Monthly Archive for April, 2005

Old-style Nigerian scam: via fax

Published on April 30, 2005 in spam. Closed


Amazing: I just got my first Nigerian (419) scam via FAX! In these days of practically free email sending, you have to admire someone who goes the extra mile and pays for sending faxes. A handwritten letter would have made me feel even more special, but it’s a start.

A Mister Victor Abbor (vicabbor2@yahoo.com or vicabbor@sify.com) from Lagos has picked me as a candidate for transfering a substantial amount of money ($17.6 mio), formerly belonging to Mr. Akbar Ali, who unfortunately died in the Benin plane crash on Dec 25, 2003. I have to pose as a relative for Mr. Ali (I do have a slight tan from one week in Portugal, so I should pass easily for an African) In return, he would only take a meager 65% and leave me with the remaining 35% (what, no taxes?) which amounts to … $6.16 mio, or € 4.7 mio. A day’s work for a day’s pay.

Victor refers to articles on CNN.com: Benin crash, and Pravda.ru: Bloody Christmas. Obviously, the fact he knows these articles should be enough proof that he is indeed capable of touching the money. Funnily enough, just after asking my personal details, he signs the letter as Paul Udo. I’m confused now. Is Udo Abbor’s secretary or something? While “Victor Abbor” has no Google hits yet, “Paul Udo” does have prior activity: on nigerian419fraud.freeserve.co.uk he appears to have promised 30% of 32 mio to someone else. I suddenly don’t feel that special anymore.

The fax is supposedly sent from +234-7594683 (+234 is Nigeria’s country prefix)… Nah, I don’t think I’m gonna do it. If any one is interested in doing business with Victor/Paul, just let me know. Just browse through The Spamletters first to get a feel of how to do business the Nigerian way.

Know Your (Metric) Limits

Published on April 28, 2005 in bandwidth, hardware and science. 2 Comments


From Wired – July 2004:

The universe comes in a box. It’s a big box, and you almost never see the walls, but its boundaries are immovable – the speed of light, gravity, the way atoms interact. Even if time and space are unlimited and illimitable, physics, chemistry, and biology dictate maxima and minima in the universe. Like the strict meter and structure of a sonnet, they make the final product all the more beautiful. – Adam Rogers

5 billion Years – Maximum time Earth has left.

That’s when the sun goes red giant and expands past Earth’s orbit.

5.4 * 10-44 seconds – Shortest possible time.

Any shorter and quantum mechanics can’t tell whether events are simultaneous.

1.419 * 1026 meter (15 billion light-years) – Maximum distance we can see.

The universe is about 15 billion years old - this is light’s travel time.

1.6256 * 10-35 meter (6.4 * 10-34 inches) – Shortest possible distance.

Planck length: any shorter and quantum mechanics can’t tell between here and there.

34.92 km (21.7 miles) – Maximum height of a mountain on Earth.

Uplift reaches equilibrium with pressure at the base.

3.048 * 10-7 m (1.2 * 10-5 inches) – Minimum size of an actively growing cell.

Free-living cells need room for a full genome, proteins, and guts.

130 m (427 feet) – Maximum height for a tree on Earth.

Gravity overcomes surface tension in the plant’s circulatory system.

265 – Minimum number of protein-coding genes for life.

As seen in the smallest known single-cell organism.

200 million years – Maximum age of sub-oceanic crust.

Older than that: it cools, becomes denser, and “subducts” back into magma.

-273.15 ° Celsius (-459.67 ° Fahrenheit) – Minimum possible temperature.

Heat is a function of molecular motion, which stops at absolute zero.

338 km/h (210 MPH) – Maximum wind speed for an Earth hurricane.

A storm can acquire only so much energy from the sea.

0.24 second – Minimum delay of a signal sent via geosynchronous satellite.

It’s light speed up 35.600 km (22.300 miles), and back down.

430.000 Mbps – Maximum speed to record data to magnetic media.

Bits won’t flip reliably with a pulse under 2.3 picoseconds.

100 Tbps – Maximum information bandwidth over optical fiber.

Higher power levels mash signals together.

1051 operations per second – Maximum computational power.

Quantum rules won’t let the ideal 1-liter, 1-kilogram laptop crunch data any faster.

Contributors: Sunny Bains, Thomas Hayden, Greta Lorge, Michael Myser, and Boyce Rensberger / Sources: Fire in the Mind: Science, Faith, and the Search for Order (Knopf, 1995); Institute for Genomic Research; Lucent Technologies; MIT; NASA; National Institute of Standards and Technology; Nature; UC Berkeley; Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; Yale

via Andrew Ferguson and bytehead.org

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My favourite drummers

Published on April 26, 2005 in music. 1 Comment


Bernhard Castiglioni has created the ultimate drummer’s web site Drummerworld.com: bios and pictures of most of the world’s greatest drummers and lots of video footage. I’ve spent hours browsing through the recordings and here are some of my favourites:

  • Brian “Brain” Mantia’s gogo-beat: you don’t need dozens of toms and cymbals to lay down a funky groove
  • Toto’s Jeff Porcaro explaining how he created the “Rosanna” beat inspired by (he calls it ‘stolen from’) Bernard Purdie, John Bonham and Bo Didley.
  • Bernard Purdie who’s just fabulous but man, does he know it.
  • Jeff Hamilton doing some nice stuff with the brushes
  • Gavin Harrison mixes time signatures: Rhythmic Illusions
  • Rick Latham, with a hairdo that takes us back to the Miami Vice glory days, demonstrates the cow bell
  • Jojo Mayer showing how to do a quadruple bass drum beat with 1 foot and 1 bass drum
  • and the master remains Steve Gadd: see him explain the “50 ways to leave your lover” groove or more recent in the Drummers Collective: you don’t need volume to show off skill

Some names that I miss in his overview: Stevie Wonder, Dennis Davis (who played with David Bowie, Roy Ayers and Stevie Wonder), Phil Gould (from Level 42), Carla Azar (who played with Prince and Wendy & Lisa). Very few female drummers on this site, actually, and even less video footage of them.

And then some drummers who just like to show off:

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Instant Ken and Barbie: Melanotan to the rescue

Published on April 24, 2005 in science and Society. 1 Comment

Thus a drug called melanotan (…), which was developed as an analogue of this hormone to promote a natural tan as protection against skin cancer, was found to have the side effect of dramatically increasing libido in men and women during clinical trials. Female rats increased their rate of copulation by 300% after a dose of melanotan, and 80% men suffering from impotence reported getting normal erections after taking this drug. Melanotan also inhibits appetite by suppressing the action of the hunger center of the hypothalamus. So it makes you tanned, thin and horny – which is why it is sometimes called the “Ken and Barbie drug.”
from www.hss.bond.edu.au

Now let’s see how long it takes before I get my first “Herbal Melanotan” spam mail.

Also covered in: dissectleft.blogspot.com – www.adamsmith.org – news.bbc.co.uk

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