Saturday Reads: I got this one…

Happy Birthday BB…

Good Morning!

Wow, WordPress had another one of those updates…, as I write this post with all sorts of new WP features and editing changes, no wonder the site was so damn slow yesterday.

As you can see, it is someone’s birthday today, Happy Birthday Boston Boomer. Hope you enjoy your special day.

Just a few quick links this morning.

I know that BB is fond of crime stories, so she may find this post thought-provoking. How I Changed My Mind About the Jeffrey MacDonald Murder Case

Remember the perceptual illusion where you look at a picture and you’re certain that you see the bust of a young woman? Then, if someone draws your attention to certain details, suddenly the picture transforms into the profile of an old woman. It’s a disorienting trick. You think you know what you’re seeing, but then you aren’t so sure.

The Jeffrey MacDonald murder case is one of the most disturbing in living memory. There are only two possible pictures, both nightmares.

Picture #1. Jeffrey MacDonald, a Princeton-educated Green Beret doctor with no history of violence and a sterling record, butchered his pregnant wife and two young daughters using a knife, ice pick and club. Then he injured himself and set up the scene to make the crimes appear to be the work of intruders. He claimed they chanted, “Kill the pigs!…Acid is groovy!” and scrawled the word “PIG” on the wall in his wife’s blood.

Picture #2. Jeffrey MacDonald, a bright young man with everything in life to look forward to, lost his wife and children to senseless, horrific violence. A military hearing found charges against him “untrue,” but he was convicted nine years later in a civilian trial. He has been imprisoned for three decades for a crime he did not commit.

Two possibilities: MacDonald is a monster, or he is a victim of terrible injustice. Young woman; old woman.

I can relate to Parramore’s article because I too was born in spring of 1970…and I also was fascinated with the TV miniseries and book Fatal Vision.  However, I don’t know if I could be so moved by the possible “revelations” to completely change my mind about guilt. I do get the fact that there was definitely enough “reasonable doubt” in this case, and I can understand the thought processes of questioning the jury’s decision and the judge’s subsequent sentencing…but it does not make me any less certain that there is something sinister about MacDonald. Creepy yes…reasonable doubt, fair enough. All I need to say is two words: Casey Anthony.

On the science front, this next article is just plain cool, or as Dakinikat would say…kewl. Researchers synthesize new kind of silk fiber, and use music to fine-tune material’s properties

This diagram of the molecular structure of one of the artificially produced versions of spider silk depicts one that turned out to form strong, well-linked fibers. A different structure, made using a variation of the same methods, was not able to form into the long fibers needed to make it useful. Musical compositions based on the two structures helped to show how they differed. (Credit: Markus Buehler)

Pound for pound, spider silk is one of the strongest materials known: Research by MIT’s Markus Buehler has helped explain that this strength arises from silk’s unusual hierarchical arrangement of protein building blocks.Now Buehler — together with David Kaplan of Tufts University and Joyce Wong of Boston University — has synthesized new variants on silk’s natural structure, and found a method for making further improvements in the synthetic material.And an ear for music, it turns out, might be a key to making those structural improvements.The work stems from a collaboration of civil and environmental engineers, mathematicians, biomedical engineers and musical composers.

“We’re trying to approach making materials in a different way,” Buehler explains, “starting from the building blocks” — in this case, the protein molecules that form the structure of silk. “It’s very hard to do this; proteins are very complex.”