Great reddit story on help during the blizzard

by NASA Goddard Photo and Video

To All of You Kind Strangers: Thank You.
[Via reddit.com:]

Today I woke up to a blizzard. I had planned on staying home so it was no big deal. At about noon, I looked out my front door and saw that someone had anonymously snow blown (blowed?) my drive way: Thank you.

At about 5 pm it became apparent that my mentally handicapped uncle was stuck at the local mall due to the weather and having a panic attack. I am the only relative within driving distance so I dashed outside to find that my driveway was covered again. I grabbed my shovel and started going to town. I glanced across the road and saw another neighbor snow blowing his driveway across the street (we’ve never met before), and I asked him if he would let me borrow it for a moment. He said sure, and he cleared 2 ruts for me to pull out of. I made it down the driveway only to get stuck in the road. That same neighbor returned to help push, but we eventually had to admit that even if we did get my car unstuck here, it wouldn’t make it very far. Even though we didn’t succeed: thank you neighbor.

It’s getting late, and the roads aren’t getting any better. Buses aren’t running, taxis aren’t running, my uncle is stuck. And he’s scared. I talk to him for a bit, my father talks to him for hours. We hear that a woman from the mall has decided to take my uncle and his friend through a tour of the administrative offices to help calm him down, and make things fun. She’s even found him a couch to sleep on. To you, kind woman I’ve never met and had never met my uncle until today: Thank you, thank you, thank you.

To all of you wonderful people out there who do these little acts of kindness, to neighbors and total strangers. You are what makes a group of strangers into a community, and for that I thank you.

[More]

Often the web can be filled with anger and indifference but there are many times when it provides an opportunity to recognize the humanity in so many of us. And it so often is seen during extreme events. People forget their differences and work together much more.

My family and I were on the island of Kauai when Iniki hit. The ability of people to come together to help was also evident then. I guess that is how we survived as a species – our normal inclination is to help others in the group.

The TSA scanners may not only be invasive, they appear to be easily rendered ineffective

Pornoscanners trivially defeated by pancake-shaped explosives
[Via Boing Boing]

In case you were wondering whether pornoscanners are harder on the vast majority of innocent, non-terrorist fliers, or the minuscule minority of terrorists, wonder no more. From Leon Kaufman and Joseph W. Carlson’s “An evaluation of airport x-ray backscatter units based on image characteristics,” published in the Journal of Transportation Security:

The penetration not only distributes exposure throughout the body (this affecting the calculation of effective dose, which comprises a sum over all organs), but tends to diffuse the effects caused by contraband materials. Images can be made at low entrance exposures, but of very poor spatial resolution and S/N. The calculated signal excursions at high kilovoltage are so small as to make it doubtful that at any reasonable exposure levels density differences will be noticeable unless the contraband is packed thickly and with hard edges. Although the excursions are larger at low kilovoltage, they are still small and in the noise of the device’s operational limits. The eye is a good signal averager at certain spatial frequencies, but it is doubtful that an operator can be trained to detect these differences unless the material is hard-edged, not too large and regular- shaped. Anatomic features and benign objects add structured noise that interferes with signal averaging. Figure 18 shows a widely-distributed backscatter image. On the left is a complete view of her torso, on the right, a section has been blacked out. While the breasts are easily recognized at right, without some prior knowledge of the subject, it would be hard to distinguish the increase of intensity in the superior part of her breasts from the natural gradients of the image.

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High explosives and wires, along with razor blades can be hidden if they are thin enough and have thin edges against the skin. I would be willing to bet that Hollywood makeup artisans who create all sorts of facial and body appliances made to look real would have the knowledge to accomplish fairly easy demonstrations. Perhaps a Mythbusters episode, since both of the hosts have some experience with these sorts of artistic deceptions.

I’d love it if Mythbusters showed that these machines did absolutely nothing to make us safer.