
Hacking the Nobel Prize Medals - sanj
This is so deliciously brilliant I can't stop geeking happily over it:<p><i>When Germany invaded Denmark in World War II, the Hungarian chemist George de Hevesy dissolved the gold Nobel Prizes of Max von Laue and James Franck into aqua regia to prevent the Nazis from stealing them. He 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 and presented the medals to Laue and Franck.</i><p>(from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqua_regia)
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dkokelley
I'll bet that would qualify for the "Name a time when you successfully hacked
some non-computer system to your advantage" YC application question.

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mynameishere
...much, much easier than digging a hole and putting the medals in the hole.

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abstractbill
Turing did that, also in WW2, with some silver bars.

He never managed to find the exact spot where he had buried them.

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mynameishere
If only there was some way of representing locations on paper in miniature by
using proportionate distances...

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kajecounterhack
You're NOT talking about a map.

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sh1mmer
That is an awesome, if random, piece of trivia.

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fgimenez
Why the overuse of the word hacking? I find it everywhere in situations where
it just isn't appropriate. This particular example is an incredibly clever use
of chemistry, not hacking. Imagine some chem oriented news site saying that
programmers "synthesized" code.

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sanj
I hadn't realized that the word had suddenly gotten narrowed down!

I spent then 90's at MIT and was indoctrinated with the term there. It was
used referred to any clever solution (no pun intended) or trick, and most
especially one that thumbed its nose at authority:

<http://hacks.mit.edu/Hacks/by_year/1994/cp_car/>

I'll stand by my usage: this qualifies _admirably_ on both counts.

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tait
I wonder if Sanj stubled across that by reading
<http://ask.slashdot.org/askslashdot/08/08/30/022237.shtml>, like I did. Sanj?

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sanj
indeed I did!

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stcredzero
Apparently, a similar scheme is used to smuggle cocaine:

[http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S037907380600129...](http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0379073806001290)

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deathbyzen
Neato.

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dissenter
These days the best way to get a Nobel is to devote yourself to liberal
politics.

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kajecounterhack
If you're referring to Al Gore, you mean climate change, not "liberal
politics."

Lets not turn this site into a political arena. We have enough angry mob sites
on teh interwebz as it is.

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laut
Al Gore is a politician. Not a scientist. What he does is politics. Global
warming is used by politicians to tax and regulate.

Check out this video by an actual professor:
<http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=FOLkze-9GcI>

