Hiding Nobel prizes in plain sight
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
So I strongly suspect that our programming ability is related to our capacity for being pedantic, as annoying as that may be socially.
Just like all tall people are good at basketball? Being a pedantic nit has nothing to do with one's ability to write code.
Regardless, this is a pretty cool story.
Huge bugs can come from small mistakes. The bug that tripped up Colin and ended up as a story on HN a while back was nothing more than a missing ++ in his code. Yet that tiny mistake screwed up the security of his cryptography.
I doubt one would get very far in any kind of serious debugging session without the ability to be pedantic. It doesn't mean we can't judge the time and place for it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ly1UTgiBXM [NSFW/profanity]
Suppose, for instance, that instead of dissolving the Nobels de Hevesy had incorporated them into something that looked like a satirical picture mocking von Laue and Franck, and hung it on the wall. And suppose that had worked, in that the Nazi authorities never noticed that the picture had real Nobel prizes in it. That, to my mind, would have been clever-and-touching-and-funny in a different way to what de Hevesy actually did. Do you really think it's mouth-foamingly pedantic to want to have different terminology available for describing those different things?
Never again.
- Stephen Fry
But it does give an interesting exercise: how else could you hide gold in a chemistry lab in such a way that at least the gold is retrievable? I can imagine submerging the prizes in various dangerous chemicals, but getting them clean enough to be safe afterward would be worrisome.
They saved the gold, but the prize did not need saving.
[1] actually, it is from a novel https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Rejto_Jeno
Why do you find this disturbing?
Germany was still Germany during the Holocaust, just as the United States was still the United States when it was committing genocide against Native Americans, Belgium was still Belgium when it was responsible for atrocities in the Congo, etc., etc.
Funny you should mention that, because at the time that the atrocities were occurring, the Congo was not a Belgian colony. Rather it was the personal colony of King Leopold of Belgium and was handed over to the parliamentary government of Belgium after the atrocities came to light.
When Germany invaded Denmark in World War II, the Hungarian chemist George de Hevesy dissolved the gold Nobel Prizes of the German physicists Max von Laue and James Franck in aqua regia to prevent the Nazis from confiscating them. The Nazi government had prohibited Germans from accepting or keeping any Nobel Prize after the jailed peace activist Carl von Ossietzky had received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1935. De Hevesy placed the resulting solution on a shelf in his laboratory at the Niels Bohr Institute. It was subsequently ignored by the Nazis who thought the jar—one of perhaps hundreds on the shelving—contained common chemicals. After the war, de Hevesy returned to find the solution undisturbed and precipitated the gold out of the acid. The gold was returned to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Nobel Foundation who recast the medals and again presented them to Laue and Franck.[5][6]