shrimp etc. Without light the energy that supplies the food chain comes from the bacteria that generate it from the chemicals being spewed out.

https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-a-hydrothermal-vent-2291778

Clive Robinson • May 25, 2020 6:43 AM

@ A Dub,

because aside from my habitual skepticism, beaming 150kW of power through the atmosphere ain’t hay

You are both correct and incorrect, as you are a couple of bits of information missing 😉

Firstly as you heat air, it changes it’s optical properties due to it’s density change. In fact if you get a metal tube and spin it whilst heating it to near read heat, if you look down it’s “bore sight” you will find you have a lense. There was a paper on this some years ago that a snipit of ended up in New Scientist. If memory serves it was from South African researchers and they made a telescope as a practical demonstration. So remember “the transmission medium” absorbes energy thus has an attenuation coeficient that also changes with the mediums nonlinear properties (think a boiling kettle, it you look carefully you will see that at the spout where the real steam is it’s transparent, as it quickly cools the steam phase changes and condenses back to suspended water droplets, and forms a sort of white cloud most of us incorrectly call steam).

Secondly a well known problem with making holes in things is “swarf” that fouls the cutting. That is when you use a conventional drill the cut material blocks the hole and creates friction, heat and all sorts of issues. Thus most “drills” have a fluted or spiral series of lands designed to lift the swarf away from the cutting point. Lasers have the same problem as they ablate a material, the lifted material gets heated and forms an absorbing layer that significantly antenuates the power of the beam at the cutting point.

Thus using a laser as a coninuous wave (CW) at a point is realy quite self defeating. There are two solutions. Firstly move the CW beam around in a small patern which reduces the actual cut power as you are effectively spreading the beam energy over a much greater cut area. Secondly use Pulse Wave Modulation (PWM). If the laser is only on for say 10% of the time this alows much of the cut material to escape as vapour away from both the cutting surface but also out of the beam bore sight. On the face of it, this sounds like it would also reduce the beam power to 1/10th… but it actually does not. There are various “energy storage” places in a laser system one is the optical cell, so if you push 150kW into the cell the pulses coming out will be aproximately ten times the power in the pulse over one tenth the time, so the equivalent of 150kW mean or CW and 1.5MW peak at the 1/10th PWM rate.

A very similar trick can be done with thermionic valves / tubes and semiconductor devices. In essence what destroys them is heat disipation over a period of time. Thus a power transistor rated at 100W disipation, will provided you stay inside other limits give you a peak disipation of 1kW for a 1/10th PWM waveform. This has been exploited in high power RADAR systems for more than half a century. If you want to see just how much energy can be stored and released look up “water capacitors” which can store immense amounts of power before the dielectric (pure water) breaks down. More than enough time to charge ten or so in parallel to many kV then discharge them in series via a “UV triggered spark gap”.

Which brings us back to you idea about “sound”… It is known from mathmatics and physics, that if you hit a “perfect” resonator at it’s resonant frequency the energy builds up linearly to infinity. In practice the ancient Chinese with their very large “gongs / cymbals / bells” knew about this and could by carefull timing produce very intense and often destructive levels of sound.

There is also the issue of water in pipes, if you get the flow rate right and likewise the pipe mounting points, it will act as a self resonant resonator and if not damped will destroy it’s self fairly quickly.

Thus a PWM laser with an optical feedback system can be used to pump energy into a surface at it’s self resonant frequency, this turns out to be more destructive than burning little holes in things. Importantly, the beam does not have to be anywhere near as focused as it’s the “knock energy” that does the damage and a four by four timber works just as well for that as does drilling out several hundred little holes…

So if pulsed right, such that the side of a plane self resonates, you could get a good chunk of that 150kW as “sound power” conducted around the air frame and radiating into the internal spaces.

More interestingly you can “double modulate” the laser. If you can not just change the pulse repetition rate to the correct frequency you can then modulate the power in each pulse, the result being at the target the equivalent of an Amplitude Modulated signal at a much lower frequency. Humans are known to be susceptable to certain low frequency wave forms… Just imagine what would happen if you made the side of an aircraft not just resonate at some frequency in the upper audio spectrum but be amplitude modulated at those low frequencies?

For instance sound around 18Hz is known to cause people to have gut wrenching loss of bowl and bladder control as well as vomiting. Which is what you try and induce with various types of chemical warfare… Other frequencies will induce problems with your vision, whilst others have been found to cause people to colapse into a twitching pile.

Just something to think about 😉

Clive Robinson • May 25, 2020 12:45 PM

@ JonKnowsNothing,

Was this part of the enhanced techniques promoted by Mitchell and Jessen for use by the CIA?

I’ve little knowledge of either Mitchell or Jessen save for that which has appeared in some MSM articles. As for the CIA, what is “official” and what is “not official” interrogation techniques is far from clear, especially bearing in mind the behaviour of the current official in charge.

Whilst “infrasonics” can be used to tourture people it’s generally not that easy to generate with conventional audio equipment (think specialised bass speaker in a 27ft long pipe that’s around 30in in diameter).

The old tourture technique with sound used to be loud AGWN passed through a parametric amplifier than put into headphones at quite a high level. This could be combined with “flotation” in epsom salts at near body temprature. This used to cause the brain to become effectively “disconected with reality” in some but by no means all people subjected to it.

How effective it was I’ve no idea, but I do know that a large number of people used this form of “sensory deprivation” in a way not to disimilar to those using infected rye flour to get an Etgotim high on Claviceps purpurea poison from the “Rye Ergot Fungus” that can infest the seed head (looks like very small black catkins). Which was effectively an “LSD trip” and historically noted as causing “St Vitus Dance”.

I do know that quite recently US Diplomatic personnel at one mission started exhibiting strange symptoms and it was thought that maybe they had been subjected to infrasound. It was discussed on this blog as well.