String theorist vs. SUVs

All of my left-wing anti-gasoline readers - and they probably constitute a majority of the readers - should consider their support for Billy Cottrell.



Billy Cottrell is a slightly eccentric :-) 23-year-old graduate student from Caltech who decided that the SUVs were evil, and therefore spray-painting (and possibly also torching) these SUVs is the right answer.



The total damages are about 2.3 million dollars and Cottrell has been threatened with up to 40 years in the prison. Well, it's not too surprising that he has probably agreed to become a police informant and his ecoterrorist friends have unfortunately stopped their support.



But why is it interesting? It's because Billy is described as a string theorist! The judge Gary Klausner, for example, mentioned that "string theory was an area of physics". Billy corrected him: "It's the area of physics." :-)



Of course, it's too bad that Billy has put himself into such problems, but he has some sympathies of mine, too. The main difference between Billy and the Kyoto protocol is that the damages made by Billy are 2.5 million, while those caused by the Kyoto protocol in the world will be 2.5 trillion - and the latter will be completely legal, unlike Billy's Molotov cocktails. :-) Moreover, the Kyoto is much less focused.



http://www.spiritoffreedom.org.uk/ ...

http://www.freebillycottrell.org/

http://www.pasadenastarnews.com/ ...

http://www.google.com/ ...



At any rate, I would like to discourage all of my other fellow string theorists from torching SUVs and other types of ecoterrorism.



The newest developments (I wrote them before, but blogger.com was frozen): Billy has been convicted on virtually all charges facing him, except for the most serious one that would imply at least 30 years in the prison. Without this particular charge, he is expected to spend roughly 5 years in the federal prison. His attorney wanted to argue that Billy had Asperger's syndrome, but it won't work, it seems.



I learned that he wrote a bachelor thesis about p-adic numbers in string theory at Chicago... I also learned about his research at Caltech which should be kept confidential, I think.