On Doing The Impossible For A Living

This is great. It starts out with a straightforward job that's technically impossible (but, like many technically impossible things, easy to do when near enough is good enough), and leads into an entertaining discussion of mathematical proofs, both accepted and faulty, many of which have a lot more direct application to human life than you might at first think.

See also the gloriously annoying Doctor James Anderson, a computer scientist and garden-variety mathematical crank who's recently attained a certain amount of celebrity for his tireless work in polluting the brains of children with nonsense.

Dilute it enough and it turns into science

There's something to be cherished in those moments when people in positions of authority decide it's time to make perfectly clear that they shouldn't be.

So I'm happy to report that one Lionel Milgrom, on the Board of Directors of the UK Society of Homeopaths, is now, officially and unquestionably, a whiny little liar.

I was going to e-mail him and ask him why he hasn't apologised for what I originally presumed to be, I don't know, an e-mail sent while drunk or something, but apparently all you can expect from him in return is abuse, so I think I'll give it a miss.

This isn't really news, of course. Professional apologists for orthodox homeopathy must, like professional apologists for young-earth creationism, be able to accept the complete wrongness, and indeed frank dishonesty, of the basic arguments they present, and yet come out swinging again the next day as if nothing has happened. Anybody with enough moral fibre that they can't stomach doing that is naturally replaced by someone who can. It's like politics.

(I ramble on about homeopathy here and here.)

Entertaining additive

XXL Bio-Fuel Enhancer is an amazing development from Malaysia, where there are many palm oil plantations and palm oil costs very little. And where, by means of a secret refining process, it turns out that one can convert this palm oil into "XXL nano-molecules that can crack and reform hydrocarbon molecules in fossil fuels into high quality, powerful fuel molecules that contain vast amounts of energy and oxygen"!

And all you need is one drop per litre! Which is good, because now the palm oil costs, I don't know, a hundred times as much? More?

Extremely plausible explanation

See? It's just that simple!

And in absolutely no way a gigantic pile of bollocks!

Don't listen to those people who foolishly suggest that breaking molecular bonds to turn a compound into another with greater combustion energy is difficult without, you know, some kind of energy input. Not to mention anybody who points out that when your fuel molecules already have oxygen in them, that means they're already partially oxidised, which means you get less energy when you burn them (that, essentially, is why alcohols have less energy per litre than hydrocarbons).

Presumably one should be careful not to add too much XXL Bio-Fuel Enhancer to one's fuel tank, lest it crack all of the bonds in the gasoline hydrocarbons and leave you with a fuel tank full of charcoal, and a cloud of hydrogen floating away into the sky.

And the tyres never wear out, and it sharpens razor blades too!

After I said rude things about an incoherently promoted automotive gadget in this letters column (as usual, it promised to give you better fuel economy, more power, and anything else they could fit on the page), one of the people who worked there sent me an e-mail.

He was, thankfully, not threatening to sue me (unlike some people mentioned in that same column...), but he did say that it was their policy to only charge customers who agree that they "feel the difference".

He asked me if I'd ever heard of a scammer who offered this level of service. He has not replied to me since I told him "yes, just about all of them".

Money-back guarantees are, actually, absolutely standard in this field. I'm sure some of those guarantees are fake, but they seldom need to be. People who're willing to buy a quantum dimensional vortex optimiser for their car's fuel line are also people who're likely to "feel the difference" from it, even when there isn't any actual difference to feel.

I often link to Tony Cains' excellent Guide to Fuel Saving when I'm talking about these kinds of gadgets (and fuel additives), because he's pretty much got the whole field covered. His page about the dangers of testimonial evidence is particularly relevant, to both this specific issue and the general subject of bogus products in which people believe.

Gold, stocks, magic beans... what to buy?

Today, the gods of the botnet have favoured me with a bunch of "Randomname check this" e-mails, some of which promote PMHD and some of which are still promoting good old CNPM.

But they don't tell you which one to invest in!

According to the thousands of completely different and independent real human beings who're sending us all the exact same e-mails every day about these piddling pink sheet stocks, both of them are about to receive major acquisition attention.

So you should spend all of your money on both of them!

This is terrible! I'm so confused!

Meanwhile, the multi-sourced "GOLD investments in Africa", "Real invest in real resource", "African GOLD Investment" spams keep rolling in.

I am indebted to a commenter on my last post for this image from the internationally respected Land Resource Association LLC's photos page:

Trustworthy miners

That dude on the left looks very trustworthy, but the one on the right is clearly unconvinced that even white men are dumb enough to send any money.

The Land Resource Et Cetera Web site, by the way, is registered in the well known city of Ghana, Switzerland.

"Gold gold gold gold GOOOOLLLLD!"

The latest product of what I presume to still be the SpamThru botnet is a cavalcade of come-ons for an alleged mine for alleged gold in alleged Africa.

They're piling up in news.admin.net-abuse.sightings already; I've had a couple of dozen of them, as usual all from different servers.

The same objection applies here as it did to the previous outbreaks - not many people are likely to find an offer more appealing if they get numerous copies of it with slight subject line variations.

This one differs in that it's promoting a Web site, rather than a penny stock. The site (for the "Land Resource Association LLC" - I just added that so Google searchers can find this page) looks more than scammy enough to actually want to be promoted in this way, so I doubt this is a Joe Job.

Apparently, they're pulling about $US360,000 worth of gold out of the ground a month, so obviously they, um, need investors to send them money, so that they can... hmm.

It's not even clear what country they're pretending to be mining in. Maybe Ghana. In that case, the amount of gold they claim to be digging up now equals the GDP per capita of something like 8400 Ghanaian citizens. That's a lot of labour and machinery buying power in a country with 20% unemployment.

But never mind that. Invest! Invest now! Don't miss out on your one chance in a lifetime to be ripped off by this particular scam!

Posted in Scams, Spam. 5 Comments »

On People Fooling Themselves

In a discussion on the SKEPTIC list about the wine-under-pyramids people I mention in passing in this review, this 2002 New Yorker article (ObBugMeNot) was mentioned.

It's educational and entertaining. If you haven't read it, do.

Smoking banana peels won't work, either

If you're looking for a pill that "Delivers Powerful Mind Expansion!", allows you to "Surpass Current Human Capabilities by 3,000 Years!", allows you to engage in astral projection and, you know, generally opens up the metauniverses of time, space and love to your liberated Klein-bottle superconsciousness - good news!

There are plenty of those!

Unfortunately, they're mostly illegal. The ones that're legal, unless you're living in some country where the jerks in government have absent-mindedly failed to ban certain plants, usually suck.

Which brings us to the magnificently insane "Magneurol6-S", also billed as the "Psychic Pill" (man, this post is gonna suck in some choice Google ads).

Magneurol is guaranteed to do exactly what it's promised to do, which is to say, awaken you to the fact that you are an earthbound god spinning your own mandala of truth and inspiration between the 512 dimensions of the Machine Elves.

The guarantee may well be genuine. If you're daft enough to buy these pills in the first place, I bet you're also daft enough to believe they work, especially if you help 'em along a bit with your favourite entheogen. If you're just not fantasy-prone enough to talk yourself into believing the pills are working, then you may well still be happy to believe that this is because you weren't reverent enough, and you just have to buy more (only $US49 for a 30 day supply!) and keep trying.

Magneurol is so named because it contains, wait for it, magnetite. OK, a "proprietary blend" of "Magnetitum", officially, but they're happy to call it magnetite elsewhere.

This is, I think, genuinely a bit of a new one. Nutballs of all kinds love to use magnets externally, but eating magnetic substances, not so much.

(If you decide to eat whole magnets, by the way, it's recommended that you stop at one.)

Along with the magnetic iron oxide, Magneurol also gives you a handful of vitamins, and a couple of chemicals that may or may not have something to do with neurotransmitters. But it really doesn't matter, because Magneurol is a pill. When you eat something, you digest it, breaking it down into simpler chemicals that the body may or may not later recombine into the same compounds you originally ate.

This fact is a bit of a problem for the quacky-dietary-supplement industry in general. People buy, for instance, shark cartilage pills, because they've been told that sharks don't get cancer, and then they eat them, and the magical shark cartilage is broken down like any other protein (well, insofar as the human digestive tract can break down cartilage - have you noticed people eating a lot of ears and noses?), and nothing happens.

(Oh, and sharks do get cancer, by the way. Of the cartilage, too.)

If you eat magnetite, I'm afraid you will not, as the Magneurol pushers suggest, end up with mystic magnetic particles in your third eye, or whatever. (Actually, they bang on about mysterious tiny bacteria that super-psychic animals are meant to have in their brains, or something.)

If the pills actually do contain magnetite then eating them will, at best, give you a bit of iron supplementation. Most of the magnetite will just go harmlessly through you. Some will dissolve in your stomach acid (if, unlike me, you have plenty of that), and in the process it will stop being magnetite and start being unmagnetised ions in solution, with which your body will do what it can.

I'm sure that your magnetite-laced poo will be very, very psychic, though.

Posted in Scams. 5 Comments »