LITF (black boxes)

The actor Gene Hackman and his wife were discovered dead at their home
in Santa Fe on February 27th.  They had both obviously been dead for a
while.  But for how long?

Much of forensic science is pseudoscience, as proven by the large
number of people "proven guilty" by forensics but later proven
innocent by DNA.  But some of it is valid, including DNA itself.
(Though DNA evidence can be misleading.  Look up the Phantom of
Heilbronn.)

In plane crashes, we can tell who died at impact and who died in
the following fire by whether there was any soot in their lungs.
Similarly if the crash was in water and some drowned, by whether
they had water in their lungs.

Speaking of plane crashes, it was possible to tell which indicator
lights were on at the instant of impact because the way incandescent
filaments shatter is different if they're hot than if they're cold.

But the main way we know what happened in recent plane crashes is from
the planes' "black boxes" -- cockpit voice recorders and flight data
recorders, both of which are actually orange.  It's just as well,
since indicator lights are no longer incandescent.

In today's news, I learned that we do know Hackman's exact time of
death.  It was on February 18th.  How do we know?  From his "black
box."  He had an implanted pacemaker.  Like most modern electronics,
it's computerized, with plenty of data storage.

You know we're Living In The Future when people have built-in black
boxes.

We don't know the time of his wife's death, except that it was after
the last time she was seen on February 11th.  It's believed that she
died several days before her husband did, probably of Hantavirus, and
that the lack of her daily care of him contributed to his death.  (He
had Alzheimer's.)

A dog also died, presumably because it was in a cage and couldn't
reach food.  Two uncaged dogs survived.

Getting back to plane crashes, the NTSB was able to recover data from
the heavily damaged cockpit voice recorder of very violent recent Lear
Jet crash in Philadelphia.  But it turned out to be useless, due to
lack of maintenance.  It hadn't been turned on in years, so all the
data was from a much earlier flight.  Technology can't compensate for
incompetence or laziness.

(Gene Hackman is not to be confused with Larry Hagman, a different
deceased actor.)
--
Keith F. Lynch - http://keithlynch.net/
Please see http://keithlynch.net/email.html before emailing me.