The reason isn't that the mail is made radioactive by irradiation, but that it's made to contain "unorthodox" molecules and that it's chemically heterogeneous.
Our understanding had been that the President's and Vice President's mail was being irradiated, along with the mail of members of Congress and other officials. Among those to whose staff we sent e-mails was Sen. Mark Dayton. We noted afterward that many of his staff seemed to have resigned. Later, in October, he announced the closing of his office for security reasoms.
Our e-mails about irradiated mail that had been sent to staff of Sen. Dayton and other senators before Dayton closed his office were in July 2004.
We have copies of those e-mails as "sent" items on our computer with the date of sending embedded by the internet systems involved in the transmission. We can forward a copy of those e-mails to anyone who would like to know for sure that the e-mails were actually sent. (We'd need a destination e-mail address.)
Request may be made at (317) 523 6943 or scinotes2001@yahoo.com
Our impression that quite a number of Dayton's staff may have resigned is based on the fact that we now have only five valid e-mail adresses for his office. That's about one-third of what we had a few months ago.
First this preface: During the 2004 presidential election Dan Rather suffered an embarrassment which took us back to 1992, when we ourselves had suffered an embarrassment and had been slightly acquainted with a Mrs. Kathy Rather. She was evidently related to Mr. Dan Rather in some way--or perhaps she was a pretender of some sort. Our interaction with Kathy Rather, who was then working at the Indiana University Medical Center, involved our ideas about chemical heterogeneity and our chance mention of Mrs. Marilyn Quayle’s apparent brush with cervical cancer.
In that time period, CBS personalities such as Mr. Alan Alda, Mr. Pee Wee Herman, and Connie Chung were sighted on the grounds of the Medical School, in or near University Hospital.
The upshot was the Dan Quayle/Murphy outbreak in the national media. We have told the story many times and no one has offered much of a denial as to the accuracy of our telling. In our experience the name “Rather” evokes a devious form of journalism that we didn’t admire at the time.
Is there much morality in the news business? In the short run, very little. But what is one to make of news of Mr. Rather's diminished status at CBS which came in late 2004? Perhaps in the long run, even in the cynical news business, one's past actions can eventually come back to create a day of reckoning.
Now some of our thoughts about science:
Unorthodoxy
The set of names and words used in English is large, but that set is only a small subset of all the permutations that can be made using letters of the alphabet. As an indication of that, think of this word:
“feudal”
If the letters in “feudal” are arranged in any other order, they don’t make another word or--as far as I know--any name. There could be someone whose last name is "Faleud,” I suppose; but even if there are three or four surnames that can be made using the letters in “feudal,” there are still (6)(5)(4)(3)(2) total 6-letter permutations possible with those six letters.
The total is 720.
Most of those permutations must be described as “unorthodox.” The word “gibberish” might be used to describe nonsense anagrams such as “dalufe” and “ladeuf.” That’s because they have no use in normal English. But there are many more of those unorthodox permutations than there are of the “orthodox” permutations—which, to repeat, are the permutations we make use of in English language communication.
So in the case of “feudal,” it seems that less than 1% of permutations are orthodox.
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