From: ja4@optusnet.com.au
Date: Sat, 07 Jun 2008 17:57:29 +1000
To: dan@dansdata.com
Subject: [blank]Dear Dan
I have been watching your newsletter for "news on Adams Platform and I have something for you - well thats the biggest understatement you will have heard when you go to adamsplatform.com.au which now populates a web page not your newsletter which it formerly did! ON THE WEB PAGE IS THE MISSING ALGORITHM all there in its GLORY with ORIGINAL WORKINGS FROM ADAM CLARK HIMSELF---- Now before you start crying fraud and liar like the Melbourne Club has for the past four years I say this - download the pdf and tell me that I am wrong. Alternatively email me and I will SPAM you a PDF of the form content and Behaviour of MATTER!!!! All complete and all together perfect just like he represented to Mediaworld before it was "controlled" by the United States Government and the Australian Government in a joint project called OPERATION PLATFORM!!!!
ITS NOW PUBLIC AND YOUR THE SECOND WEB SITE TO RECEIVE IT SO ENJOY AND PASS THE WORD FOR THE TIME HAS COME FOR THE DAWN OF A NEW AGE OF COMPUTING AND ITS CALLED ------ AP TECHNOLOGY POWERED BY ADAM CLARK. Ps The web site will be populated with lots more detail in the coming weeks so no exclusives I am afraid unless I am wrong then you can print this email and post it to Adam as yet another fraud - see his cc --- that was a joke - the decision to go freeware was not an easy one and ALL will be explained in TIME!!!!
Yours Faithfully
Mr. John Anderson
Former Director Mediaworld Communications Limited
Member of MWC Creditors Committee
Company Director
MWB, MWC Bachelor of Business and Law
Ballarat University
For the benefit of anyone that's only recently joined us, the "Adams Platform" was an Australian-made ultra-revolutionary video compression scheme.
Which, like every other system that was meant to send high-quality video down a phone line in the pre-broadband days when that was a very marketable sort of product, did not work at all.
There've been many such systems before and after the Adams Platform - I wrote about a few of them, and the Adams Platform, here.
The Adams Platform, however, put its inventor, one Adam Clark, on the Business Review Weekly Young Rich List for 2004 - but with the proviso that "a pack of angry investors is chasing him for answers". The only answer they got was the complete collapse of Media World Communications. And if the above message is to be believed, the "pack" of creditors coalesced into a "Committee", which suggests that they still haven't got their money back.
A John Anderson was indeed involved with Media World Communications back then, and I suppose my correspondent may be that same John Anderson. If this is the case, then it would appear that the last four years have taken something of a toll.
Never mind video compression - adamsplatform.com.au does indeed still exist, and today its only purpose is to provide the world with what my correspondent above most accurately describes as "a PDF of the form content and Behaviour of MATTER!!!!"
I'm sure all of those exclamation marks are entirely justified, though I can't make head or tail of the bloomin' thing myself.
Perhaps you'll do better. Do please post a comment if you figure out how this stunning insight - ascribed by Mr Anderson to Adam Clark, who is I presume now working in an undisclosed offshore location - may be applied to the transmission of full-bandwidth video down a dial-up modem connection, or to the negation of gravity, or to teleportation, or indeed to anything at all.
7 June 2008 at 7:48 pm
Looks like one of Lance Hills' early schematics of that new fangled textile dessicator. I think the formula is to do with maintaining cable tension. What was the name his marketing people came up with?
8 June 2008 at 3:18 am
Dan, your links for "after" and "here" appear to be faulty.
8 June 2008 at 3:36 am
Fixed now. Thanks!
8 June 2008 at 9:57 am
That equation at the bottom is short of at least 2 brackets.
8 June 2008 at 7:54 pm
Along with some sense...
10 June 2008 at 5:51 am
It's a shame that this guy and the Timecube guy are likely just silly frauds. If they both really believed what they're tossing about, I imagine locking the two of them into the same room for a couple hours with a crayon, paper, and hidden camera would be the top grossing comedy for 6 years running.
10 June 2008 at 7:05 am
Gene Ray has not, to my knowledge, done anything in the last ten years to suggest that he does not absolutely 100% believe his Time Cube theory.
The above diagram is exactly the sort of thing that the cleverer sort of schizophrenia sufferer often generates, but I don't think Adam Clark is that sort of fellow - or, at least, he wasn't a few years ago when he was scamming people with the Adams Platform.
Then again, I also have no strong reason to suppose that Adam Clark actually had anything to do with this new "missing algorithm". Mr Anderson's e-mail, in contrast, is practically diagnostic of some sort of delusional disorder all by itself. For all I know, he thinks Adam Clark sent Diagram A to him by mental telepathy.
(I'm not about to correspond with Mr Anderson to determine his beliefs about the provenance of the diagram; this guy gives me all the crackpottery I can handle already.)
10 June 2008 at 11:01 am
Actually, most of the diagram appears to be a lossy per-pixel compression scheme that tries to preserve something like an arguably-reasonable dynamic range (i.e., if red was much brighter than green before compression, it should come out the other side also brighter). Of course, the problem is that there's nothing in the algorithm to preserve the state of the neighboring pixels. The net effect should be something like the "portrait" mode of image processing. Kind of a blotchy water-color effect. The spiral paths may be trying to spread the botches out but I suspect that the visual effect would be more like what you would see with crayons when you don't remember to color only in one direction.
Unless I'm completely misunderstanding the diagram and the flow chart, of course.
And, no, I don't know what the equation at the bottom is supposed to be, unless it's an overall gamma to approximate the base brightness of the image.
Or it could just be lunacy.
16 June 2008 at 2:41 pm
Well-spotted, Axiom. The compression scheme, as outlined in the US patent, involved choosing four colours and expressing all other pixels as a multiple of one (or possibly two) of those colours. If I hadn't deliberately been trying to keep an open mind, I would have realised on day one that this meant an untenable reduction in the colour space. Without actually wasting my time deciphering the diagram, the colour coefficients leap out at me; it seems pretty clear why the patent ended up as it did once Adam was pressed by a patent attorney.
As for Adam himself... I've heard it said that one sign of schizophrenia is the ability to hold contradictory thoughts in one's head. Alternatively, to be able to believe 100% in something one knows is a lie. This was exactly what I observed in Adam when the house of cards began its collapse. It was his own unwavering conviction that made him so difficult to dismiss, or to catch out.
As to how he pulled it off? Mostly sleight of hand, both physical and technological.
I was certain he'd land in jail. Oh, well, that's corporate law for you.
21 June 2008 at 9:37 pm
> I’ve heard it said that one sign of schizophrenia is
> the ability to hold contradictory thoughts in one’s head.
Actually, almost all humans do that, to a greater or lesser extent. Schizophrenics are just more egregious about it.
23 March 2009 at 11:05 am
You're quite right, the Adam Clark I met circa 2004 seemed like a perfectly sane guy who knew exactly what he was doing: committing fraud by exploiting people with many more dollars than technical sense.
BTW, his website now shows a default page. So it's gone into oblivion like the dozens of magical compression schemes before it.
I wonder whatever happened to his money. And how he's managed to stay out of jail.
23 March 2009 at 1:36 pm
Yeah, I noticed the other day that adamsplatform.com.au seems to have bitten the dust.
All there was in the adamsplatform.pdf file was that one diagram, though, so it is preserved in all its magnificence in that image file.