Not Your Usual Hobby

It's amazing what people do in their spare time. Some folks collect stamps, or go hiking, or, hell, do cross-stitch. Whatever. Something to make life a little more interesting. I write fiction. Some folks go further, doing something to change the world. I'm campaigning for Obama, for instance.

And then you get the weirdos. Consider a historian named Dee Brecheisen, for instance. What did he do that was so weird, you ask? Was he a snake charmer? Fire eater? Duct tape artist? Sock collector?

No, no, nothing like that at all. Those things would be too normal. No, Mr. Brecheisen collected civil war-era mummies and showed them off at home:

http://www.comcast.net/news/articles/general/2008/04/08/Soldier.Remains.Exhumation/

Or, more accurately, he was a grave robber of century-old burial sites.

Union troops had been stationed at Fort Craig, in New Mexico, in the 1880s to guard against Confederates and Indians, but the fortress had been abandoned and the location of its graveyard lost. Until, that is, Brecheisen found it, some time in the 1970's or '80's. Since then he has unearthed some 20 graves and stolen their contents, bodies and all.

But that's not the most disturbing thing. Apparently, at least some of these bodies and their possessions were displayed in his house. One historian friend of Brecheisen's, a guy named Don Alberts, visited the house 30 years ago and saw there the full mummified remains of an African-American Union soldier, "with patches of brown flesh clinging to facial bones." Did the friend DO anything about this? Did he report it to anyone? No.

Brecheisen: "Over here you can see my authentic collection includes a musket, a belt buckle, and, oh, the rotted remains of a corpse I dug up in the desert."

Alberts: "Oooh. Lovely. That's perfectly normal."

Brecheisen: "And next I'll show you my collection of Civil War hats…."

The skull of the soldier eventually wound up being stored in a brown paper bag.

When asked why Alberts hadn't reported his pal's macabre and illegal practice, he simply replied, "I didn't want to get a friend in trouble."

Goody for you, Don.

Sadly, Brecheisen recently died. All of his other "mementos" have been auctioned off by the family (apparently they didn't have any qualms about selling off body parts and stolen burial items, either).

Personally, I hope Brecheisen gets dug up a hundred years from now and displayed in someone's living room – and his head winds up in a paper bag.

It's good to have hobbies.


Image taken from HERE.

Yep, Still Due To Morons

If you’ve read this blog for long, you know my fascination with a mud volcano in Indonesia called Lusi (HERE was my last post on it). Lusi erupted in May 2006 after morons from a natural gas drilling operation called Lapindo Brantas drilled a borehole without adequately protecting the hole from collapsing the surrounding strata. As a result, hot water and mud shot up through their hole to form a continuously bubbling mud volcano.

The mud from that volcano has now submerged 10 square kilometers, displaced up to 30,000 people, covered homes, highways, train rails, and factories, and resulted in the death of 13 people when a natural gas line exploded. Repeated attempts to staunch the flow have all failed, including diverting the mud to rivers and throwing down gigantic concrete balls and chains. Nature has refused all attempts.

Lapindo Brantas has attempted to claim that the volcano was not due to their own stupidity, but rather to an earthquake that happened a couple days before.

Now a geologist (Professor Richard Davies of Durham University's Centre for Research into Earth Energy Systems) has shown conclusively that their earthquake argument is full of hot air (or hot natural gas if you like):

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/07/070731125741.htm

The report was published in the journal GSA Today.

I love it when morons in positions of authority get caught trying to worm their way out of responsibility. This study ought to be the last nail in the coffin for Lapindo, who is trying to get out of paying for the damages by claiming the volcano was “natural.”

But look on the bright side, Lapindo. Maybe you could open a mud spa resort!

No Amour For The Amur Leopard

People can be such morons.

Last week the World Wildlife Federation released a report stating that only 25 to 34 of the beautiful Amur Leopard were left in the wild. Amur leopards are often considered the rarest and most graceful large cat species (though I consider the Tibetan snow leopard more attractive and graceful, personally). It lives in the boreal forests of Korea, northeast China, and eastern Siberia. With so few, though, the likelihood that it will survive as a species is in doubt. It has been nearly wiped out due to logging, farming, poaching, and industry. Of those surviving, only 7 are thought to be females. Why so few? When cats are stressed they tend to have male offspring for some reason.

Today, less than a week later, a report was released that one of the female Amur leopards had been killed:
http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science/04/23/leopard.extinction.reut/index.html

The leopard had actually been killed a few days before the initial WWF report was released. The leopard is protected in most of their region, and the Russian government recently re-routed a proposed pipeline that would have gone through the leopard territory, but this is a case of too little, too late, as far as those governments are concerned.

Now, this most recent leopard kill is particularly stupid. Had it been killed by a very hungry hunter, maybe I would have a shred of understanding. I think of African refugees killing large primates, for instance. I wouldn’t do it, but if someone is starving they might go to that extreme. But the leopard wasn’t killed for food. Further, it wasn’t even killed for the beautiful hide, or even for the bones (which, in China, are ground down for the sake of “medicine”). No, this poor leopard was shot from behind, the bullet shattering the tailbone and lodging in the gut. Then, when the animal was down, the killer beat it to death with a blunt object. He left the carcass to be found after anonymous tips were relayed to the WWF. He didn’t even take its body as a trophy-kill. Could this rare and elegant leopard have been killed in self-defense? Not likely, since the Amur leopard has never been known to attack a human, and this one was shot from behind.

So that just leaves one reason for killing it: Total Stupidity.

I can just imagine the thoughts going through the killer’s mind: “Oh, hey, there’s one of those leopard thingees. I’ve got a gun. Let’s shoot it in the butt. Heh heh, yeah, that’d be cool! Then I’ll get some practice being a caveman and bludgeon it to death. Oh man, wait ‘til the guys back at the yurt hear about this!”

Yeah. What a f*cking moron.


Update (12/20/07): HERE is a nifty Nature-documentary excerpt about the Amur leopard.

More Mud News

Man, I love this story. You may remember a previous post of mine back in early February on the mud volcano in Indonesia that was inadvertently created by morons drilling for natural gas. So far, waves of stinking, scalding, liquefied mud have engulfed four villages, a road, numerous factories, a railway, and forced the evacuation of 15,000 people, plus 12 deaths. Attempts to divert the mud failed miserably. In late February, I reported that the Indonesian authorities were going to try to plug the volcano with giant concrete balls, despite warnings from local geologists that it would be vain attempts. They’ve been trying that approach, and, of course, the concrete balls have made no difference at all.

So now they have been attempting to stem the flow with giant chains, as well as balls, thinking they could create some sort of “mesh” network. Again, local geologists have scoffed at the idea, mainly because no one has any idea what the topology of the flow is like “down there” or whether a “mesh” would make any difference:

http://www.physorg.com/news94797482.html

So far, there’s been no real difference. The good news, though, is that the volcano stopped spewing mud for about half an hour at one point, suggesting that it may wind up plugging itself. They called it “coughing”.

I’d call it wishful thinking.

Man versus Nature. Eventually, Nature always gets her way, and sometimes she gets revenge. She can be a cold, cold bitch. Apparently, she can also be hot and spewing....

Update (8/8/07): Studies have shown conclusively that the volcano was formed by the drilling and not by an earthquake. See this recent post: http://angrylabrat.blogspot.com/2007/08/yep-still-due-to-morons.html

Lost Data

This morning I lost an electronic folder of data. That data took about a day's worth to collect, fighting all the while against hardware problems. This was followed by almost a day of fighting software glitches to analyze the data. There was a lot of moving around of files during the process of de-bugging those glitches, and somewhere along the way the entire file got moved or deleted.

I panicked a little. But, being the paranoid sort, I had a couple of temporary backups on other computers that I had not yet deleted. Whew! I restored a copy of the original files back where they belonged, with only a half hour of time lost.

Then around noon today I read on CNN how another technician had made a similar screw-up – and lost nine month's worth of data from about 800,000 files for the State of Alaska Department of Revenue:

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/03/20/lost.data.ap/index.html

Yes, this technician, who remains unnamed, was doing some routine reformatting of government hard drives last July. Unfortunately, this person erased all the information on the drive that determined oil revenue money going to all Alaskans, one of Alaska's biggest perks to its citizens. Then the tech accidentally deleted the backup hard drive. Oops. But wait, they had a second backup! But when they went to that one, the files had somehow been corrupted and rendered unreadable! Data retrieval attempts by Microsoft and Dell failed.

Now, I would love to get a peek into this technician's brain at that point, just for the sake of morbid curiosity, as they stood there wide-eyed and mouth open staring down at the corrupted hard drive and the two erased hard drives which HAD contained data for $38 BILLION worth of revenue allotments. Yes, BILLION with a capital B! Can we say, "Oh, f*ck!" Somehow I don't think they were thinking about the next episode of "Lost!". More likely they were wondering if they would be allowed enough time to grab their office plants before they were escorted out of the building.

What followed was about four months of manic data-re-entry from the original paperwork, stored in 300 cardboard boxes. Half a dozen seasonal workers were re-hired for the purpose, and 70 employees worked weekends and overtime, at a cost of $220,000. Much to their credit, nearly all refunds went out on time. Interestingly, no one was fired over the incident, and there apparently hasn't been any public finger-pointing, but I doubt one particular technician will be getting their bonus this year.

This brings me to a somewhat related topic. Isn't it interesting that, for sheer reliability, you just can't replace paper with electronic files? I mean, in two thousand years, when the next "Dead Sea Scrolls" are pulled out of some office filing cabinet, do you think they'll be on a computer disk, or on reams of paper? I'd put my vote on paper. Hell, I can't read the disks I saved 10 years ago with my Mac Classic, and the fools up in Alaska couldn't read a backup drive that wasn't even a year old. Paper deteriorates, too, but even cheap newsprint is still around from hundreds of years ago. Even if we invent some super-hardy storage device, what are the chances the computer hardware and software will still be accessible to read it? With paper, all you need is your eyes.

Well, back to analyzing my data. Hmm. Now where did I save my restored copy, again?….

Plugging The Volcano

Oh man! Do you remember my post about the mud volcano in East Java, where a natural gas-exploration company used faulty practices in their drilling and wound up creating a mud-spewing volcano that has since displaced 13,000 people and buried four villages? Well, make that 15,000 people, and the mud is still spreading. It has now threatened a major railway.

Even though leading geologists have published a report showing the catastrophe was caused by faulty drilling techniques, and Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has ordered the company to pay restitution, the drilling company, PT Lapindo Brantas, and Indonesian welfare minister Aburizal Bakrie, whose family owns the company, still claim the company is innocent and that the catastrophe is due to natural causes. Efforts to divert the mud flow to a local river have failed.

Here is a YouTube video of the volcano and the attempts to build diversion levees:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJdjcL4aPD4

Geologists suggest further attempts to divert the flow, to the sea, but the Indonesian government has other plans: Plug the hole!

http://www.physorg.com/news91194086.html

That's right. Their plan is to lower 2,000 high-density concrete balls into the hole of the volcano, thinking that the balls will slow the flow by 50 – 70%. A local geologist says it is doomed to failure and that the balls will likely be pushed back out.

Seems sorta like the story of the Dutch boy putting his finger in the dike, eh?

Lusi In The Sky With Mud

Once again someone has done something really, really stupid to upset the Earth. No, I'm not talking about the global warming report just put out by the U.N. that showed the phenomenon is man-made, I'm talking about some morons who went drilling for natural gas and wound up making a gigantic mud volcano.

Here's a news report: http://www.physorg.com/news89653591.html

And here's the Geological Society of America journal article from February's issue: HERE

The morons in question were an Indonesia gas-drilling company called Lapindo Brantas. Back in May 2006 they were boring a hole in the ground near Surbaya, East Java, to look for gas and didn't line the sides of their hole with steel casing like they should have, which would prevent against unexpected expulsion of pressurized water. As a result, they drilled through an area of limestone, exposing an underwater aquifer, and up the water went. Only the aquifer wasn't just water, it was mud. Lapindo Brantas tried to blame the accident on an earthquake that happened days before, but the study reported in the journal of the GSA proves it was man-made.

I can imagine the conversation that led to the accident:

Bore-hole guy: "Hey, Foreman, should I put some steel casing down the bore hole? You know, like we are required to."

Lapindo Foreman: "Naw, Bambang, what's the worst that could happen? A little mud? Let's save some time and money and just dig without it. Get to work!"

What resulted was a mud volcano – a giant cone of constantly-spewing mud. This one has come to be named "Lusi". Ten square kilometers around the volcano are now uninhabitable and 13,000 people are permanently displaced. Four villages were completely erased, along with 25 factories, and 13 people died when a gas pipeline collapsed. The mud flow will likely continue for years, and there will probably be a collapse of earth around it resulting in the formation of a caldera.

How do you say "Oops" in Indonesian?

Maybe some good could come of this, eh? The power of positive thinking! Why, this could be the world's largest mud bath. They could make a spa for tourists. No? How about an SUV off-roading mud race? Yeah, that's the ticket. Those crazy Javanese and their monster trucks….

Okay, fine, it's a horrible catastrophe with no possible golden lining that resulted from someone's stupidity. Go figure.


UPDATE: http://angrylabrat.blogspot.com/2007/02/plugging-volcano.html

Morons and My Yearly Calendar

For something like seven years in a row now my lovely wife and I have made a personalized calendar to be given at Christmas time, one for each set of parents, featuring photos we had taken over the past year. It used to cost a buttload when we had a printing business make it for us, but for the last few years I have printed it myself at home using special software, digital copies of our photos (I'm good at Photoshop), and our relatively decent inkjet printer. The overall cost is half that of having an office copy center print it for us. Unfortunately, I still rely on an office copy center to do the binding.

Now you wouldn't think it a terribly difficult job to bind two calendars: holes punched for the spiral wire on one side, a hole to hang it on the other side, and a clear plastic cover. It only costs a few bucks and should take about 10 minutes for them to do on their binding machine, right? It also requires a minimum of intelligence on their part to set the machine and follow my instructions. I'm not asking them to bind the Guttenberg Bible or anything. And yet, they always screw it up.

The last couple years they flipped a page, requiring me to go home and come back the next day with yet another printed copy of the page for them to try again. One year they punched multiple nail holes instead of one. This year I went to Staples and they said it would take three days for them to do it, *at the soonest.* Now, the place wasn't busy when I went on my way to work, so why the hell they couldn't find a few minutes to punch some pages is beyond me. "No thanks," I said, and was late to work. Later I took off lunch to go to their competitor down the street, OfficeMax. OfficeMax said "no problem" and told me to come back after work, so I left my calendars there. When I came back after work, they had only bound one of the calendars and had lost the other. When they finally found it, the worker said, "It'll only be five minutes." Of course I wanted to scream, "If it only takes five minutes, why the hell didn't you do it while I waited when I was here at lunchtime?" But I didn't, fearing that any disturbance in their concentration might kill off the last of their brain cells. The worker bound the calendar. I gave it a quick look to make sure the holes were there, that it was bound, and that no pages were flipped. Satisfied, I paid and left (of course they didn't offer any compensation for my trouble). Later that night we found that the worker had punched the nail hole on the wrong side of half of the pages (not the first or last half, either, but the middle half!), then apparently caught herself and additionally punched a hole in the correct side. You'd think she would have pointed it out and said, "Oops. Let me offer you a discount." It was too late to redo it, as our Christmas packages were waiting for the calendars before being mailed and would likely already arrive late to my mom.

So what the hell is wrong with these office copy places? Do they only hire morons? Is there a calendar-copy center conspiracy against me? Or is it that the instructions for the binding machine are written in Swahili? You know what, I think I'll finally be looking into binding my own next year!