Category: Vanities

The $80 Million Fake Bomb-Detector Scam

How could nearly 4,000 pounds of explosives have passed, undetected, into one of the city’s most tightly controlled areas ?

The first impulse was to look for infiltrators and collaborators. Some 60 suspects who had worked at checkpoints and local police posts near the bombings were rounded up. But the real problem, it turned out, was with the handheld bomb detectors being used at just about every Iraqi-run checkpoint in the country. They were toys. They had never worked. It had all been an expensive charade—costing the Iraqi government tens of millions of dollars and hundreds of lives—engineered by a portly middle-aged salesman in Britain.

→ Vanity Fair

More Ties Than We Thought 

There is 177,147 different tie knots according to this paper.

The pair used an existing tool from logic – known as formal language theory – to express the basic rules of tying a neck tie as a series of symbols. This included things like the placement of the tie, the direction of the fold and the need to end in a final tuck. They used their tie language to show that only 85 knots were possible.

Now mathematician Mikael Vejdemo-Johansson of the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, has vastly broadened the tie landscape.

→ New Scientist

Bill Gross’s Bloomberg Terminal, Now A Piece of History

The keyboard will be on display as part of the Smithsonian’s “American Enterprise” exhibition and become part of the permanent collection, according to Peter Liebhold, chair and curator of the division of work and industry at the Washington-based National Museum of American History. Accompanying the keyboard are two Beanie Babies — a bull and a bear that were draped over Gross’s monitors at Pimco — and a pair of fuzzy dice representing “his beginnings as a professional blackjack player,” Liebhold said.

“My favorite thing is the password,” Liebhold said in a telephone interview Friday. “If you look at the keyboard you can see that Bill Gross, who’s controlling maybe the biggest bond fund in the world, on a piece of paper Scotch taped to the top of his keyboard has written his ID and his password. So he’s just like everybody else.”

→ Bloomberg

I Fooled Millions Into Thinking Chocolate Helps Weight Loss. Here’s How.

A great reminder that medias can easily be fooled and help propagate false informations with pointless headlines.

Other than those fibs, the study was 100 percent authentic. My colleagues and I recruited actual human subjects in Germany. We ran an actual clinical trial, with subjects randomly assigned to different diet regimes. And the statistically significant benefits of chocolate that we reported are based on the actual data. It was, in fact, a fairly typical study for the field of diet research. Which is to say: It was terrible science. The results are meaningless, and the health claims that the media blasted out to millions of people around the world are utterly unfounded.

Here’s how we did it.

→ io9

Mayweather : The Boxer and the Batterer

An essay on Floyd Mayweather Jr. as both :

I can’t, of course, say what’s behind Mayweather’s serial abuse — physical, verbal, or emotional — of women. Men who are rich beat women; men who are poor do, too. They do it in Alaska and South Carolina, in New York and Oslo and Dubai. They do it when they get away with it, and they do it when they don’t. Every day, an average of three women in the United States are killed by a current or former lover. But the more I watched Mayweather fight, and the more I read about his allegedly violent acts outside the ring, the more I began to see it as all of one piece. The circus that follows him. The bag filled with cash and gambling slips. The entourage. The houses and the women installed in them, the diamond rings as collars. The way he takes the measure of a situation in the ring, determining when it’s safe to punch and when to duck.

→ Grantland