One of those causes has, for me, been self-evident. It’s an abnormally low normal body temperature. Finally, it looks as though research is beginning to provide evidence-based support for that idea.

The investigation has been undertaken using dogs for now, but a comparison between weight and body temperature has shown (among other things) an inverse correlation between the two (i.e., the lower the body temperature, the higher the weight).

Science Digest shows a summary here:

www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/08/110812162549.htm

and the International Journal of Obesity published the paper here:

www.nature.com/ijo/journal/v35/n8/full/ijo2010253a.html

It amazes me that this aspect hasn’t been investigated long ago. One of the things you learn when studying clinical chemistry is that temperature can control the direction in which metabolic processes take place; conduct the process at one temperature and A→B, but conduct it at another (usually lower) temperature and the process is driven in the opposite direction (A←B).

This also gives the lie to the idea that a calorie is a calorie is a calorie and that obesity results solely from taking in more calories than you need. If your metabolism is out of whack because your body temperature is awry, it’s entirely possible for the emphasis to change – from giving highest priority to immediate energy needs and lower priority to fat deposition, to a priority that puts fat deposition as the main priority and immediate energy needs much lower down the list.

That would mean that two individuals with exactly the same lifestyle, the same apparent caloric needs and the same intake would experience totally different results. One would have a “normal” weight while the other would become obese – and not understand why.

Abnormal “normal” clinical values are well-known. For example, the normal resting heart rate is around 70 beats per minute (bpm). I once worked with someone whose normal resting heart rate was 45 bpm. He wasn’t super-fit, it was just the way his system operated. If he exercised vigorously his rate would struggle to reach 70 bpm. For a so-called “normal” person this would result in a diagnosis of bradycardia. How different can the values get? Competitive cyclists can obtain resting heart rates as low as 28 bpm.

I know someone who has been suffering from super-obesity pretty much all their life. Their normal body temperature, instead of being around 98.6° Fahrenheit, lies between 94.6° F and 96.4° F.

A lower temperature implies a different metabolism, whether it’s in a dog or a human being.

Once the pattern is identified, the next step is to try to discover why the body temperature is so low. One possible cause is a genetic difference. Another is a mitochondrial defect. Yet another might be an environmental factor (a toxin of some kind).

And yet another – and in my view, probably one that’s quite prevalent, given the subjective histories I’ve encountered – is the possibility that the individual has contracted an infection earlier in life, one that marked a change in their physiology from that point on.

The infection could have been ostensibly bacterial but the underlying agent might have been viral (the two have been known to travel together, one inside the other), and the virus could have been the key agent, altering either cellular or mitochondrial genetic code in such a way that the human host was afflicted with severe obesity that resisted attempts to control it.

Such a condition could be masked by other factors – even eating disorders on top of emotional issues – making the correct diagnosis difficult to achieve.

I hope I can look forward to the time when the underlying causes of severe obesity (i.e., gaining more than 100 lbs) are properly identified and treated, and the stigma currently experienced by sufferers fades into history.

I say “I hope” simply because the world doesn’t always take on board modern knowledge (look at the farcical situation with regard to the teaching of Evolution, for example; by now it should be accepted as fact and the discussion should center on the discovery of the different mechanisms).

There was a time, centuries ago, when epilepsy was believed to be possession by demons. The treatments were often really bizarre: being thrown into a pig sty was popular at one time (the idea was that demons wouldn’t be able to stand the conditions and would leave the human host).

Luckily for today’s epileptics we’ve learned a great deal since then. Or have we? In Tanzania they still believe epilepsy is caused by demon possession. Maybe it will take an equally long time to accept that severe obesity is not simply caused by stuffing your face…

I have broken it into three parts, to make it easier to consume. Even so, it’s complicated.

What makes it so dreadful is the dysfunctional family dynamic that is revealed, one largely controlled by what is almost certainly undiagnosed – and untreated – mental illness coupled with wealth, along with sheer criminal greed. And I do mean criminal – there are aspects of the story that warrant investigation by the FBI.

It would remain just that – a story – if it were not for two facts.

One, it’s all true. Two, I have documentary evidence for much of what I describe here, and I include fragments of those documents as proof of what I say. The originals are well-preserved.

The Beginning

There’s a necessary preamble, to set the scene. I’ll be as brief as I can, but note that “brevity” is not my middle name. I’ll also use pseudonyms, partly because I don’t want to give the guilty parties any opportunity to launch frivolous lawsuits as a way to avoid their inevitable punishment, and partly because that way only the guilty will know who’s who. If they choose to act upon what I write, they’ll be opening themselves to action by exposing their identities.

But who said criminals were intrinsically smart?

Let’s start with the two people I know well: Pea and Sea. Pea’s male, Sea’s female. They are the innocent parties in all this and I feel badly for them. They did nothing whatsoever to deserve the fate being imposed upon them, and they are presently still powerless to do anything to stop their descent into oblivion. And thus the rationale for this post.

Pea and Sea met in an unusual way. At least, it was unusual for 1994 – they met online, 6,000 miles apart from each other. Back then the Internet hadn’t been invented and sending email was something of an art rather than a routine event.

Pea was working for a well-known University in the UK, while Sea was coping with having become recently disabled in the USA. Sea used her AOL account from home to access newsgroups (they still exist today) via UseNet and Pea found himself doing two jobs – one paid, one unpaid – that came with access to the academic online communities and while working late at night in the office he, too, explored UseNet in between print jobs that sometimes took hours to complete.

Both Pea and Sea encountered one newsgroup in particular and found many kindred spirits there. They read each other’s posts and found them supportive yet entertaining, and over time progressed to email and finally to telephone communication.

By the beginning of 1995 – even though neither knew what the other looked like – they had formed a strong relationship and in late February 1995, Pea flew to visit Sea for a couple of weeks. Both were pretty sure they wanted to make a lasting commitment, and on March 5, 1995, Pea proposed (taking eight hours to do so – l..o..n..g story) and Sea accepted.

The difficulty lay in deciding how to marry. Should Sea move to the UK to marry Pea (option A), or should Pea move to the US to marry Sea (option B)?

The decision was made as a result of three things:

1. Pea already had a passport whereas Sea didn’t (score 1 for option B);
2. Pea had reached a crossroad in his employment and the possibility of resigning had arisen more than once (score 2 for option B);
3. Aunt Bee, a relative of Sea’s (her only aunt), had indicated to Sea that if Pea could get himself over The Pond, she would pay for both wedding and honeymoon, which was (it seemed at the time) incredibly generous

Score 3 for option B and option A yields the floor.

So Pea began the process of dismantling his life in the UK and the extraordinary process of applying for a K1 (Fiancé) visa, (which didn’t come through until the morning of the day that Pea was due to fly out of the country), and at one point nearly causing an incident at the US Embassy in London. Talk about coming down to the wire.

And so it was that Pea arrived on the Eastern seaboard of the US (nearly causing yet another incident in the process, this time at the office of the INS at Newark, NJ – another long story), where he was met by Sea and whisked away to Meet The Family.

On to Part 2…

Most of the time this is true, but there are occasions when words – outright, manipulative lies, say – can inflict incredible pain. Here’s a case in point.

My wife – we’ll call her C – is disabled. There is no doubt about that. She’s registered as disabled and has qualified to receive Social Security Disability. To those who scoff that anyone can be registered as disabled, I can say in all honesty: you don’t what the fuck you’re talking about.

C has been re-assessed a number of times since we were married almost 16 years ago, and each time has qualified to continue receiving SSD. Most recently the SSA decided that her condition is never likely to improve and so opted not to re-assess her (which is quite a set of hoops to jump through, believe me).

She was in this position before we even got married, but in the last several years the main focus of her disability has changed and it has worsened to the point that she is no longer ambulatory.

The turning point was late summer 2002 when one of my sisters and her family came to visit us. C had been standing in the kitchen for only a little while and at first none of us noticed that she was in tears with the pain – just by standing.

Among a number of ailments, C has severe degenerative arthritis of both knees. Some years ago her Rheumatologist examined X-rays of both knees and declared that there was no discernible cartilage, so her joints are bone on bone. If you know anything about pain levels, bone pain is among the most severe, barely managed even with strong painkillers (we’re talking Hydrocodone and Oxycontin here).

My wife even qualified to have both knees replaced, but – and this is most bizarre – having asked the insurance company for permission to perform the surgery, and received it, her orthopedic surgeon at the time then refused point blank to go forward, and what’s more, refused to discuss the reason for his decision, refused even to discuss it with other medical professionals. To this day we have no idea why.

The situation has worsened over the years in fits and starts, but the last five years have probably been the worst, as C’s mobility has reduced from being able to walk from our apartment to the car (maybe 200 feet) and handle some stairs, to being mostly bed-ridden (70% or more of the time – that means the pain abates just enough for her to get out of bed for a few hours maybe 1 day in 3 or 4 if she’s lucky) and barely able to walk to the bathroom (15 feet) without a cane¹. Steps or stairs are impossible. We had our bathroom modified to be more disabled friendly and I took on all of the physical tasks that C could no longer participate in, such as cooking, cleaning, laundry, and so on.

When she does feel up to it, C needs a walker to get from the bedroom to the den or the living room and that’s as far as she can manage.

To get her to the car, about four years ago we bought a transport wheelchair (specifically a bariatric transport wheelchair – it’s much wider than a standard wheelchair).

To those unfamiliar with the difference, a transport wheelchair doesn’t have the giant rear wheels that a regular wheelchair possesses. A transport wheelchair is designed solely to allow the occupant to be pushed by someone else from point A to point B. It can’t be propelled by the occupant. Here’s a photo of my wife’s beast:

The Transport Wheelchair

The rear wheels are small, only a little larger than the front wheels. Unless you have orang utan arms, you’ll never reach them while sitting in the wheelchair, let alone have the upper body strength to manipulate them.

You would think that a medical professional would know this – a nurse, say? – but it would appear not, as you will see.

So to go anywhere outside the apartment, my wife has to be pushed by me, and I have my own health issues that make it no easy task (arthritis of the spine and now of the left hand (Heberden’s nodes – look ‘em up) as well as barely controlled high blood pressure, and chronic paresthesia in both feet and parts of my legs, possibly the result of impacts to my spine when I was younger that have triggered spinal adhesions.

Anyway, C can still drive a little (I don’t, for complex reasons that have to do with not already being a driver before I came to the US) but her knees restrict the distance. So I push her to the car, help her get in, collapse the chair and put it in the trunk. When we reach our destination I reverse the process. Any trip is always a two-man effort. Well, one man, one woman, one wheelchair.

Usually, after about 5 to 7 miles of driving in street traffic, the pressure on C’s knees caused by pressing on the pedals produces sufficient pain that it takes her days, literally, to recover from the task. (We don’t have the money to get the car modified to change the controls, although a change to C’s medical insurance – from a Medicare HMO to a PPO – might give us the hope of getting help with the task.)

For this reason we stay close to all our medical providers (who are excellent, and we would be fools to give them up), but because of the physical trauma involved, the visits to them are few and far between. In 2010, for example, I think we made just two trips to see our GP. We were supposed to make 12.

C’s brother, however, is of the conviction that if you’re in a wheelchair, you can’t drive a car.

Whaaat?

Fifty years ago I used to push our old art teacher in his (regular) wheelchair to his car (a Mini) and he would haul himself out of the chair and into the car, then collapse the chair and pull it across his chest and into the well where the front passenger seat would have gone.

Is it really possible to be alive in this day and age and dispute whether someone disabled who requires a wheelchair can actually drive a car? Just how out of touch with reality do you have to be?

The most amazing thing, though, is the complete refusal of members of C’s family of origin (who live some 3,000 miles away and have never bothered to visit her in all the time we’ve been married) to believe that she is disabled.

We were recently evicted from our apartment (another long story, and not a happy one, that also involves action (and inaction) by that same family – I may vent to this blog on that subject too).

C’s brother had the temerity to proclaim that C couldn’t be disabled because “if you’re genuinely disabled you can’t be evicted.”

Whaaat?

An attorney friend offered to write to him to try to disabuse him of that belief – we figured if he didn’t believe us he might at least accept the truth from a lawyer who can tell him what can and can’t be done in an eviction – but that went absolutely nowhere.

C’s sister-in-law even had the gall to call the attorney in response to the letter to the brother (a violation of the law, since she was not named in the letter, which was a privileged communication between the attorney and the brother) and tried to pull the wool over his eyes. Big mistake. Never, EVER, lie to a lawyer.

It gets worse. The sister-in-law, who HAS to know better (she is or was a nurse), has been peddling the same lie about C’s disability to other members of the family – namely that C is not genuinely disabled or she wouldn’t have been evicted, and that if you’re bed-ridden you can’t drive a car.

I can’t believe that in one of the most advanced countries in the world there is this backwater mindset that thinks this way.

It is staggeringly shameful. The more so when these people have made it clear that they regard themselves as pious.

In their shoes, I’d have died of shame and embarrassment long ago.

1. “Cane” is rather a misleading term for this aid – it’s heavy metal (2lbs or more) and could probably stop a charging bull elephant.

Fun Fact: our car, a Toyota Camry Solara, is seven years old. It has about 12,000 miles on the clock. You do the math. Most cars clock up about 12,000 miles a year in normal use in this neck of the woods. Does that suggest it’s not driven very much? Could that be because the driver is, ooh, what’s that word? Disabled?

Does this mean that we are at the center of the universe? You’d think it would, since if everything is moving away from us, and nothing is moving towards us, that circumstance could surely only arise if we were at the center.

Sometimes when trying to understand something complicated it helps to reduce the levels of complexity and work with a much simpler set of circumstances in order to gain an understanding of the underlying principles.

So let’s not try to think of how this would work in the three dimensional[1] universe, and simplify the problem by reducing the universe to being just one dimension. What would such a universe look like? It’s a line:

– and it’s stretching out in both directions at once (the expansion of the universe).

So let’s stick a few galaxies into this one dimensional universe – the easiest way to represent them is as dots on the line:

That blue-green blob is where we are in our Milky Way, somewhere along this one dimensional universe. Look at what happens when the universe expands some more (i.e., when time passes):

Notice how the distance between each galaxy has increased. If you were an observer sitting somewhere in that blue-green blob, both of the galaxies sitting either side of you would appear to have moved away from you.

In fact, all of the blobs would appear to have moved away from you, no matter in which direction you looked (bearing in mind you can only look in two directions in this version of the universe), and no matter in which blob you were sitting.

Now, a one dimensional universe is difficult to relate to. Two dimensional is a bit closer to reality. So let’s redo our model.

Above we have a two dimensional version of our universe, with the galaxies distributed sort-of randomly throughout it. What happens when the universe continues to expand?

Hopefully you can see that all of the galaxies appear to have moved away from each other. No matter which galaxy you sit on, all of the others that you can see appear to have moved away from you (and from each other).

Also, hopefully, you can imagine that for the case of the three dimensional universe (which would appear as a cube in this scenario, just for simplicity), the same principle would hold true:

It’s much harder to convey the depth of a three dimensional universe in this medium, but hopefully the limited visual effects here will enable you to imagine that some of the galaxy blobs are nearer and some are farther away. When the expansion continues, again the objects appear to move apart from each other in all directions:

This is of course only true in terms of galaxies. Our solar system is not moving away from our galaxy (the Milky Way), just as the Earth is not moving away from the Sun.

Gravity is holding us all together; that much seems to be true. But gravity has only a limited reach, and once you get far enough away from our galaxy, it becomes apparent that other galaxies are moving away from us in all directions.

What’s more, the speed with which they’re moving away is increasing all the time – they’re not just moving away from us, they’re accelerating away from us, and whoever has their foot on the accelerator, they don’t seem to be too keen to ease off any time soon.

As it happens, we now think we know the reason why this acceleration is happening, and that will be the subject for Part 2, along with the reason why I think there must be a fourth physical dimension to explain Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance”.

Part 3 will look at how two-dimensional Time could resolve the so-called “Grandfather Paradox”, and why we will probably never be able to travel into the Future until someone in the Future comes back to pick us up…

[1] It’s accepted that the universe consists of something called “space-time”, which is the usual familiar three dimensions of space coupled to the single dimension of Time. However, I have a strong suspicion that Time is not just one dimensional but two, and I’m pretty certain there’s another dimension of space, making 4+2=6 dimensions in all. At a minimum. Some of the (i.e., my) reasoning behind that will be presented in the next posts.

And crackpot though this idea may seem, mine is not an original idea – not by a long chalk. There are those who have taken the basic concepts and extended them considerably, even representing them in a form of mathematics that is quite beyond me (at the moment).

Check out the work of Itzhak Bars at UCLA. There are articles here and there on the ‘Net, too:

Roger Highfield writing in the Telegraph (UK)

Tom Siegfried writing about Itzhak’s work

Frank Arntzenius on the Philosophy of Time Travel

Breaking It Down

Part of the problem, it has to be said, lies in the way information about biological evolution is presented. Often the statements are made metaphorically by the presenters but are interpreted literally by some listeners.

Part of the problem lies in a misunderstanding of the language that’s associated with biological evolution (and since in some cases we’re talking about the form of English that was in use in Charles Darwin’s time, that at least is understandable).

Part of the problem, sadly, lies in the deliberate muddying of the waters by individuals interested more in the destruction of the ideas that biological evolution brings than in the presentation of genuinely alternative explanations of observations – explanations that conform to a set of moderately simple rules, a set that comes under the umbrella term “the scientific approach”.

And inevitably, part of the problem lies in the way that the subject of biological evolution is taught (or not) in many schools, by some teachers who have an agenda that does not include objectively teaching their students the (currently known) facts. These are just out and out bad teachers but there doesn’t seem to be an objective system in place to weed them out. Not at any level.

And then there’s the issue of genuine misunderstanding, in which some individuals have been deliberately and wilfully misinformed and misled by others who care not one jot for the truth of any issue if it contradicts their distorted view of the world.

But those misled individuals are open to being shown evidence that could put them on the right track, because they’re capable of thinking for themselves. They have the perspective that the explanations given to them thus far do not quite seem right. Some things don’t fit together well, but they can’t put their finger on exactly what or exactly how.

Finding the right evidence and the right way to present it unambiguously are going to be major challenges, however. Once the bad seed is sown, it’s not a simple matter to un-sow it.

Over time, the reality of who claimed what and when becomes so mixed up that extracting the kernels of truth is increasingly a herculean task. The more so when there is a continuous cacophony of distracting discourse, such that it’s hard to find a quiet spot in which to sit and try and make sense of the whole thing.

So, how might the mess be sorted out? Can it be sorted out? Is there a way of backing off and then taking a run at the problem from a different angle?

Maybe.

One way might be to realize that it’s such a complicated issue on its own – without all the other crap injected by interests determined to derail the search for some degree of objective truth - that it is physically impossible to impart a decent understanding of the entire subject in one or two pages.

That almost certainly dooms blog posts like this to failure from the get-go.

Recently I saw a brief few seconds of a presentation about a document from the 1800s, and then watched over an hour of video in which the debunker painstakingly laid out the reasons why the original presentation wasn’t just flawed, it was downright false (and not by accident). That’s one heck of a workload – taking 30 times as much effort to undo the damage as it took to inflict it in the first place – and it was done efficiently, too; in less experienced hands the task could have taken much longer.

I have read anecdotes from individuals who managed to go from being against the whole idea of biological evolution, to being proponents of it – but the journey from one stance to the other took them at least two years of study, powered by a commitment to finding out for themselves what the truth of the matter might be.

(This is analogous to my crossword puzzle example, in which the one ill-fitting answer – that didn’t make sense when put together with all the other answers but was so right by itself – was the driving force behind my need to get to the bottom of things, to find once and for all the right answers.)

That’s a huge task to undertake, especially if you’re not that sure that you have misunderstood what biological evolution is about.

It’s only when you have a hunch that you might have been given the wrong end of the stick that you stand any chance of being able to change your perspective.

So the first step has to be to identify your own perspective and to be honest about it. That honesty with yourself is key.

Where Do You Stand?

Do you feel that there are unanswered questions that might sway your thinking if you could only find an impartial reference source that you could trust?

Or do you feel that any attempt to “get at the truth” is ultimately doomed to failure because biological evolution absolutely cannot be true?

If your perspective is the latter, why can biological evolution not be true? Is it because it’s scary? Is it because if any part of it is true, it means that some or all of your life has been based on a lie and that cannot and must not be allowed to happen?

Could you entertain the possibility that if biological evolution really has happened and continues to happen, that doesn’t automatically consign all of your values to the scrap heap? That in fact most – if not all – of the basic rules by which you have lived your life could still be used to live your life?

That your value as a human being – to yourself and to others – is not in any way diminished by the truth (or otherwise) of a single encompassing idea?

If biological evolution is true, does that make the possession of a belief in honesty and integrity a bad thing? Does loyalty cease to be a positive attribute? Does a belief in biological evolution mean that you must now be antisocial, that you must now adopt a criminal lifestyle? Must you now become unfaithful towards those who trust you? Must you lie, and cheat, and steal?

Are you really forced to abandon everything good in your life and must you now embrace a life of evil, of hate for your fellow man, of subversion and destruction?

I think the answer to that is obvious: of course not. If biological evolution is indeed true, none of the positive philosophies you espouse are suddenly and dramatically made false.

But what would change?

There’s a scene in the film “Monty Python’s Life of Brian” in which John Cleese, addressing a group resistant to rule by Rome, talks about how the Romans had done nothing but take from those they’d conquered.

He then poses what he thinks is a rhetorical question.

“What have the Romans ever given us in return?”

He doesn’t expect a reply, because, after all, as everyone knows, all the Romans ever did was conquer people.

There’s a moment’s silence. Then a hand goes up and a voice says:

“The aqueduct?”

Cleese agrees, after a moment’s thought: “Oh, yeah, yeah – they did give us that. That’s true.”

Another hand goes up. “And the sanitation.”

Others agree – they remember what the city used to be like.

Cleese agrees, a little tetchily. “All right, I grant you, those are two things the Romans have done for us, but…”

Another hand goes up. “And the roads.”

Cleese is becoming exasperated. “Well, yes, obviously the roads – it goes without saying, but apart from the aqueduct, sanitation, and the roads…”

He’s interrupted again. “Irrigation.” Others chime in. “Medicine. Education. The wine…” There’s a discussion about how they’d miss the wine if the Romans ever left.

The list continues. “Public baths. And it’s safe to walk the streets at night now…”

If you’ve never watched the scene, try watching this (I guarantee you will not become less of a human being by being exposed to a little humor):

There’s an analogy here with aspects of biological evolution. The difference lies in the time-line: for the film’s scene, it’s a matter of seconds. Cleese asks a question, and within moments there are answers, slow at first but building as the respondents realize that perhaps they’ve been taking some things for granted.

As far as answering the questions arising from the ideas that biological evolution brings, the responses have – to some – been a long time coming.

That’s not too surprising, when you stop and think about it, given that biological evolution has been proceeding in its various forms for millenia, whereas our initial understanding of some aspects of it has only had a tiny fraction of that time to develop and grow. We’re following along well after the party has begun.

Let’s look at a couple of things that, if they were answered to your satisfaction, wouldn’t necessarily change your views on biological evolution, but they might change how two pieces of the jigsaw fit into the bigger picture.

Because the subject takes up so much space, we’ll move on to Episode 3 to continue the discussion.

Long ago I took advantage of IE7’s facility for allowing you to set up your own default search engine link. I like Scroogle for this – they still have the level of ethics that Google seems to be losing in huge quantities.

I didn’t notice until today that Scroogle had been supplanted with Google by Microsoft at some point in the myriad updates and security alerts and other crap that’s an irritating consequence of using MS products.

No problem, I thought – I’ll just reinstall the setting for Scroogle by adding in the appropriate URL.

I clicked on the provided button:

Selected the right option...

Pulled up the menu:

Chose to find more providers...

And chose Find More Providers…

Up came the obligatory minimalist MS page (hah! NOT!):

A small list of everything I don't need...

and I added the (correct as far as I know) URL:

http://www.scroogle.org/cgi-bin/nbbw.cgi?Gw=TEST

I gave the item an innocuous name (ScrScr) and clicked Install. Internet Explorer (version 7.0.5730.13 since you ask) did an odd thing. It told me:

I'm not me...

Dang. I wonder where I can get my hands on a copy of Internet Explorer… Oh, wait, I happen to have a copy – and the POS software is telling me “you don’t have me”. Huh?

I did a search on the ‘Net for the error code 32811 and came up with what looked to be a promising site:

http://www.winhelponline.com/articles/122/1/Error-Element-not-found-when-attempting-to-add-a-Search-Provider-in-Internet-Explorer-7.html

It seemed to describe exactly the problem I had. I even had a similar script error (when I pulled it up):

I'm feeling helpful...NOT!

I followed the instructions to use the registry editor (always worthwhile backing up the registry before hacking it, IMHO), rather than use the ready-made fix offered (I like to be in control of what’s going on every step of the way under these circumstances).

I also used regedt32 rather than the suggested regedit.exe, since I prefer to avoid older tools when possible (I’m running XP Pro, which is from the NT/2000 family of operating systems).

Pulling up the target key was a slow business – that part of the registry must be humungous on my machine. Note to self: Quick! Back up the entire registry ASAP and do it multiple times. Then do it again just for good measure. And then again. No, it’s not because it’s a vulnerability. The registry is a valuable feature. Keep saying it: the registry is a valuable feature.

The default was indeed “C:\WINDOWS\system32\shdocvw.dll” and I replaced it as instructed with “C:\WINDOWS\system32\ieframe.dll”.

Then I retraced my earlier steps to install Scroogle, and clicked Install. Lo! Something wonderful happened:

On the road to Success... I hope.

I decided not to make it my default search provider – just in case. It was puzzling though that the “provider” seemed to be Microsoft and not Scroogle…

Then I tested it, and it worked as expected. So then I made it my default. Phew. Sanity restored. Well, almost.

You begin to see just how far operating systems haven’t come in the last twenty years, don’t you? Can you imagine the shape the auto industry would be in if their products required such tinkering? They used to require it, a hundred years ago – drivers had to manually advance and retard the ignition timing using a special handle as they drove along. To be a driver back then you also needed to be an engineer.

Kudos to Ramesh Srinivasan for some pretty spectacular encyclopedic knowledge of such an arcane subject!

And note that the article is dated 2008 – two years ago. Do Microsoft ever learn anything?

Note how they seem to have to rely on unpaid expertise such as that ably demonstrated by Ramesh – all the while pouring scorn on Open Source solutions and doing their best to destroy or damage them. And what do Open Source solutions mostly rely on? (It’s a rhetorical question, but just in case you didn’t catch the subtle irony: unpaid expertise).

OK. Now where was I before I had to take so much time out to handle something that shouldn’t have needed my attention in the first place?

Now it seems that I may be suffering from a very low grade form of long term depression known as Dysthymia. It’s very tentative and not yet supported by a formal medical diagnosis.

For that reason I’m reluctant to head to the doctor to see whether I’m right (and also because I don’t have medical insurance and while I’m not working I’ve no funds to afford to see a specialist), so I’m going to test the waters by self-medicating using an OTC (over the counter) preparation called St John’s Wort (SJW or the Wort).

If I have no improvement I may consider going to the next level (i.e., a visit to my primary care physician, but only once I’m working again).

If I have some improvement I may continue with my self-dosing regimen until I’m back on Lipitor (which is one of the pharmaceuticals that has a warning of complications if taken with SJW, according to a pharmacist) at which point I will definitely need to go to the next level.

BACKGROUND

So what makes me think I have dysthymia?

Two things. One, my wife, who is formally trained in such things, says she recognizes some of the symptoms in my behavior. Two, when I checked the list of possible symptoms that might lead to a confirmed diagnosis, I found I possessed at least two of them (for at least two years) and possibly more:

1. Feelings of hopelessness
2. Insomnia or hypersomnia
3. Poor concentration or difficulty making decisions
4. Low energy or fatigue
5. Low self-esteem
6. Poor appetite or overeating.
7. Irritability

I definitely have 3 and 4, occasional 2 (insomnia), rarely 6, rarely 7, and no 1 (a blip now and then but nothing to write home about) or 5 (too much ego )

So in theory I may have a very low grade depression and it is getting in the way of achieving my goals, not the least of which is finding a new way to earn an income, since it seems likely that technical writing is now an offshore function for many businesses and that hits me hard.

Having re-invented myself more than once in the last 15 years, I’m left with nowhere to turn to try and exploit another facet of my skillmix. Tech writing was the last quill in my quiver, so to speak.

My long term goal has been to earn a living writing fiction (and self-publishing, to exert as much control as possible over pricing and profit), and that seems the only door left open to me. But I need to focus and stay sustained at writing tasks and that’s not happening.

It’s not writer’s block. I’ve never really suffered from that – one of the things I like about my brain is that I can sit down at a typewriter with no idea what I’m going to write and the ideas just appear and get put down on paper. Or they used to.

If I ever found myself stuck for something to write I used to take a long shower or bath and just let my mind wander. I’ve even been quoted to that effect in another writer’s book (Jenna Glatzer’s “Writer’s block: and other problems of the pen“):

Taken from Google's image of a page

I guess it’s motivation more than anything else – perseverance seems to be lacking, and that was one quality I have had in spades for as far back as I can remember.

Objectivity is going to be hard. It will be very difficult – if not downright impossible – to separate any real improvements from those that arise simply because I know I’m taking something that may influence my behavior.

For that reason I’m going to ask my wife to monitor my behavior over a full month (during which time I already know we’re going to be in serious trouble, being overdue for rent right now and also under threat of being levied onto the streets by the IRS for no good reason), as well as writing down my thoughts in this blog as best I can. One of my problems is that I’ve not written a single published post in two months and that needs to change too.

So, here goes.

Day 1

Hank, our friendly pharmacy delivery guy, came round at around 1pm with some prescriptions as well as the bottle of SJW. Fifty pills in all, to be taken as one three times a day. That’s just under 17 days of treatment. I’ll need to re-order if I’m going to have enough to keep going.

I take one with some coffee around 2pm. I wonder: does caffeine impact SJW? Note to self: look that up!  [EDIT: Haven't found anything reported for caffeine, but also couldn't find anything adverse with regard to Lipitor. I did find a negative report with regard to Prilosec (omeprazole, reduced bioavailability), which I do take, so we'll have to watch that carefully. And guess what? One of the reported side effects of SJW is...lethargy. Just what I need.]

This will allow me to take another before bed this evening, giving me a solid 16 days (48 pills) of treatment. Barring any problems, of course. My biggest fear is that SJW – indeed, any psych medication – will interfere with my creativity. I know that genuinely mentally ill patients have that fear, but I don’t know whether mine is a legitimate one. We’ll see. I have a draft of Frankenstein and the Seven Dwarves that is long overdue for work…

If nothing else, the thought of SJW gave me an idea for a cartoon character called (and I’ll tell you how to pronounce his name ahead of time: it’s “sinn-junn”) St John The Wart.

I don’t even know whether I can draw a wart well enough for it to be considered a reasonable cartoon. I’ve thought about how to place it in context – it can’t be a plantar wart (verruca) because the location doesn’t give much opportunity for comedy, so it’s going to have to reside on a finger, probably on the right hand near a knuckle.

That gives St John the opportunity to read the back page of a newspaper and be close to the action in nose picking and bottom wiping, so that’s all right then

Day …er… well, something like 16

Well, that went well. I did actually feel some slight benefit from taking the Wort – sufficient for me to re-order a bottle today (it’s under $7 so it’s not a bank breaker) but in the meantime got so involved in working with various official bodies (mostly tax authorities) that I didn’t get around to maintaining this particular blog entry. D’Oh! (in spades).

The biggest problem I had was remembering to take the pills (which really do pong), so I didn’t maintain a regular dosing of one three times a day, but even at that (worst case: one pill in 24 hours) there was still some barely noticeable benefit, namely that the sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach every time I thought about our predicament (and the concomitant “I don’t want to deal with this right now” feeling) both disappeared.

Whether that stomach effect is the reason why there is a possible adverse interaction with a proton pump inhibitor is hard to say. And there’s always going to be the possibility that my perceptions of improvement are purely subjective and totally imaginary – but, at the end of the day, if I can get on and do the things that need doing, and all it’ll cost me is a few bucks (as long as it doesn’t physically harm me), then I’m going to go for it, at least for the near future.

I’m not big on herbal treatments, still less so on some of the egregious woo that passes for dubious therapies these days, and I prefer not to take even orthodox medication unless I really absolutely have to (and there are a couple), but for now Wort seems to be doing the job (even if it’s not the job I anticipated it would do) and that’s good enough for me.

I just wish they’d do something about the awful smell…

[UPDATE 2010.06.12: The product I tried initially consisted of a single 300mg tablet of 0.3% Hypericin (standard extract of "aerial parts") taken three times a day. The manufacturer was LEADER.

Yesterday I obtained the same product from another manufacturer (WINDMILL) and it's exactly the same formulation, exactly the same strength (300 mg) and yet the dosage instructions are different: a single tablet to be taken TWO times a day.

Why the difference, I have to ask? Most products that are the same but manufactured by different companies still have the same dosing instructions, whether it's Alka Seltzer (aka effervescent antacid/pain reliever) or Aspirin.

Ironically, today I read that St John's Wort has been shown to be effective for treatment of major depression - but not of dysthymia (!) Dang. We'll see. One swallow does not a summer make (Aristotle).]

[UPDATE 2011.08.04: Well, it's a year on and I have to say that - given our dire circumstances (homelessness, since March 9, 2011) - St John's Wort has helped me stay on a reasonably even keel emotionally all this time.

How do I know it's the Wort and not just me being me?

I have some confidence in it being mostly (if not all) the Wort. In the past (i.e., pre-Wort), whenever I pondered our awful situation (and I'm going to blog about that shortly, to make sure that no matter what happens to us, OUR version of events will be made a matter of public record) there was an awful sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach and a lump in my throat. Some readers (if there are any) may be familiar with this negative feeling.

That feeling has been absent all this time, but it wasn't immediately apparent to me until I reviewed my feelings during the course of events over the last year. It was then that I realized that the sinking feeling has been totally absent.

That feeling used to (negatively) impact my motivation to do the things that needed doing (such as liaising with the IRS, for example).

I have had good experiences sometimes with IRS agents but the vast majority of the time I've been talking to people who evidently take a delight in being obnoxious, unpleasant, and unreasonable - the "little Hitler" syndrome - and it takes a spot of girding up the loins to pick up the phone and take the first step on that generally horrible path (usually because I have rarely had good news to impart).

The need to loin-gird has been noticeably absent, although to be fair that might also have something to do with the assistance of the Bookstein Tax Clinic, whose staff and students have been nothing if not supportive all this time); however, I'm confident that the Wort has played a significant part in keeping me at least on an even keel, if not endowing me with an excessively sunny disposition (Stepford Wife-style).

So, on balance, I'd say that the Wort has worked well for me, indeed better than I would have anticipated. That doesn't mean I advocate it to all and sundry as a cure-all (although I'd certainly suggest trying it for a short period to see if it provides benefits; if it doesn't, see your GP pronto. You may need bigger guns to be brought to bear).]

Orwell was a believer in social democracy, an advocate of revolutionary opposition to totalitarianism, and had a strong sense of injustice.

He was reportedly concerned that socialists are not immune to the corrupting effect of power, especially absolute power, and wrote other pieces highlighting the risks in a satirical manner (Animal Farm being a classic example).

I remember when the year 1984 arrived – just about everyone was looking for evidence that Big Brother was either on the horizon or at the very least was packing the last of his socks before closing his suitcase and heading out the door, ready to start work on a spot of oppression before tea.

I also remember a report in the UK that discussed the fact that government computer systems – some 25 of them – had been recording the minutest of trivia about the country’s population since the 1950s. Some of them we were familiar with: the Inland Revenue, DoHSS, DVLC, and so on.

Even recently, when staff at a school district in the US used a webcam built into a school-provided laptop to spy on a student while he was supposedly in the privacy of his own home (see Not Just Crossing The Line), it seemed that another piece of the Big Brother jigsaw had been put solidly in place.

It did look as though the core elements of control required by Big Brother were indeed present. The trouble was, where was Big Brother?

In the last fifteen years or so I have come to the realisation that George got the idea right – control of the people through the power derived from the possession of massive amounts of detailed information – but he was facing the wrong way.

As he and others stood outside their metaphorical front door, scanning the horizon for signs of the Big Man and his suitcase, a dark and furtive figure had already crept into the house through an open window in the back, and he’s been growing in strength and power ever since.

The United States has the rather dubious distinction of being the one western democratic republic that absolutely hates and loathes its government. Its people do not trust Washington or any one of a half century of other city locations as far as they can be thrown. The latest report I saw claims that just a quarter of the population believe that their government can be trusted.

For me, coming to the country in 1995, there was a strong sense of impending anarchy, an undercurrent of anger and resentment against government and indeed anything that represented authority of any kind. For its part, the authority often came across as intransigent, bullying, and totally out of touch with the daily reality faced by many citizens. It seemed, on the surface, as if it was an invading power, rather than being drawn from the very ranks of the citizenry itself (or possibly themselves).

Even “experts” in any field are reviled, their considered opinions found wanting when matched up against the ignorant ranting of television and radio “celebrities”, irrational postulations by racist and extremist political fringe groups, or stupid and bigoted conspiracy theories propounded by those who smell money but who usually smell of something else.

I think the key word in Big Brother is Big. As in Big Business. As in Small Business rarely has the clout to enforce its opinion on anyone, but Big Business seems to have had the run of the place for decades, and is now so confident of its grip on society that it doesn’t feel it has to do things in secret any more.

I’ve come to the realisation in the last decade and a half that in the US at least, Democracy is more accurately defined as “government of the people, by the corporations, for the corporations”.

Time and again I see situations where a popular vote shows what the people want, but when the time comes to implement it, various vested interests – almost exclusively corporate – have the power and ability to block it indefinitely.

And that has to be bad. Politicans may be easy to buy in America, but the real villains are the ones doing the buying. When I hear various groups (such as the so-called Tea Party Movement) rabbitting about how they need to take back government (from the government?), how The People need to re-exert their control of the country, I think: I come from Earth. What planet do you come from?

It’s not possible to take back control of the country from politicians you don’t happen to like, because they are no longer in control and haven’t been for decades.

If you replaced all of them with new politicians who pledged never to be bought, how long do you think it would be before the last one finally capitulated? Years? Months? Weeks? Days?

It’s something I’ve never quite understood. In the US, the over-arching principle seems to be, paradoxically, caveat emptor – let the buyer beware.

But surely it’s the seller who should be the one we focus on?

In the UK and elsewhere in Europe, it has long been the case that buyers shouldn’t have to take their lumps because they bought something that was misrepresented. Consumer protections seem to be much more widespread than they are in the US (which wasn’t always the case).

If Entity A cons Entity B, we shouldn’t criticize B for having been conned – at least, in a sane modern world we shouldn’t. We shouldn’t point and laugh at B because they were fooled. We should instead look long and hard at A and their practices and pass laws to prevent them from behaving so badly, if necessary shutting them down altogether.

Indeed, some of the federal organizations in the US came about because of undeniably criminal activities by companies.

The FDA, for example, owes its origins to the execrable practice of cosmetic companies selling quack cures that not only didn’t work as advertised, they actually seriously injured some consumers.

Rather than telling the buyer to simply beware, people supported the idea that it should be nigh impossible for the seller to place the buyer in a position where they would need to beware.

And for the small companies, that situation obtains. But for corporations, the rules don’t seem to apply.

The question in my mind, therefore, is what is the threshold? How big does a company have to become in order to go from being merely big to being Big?

Could we impose restrictions on the size (and how would we measure that?) to which a company may grow before it is constrained from growing any larger – could we require that it must divest itself totally of parts, if necessary, in order to stay within the limits that permit the organization to avoid behaving in such an antisocial – indeed, anti-societal – manner?

Usually we get the answer (when does merely big become Big?) after the event – once the company has grown so big that we can now no longer realistically exert any control over it. Instead, it controls us.

I don’t know what we would measure or how, but I suspect that we ought to start trying to find out – now. There is a storm brewing, of the worst kind, and it would be a major tragedy if, during that storm, individuals were victimized simply because those giving vent to their frustrations were seriously misinformed and misdirected.

(I recall with anger and horror the attacks after 9-11 that were perpetrated in the US against anyone who wore a turban. The ignorance and stupidity of those who perpetrated the assaults was and is incredible; we don’t need a repetition of that.)

Ultimately, though, there may be a silver lining in the dark cloud. If corporations are going to continue to be assigned rights that previously were only enjoyed by individuals, there will eventually be a tipping point.

Beyond that point, instead of simply enjoying freedoms hitherto accorded to individual citizens, such corporations would find themselves as accountable as if they were persons.

I look forward to the day that an entire company is ordered to jail as punishment for some execrable act that it thought it could perpetrate with impunity.

But I’m not going to hold my breath. My doctor says it’s bad for me…

They were critical of the way the vulnerability was notified. The researcher who made the public notification, Maurycy Prodeus, did so on 26 February.

Yet if you dig a little deeper, you discover that Microsoft are being disingenuous. According to Maurycy’s own report, he notified Microsoft on February 1, almost a full month earlier.

So what they’re really miffed about is that they didn’t get to hush it up. Either that or they should be conducting a massive internal inquiry to discover why nothing was apparently done for three weeks (we can only judge them by their actions: i.e., none, apparently), and then when the information became public – a service to the users of Microsoft products - they managed to respond within a weekend.

The vulnerability revolves around pressing the F1 key when prompted by a specially crafted dialog box generated by a malicious website.

Those dialog boxes are getting be a real liability IMHO (see Déjà Plagié).

The timing is interesting, because I had planned to blog about the ongoing dismantling of major league “bot nets” (the largest contains 12.7 million PCs) – which I will do, shortly – and the growing evidence that current approaches to computer security are continuing to fail. Crime is paying – bigtime.

Kids don’t know when they’re being conned (which makes the troll’s activity all the more antisocial) and this was clearly a sick mind at work. Animals shouldn’t be made to suffer so some idiot can get their jollies.

So, knowing something of how the ‘Net addressing system works and where to find relevant information in the headers of newsgroup posts, I was able to track her down to a single college in the UK. Armed with her username I discovered that elsewhere she had used her real name (presumably feeling safe in her supposed anonymity).

I located an appropriate Admin contact email address, and notified them of her activity, providing evidence in the form of her newsgroup posts.

She was reported to her tutor, who (being almost totally uninformed about the ‘Net) interviewed her to try to determine the facts.

She misled him into thinking that hers was a modern philosophy that was the result of the creation of the Internet, a form of mild anarchy and a harmless and youthful protest against authority.

He swallowed the line and wrote to me to tell me that there was nothing he needed to do (even though I had pointed out that children were likely to follow her advice to pour hot wax into their pet’s ears).

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it) – and this is a hallmark of these kinds of moron – the troll couldn’t keep her glee to herself.

Armed with the (mis)belief that she was now free to do whatever she liked, she crowed in one of the pet groups about how stupid her tutor was and how she’d been able to hoodwink him easily. She railed against the “nazis and fascists” and “thought police” who would attempt to constrain her activity.

So I simply posted her garbage to her tutor and asked him if he was absolutely certain that there was nothing he needed to do.

There’s nothing like being suddenly made aware that you’ve been taken for a fool to make you sit up and take notice.

His response was swift. He apologized immediately but said that he felt dismissal from the college was not warranted if there was a possibility that she might mend her ways. He arranged with the IT department to restrict her access to newsgroups that were relevant to her studies and she was placed on notice.

We never heard from her again.

No-one was trying to prevent her from contributing genuinely helpful suggestions on how to keep a pet healthy. But in behaving so irresponsibly (one might almost think she was a sociopath in the making) and with such a malignant intent, she was turning her freedom – to do whatever she wanted, without repercussions – into the oppression of others (in this case children and animals).

All that was asked of her was to be accountable for her actions. Once that happened, the oppression disappeared.

I can attest to that. When I was 18 my IQ was tested as part of a battery of tests by the Department of Employment in the UK. The aim was to find the kind of job that might suit me well. (It didn’t work.)

Much later (like 24 years later) I had my IQ tested again, this time in the US, as part of a battery of tests by a prospective employer (I got the job, and was excitedly informed that my IQ was the second highest in the entire company).

I’m not going to say what my IQ is or was, except to remark that the value was somewhat greater than 120 and hadn’t changed in all those years (despite the cultural bias of such tests, which ought to have had me performing less than optimally in the US – unless I did perform poorly but my IQ had increased during the intervening 24 years by exactly the same amount that it dropped because of cultural bias. Yeah. That’s the ticket.)

The reason I mention all of this is that I have always claimed that IQ measures are no real measure of intelligent behavior/behaviour.

Take me for example.

My >120 IQ has had me:

• set fire to my hair (twice, doing the same activity: checking a cigarette lighter that seemed to have malfunctioned - by holding it up to my ear and listening for the hiss of butane gas; instinctively I’d also struck the flint mechanism at the same time and discovered that the gas was indeed being released, as it ignited, setting fire to my hair and burning my ear)
• electrocuted twice (in the UK, where a jolt from the mains electricity can send you clear across the room: the first time, I tried melting some solder using an unusual heat source: an electric fire (boy, was that bang loud as the 13 amp fuse blew and I flew ten feet backwards), and the second time I attempted to replace a 5 amp fuse while the fuse holder was still “live” and sending 240 volts through my hand and arm even as I tried to push the new fuse into place and found myself getting inexplicably weaker and weaker and my right leg beginning to curl up behind me…).
• place a large quantity of radioactive material, with minimal screening, in a lab refrigerator right next to a batch of unexposed film…

The list goes on.

It seems those with high IQ only benefit if we’re being told what to do – determine number ratios, probabilities, use deductive reasoning, and learn from hindsight (which I clearly and signally failed to do, not once but twice) – especially if we’re told that there are logic pitfalls to watch out for.

The key skill apparently is that of rational thinking. So whether you have a high or low IQ, as long as you are capable of rational thinking, you’re OK – those with a high rational thinking quotient have fewer “negative life events”.

Maybe.

But it does seem likely that at some time in the future there will be an RQ test – to determine one’s Rationality Quotient.

Take these three questions, for example:

1. A bat and ball cost $1.10 in total. If the bat costs $1 more than the ball, how much does the ball cost?
2. If it takes five machines 5 minutes to make five widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets?
3. On a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half of it?

Apparently 3,400 students were asked these questions. Only 17% got all three right.

If you fancy your chances and want to know the answers, send a blank email to peter.g.brooks@earthlink.net. I’ve rigged it so that you’ll get a message back telling you the correct answers, but only for the next five years, so don’t take too much time…

Here’s a reminder of what the note contained (we’ve never seen the reverse side but Dora states that it simply read “Miss Penny” so there’s unlikely to be any additional useful information there).

The Dorabella Cipher

There are some initial observations that even those unskilled in these things (i.e., me) can make.

1. Everything is composed of what appear to be semicircles (or the letter “C”). Some of them are badly written and are thus ambiguous.
2. Some of the semicircles (eventually I called them “cusps”) are on their own while others are stacked together, so there are three basic types of symbol:
   • Single cusp
   • Double cusp
   • Triple cusp
3. Each of the three types can appear rotated in one of eight positions.
4. Three types with eight positions yields an “alphabet” of 24 possible symbols.

The first thing that sprang to mind was that this number is not exactly the same as the number of letters in the English alphabet, but it’s close.

The second thing was that in the Roman alphabet some letters were used interchangeably. “I” and “J” could be represented by “I”, while “U” and “V” could be represented by “V”.

That gave a 24 letter alphabet, and maybe – just maybe – that was significant. Could these symbols represent a reduced alphabet?

Other things that came to mind were:

• Is there an association between the possible Italian connection (through the name Dorabella that Elgar is known to have used later as a nickname for Dora Penny) and the Roman origins of Italy (hence Latin)?
• There’s an odd mark on the bottom line – a dot – between the fifth and sixth symbol. To my mind it looks to have been deliberately placed. Could it act as a separator between different parts of the message, or different encryption methods?

The next step was to visualize the alphabet, but where to start? Since it’s anyone’s guess, I opted to divide the alphabet into three sets of eight, starting with the single cusp (eight rotations), then the double, and finally the triple.

I created a simple table of symbols using Microsoft Word’s Draw facility. I opted to start from a position where the very first symbol would look like a “C” since this letter has some significance in music:

Core Symbol Set

Then I added my reduced alphabet:

Core Symbol Set With Tentative Alphabet

 So far, so good. The next step was to analyse the distribution of the symbols as used in the note itself. Did it make use of all 24 symbols?

Distribution of Symbols Used

Clearly not. There are at least four symbols (their corresponding letters underscored and marked in red) that don’t appear in the note itself but which are part of the set of possible symbols. This wouldn’t be entirely unexpected, because of the length (or rather, lack of it) of the message – it uses only 87 symbols or letters, which is going to make it difficult to crack using approaches that rely on the frequency of occurrence of letters in text.

At this point I came across an article in New Scientist by Professor Kevin Jones entitled “Breaking Elgar’s Enigmatic Code”. It’s available through other sites on the ‘Net, although the graphics are usually omitted, and those are actually important, since one of them lists Professor Jones’ interpretation of the symbols as letters using a reduced alphabet.

Professor Jones’ interpretation is this:

BPECAHTCKYFRQDRIRRHPPRGTYTGFS

TRTHTCKLCERREHGQTRFRHUSQGXKKXFS

ESHUSEGUWGSERHUQSGCPGSHCGAC

Using this information it’s possible to work backwards and derive the table of letters corresponding to symbols that Professor Jones used – and it was different from mine. (As it turns out, that’s not as important as you might think.)

Note that the interpretation is gibberish – no magical revelation here. That’s not surprising – this message has remained undeciphered since 1897, so if it was going to be that easy, I wouldn’t be writing this post…

The gibberish suggests that Elgar encrypted his original message first, using a method that has yet to be determined, and then converted it to a symbolic form before writing it down. He may have performed other processes too, as we shall come to see.

At around the same time I came across another, much more crucial, piece of information. It was a link to an article by Eric Sams, someone who has played a major role in the attempts to crack the cipher (check with the prior blog post for more information).

The reason this article was so significant is that at the very end, in an Appendix (d), Eric reproduced a page (or possibly two facing pages – it’s difficult to tell) from an exercise book owned by Elgar, in which he had written down not just the full symbol set, but assigned an alphabet using the reduced set, and even written a few test messages. There are other significant items on those pages, and we’ll come to those later.

The exercise book dates from the 1920s, years after the cipher was used in the note to Dora, but the key thing is that it shows at least one version of the mapping of symbols to letters, and the use of the reduced alphabet.

It meant I had been on the right track. It also confirmed Professor Jones’ mapping of letters to symbols (I’m assuming that he had seen the exercise book pages). Here is the re-arrangement of the table, based on the new information:

Re-arranged Map of Symbols to Letters

The symbols that do not appear in the note are now mapped to M, N, O and Z.

It was becoming clear that in order to work effectively with the symbols it was necessary to have a font rather than a set of crude drawings, and so I created a very rough and ready TrueType font and made it freely available.

The use of the font enables other things too. It’s possible to use the symbols in a spreadsheet and perform analyses on the distribution of the letters the symbols represent.

I also subscribed to a Yahoo! group dedicated to research into the cipher. I am presently co-owner and co-moderator of the group, which numbers some 220+ [Update: 430+] individuals from all walks of life and spread through different parts of the world.

We all have our own ideas about what the cipher might represent and how it might be decoded – if it was ever intended to be decoded – and, apart from a few attempts that are less than convincing, no-one has yet come up with a definitive answer that is acceptable to the majority.

Later I developed a tool based on Microsoft Excel, written in VBA, that makes a number of things possible, including experimenting with pseudorandom maps of symbols to letters.

That tool is freely available, in the same location as the TTF file. Some preliminary documentation accompanies the Excel file. (I had intended to create a version based on OpenOffice but I would have to find another way to visually present certain functions, since those don’t have counterparts to the features available in Excel’s VBA, and so far I have not had time.)

The next step was to undertake a deeper analysis by looking at the frequency of occurrence of each symbol in the message, and compare that with known frequencies of occurrence of letters of the English alphabet in various texts – the subject of the next post.

I also encountered the work of William Friedman and in particular his Index of Coincidence, which, when used with the understanding that there is virtually no statistical confidence in the results (!) can help guide the choice of approaches to decryption. We’ll look at that in the next post too.

I did a quick search through Google to see whether a recent blog post from this site had made it to the database yet, and encountered a strange scenario.

Look at this cross-section from my results for “Effluvium of Consciousness”:

Notice how every entry has a hotlink and an apparent URL of the form {sitename}/{filename}.php{?}{tag}={the hotlinked phrase in the result}.

At first sight I didn’t think much of this (but I should have); I was curious as to what materials of mine were being hosted by all those sites.

(For those who are not familiar with some of the conventions used in URLs, the “?” is a way to pass a value to the .php file, and in this case also an identifier. So when, for example, rgo.php runs (third example above), the ”?” essentially says “look for a variable inside the rgo.php file called “a”, and pass the value “effluvium%20band” (where %20 is code for a single space) to it, and execute the code in the file.)

I started checking out those links (and not in sequence – I’m weird like that). Almost every single one failed, generating a Page Not Found error. Until…

Until I hit one of them and it took me to another site that produced a dialog warning me that my system was probably infected and that I should begin a scan immediately. The dialog only had an OK button.

Sound familiar?

There was no barrage of popups to hammer the point home. Maybe the scum behind this one had decided that they were overkill and gave the game away.

So I did what I advocated in the earlier post (use the Task Manager) and zapped everything that was open in the browser (Internet Explorer 7).

A few minutes later when I ran the same search again, all of those entries had disappeared. I’ll come to that bit later.

What the URLs in the image above generally have in common is that they are all .php files located off the root of the URL and they all use the “?” followed by a tag that is different in every case (and mostly not a real word) followed by a short piece of text that matches the text of the hotlinked heading of each entry.

This is a huge red flag, because it signals that the site you’re accessing is almost certainly trying to take you to another site, without making it as obvious as it used to be.

At one time the actual URL would have been included – it would have read something like:

http://…/redirect.php?s=http://validsitename.validextension/kjshsd.js

I guess the morons who do this kind of thing are capable of learning something. Just not how to have a social conscience.

Some years ago I read a report about a government department’s website that had been hijacked in a similar way. They had a perfectly valid redirection function built in to their site, so that when you clicked on a link on one of their pages, it would use the PHP code in the module (it might even have been called redirect.php) to transfer visitors to an appropriate web page to match.

All well and good, but criminals were using that same function to make their activity look legitimate. Essentially they were using it as a springboard.

What they did was to send out a whole slew of emails with an embedded hotlink that didn’t quite match the URL assigned to it.

If a user didn’t click on the hotlink, but instead just put the cursor over it, the status line provided by the browser still made it look legitimate.

Except that if you looked a little further along the line – even though the first part had the legitimate government URL – you could see that there was not only another URL added, but it included a javascript file (another huge red flag) as its destination.

The author of the report said that the department was notified, and when checked some days later, the .php file hadn’t been taken down or fixed, and so the capability of being abused by criminals was still in place and still active. The department had done nothing.

As it happened, I’d been sent an email in which that link had been inserted, and I was suspicious because the link in the email did not match the URL assigned to it, and I did an initial bit of research by looking for the second URL through Google. That’s how I found the report.

I was curious to see whether the department had fixed the problem – I was reading the article months after it had been originally published.

I copied the URL up to the point where the malevolent http:// began, and instead used the URL of a website I owned. I wanted to see if the facility still existed, but I wasn’t going to be dumb enough to send myself to a probable malevolent site.

When I plugged the whole thing into my browser and hit Enter, I got taken to my website - by a government site. The vulnerability was still present and still capable of being operated by criminals.

So I located a contact email address and wrote to the department myself, telling them that the vulnerability was still active, advising them that this was a really serious issue and someone really ought to be addressing it.

I got a response back telling me that the department’s site had not been hacked, that the redirect was an internal function that could only send visitors to other, internal, sites.

I couldn’t believe how stupid they were being.

So I wrote again, this time giving CNN as I recall in a URL that used their URL and the vulnerable .php file, and inviting them to click on the link. I predicted that their site would take them to CNN (‘cos I knew that’s what it did to me, since I’d tested it carefully).

I got back a bland “thank you for your information” in response, and I figured I’d done all I could.

But a day later I decided to see if they’d actually listened to me, and lo! the redirect was gone (no .php file) and instead they’d put actual URLs that matched the destinations. So maybe they did listen after all.

Back to the results in the image above.

What puzzles me is that when I re-ran the search without changing the parameters, I expected to get the same results, and I didn’t.

It’s possible that the .php files are a single-use exploit – when they’ve been accessed once, perhaps they’re programmed to disappear (delete themselves) or rename and re-assign themselves.

But it happened too quickly if the .php files actually exist on the servers hosting those pages; Google updates quickly but not that quickly – unless Google’s own servers have been compromised (could that have happened when the recent Chinese exploits of GMail back doors occurred?), or their database has been tainted in some way.

Or my own system could have been compromised – except that I just spent two days checking and rechecking my system to make sure it was clean (and it does appear to be).

There are occasions when you can spot scam results that appear from time to time in Google searches. I’m assuming that in those instances someone has temporarily found a vulnerability and exploited it for a while until someone else spots what’s going on, tells Google and then Google moves to shut the scam down.

Occasionally, if you do a search for something totally ridiculous – such as the phrase “waddling dingbats with hypertrophic symbiosis” – you’ll occasionally find that the top results say things like “{famous company name omitted ‘cos I don’t want to get sued for defamation} has a special offer on waddling dingbats with hypertrophic symbiosis this week”, or “You can get some really cool deals on waddling dingbats with hypertrophic symbiosis today on {another famous company name, omitted ‘cos I still don’t want to get sued for defamation}” and so on.

The latest scam is meta-search sites. These are sites that appear high on the list in the results, but when you click on their link you find another list of results, the one that you should have got the first time from the search engine you engaged to do the task.

I don’t know how the scumbags do it, but I’m sure that Google are on it and I’ll see fewer fake results as time goes by.

Until the next exploit…

Some years ago I stumbled across an article on Steve’s site that woke me up to some of the crappiest behavior/behaviour of human beings that Internet access seems to bring forth.

In this case I refer to “script kiddies” – barely teenaged individuals who delight in bringing whole corporations to their knees, even if only for a few hours.

Steve’s article is no longer available on his corporate site, it seems, but there’s a related article (PDF) here that discusses it and it’s well worth taking the time to read, IMHO. The more so if you want to have your consciousness raised (and possibly your blood pressure).

From that edification I progressed to looking at some of the utilities that Steve was offering for free, and I became a proponent of the firewall product Zone Alarm based primarily on Steve’s comparison of that with other offerings at the time.

If you don’t know what a firewall is or does, I’ll blog about it at some point (sooner if you send a comment asking for it ). IMHO every PC ever sold should come with Zone Alarm as standard. ZA is to firewalls what PKZip is to file compression. Waddya mean, what’s PKZip?

If you don’t know what file compression is, or even why it’s A Good Thing, send a comment asking for that too Otherwise I’ll get there eventually, but slowly.

Anyway, back to the subject at hand.

If you want to know just how secure your computer is, I recommend downloading and running LeakTest from GRC (it’s free, and it’s invaluable). It doesn’t need to go through installation – it’s a standalone.

There are other GRC utilities that deserve to become more well-known – such as IDServe – and I’ll blog about those too (the more so if you send a comment blah-blah-blah).

The latest version is still 1.2, I think. If you have a firewall installed on your system and want to test it, trying running LeakTest and see if the firewall stops the utility from accessing GRC’s site.

Why might that be important? Surely the main threat is from outside – hackers trying to get in?

That’s where the main threat is, but you need to take care of business at home, so to speak.

If you accidentally install some malignant software – so-called malware – that is designed to use your Internet connection (whether it’s up all the time or only when you dial in to a service provider) to talk to even more malignant people somewhere in the world, you’ve essentially opened the door to some pretty nasty individuals even as Zone Alarm (or other firewall) is trying to restrict access to legitimate purposes only.

You can unwittingly install such software on your system in a number of ways.

• You could click on a dialog box put up by a website, and a program will install Something Nasty on your system (because your firewall thinks you’re giving the stuff your blessing).
• You could download a bootleg video or audio file, and attached to it would be malware.
• You could be unintentionally redirected to another website (porn or otherwise) by a link that looks genuine but isn’t.
• Your favorite/favourite news website or fanzine site could be hacked into and when you next visit it, it’ll install all manner of crud on your system.
• You could insert a memory stick with some items a friend or colleague gave you – maybe at work, even – and unwanted software and other materials will be placed on your hard drive.
• You could insert a music CD into your computer’s ROM drive and unknowingly infect your machine.
• You could open an email from your best friend or a family member, someone you trust implicitly – and they may not even have realized that they were sending you anything nasty.
• You could even bring home some shrink-wrapped software from a store and install it onto your system – and infect your machine, because some individual at the company that was hired to make thousands of copies of the disks and manuals thought it would be fun to infect his company’s drives with a virus, or a password stealer, or a worm, or any one of a wide range of bizarrely-named bits of malware, which was then incorporated into the finished commercial product.

The list goes on and on.

And then there’s War Driving and variants of it. Somebody drives by your apartment or house and scans for a wi-fi router that might not be securely protected (W.A.R. stands for Wireless Access Router).

They don’t even need a PC – you can get small gadgets that simply let someone know that there’s wireless activity in an area, and they can then designate someone else to come in and investigate further.

If the router hasn’t been set up properly, those people can get in and either use the router for their own purposes – sending SPAM for example – or attempt to access any systems currently on your side of the router (where you might have relaxed your concerns about security).

It’s frightening to think of the amount of background knowledge you need to have these days, just to stay safe when using a connected computer.

But in reality it’s no different than going out on the streets for a trip, even a short one.

Whether you’re a pedestrian, a cyclist, a motorcyclist, a car driver (even a passenger), a truck driver, a bus passenger, and so on and so on, you still have to have your wits about you and obey some basic rules about stepping off the pavement/sidewalk, crossing the road, on which side of the road to walk or cycle, what speed to observe, what to look out for in the behaviour/behavior of other road users, even the surface of the road or street – is it icy? Muddy? Covered in wet leaves? Broken glass? Is there another aircraft on your flight level? And so on.

The driving analogy is probably more apt than you might think. Back in the day, when the first motor cars were being driven on the street a runner had to travel well ahead of the vehicle waving flags to warn pedestrians that a car was about to come by.

It sounds a bit over the top but there was a genuine fear that pedestrians might be killed or horses frightened into bolting if such precautions were not taken.

We haven’t reached the stage of development where our culture demands that we pass tests of our fundamental knowledge of computing and the risks associated with online access, before allowing us to use any computer for surfing the Web.

We may in fact never reach that point. It may always be a case of caveat emptor: buyer beware (by which I mean that you’re on your own when it comes to being safe rather than sorry while being online).

It will always pay you to try and add to your understanding of the incredibly varied and complicated ins and outs of computers, computing, and computer-related security issues.

It’s mostly boring, it hardly ever seems relevant (until you get hit), and some of the stuff seems to have been dreamed up by a bunch of guys drinking something dubious behind a large tree in the park. But it does pay dividends.

Knowledge (and learning) is power – even more so now, and will be in the future.

SilverTiger recently reported success with his fight against plagiarism of his work, for which many congratulations.

Yesterday, a friend of mine who gets to photograph celebs (and he does a damned good job of it too) recently discovered that a whole slew of his latest shots of a particularly popular young lady (can you say Transformers?) had been stolen and uploaded to a site on the ‘Net.

He gets alerted when things like that happen (he uses Google Alerts) because, of course, the scumbags who do this kind of thing want to drive traffic to their site so they register changes to their content with Google as quickly as possible, and the rest should be fairly obvious.

So he went to the site to check on the potential abuse of his property. All of a sudden, pop-ups started appearing in droves on his screen, followed by a dialog that advised him that he could buy some software to stop pop-ups like those from appearing.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one already…

He closed the dialog because he wasn’t interested in buying the crap that was being sold – and that was probably the point at which his system was infected.

It’s a relatively recent trend, but one that’s alarming. There are scams that use specially coded dialog boxes designed so that when you click Cancel or hit the Close button, that’s when the payload gets triggered.

The solution is to NOT do anything with the dialog. Don’t click on it at all. How do you know if the dialog’s an infection carrier? You don’t, but it doesn’t harm to treat it as if it is. There’s Protection in Paranoia.

Resist the urge to even think of buying the software – the same bunch that “sell” the software also create the pop-ups to make you feel nervous or annoyed, and in any event they’re not interested in selling you anything; they want your credit or debit card info so that a few hours later they can vacuum all the available money from your account.

The solution is to run the Task Manager (generally Ctrl-Shift-Esc will pull it up in Windoze), select the Applications tab, and delete any entry for your browser until there are none left active. Then close Task Manager (File > Exit) and run a full antivirus scan on your system just to make sure that nothing slipped through. Especially check for what are known as rootkits.

(Also consider backing up your registry about once a week onto a separate external medium such as a memory stick or recordable CD/DVD. You can find out how on the ‘Net through Google.)

Even if they can’t persuade you to let them steal your money, these scum will settle for damaging your operating system – which is what happened to my friend (who runs Vista, which I didn’t know at all until yesterday, but I do know now that I will never allow it on any of our systems).

In my friend’s case, the malware damaged his registry in such a way that he couldn’t run any installed application directly, and more importantly he couldn’t run any operating system tools to help revert to an earlier copy of the registry (we did try the simple approach of F8 after POST and choosing the option to revert to a last known good configuration).

I managed to perform a few minor checks that didn’t need the registry to work (I ran a boot-time disk integrity scan of his drive, and then ran his antivirus software via a mouse right-click action, which was helpful but oh-so-slow), but we had to give up eventually and he called in some professional help since I wasn’t able to do anything really useful. I’m a firm believer in staying out of things I don’t understand well enough. But that professional help is going to cost him.

In the meantime I’ve done some research on Vista and I discovered that Microsoft arranged it so you can’t easily create a boot/rescue CD or DVD for that OS. How nasty is that? Can you imagine the contemptuous attitude towards the user there must have been in Marketing meetings over that?

Thinking about it, Toyota recently exhibited a similar attitude towards their customers by initially refusing to accept that there was any problem with some of their vehicles. (Don’t get me wrong – I’m not knocking Toyota’s technology or its engineers. We own a Toyota and we couldn’t be more pleased with it. But the public relations sometimes sucks, and execs are to blame for that since they’re the decision makers.)

Maybe it’s a new requirement to become an exec: scorn the user’s real needs, just give them what Marketing say they should have that’s cheapest to produce, and it doesn’t matter if some of the components are shoddy because focus groups said it doesn’t. Can you tell how unimpressed I am with today’s senior management in a slew of companies?

Back to the story.

It is possible to create a Vista start-up disk, but you need access to another ‘Net-accessible system to do all the work first (which is what I’m doing for my friend now, to handle any future instances).

I can recommend HowToGeek.com’s helpful article especially – it’s a useful starting point and contains links to other useful sites.

In the meantime, after almost a full day’s work, we understand that his system has been recovered and he should be back up and running again by this evening.

But how depressing. You get ripped off by scum, and when you go to check to see exactly what they ripped off, you get screwed by them yet again.

It’s like getting mugged, and while you’re reporting the assault to the local police, the mugger burgles your house because they know you’re going to be elsewhere for a while, and hey, they’ve got your house keys, your address from other materials you were carrying, and other useful info that will come in handy down the road when they get someone else to screw you still further. (It happens, too).

-o-

Yesterday was also a little depressing for me, too, but for different reasons.

I was asked if I wanted to appear in a Jay Leno (who returns shortly to host the Tonight Show, on my birthday as it happens) sketch as a “distinguished gentleman” but I had to turn the invitation down.

Partly because it’s not a good time right now (eviction looms yet again, and this time I don’t think we’re going to be able to avoid being on the streets) and partly because the one and only time I was ever remotely “an actor” I was 7 years old and I didn’t enjoy it one tiny bit. I didn’t even act – I was an announcer. One of these days I’ll paint the picture on this blog.

It’s given me an aversion to the limelight that stays with me 50 years on. It doesn’t matter that there are no longer limelights – the principle is the same. I have great respect for those who can act – I just can’t bring myself to tread the boards. It would probably kill me (or at the very least leave me capable of taking only “drooling vegetable” rôles).

Oh, well. Maybe I can get a gig as a homeless person on a reality show. Very soon. Viewers only ever get to see me in silhouette inside a cardboard box.