The ware for January 2007 is shown below. Click on the image for a much larger version.
It’s unusual that I would post something that is a prototype that I made for Name That Ware; I usually consider my home-built prototypes to be unfair for the competition because I can make it arbitrarily obscure because by definition nobody else has seen these. However, I have a bit of a bone to pick this month. I try to avoid using this blog as a platform for my (biased) opinions, so I apologize for the rant: I feel this strikes too close to home to be left alone.
Some of you may be aware of the bomb scare in Boston caused by a guy who simply put circuit boards with LEDs up around the city. Those of you who read my blog frequently can probably guess that I’m not only upset by this, I’d be positively incensed by the sheer idiocy of the city of Boston in handling this situation. To quote Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley, the maker of these is charged with a felony for creating a device described as follows:
Oh. My. God. What in the hell is she thinking? My whole life is about making stuff that, by her definition, could be interpreted as sinister looking. Am I now a terrorist? Or am I just a hard-working, freedom-loving engineer who doesn’t bother to put a nice shiny case around everything I build? Should I be arrested for walking around in public with these devices? And perhaps even displaying them as works of art, carrying them around with me to raves and other public places with lots of people at them? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve hopped on an airplane with devices that probably look more sinister than the one above, but are just as benign. And then, if you only knew how dangerous the Lithium Ion batteries in every laptop was in comparison to the stuff I have built…
Here’s another choice quote from the article:
‘”Scaring an entire region, tying up the T and major roadways, and forcing first responders to spend 12 hours chasing down trinkets instead of terrorists is marketing run amok,” Markey, a Democrat, said in a written statement.”‘
Look. Who scared the region? The signs, or your reaction to the signs? Have you not forgotten the immortal words of FDR:
“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
If Boston had simply looked at the signs and evaluated them, there would be no scare, and no impact. Some of you may argue that you would rather be safe than sorry. Caution is always a good idea, but you need to be educated in what you’re being careful about. Simply going after whatever Hollywood might portray as a bomb, or what an uninformed person may phone in to be a bomb, is the making of a witch-hunt society. If I have a score to settle with my neighbor, I could just make it even by calling in the terrorist squad on them for having several empty bottles of detergent around their house because bleach could be used to make bombs. You can pay all the money you want to a terrorist response team, but if they are uneducated, they are still ineffective, and all they do is propagate the sense of insecurity and terror. I’m scared because now I know idiots are looking after our cities.
How many terrosists have these people chased down, exactly? I think the problem is that everyone is looking for terrosists so hard that even a humble artist has now been turned into a terrorist because over-funded and terribly ineffective programs are turning out to be a waste of public money, and these programs need to find a raison d’etre. Don’t blame the incompetence of your team on the artist. Blame your incompetence on a total lack of knowledge on the part of your team. Anybody lightly trained in the art of electronics–every reader of this blog, in fact–could immediately recognize the fact that what was in Boston was not a bomb. Wires and a battery pack do not make a bomb. At worst, the artist could be accused of vandalism; at the best, the artist is exercising his right to Free Speech.
Let me tell you what I worry about. The Spanish Flu was recently synthesized and tested on a primate population to study exactly how it managed to kill 2.5-5% of the world’s population in about one year, or 25 million people back in 1918 (see Nature vol 445, No 7125, pp237, “Concern as revived 1918 flu virus kills monkeys”). We’re still vulnerable to this strain, H1N1, of influenza, and it’s much more deadly than H5N1 (aka the dreaded “Avian Flu”). What of the terrorist who walks through Chicago O’hare on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving with a 4-oz spray bottle full of this or a similar virus, putting on his or her deadly “cologne” while waiting for their delayed connection in the crowded terminals? Extrapolating statistics, that would be 150 million people killed worldwide by the virus in 25 weeks. Remember that the US only has 300 million people. (Not a totally fair comparison, first because it is worldwide deaths vs. the US population only, and second because we have had great medical advances since 1918. However, the mechanism for killing by the virus is a Cytokine storm, which kills very rapidly and quickly–by the time you thought about going to see the doctor, you are probably about to die). Should we still research H1N1? We absolutely should. We need to understand this threat to combat it. Perhaps you say H1N1 is too esoteric for a terrorist to get ahold of. Well, last I checked, its less lethal “Avian Flu” friend (H5N1) that you have probably heard about is breeding in the poultry stocks of many third world countries. And even if its mortality rate is below 0.2%, consider the economic impact it would have if all the airports were shut down because it was reported that our busy travel and commerce system was being used as a conduit to spread the virus. Or, if you are worried about economic impact and not deaths, howabout global warming? There’s a problem that will impact generations to come and our leadership continues to bury its head in the sand about it. The Department of Homeland security will spend $35.6 billion next year searching for terrorists, but only $3 billion researching global warming. Do we have our priorities correct? We could lose double-digit percentages of Florida’s landmass as a result of global warming. And unlike terrorism, global warming is now pretty much a certainty. It’s not “if”, but “when”.
In the end, this “War on Terror” has done nothing but induce more terror on the population. The government introduced a whole new set of apropriations to deal with terrorism; now, these large, expensive organizations are looking for a reason to exist and they are justifying their existence by extending the reign of terror on the population and using innocent Americans as scapegoats. You want to know what really kills Americans? Smoking. Heart disease. Drunk driving. Lack of exercise. McDonald’s and Philip Morris has lead to the deaths of more Americans than any terrorist group, but I would never, ever, suggest that we ban such organizations. Choice is beautiful, even if it can be dangerous.
Don’t get me wrong–I’m not of the opinion that I think we should do nothing about a potential terrorist problem. Some measures were productive and effective, and probably good for us in the end. The point of this post is that despite the good things that have happened, I think that now things have gone just a little too far in the wrong direction and we are starting to lose the very thing we are trying to protect, our civil liberties and our peace of mind. We have scared ourselves into believing that ghosts are real, and this event shows us that it’s time to reconsider the reality of the situation.
I believe that fundamentally, the most effective way to deal with terror is to not be afraid of it. I say take it with a stiff upper lip, ignore it, and live life like you used to, as a free society with great liberties and tolerance for all walks of life. Travel. Express. Build. Innovate. Research. Be an Individual. Be smart about who you trust, but still be willing to trust. Even if you don’t understand someone right away, it doesn’t mean they are out to kill you. If you are afraid of terrorism to the point where you fear that a hack-job lighted sign could be a bomb, then you shouldn’t even be on the road. The more you try to look for terrorists, the more terrorists integrate into society and go under the radar, and the more successful they are at causing the population to terrorize itself.
Just because I live in a world of circuit boards and batteries, and because I’m not like you, doesn’t mean I’m a terrorist.
Thanks to those who read this post. I know there are those of you who will disagree with me, and I expect that you, too, will express yourself in my comments section. I apologize for this rather political and probably controversial message, but I feel if I don’t speak up about this, it may only be a matter of time before my rights are directly threatened:
