Daily Archives: December 1, 2009

Spilling State Secrets

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I had no idea that I could have let the proverbial cat out of the bag when I linked to different ways of lacing/tying your shoes. But it turns out that the CIA used lacing patterns as ways to send messages (slideshow). It’s the visual part of Tinker, tailor, soldier… illusionist?

“The instant the performer sees the spectator take a cigarette, cigar, or pipe, he takes the packet of matches from his pocket, tears off one match, and holds packet and match ready to ignite the match,” the magician John Mulholland wrote in a manual in the 1950s. “He does these things openly because what he does can only be looked upon as a friendly and courteous gesture.”

Mulholland’s instructions were written not for stage magicians, but for the covert operatives of the CIA. At the height of the Cold War – in the era of nuclear missiles and submarines, amid the tangled cloak-and-dagger maneuverings of espionage and counterespionage – the agency was also secretly doing something else. It was trying to learn to do magic.

Fortunately it’s all been declassified. Whew!

More Professors Who Lie

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Catching up with blogs after Thanksgiving travel. I saw this on Chad’s linked list. Zen Moments: My Favorite Liar

What made Dr. K memorable was a gimmick he employed that began with his introduction at the beginning of his first class:

“Now I know some of you have already heard of me, but for the benefit of those who are unfamiliar, let me explain how I teach. Between today until the class right before finals, it is my intention to work into each of my lectures … one lie. Your job, as students, among other things, is to try and catch me in the Lie of the Day.”

And thus began our ten-week course.

I think that’s a pretty interesting way to engage the students.

Later on, the author lists some lessons learned from the exercise, including

“Experts” can be wrong, and say things that sound right – so build a habit of evaluating new information and check it against things you already accept as fact.

It should probably go without saying, but this holds true for nonexperts, only moreso. Skepticism is a tool that gets refined as one progresses in science, and one tends to develop a decent BS detector. For claims that jibe with what I already know, provisional acceptance is easier. If an assertion seems dubious, I require more convincing. I like Feynman’s trick (can I use that word, in light of the recent kerfuffle?) which he explains in one of his books, of thinking of an object or scenario, trying to disprove an assertion.

That's Entertainment!

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xkcd: Physics for Entertainment

Physics for Entertainment was written by Yakov Perelman in the 1920’s (in Russian) and updated periodically through the 1930’s. There are actually two parts to it, but Volume 1 is long out-of-print (though findable online — more on that later). The book I have is a 1975 translation of Volume 2. The book is a series of a few hundred examples, no more than one or two pages each, asking a question that illustrates some idea in basic physics.