Silverware Thief

Here are two things, not of sufficent worth to rate a post by themselves. The last is something that could make a very long post, but which I don’t have the time at present:

Fatal Mushroom

If you promise to never, ever, eat a wild mushroom, you don’t need to read this article. Go here to read about Amanita phalloides, the poisonious mushroom that is responsible for the majority of fatal mushroom poisonings worldwide. It is estimated that 30 grams (1 oz), or half a cap, of this mushroom is enough to kill a human.

For The Geeks

As a follow-up to my note on the ENAIC, here is the wikipedia article on the IBM 305 RAMAC, the first commercial computer that used a moving head hard disk drive (magnetic disk storage) for secondary storage. Just so geeky, man.

Save The World

This is a follow-up to my post on Able Archer. Stanislave Petrov saved the world from nuclear annhilation. His reward? He was given a reprimand. His once-promising Soviet military career was permanently ruined. He took early retirement and suffered a nervous breakdown. But never fear, on May 21, 2004, the San Francisco-based Association of World Citizens gave Colonel Petrov its World Citizen Award along with a trophy and US$1000 in recognition of the part he played in averting a catastrophe.

So in the end he was award one thounsand dollars for saving the world. Who ever knew it came so cheap.

More seriously, it is chilling to read of what happend:

Stanislav Petrov, a Strategic Rocket Forces lieutenant colonel, was the officer on duty at the Serpukhov-15 bunker near Moscow on September 26, 1983. Petrov’s responsibilities included observing the satellite early warning network and notifying his superiors of any impending nuclear missile attack against the Soviet Union. In the event of such an attack, the Soviet Union’s strategy was an immediate nuclear counter-attack against the United States, specified in the doctrine of mutual assured destruction.

At 00:40, the bunker’s computers reported that an intercontinental ballistic missile was heading toward the Soviet Union from the US. Petrov considered the detection a computer error, since a United States first-strike nuclear attack would hypothetically involve hundreds of simultaneous missile launches to disable any Soviet means for a counterattack. Furthermore, the satellite system’s reliability had been questioned in the past. Petrov dismissed the warning as a false alarm, though accounts of the event differ as to whether he notified his superiors or not after he concluded that the computer detections were false and that no missile had been launched. Later, the computers identified four additional missiles in the air, all directed towards the Soviet Union. Petrov again suspected that the computer system was malfunctioning, despite having no other source of information to confirm his suspicions. The Soviet Union’s land radar was incapable of detecting missiles beyond the horizon, and waiting for it to positively identify the threat would limit the Soviet Union’s response time to minutes.

Had Petrov reported incoming American missiles, his superiors might have launched an assault against the United States, precipitating a corresponding nuclear response from the United States. Petrov declared the system’s indications a false alarm. Later, it was apparent that he was right: no missiles were approaching and the computer detection system was malfunctioning. It was subsequently determined that the false alarms had been created by a rare alignment of sunlight on high-altitude clouds and the satellites’ Molniya orbits, an error later corrected with cross-reference to a geostationary satellite.

Petrov later indicated the influences in this decision included: that he had been told a US strike would be all-out, so that five missiles seemed an illogical start; that the launch detection system was new and, in his view, not yet wholly trustworthy; and that ground radars were still failing to pick up any corroborative evidence, even after minutes of delay.

We came that close to all going up in a bright flash.

The lessons one could take from this are multitude, but I’ll leave you ponder them yourself.

Read the rest of the Wikipedia article here.