Pseudonyms: Criminals

It seems that many major criminals either take on pseudonyms (aliases) or have them assigned to them.

The Unabomber (Ted Kaczynski) was assigned his pseudonym from the FBI acronym for UNiversities and Airline Bomber.

New York Police discovered in 1977 a handwritten letter near the bodies of two victims that was addressed to a NYPD Captain. In the letter, the killer referred to himself as "Son of Sam" for the first time. The press had previously dubbed the killer "the .44 Caliber Killer" because it was the weapon of choice for serial killer David Berkowitz.

Here are some of the better known criminal pseudonyms and their owners.

• Al Capone was really Alphonse Gabriel Capone
• Baby Face Nelson (Lester Joseph Gillis; also used the alias George Nelson)
• Billy the Kid (William H. Bonney; born William Henry McCarty, Jr.)
• Black Bart (Charles Earl Bowles)
• Bugsy Siegel (Benjamin Siegelbaum)

• Butch Cassidy (Robert LeRoy Parker) and The Sundance Kid (Harry Alonzo Longabaugh)
• Carlos the Jackal (Ilich Ramírez Sánchez)
• Dutch Schultz (Arthur Flegenheimer)
• Green River Killer (Gary Leon Ridgway)
• The Happy Face Killer (Keith Hunter Jesperson)
• Hillside Strangler was the collective pseudonym used for for two serial killers, Angelo Buono and Kenneth Bianchi.
• The Iceman (Richard Kuklinski)
• The I-5 Killer (Randall Woodfield)
• Legs Diamond (Jack Diamond)
• Lucky Luciano (Salvatore Lucania)
• Machine Gun Kelly (George Celino Barnes)
• Murf the Surf (Jack Roland Murphy)
• Ned Kelly (Edward Kelly)
• The Night Stalker (Richard Ramirez)
• Pretty Boy Floyd (Charles Arthur Floyd)
• Sara Jane Olson (Kathleen Soliah)
• The Yorkshire Ripper (Peter Sutcliffe)

We currently do not have real names to attach to some pseudonyms, including from the distant past:  the still unsolved Jack the Ripper murderer  - and the more modern Zodiac Killer.

Bombogenesis and bomb cyclone

Today the East Coast of the U.S. was hit with a big snowstorm and terms like bombogenesis and bomb cyclone were all over the news and social media. They sound like made-up media terms, like snowmageddon or snowpocalypse, but they are legitimate meteorological terms.

These terms were new to me but have been in use by meteorologists since at least 1980. The winter storm in March 1993 that was called the Storm of the Century was also a bomb cyclone. Social media has made bombogenesis and bomb cyclone part of our winter vocabulary.

But why "bomb?" That term comes because, like a bomb, the storm's pressure has to drop at least 24 millibars in less than 24 hours. That marks how quickly a storm strengthens.

The more familiar cyclones of tropical temperatures feed off patches of warm ocean water. But a winter bomb cyclone is from colliding air masses. You might hear it called a "winter hurricane" but meteorologists usually avoid that name.

And why "genesis?"  Bombogenesis refers more specifically to a bomb storm's development or "genesis." First the genesis, then the cyclone.

Over the Ether

In ancient and medieval times scholars and philosophers believed that there was a medium which filled out the space of the universe. This medium was called aether or ether, or also quintessence.

Ethers are definitely a class of organic compounds that contain an ether group—an oxygen atom connected to two alkyl or aryl groups.  But "ether" is a word that can mean several things.

Ether can refer to the upper regions of space.

It was once used as the name of a common surgical anesthetic.

Ether, or luminiferous Ether, was the hypothetical substance through which electromagnetic waves travel. It was proposed by the greek philosopher Aristotle and used by several optical theories as a way to allow propagation of light, which was believed to be impossible in "empty" space.

The brilliant and erratic Nikola Tesla believed that electromagnetic waves propagate in aether and that gravitational and magnetic forces are all directly related to the aether.

It took many years and many experiments, but now we know that, based on scientific evidence, electromagnetic waves do not need a medium to travel through. The existence of ether was not found in the Michelson-Morley experiment performed in 1887, and the the then-prevalent aether theory fell away. Heading in another direction, research eventually led to special relativity, which rules out the existence of aether.

But despite that research in the early days of radio, "over the ether" was a phrase used to refer to radio airwaves, as when a signal comes over the ether.

Radio waves are electromagnetic radiation and, unlike sound waves which require material to vibrate and reflect energy to be heard, radio waves are received by being caught by an antenna. They can then be focussed and amplified using a tuner and amplifier system.