Guns & Testosterone

So some bloggers over at Discover Magazine put up a post titled NCBI ROFL: Study proves guns make you an a**hole.  They quote the abstract from a research paper in Psychological Science titled Guns, testosterone, and aggression: an experimental test of a mediational hypothesis:

"We tested whether interacting with a gun increased testosterone levels and later aggressive behavior. Thirty male college students provided a saliva sample (for testosterone assay), interacted with either a gun or a children’s toy for 15 min, and then provided another saliva sample. Next, subjects added as much hot sauce as they wanted to a cup of water they believed another subject would have to drink. Males who interacted with the gun showed significantly greater increases in testosterone and added more hot sauce to the water than did those who interacted with the children’s toy. Moreover, increases in testosterone partially mediated the effects of interacting with the gun on this aggressive behavior."

As the owner of a .40 caliber Glock 22, I have to take exception to this article.  As a man, I guess I fail to see how an increase in testosterone necessarily equates with making one an asshole. What not title the post "Study proves guns make you more manly"?

Of course the NCBI ROFL bloggers are women.  What a surprise.  Hey sweeties, testosterone does not automatically make you an asshole - there are plenty of metrosexual girlie men out there (example at right) who presumably have some testosterone running through their pretty little veins (or maybe not).  Some of us are just assholes by choice.

Hey, how about this post by the same bloggers:  NCBI ROFL: The presence of an attractive woman elevates testosterone and physical risk taking in young men.  Alternative title - "Women turn men into assholes."

I'm afraid Hudson Valley Geologist will just remain an unrepentant male asshole.  Don't ask me for water and hot sauce either.

Ghost in the Wires

Just finished Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker by Kevin Mitnick (2011, Little, Brown and Company).

Kevin Mitnick is a well-known computer hacker, now making money as a computer security professional, who was once the subject of an intense manhunt from the FBI and US Marshals for his hacking activities against the phone ("phone phreaking") and computer companies.  He spent several years in prison for his felony crimes.

On one level, I found the book to be an interesting read.  I'm about the same age as Mitnick and if my parents had more money when I was growing up I probably would have made some forays into computer hacking myself.  I was an avid electronics hobbyist and remember lusting after the Altair 8800 when I saw it in Popular Electronics as a teenager but couldn't afford it.

It wasn't until I went to college that I started using computers.  I found myself hanging out with the computer geeks and learned the UNIX system (remember emacs?), C, and even did some simple hacking on the school's VAX/VMS system.  I could have gone to the dark side if I had gotten into all of that a decade earlier.

Anyway, I do understand the appeal of hacking.  The thrill of learning how to beat the system, snoop around where you shouldn't be, the adrenaline rush of risking getting caught.  Most people outgrow it and go on to do something useful in life.  Other people, however, seem to get addicted to it all and Mitnick was one of them.

While Mitnick undoubtedly had technical skills honed by hours on the computer, his real skill was what he called "social engineering" - something other people would call "lying" and "grifting".  He would research a company and then call some poor low-level employee with access to their computer system and say something like "This is Bill in engineering and I'm having trouble with the xxx system.  Can you help me by checking a few things on your machine?"  Then he'd have the poor sap employee  run a series of cryptic commands that would give Mitnick access to the system with administrative rights.

Most of Mitnick's virtual break-ins were the result of him conning people over the phone.  Since he started his "career" by hacking the phone company, he was able to get callbacks to his cell phone with a phone number that looked as if it was an internal phone number for the company he was hacking.

Mitnick was clearly an addict when it came to hacking.  He did it even knowing it hurt people close to him - he claimed to be close to his mother and grandmother but he was always calling and telling them the FBI was on to him, he had to run, or he had been arrested.  I felt sorry for them - he must have really broken their hearts.  He also persisted in his hacking even when he knew he was being investigated by multiple local and federal law enforcement agencies and even when he had to move from L.A. to Vegas to Denver to Rayleigh to try and keep one step ahead of them (even while on probation for hacking).

Mitnick also comes across in the book as being a complete sociopath.  Besides the harm he was constantly doing to his loved ones by his illegal activities, he also had no qualms about his computer hacking activities.  He claimed to just be doing it because he enjoyed the challenge.  Problem is that he caused real harm to real people.  He hacked phones to make thousands of hours of free calls that were then billed to random people.  Real people getting real bills who then had to spend hours dealing with the phone company to get straightened out.  He broke into companies and stole lists of credit card numbers which he thought was OK since he never used them for anything.  Still a crime dude!   Again, real people had their credit card numbers stolen and needed to go to their banks to get new cards, etc.  He lied to people and tricked them into giving him access into corporate computer systems.  No harm?  Ask the people who were then talked to, disciplined, or perhaps fired to allowing Mitnick to trick them into getting into the company's computers.  He broke into corporate computers and stole source code for operating systems for phones and computers.  Proprietary corporate source code that cost millions to develop and that allowed Mitnick to exploit any weaknesses to hack even more.  Then he wondered why they got so upset and got the Feds after him.  He was upset that the Feds were tapping his mom's phone, his friend's phones, etc. yet used his phone hacking skills to tap and listed to other people's conversations and read their private email.

After all his years of serious hacking, stealing services from phone and computer companies, breaking into corporate computer systems, conning people, stealing proprietary source code, tapping people's phones, reading people's private emails, etc. etc. etc., he's mystified as to why the Feds spent so much time and energy tracking him down and why they wanted him in prison with no access to computers or phones.  Quite frankly, if I had been the target of Mitnick's hacks, I'd probably want to beat the guy with a baseball bat.  He's completely clueless for a smart guy - something's obviously a bit off in his brain wiring.

In sum, while an interesting book, Mitnick comes across as a real asshole.  I would recommend this book not just to people interested in hacking but to any mental health professionals interested in addictive and sociopathic personalities.

Geology definition

I love the Uncyclopedia entry on GEOLOGY.  Favorite quotes:

"Geology (from Bushman - Geo meaning Rock and logy meaning masturbation)..."

"Geology was created so that drunks were able to get paid by universities to create fiction..."

"Geologists are most classically portrayed as larger than life figures in pop culture known for their often excessive and unwieldy hair and habits such as flatulence, promiscuity and acts of random violence. The lives of geologists are often even more fascinating than the rock(s) which they study."

I like the entry on GEOLOGIST too.

Perihelion

Tonight, January 4 at 8:00 pm EST (0100 UTC July 5), the Earth will be at perihelion. The word is derived from the Greek words for "near" (peri) and "Sun" (helios). It's the closest we'll be to the Sun all year.  As I write this, however, at 9:00 am, my outdoor thermometer says it's currently 12° F outside.  If we're so close to the Sun, why is it so damn cold outside?

Well, first of all, it's only cold for us here in the Northern Hemisphere.  It's early summer down in the Southern Hemisphere and quite warm.  That's because the real reason the Earth has seasons is its 23.5° axial tilt.  Right now, two weeks after the winter solstice, those of us in the Northern Hemisphere are tilted about as far away from the Sun as we can be.  Those in the Southern Hemisphere are tilted toward the Sun.  We get less hours of daylight, the Sun is lower in the sky all day, and the sunlight is spread out over a larger area - ergo, it's colder.

In the early 1600s, German mathematician/astronomer Johannes Kepler developed his Three Laws of Planetary Motion.  He showed that as planets orbit the Sun, they actually move in ellipses, not perfect circles as was previously thought from the times of the ancient Greeks.  This means that planets are sometimes closer to the Sun (perihelion as mentioned above) and sometimes further from the Sun (called aphelion).  Therefore, when we talk about the distance of a planet from the Sun, we have to specify the average distance.

According to Wikipedia, the average distance from the Earth to the Sun, also known as an astronomical unit (1 A.U.) is 149,597,870.7 km (92,955,807.3 mi).  We can also look up the values for perihelion and aphelion as 147,098,290 km (91,402,640 mi) and 152,098,232 km (94,509,460 mi) respectively.

In astronomy, the shape of an elliptical orbit is given by its eccentricity (e) which can be defined as:

     e= [(aphelion - perihelion) / (aphelion + perihelion)]
     e = [(152,098,232 km - 147,098,290 km) / (152,098,232 km + 147,098,290 km)]
     e = 0.01671123

An eccentricity of 0.0 would be a perfect circle.  An eccentricity of 0.0167, like the Earth has, is pretty darn close to circular.  Looking at the numerical difference between aphelion and perihelion, and comparing that to the average distance from the Sun gives us:

     (152,098,232 km - 147,098,290 km) / (149,597,870.7 km) * 100% = 3.34% difference

It's really not that much of a difference.


How much does this change in distance affect the amount of incoming solar radiation (insolation) from the Sun?  Imagine the Sun radiating energy outward in all directions.  As you move away from the Sun, the energy is distributed over larger and larger spherical areas as seen at left.  Since the surface area of a sphere is 4πr², the total insolation decreases by the inverse square of the distance (r) (this is called the inverse square law).

Let's look at the difference between aphelion and perihelion distances.

     Aphelion Insolation = [(149,597,870.7 km) / (152,098,232 km)]² = 0.9674
     Perihelion Insolation = [(149,597,870.7 km) / (147,098,290 km)]² = 1.0343

That's about a 6.5% difference in insolation.  Not really noticeable in our surface temperatures, but it is a difference you can see if you observe the Sun through an appropriately filtered telescope (here's where every blogger writes "Don't stare at the Sun with your naked eye!"  Not me.  If you're stupid enough to go outside and stare slack-jawed at the Sun, go right ahead.  Hurts, don't it?).

So, yes we're closest to the Sun for the year today.  And we still have two months of bitterly cold weather to live through here in the Hudson Valley.  The Hudson Valley Geologist is not a fan of winter - the snow covers up all the beautiful rocks!