Tuesday 14 July 2009

Morning updates [updated]

The Royal Canadian Mint still doesn't know what happened to $15 million in gold. Having exhausted plausible theories, like bad accounting, some now turn to more implausible heist accounts: folks dissolving gold in acid and thereby sneaking it past the metal detectors. The Mint assures us that their detectors can detect this kind of dissolved gold. But they still don't know what happened to the gold. I guess I'm not cut out for heists; last thing I'd think to do with gold is dissolve it in acid.

On folate in bread: the bootleggers and baptists story is seeming less plausible to me than that the reg is just part of some boilerplate treaty agreement on food regs, treaty language imported from elsewhere, and that nobody thought too hard about that bread is exceedingly unlikely to be traded across wide oceans. How hard would it be to strike out a line or two from a bigger treaty where there is no real trade issue though?
Update Some stories suggest the issue is flour, which would make more sense. Flour can travel by ship.

1 comment:

  1. Apparently, Dutch physicist Niels Bohr used that method to save his Nobel medal from the German invading forces in 1943. He left the country to avoid arrest, but didn't want to take the medal with him, presumably because possessing it would identify him. Instead he dropped the medal in a jar of nitric acid and left it in a cupboard, where it was overlooked when his house was searched. After the war was over he returned to Copenhagen, retrieved the jar, precipitated out the gold and returned it to the Nobel society, who restruck it for him into its orignal form.

    This may be apocryphal, but it's still a great story.

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