"Oh! What a tangled web we weave, When first we practice to deceive."  Sir Walter Scott

Idea Man

           The idea is, what if we have overlooked a method of sorting out all of the trace evidence left over by a very big explosion or terrorist act, like that of 9/11?

           Recently, I read an article about a new device, a trace evidence sorter, that worked by having a CSI investigator vacuum up all of the particles in a room, and then this dust or debris is put into a device that mixes it with water, and then spins the water about to segregate the particles of different matter for easy extraction and identification.

           It reminded me of something that I saw years ago on Nova: the episode showed a new way of recycling garbage by passing the trash we throw away through "pulverizers" which was a hammer-mill equipped with sharp blades, to reduce the garbage into small pieces.  Then this disintegrated trash was dumped into a special room where an artificial whirlwind was created, and the whirlwind lifted up the trash pieces, and separated them into free-floating "Saturn rings" of different materials.  The different weights or specific densities of the materials caused them to segregate.  Then, a number of chutes would pop up from the floor of the special room, and shunt the now-sorted materials into different bins for easy recycling.  This project never caught on, apparently because nobody could afford the very high electric bill of the pulverizers' phase of this operation; land-fills were cheaper.

           Nova said that this garbage sorting system was created by the scientists of Princeton University.  I have been unable to find any trace of this thing on the web or at the Princeton University web-site, but Nova displayed a working model of it.

           The point is, if we had such a massive problem with sorting out the tons of debris from the 9/11 terror attacks of the fallen WTC, something like this very large-scale trace evidence sorter could have done a good job of completely sorting out everything in that debris.  It may be a big forensic tool or machine which we have overlooked.

           That covers it.

"Oh! What a tangled web we weave, When first we practice to deceive."  Sir Walter Scott

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