A walk on the weird side

27 April 2007 — dan

I have a strange relationship with the folk at Life Technology.

They sell a lot of things.

Every single one of those things is outrageously, hilariously fraudulent.

Seriously. Go and have a look. It's great.

I have mentioned Life Technology from time to time on dansdata.com, and the Life Technology people, who do not think like you and me, have as a result alternated between asking to buy ads, being very cross with me, and sending me press releases.

Like this one, which turned up the other day (spelling original; a few strange high-ASCII characters redacted):

HI DAN, WE THOUGHT YOU MIGHT LIKE THIS

THE TESLA SHIELD™ HYPERSPACE VERSION 1.0
The Tesla Purple Ennergy Shield™ Hyperspace Version 1.0 is the most powerful and advanced Tesla Shield that we have created so far and has taken many months in design and beta testing. The Tesla Purple Energy Shield™ Hyperspace Version 1.0 incorporates all of the enhanced design and componentry characteristics of The Tesla Purple Energy Shield™ Ultra Advanced Version 1.0, but more importantly The Tesla PPurple Energy Shield™ Hyperspace Version 1.0 integrates an internal radionics struuctural link to a RAD 5 Radionics Machine running at full power at the Life Technology™ laboratories 24/7/365.

The RAD 5 Radionics Machine is a state of the art remote influence / transformational radionics machine designed by the esteemed quantum physicist and radionics technology pioneer Karl Welz of Hyperspace Communications Technologies International (www.hscti.com). The RAD 5 is undoubtedly the most sophisticated and powerful radionics machine available today. The integral radionics structural link enables The Tesla Purple Energy Shield™ Hyyperspace Version 1.0 to be permanently recharged by an unlimited source of subtle energy.

The upgraded internal componentry in synergy with the new integral structural link with the RAD 5 Radionics Machine enhances the subtle energy properties of The Tesla Purple Energy Shield™ Hyperspace Version 1.00 by a factor of up to x100. Incredibly, Thats one hundred times more power than the original Tesla Shield™ ! Life Technology™ can confidently assert thathat The Tesla Purple Energy Shield™ Hyperspace Version 1.0 is the most powerful and advannced personal transformational energy tool available anywhere today.

The Tesla Purple Energy Shield™ Hyperspace Version 1.0 is priceed at $299.95.

Ordering :
All variants of The Tesla Purple Energy Shield™ aare available through The Life Technology site at
http://www.lifetechnology.org/teslashield.htm

Whoo-ee. That ought to attract some really choice Google ads.

(But none for Life themselves - I've blocked their ads. There are plenty of other people happy to take your money to fool you into thinking their "radionic" devices do something useful, though, and I'm confident that some of them will be glad to advertise here.)

Life's products are modern updates of the potions and talismans I imagine travelling shamans selling to peasants in the Dark Ages. Some people are clearly happy to be counted as part of the filthy peasant demographic today, though, because stores like Life Technology's are quite numerous.

While Life's site is full of quantum this and electronic that (don't miss The Ultra Advanced Psychotronic Money Magnet™ EECS Version 1.0!), some of the promotional lingo hasn't changed for thousands of years.

Life Technology are, for instance, very much in favour of the modern "alchemy" movement, which has given rise to a marvellous substance called "White Powder Gold".

White Powder Gold resembles the actual conventional kind of gold in no way whatsoever, apparently because it is "monatomic", a quality not normally seen in solid substances. But have no fear, this monatomic gold is much better than regular old metallic gold. It's widely alleged to be very very good for whatever ails you.

Life's own version of the product comes with an entertainingly lengthy explanation of its origin and benefits, which I believe I can sum up as "it'll make you schizophrenic, but also immortal".

If you buy Life's monatomic gold in quantity it only costs about a third as much per gram as metallic gold (the Bush presidency has been good to the price of the kind of money that'll be useful after the collapse of civilisation...). Regrettably, however, the substance's stated "Philosopher's Stone" nature does not give it the ability to turn anything, including itself, into metallic gold.

(I note that the white-powder-gold enthusiasts have been repelled from the Wikipedia Philosopher's Stone article. Regrettably, the blinkered science-worshippers who rule Wikipedia with iron-fists-that-will-never-become-golden-fists have deleted the article that explained all about these Orbitally Rearranged Monatomic Elements, on the entirely unfair grounds that it was utter claptrap. This made someone very cross. But the video will not be silenced!!1!!one!)

[UPDATE: A few months later, Life Technology got back to me!]

Posted in Scams, Science, Spam, Strange Tales. 6 Comments »

Break the laws o' physics, win a prize

24 April 2007 — dan

Another Metafilter-inspired post, but at least this time I've got some comments in the thread.

Here in Australia, we've got a TV show called The New Inventors, which does not always do as much due diligence on the inventions they feature as they ought.

So, every now and then, something turns up on the show that sounds absolutely fantastic, and is therefore picked as the best invention of the three featured in that episode, and gets significant publicity as a result - but which is actually a scam.

I mention a couple of previous examples in this comment; any readers who watch the show more often than I do (those two examples turned me off it...) may be able to suggest others.

The Exhausted Air Recycling System has done very well for itself. It was named Invention of the Year for 2006.

The trouble is, it just doesn't make sense.

It's meant to be able to make air tools (which are notoriously inefficient) consume up to 80% less power, by routing exhaust air back to the compressor. But I, and others, can't see how this is possible without reducing tool power by exactly the amount you're apparently increasing efficiency.

My bullshit detector didn't trip the first time I saw the EARS - or the second, third or fourth, for that matter - because on the face of it, you'd think that it would be possible to take the above-atmospheric-pressure air coming out of an air tool and do something useful with it.

But now that I've thought about it some more, it seems quite clear that whatever you put on the outlet of the tool will restrict outgoing air flow, which will inescapably reduce the tool's power.

Other commenters on the Metafilter thread and elsewhere have gone on to express severe reservations about other aspects of the system, like for instance the fact that the return hose is the same narrow diameter tubing as the feed hose, despite the fact that the return has to handle a much larger volume of air, now that the pressure is lower.

[blinks innocently] Comments, anyone?

I doubt this'll end up being as much fun as the Firepower saga, but there still ought to be some entertainment to be had.

(The latest update on the Firepower story, by the way, is a good summary of the whole sordid story.)

Posted in Machinery, Scams, Science. 10 Comments »

How about "electronic Viagra"?

24 April 2007 — dan

I have little to add to this Techdirt piece on the recent widely-forwarded Independent article concerning "electronic smog" (another triumph of science journalism!). Given that the article itself admits that there is not any evidence that this "smog" is in fact harmful (or has any effect at all on anybody), I humbly submit that one might equally justifiably call it "electronic vitamin C", while one is waiting for evidence of effect to arrive.

(Ben Goldacre's been catching abuse for a year or so now as a result of his clearly inhuman and evil view that people who believe electromagnetic "pollution" is making them ill have real symptoms, but are incorrect about the cause. For some reason, it's hard to find similar pressure groups who believe that people who hear voices should be provided with earplugs.)

Posted in Electricity, Scams, Science. 5 Comments »

Why is that ultracentrifuge walking down the hall?

17 March 2007 — dan

On ruining really expensive lab equipment, from organic chemist Derek Lowe's blog.

I find something very soothing in these sorts of tales of personal disaster. Chemistry ones tend to be juicier than information technology ones; the latter may involve halon dumps but seldom include any gaseous hydrogen chloride.

The chem stories, like metalworking stories, are also usually not so technical as to be incomprehensible to those of us whose chemistry expertise extends not much further than the ability to tell bromine from packaging peanuts.

Lowe's whole Org Chem Horror Stories category is here.

Posted in Humour, Science, Strange Tales. 5 Comments »

The latest deadly threat to society

10 March 2007 — dan

Ben Goldacre, on a recent UK health scare about nitrous oxide, with which some dude managed to suffocate himself.

It's perfectly clear that nitrous is many orders of magnitude safer than alcohol or tobacco, so there is of course now a very newsworthy government crackdown going on to protect people from the harmless gas by adding as many of them as possible to the prison population.

Business as usual in the War on Some Drugs, in other words.

To find a representatively awful piece about the scare (which had previously escaped my attention, on account of the fact that I'm approximately on the other side of the planet), I knew to go directly without passing Go to the always reliable Daily Mail. They did not disappoint (though, as Ben points out, the longer Times piece makes even more mistakes), and proudly stated that "repeated use of the gas can kill and poisoning is a long-term risk".

Assertion one, there, is just barely true, in the same sense that it's true that people who get into aeroplanes can, soon afterwards, fly said planes into skyscrapers. They almost certainly won't, though, just as repeated use of nitrous almost certainly will not kill you, or contribute materially to whatever eventually does.

And, as Ben explains, the vitamin B/folate deficiency problem that's the only real long term risk of chronic (not occasional) nitrous oxide exposure does not by any stretch of the imagination qualify as "poisoning". Well, unless you accept that the "antidote" is knocking off the drug and taking a multivitamin pill. Pissiest Poison Ever, anyone?

I feel kind of goofy defending nitrous when I haven't even had any for some years now, but I do still have a couple of Web pages of great antiquity about it. And it really gets my back up when we're treated to yet another cynical panic about some generally-harmless molecule or other, brought to us by that portion of society which, for reasons even they can't clearly figure out, hates happiness.

So there.

Australian shoppers who can't find cream whipper bulbs in their local supermarket (some genius made it illegal to sell them to minors in most if not all of Australia, cutting off the whole bloody market, so Aussie supermarkets generally just stopped stocking them altogether. The kids went back to booze, ciggies and sniffing glue, of cause) may like to check out this eBay seller.

Posted in Science. 3 Comments »

The domesticated fire-bomb

9 March 2007 — dan

Potassium permanganate, even in these over-regulated times when perfectly sensible six-year-olds cannot buy arsenic over the counter, is still pretty easy to find in most allegedly civilised countries.

If you've got your hands on some of those pretty purple crystals, and also have some ordinary supermarket glycerine, and you pour the latter onto the former...

...this will happen.

If you'd prefer your spontaneous combustion with a more traditional audience of stoned-sounding high schoolers, this second video may be more to your taste.

The reaction will occur faster when the permanganate crystals are smaller. The smoke has a pleasantly firework-y smell, and is not a lot more toxic than you'd expect any other smoke you found in your kitchen to be.

This reaction is, of course, easily adaptable into hilarious devices for setting fire to school rubbish bins, automatic teller machines, ballot boxes and so on.

I also remember substituting potassium permanganate for potassium nitrate - of which I didn't have any - in gunpowder recipes. The result was a nice flammable powder, but of little use for making weapons of mass destruction.

This all works because potassium permanganate is quite a strong oxidiser. Not "quite a strong oxidiser" in the charmingly understated terms of the kind of chemist for whom anything that'll leave the paint on the walls of the lab clearly does not even justify the use of eye protection, but still strong enough to spontaneously react with numerous other common chemicals. Glycerol just gives you the best bang, or at least whoosh, per buck.

And, again, potassium permanganate is quite pleasingly non-dangerous. No, you shouldn't feed it to your toddler, but it's only moderately toxic.

Oh, and it's about the most intensely purple substance in existence. One small crystal will slowly and interestingly purpulate a large bottle of water. And that water will, then, leave yellow stains on things. Just to keep it interesting.

Posted in Nerdery, Science. 2 Comments »

Further advances in quackery

5 March 2007 — dan

Apparently "NeuView Glasses", a pair of sunglasses with little side-blinkers that can be selectively raised out of your field of view, are able to "initiate a profound and positive neurological event". They thereby cause a number of fuzzily described but wonderful things to happen. Just having a light shone at you from the appropriate side of your head will not work. Don't ask why not.

This is all based on the extremely sciencey Thought Field Therapy, with lashings of left-brain/right-brain pseudoscience.

The vendors of these marvellous devices (only $US67.50 plus shipping!) respectfully request that you not raise the subject of Peril Sensitive Sunglasses, no matter how much their product reminds you of them.

(Oh, and the target market for these things is alleged to be "everyone". Hey, blind people! You're nobody!)

Coincidentally, I just bought myself a (cheap) pair of pinhole glasses on eBay. Not because I think they're actually good for anything in particular ("Pinhole glasses - they're better than squinting!" is as much of a sales pitch as you can come up with for them without lying), but because they're a neat optical curiosity to add to my collection, along with the prism glasses (similar to these ones) and the IR goggles.

(I haven't quite made it to pseudoscope territory yet.)

Posted in Scams, Science. Leave a Comment »

Moonshine

2 March 2007 — dan

"A giant moonbeam reflector may shine away depression" is the title of a widely-linked recent Popular Science piece, about one Richard Chapin and his colossal array of allegedly therapeutic moon-mirrors.

Go and read it. It's worth it just for the picture, which makes clear that this thing could probably cook a whole cow pretty fast during the day.

Shining away depression reminds me of good-byeing it, which is cheering. But the piece itself, and the people talking about it, are as usual contributing to my depression by being impressively uninformed.

Oh, and by encouraging sick and desperate people to trek out into the Arizonan desert to be bathed in purest placebo, rather than doing (a) something that might actually impede the progress of their disease or (b) something more fun.

Yes, the moonbeam reflector is just silly on its face; strange ideas about moonlight are, in an etymologically deterministic sort of way, quite popular among lunatics. But Popular Science, at least, should have run their article past someone with a high school science education, so they wouldn't say stupid things like "moonlight's frequency and spectrum are unique".

Well, yes, moonlight does have a unique spectrum, in the sense that sunlight that bounces off anything has a unique spectrum. Sunlight that bounces off my foot today has a different spectrum from sunlight that bounced off my foot yesterday. Just not very different.

What "frequency" is supposed to mean in this context, though, is entirely beyond me. By definition, something with a "spectrum" does not have one frequency.

And if you take the "unique spectrum" to mean that there's anything very interesting about the spectrum of moonlight, you're wrong. For the wavelengths normal mirrors can reflect, moonlight's spectrum is essentially the same as that of sunlight bouncing off any other grey rock. It's not as if the moon has an atmosphere that absorbs certain wavebands, after all. Moonlight is a plain old continuous spectrum, mildly polarised by reflection (but not polarised any more by reflection from the mirrors, since metallic surfaces do not polarise reflected light).

This is mentioned in passing here. Also, it stands to bloody reason. The moon is just a lot of grey rocks, for God's sake. It's like the world's biggest camera-calibrating grey card, though rather darker than the usual 18%.

(Although, actually, the moon's average full-moon 12%-ish albedo really does nicely match what many light meters are apparently calibrated for. Regrettably, you can't really carry the moon around with you, and people don't take a lot of sunlight-exposure photos when the full moon is visible.)

It's not very scientific to point out that long exposure colour photographs taken by moonlight look very much like short exposure photos taken by sunlight, but I might as well throw that in too, since I quite like this one I took...

Three Sisters apparently not by night

...at 0238 hours on a full-moon morning.

There is, to be fair, a bit more to moon reflections than that. The albedo of airless rocky bodies is more complex than that of a piece of grey cardboard, as is explained in detail here. But I don't think any of this was news to astronomers 200 years ago, though they would doubtless recognise a big array of light-concentrating mirrors as being akin to the coloured light therapy that had been in use, worthlessly, for many centuries before. The invention of electric light reinvigorated this branch of quackery.

Like every good crackpot, Richard Chapin has a patent, which explains the details of his invention far better than any news piece is likely to.

Posted in Scams, Science, Strange Tales. 3 Comments »
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