Thursday, March 23, 2006

How they probably did not steal my identity

This story looks like a continuation of the story
but the details are slightly different and potentially more serious.

What happened today? At 3:00 pm, after the class about the anomalous magnetic moments, I received a very strange package to the department. It was a book about Benazir Bhutto. If you don't know - and I did not really know - she was the first female leader of a Muslim country: a politician from the People's Party of Pakistan (PPP). The pretty book by Mary Englar costs $30.60, quite a price for 112 pages. But the book looks really nice.

It should be obvious that I had never ordered a book about Benazir Bhutto. What was even more disturbing was the address where the book was sent:
  • Lubos Motl
  • Lyman Lab
  • Photographer
  • 36 Oxford Street Apt. 11
  • Cambridge MA 02138-1957
I am not a photographer and the address has nothing to do with me: it is a complete accident that it ended up in the physics department at 11 Oxford Street where we have no apartments: moreover, the Lyman Lab is not a photographic lab. Josh Lapan (and Suvrat Raju) helped me to try to apply for the free annual credit report to see how much money have the identity thieves borrowed on behalf of my name. Neither of the three agencies returned any data. It became obvious that someone has stolen my identity and changed the official address so that I cannot get the data using my real address. And he or she is buying books, houses, and airplanes using the credit card.

Moreover, who could be interested in a Pakistani politician? For example, Al-Qaeda. A terrorist has apparently used my identity from the phishing website and the politically correct bankers have opened a credit card for him, assuming that he must be Lubos Motl.

The only method how to pay all those millions of dollars back that I could think of was to nominate Viktor Kožený, a friend of mine from the Bahamas who offered me to become a Czech shadow minister of education, as a candidate for "Scholars at risk", a scholarship at Harvard. If he wins, he could give me a few million from his assets of hundreds of millions of dollars. ;-)

So I went to see how 36 Oxford Street looks like. The building is called the Conant Hall and it belongs to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. You could smell the drugs and see the blood on the floor. There are scary posters informing the readers about conferences of various researchers in racial studies and similar pseudosciences. You can imagine that the environment had to be quite depressing for me. You can't get behind the second door into the building - otherwise police is immediately alerted, as you can read on the walls. I made it sure that my fingerprints are cleaned from all the doors that I touched. Also, I was waiting for the fake Lubos Motl to appear behind the door. How is he or she going to look like? Should I kill him or her? Am I strong enough to do it?

Eventually I called the publisher and a rough framework of the solution to the mystery suddenly emerged in front of my eyes when they told me that the book was free. I completed the details of the theory after the telephone conversation. Can you solve the puzzle, too? Let me give you a hint: the page 36 of the book explains that Benazir came to love her experience in the United States at Harvard's Radcliffe College in snowy New England. Also, the page 97 of the book outlines the most important events of Bhutto's life between 1968 and 1971 - and the page contains three pictures: a picture of a college in Cambridge, a photograph of the first man on the Moon, and a picture of the first microprocessor by Intel.

Why are these events in Bhutto's life relevant for solving a mystery about criminals who just ordered a book about her 35 years later? Do you know the answer? If you don't, read the following sentence backwards:

.koob reh fo ypoc eerf a em tnes dna ,211 egap no em deknaht ,effilcdaR fo erutcip ym desu sah ralgnE yraM