Clever, touching and funny ... but I'm not sure that "a jar of chlorauric acid, formed by dissolving the gold from two Nobels in aqua regia" quite counts as "Nobel prizes" any more, never mind "in plain sight".
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
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.
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.
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.
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