The BBC has a report about the security of British nuclear bombs prior to 1998:

Newsnight has discovered that until the early days of the Blair government the RAF’s nuclear bombs were armed by turning a bicycle lock key. There was no other security on the Bomb itself. While American and Russian weapons were protected by tamper-proof combination locks which could only be released if the correct code was transmitted, Britain relied on a simpler technology

Papers at the National Archive show that as early as 1966 an attempt was made to impose PAL security on British nuclear weapons.

The Chief Scientific Adviser Solly Zuckerman formally advised the Defence Secretary Denis Healey that Britain needed to install Permissive Action Links on its nuclear weapons to keep them safe.

“The Government will need to be certain that any weapons deployed are under some form of ‘ironclad’ control”.

The Royal Navy argued that officers of the Royal Navy as the Senior Service could be trusted:

“It would be invidious to suggest… that Senior Service officers may, in difficult circumstances, act in defiance of their clear orders”.

Neither the Navy nor the RAF installed PAL protection on their nuclear weapons.

You can read the full article HERE.

This is the best book title ever. Kinda makes you wonder what the brown specks are in the bowl

Here’s a funny video of pranksters using Richard Simmons sound clips to prank call some guy.

(requires Adobe Flash plugin… click HERE to watch it on YouTube)

So I tried this new energy drink Verve, and the label said it had 80mg of caffeine. I got curious and decided to investigate how much caffeine other drinks (mainly soda) have. I discovered some things I didn’t expect: Pepsi One has more caffeine than Mountain Dew, and Diet Coke has more caffeine than Dr. Pepper which has more caffeine than regular Coke. A much more complete list can be found HERE.

Being the nerd that I am, I then went to WebMD and looked up caffeine. Here’s somethings I found:

“Caffeine exaggerates the stress response,” says James D. Lane, PhD, professor of medical psychology at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C., and a long-time caffeine researcher. “At the cellular level, caffeine locks the receptor normally used by adenosine, a brain modulator that provides feedback to avoid overstimulation of nerve cells. If adenosine is locked up, nothing keeps the nervous system from getting too excited at a cellular level.”

So what’s the harm, ask caffeine fans, who point to studies showing the benefits of caffeine, such as boosting memory and improving concentration and perhaps lowering risks of diseases such as Alzheimer’s and liver cancer.

But others are alarmed by what they say is an increasingly overcaffeinated nation; they are concerned by studies finding too much caffeine can set you up for high blood pressure, high blood sugar, and decreased bone density — not to mention jangled nerves.

And some fun facts from another article:

Children’s consumption of soft drinks has doubled in the past 35 years, with sodas supplanting milk.

By triggering the release of adrenaline to help muscles work harder and longer, caffeine so clearly enhances athletic performance that until 2004 it was considered a controlled substance by the International Olympic Committee.

The young adult crowd who favor caffeine with their alcohol appear to be putting themselves at some risk, too. According to Mark Fillmore, a psychologist at the University of Kentucky, “Caffeine seems to restore the speed of your behavior but not the accuracy.” This gives a whole new meaning to “The Quick and the Dead!”

The guys over at Fat Penguin have a great link to a video of comedian and ventriloquist Josh Dunham. If you haven’t seen his stuff before, I highly recommend it.

(requires Adobe Flash plugin… click HERE to watch it on YouTube)

There’s a great piece in The New Yorker about the history and unreliability of FBI criminal profiling. It’s a fascinating article, especially if you’ve enjoyed Thomas Harris’ books (such as “Silence of the Lambs”), where profiling is featured heavily. I found this statistic interesting:

In the mid-nineties, the British Home Office analyzed a hundred and eighty-four crimes, to see how many times profiles led to the arrest of a criminal. The profile worked in five of those cases. That’s just 2.7 per cent…

The issue is that profiles are usually very vague, and possess traits similar to how magicians and fortune tellers give readings. From the article:

Astrologers and psychics have known these tricks for years. The magician Ian Rowland, in his classic “The Full Facts Book of Cold Reading,” itemizes them one by one, in what could easily serve as a manual for the beginner profiler. First is the Rainbow Ruse — the “statement which credits the client with both a personality trait and its opposite.” (”I would say that on the whole you can be rather a quiet, self effacing type, but when the circumstances are right, you can be quite the life and soul of the party if the mood strikes you.”) The Jacques Statement, named for the character in “As You Like It” who gives the Seven Ages of Man speech, tailors the prediction to the age of the subject. To someone in his late thirties or early forties, for example, the psychic says, “If you are honest about it, you often get to wondering what happened to all those dreams you had when you were younger.” There is the Barnum Statement, the assertion so general that anyone would agree, and the Fuzzy Fact, the seemingly factual statement couched in a way that “leaves plenty of scope to be developed into something more specific.” (”I can see a connection with Europe, possibly Britain, or it could be the warmer, Mediterranean part?”) And that’s only the start: there is the Greener Grass technique, the Diverted Question, the Russian Doll, Sugar Lumps, not to mention Forking and the Good Chance Guess — all of which, when put together in skillful combination, can convince even the most skeptical observer that he or she is in the presence of real insight.

And regarding the case of the BTK killer:

They had been at it for almost six hours. The best minds in the F.B.I. had given the Wichita detectives a blueprint for their investigation. Look for an American male with a possible connection to the military. His I.Q. will be above 105… He will drive a decent car. He will be a “now” person. He won’t be comfortable with women. But he may have women friends. He will be a lone wolf. But he will be able to function in social settings. He won’t be unmemorable. But he will be unknowable. He will be either never married, divorced, or married, and if he was or is married his wife will be younger or older. He may or may not live in a rental, and might be lower class, upper lower class, lower middle class or middle class. And he will be crazy like a fox, as opposed to being mental. If you’re keeping score, that’s a Jacques Statement, two Barnum Statements, four Rainbow Ruses, a Good Chance Guess, two predictions that aren’t really predictions because they could never be verified — and nothing even close to the salient fact that BTK was a pillar of his community, the president of his church and the married father of two.

Click HERE to read the full article.

My wife and I were searching YouTube this weekend and found this compilation of George Bush video clips. I know it’s easy to make someone look stupid with 7 years of video clips in your hands, but Bush is a little over the top. Enjoy!

(requires Adobe Flash plugin… click HERE to watch it on YouTube)

Okay, I’m hooked on the online game Desktop Tower Defense (thanks Jeff and Tony). The basic idea is you start with a certain amount of gold, which you use to buy different towers. You arrange the towers on a map, which are used to kill bad guys trying to cross the screen. If 20 bad guys make it to the other side, you lose. The strategy is in what towers you place where, and how you spend your gold to upgrade their power.

Anyways, it’s pretty addicting (you’ve been warned)…

Defence Tech has a post on the new helmets for pilots flying the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. From the article:

An MoD spokesman said: “Unlike other jet aircraft the JSF, which is planned to replace the Harrier, does not have a traditional head-up display

Instead the computerised symbology will be displayed directly on to the pilot’s visors, providing the pilot with cues for flying, navigating and fighting the aircraft. “It even will superimpose infra-red imagery on to the visor to allow the pilot to look through the cockpit floor at night and see the world below - like something out of Terminator.

Pretty freaky looking… read the full article HERE.