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Nixon Tape To Reveal Secrets at Last?
jonerik writes: "As part of its inevitable 30th-anniversary-of-Watergate coverage, ABC News has this article on the National Archives' search for someone who can recover part or all of the missing 18 ½ minutes of President Nixon's Oval Office tapes, whose existence had been unknown until the Watergate hearings. The famous tape - recorded on June 20th, 1972, three days after the Watergate break-in - was last examined in 1974, but Nixon tape archivist Karl Weissenbach is hoping that nearly thirty years of technological progress can make the difference this time, saying 'We have decided that the time is right and appropriate to determine whether that conversation can be retrieved or recovered.' Stephen St. Croix, one of several forensic audio experts who is interested in taking on the job, says 'You never completely erase a tape. You think you do, but you really don't.'" There's another article in Wired on this quest as well.
Nixon wasn't impeached.
Right. He resigned because he was about to be impeached.
- Have a picture
Anybody remember who finally fired Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor who was investigating Nixon?
Turns out, it was a 25-year-old named...Robert Bork, who was famously rejected for supreme court in 1987 and hired by Netscape in 1998 to lobby their case!
See a Dr. Dobbs Journal reprint from 1998 for geek-friendly history.
Hysteresis. Ferromagnetic materials carry a "memory" of their magnetic history. AFAIK that's the basic principle behind our ability to track the motion of the magnetic pole over millions of years.
Superconducting quantum interference devices (SQUIDs) are seriously cool...they can measure magnetic fields down to about 10^-10 gauss. They'll detect fields created by things like a fetal heartbeat or a car starting down the block.
the amount of credible investigative journalism has dwindled to the point of non-existence.
In all seriousness, what Woodward and Bernstein did was not good journalism. In the end, they got it right, but it could have just as easily gone the other way.
W&B got lucky. Their All The President's Men is as often fiction as fact. If you read through their articles as they were printed (as I have as part of a number of journalism classes), you will come to understand that history has been very kind to them. They made a number of critical mistakes in their reporting.
They are cultural icons, changed the political landscape and are the answer to more than one trivia question so we must give them their due but their due isn't that of great journalists.
InitZero
Yes, if you want it erased really well, it does take longer than recording. At least with conventional recording equipment.