Clever, touching and funny ... but I'm not sure that "a jar of chlorauric acid, formed by dissolving the gold from two Nobels in aqua regia" quite counts as "Nobel prizes" any more, never mind "in plain sight".
It's more like hiding the gold from Nobel prizes from the Nazis in plain sight. Still, it's a very interesting way to hide gold that most non-chemists would never think of.
But it does give an interesting exercise: how else could you hide gold in a chemistry lab in such a way that at least the gold is retrievable? I can imagine submerging the prizes in various dangerous chemicals, but getting them clean enough to be safe afterward would be worrisome.
Counting "Nobel prizes" can go a long way[1]: if somebody was on a ship from Stockholm, and would be smart enough to win several Nobel prizes (on poker from drunk passengers)?
Computers themselves are very pedantic, so we wouldn't be very good at using them if we weren't good at being technically correct. The compiler won't forgive you for missing a semicolon or mismatched parentheses.
So I strongly suspect that our programming ability is related to our capacity for being pedantic, as annoying as that may be socially.
I doubt one would get very far in any kind of serious debugging session without the ability to be pedantic. It doesn't mean we can't judge the time and place for it.
I never said that one caused the other, only that pedantry is necessary when writing correct computer programs.
Huge bugs can come from small mistakes. The bug that tripped up Colin and ended up as a story on HN a while back was nothing more than a missing ++ in his code. Yet that tiny mistake screwed up the security of his cryptography.
I take it you think I was "foaming at the mouth to practise pedantry". Well, I certainly wasn't foaming, and it doesn't seem to me especially pedantic to want to distinguish between "hiding X in plain sight" and "doing something else that enables X to remain hidden", however clever that something-else may be -- because real Purloined-Letter-style "hiding in plain sight" is a different sort of trick, exploiting different human failings.
Suppose, for instance, that instead of dissolving the Nobels de Hevesy had incorporated them into something that looked like a satirical picture mocking von Laue and Franck, and hung it on the wall. And suppose that had worked, in that the Nazi authorities never noticed that the picture had real Nobel prizes in it. That, to my mind, would have been clever-and-touching-and-funny in a different way to what de Hevesy actually did. Do you really think it's mouth-foamingly pedantic to want to have different terminology available for describing those different things?
I'm sorry for the harshness of the earlier reply, but yes, I imagine that it was a kind of eager, if sincere, pedantry. I get where you are coming from, and again, the harshness was more aimed at the community's collective tendency.
I liked the episode of lupin the third where they melt down the gold and apply it the body of a truck and then paint it and drive it over the border. the guards search the truck, but the gold IS the truck.
Like the episode of Monk where an eccentric rich fellow wrote hundreds of volumes of his diary talking about his treasure. Nobody can figure out what his clues mean. Turns out he wrote them with gold ink.
I imagine it takes some mighty wherewithal to so cleverly hide such important historical items under that level of pressure, what with the Nazi regime breathing down your neck and all.
Or the Stephenson novel would outline why the idea wouldn't work (some people suggest in comments melting the gold into the frame of a car, which is specifically avoided in Cryptonomicon).
as a german I'm a bit disturbed they didn't call it Nazi-Germany in the text. And the nazis tried to get any gold for foreign exchange, even from gold teeth of jews they executed, so I have some doubts about this story ..
The text mentions World War II, so it’s clear from context who was running Germany at the time.
Germany was still Germany during the Holocaust, just as the United States was still the United States when it was committing genocide against Native Americans, Belgium was still Belgium when it was responsible for atrocities in the Congo, etc., etc.
>Belgium was still Belgium when it was responsible for atrocities in the Congo, etc., etc.
Funny you should mention that, because at the time that the atrocities were occurring, the Congo was not a Belgian colony. Rather it was the personal colony of King Leopold of Belgium and was handed over to the parliamentary government of Belgium after the atrocities came to light.
The most recent edit to the article prepended "Nazi" to "Germany" and contributed nothing further. This seems rather unnecessary, as the sentence clearly specifies that this occurred during WWII. Did you make this change?
For those that didn't get this immediately, here is the relevant component from Wikipedia:
When Germany invaded Denmark in World War II, the Hungarian chemist George de Hevesy dissolved the gold Nobel Prizes of the German physicists Max von Laue and James Franck in aqua regia to prevent the Nazis from confiscating them. The Nazi government had prohibited Germans from accepting or keeping any Nobel Prize after the jailed peace activist Carl von Ossietzky had received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1935. De Hevesy placed the resulting solution on a shelf in his laboratory at the Niels Bohr Institute. It was subsequently ignored by the Nazis who thought the jar—one of perhaps hundreds on the shelving—contained common chemicals. After the war, de Hevesy returned to find the solution undisturbed and precipitated the gold out of the acid. The gold was returned to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Nobel Foundation who recast the medals and again presented them to Laue and Franck.[5][6]
