taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

• Groklaw – Anonymous Speech in Email Upheld in Spammer Case : Groklaw goes into the detail of how and why the Virginia anti-spam law could be overturned. Ugh. I strongly believe that spam = UBE, not UCE, and political spam is still spam, so this is particularly disappointing for me
  (tags: ube uce spam law legal virginia jeremy-jaynes groklaw anti-spam)

• VMware server tweaks : ugh. quite a lot of voodoo here, need to investigate to see if any of these improve performance on our little build farm vmware server
  (tags: vmware performance linux tweaks kernel)

• consumer tips in response to the XL Airlines collapse : tour operator/airline went bust, leaving its customers well in the lurch. Those who booked flights directly on their website, using a debit card, have lost their money. Most travel insurance doesn’t cover airline collapse. Moral: use a credit card
  (tags: credit-cards safety consumer xl-airlines travel-agents atol flights travel)

Tags: anti-spam, atol, consumer, credit-cards, flights, groklaw, jeremy-jaynes, kernel, law, legal, linux, performance, safety, spam, travel, travel-agents, tweaks, ube, uce, virginia, vmware, xl-airlines

I’m off to Nice on vacation for two weeks, starting tomorrow — back on May 25th. See ya then!

In the meantime, and appropriately enough given that jet fuel I’ll be consuming, here’s some interesting stuff from my mate Eoin on carbon offsetting…

‘It’s a fecking minefield to figure out. There are many conflicting standards, some of which sound impressive but are useless in reality.

Steer clear of tree planting, especially outside Europe; even a well-run forestry in Europe will take decades to make any difference.

The best quality-mark appears to be the CDM Gold Standard. The Gold Standard is a recent introduction, a response to the weak, conflicting Kyoto standards and many ad hoc government ones. Gold Standard specifically excludes tree plantatations.

The following operators are the only ones I found that are Gold Standarded and also pass the bullshit smell test (which is far more stringent ;-) thanks to all who supplied links etc. — eoin

• My Climate – Seem good. run out of Switzerland. Professional vibe. Mainly projects in the developing world.
• Atmosfair – like the swiss one except smaller and German. Again, seems professional, their projects page in particular reads well. Doing a German schools project as well as developing world ones.
• Climate Friendly – Aussies. Mainly wind power, in Oz & NZ. Again seem good, have been around for a few years. Website is decent if a bit all over the place.
• Sustainable Travel International – more an eco-holidays travel agent than offsetting per se. Useful bookmark.
• Puretrust.org.uk – These guys seem good. Interesting business model. They buy high quality carbon credits, from mainly Gold Standard providers, and retire these credits. Permanent retirement, I think, though this wasn’t 100% clear on their site. So they both support the providers directly by doing business with them, and also jack up the market price by reducing supply. This supply choke isn’t something that the rest of them do, at first glance anyway. Clever idea. As the market price gets higher it will put pressure on companies to reduce their emissions, not just buy their way out of it.’

Now it’s worth noting that this is the state of play as of May 2007; it’ll definitely change pretty quickly as time goes on. Good info, though.

Tags: carbon, carbon-offsetting, ecology, green, markets, science, travel

It’s interesting reading US weblogs when they wax enthusiastic about Ryanair, typically on the foot of this BusinessWeek article.

Here’s the thing — flying Ryanair is a deeply unpleasant experience. I’ve heard rumour that their staff are paid commission based on how many discretionary charges they can pile onto the basic fare — leaving you feeling nickled and dimed at every turn — and that certainly matches with my experience. I mean, I’ve had better service in train stations in Uttar Pradesh.

In our case, our “no more” moment was after a trip to Spain earlier this year, where we were humiliated for attempting to shift around luggage instead of immediately paying the charges liable once you exceed 15 kilos (33 pounds). (Naturally, there’s no weighing scales until you get right in front of the check-in desk…) Once it became clear we didn’t want to pay the fee, the check-in person screamed at us, and sent us to the back of the check-in queue – like bold schoolchildren!

This level of service is pretty standard, going by local word of mouth. Several of my friends have, like me, vowed never to fly them again, even picking more expensive flights to more distant airports to avoid it.

It’s certainly not comparable to JetBlue, or any other low-fare airline I’ve had the pleasure of dealing with — this is a level below. The BusinessWeek article ends with:

American long-haul discounters aren’t likely to go to the extremes Ryanair has gone to sell basic services, but they’re paying more attention to Ryanair these days. “They’re on the cutting edge,” says Tad Hutcheson, vice-president for marketing at AirTran, which recently assigned two marketing staffers to spend a week flying on Ryanair. “Charging for Cokes or snacks, blankets or pillows–I’m not sure Americans are ready for that.”

Well, I certainly hope not, for their sakes!

Tags: business, cluetrain, ryanair, service, travel

So, I’ve been back in Ireland for several weeks now. How goes the culture shock? Well, let’s make a list of the stuff I’m missing from California:

• C, who’s still back there finishing up her contract. Hurry up, C!

• All my friends I left behind in the US :( Come visit!

• The weather (well duh)

• Trader Joes: low-cost, high-quality organic and near-organic food

• The excellent Mexican and Southern food. Mmm, Taco Mesa

• Super-cheap cocktails — although having good Guinness makes up for a lot of this

• The back country — desert, mountains, snow, national parks. Ireland may have more surviving history dotted about, but it’s just flat. I miss the mountains

• Netflix — haven’t spotted a replacement for this yet. There are companies in Ireland that use a similar idea, but it appears every one just about manages to screw it up and render it useless, generally by introducing throttling, late fees, or slow turnaround. meh

• The way my Irish accent meant I could get away with pretty much anything. That trick doesn’t work in Ireland ;)

In other news: the broadband choices situation has pretty much gone to shit.

It turns out that all the good options are quite dependent on local-loop unbundling, which — somehow — still hasn’t gotten around to my local exchange. As a result, guess who’s going to be stuck on the wrong end of dialup, no less, for “2 to 3 weeks” until Eircom deign to switch on the bitstream access for my new BT-resold ADSL connection? Here’s hoping there’s a neighbour with broadband and wifi when I move back in. Joy.

Tags: broadband, california, food, ireland, life, lists, llu, netflix, travel, us

Greetings from sunny Dublin, Ireland! (really!)

I’m now back in taint.org’s native timezone, although precariously set up and experiencing occasional interruptions. If you’re waiting for a mail from me, it may take a little more time.

I did have time to be interviewed last week by Karlin Lillington for this Guardian story:

To make sure customs agents could read his cat’s chip to match him to his Pet Passport on return to Europe, Mason bought his own scanner at a cost of some £200. “I didn’t want to risk the cat being impounded for six months’ quarantine at Heathrow,” he sighs.

It’s true.

Happy to be back — I think. Looking forward to my first pints, in over a year, of creamy Guinness in its native habitat. I also have a couple of half-written weblog entries I wrote on the plane, too…

Tags: bubba, cat, dublin, guardian, guinness, home, meta, rfid, travel

I love these pictures:

I link-blogged that article ages ago, but I keep thinking of it, so it’s worth a proper post in its own right, to expand on that.

These guys work at an Indian mobile phone repair stall in Karol Bagh Market, in Delhi. The blog entry notes:

As in China, many of the mobile phone shops and street kiosks offer mobile phone repair service. Many of these guys can strip and rebuild a mobile phone in minutes. … a lot of the hyperbole surrounding western hacker culture makes me smile compared to what these guys are doing day in day out.

Also, a commenter notes: ‘in india, for about 1$, you can convert a CDMA phone to GSM !! also, they can unlock phones and do a veriety of hacks for little money.’

There’s so many lessons I’m getting from it:

1. I’ve had a shoe resoled in 5 minutes for next to nothing at a stall not too different from that — but this is a mobile phone. It’s amazing to think of that level of hardware hacking taking place every day at a back-street market stall.

2. Those phones were doubtless planned, as a product, with a ’ship back to manufacturer’ support plan. That clearly isn’t going to fly without that developed-world luxury, Fedex. So this is the developing-world street finding its own uses for things, and working around the dependencies on systems that are optimised for the developed world.

3. It’s the flip-side of Joshua Ellis’ grim meathook future, where we’re not facing down the barrel of a New-Orleans-style descent into barbarity if the power suddenly cuts out; tech can go on. It may be a little chunkier, though, and with more duct tape, but hey.

4. It’s also a beautiful demonstration of how those of us in the developed world who assume that developing-worlders cannot find a use for high tech, are talking shit. (cf. Ethan Zuckerman as a good example of someone who gets this, more than almost anyone else I can think of.)

I think this is one of the most important lessons I learned while travelling through India and SE Asia a few years back — the developing world is using high tech, and it’s not using it in the same ways we do — or even the ways we anticipated, and we have plenty to learn from them too.

Found at Jan Chipchase’s site, which is full of great contemplation on this stuff. (The story on Seoul’s selca culture is nuts, too — it’s like Flickr^1000.)

(PS: I have a wisdom tooth extraction scheduled for next Friday… wish me luck. That’s another thing you don’t want to happen in the developing world, although I daresay it’d rock in Bangkok!)

(Update: clarification — my cite of Ethan Z was meant as a compliment ;)

Tags: delhi, developing-world, grim-meathook-future, hacking, india, markets, mobile-phones, phones, tech, travel

So, I’ve just bought myself an RFID implant reader.

However, don’t jump to conclusions — it’s not that I’m hoping that possession will put me on the right side of the New World Order 21st-century pervasive-RFID-tracking security infrastructure or anything — it’s for my cat. Here’s why…

Many years ago, back in Ireland, we had an RFID chip implanted in our cat, as you do. Then 3 years ago, we entered the US, bringing the cat with us, and started looking into what we’d have to do to bring him back again.

Ireland and the UK are rabies-free, and have massive paranoia about pets that may harbour it; as a result, pets imported into those countries generally have to stay in a quarantine facility for 6 months. Obviously 6 months sans kitty is something that we want to avoid, and thankfully a recent innovation, the Pet Travel Scheme allows this. It allows pets to be imported into the UK from the USA, once they pass a few bureaucratic conditions, and from there they can travel easily to Ireland legally. (BTW Matt, this still applies; we checked!)

One key condition is that the pet be first microchipped with an RFID chip, then tested for rabies, with those results annotated with the chip ID number. Once the animal arrives in the UK on the way back, the customs officials there verify his RFID implant chip’s ID number against the number on the test result documentation, and (assuming they match and all is in order) he skips the 6 month sentence.

So far, it seems pretty simple; the cat’s already chipped, we just have to go to the vet, get him titred, and all should proceed simply enough from there. Right? Wrong.

We spent a while going to various vets and animal shelters; unfortunately, almost everyone who works in a vet’s office in California seem to be incompetent grandmothers who just work there because they like giving doggies a bath, couldn’t care less about funny foreign European microchips, and will pretty much say anything to shut you up. Tiring stuff, and unproductive; eventually, after many fruitless attempts to read the chip, I gave up on that angle and just researched online.

Despite what all the grannies claimed, as this page describes, the US doesn’t actually use the ISO 11784/11785 standard for pet RFID chips. Instead it uses two alternative standards, one called FECAVA, and another FECAVA-based standard called AVID-Encrypted. They are, of course, entirely incompatible with ISO 11784/11785, although, to spread confusion, the FECAVA standard appears to be colloquially referred to in parts of the US vet industry, as “European” or even “ISO standard”. I think it was originally developed in Europe, and may have been partially ISO-11784-compliant to a degree, but the readers have proven entirely incompatible with the chip we had, which is referred to as “ISO” in the UK and Ireland at least. They don’t even use the same frequencies; FECAVA/AVID are on 125 KHz, while ISO FDX-B is on 134.2 KHz.

(BTW, a useful point for others: you can also tell the difference at the data level; FECAVA/AVID use 10-digit ID numbers, while ISO numbers are 15-digit. Also, “FDX-B” seems to accurately describe the current Euro-compatible ISO-standard chip system.)

Now, a few years back, it appears that one company attempted to introduce ISO-FDX-B-format readers and chips to the FECAVA-dominated marketplace, in the form of the Banfield ‘Crystal Tag’ chip and reader system.

That attempt foundered last year, thanks to what looks a lot like some MS-style dirty tricks — patent infringement lawsuits and some ‘your-doggy-is-in-danger’ FUD:

what we have here is a different, foreign chip that’s being brought in and it’s caused a lot of confusion with pet owners, with shelters, and veterinarians.

(Note ‘foreign’ — a little petty nationalism goes a long way.) The results can be seen in this press story on the product’s withdrawal:

Although ISO FDX-B microchips are being used in some European countries and parts of Australia, acceptance of ISO FDX-B microchips is not universal and the standard on which they are based continues to generate controversy, in part due to concerns about ID code duplication.

FUD-bomb successful!

Anyway, this left us in a bad situation; our cat’s chip was unreadable in the US, and possibly even illegal given the patent litigation ;) . We had two choices: either we got the cat re-chipped with a US chip, paying for that, or we could find our own ISO-compatible reader.

We sprung for the latter; although the re-chipping and re-registration would probably cost less than the $220 the reader would cost, we’d need to buy a US reader in addition, since the readers at London Heathrow airport are ISO readers, not FECAVA/AVID-compatible. On top of that, this way gives me a little more peace of mind about compatibility issues when we eventually get the cat to Heathrow; we now know that the cat’s chip will definitely be readable there, instead of taking a risk on the obviously-quite-confusing nest of snakes that is international RFID standardisation.

Anyway, having decided to buy a reader, that wasn’t the last hurdle. Apparently due to the patent infringement lawsuit noted above, no ISO/FDX-B-compatible readers were on sale in the US! A little research found an online vendor overseas, and with a few phone calls, we bought a reader of our very own.

This arrived this morning; with a little struggling from the implantee, we tried it out, and verified that his ID number was readable. Success!

Tags: patents, pets, quarantine, rabies, rfid, travel

New Scientist News – How far should fingerprints be trusted? (via jwz):

Evidence from qualified fingerprint examiners suggests a higher error rate. These are the results of proficiency tests cited by Cole in the Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology (vol 93, p 985). From these he estimates that false matches occurred at a rate of 0.8 per cent on average, and in one year were as high as 4.4 per cent. Even if the lower figure is correct, this would equate to 1900 mistaken fingerprint matches in the US in 2002 alone.

This is why I’m so unhappy about getting fingerprinted as part of US immigration’s US-VISIT program and similar. My fingerprints have been collected on several occasions as part of that program, and as a result will now be shared throughout the US government, and internationally, and will be retained for 75 to 100 years, whether I like it or not.

As a result, with sufficient bad luck, I may become one of those false positives. Fingers crossed all those government and international partner agencies are competent enough to avoid that!

Update: oh wow, this snippet from the New Scientist editorial clearly demonstrates one case where it all went horribly wrong:

Last year, an Oregon lawyer named Brandon Mayfield was held in connection with the Madrid bombings after his fingerprint was supposedly found on a bag in the Spanish capital. Only after several weeks did the Spanish police attribute the print to Ouhnane Daoud, an Algerian living in Spain.

eek! Coverage from the National Assoc of Criminal Defense Lawyers, and the Washington Post.

Tags: false-positives, fingerprints, security, statistics, travel, us-visit

Travel: Toorcon was great fun! Lots of interesting conversations.

Unfortunately they had a cruddy internet connection, so I’m majorly backlogged, and can’t write about any of it just yet ;)

Tags: connection, cruddy, fun, internet, toorcon, travel

Politics: Kerry in Colorado:

“Just to put your minds all at ease, I have four words for you that I know will relieve you greatly,” Kerry told the fund-raiser. “How does this sound? Vice President Hunter Thompson.”

Travel: Great posting on culture shock and ‘going native’ at Yankee Fog.

Hacks: Dan Kaminsky’s LayerOne presentation hits Slashdot. Definitely one of the highlights of that conference.

Spam: confession for two: a spammer spills it all. Interesting — especially since the spammer winds up earning less than he would have working for Starbucks.

It’s also worth noting this posting from Gary Smith on the sa-users list, in which Gary filled out a spam form with some not-entirely-valid info — with hilarious results!

So I did talk to some of these lenders. Apparently they buy leads from www.lendergateway.com . One guy that I talked to was irritated because it costs him $100 per lead they sell him and it’s supposed to only be sold to him. He apologized quite a bit and was nice enough to give me the information on who sold him the names. The number he game me goes to voicemail which I’m going to try later. A couple other people told me what I can do with myself and one lady kept saying that she couldn’t give me information on who provided her with my information.

The stupid thing is each time I talk to them I tell them I’m on a cell and that I need their name and number and I’ll call them right back. They give it to me… So when they hang up I start calling again and again. I’ve been irritating the hell out of them…

Anyways, that’s the fun storing of what happens when these forms are filled out.

$100 per spurious ‘lead’ would make a serious dent, if enough spurious leads showed up… ;)

Tags: ease, fund-raiser, great, information, lead, number, politics, sound, spam, spammer, travel

Travel: I’ve just spent a week in the UK; much culture was imbibed, I got to see Michael Landy’s Semi-detached at the Tate, met up with some good mates including the pregnant Lean, and was a happy camper overall.

Then I had an 11-hour transatlantic flight, stuck in the middle of a 5-seat row with pointy elbows on both sides; then, best of all, arrived at US Immigration and found myself fingerprinted and had my photo taken, in accordance with their new policies under the US-VISIT program.

Apparently the biometrics equipment providers are a company called Cross Match Technologies. Fingers crossed (arf!) they have better false positive rates than their competitor, Identix.

I’m looking forward to seeing similar false-positive-prone usage of biometric data, for US visitors to other countries in response. (With hilarious results!)

Aside: I wonder how href=”http://use.perl.org/%7eMatts/journal/18915″>Matt’s cooking-related-program-activities injury will affect his biometric profile?

Also of relevance — apparently Boston are introducing random spot-checks of passenger’s papers on their metro transport.

It’s interesting that travel by train requires a passport, driver’s license, or similar heavyweight documentation — but one can zip around the country unimpeded by road. Of course, all of this is moot, seeing as the 9/11 hijackers had perfectly-in-order documentation, including driver’s licenses, and travelled extensively under their real names and passports. One wonders what exactly all this has to do with the War Against Terror, given that.

Funny: Knight Foundation, featuring a downloadable David Hasselhoff Paper Plane! Don’t forget, the song ‘Hot Shot City’ is particularly good.

Tags: camper, culture, documentation, driver, flight, hour, middle, semi-detached, transatlantic, travel, week

Travel: I’m just back from a great road trip around Nevada and Arizona – lots of fun was had, and I even came out $100 up on the blackjack!

In other travels, my mate Eoin recently visited Muff, Co. Donegal, and made sure to get a picture of the event.

Muff is well-reknowned as one of those towns with a silly name; the story goes that they even have a SCUBA diving club, called — guess what – “Muff Diving Club”. Sadly, the reports are apparently greatly exagerrated. Eoin writes:

I have been hearing the story of the ‘muff diving club’ for the last 10 years, and now i can categorically state that its an urban legend. No such thing. There was a ‘top muff’ petrol station though where we picked up a few keyrings. The girl behind the counter was trying to give us all 200 keyrings left in the bag as she was so sick of muppets like us coming in for a laugh.

Tags: blackjack, club, event, fun, mate, muff, picture, road, story, travel, trip

Travel: Maciej writes up a few reasons why he likes Poland. Aside from the hilarious description of day-to-day formality in speech, there’s this snippet:

In all of Eastern Europe, it’s traditional for passengers on an airplane to applaud when it lands. The cynic in me is tempted to call this a legacy of the Tupolev days, when a safe landing was truly a special occasion, but I prefer to think of it as an acknowledgement that flying ten kilometers above the Earth at near-sonic speeds is something to appreciate. For unknown reasons this custom irritates the stuffing out of certain of my American friends, who will be glad to know it is slowly dying out, reserved now only for more spectacular landings in heavy rain or turbulence.

This is something that’s traditional amongst the older Irish travellers, too (I’ve noticed it on charter flights to holiday destinations). The youngsters don’t do it, of course, unless the plane has just stopped safely after skidding sickeningly sideways across the tarmac.

I’ve always wondered if it was an Irish thing, but now I see it’s not; and given the two nations involved, and the distance between them, I suspect it’s something that people always used to do, and they’re just not doing anymore in the places where air travel is commonplace.

Shame, I’m sure the staff would love the appreciation ;)

Tags: airplane, description, formality, landing, legacy, occasion, snippet, something, speech, travel, tupolev

Japan: This is fantastic; full of odd little facts about Japan. Here’s one I really like:

1. ‘(How do you explain) the frequency of Japanese people (usually women) running or jogging for no apparent reason. In the travel agency, ‘let me get you a copy’ and she runs away. In my office a woman runs to the bathroom (can be explained) and then runs back to her desk (huh?). Most of the teachers I work with wait for the bell in the teacher’s room, and then practically sprint to their classes. Do you know why all this running is going on? Fitness? Service? An Edo-era leftover?’–Question submitted by Ben Schwartz
2. I once teasingly asked a female with whom I worked why she always did a sort of feigned jog to and from the copier, especially since her jog was slower than her walk. The humour wasn’t lost on her, but she explained that many Japanese do this at work because the appearance of urgency is important in more traditional office environments. You don’t have to truly run around frantically, but just offer the gesture.–Answer kindly submitted by Lou C.

Another good one — it seems Bob the Builder had to have a finger added for the Japanese market, in order to not look like a yakuza.

Tags: agency, bathroom, copy, frequency, japan, jog, jogging, office, reason, travel, woman

This is fantastic; full of odd little facts about Japan. Here’s one I really like:

1. ‘(How do you explain) the frequency of Japanese people (usually women) running or jogging for no apparent reason. In the travel agency, ‘let me get you a copy’ and she runs away. In my office a woman runs to the bathroom (can be explained) and then runs back to her desk (huh?). Most of the teachers I work with wait for the bell in the teacher’s room, and then practically sprint to their classes. Do you know why all this running is going on? Fitness? Service? An Edo-era leftover?’–Question submitted by Ben Schwartz
2. I once teasingly asked a female with whom I worked why she always did a sort of feigned jog to and from the copier, especially since her jog was slower than her walk. The humour wasn’t lost on her, but she explained that many Japanese do this at work because the appearance of urgency is important in more traditional office environments. You don’t have to truly run around frantically, but just offer the gesture.–Answer kindly submitted by Lou C.

Another good one — it seems Bob the Builder had to have a finger added for the Japanese market, in order to not look like a yakuza.

Tags: agency, bathroom, copy, frequency, jog, jogging, office, reason, travel, woman

Wired: Turn Back the Spam of Time. An article about the time-travel spammer, now fingered as Robert ‘Robby’ Todino:

The anonymous e-mail offered $5,000 to any vendor capable of promptly delivering a collection of far-fetched gadgets for conducting time travel. Among the mysterious devices sought by the message’s author were an ‘Acme 5X24 series time transducing capacitor with built-in temporal displacement’ and an ‘AMD Dimensional Warp Generator module containing the GRC79 induction motor.’

He’s genuinely interested, it seems — but has a few psychological difficulties. (Thanks to Gary Stock for spotting it.)

Tags: article, collection, spam, spammer, time, todino, travel, turn, vendor, wired

TidBITS weighs in. They cover the issues very well, and also have noticed the problem that arises when a C-R system decides to challenge e-commerce notifications — like your air travel e-tickets, for example.

Found at Gary Robinson’s blog, where he also links a couple of taint.org items, cheers Gary ;)

Also, from /.: the House of Lords debates the etymology of ’spam’. Quite funny:

Lady Saltoun of Abernethy: My Lords, do the Government have any plans to restrict unsolicited faxes? My fax paper is always being wasted by people who send me faxes I do not want. I do not know whether they could be called ‘corned beef’ or something, but I have had enough of them.

Plus another anti-spam Senate bill, from Rep. W.J. ‘Billy’ Tauzin (R-La.) and F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.). This one is apparently riddled with loopholes: ‘this is yet another bill . . . attempting to get rid of the porn and the scams, but really clearing the way for legitimate companies to spam,” said John Mozena, co-founder of … CAUCE.’

Tags: air, bill, blog, example, found, problem, spam, system, tidbits, travel

Who knew relocating with a cat could be so tricky? Well, actually, I did. He hates travel. I’m considering just putting him in a crate and handing him off to a courier to do it.

Paul Graham’s Spam Conference seems to be doing great; they’ve moved to a bigger room, and are expecting 480 (!!) attendees.

I still can’t make it due to all this movage, but thankfully there’s a few SpamAssassin folks going, so we’ll still be able to snarf some good tricks with any luck.

In other news, the public mass-check submission run for SpamAssassin 2.50 is about to start; with the new with-bayes and with-net-tests dimensions in the matrix, it’s going to be the biggest run yet. Should be fun.

Tags: cat, conference, courier, crate, movage, room, run, spam, spamassassin, travel

Sex in space rears it’s head again (ooer): apparently NASA have sent over a pregnancy testing kit for the {astro,cosmo}nauts on the ISS. Best quote:

In his book Living in Space, Dr Stine, who died in 1997, said that Nasa staff at the Marshall Space Flight Centre in Huntsville, Alabama, had used a buoyancy tank that simulates low-gravity conditions to test the possibilities of weightless sex. “It was possible but difficult,” he said, “and was made easier when a third person assisted by holding one of the others in place.”

Say no more!

Date: Mon, 03 Sep 2001 12:06:03 +0000
From: “Martin Adamson” (spam-protected)
To: (spam-protected)
Subject: Sex in space: thin blue line keeps crews in check

The Times

MONDAY SEPTEMBER 03 2001

Sex in space: thin blue line keeps crews in check

BY MARK HENDERSON, SCIENCE CORRESPONDENT

ASTRONAUTS on the International Space Station (ISS) have been supplied with DIY pregnancy tests in case the enforced intimacy of space travel prompts mixed crews to try for the 200-mile-high club. The test sticks have been included in the station’s medical pack in one of Nasa’s first admissions that its astronauts might have sex in orbit.

Although the US space agency has always taken a prudish attitude towards such activity, the kits are intended for its aftermath: female astronauts take a pregnancy test before launch and are not allowed to fly if it is positive.

Scientists know little about the effects of space travel, particularly those of weightlessness, on human embryos and any astronaut found to have become pregnant on board the ISS would almost certainly be returned to Earth at the earliest opportunity.

The station’s present crew will not need the kits: all three are male. The crew they replaced recently, however, included a female flight engineer, Susan Helms, and the next crew but one will also have a female member, Peggy Whitson.

Details of the pregnancy test and directions on how to use it have emerged from a set of leaked Nasa documents on emergency and medical procedures obtained by the website SpaceRef.com. The documents provide astronauts on board the ISS with guidance on dealing with situations ranging from a crew-mate becoming suicidal or psychotic to diarrhoea, motion sickness, nosebleeds and dentistry. Nasa would not comment on the handbook.

Keith Cowing, editor of SpaceRef.com and a former Nasa scientist, said that the tests were clearly aimed at detecting conceptions in orbit.

“Since the crew get a good physical exam before flight, and I doubt that anyone would deliberately fly while pregnant given our sparse knowledge of what might happen, one has to assume that this test is to detect a particular medical condition that developed while the individual in question was already in space,” he said.

“There is a rather short list of ways whereby this specific condition can arise. Nasa never discusses the possibility of sex in space, but it does not look like they’re worried about what an astronaut might have done with her husband the night before launch.”

It remains unclear whether or not the 200-mile-high club already has any members. There is no suggestion that any astronauts have had sex on board the ISS since its launch in 1998, but many believe that the increasing length of time spent on board — the last crew were in space for 165 days — makes it more likely that such a relationship will develop.

Harry Stine, a former Nasa technician, said that the agency had conducted experiments in the simulated weightlessness of a flotation tank, but never in space itself. In his book Living in Space, Dr Stine, who died in 1997, said that Nasa staff at the Marshall Space Flight Centre in Huntsville, Alabama, had used a buoyancy tank that simulates low-gravity conditions to test the possibilities of weightless sex. “It was possible but difficult,” he said, “and was made easier when a third person assisted by holding one of the others in place.”

Nasa has always been coy about the idea of sex involving its astronauts, but some cosmonauts have been more forthcoming. Valeri Polyakov, who spent 14 months on Mir between 1992 and 1993, said to mission control shortly before his return: “No need to say what we are longing for.”

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