A 1980 homemade bomb plot fit for a Hollywood thriller, two sets of twins in Columbia switched at birth and finding the truth after 24 years, and a different argument against pot…after a little hiatus for the summer, these are my Jeneral finds of the week of 2015-09-24:
- The 1980 extortion attempt, and resulting bombing, of the Harvey’s casino in Lake Tahoe is something I had never heard of until this week. Likely it isn’t notorious because no one got hurt, but a recreated model of the improvised bomb device is apparently still used in FBI bomb training. There were seven different ways the bomb could have been triggered to blow. This account here reads like a Hollywood thriller! It’s a long read but amazing, I’m in marvel of the perpetrator’s engineering feat. http://www.damninteresting.com/the-zero-armed-bandit/
- It’s an amazing story of two sets of identical twins who were mistakenly switched in the hospital in Bogota, Columbia. Raised in completely different situations, (one set in relative middle-class in the city of Bogota, the other set in poverty in a rural area over 11 hours away) they accidentally discovered the truth when a colleague of one in an engineering firm walked into a butcher shop to discover him working behind the counter. The complexities of identity and fraternal relationships as the two sets meet and get to know each other are fascinating. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/12/magazine/the-mixed-up-brothers-of-bogota.html?_r=0
- The mini-biographical snippets collected and shared by Humans of New York continually have stories and ideas that touch me or provokes a second thought. This picture and profile of a teacher has a viewpoint about marijuana use by teenaged students that made me have a second thought: “I’ve taught high school for 25 years and I hate what marijuana does to my students. My students become less curious when they start smoking pot. I’ve seen it time and time again. People say pot makes you more creative, but from what I’ve seen, it narrows my students’ minds…I hate when people say that it’s just experimenting. Because from what I’ve seen, it’s when my students stop experimenting.”
~Jen