The inventor of leaded gasoline also invented Freon. Thomas Midgley, Jr. possessed "an instinct for the regrettable that was almost uncanny." and "had more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth's history."

Early Years Thomas Midgley Jr.'s

Midgley was born into a family of inventors: his father and grandfather owned patents and its ancestor worked for James Watt, inventor of the steam engine.

Source [Google Images]

In 1905, while attending a school in Connecticut, the young Thomas was faced with a situation that was to familiarize him with scientific instrument that allowed him to break trail men in his family: a dispute with a teacher. During the first hour of chemistry attended Midgley jr., The teacher said to the class that the periodic table is a proof of God's existence. Young Thomas has not agreed with the statement the teacher.

"We had a fight. I argued that the only thing that demonstrates the periodic table is that atoms are composed of smaller particles. The dispute lasted for days and weeks, but was by no means one pointless. Over that debate I familiar with the periodic table, that I remained in my mind as a very useful tool in research, "he later told Midgley jr.

Thomas decided to follow his father and joined the faculty of mechanical engineering from Cornell University. Despite further innovated in chemistry, he has studied during college than the basic concepts that were taught to all future engineers at Cornell. During conştinciozitate faculty were noted by studying the minimum required many courses, in order to focus on those who interested him.

After graduating in 1911, Thomas won his first job in the company National Cash Register (NCR), headquartered in Dayton, Ohio. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Dayton was a genuine innovation center, the place where the Wright brothers built the aircraft with which they conducted first flight in the history of aeronautics. Midgley worked one year at NCR, where he discovered his passion for industrial research and met the man who would play a key role in his life: Charles Kettering.

Year spent in Midgley NCR caused to want to do experiments to discover new products, but the economic context of the time was not yet favorable. Thomas would spend the next year working for his father in a company that marketed the tires. In 1916, when the family business went bankrupt, Midgley found himself in a critical situation.  "Suddenly I was without a job, a wife and two children to support and little money in the bank. We have taken a quick trip through the country, contacting numerous people from different industries, but we have not found a job after my own heart . When I returned home, I took the most important decision of my life: I decided to work for Mr. Kettering, regardless of salary offered, and see what happens ", said Midgley later. (Source 1, Source 2, Source3)

Midgley died three decades before the ozone-depleting and greenhouse gas effects of CFCs in the atmosphere became widely known(Source). Bill Bryson remarks that Midgley possessed "an instinct for the regrettable that was almost uncanny."(Source) J. R. McNeill, an environmental historian, opines that Midgley "had more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth's history."(Source)

When soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo was asked to donate his cleats for a charity auction benefitting a 10-month-old child suffering from a brain disorder that can lead to 30 seizures a day, Ronaldo paid the full $83K cost of the surgery for young Erik Ortiz Cruz.

Portugal’s star Cristiano Ronaldo was asked to donate his cleats for a charity that would benefit a 10-month-old child suffering from a brain disorder. 

Cristiano Ronaldo, the Real Madrid star, will pay the full $83,000 cost of the surgery (almost 60,000 Euros) for young Erik Ortiz Cruz. 

According to USA Today, Erik suffers from cortical dysplasia, a condition that can lead to as many as 30 seizures a day. 

Pictre Source: Tumblr

According to another source, Ronaldo is also giving his boots and signed kits to a charity to help the family for raising extra money. 

Helga Estby walked across America to win a $10,000 prize to save her home. When she finished, the sponsor refused to pay out. She returned home and found two of her children died in her absence, then she lost her house.

Source: Wikipedia

The year was 1896. Helga Estby, 36, and husband Ole, 45 had both emigrated from Norway to America. They lived on the farm Mica Peak in Spokane in Washington state on the US west coast with their nine children. - She decided to go across the country in an attempt to save the family farm.They were unable to pay taxes and interest after the depression that came in the 1890s, says author Linda Lawrence Hunt magazine on-line. She has written the book about Helga's incredible ride. Hunt, who is retired professor and journalist, also lives in Spokane, Helga's hometown, and she even has Norwegian ancestry. His grandfather came from Engleøy, near Steigenberger and went to Minnesota. Hunt was first hear about Helga in 1984. Estby family had kept the brave woman's story secret. They were ashamed of the unusual trip. - It really is a fascinating story, says Hunt. For years she has traveled in Helga's footsteps, and now the book " Bold Spirit: Helga Estby's Forgotten Walk Across America Vicotorian »come. And there is no feel-good-historieHunt tells us.Helga Estby was pushed out of the Norwegian community in his hometown due to turn over the country. A HINT OF HOPE. In 1896 Helga, who came to the country 11 years old, heard about a contest by a friend on the East Coast. She also read about it in a newspaper ad. The farm she and her husband stayed in was on extrasensory 650 goals, but it went bad. One of the children had recently died. Ole worked as a carpenter, but he injured himself and had no mission. - A woman promised her 10,000 dollars she managed to walk across America without escort, says Hunt. She would start in May that year and the goal was to reach New York on 20 December. And with this she would prove that women could do more than just stay home. REQUIREMENTS WERE READY.It was not a matter of supplies, the participant was only allowed to carry five US dollars home.And it was impossible to walk at random. To win you have to visit the state capitals on the road and collect the signatures of important political leaders. The woman who would go also had to wear something called a "bike costume." It consisted of a short skirt with slits and flannelsjakke. It should have been the sponsor who was behind this requirement, the woman who promised the reward may have been involved in the garment industry.For over a hundred years ago there was talk about a lot of money. After today's value went Helga for over four million. The tour was 5600 kilometers. DE LA unleashed.Together with her daughter Clara on 18 Helga started from the family farm in Spokane 5 May 1896. They had brought a letter from his hometown's mayor Horatio Belt.Here was Helga described as a "lady" with good character and good reputation. Thanks to this they got help and shelter in many places. They had blown skirt the rule and taken on long skirt by contemporary Victorian fashion, corset, hat, snow boots five dollars each, two bags, knives, pepper mills for protection and a Smith & Wesson revolver. Near Salt Lake City came skirts the road. The shift to shorter skirt that was more practical to go in, but that also led to the ankles were visible. It was not in line with contemporary practice and a bit of a scandal. But the new skirt length made them more effective. Their exact itinerary has Hunt still not received a complete overview over, but walked from town to town, across rivers, they went to the mountains and managed over four mil a day. They sought out a local newspaper and got his story in print. How they hoped to get out bucks from people who read the newspaper. TRIP WAS DANGEROUS. It was not common for women traveled the front at this time, and mode of travel also attracted attention. On the way down the mountain before arriving at the town of La Grande they were overtaken by a man who had followed them for several days. He did not go his way, and thus took Helga affair. She shot him in the leg. Man was one thing. In addition, they met bears, mountain lions, rattlesnakes. The constant heat was a problem. Mother and daughter two often stopped train stations for shelter.On the way out of Chicago, they met some vagabonds and "went backwards with gun pointing at them to save ourselves for harm," wrote Helga in the diary say. But there were also many that would help them on their way through Oregon, Idaho, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. In Utah and Idaho visited the two women several mines. It was almost as unusual that women went into the mines as they walked in ankle high skirts. From this trip, there is only one left by Helga. She wrote about it in her journal, and history has been saved. BUT THEY WERE FOOLED. Around Christmas 1896 approached you up New York City. They had gone for six months when they realized that it was the dream. The two women met the target on December 23, three days delayed because of Claras sprained foot. When they learned that the woman who stood behind the competition would not pay the 10,000 dollars. - The woman who had promised them money did not give them a penny because they were a few days too late there compared to the original plan, explains Hunt. Nobody knows anymore who this was. The name of the woman who had pledged money has disappeared with time. DE HAD HOME. Clara and Helga went on one defeat after another. Now they were desperate to get home, they had been told that two of Helga's children had died of black diphtheria. They were in New York and tried to earn enough money for the train ride home. After several months took pity a rich man above them. He felt sorry for the women and paid the train fare. But when Helga came home one would know of her. She was seen as a deserter, and gossip went in the Norwegian community. Even her own children were ashamed of her mother's turn. They thought it was wrong for a woman to leave his duties in that way. The trip was whispered about, but then added a total cap on. This was something no one talked about. HELGA GOT A HARD TIME.After returning she plunged into deep depression. The family lost the farm, but after they moved into the city, succeeded her husband Ole in starting a business builder. Her husband died in 1913 when he fell from a roof at work. Helga, who was then 53, began writing down her story. The plan was to write a book. It was never finished, but Helga's trip changed her life anyway. She became active in politics and fought for voting rights. DE WERE NOT HEROES.But Helga descendant Doug Bahr would not forget the two women relatives. In 1984 he wrote a school essay about the journey across the country, he called it "Grandma goes from coast to coast." It was this style Linda Hunt heard via her husband sitting in a jury which gave young Martin a price for the work.Since that time 20 years ago, she tried to get to the bottom of Helga's history. Certainly was Hunt impressed achievement, but most of all she was surprised that the family kept the incredible trip secret for so many years. - All the family knew was based on two articles that were spared from Minneapolis newspapers. They acted on the trip home from New York. The story was completely hushed up. Nobody spoke about it ever. Grandchildren who lived in the same house as Helga knew nothing about her journey, says Hunt. Daughters REMOVED ALL TRACKS. Helga died in 1942. Shortly thereafter ensured daughters Ida and Lillian to remove everything after her.They gathered what she had written and lit it. Margaret Estby, Helga-law, managed to save anything. Helga had gathered a lot of information in a scrapbook. - This scrapbook was found on her deathbed and hidden in secret, says Hunt. When Margaret died were her children scrapbook and the story remained in the family until young Doug wrote his style. - Doug is currently firefighter outside Seattle. He and his entire family are today very proud of the Helga did, says Linda Lawrence Hunt. The first edition of the book about Helga is torn away. It is currently available only in the US.

References

1. Wikipedia

2. Bold Spirit Book

3. Hunt, Linda Lawrence (2005) Bold Spirit: Helga Estby's Forgotten Walk Across Victorian America (Random House) ISBN 978-1-4000-7993-3

4. Dagg, Carole Estby (2011) The Year We Were Famous (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company) ISBN 978-0-618-99983-5

5. Kirkpatrick, Jane (2011) The Daughter's Walk (WaterBrook Press) ISBN 978-1400074297

What Is on Voyager’s Golden Record?

From a whale song to a kiss, the time capsule sent into space in 1977 had some interesting contents

I thought it was a brilliant idea from the beginning,” says Timothy Ferris. Produce a phonograph record containing the sounds and images of humankind and fling it out into the solar system.

Sagan had originally asked for permission to include "Here Comes the Sun" from the Beatles' album Abbey Road. While the Beatles favoured it, EMI opposed it and the song was not included.

By the 1970s, astronomers Carl Sagan and Frank Drake already had some experience with sending messages out into space. They had created two gold-anodized aluminum plaques that were affixed to the Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 spacecraft. Linda Salzman Sagan, an artist and Carl’s wife, etched an illustration onto them of a nude man and woman with an indication of the time and location of our civilization.

The “Golden Record” would be an upgrade to Pioneer’s plaques. Mounted on Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, twin probes launched in 1977, the two copies of the record would serve as time capsules and transmit much more information about life on Earth should extraterrestrials find it.

NASA approved the idea. So then it became a question of what should be on the record. What are humanity’s greatest hits? Curating the record’s contents was a gargantuan task, and one that fell to a team including the Sagans, Drake, author Ann Druyan, artist Jon Lomberg and Ferris, an esteemed science writer who was a friend of Sagan’s and a contributing editor to Rolling Stone.

The exercise, says Ferris, involved a considerable number of presuppositions about what aliens want to know about us and how they might interpret our selections. “I found myself increasingly playing the role of extraterrestrial,” recounts Lomberg in Murmurs of Earth, a 1978 book on the making of the record. When considering photographs to include, the panel was careful to try to eliminate those that could be misconstrued. Though war is a reality of human existence, images of it might send an aggressive message when the record was intended as a friendly gesture. The team veered from politics and religion in its efforts to be as inclusive as possible given a limited amount of space.

Over the course of ten months, a solid outline emerged. The Golden Record consists of 115 analog-encoded photographs, greetings in 55 languages, a 12-minute montage of sounds on Earth and 90 minutes of music. As producer of the record, Ferris was involved in each of its sections in some way. But his largest role was in selecting the musical tracks. “There are a thousand worthy pieces of music in the world for every one that is on the record,” says Ferris. I imagine the same could be said for the photographs and snippets of sounds.

The following is a selection of items on the record:

Silhouette of a Male and a Pregnant Female

The team felt it was important to convey information about human anatomy and culled diagrams from the 1978 edition of The World Book Encyclopedia. To explain reproduction, NASA approved a drawing of the human sex organs and images chronicling conception to birth. Photographer Wayne F. Miller’s famous photograph of his son’s birth, featured in Edward Steichen’s 1955 “Family of Man” exhibition, was used to depict childbirth. But as Lomberg notes in Murmurs of Earth, NASA vetoed a nude photograph of “a man and a pregnant woman quite unerotically holding hands.” The Golden Record experts and NASA struck a compromise that was less compromising—silhouettes of the two figures and the fetus positioned within the woman’s womb.

At the risk of providing extraterrestrials, whose genetic material might well also be stored in DNA, with information they already knew, the experts mapped out DNA’s complex structure in a series of illustrations.

Demonstration of Eating, Licking and Drinking

When producers had trouble locating a specific image in picture libraries maintained by the National Geographic Society, the United Nations, NASA and Sports Illustrated, they composed their own. To show a mouth’s functions, for instance, they staged an odd but informative photograph of a woman licking an ice-cream cone, a man taking a bite out of a sandwich and a man drinking water cascading from a jug.

Olympic Sprinters

Images were selected for the record based not on aesthetics but on the amount of information they conveyed and the clarity with which they did so. It might seem strange, given the constraints on space, that a photograph of Olympic sprinters racing on a track made the cut. But the photograph shows various races of humans, the musculature of the human leg and a form of both competition and entertainment.

Taj Mahal

Photographs of huts, houses and cityscapes give an overview of the types of buildings seen on Earth. The Taj Mahal was chosen as an example of the more impressive architecture. The majestic mausoleum prevailed over cathedrals, Mayan pyramids and other structures in part because Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan built it in honor of his late wife, Mumtaz Mahal, and not a god.

Golden Gate Bridge

Three-quarters of the record was devoted to music, so visual art was less of a priority. A couple of photographs by the legendary landscape photographer Ansel Adams were selected, however, for the details captured within their frames. One, of the Golden Gate Bridge from nearby Baker Beach, was thought to clearly show how a suspension bridge connected two pieces of land separated by water. The hum of an automobile was included in the record’s sound montage, but the producers were not able to overlay the sounds and images.

An excerpt from a book would give extraterrestrials a glimpse of our written language, but deciding on a book and then a single page within that book was a massive task. For inspiration, Lomberg perused rare books, including a first-folio Shakespeare, an elaborate edition of Chaucer from the Renaissance and a centuries-old copy of Euclid’s Elements (on geometry), at the Cornell University Library. Ultimately, he took MIT astrophysicist Philip Morrison’s suggestion: a page from Sir Isaac Newton’s System of the World, where the means of launching an object into orbit is described for the very first time.

Greeting from Nick Sagan

To keep with the spirit of the project, says Ferris, the wordings of the 55 greetings were left up to the speakers of the languages. In Burmese, the message was a simple, “Are you well?” In Indonesian, it was, “Good night ladies and gentlemen. Goodbye and see you next time.” A woman speaking the Chinese dialect of Amoy uttered a welcoming, “Friends of space, how are you all? Have you eaten yet? Come visit us if you have time.” It is interesting to note that the final greeting, in English, came from then-6-year-old Nick Sagan, son of Carl and Linda Salzman Sagan. He said, “Hello from the children of planet Earth.”

Whale Greeting

Biologist Roger Payne provided a whale song (“the most beautiful whale greeting,” he said, and “the one that should last forever”) captured with hydrophones off the coast of Bermuda in 1970. Thinking that perhaps the whale song might make more sense to aliens than to humans, Ferris wanted to include more than a slice and so mixed some of the song behind the greetings in different languages. “That strikes some people as hilarious, but from a bandwidth standpoint, it worked quite well,” says Ferris. “It doesn’t interfere with the greetings, and if you are interested in the whale song, you can extract it.”

A Kiss

Reportedly, the trickiest sound to record was a kiss. Some were too quiet, others too loud, and at least one was too disingenuous for the team’s liking. Music producer Jimmy Iovine kissed his arm. In the end, the kiss that landed on the record was actually one that Ferris planted on Ann Druyan’s cheek.

Life Signs

Druyan had the idea to record a person’s brain waves, so that should extraterrestrials millions of years into the future have the technology, they could decode the individual’s thoughts. She was the guinea pig. In an hour-long session hooked to an EEG at New York University Medical Center, Druyan meditated on a series of prepared thoughts. In Murmurs of Earth, she admits that “a couple of irrepressible facts of my own life” slipped in. She and Carl Sagan had gotten engaged just days before, so a love story may very well be documented in her neurological signs. Compressed into a minute-long segment, the brain waves sound, writes Druyan, like a “string of exploding firecrackers.”

Georgian Chorus—“Tchakrulo

TMurmurs of Earth. Sandro Baratheli, a Georgian speaker from Queens, came to the rescue. The word “tchakrulo” can mean either “bound up” or “hard” and “tough,” and the song’s narrative is about a peasant protest against a landowner.

he team discovered a beautiful recording of “Tchakrulo” by Radio Moscow and wanted to include it, particularly since Georgians are often credited with introducing polyphony, or music with two or more independent melodies, to the Western world. But before the team members signed off on the tune, they had the lyrics translated. “It was an old song, and for all we knew could have celebrated bear-baiting,” wrote Ferris in

Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode”

According to Ferris, Carl Sagan had to warm up to the idea of including Chuck Berry’s 1958 hit “Johnny B. Goode” on the record, but once he did, he defended it against others’ objections. Folklorist Alan Lomax was against it, arguing that rock music was adolescent. “And Carl’s brilliant response was, ‘There are a lot of adolescents on the planet,’” recalls Ferris.

On April 22, 1978, Saturday Night Live spoofed the Golden Record in a skit called “Next Week in Review.” Host Steve Martin played a psychic named Cocuwa, who predicted that Time magazine would reveal, on the following week’s cover, a four-word message from aliens. He held up a mock cover, which read, “Send More Chuck Berry.”

More than four decades later, Ferris has no regrets about what the team did or did not include on the record. “It means a lot to have had your hand in something that is going to last a billion years,” he says. “I recommend it to everybody. It is a healthy way of looking at the world.”

According to the writer, NASA approached him about producing another record but he declined. “I think we did a good job once, and it is better to let someone else take a shot,” he says.

So, what would you put on a record if one were being sent into space today?

Sources:
Voyager, The Love Story 
We Are Singing Stardust: Carl Sagan on the Story of Humanity’s Greatest Message and How the Golden Record Was Born

Parton sends books to Rotherham

A reading scheme developed by the US country singer Dolly Parton is a proving a big hit in the UK

Elizabeth Smith was in hospital having had her first child when she learned about the free books. The nurses gave her the form as part of an information pack and six weeks later a book – a Peter Rabbit story – addressed to her son, Aaron, slipped through the letterbox of her Rotherham home. The following month, another book arrived for Aaron and another the next month, until the little boy became used to the sight of the postman delivering a fresh title every month.

"He calls it 'Aaron post' and he knows the books are for him," says his mother. "When the postman comes Aaron runs to check, and if there is a book he wants me to open it straight away. The books have been a wonderful way to bond, and reading the stories before bedtime has become part of his routine." Aaron is now 22 months and he will go on receiving a new book a month until his fifth birthday. He is one of 13,000 children in Rotherham, aged under five, who are sent a book every month because of a woman the children refer to as 'The Book Lady', but who is better known as Dolly Parton.

Parton is one of the all-time great country singer–songwriters, but for the past 15 years she has also been spearheading a campaign to get children reading. Her Imagination Library started in her home town of Sevier County in Tennessee where she had grown up in a two-room wooden shack with her 11 siblings. When I met Parton in Dollywood, the theme park she co-owns in eastern Tennessee, she explained why she started the library. "Many of my own relatives didn't get a chance to go to school or get an education," she told me, "and my dad didn't learn to read and write because he was born into a very large family and they had to go out and work in the fields to make money. My dad felt crippled by that – so I thought this book scheme would be a wonderful tribute to him."

Parents at the Coleridge children’s centre in Rotherham said the Imagination Library scheme had inspired them to read more, as well as enthusing their children. Photograph:

From those modest beginnings the Imagination Library has grown. "In 1999, the library was mailing books to 2,300 children every month", says David Dotson, president of the Dollywood Foundation, which looks after the administration of the scheme. "Today, it is mailing to just under 700,000 children every month in the US, Canada and, since 2008, Britain. The scheme was launched with a visit by Parton to Rotherham in December 2007."

I met some of those children, along with their mothers, at the Coleridge children's centre, which offers family learning programmes that look at the benefit of sharing books and the importance of reading out loud to children. One woman told me that reading to her baby had inspired her to start reading more herself, to set a good example; while an Asian woman said that the books were helping illiterate parents to learn to read English – the children were reading to their parents."Rotherham borough council was the first to sign up and we started registering children at the start of 2008", explains Alison Lilburn, project manager for the scheme in the town, "and since then we have registered over 18,000 children and we are sending out books to just over 13,000 children each month – which is 85% of the population under five years old."

Rotherham's council leader, Roger Stone, heard about the Imagination Library while on a visit to the US. Convinced the book scheme could raise literacy standards in Rotherham, he set about trying to bring it to the UK. Following Rotherham's lead, Sheffield, Luton, Sheerness, Nottingham, Wigan and two communities in London have joined in, and recently the Scottish Book Trust announced that it would be adopting the scheme for "looked after" children across the whole of Scotland, funded by the Scottish government.

There are, of course, other book schemes operating in Britain – Bookstart, for example, offers free books to children before they start school and the NationalLiteracy Trust has many reading schemes. "The Imagination Library complements other book-gifting programmes", says Natalie Turnbull, the UK director of the scheme, "simply by the volume of the books we send – one a month – and also the fact that the books are being delivered by post to the home, so there is a guarantee that the book is going to reach that child."

The fact that the scheme carries Parton's name has led some to think that Parton herself funds the library; in fact, while her Dollywood Foundation pays for all the administration costs in maintaining the database, it does not pay for the actual books. It is, however, able to ensure that the books are bought at a hugely discounted rate: Penguin, which supplies all the books, sells them to the scheme for an average price of £2, which is up to a quarter of their usual cost.

In Rotherham the cost of the scheme is met through donations from the Chamber of Commerce, the NHS and, this year, the local authority. In Luton, the scheme is being paid for by the Wates group and it is anticipated that around 24,000 books will be sent out each year.

While the scheme is undoubtedly laudable, is there any need to spend money giving families free books when they can easily visit their local library? "Not everybody is that way inclined", says Lilburn. "The difference with this scheme is that the book is addressed to the child and, based on all the parental feedback we get, the children are really excited when that book comes through the door."

Rotherham is now trying to measure the impact of the Imagination Library. "Because we have other initiatives to assist reading, it isn't easy to measure how much the Imagination Library has helped," says Lilburn. "But we do know that year on year Rotherham has improved in terms of its education, language and literacy development and we are now the same level nationally, when in previous years we have been way below the national average."

By the time children start school they are coming to the end of their eligibility for the Imagination Library, but schools in Rotherham are, Lilburn says, increasingly recognising the part that the book-gifting scheme can play in developing reading. "What we are getting back from teachers is that where they use Imagination Library books, the response from children is really positive," she says. "There is a commonality among kids because they know each other has had the book, and they are familiar with the books."

Aaron has not yet started school, but he has already started putting sentences together from books he has read with his mother. She believes the Imagination Library should be expanded so that every child has the opportunity that her son has. "I don't think it is just schools' job to encourage reading," she says. "What is so great about the Imagination Library is that it is not means-tested. When things are means-tested it means that there can be a stigma to being part of the scheme, but with the Imagination Library every child has the opportunity to allow their imagination to grow."

Sources:

Dolly foundation : from wikipedia

Country Music Legend Dolly Parton’s New Role: ‘Book Lady’

Mr. Know-It-All: Is My PayPal Frequent-Flier Scheme Illegal, or Even Feasible?

• BY JON MOOALLEM  

My credit card gives me frequent-flier miles. Why can’t I set up a PayPal account to charge myself thousands and use that same money to pay off the card?

A Chicago consultant once ran a scam like this, except it wasn’t a scam, because it’s perfectly legal, and it wasn’t really like this, because it was much, much better.

Brad's Deals / YouTube.com

In 2008 the US Mint began selling $1 coins on its website for $1 each, with free shipping. (The Mint wanted to replace as much paper currency as possible with longer-lasting coins.) Brad Wilson, who is the proprietor of BradsDeals.com, charged a few boxes of 250 $1 coins to his credit card, racked up the corresponding airline miles, and then deposited the coins in his checking account to pay off the credit card charges. Just like that, he’d essentially laundered money through the federal government and conjured frequent-flier miles out of thin air. “OK,” Wilson said to himself, “let me try to scale this up a bit.”

Before long Wilson was running shipments of $1 coins worth $40,000 apiece and had rented a UPS mailbox near his bank for nearly instantaneous pick up and deposit. The airline miles piled up. (Actually, Wilson was using his credit card to earn Starwood points, not airline miles, then converting them into American Airlines frequent-flier miles at the companies’ standard exchange rate of 1 to 1.25 — therefore upping his take even more. This is just the way Wilson operates.) When he got to almost 4 million frequent-flier miles, he stopped.

When I talked to Wilson, he quickly diagnosed the many flaws of your idea, even though it is legal — for example, PayPal would charge a fee on each transaction, and, more important, the company is notoriously vigilant and easily spooked and can delay a transaction if it suspects any sort of foul play, thus tying up your money. But even as he eviscerated your plan, Wilson saluted your effort and encouraged you to keep trying: “Every once in a while, an idea pops up that doesn’t have a catch.”

Our neighbor named his Wi-Fi network TwatRocker. We occasionally steal his Wi-Fi, because it’s the strongest signal in the back of our house. We have a young daughter, who doesn’t know yet that “TwatRocker” is dirty, but I worry about when she does. Can I force this creep to change the name?

Ugh. I imagine you must feel like Jean Valjean in Les Misérables: a loving man, nearly broken by a conspiracy of circumstance and abuse, forced to steal bread for his sister’s hungry children. Except in this case, the baker’s a pervert and the only bread in the window is shaped like a penis, and Jean Valjean, not wanting to see innocent, milky-cheeked children eat this vile loaf, wonders whether he can ask for a plain old roll instead.

Isn’t that how it feels?

Well, the truth is much less dramatic, according to Stanford law professor Mark Lemley. For starters, “no way is ‘TwatRocker’ obscene,” Lemley says. Offensive, maybe. But your neighbor isn’t projecting it into your home; your daughter sees it only when she actively accesses the Internet. And as Lemley points out, “if that’s the worst thing she sees on the Internet, you are a very lucky person.”

“IF THAT’S THE WORST THING YOUR DAUGHTER SEES ON THE INTERNET, YOU’RE A VERY LUCKY PERSON.”

Also know that you are not technically stealing anything. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (the law Aaron Swartz was famously charged with breaking) is notoriously vague about what constitutes “unauthorized access” to a network. But more important, it’s hard to argue that access is unauthorized if the network has no password. Maybe, Lemley says, your neighbor wants everyone to share TwatRocker freely.

My point is, don’t we all sometimes inflate our problems into sprawling, agonizing epics? Aren’t we all guilty of Les Misérablizing the difficulties of daily life? Do you hear the people singing? Singing the songs of angry men? Well, that’s you — and your neighbor. And me too — each of us staging our lonely revolutions against the perceived monarchy of everyone else.

We can do better. Go knock on your neighbor’s door. Explain the problem. Talk it out like human beings. Maybe invite him to a musical.

I think my girlfriend is stealing jokes and insights about the news from Twitter — throwing them into conversations like they are hers. How do I prove it and catch her?

What your girlfriend is doing, if she is doing it, is dishonest—a tiny betrayal—and you have some options about how to address it. You could easily look at the accounts she follows on Twitter, search for her source material, and call her out when she uses someone else’s jokes. Try something like “Ha, I loved that tweet from Sarah Silverman. What a funny lady!” But remember that episode of Louie, where Louis CK confronts Dane Cook about stealing his jokes? He does so thoughtfully, tempering his anger with humility and bigheartedness. Go watch it, because the second option would be to settle your problem with this same maturity. “Are you willing to admit, even for a minute, that maybe you inadvertently took ‘em?” Louie asks. “Maybe it was inadvertent, but maybe it did happen?” It’s a master class in generous accusation. Sometimes it’s OK to steal from Louis CK.

References:

How One Man Earned 4 Million Airline Miles by Buying...

This Man Earned 4 Million Airline Miles by Buying Dollar ...

"D. B. Tuber" robs an armored car guard at the Bank of America in Monroe on September 30, 2008.

On September 30, 2008, in one of the more unique bank robberies in Washington state history -- one that makes the national news -- an armored car guard is robbed outside of a Bank of America branch in Monroe (Snohomish County).  The robber posts a Craigslist ad several days before the robbery, seeking workers for a phony job in Monroe; the workers are instructed to wear the same work outfit. Those answering the ad receive emailed instructions telling them to meet near the bank at 11 a.m. on September 30, and about a dozen men show up at the prearranged hour. At the same time the robber, similarly attired as his decoys, assaults the armored car guard outside of the bank and flees with $400,000. The robber escapes by floating away in a yellow innertube on nearby Woods Creek, earning him the nickname "D. B. Tuber." A 28-year-old man, Anthony Curcio, is later convicted of the crime.

The ad went up on Craigslist late in September: "Laborers with landscaping experience wanted for a job in Monroe." Those who answered got an email back telling them to meet at 11 a.m. on September 30 in Monroe at two different spots -- an Albertson's parking lot and Eagle Park -- located near the intersection of Old Owen Road and Highway 2, and both right by a Bank of America branch. The ad also instructed the workers to wear safety glasses or equivalent eye protection, ventilator mask, yellow safety vest, and a long-sleeved shirt; follow-up emails instructed them to wear a blue shirt if possible, and to wait for the project manager once they arrived.  About a dozen men arrived at the two locations at the appointed hour and waited patiently outside in the mild morning for a job supervisor who never showed up. 

By 11:15, the men were beginning to realize they'd been scammed. Then they found out how badly.  While they were waiting for their ghost employer, another man nearby, similarly clad as his decoys in a mask and long-sleeved shirt, watched as an armored car guard, carrying canvas bags filled with cash, walked out of the bank and up to his armored vehicle parked nearby. At about 11:04 a.m. the robber raced up to the guard, sprayed him in the face with pepper spray, and snatched a bag of money from the guard.  He then turned and raced 100 yards across Old Owen Road and through some underbrush to Woods Creek, shedding his accessories as he ran. Two men who witnessed the robbery tried to chase the yegg down, but he leapt into the creek and vanished.

Floating to a Fleeting Freedom

There were conflicting reports as to just how the crook got away. People couldn’t really believe that he used an innertube (one witness said he swam away), but it was true. The thief hopped aboard a yellow innertube that he had stashed in the creek and floated to his escape; the innertube was later found about 200 yards away. The sheer audacity of the heist and subsequent escape quickly earned the robber the moniker "D. B. Tuber" in a nod to the infamous 1971 case involving the airplane-hijacking, parachute-escaping robber D. B. Cooper.

The Seattle P-I reported that a similar ploy with look-alike decoys was used in a 1999 movie, The Thomas Crown Affair, in which an art thief escapes with a masterpiece from a museum while security guards are distracted by several nearby look-alikes hired by the crook. Perhaps this gave the Tubed One the idea for the extras in the Monroe robbery, though the police responding to the real-life crime were not fooled by the decoys. But the Craigslist ad was an added touch, and the innertube getaway was all original; Seattle FBI spokeswoman Roberta Burroughs told The Herald (Everett) that she had never heard of a similar tactic in 15 years of investigating bank holdups.

The amount of money taken was initially not disclosed, but was later learned to be about $400,000. The armored-car guard was treated at the scene for exposure to pepper spray and released. The national media quickly picked up the story, giving the city of Monroe its 15 minutes of fame in the early autumn of 2008. But although the crime had been well planned, the felonious floater had left a clue or two, and thanks to a tip from a citizen and a DNA sample from the mask dropped by the robber as he fled, police arrested Anthony Curcio, 28, of Lake Stevens (Snohomish County) on November 3, 2008. In July 2009, Curcio was sentenced to six years in federal prison for the crime.

Curcio was released in 2013 and moved to Woodinville in King County. In 2014, he was reported to be living quietly as a stay-at-home father to his two children. In an interview with The Seattle Times that September, Curcio acknowledged his mistakes and said that since his release he had spoken at area schools in Washington and Oregon on the dangers of drug addiction, which he said led him into a spiral that eventually culminated in the robbery.

Sources:

Bankrobber recruited Craigslist decoys to confuse police

Wash. Man Pulls Off Robbery Using Craigslist, Pepper Spray

The Second San Fernando Massacre

Narco gangster reveals the underworld
Cartels have taken cruelty up a notch, says one drug trafficker: kidnapping bus passengers for gladiatorlike fights to the death

On Mexican Federal Highway 101 bus-loads of Mexican citizens and tourists alike were vanishing without a trace. No ransom demands or otherwise were ever made and the authorities were beginning to doubt their original theory of kidnappings. Then they discovered a truth far more grisly and even more surreal than simple kidnappings. Welcome to San Fernando...

San Fernando, a town of 57,000 people and roughly 100 miles from the US border, is no stranger to mass killings and massacres. Only one year before in 2010 the city was famous for another massacre wherein the mass murder of 72 undocumented immigrants took place, this was the first San Fernando Massacre. The Mexican state of Tamaulipas was at the time home to the Los Zetas drug cartel whose headquarters was believed to be in the small village of El Huizachal on the outskirts of San Fernando. It was this group that was responsible for both San Fernando Massacres.

In the first massacre, the killings were the result of a conflict between the immigrants and the cartel, the cartel had bigger guns and won, simple as that. However, in the second San Fernando massacre the Los Zetas were being truly creative in their efforts to resolve an imposing threat from neighbouring drug clans.

The bus loads of people were being abducted for the very specific purpose of training them as assassins. Once abducted the women would be sequestered to make-shift barracks where they would be repeatedly raped for the pleasure of the Los Zetas soldiers. This would happen day in and day out until they had eventually gone insane, or the cartel decided that they were for some other reason no longer usable at which point they would be executed.
The men, on the other hand, were chained in a large garage structure that provided little shelter from the elements. Each day they would be put into pairs and given ordinary tools such as hammers, sickles, or even regular wood saws. These tools were meant as weapons for the male captives to use when led into a pit and forced to fight to the death (like the gladiators of ancient Rome). After several rounds of one-on-one gladiator battles to the death, the survivors would be rewarded with their first meal and informed of their new purpose in life as assassins for the Los Zetas drug cartel.

This practice was being a carried out in San Fernando for the better part of six months with little intervention from the authorities. The townspeople knew what was happening, but fearing for their lives they never spoke out against the cartel, even when they’re own family members were amongst the “new recruits”. 

In a 2012 article in the El Universal, several anonymous residents gave testimony of the events in Tamaulipas. One elderly woman stated: "We could not do anything. We were fighting for our lives and watched helplessly as they were being taken. The abduction of the buses were in full daylight, even outside the bus station. But we could not say anything, we remained silent. We have family, we have children and we cannot leave here." More chilling are the words of her granddaughter: “My mom always reminds us before we leave: if they come for you don’t be trapped alive. So at least we'll have your body and know where you are and lay our flowers.”

Despite the shroud of silence, there are only so many people, especially tourists that can go missing in a six month period before the authorities take notice. In august of 2011 six hundred and fifty Mexican soldiers flooded the streets of San Fernando forcibly removing the local police force and beginning a massive hunt for the Los Zetas base. What they found during their search were the unmarked graves of 193 female victims of rape, torture, and murder, and the male victims forced to fight as gladiators.

The known members of the Los Zetas drug cartel involved in the massacre were arrested in short time, but it is likely that many were never found. There were far more deaths than initially thought, when Édgar Huerta Montiel, a high-ranking boss in Los Zetas was interrogated he told Mexican federal authorities that there were approximately six hundred victims, roughly one hundred per month. Today Mexican Federal Highway 101 is known as 'The Highway of Death', although it is now relatively safe, it was in 2011 described as "burned vehicles, bullet-shot trucks on the side of the road, and dead bodies, often decapitated, that the cartels would leave behind."

References:

Mexican crook: Gangsters arrange fights to death for entertainment

The 'Second Massacre of San Fernando' (2011)