Perpetual claims, perpetually continued

24 February 2010 — dan

A reader writes:

I am super sceptical about Steorn's claims of over-unity, but can you please decipher their latest video? I just don't understand the testing methods and the physics involved – I just want an easier to understand explanation. The video is here http://www.steorn.com/ and I've read the explanation and comments here http://www.nolanchart.com/article7327.html and some really interesting (but over my head) replication experiments here http://jnaudin.free.fr/steorn/indexen.htm.

I can't see anyone showing exactly how it doesn't work, or anyone easily explaining how it does. Can you please devote a blog entry or page to it?

(Just re-read my email – I sound like I'm promoting them, but I am just interested and looking for explanations)

Andrew

Well, I'll devote this blog post to it, but it won't be quite what you asked for!

Until Steorn start handing their devices over to testers that aren't on their payroll, there is nothing to explain. For the same reason, most people don't spend a lot of time analysing the amazing ability of Transcendental Meditators to levitate, turn invisible and walk through walls, because they have never actually demonstrated that they can do these things, in anything remotely like a test that eliminates blatant, basic, wouldn't-fool-a-five-year-old cheating.

I mean, what did Steorn even actually show in that video? Something going round and round, and a man saying that it was an over-unity device? That Hutchison Effect guy seems to have done a lot more presentation work.

Steorn are either about the ten-millionth free-energy scam artists, or about the ten-millionth "free energy pioneers" to fail to correctly measure what's going on, because they don't measure RMS power, mistake voltage for power, put their lopsided antigravity machine on a bathroom scale that can't properly weigh something that's vibrating, et cetera.

(Whenever a perpetual-motion huckster mentions "back EMF", you've got a pretty ironclad guarantee right there that he needs to buy some more expensive multimeters.)

To believe otherwise is to watch Transcendental Meditators bouncing around on their bottoms, and immediately rush to sell all of your Boeing stock.

Don't worry, though. I'm sure all of your questions will be answered with great enthusiasm in an upcoming Discovery Channel special called "The Exciting New Science Of Perpetual Motion"!

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

"Your situation is hopeless! Sell your house with us!"

17 February 2010 — dan

We used to regularly receive junk mail from estate agents, which took the form of a folded piece of paper, held closed with a circular red sticker pretending to be sealing wax. The piece of paper offers the recipient - who, frequently, does not actually own the house they're living in - the exciting opportunity to receive a "free market appraisal" of our home.

Presumably, the idea of these things is to fool people into thinking that normally, if you ask a real-estate agent to come and see what they reckon your house is worth with an eye to selling it, they charge you $500 just for picking up the phone. You can, of course, actually receive such a "market appraisal" for free.

One local estate agent has really raised the bar recently. We've received two of these things now:

Goofy estate-agent certificate

That's a gold-embossed stamp in the bottom right corner of the "valuable Certificate" (it'd look better in a photo than this scan, but I can't be bothered). Note also the stock-certificate-esque border.

These "Certificates" remind me of the "surrender pass", a staple of the psychological-warfare business. Most air-dropped propaganda leaflets, along with saying that the dropping side had clearly already won, the drop-ees had been abandoned by their country, the Statue of Liberty is kaput, et cetera, also encouraged enemy soldiers to surrender and provided instructions on how to do so.

Some of the leaflets, however, went so far as to make one side into an actual "surrender coupon" or "safe conduct pass". Which kind of gave the impression that you weren't allowed to hang your undershirt on a stick and wave it at Allied soldiers unless you had the correct paperwork. Or that you could surrender without a pass, but might be in trouble afterwards if you lacked a This Man Not To Be Summarily Executed certificate.

(These things are of course still being printed; here's a big archive that extends to the first few years of the current Iraq and Afghanistan wars. This site has a lot of leaflets, too. There were also "black propaganda" leaflets, which pretend to be from someone other than the side that's actually dropping them. "Congratulations, comrades, on so courageously hurling yourselves upon the merciless bayonets of the enemy! By the time you are all dead, we will have conquered the world!")

A few propaganda leaflets had some sort of value. Some leaflets had valuable information on them, like for instance offering rewards to enemy soldiers who decided to help the other side. And a soldier who's trying to surrender may be a bit less likely to be shot if he's waving a yellow safe-conduct ticket in the air.

As far as any actual laws-of-war stuff goes, though, the standard air-dropped "surrender pass" was and is every bit as valuable as these junk-mail real-estate certificates.

Posted in Ads, Strange Tales. 12 Comments »

Maxwell's equations are what the Freemasons WANT you to believe

13 February 2010 — dan

A reader writes:

After an idle evening reading the comments section (I know) on the blog of the BBC's US correspondent, Mark Mardell, I came across this ... interesting perspective.

258. At 04:12am on 09 Feb 2010, KingLeeRoySandersJr wrote:
I can answer why electrical power in most of the USA is above ground. The reason is simply in the USA power lines are carrying much more voltage and current than in Great Britain for the most part and travel greater distances. Electricity doesn't simply flow through the wire but on the outside of a wire. The circumference of the wire carries the power if it were underground much of it would be lost in the ground.

Now here is something you don't know. Power companies use different transformers under different conditions. Ever plug in a device and the wire gets warm but other times it doesn't? That happens because when there is a great power demand the power companies try to fool the public that there is adequate power by simply supplying the voltage and the device works.

But this is not what they are telling you. The voltage is there but not the current the device demands in it's productive use of wattage to function. It can't obtain it on the gauge of wire it is designed for and the wire gets hot, homes burn down, lives and possession are lost! Simply because inadequate power is produced. Voltage ratings exist but only because current is decreased. This creates the illusion of adequate electrical power.

[...]

I can't identify a single thing in that comment that appears to be true. Am I wrong?

Jonathan

Yes, "KingLeeRoySandersJr" does appear to have a very independent mind. Perhaps he read something about power factor somewhere, and then took further guidance from disembodied voices.

But no, he's not wrong in everything he says. I guess, for instance, that if you were to run un-insulated power lines underground, you probably would lose a lot of power. For analogous reasons, jet fighters without windscreens do not work very well and cars without wheels have disappointing top speeds. Humanity waits patiently for the genius who can unravel these mysteries.

(Fortunately, the extra weight of insulation ceases to be a problem when you no longer have to hang your wires from poles. A lot of people find it surprising that overhead power lines are almost always un-insulated; this often seems to be because they don't know the difference between insulation and shielding. My learned colleagues at Harmonic Energy Products had this problem many years ago, and the confusion also cropped up in connection with this gloriously stupid audiophile power cable.)

The first thing KingLeeRoySandersJr says, about current flowing through "the circumference of the wire", is also not complete nonsense. He's talking, assuming he's got some connection with consensus reality, about the "skin effect", in which the higher the frequency of the AC you're trying to push through a wire, the shallower will be the depth into the wire in which significant current flow occurs. This has to do with eddy currents, which cancel each other out in the middle of the wire but increase current flow on the surface.

Some huge power-transmission lines are DC, which has an infinite skin depth, and some transmission lines for exotic applications - like particle accelerators - run at high frequencies. But changing the frequency of AC is as difficult as changing its voltage is easy, so the vast majority of high-voltage long-distance lines run at the same 50 or 60Hz as the rest of the grid. "Skin depth" - the depth at which current density is one-on-e, or about 37%, of the current density at the surface - at 50Hz is around 9.3mm for pure copper and almost 12mm for pure aluminium, unless the calculations I just did based on Wikipedia's tables of permeability and resistivity are based on subtly vandalised numbers. At 60Hz the depth drops a little, to around 8.5 and 10.9mm, respectively. If you're for some reason shifting 1kHz AC, your skin depth falls to 2.1 and 2.7mm, respectively.

Audiophile nitwits sometimes bang on about skin effect, and pay big bucks for cables with zillions of tiny separately-insulated conductors, maybe woven like Litz wire and maybe just floating around as a cloud, in order to defeat it. The theory is that skin effect increases cable resistance for high frequencies, so you lose treble - or "musicality", or "coherence", or whatever it is they've made up now - if your cables are too fat.

But even if your golden ears have the mystic ability to perceive 40kHz sound, an octave higher than the usual rule-of-thumb 20kHz upper bound for human hearing and higher still than the maybe-14kHz that's the highest most young-ish adults can perceive, skin depth in copper wire will still be around a third of a millimetre at that frequency. This gives plenty of copper to conduct your line-level or speaker-level signals, at all audio frequencies, in just about any cheap cable you care to name, and a resistance difference for 40kHz versus 10Hz of three-fifths of bugger all (a technical term), even if you hook everything up using the now-nearly-proverbial coat-hangers.

(God help me, I just searched for "skin effect" and "digital interconnect" and yes, right there on the first results page are people selling a carbon-fibre RCA cable for digital data that's supposed to be better because, among numerous other brain-hurting explanations, it ain't got no skin effect. It can be yours for a mere $US225!)

Clearly, at normal mains frequencies you need a pretty darn thick conductor before skin effect makes much difference. Big power-transmission cables are pretty darn thick conductors, though, so yes, it affects them. Most aerial power cabling is aluminium (which has higher resistance per unit area than copper, but lower resistance by weight, which is very important for cables strung from towers), but I think it's quite common for those cables to have thin steel wires in the middle to improve their strength. Steel is a pretty terrible power-transmission material, having a skin depth of less than a millimetre at mains frequencies (and yet mild-steel coat-hanger wire keeps passing those blinded audio tests!), but it doesn't matter when skin effect confines most of the current to the outer, aluminium portion of heavy power-transmission cable.

Posted in Electricity, Science, Strange Tales. 13 Comments »

Your weekend Firepower update

30 January 2010 — dan

Gerard Ryle recaps the Firepower story in light of Tim Johnston's sudden loquaciousness in court.

Oh, and it turns out that Tim's Vladimir Putin Number is, at most, two.

(If Mr Putin himself turns out to have invested even one thin rouble in Firepower, I don't think it's likely that any other creditors, no matter how destitute, will object to Vlad getting paid back before them.)

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

Your worthless fuel pills, or your life!

21 January 2010 — dan

Nothing much was going on in the riveting Firepower imbroglio, until yesterday.

Before then, the wife of Firepower former-business-partner Warren Anderson said he attacked her, during an argument about a missing computer (there do indeed seem to be a lot of missing computers in this story...). She hauled Warren into court to face those charges, and then he said he didn't do it. Whoopee.

Now, though, Tim Johnston has said that Firepower - uh, well, the Firepower company that was selling possibly-illegal shares to Australian investors, anyway - never actually owned the intellectual rights to their products. See, it was one of the several other Firepower companies that owned the IP rights. That other company was run by a guy called Trevor Nairn, and Tim says he wouldn't give up the rights.

So, according to Tim, the abovementioned Warren Anderson rounded up some blokes to remonstrate with Mr Nairn, by taking him on one of those stimulating little day-trips that involve one or more large gentlemen with weapons, one unwilling participant, a shovel, and an isolated area.

You may have seen this procedure in a movie.

(If you haven't, allow me to recommend "The Magician"!)

Mr Nairn says that nothing of the sort ever happened.

This is all almost as mystifying to me as Mr Nairn says it is to him, since the Firepower fuel additives, just like the umpteen other such additives hucksters have sold over the years - and including of course the other additives that Tim Johnston himself previously sold in New Zealand - were and are completely worthless.

(Well, either that, or the people selling these things invariably try really really hard to make all of their "supporting evidence" look like a crock of crap. A product that did what their countless products are always said to do would be worth billions of dollars a year, but they never bother to take a lazy week to properly prove their claims and thus uncork the money-fountain.)

Who gives a damn if you've got the world rights to manufacture your placebo? Just make a new one, to a different formula, and go on with your upstanding legitimate business. No grave-digging, real or fictional, required!

Perhaps Johnston is just still trying to keep up the front that he believes his products actually work, and it's all a giant conspiracy by the oil companies and the Freemasons and Jehovah to make him look bad, or something.

It would still, of course, be simplicity itself to hand a couple of packs of Firepower pills - I think whoever's currently sitting on the cardboard box containing Firepower's surviving assets might be persuaded to give 'em up - to one of the dozens, if not hundreds, of organisations in Australia who could see if the claims were true.

I'll hold my breath for that, if you will!

Posted in Firepower, Scams, Strange Tales. 4 Comments »

The allegedly-wireless allegedly-RCA "Airnegy" alleged charger

13 January 2010 — dan

A reader writes:

You're probably getting about a million questions on this gizmo from CES, but do you think the RCA Airnegy WiFi charger is anywhere near remotely practical?

Airnegy charger

They claim it will "harvest" energy from 2.4GHz devices, like wireless phones and WiFi devices. They say it can charge a cell phone from 30% to full in 90 minutes on the CES floor, which is confusing because of all the wireless devices on the CES floor and the fact that many cell phones report full early to make their batteries look better. Since a Wi-Fi device operates at 100mW and that shrinks with the inverse-square law, wouldn't any Wi-Fi power be trivial?

Would this only be practical if you had a lot of overlapping Wi-Fi hotspots and/or a huge charger, or am I missing something? They're even claiming they can integrate this into batteries in the future.

If this is a scam or borderline useless, why is RCA promoting it? I could understand this kind of trash from a fly-by-night operation like all the fuel-pill pages, but I would think RCA would want to keep some of its reputation.

Tim

Yes, I think this has to be some sort of hoax. I ain't no RF physicist, but I don't think the numbers add up at all.

(I am, unsurprisingly, not alone.)

The output of the very small charger for my very low-powered mobile phone (a Motorola F3) is specified as 6.4V @ 200mA, which is 1.28 watts. The output of a standard Wi-Fi access point is, as you say, limited by the spec to 100 milliwatts. And, again as you say, the laws o' physics dictate that even if this thing contains a beautifully-engineered rectenna that hoovers up 90% of the 2.4GHz-ish RF energy that impinges upon it, it'll still collect far, far too little power to do anything very useful. For the same reason, it is difficult for a device the size of a canoe to harvest much energy from the wake of a passing ocean liner.

It's actually not quite as bad as you might think from a pure inverse-square law calculation, because the "impossible antennas" used in normal access points have a sort of inverse-hourglass-shaped radiation pattern, concentrating output around the antenna at the expense of output above and below it. If you're lined up with the radiation pattern of one of the larger "omnidirectional" Wi-Fi antennas, you could easily be getting three or four times as much power as you'd get if it were a real omnidirectional antenna.

But unless the Airnegy is squished right up next to the antenna so it covers, and near-totally absorbs, some relatively large fraction of the entire radiation pattern (and, of course, thereby makes devices in its "shadow" unable to see the AP any more...), then the energy it'll receive even from several out-of-specification half-watt Wi-Fi adapters will be extremely low. Never mind charging a phone - you wouldn't even be able to light an LED.

(A crystal radio can run on the RF energy from its own antenna, but that's in the microwatt range, at best.)

I suppose a device with some sort of broadband fractal antenna in it, that can suck up everything from 50Hz mains hum to high-gigahertz radar beams, might be more practical. But the Airnegy is said to be 2.4GHz-only.

Oh, and there doesn't seem to be any mention of this product on the RCA site. And although the Airnegy CES stand looks professional, the products themselves look like quick mock-ups to me. Look at this battery, for instance. It looks as if they put a construction-paper wrapper around a standard battery.

(I presume someone's paid to have the stand there, too, unless CES was having trouble filling the floor and let in hoaxers for free, like the funny fake ads that fill holes in newspaper classifieds.)

Note also that RCA is now, I think, one of those "zombie brands" that has been reduced to nothing but a logo that's slapped on random Chinese flea-market gadgets. So even if it actually is a "real RCA product", that doesn't mean much any more.

This also isn't a new idea. Here's a piece about a "prototype Nokia phone" that's supposed to somehow harvest five milliwatts from incident RF.

Can any readers who've got some of that fancy book-learnin' about that thar electrickery help me out, here?

(Somebody on that Boing Boing post busted out the Friis transmission equation.)

Has anything at all like this thing ever actually been made to work?

(And no, inductive chargers don't count!)

Posted in Electricity, Scams, Science, Strange Tales. 10 Comments »

The £795,000 paperweight

19 December 2009 — dan

I get one or two e-mails a week from someone who's discovered the donation page on dansdata.com, and immediately decided that all I do is beg for money.

Sometimes they ask me what my secret is. Sometimes they ask me for a cut of the (presumably massive) take. Sometimes they try to get me to join some questionable scheme, or just send me a PayPal money request.

And sometimes... well, sometimes I get something like this.

From: "k.macleod"
To: dan@dansdata.com
Subject: google old ladies face (Eternity Stone) value estimated 96.000.000 yen CHINA currencey
Date: Fri, 18 Dec 2009 22:04:44 -0400

Dan the Man' no douth u probably make money on your site, but i am talking huge money here' C that old ladies face well i discover rock's and stone's like that, unfortunatly not near as great' but what I do have' I can honestly say 2 u r as good or better then any1 else's collection in the World and the world is a pretty big place Dan as u know' i am broke' not a cent coming in 2 my household other then my wife's income. I need a computer savvy warrior Dan' I swear 2 U' in my Heart i truly believe my treasure's r thee best in the world, there's a stone on e-bay of a alien face' asking price 795.000, now i can relate that stone 2 some of mine only i think mine r better and Dan i have countless speciman's, here Dan i will throw u a carrot 2 intice u more ? i have bernie madoff - hitler- and the big big guy (Kong) all made by the hand's of mother earth. thanks -the MimiKKing

So... "K" is in the rocks-that-totally-look-like-faces-or-something business, I guess.

K's unusual form of expression suggests to me that his world-class collection of rocks that look like things may not actually be quite as world-class as he believes.

He's right about there being rocks that look like faces and have huge price tags, though. I mean, check this one out. (That's an eBay listing, which will disappear some time after the auctions finishes; here's a local copy of the listing. And while I'm at it, it's here on ebay.com, and here on ebay.com.au.)

What you might foolishly mistake for a stone the size of a softball with a hole through it is actually a "distinctive human face/skull", and an "impressive show piece with its dazzling detail and endless enchantment". With a price tag of £795,000!

Expensive rock

For... this.

"K", and the I-sincerely-hope-joking seller of the above rock, both profess to be very excited about this "eternity stone" thing, which seems to trace back to this story on a Chinese Web site. That story, which totals 64 words including the headline, says that a rock that vaguely resembles an old lady's face was in 2004 said, by "experts", to be worth 96 million yuan. (Or, according to the eBay listing, "£12 Million Dollars!!")

It doesn't tell us who's ever paid 96 megayuan (or twelve million pound-dollars) for this paperweight, though. This remarkable story also appears, for the last five years, to have escaped the notice of the rest of the world's news services. So has the "China Rare Stone Expo" at which the remarkable rock was supposed to have been exhibited; that seems to only be mentioned in reprints of the story about the near-priceless grandma-rock.

I fearlessly predict that if anybody clicks the Buy It Now button on the £795,000 eBay "skull" listing, that person will run giggling out of the auction-room as soon as they're asked to pay up.

Perhaps I should advise my correspondent to try selling "haunted" or other "magical" things on eBay, rather than sets of all-natural Hitler/Madoff book-ends.

Posted in Scams, Strange Tales. 6 Comments »

The tragedy of Conservapedia

17 December 2009 — dan

Every now and then I visit RationalWiki, to see what the crazy kids of Conservapedia are up to.

(I strongly recommend doing it this way, rather than injuring your brain on Conservapedia's own Recent Changes page. For a precis, check out RationalWiki's Best Of Conservapedia!)

Yesterday, this process led me to an excellent summation of Conservapedia's core problem, which I hadn't figured out before.

It turns out to be the same core problem that many cults, dictatorships and even owner-operated businesses have.

Constructive criticism of Andrew Schlafly
(click for legible version)

Conservapedia is, you see, constantly besieged by "parodists", people who're only there to pretend to be "radical conservatives", when they're actually writing satire. It's like Pretend Office, except malicious.

If Conservapedia were actually what it appears to be on the surface - just another manifestation of the USA's bizarre radical-conservative movement - then this wouldn't necessarily be a fatal problem. As a general rule, vandalism of Wikis is pointless (NSFW link), because it's so easy to fix. All you need is a decent population of sincere editors, plus maybe an automated tool or two (to easily deal with blatant stuff like page-blanking, single edits that make an established article 100 times its previous size, et cetera).

Unfortunately, though, Conservapedia isn't just "Wikipedia for neoconservative nutcases". It's actually a dictatorship, ruled by Andrew Schlafly.

(Who made it onto the Colbert Report the other day! Note that Stephen Colbert actually is a Sunday School teacher, and is... intrigued... by Schlafly's recent "Conservative Bible Project". The CBP is a "translation" of the Bible that's mainly being created by people who, like Schlafly, don't actually know Hebrew or Greek or Aramaic, but nonetheless feel up to the task of making the Good Book more aligned with radical-conservative ideology. The CBP is one of those things that's pretty much beyond parody; only if you've got Colbert's chops should you attempt to satirise it.)

Andrew Schlafly's problem is the same as that of various dictators and cult leaders: He rules his domain with an iron fist, and brooks no disagreement.

If you agree with Andy 99% of the time, and don't back down over that last one per cent, he'll ban you from editing Conservapedia.

If Andy were one of the great polymaths of our age then this would be a problem - because nobody knows everything - but could still kind of work. Unfortunately, Andy just thinks he's one of the great polymaths of this (or any!) age.

So when someone happens along who actually knows stuff that Andy doesn't about, let's say, relativity, and insists that Andy is actually wrong, Andy will briefly argue with them, and then ban them. (Andy pretty much seems to think that relativity as a "Liberal" plot. I kid you not.)

The above-screenshotted commentary...

Constructive criticism of Andrew Schlafly
(click for legible version)

...came in the aftermath of yet another long-term, trusted Conservapedia editor "coming out" as a parodist. It points out this fatal flaw; the only people who actually will agree 100% with Andy, going along with him on all of his weird quarter-baked notions and backing down instantly at the first sign of any disagreement, are the parodists. (Well, them and people who don't actually know anything at all, who may not be exactly the people you want contributing to your encyclopedia.)

So Andy's own egotism is destroying the greatest product of his ego. It's like a tragic play, except the audience is cheering at the end.

This is even worse than the problem expressed in the classic aphorism, "First-class men hire first-class men. Second-class men hire third-class men."

(I know that's sexist, but I think the original wording more clearly conveys the antiquity of the sentiment. And that saying always conjures up, for me, an image of some Stephen-Fry-ian chap showing a young colleague the ropes over cigars and brandy at the club. I find that image fundamentally incompatible with gender-neutral pronouns.)

Even with the occasional extension "...and third-class men fire first-class men", that aphorism doesn't cover the dreadful situation at Conservapedia, where a second-class (at best...) man is in charge of the whole shebang, and utterly determined to winnow the workforce down to nothing but people who won't do a lick of real constructive work at all.

In dictatorships and cults where the man (only occasionally the woman...) in charge will tolerate no disagreement at all, the result will be a bunch of yes-men who do, at least, have some interest in advancing the project, if only so that they can be promoted into more powerful positions.

On a Wiki, though, control-freak egotism from the boss is even more of a disaster, because it's easy for anybody in the world to casually throw a spanner in the works whenever they have a spare moment. And if your Wiki is about a contentious topic - in which category "the whole of human knowledge" probably qualifies - there'll be plenty of people who're eager to mess with you.

The reason why the above advice to Andy (as I write this, it's the eighth-highest-voted entry on Best of Conservapedia) is a screenshot and not just a link to the Conservapedia talk page is that Andy's response to this criticism was the same as it always is. He erased the criticism, and banned the user.

And on it goes.

Posted in Strange Tales. 12 Comments »
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