travelog – tuesday
“Hardcore” conference day… went to the forensics talks and the poster session in the morning, couple random ones in the afternoon. It was the usual mix, about half interesting stuff and half not-so-interesting. The better forensics talks mostly focused on dogs as analytical instruments – which sounds odd, but they actually make very good “instruments”: highly sensitive recognition elements (nose), processing power to discriminate between “bad” signals (bombs, drugs, bodies) and to follow them to the source. Plus they’re self-contained, easily portable, very easily powered, and covered with fur… Take that, Thermo! Mwahahahah.
One of the more generally interesting points that came up in the morning forensics session was that dogs don’t apparently recognize explosives directly. Rather, they recognize a certain chemical added to most available explosives. This chemical, in turn, can be completely blocked by the right type of plastic…. implying that bombs sealed inside such a plastic layer would be very hard for dogs to detect. Combine this with the fair-to-middlin’ performance of the fancy-schmancy ion mobility setups at the average airport security stop, and it’d actually be fairly easy to carry “high energy” materials to places they definitely shouldn’t be. (I’m not familiar enough with x-ray sensitivity to know how that’d affect this. I’d be surprised if it were that hard to disguise it either as some other low cross-section material like plastics, or to wrap it in innocent-looking metal.) Obviously, I have no intention of testing this suspicion 
The interesting point, though, is that the details of which plastics were tested, and the dogs’ performance in response (and thus the info on which plastic(s) might be useful for this) were announced very casually, with no particular concern shown for the fact. I’m not sure if that’s because it’s already well-known among people whose interest it is to know such, or if they just assumed that nobody who’d go to FACSS is “dangerous”. It’s not quite the same thing as standing up there and detailing how to build an undetectable bomb, but it certainly gave away for free information that would (presumably) be difficult for terrorists to discover on their own.
Went to the “Raman Reception” Tuesday night, hosted by (of course) Mike Carrabra. Academics seem to fall into one of three stereotypical categories: Shy introverted geeks, refined sophisticated sorts who sort of just happen to do chemistry in between wine tastings, and the unnatural fusion of used car salesmen and frat boys. Namign no names, the reception (as anticipated) was rather dominated by the last sort, right down to out-of-place anatomical references. I guess because the geeks and the sophisticates had better things to do
Walked around near the convention center for a little while after… nothing too exciting.