MONSTERS: Just what is this?

We're not sure what this creature is. Its teeth look mammalian and herbivorous. It could be a large ungulate judging by the skull morphology but what was it doing in the Sakhalin sea, where it washed up on the Russian coast? The body also seems to be disproportionately long, as can be seen in the other photographs available on the site from which this picture was borrowed.

Deliciously creepy.

Click on the image to visit the originating site.

FRAUD: Credit this

Of course, we make our living by selling things, so it's always nice to get a message such as this one, from kuss**@surimail.com:

Dear Sir/Madam,

I am Ong L Kuss** from Singapore, I want to order the FoxBox Portable Oxygen & Carbon Dioxide Analysis System, Qty:10 units.

How much the price? Do you shipping to Singapore and accept payment by credit cards?

I look forward to your reply, thank you.

Sincerely,
Ong L Kuss**.

How nice - a very large order! Then you start noticing a few things, and they're major alert factors.

1. The writer is from Singapore (Nigeria is another popular base).
2. The writer uses a web-based email account that's easy to fake.
3. The writer wants to pay by credit card.

Now, any one of these factors isn't troubling by itself, but when they cluster together like this, they spell PROBABLE FRAUD. Let's see if the writer graduates to TOTAL FRAUD. So, we reply to his email and ask him for a credit card number and shipping preferences.

Here's his reply:

Card Type: Visa
Name on Card: Ong L Kuss**
Card Number: 4719************
Exp. Date: 03/07

Billing address:

Company: DUTA International Pte Ltd
Address: 2 Boon Leat Terrace #01-03
City/State: Harbourside
Zip: 119844
Country: Singapore
Phone: 65-6377-1551
Fax: 65-6377-1221

And the shipping preference is the fastest available, overnight if possible.

OK, we have TOTAL FRAUD. Why? Two additional reasons.

1. The writer wants the absolutely fastest possible shipping.
2. The writer specifies a mail-drop as his address.

The mail-drop looks like a nice enough little company (http://www.dutafreight.com/) that we're sure isn't in on this act.

Calling the VISA international center (800-847-2911) establishes that the card was issued by US Bank, and gives a contact number: 877-734-8742. Calling that number is frustrating; it's for an "REI Visa" and it's difficult to get through to a human. Finally, pressing ##### does the trick, we explain the situation, and are put on hold for the fraud department. We're on hold for TEN minutes; when we finally get through, the fraud guy appears to think he's doing us a huge favor by confirming that the card was not, in fact, issued to Mr. Kuss** in Singapore. But the fraud guy says he won't alert the card owner to the fact that his card number is floating around cyberspace. We offer to email him the correspondence but he says US Bank doesn't have email, and gives us a FAX number (701-461-2300) that it turns out is not, in fact, attached to a FAX machine. Wonderful customer service, US Bank. We've reported this type of fraud to a number of different banks, and so far, Fifth Third has had the best fraud department and US Bank the most USless by a SUpersized margin.

So you might wonder how Mr. Kuss** intended to profit from this deal. It's simple. Here's what he does:

1. Get a web-based email account and invent a name.
   
2. Place an order for several expensive, sellable items. Jewelry is a favorite with these scam artists, but expensive scientific equipment will do.
   
3. Give a fraudulently obtained credit card number. The number and expiration date will check out as valid unless the merchant goes to the trouble of matching names.
4. Specify a mail-drop address.
   
5. Specify the fastest possible shipping.

Here's what a naive merchant would do and experience:

1. Check the credit card number - it exists and has funds.
2. Ship the goods by FedEx or DHL Courier.
3. Congratulations, merchant, on a great sale!
4. Receive a call from the credit card company a couple of days later denying the charges and demanding the money be repaid immediately - often with an additional penalty.
5. Attempt to contact Mr. Kuss** without success.
6. Contact the mail-drop. Sorry, but the goods are gone.
   
7. Contact law enforcement in Singapore (or Nigeria) and get the run-around.
   

When a bank has a good fraud department, it's amusing to string the would-be fraud artist along and request more and more credit card numbers, and pass them over to the issuing bank. Our record was 12 credit card numbers (all Fifth Third) from a Nigerian scammer operating on Hotmail. Mr. Kuss** subsequently sent us another two REI card numbers, and we tried reporting them with the same result - the card holder's name didn't match Mr. Kuss**'s, so once again, fraud ahoy. But the fraud guy again said he would not alert the card holders that their credit card information is common currency in Singapore.

Once again we asked ourselves: Why try to report fraud to a bank that doesn't give a rat's patootie about their customers' security? US Bank's fraud department is such a sick joke that we'll simply resolve the issue by directing Mr. Kuss** to this blog next time he contacts us. We do feel sorry for the REI cardholders, but what more can we do?

Of course, we do encourage legitimate customers to use credit cards. That includes overseas customers. But be prepared for a degree of skepticism if you contact us via a web email account, and want express shipping to a mail drop. That said, if anyone holding their own real REI Visa card wants to buy a FoxBox (or ten) from us, we'd love to hear from you!

SPACE: Announcement

We're happy to announce a good reason for the recent paucity of blog entries - we've been too damn busy. As you can read here, we've formed a relationship with the first-ever private space program. Bigelow Aerospace is an innovator supreme, so it only makes sense that they've chosen us as experts in biological systems and associated instrumentation. We anticipate that the experience of designing (and constructing) for the uniquely challenging field of space travel will spin-off in improved products for our earthbound customers. We invite our friends and colleagues in the biological research community to follow Bigelow Aerospace's launches. And, if you have an idea for a novel and practical biological experiment in microgravity, why not drop us a line? We can't promise anything, but ideas are always welcome.

SPACE: Congratulations, Bigelow Aerospace!

A big, Las Vegas sized CONGRATULATIONS to Bigelow Aerospace, the Las Vegas based aerospace company that has just flown the first scale model of its planned inflatable modules that will, in turn, be assembled into the first private space station - and space hotel. Once you're that far out of the gravity well, more exotic destinations are within much easier reach. This is an historic moment.

The essence of this event's importance is its uniquesness. In recognizing its uniqueness - who else has flown a private spacecraft without an immediate commercial mission, but as part of an ambitious long-term program? - one has to ask why this event is unique. Plenty of people - dozens - have the wherewithal to do this. Some, like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, could fund an ambitious, historic program like BA's without even noticing its financial impact. Yes, there are quite a few players in the suborbital arena, but the raw, pulse-pounding drama is to reach orbit, not pause, poised at the top of gravity's rainbow, before falling back to Earth like Icarus.

Soon we'll have ways to reach space affordably, and thanks to BA, somewhere to stay, focus, and regroup before leaving on the next stage of the journey.

Way to go, Bigelow!

SNAKES: Snakes that fly, oh my

The gentle reader should be aware that snakes, though not particularly aerodynamic, can fly. One of Sable Systems' customers, Jake Socha of the Argonne National Labs, is the world expert in this area. Seed magazine recently featured some of his outstanding photography of flying snakes (not all are flying; some are merely photogenic, which is enough). You can see them here.

PHYSICS: 120 Orders of magnitude? Orders, Schmorders

Ya hafta love modern physics and especially modern cosmogeny. From a sleepy and rather certain view of the universe, the weirdness coefficient has grown exponentially until new units of weirdness are now required. I'm not sure what the fundamental unit of weirdness is, or even if there is an associated particle, but the homely weird is now measured in kiloweirds or megaweirds.

To drive this home, consider what happens when you trap several prominent physicists on a tropical island, as described here. As the convener of the group said,

What you couldn't understand was how to cancel a number to a hundred and twenty decimal places and leave something finite left over. You can't take two numbers that are very large and expect them to almost exactly cancel leaving something that's 120 orders of magnitude smaller left over. And that's what would be required to have an energy that was comparable with the observational upper limits on the energy of empty space.

We knew the answer. There was a symmetry and the number had to be exactly zero. Well, what have we discovered? There appears to be this energy of empty space that isn't zero! This flies in the face of all conventional wisdom in theoretical particle physics. It is the most profound shift in thinking, perhaps the most profound puzzle, in the latter half of the 20th century. And it may be the first half of the 21st century, or maybe go all the way to the 22nd century.

Unqualified as I am, I can think of a few others that begin to rival empty space energy. Dark energy and dark matter, to name just two - if, in fact, they aren't artifacts of a failure to understand gravity fully. We are realizing, finally, that human intelligence might not be up to every task we assume it can master. The metempsychosis from carbon to silicon might just change that, too. And it might, just might, happen in our lifetimes.

INSECTS: Outstanding macro photography

An outstanding collection of macro images, mostly of insects, comes recommended by my friend Bill Jordan the science writer. He's the author of Divorce Among the Gulls, A Cat Named Darwin, and other future epics. He, Robbin and I are owners and fans of muscovy ducks, but that's another story.

The images are reminiscent of the South African master macro photographer Anthony Bannister, who's also known for his wildlife photography. His work on Skaife's African Insect Life was classic. My copy of that book, which I bought while living with Menan du Plessis in Cape Town, is one of my few treasured possessions.

A big part of the wonder and magic of insects is their utterly different body plan. We wear our bones on the inside; they, on the outside. We have our hearts close to the front; they, running just inside their backs (yes, they have multiple hearts). We have our distal CNS running along our backs; they, along their fronts. Our eyes are single and paired; theirs multiple and paired plus a couple of extras. We obtain oxygen via lungs and respiratory pigments; they, via the tracheal system that delivers it directly to their cells. They are so alien that they might as well have evolved on another planet - yet biochemically we are brother and sister. And our finest AI experts and roboticists have yet to come up with anything one thousandth as self-aware as a Drosophila.

The new macro site is called pishmo.com and can be accessed here. It's entirely in Cyrillic so I have no idea what these good people do for a living, if the concept even applies to them. The image hyperlinks directly to the macro page on their site; click on it to visit.

Here's the thing with links like this: By linking directly to an image on their site I'd be stealing their bandwidth, but by copying the image, reducing its size, and posting it on this blog's server (as I did), I might be violating copyright. Assuming the Pishmolians want their macro photography recognized, I wonder which violation they prefer. No need to send the Russian Mafia; a polite email is all that's necessary.