The Mystery of the Havana Syndrome

We start with approximately 33 bits needed to uniquely identify her. She lives in Havana, which immediately slices 11 bits from our search space (the population of Havana is around 2.13 million, or ~2^21). She's female, so we can roughly cut our population in half again; now we're only at 20 bits.

She worked in the Havana embassy in 2017 and was one of the people impacted by the strange health issues. There were about 24 people impacted (insofar as I can quickly find online), which means she must be one of these 24 people. Assuming all of the other 23 are also female, now there are only 4 bits remaining (24 = 2^4.58).

Finally, she has twin 12 year old children. We'll have to make a few fuzzy assumptions here, but given 1) a birth rate of ~1.5 per female per year, 2) a world female population of ~3,232,000,000 in 2005, and 3) a chance of having twins at about 3.33%, she is most likely in a set of about 159,984,000. This is only about 27 bits, which means we get a little over a 5 bit reduction by placing her in this set. That gives us the last 4 bits we need.

This is all assuming that the information given in this article is correct and the foregoing estimates are comparable to the real world statistics. This is a little fuzzy because I'm not sure if she's actually Cuban or American (and therefore where she was in 2005, or which estimates to use for calculating twin and birth rate statistics).

Though a little bathing holiday, might help wash off all those ashes from their legacy.

>> In fact, aside from the victims’ accounts, there was no conclusive evidence that anyone in Cuba was attacked at all.

>> an investigation carried out by Canada and Cuba has thus far found no evidence of attacks.

>> After the study was published, JAMA received letters from other specialists, arguing that the study was flawed, especially in neglecting psychological explanations.

>> "After a year and a half, the most powerful nation on earth hasn’t been able to present one single piece of evidence"

>> But he acknowledged that more data were needed to convince skeptics that the syndrome was real. He said his team was awaiting “potential tangible evidence” from a new neuroimaging study involving the victims.

> You insinuate that the new administration is the only group of people in the world interested in scuttling normalization

Sure, plenty of other parties interested in stopping the normalization of relationships exist. But their state intelligence agents aren't the ones claiming injury from a mysterious attack that no one seems to be able to prove happened.

> The article was about the many non-CIA officers affected.

Psychosomatic illnesses are a real thing. They can cause real and serious impact to people's health.

A psychosomatic illness arising after the stress of living and working in a country that has been "the enemy" for six decades, after being told that you will be under "constant surveillance by Cuban intelligence", after their intelligence agents make it clear to you that you're under surveillance? After three agents of your state intelligence suddenly come down with a mysterious, unexplainable illness? Seems entirely plausible to me.