840,000 gallons of oil from a corroded Enbridge Energy pipeline have leaked into Michigan’s Kalamazoo River near Battle Creek this past week. More specifically, “The oil is moving from Talmadge Creek into the Kalamazoo River, which flows from near the city of Battle Creek into Lake Michigan.” Swell.

Edward Vielmetti, friend of New Orleans and lead blogger at AnnArbor.com has been doing yeoman’s work staying on top of the story and associated political foibles as it unfolds. Follow Ed on Twitter for up to the minute information. For more, I suggest you follow Canadian news on this story because a) Enbridge Energy is a Canadian company and b) there’s a certain sheen, shall we say, to the quality of FoxMSNBCNN reporting: CBC News says 3.7 million litres while CNN says 19,500 barrels. Been there, done that, right?

Some other things that ought to sound terribly familiar to Gulf Coast residents. Here’s #2: Michigan oil spill: U.S. warned Canadian company about pipeline monitoring

3) Expect the same old disheartening song and dance from the Yankee right. The Michigan Messenger reports:

State Sen. Glenn Anderson (D-Westland) has introduced legislation in the State Senate to lift a cap on costs oil companies have to pay for clean ups associated with their pipelines.

Anderson told Jack Ebling on WILS 1320 AM radio Wednesday that right now, state law caps the damages a company is liable for at $15 million.

But the Senate, which is dominated by Republicans, adjourned for a mid-summer break without acting on Anderson’s legislation.

“They chose to do nothing with it,” Anderson said. “They passed a resolution that called on officials from the federal government to the locals to do all they can. That’s nothing but talk.”

3a) Chicago’s Mayor Daley: Michigan oil spill worse than Asian carp so “Michigan better do something about the investigation, the criminal and civil investigation. Who’s paying for it, and who had the oil spill in the Kalamazoo River, because it’s flowing into Lake Michigan.” Blarghblarblar.

And 4) @Enbridge_PR “Lake Michigan is not as big as the Gulf of Mexico, but we’re gonna try to beat those filthy Brits at their own game! @bpglobalpr” Right down to the fake Twitter account.

Wake me up when it’s all over, ferchrissakes.

When on the road, Feldman highlights the specialties and quirks of his host town.  One of the interviewees this time was Paul Locher of The Daily Record, Wooster know-it-all and author of When Wooster Was A Whippersnapper.  For instance, we learned that the town sits at the intersection of three large Native American trails, which are now major state highways.  The natives held off the Presbyterian influx for quite a while until one of the settlers shot and killed a chief named Beaver Hat and took over the center of town (at which a couple of women in the audience shrieked with laughter – killing natives, very funny).  We also learned that Gerstenslager, now an auto body maker, used to make carriages for the likes of German emperor Kaiser Wilhelm and Oscar Mayer’s Wienermobiles (again with that whole Wisconsin connection).  And the average commute time in Wooster is 11.7 minutes.  That long, huh?

Here is a slideshow of pictures Julie and I took at the event.

The WYK? band killed as usual – John Thulin on piano, Jeff Hamann on bass and James Brown’s own funky drummer and Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame inductee Clyde Stubblefield.  We got to talk with Michael Feldman, John Thulin and Clyde Stubblefield at length after the show, when Thulin encouraged me to go after my dream of re-learning piano, but only on a Yamaha if I ultimately choose an upright.

And, darn it, I forgot to get Feldman on board with the HinJewism movement.  Next time.

The technology generated and used in World War II, that are still in use to this day, boggles the mind.  Radar, sonar, jet engines, rocket propulsion, nuclear fission and, most important to me, encryption and code-breaking.  So, imagine my surprise when D tapped me on the shoulder, pointed down the way to a collection of what looked like old, skinny typewriters and said, “Hey, you might want to take a look at those.”  In a large glass display case, on the starboard side of the U-505, sat naval Enigma machines recovered from the sub!  This one is probably a rare M3 with a ticker printer on top (the display’s captions aren’t too helpful).

Hope you like these pictures because it took me 20 minutes to get them (and the others in the set), I lost D And The Gang in the process and a search party was sent out to find me – sorry!  Crypotography is damned cool and how often does one get the opportunity to stare lovingly at a well-preserved Enigma machine?   Of course, my love for and comprehension of this topic  is … well, let’s just say I’m a dwarf standing on the shoulder of über-dorks.  I close this post by turning it over to Neal Stephenson, in his letter to mathematician Mike Anshel:

… As you know better than I, the Riemann Zeta function has been, and continues to be, of intense interest to mathematicians. During the 1930s, Alan Turing went so far as to build a mechanical device for calculating its values. This dovetails naturally with one of the chief themes of my novel [Cryptonomicon], which is the early history of the computer. So, in the book, I have invented two fictitious characters, Rudolf von Hacklheber and Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, both mathematicians who (so the story goes) befriend Turing at Princeton shortly before the outbreak of World War II.

A few years later, at the height of the war, von Hacklheber (who by this point has gone back to his homeland of Germany and has ended up working as a cryptographer for the Nazi regime) needs to invent a wholly original cryptosystem that has nothing in common with the Enigma, which he suspects has been been compromised. The system he comes up with, which is dubbed Arethusa, makes use of zeta functions. It is computationally intensive by the standards of the 1940′s, but this problem is ameliorated somewhat by the fact that, as a result of having helped Turing work on his zeta function computer at Princeton, von Hacklheber knows how to build a device that will automate many of the calculations.

Capture of U-505 on 4 June 1944

On 4 June 1944, a hunter-killer group of the United States Navy captured the German submarine U-505. This event marked the first time a U.S. Navy vessel had captured an enemy vessel at sea since the nineteenth century. The action took place in the Atlantic Ocean, in Latitude 21-30N, Longitude 19-20W, about 150 miles off the coast of Rio De Oro, Africa.

… Alerted by American cryptanalysts, who–along with the British–had been decrypting the German naval code, the Guadalcanal task group knew U-boats were operating off the African coast near Cape Verde. They did not know the precise location, however, because the exact coordinates (latitude and longitude) in the message were encoded separately before being enciphered for transmission. By adding this regional information together with high-frequency direction finding fixes (HF/DF)–which tracked U-boats by radio transmissions–and air and surface reconnaissance, the Allies could narrow down a U-boat’s location to a small area.

Fifty eight crew members were taken out of the submarine and sent to a POW camp in Ruston, Louisiana.  In late 1954, Chicago acquired the submarine from the US government and installed it in the Museum of Science & Industry. The gutted interior of the submarine was refurbished with parts donated by German manufacturers. Their rationale: “We are sorry that you have our U-boat, but since she’s going to be there for many years, we want her to be a credit to German technology.”

We didn’t see the whole museum, but spent large chunks of time in the following exhibits: Toymaker 3000, Petroleum Planet, Circus, the captured U-505 submarine (schwing!), Internet World, the Transportation Gallery (with the Wright Flyer!) and Harry Potter: The Exhibition. Friend Annie and I got great pictures everywhere except at the Potter exhibit because Warner Bros. are a bunch of wankers who want to own all rights to everything they touch and you to spend hard cashola in the store at the end. It’s what the market chooses to bear, as D likes to point out, and he’s not entirely wrong as witnessed in the sheer number of (little and big) kids who threw obscene amounts of money at cheap replicas of Harry’s wand and Nimbus 2000s built to seat toddlers. Me? Contemptuous? No!

Back to the point of this post. D, the two young ‘uns in our group and I decided we were going to watch the ToyMaker 3000 automated assembly line in action by having it make each of us a little plastic gravitron. Ever the chivalrous one, D et me go ahead of him in line. Smiling, I stuck my little barcode in the reader and BOINK** – the machine jammed, renewing my interest in the theory that I am indeed an earthly agent of Chaos. Sirens wailed, children screamed, the SWAT team dropped in on ropes, allegations bounced against the walls. All was discord and sweating parents, until we saw the coolest thing: a real-live museum engineer apparating to fix the robotic assembly line (oh, the irony) with wires, screws and tools. That was pretty neat, educational and worth the hour wait.

Of course, my gravitron is chartreuse in color and has not yet been removed from its packaging. What sort of a nerd do you think I am?

More pictures and stories to come from Chicago.

–
*Yeah, it did wonders for the PTSD, thanks for asking.
** The sound of scientific progress, as everyone knows.

Jay Goyal, state representative from Mansfield, i.e. a stone’s throw from my house. And not just any old state rep.  Goyal is first Asian-American elected to the Ohio Legislature, majority whip and VP of Goyal Industries, which specializes in metal fabrication.

So, why is this the first I hear of him?  Come on, Indian community of Northeast Ohio, you’re letting me down. Aren’t you supposed to be on top of this news and blast it out there in your daily opening of the floodgates of email spam?  Or are you still verklempt from the successes of Neel Kashkari, Aneesh Chopra and Vivek Kundra that one more young, influential Indian is going to send you careening over the edge?

More about Goyal at Sepia Mutiny.