This JavaScript alert box is admissible in court

7 November 2009 — dan

Most people have seen stupid "copy protection" on Web pages, where some message about copyright or something pops up when you click the right mouse button. This is supposed to stop you from wickedly making another copy of some portion of the data that has already been stored on your own hard drive when your Web browser asked the server for the page, and the server cheerfully sent it.

(See also, people who make Web sites and then demand that you not link to them.)

Via The Daily WTF's most recent instalment of Error'd, though, comes what may be the Greatest BS Right-Click Warning Ever:

Ridiculous right-click warning

Every listing from this seller has this. Just scroll down to the main product description and click your wicked pirate terrorist right mouse button somewhere on it, and you will immediately receive your very own copy of this fascinating alert box.

Right-click over and over! Send dozens of "reports"! Wheeee!

In case you're new to all this, and wondering: No, nothing's actually being "recorded" or "reported". The alert is created by a little snippet of JavaScript that tells the browser to do something when you release the second mouse button. In this case, the code pops up the alert with the stupid message.

It works in the same way as this, which also pops up an alert when you click on it. (It's also not unlike the system used for "security" by the subjects of another Daily WTF story.)

Unless you've got JavaScript disabled, that is, in which case it won't do anything at all.

If you throw caution to the wind and view the source of any of this eBay seller's item pages - using that advanced hacker tool, your browser's "View" menu, or perhaps just by right-clicking somewhere else on the page from the main product description - you'll see that the high-powered enterprise-computing code that creates this very serious warning is part of a rather long single line.

As entertained DailyWTF commenters have observed, that line is, in the case of the listing I looked at anyway, a magnificent 40,076 characters in length.

Some text editors will choke on lines longer than 32,768 characters, you know.

So that's even more security, right there!

Posted in Humour, Nerdery, Strange Tales. 8 Comments »

Reports of my site's death are greatly exaggerated

31 October 2009 — dan

UPDATE: The problem now, finally, seems to be fixed. Please comment on that post if you're still unable to see dansdata.com. And now, back to the original text of this post.

Some users of the Optus ISP here in Australia are having problems accessing dansdata.com. It's been happening for a while - here are people complaining about it in September, with the later reports only a few days ago.

I think all of the people with this problem have Optus cable Internet (as opposed to DSL or dial-up or satellite or carrier pigeon), though, fortunately, very far from all Optus cable users seem to have the problem. The nature of the problem is pleasingly clear: Dansdata.com has, from their point of view, been completely gone for weeks now, if not months.

Except it's not, of course. I may only put up one new article per decade on dansdata.com, but I have not died or been abducted by Zeta Reticulans or decided to reject technology and return to the land.

In the olden days of the late 1990s, the first diagnostic step when you wanted to see if a site was really down or if the problem was to do with your own Internet connection was to feed the site URL to Babelfish or one of the numerous dodgy proxy sites, and see if they could see it.

Now we've got more elegant solutions, in isitup.org and, if you prefer more verbose URLs, the very-similar-looking downforeveryoneorjustme.com. (I hope those two sites are actually run by different people - they seem, at least, to be on different servers - so they won't often ironically both go down at once.)

Anyway, I'm not certain about the exact nature of these problems, because a few people have e-mailed me about them, but when I ask them for details, they don't reply. I don't get a bounce message, either. This is exactly what you'd expect if some Optus router has decided that www.dansdata.com and mail.dansdata.com and everythingelse.dansdata.com are filthy spam servers all traffic from which is to be subjected to damnatio memoriae.

I've asked my Web hosts, SecureWebs, whether this is anything to do with them. It isn't. Well, it might be, very indirectly, since the server dansdata.com is on has occasionally been blocked on one or another of the many spam-server lists because of real or imagined misdeeds by other sites that share the server or nearby SecureWebs IP addresses. The Optus block could have been caused by that sort of thing, and then accidentally never cancelled. But Blogsome, who host this blog, stack rather more blogs per IP address than SecureWebs do sites, and the worst that's resulted from that to date has been a few days when bit.ly was warning people who clicked links from my Tweets that dansdata.blogsome.com might be bad.

I've also asked Optus, and they replied almost instantly to tell me that they could not replicate the problem, please send soil samples, et cetera.

So we need two things.

One: Some more detailed info about who using Optus can't see my site. This can easily be acquired by means I am about to explain in tedious detail.

Two: Complaints to Optus from the people who can't see my site, including the above info. Send the results to me as well - just posting them as a comment here will do very nicely - but you're much more likely to get action from a giant ISP on a weird problem like this if lots of people report it than if one person aggregates info and forwards it like a petition.

I could keep fiddling around trying to contact the Optus-using complainants from my addresses at other ISPs - I reckon my Optus account ought to be able to reach 'em. And I will. But I'll just point them to this blog post, so now that I've finally gotten around to writing it, so we can all try to figure it out together.

(I freely admit that I've known some people were having this problem for weeks now, but I was hoping the problem would just go away when someone at Optus hit a reset button or finally got rid of zzzzmust_delete_this_by_sep_9_09.cfg.)

The Whirlpool forum thread I mentioned earlier points to an excellent article on the Whirlpool wiki, "Is this site down?". The instructions there pretty much cover what you need to do, plus some other possibly-helpful stuff.

Basically, people who can't see dansdata.com need to ping and traceroute dansdata.com, and see what they get. Optus themselves turn out to have a Web-accessible Looking Glass server and a traceroute one too. Those can see my site, so if you can't, comparing and contrasting their results with your own could be helpful.

The easiest way to ping and traceroute from your computer is via the command line. In Windows, click Start, type "cmd", and in the resultant window just type

ping dansdata.com

and then

tracert dansdata.com

If your local DNS doesn't resolve dansdata.com to anything - "...could not find host dansdata.com", "unable to resolve target system name dansdata.com" - you can try bypassing the DNS and just going straight to the server's IP address, which is 64.85.21.19:

ping 64.85.21.19
tracert 64.85.21.19

(You can just type or paste 64.85.21.19 into your browser address bar to go to the site, by the way, if you actually can get to 64.85.21.19 from where you are. This advanced hacking technique has delivered precious, precious boobies to countless office workers and teenagers toiling under the yoke of sufficiently stupid site-blocking software.)

You can copy-and-paste the results from a Windows command-line window to somewhere else - like a comment and/or complaint message - by selecting the text, to do which you'll probably need to use the cumbersome Edit -> Mark option in the command-line window's lone menu.

If you want to be all fancy and bypass the Mark-ing, you can do this:

ping dansdata.com >>c:\dan_results.txt
tracert dansdata.com >>c:\dan_results.txt
ping 64.85.21.19 >>c:\dan_results.txt
tracert 64.85.21.19 >>c:\dan_results.txt

Presuming you have a C: drive, this will create a text file called dan_results.txt there and append the results of the commands to it, instead of just displaying them in the command-line window.

(If you used a single > instead of >>, each new output would overwrite the contents of the text file, instead of being tacked on at the end.)

Like all hip and happening ISPs, Optus only want you to contact them via some stupid Web form that redirects to a billion-character URL and that could be sending your message to screwyou@example.com for all you know. But with any luck a dozen or so people all suffering from the same disease will cause some action.

Now fly, my pretties! Fly!

Posted in Blogkeeping, Shop talk, Strange Tales. 20 Comments »

Perhaps the bits are getting lost

19 October 2009 — dan

Oh, Sky Cake Windows. You really are a new toy every day, aren't you?

Readers with unusually long memories may remember that I shamelessly begged for money to buy a new computer. Against all reason, you actually gave me enough to make that possible, just before the end of the last financial year. Said new computer, replete with overclocked Core i7 920 CPU and 6Gb of RAM, has been happily buzzing away next to my desk ever since.

I'm not actually using the new computer yet, though, because I will not permit myself to start screwing around playing Fallout and GTA and such on it until I have actually finished writing a big review about it, like unto the piece I wrote about the Athlon X2 box in 2006, and the other piece I wrote about the Pentium 4 box that preceded it in 2003.

But every time I get back to working on that big review, the PC bang-per-buck goalposts have shifted again. There is, for example, not really much reason for most people to get an LGA 1366 Core i7 machine any more, now that functionally-no-slower, yet cheaper, LGA 1156 CPUs are available. And don't even start me on the graphics-card scene.

So this has turned into the longest PC-to-PC migration project in history, with the new machine being languidly updated with data and applications. It's on all day, but only actually running a BitTorrent and distributed.net client. (I think you can spot the moment in my stats when the new box came on line. Feel free to mess up the numbers by ascribing your own distributed.net work to dan@dansdata.com, too.)

So anyway, the new computer's running Windows Vista SP2 (the 64-bit version, so I'll be able to use all of the 6Gb of memory), and it behaved itself perfectly for weeks on end. As you'd expect it to, of course; Vista was something of an adventure in frustration when it was freshly birthed, all shiny and glistening, but the two service packs have burned away the more impudent of its tentacles.

But then, just the other day, the Vista box decided to stop moving data over its gigabit-Ethernet link to my old computer, the one I'm still using, at the tens of megabytes per second to which I'd become accustomed.

Instead, it's decided to send data at, oh, maybe half a megabyte per second. 1.5Mb/s, tops. Often quite a lot less.

Vista-to-XP network transfer speed problem

That screen grab is of a transfer from the Vista machine to the XP machine, initiated and screenshotted at the Vista end. But speeds are the same if I start a transfer from the XP end.

It sped up to about 200 kilobytes per second after a few minutes. Sometimes, at random moments, it actually managed to sustain a whole couple of megabytes per second for a while. Whoopee.

Copying between all the other devices on the network works exactly as fast as it always did. The Vista box copies files between its own drives very quickly. The laptops get full bandwidth from their wireless adapters, the Vista box copies to the little Thecus N299 at its usual roughly 8Mb/s, and copying from the XP box to anything else on the network is also fine. And, get this, copying from the XP box to the Vista box is fine, too. Full gigabit speed. So this is a one-way problem.

And it's specific to the (Realtek) network adapter on the Vista box's Asus P6T motherboard. When I unplugged the Ethernet cable and plugged a USB wireless adapter into the Vista machine, I got full wireless bandwidth from Vista, via the access point and its own Ethernet hookup, to my XP PC. I presume a PCI Ethernet card or USB Ethernet adapter would work fine, too - though I wouldn't be at all surprised if the slow-transfer disease spread to the new adapter in due course.

I've plugged the Ethernet cable back into the Vista machine's built-in adapter for simplicity, now. Since the BitTorrent client is on the Vista box, this means that if I download something big on the Vista machine and want to move it to the XP one, I can either start it copying long before I want it, or plug a thumb drive into the Vista box, copy the file (at a perfectly normal speed) onto that, then plug the thumb drive into the XP machine.

This problem - or something very like it - was all the rage among Vista's early adopters back in 2007. I think the 2007 version of the problem usually had to with a well-meaning feature in Vista which is supposed to reserve network bandwidth for streaming multimedia content, so if you're watching an HD movie or something over a (suitably speedy) network from a Vista computer, you'll never have any frame-dropping or glitches when seeking, because any other file transfers from that computer will be heavily throttled even when they don't need to be.

This feature apparently often went haywire, especially in the original version of Vista. It either decided to operate all the time whether you were playing video or not, or it operated when the local user of the Vista computer was just playing music, or something, while someone else tried to get a file from his computer over the network. I think there was some kind of Copy Control Crap involvement here, too, but don't quote me.

This was meant to be fixed in SP1, and by all accounts a lot of it was. Vista Service Pack 2 has been out for some time now, and that's what my new computer is running. And as I said, for weeks on end, everything worked fine. I could play even HD movies from the Vista box over the network, A-OK.

Because this problem has such a long history, it's somewhat challenging to dig up information about fixing it on Vista SP2, as opposed to SP1 or the original extra-special Oh Dear God Why Did I Buy Vista v1.0 Edition. An inexpertly-crafted search string will thus turn up tons of people complaining about it back in 2007. The water is further muddied by different versions of the problem, in which copies from Vista to, say, Windows Server 2003 work OK, but copying stuff the other way is very slow and may even time out and die entirely. I don't think my problem is related to those ones, but who frickin' knows.

I have tried many things to fix this problem.

[UPDATE: In the original version of this post I forgot to mention that yes, I'm using a full-permissions administrator account, and yes, Vista's firewall is turned off.]

First up, I tried using a different copying program (like the aforementioned TeraCopy, or Vista's own Robocopy). No good.

I tried opening a DOS prompt (with admin permissions) and typing the voodoo chant "netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=disable". No good.

I tried Microsoft's automatic "Fix It" doodad for changing this same setting. No good.

I noticed that the Vista PC's hard-drive light is locked on for a couple of solid minutes after startup, even if I close all apps that could be expected to hit the drive. I don't remember whether it did this before the transfer problem. Perhaps it's SuperFetch-related. While I was fiddling with this, I completely disabled Windows Search. No good. Didn't even prevent the drive-flogging on startup.

(Good old lsass.exe was totting up I/O reads and writes at a great rate. I'm unconvinced that it had much to do with the startup disk-flogging, though, since it kept on reading and writing after the drive light had returned to normal occasional flashing.)

I've got Nero installed on the Vista machine; that installs some pointless services that can also hit the disk, so I killed them along with indexing. I also disabled Nero's system-startup tasks using MSConfig. No good.

I power-cycled the cheap and cheerful gigabit switch. No good.

I usually have a VNC view of the new computer's desktop open. I closed that. No good.

(VNC itself is subject to the slow-transfer problem; it updates very noticeably slower now, and of course becomes even more painful if I ignore the new limited bandwidth and force it to a high-bandwidth connection mode, like the "LAN" setting in the UltraVNC viewer.)

I ventured into the registry, and tried setting NetworkThrottlingIndex to FFFFFFFF. Then rebooted. No good.

In a moment of mad optimism, I tried telling Vista to "diagnose and repair" the network connection. It told me I needed to "turn on TCP performance improving settings", so I did. No good.

I turned off Quality of Service for the XP machine's network adapter. No good.

I turned off the same QoS Packet Scheduler and a couple of Link-Layer Topology Discovery doodads on the Vista box's network-adapter properties. No good.

I tried mapping a drive. No good.

I went on a rampage through Task Manager, killing every task that wasn't obviously necessary for Vista's continued operation. AnyDVD, audiodg, Daemon Tools, GoogleCrashHandler, jusched, nTuneService, PunkBuster, UpdateCenterService, Real Temp, PresentationFontCache, nvSCPAPISvr, MSASCui, two copies of nvvsvc.exe, Vuze and the VNC server all bit the dust.

No good.

But then there was SLsvc.exe, a Copy Control Crap process if ever I saw one. I killed it, and... No good.

I fiddled with "Remote Differential Compression". Windows said "Please wait while the features are configured. This might take several minutes", and for once it was not joking. It sat there for quite a while. But then it finished! No good!

I read through this page looking for things I hadn't yet tried. The only new one I found was disabling "Windows Meeting Space". So I did that. No good.

I said, "hang on a minute - why not just connect the XP and Vista boxes with a FireWire cable? That's fast!"

So I did. And although the XP machine was perfectly willing, it didn't work at all, because Microsoft has removed FireWire networking from Windows, as of Vista.

I noticed that Windows Update had a new driver for the motherboard's network adapter, which I hadn't installed with the other updates. So I installed that. No good.

I tried disabling "Large Send Offload" in the Vista machine's network-adapter properties. I even disabled the IPv6 one as well as the two IPv4 ones. No good.

While I was there, I tried disabling the IPv4 and IPv6 versions of TCP and UDP Checksum Offload, and an IPv4 Checksum Offload too. Each of them can be enabled for receiving, transmitting, both, or neither; I fully disabled all of 'em. No good.

I went to Device Manager and uninstalled the network adapter - and selected the "Delete driver software" option - then rebooted so it'd be redetected. No good.

Then I smote my forehead mightily, and tried a new Ethernet cable. I would actually have been slightly irritated if that had worked. It didn't. Actually, it made XP-box-to-Vista-box copies slow, just like Vista-box-to-XP-box ones. Both cables have all four pairs connected - well, unless there's a break in the middle somewhere. I cannot escape the feeling that this is trying to tell me something, but I'm too tired to figure out what it is.

I haven't yet tried starting the Vista box in Safe Mode with Networking, as this page suggests. I haven't tried connecting the two computers with a crossover cable, either. I also haven't yet tried just officially declaring the migration to be complete and starting to use the new box as my main computer.

But dammit, I want to fix this. I've gone too far to turn back now.

Perhaps there's something obvious that I'm missing, here. If any of the three people who've managed to read to the end of this post have any suggestions, I'm all ears.

Posted in Nerdery, Software, Strange Tales. 48 Comments »

A queen among quacks

14 September 2009 — dan

I discovered yesterday that, early this month, Hulda Regehr Clark died.

In the same way that the Westboro Baptist Church and its astonishingly ghastly leader, Fred Phelps, are an excellent choice if you need an example of a religious organisation that pretty much nobody sane could like, so Hulda Clark was the archetypal example of an out-there quack. She wrote a number of books, which include The Cure for All Cancers, The Cure for HIV/AIDS and The Cure For All Diseases. And she was, so far as anyone can tell, quite sincere; unlike scam artists like Kevin Trudeau, Hulda really was telling us all how to cure every disease in the world, in her opinion.

But Clark was more than just a good example of a sincere quack. Fred Phelps is a raving loony with very little popular following, but Clark's similarly deranged ideas have attracted a surprising number of true believers, and a steady stream of desperate people heading to her clinic (relocated, after some unpleasantness, from the USA to Mexico...), to piss away the last of their money and/or life.

Hulda's ideas included a firm conviction that vast swathes of human disease are caused by liver flukes, and that the flukes can be killed by a little electrical "zapper" device of her own invention. Whereupon your nonresectable pancreatic cancer will go away. This very clear sort of objectively-provable cause and cure makes Clark's theories a useful example of whacko quackery; in order to believe Clark, you're required to be utterly ignorant of, or convinced of the invalidity of, fundamental elements of scientific medicine that've been around for at least a hundred years.

Orac of Respectful Insolence has put old Hulda pretty comprehensively to bed in his Requiem for a Quack, so I'll try not to ramble on too long about What This All Means and how it's another example of why critical thinking is important and yadda yadda yadda.

(I bought another couple of copies of Why People Believe Weird Things the other day. One is already earmarked for a young relative.)

As Orac says at the end of his post, and as many other people have said - where are the people Clark cured, if she ever cured anyone? There ought to be hundreds, maybe thousands, of people who were once gravely ill but are still alive and well today, because of her.

It's like faith healers. If they really are healing people of their lameness and diabetes and who knows what else, there ought to be tons of these healed people all over the place, happy to leap up on their de-withered and even re-grown legs and testify with all the wind their now-cancer-free lungs can deliver regarding the validity of their chosen televangelist, Christian Scientist or psychic surgeon.

But faith healers are famously reluctant to even keep lists of the people they've healed.

You'd think that healed people would be the very best candidates for the donations that so many faith healers seem so perpetually to need. But nope.

(There's an ingenious subversion of the follow-up idea, in which the faith healer solicits testimonial reports of healing miracles from followers, but carefully avoids the awkward process of seeing if the "healed" people even had the disease they reported in the first place, much less whether any real diseases are really cured.)

Hulda Clark had a neat solution to the tiresome problem of following up on her "cures".

The Cure for All Cancers has a bunch of "case histories" in it, you see, which include 103 people who allegedly had their cancer cured by Clark. The way she verified that a cure had taken place, though, was by a blood test for a growth factor which, according to Hulda, indicated the presence of the deadly-liver-flukes-that-cause-all-cancer in the patient's body.

If you tested positive for that growth factor, you had cancer, even if regular doctors couldn't find it.

(The majority of patients in Hulda's case studies were only diagnosed as having the disease by means of Hulda's unusual blood test.)

If you tested positive, and Hulda Zapped you, and you subsequently tested negative, you were now cancer-free, again regardless of what conventional medicine might think.

And since you were now definitely 100% cancer-free, there was no need for Hulda to waste her valuable time looking into five-year survival rates, or any of that other nonsense to which the brutal and chaotic practitioners of Conventional Oncology are reduced.

If a patient died of cancer a year after being cured by Hulda, after all, then it must have been because the liver flukes re-infected him! If Clark told other patients about this, all it'd do is fill them with unjustified uncertainty about the validity of the treatments which Clark knew, with absolute religious certainty, worked!

I think this is quite a succinct version of the impregnable circular logic that supports all sorts of weird beliefs.

UPDATE: According to Hulda's death certificate and her own Web site, the woman with the Cure for All Cancers, the Cure For All Advanced Cancers and the Cure for All Diseases did, indeed, die of cancer.

Clearly, this can only be another example of the terrible power of malicious animal magnetism.

Posted in Scams, Science, Strange Tales. 15 Comments »

Today's sermon will be delivered by Firefox 3.5.2

20 August 2009 — dan

Firefox makes a suggestion about Answers in Genesis

Yeah, that figures. I wouldn't trust 'em either.

I'm not sure exactly how I got to this oddly apposite error, though I do know why it happened, and will bore those of you intrepid enough to make it all the way through this latest Wall-O-Words™ post with an explanation.

It all started when I read An Evolutionary Biologist Visits the "Creationism Museum", which is by PZ Myers, the Pharyngula guy and well-known desecrator of all that is holy.

The Creation Museum is a product of Answers in Genesis, or AiG, not affiliated with the other AIG, but similarly untaxable. AiG was founded by Ken Ham, an Australian-born evangelist whom we exported to the USA in 1987.

You're welcome.

(In case you were wondering, there also exists a Web site called "Answers in Revelation". It's pretty much what you'd expect - a little like "The Lord's Witnesses", but less apologetic.)

AiG's Creation Museum is a place which surely ranks among the Seven Wonders of the Whacko American Christian World (there obviously isn't really a Christian world outside the USA; it's like the World Series). The Museum is up there with the Crystal Cathedral, the even-more-gigantic Lakewood Church, the sadly-diminished Precious Moments Chapel, Touchdown Jesus and... actually, that's all I've got, off the top of my head. I'm sure commenters will help me out, here, with some more examples of the various US Jay-sus-uh enterprises' attempts to top each other in visible-from-geostationary-orbit violations of Matthew 6.

PZ Myers' article linked to the Christian page of this Cracked piece about baffling Web comics. One of the less peculiar comics told its readers to visit Answers in Genesis for the answer to one of the real posers of the Book of Genesis.

I speak, of course, of the bit where the recently-Marked Cain suddenly acquires an (un-named) wife. This is a bit surprising, seeing as the Bible has to this point mentioned a world population of exactly four people, the only female among them being Cain's mother, Eve.

Christians who bother to address a silly creation-myth plot-hole like this fall into two camps.

The first camp asserts that there were other, pre-Adamic humans, and Cain married one of them. Many white-supremacists hold that these pre-Adamic "mud people" are the ancestors of modern-day black people, who are therefore subhuman pre-Genesis prototypes on their ancient mother's side, and on their ancient father's side cursed by God. So, uh, you needn't feel bad about lynching, raping and/or enslaving 'em, 'cos they're not really people at all.

Answers In Genesis rightly deny this outrageous calumny.

They, instead, belong to the camp which reckons that Cain's wife "was either his sister or a close relative".

Because, for reasons having to do with Original Sin, AiG are certain, to the point of putting up a display on the subject in the Creation Museum, that it is impossible for any humans alive today to not be descended from Adam and Eve, and Adam and Eve alone.

Well, unless AiG's whole huge edifice of biblical literalism is to collapse.

(Given the extreme ages people allegedly lived to back in Genesis, and the parallel and unconnected Sethite and Cainite lineages, it's conceivable that Cain's wife was not actually his sister, but could have been his great-great-great-grandniece. Which is much less disturbing, I'm sure you'll all agree. Note that the completely unconnected Sethite and Cainite lineages each contain a dude called Enoch and another dude called Lamech, not to mention about four other pairs of guys with very similar names; there are actually only four people out of 16 who don't seem to have been struck by this extraordinary nominative correspondence. AiG assure us all that there's no way this could just be two differently-Chinese-Whispered versions of the same list of names. Obviously, the real question is if, when and how angels cross-bred with humans!)

Reading on through An Evolutionary Biologist Et Cetera, I had to admit that the Creation Museum has got some pretty cool displays. I mean, check out this awesome Noah's Ark diorama! And it's not nearly their whole Ark exhibit; they've got plenty more, including a recreated chunk of the Noah's Ark Construction Site! Don't miss the dinosaurs!

People like AiG, who believe the Noah story is literally true, have had to enlarge their Ark size estimates. The Bible clearly says that the Ark was 300 cubits long, but it doesn't say how long a cubit was. The road is therefore open for people like AiG to discover ever-larger sizes of "cubit", and thereby make their Ark bigger and bigger as those troublesome scientists keep discovering more and more species.

I'm not sure why AiG feel this is necessary, since it's also normal for people presenting the literal-Flood argument to say that God preserved the Ark from harm, helped to steer it to Mount Ararat, after the Flood helped the koalas make it to Australia and the polar bears make it to the Arctic, and possibly also helped Noah with the gigantic engineering task of building the Ark in the first place.

(Check out how long it takes for the average backyard boat-builder to make a small vessel; adding more family members and making it a full-time job helps, but making the project about a thousand times the size would still leave Noah and family felling trees, dressing wood, hammering, sawing, carrying and caulking for decades, at the very least.)

So I don't see what the big deal is about God making the Ark into a TARDIS as well, so it could hold as many animals as necessary without having to be as long as HMS Dreadnought, and much wider. This whole subject is a bit like discovering that there are people developing serious theories about how it was that Little Red Riding Hood failed to recognise a wolf dressed as her grandma, or calculating exactly how large a cottage could be built out of gingerbread.

But AiG reckon the Ark had to be big enough for all of the animals (and yes, they've got a Genesis Answer for the freshwater fish question). So the Ark had to be really, really, really big.

Different pages on the AiG site appear to disagree about how big the Ark was. I think the minimum is 450 feet - 137 metres. This measurement agrees with the New International Version's, uh, version.

But then, there's AiG's printable "Kids Answers Noah's Ark Bookmark" (PDF), which I consider as authoritative as anything else on the AiG site. The bookmark puts the Ark's length at a magnificent 510 feet, 155 metres. They also have a page for adults which concurs, and they proudly present an analysis from the Korea Association of Creation Research (by an extraordinary coincidence, the biggest megachurch in the whole world is in Korea...). The analysis concludes that a 135-metre Ark would have been seaworthy. With a bit of encouragement, I bet it'd stretch another 20 metres.

In the boring old secular world, the SS Great Western was, as I've mentioned before, the biggest properly seaworthy ocean-going wooden ship ever built, and its hull was about 65 metres in length (including the bowsprit, it was more than 70 metres). Even this size was too much for wood alone; Brunel used iron bands to hold the ship together.

Wooden ships bigger than the Great Western have been built on several occasions, but none dealt well with waves, and they often disappeared on their maiden voyages. No wooden ship even close to the size of even a mere 450-foot Ark has ever ventured to sea. Nobody can prove that the Ark wouldn't have worked just fine, of course, because nobody knows how it was built; there may be some amazing construction method lost to the ages, and proving there isn't is impossible.

Ark-believers like to bring up the subject of other ultra-gigantic wooden ships from the pages of history. Or, at least, from the pages of books that say they're history.

See, for instance, AiG's buddies at worldwideflood.com, who've got this awesome Flash size-comparer, which assigns the "most likely size" for Noah's Ark as a displacement of a mere "17000-28000 tonnes".

So, from the Graf Spee to the 1915 Revenge. I can totally see a family building something that big out of wood. How hard could it be?

The most impressive wooden vessels, besides the Ark itself, in the WorldwideFlood comparer are the two greatest hits in the world of mythical giant ships. First, there's Ptolemy IV's "Tessarakonteres", a mega-trireme alleged to have been rowed by four thousand oarsmen. And then, there's the Chinese eunuch admiral Zheng He's treasure ships, which were presented as vast beyond the imaginings of the Western world in that bestselling book by Gavin Menzies.

(Menzies' claims received a less than entirely friendly response from those tiresome empirical-evidence fetishists.)

The Tessarakonteres and another outrageously large wooden ship also allegedly owned by Ptolemy IV, the 115-metres-if-it's-an-inch "Thalamegos", have a peculiar tendency to only be taken seriously on Web pages that also argue for the existence of Noah's Ark. I'm sure the total absence of any substantive evidence that either of the Ptolemaic ships was ever paid for, built, crewed, sailed, sunk or salvaged has nothing whatsoever to do with the sad lack of orthodox academic interest in these extremely plausible ships about which it would be a terrible slander to say they're as physically practicable as building an Empire State Building out of pine.

(Or larch.)

For comparison, consider historically-supported large wooden vessels like the Syracusia, which ended up in the possession of Ptolemy III, or Caligula's giant round barge and "Nemi ships". The Syracusia probably existed, but is only said to be a - possibly exaggerated - 55 metres in length. And Caligula's ships pretty definitely existed, but were really just huge lake pontoons, that would have broken up at sea.

I can, at this juncture - quite a bit before this juncture, actually - hear readers begging me to stop poking at this nonsense and finish the review of that new computer you all bought me. But I think there's something more to engaging with preposterous speculations, like AiG's mania for persuading us all that the world began in the late Neolithic, than the mere sideshow-freak quality of the exercise. I think there's a significant educational value to chasing these silly rabbits. It leads you directly to basic philosophy-of-science questions like, "how do we know something is true?", and "what is truth, anyway?", and "what is sufficient evidence for a given claim to be treated as true?"

These questions are absolutely fundamental to critical thinking for everybody, not just professional scientists. But I don't think they're on a lot of school curricula.

(Did any of you readers receive lessons in critical thinking before tertiary education, or even then? You'd think that there'd at least be room, somewhere in the school year, for a half-hour on the different levels of evidence needed to make plausible the claims "I own a cat", "I own a horse", "I own an elephant" and "I own a dragon"...)

Everybody, young and old, needs to know this stuff, and one of the most entertaining ways of learning critical thinking is by examining the writings of people who don't quite get this whole "science" thing. (I think a kid could pretty much copy and paste this post into a history and/or science assignment and get a decent mark, as long as their teacher wasn't a Young-Earther.)

The Creation Museum really does seem to be, as Myers says, the very opposite of an actual museum. If you want to read about what real science museums do, I suggest Richard Fortey's excellent Dry Storeroom No. 1, (out in paperback soon!). As Fortey explains in his idiosyncratic wander through just a few of the numerous paths that exist in just his one museum, and as the Wikipedia article on museums also currently says, a museum acquires, conserves and researches the heritage of humanity and its environment. People who work in the parts of proper museums that visitors never visit devote their entire lives to collecting, collating, categorising and analysing stuff from the real world. Fortey writes of several museum employees who, after their retirement, keep coming in and working for free, so dedicated are they to the pursuit of knowledge.

I presume the Creation Museum has some actual fossils and such, and every now and then there's another News of the Weird story about hopeful fundamentalists heading off on yet another doomed trip to find the big floating Ark or the little magic one. But such efforts have all the actual substance of a dolls' tea party. The Creation Museum is, like AiG, nothing more than a great steaming heap of ad-hoc hypotheses, built on faith and making no predictions (if you don't count failed prophecies about the end of the world). The Creation Museum performs no real research, has nothing to conserve but what their exhibit-builders constructed, and is uninterested in the acquisition of new evidence, because they've already got the primary source to end all primary sources.

The Creation Museum even manages to, as Myers also notes, get the layout of a real museum wrong. Instead of letting visitors pick their own path, it funnels them through its didactic exhibits in sequence, like a haunted house or Ikea shop. (Or like a Hell House, for that matter.)

Once again, the Bible-thumpers have approximated the form, but failed to deliver the content, of the scientific endeavour. This is pretty much the definition of "pseudoscience"; pseudoscience is to real science as patent medicines were to real medicines.

Actually, that's a little unfair to patent medicines, which often contained desirable substances like alcohol, opium or cocaine. But I suppose people in hopeless situations could gain just as much comfort from religious hoo-hah as they could from opium.

Oh yes. The funny error. Remember the funny error that kicked off this bulging tumour of a post?

Firefox makes a suggestion about Answers in Genesis

The error happened because I followed a link, from some damn place, to https://www.answersingenesis.com/something_or_other, which attempts to use the SSL encryption certificate for https://www.answersingenesis.org/, whose suffix doesn't match the one in the certificate - and hey presto, there's the snigger-inducing error.

The main Answers in Genesis site is answersingenesis.org, but they also own answersingenesis.com, thus protecting that domain from being hijacked by the vile Satanists who dare to question AiG's Answers. AiG do actually have their act together as regards this stuff; if you go to answersingenesis.com it redirects you to the .org site, and neither of them try to use SSL so no certificate error appears. http://www.answersingenesis.com/anything redirects, not entirely elegantly, to the home page of answersingenesis.org, but that and the .com/.org SSL certificate thing is the only other bug I've found.

And now a reminder for any intrepid readers who've made it this far: Please nominate further Wonders of the American Religious World, and/or tell us all who, if anyone, taught you critical thinking!

Posted in Religion, Strange Tales. 39 Comments »

Another unrequested Firepower update

12 August 2009 — dan

The major focus of attention since the collapse of magic-fuel-pill company Firepower, with which I had such fun, has been the scam artist in charge, one Tim Johnston. Tim's lavish lifestyle was as unsustainable as the rest of the Firepower debacle, so he dragged his carpet-bag full of cash off into the night some time ago.

Now, another Firepower collaborator has bobbed to the surface of the treatment pond. His name is John Finnin.

John Finnin was the guy who gave Austrade grants to Firepower. Then, as is traditional among the parasitic worms who've burrowed their way through the vital organs of the world economy for so many years, Finnin became Firepower's CEO on a $AU500,000-a-year salary, while still greasing the wheels for taxpayers' money to flow from Austrade to Firepower.

(Well, I think he greased them. It might actually have been some sort of mucus. Lab tests are ongoing.)

Shortly after golden-parachuting into Firepower, though, Finnin was accused of child sex offences, and quit the CEO job.

At the time, this was all just part of the rich tapestry of tawdry dodginess that was the Firepower saga. (After a while, I was expecting Erik Prince or L. Ron Hubbard to be involved somehow.)

Given that modern society seems to be pretty sure that inappropriately touching one small boy is a worse crime than burning down a hundred fully-occupied hospitals, I'm not crazy about the publicity that child-sex accusations always attract. If you baselessly accuse someone of having interfered with children, then even if they're found as Not Guilty as anybody ever has been, the smell of the accusation will follow them around until they die.

But wouldn't you know it - Finnin's been found guilty of a total of 23 charges, which include repeatedly molesting a 15-year-old-boy. His lawyer has courageously asserted that there's an "element of entrapment" to the case, since the boy concerned was - he says - perfectly happy with prostituting himself. That's not what entrapment means, of course, but I'm sure the court will give this argument all the consideration it deserves.

This prosecution all kicked off after some different child-sex claims, which were allegedly what caused Austrade to allow Finnin to "resign quietly and return home", and thereby stop - again, allegedly - using Australian embassy privileges to help him participate in an international child-sex ring. Austrade are adamant that they didn't actually tip Finnin off about the investigation, and that their previous internal investigation of Finnin's activities did not in fact involve a "child sex ring". Austrade just allowed Finnin to give lots of public money to a man with a previous career of fuel-pill scams who then hired him as CEO of his new fuel-pill scam. So that's all right, then.

There'd been a bit of a lull in Firepower-related news before this delectable little detail came along. Gerard Ryle, the Sydney Morning Herald journalist most likely to be depicted on Tim Johnston's dartboard, published an unassumingly-titled...

Firepower book

...book about the company a little while ago. Ryle has been doing interviews and publishing excerpts. (He's got a blog, too. He's less than totally impressed with Austrade.)

It's possible that, a mere year and a bit after Tim Johnston skipped the country, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission will actually, finally, file criminal charges against Johnston. Don't hold your breath, though; it's got to take a while to figure out how to bust Johnston without bothering the various governmental worthies who were so proud to be associated with him a couple of years ago.

(There's been a civil case against whatever-remains-of-Firepower crawling along for more than a year now. ASIC has also awarded an eight-year ban to one of the several financial planners who told their clients Firepower shares were a great investment, when the shares weren't actually even legal to sell. The investors who ended up holding Firepower's toilet-paper shares continue, hopelessly, to try to get their money back.)

You can expect official regulatory bodies to take this long to dot all the i's and cross all the t's, and taking a while to do so certainly doesn't mean such bodies are useless. But it does serve as a reminder that you shouldn't expect the government to prevent rip-offs from being perpetrated, even large-scale and immensely audacious ones. Indeed, the bigger a scam is, the more likely it is to have some government officials actively helping it, either knowingly - as, I presume, was the case with Finnin - or as gullible marks - which I suppose the fresh-faced Stephen Moss might have been. (I bet Stephen's dad knew what was going on, though; Stephen claims he ended up being owed money by the vanished Mr Johnston, but his father cleared a 1.6-million-dollar profit when he sold the soon-to-be-bankrupt Sydney Kings to Firepower.)

The State government here in New South Wales has also recently banned four more bogus fuel-saving devices, not including the previously-mentioned Moletech thingy which is I think still technically legal to sell in NSW.

Among the now-banned gadgets are the "FuelMAX" and "Super FuelMAX", which are magnet devices, banned by the US FTC in 2005, but still apparently on sale from some Australian dealers. Then there's the "Magnoflow", another magnet, which the manufacturers say breaks down "fuel clusters" to allow more complete combustion, for a claimed "20% or more" mileage improvement. Which is of course BS, because modern engines burn 98% or more of their fuel already. The Magnoflow people seem to have given up on Australia, which is a terrible shame, since this gadget's US list price appears to be $US159 or more, but it was only $AU129 here in Australia.

Also now-banned-in-NSW is the "Prozone Fuelsaver" - which allegedly gives lucky buyers a magnet and a "catalyst"! (Astonishingly enough, the Prozone Fuelsaver never seems to have been tested by the catalyst enthusiasts at "California Environmental Engineering".)

Four down; only several dozen more to go.

In Australia alone.

Hurrah.

Posted in Cars, Firepower, Scams, Strange Tales. 9 Comments »

Authoritarianism: It's bad for your health

31 July 2009 — dan

I'm busy writing stuff, so let's see if I can't get you all to generate a bunch of content for me in the comments.

So I'm spinning the Wheel of Contentious Topics, buzz buzz buzz, around and around it goes, it's slowing down now... "gun control", "abortion", "religion", "Kirk or Picard"... and it's stopped on "health care in the USA"!

The previously-mentioned TechSkeptic just wrote an excellent post about the bizarre US health-care-reform situation. In brief, opponents of real reform are standing next to their rusted-out AMC Gremlin and insisting that all it needs is a lick of paint and some new seat-covers to be as good as any other car in the world today. And you shouldn't believe what people from other countries tell you about the cars over there, because that's all Communist propaganda.

I'm on the other side of the planet, and so don't actually spend a lot of time thinking about the plight of sick Americans. But I do watch The Daily Show, and the US health-care situation is an interesting example of a common problem.

I wonder if the USA will ever find its way out of this mess, where elected representatives choose talking points that are blatantly counterfactual, safe in the knowledge that a bunch of right-wing authoritarian voters (I strongly recommend Bob Altemeyer's book The Authoritarians, which is a free download) will believe them. This "authoritarian follower" population gives the cheerful promulgators of all sorts of lies guaranteed support from that ironclad 30% of the US public that never gave up on Dubya. And, often, a lot more than 30% of the US voting population fall into line.

(The 2008 presidential election had a very large voter turnout, by US standards, but almost four out of every ten eligible voters still didn't care enough to turn up. Here in Australia we probably have just as many people who don't care who gets elected, but we make them vote at least pretend to vote anyway, if they want to avoid a small fine.)

I don't mean to suggest that purest BS raining from on high upon a grateful populace is a phenomenon limited to the USA. The whole world has always had this same problem. But mass acceptance of definite and objective governmental lies seems to me to have reached its fullest flower during the Dubya administration, and it hasn't died back much now that he's finally gone.

(While I'm recommending books you can read for free, allow me to point you to Harry Frankfurt's much-less-frivolous-than-it-sounds On Bullshit. Every modern human should also own a copy of How to Lie with Statistics, but I'm afraid you'll probably have to pay for that.)

Right-wing authoritarians, as described by Bob Altemeyer, do actually understand the concept of being lied to, and also understand that their chosen authorities are often motivated to lie to them. But, often, authoritarian followers simply ignore this knowledge when they're listening to their chosen authorities.

This is the same sort of compartmentalisation that allows so many Americans to be perfectly fine with food stamps, bank-deposit insurance, unemployment benefits, Social Security and the threadbare safety net of Medicaid - especially if they're the beneficiary - but vehemently opposed to "socialism". The broadness of the definition of socialism that people use in these arguments makes pretty much every taxpayer-funded, universally-available government service technically "socialist", and therefore presumably abhorrent. Nobody seems to have a big problem with fire brigades, garbage collection, highways, bridges or public libraries, though. But, just as a segment of the US population would be perfectly happy to be ruled by a king (or a Bond villain, for that matter) as long as he wasn't called a king, many Americans are perfectly happy with "socialist" policies as long as nobody calls them socialist.

Apply no "socialist" government controls to any market you like and the result will invariably be corruption, cartels and frank fraud, giving rise to endlessly repeated boom-and-bust cycles, a minor example of which you might just possibly have noticed recently.

(On this subject, Upton Sinclair's classic The Jungle is another free book you might like to read. See also Charles Mackay's even older Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.)

There's a lot more behind the weird American authoritarian hatred for anything-called-socialism than mere common-or-garden cognitive dissonance, though. Bob Altemeyer has, for more than 40 years now, been doing psychological research on why authoritarian followers and their usual leaders, "social dominators", behave in the way that they do. He's ended up with a very large stack of evidence of far higher quality than is usual in the social sciences, and discovered some very surprising things. Once again - read the book. I found it entirely fascinating, and often blackly hilarious.

Aaaaanyway, getting back to the subject of the USA's adoration of dreadful health care, it is obvious that the USA could randomly throw a dart at a list of other countries in the developed world (and a few less-developed countries...), adopt the health-care system of whatever country they hit, and have a guarantee that it'd work better than what they've got. Provided, that is, that the USA actually managed to implement the new system properly. All bets are off if the new system turns into one of those military-industrial-political boondoggles the USA is so good at, where Congressmen and Senators secure re-election by making sure that every state gets a finger in every pie. The EU bows in awe at America's ability to add such amazing amounts of open avarice to every kind of normal bureaucratic friction.

To people in other countries, like for instance Australia where I live, it's difficult to even believe that for a significant fraction of the US population, the best health-care option available is to join the crowd in the hospital emergency room - whether or not your condition actually constitutes an emergency, of course - and hope for the best. We foreigners are similarly staggered by the fact that for an even larger segment of the US population, contracting a serious illness makes it probable that you will end up bankrupt.

We Aussies have a pretty standard underfunded-but-more-or-less-functional public-health safety-net. We pay half as much per capita for health care as the USA, and outlive you by around 2.8 years. I don't think it's just the Vegemite that's responsible for this.

The UK's population only outlives the USA's by a bit less than a year, but despite that segment of the UK's population who use the free ambulances as taxis, their National Health Service only costs them about 41% as much per capita as Americans pay.

And the list, of course, goes on. And on. And on.

So, despite what I now know about authoritarian believers, I'm still staggered by the sheer balls of the legislators and other talking heads who claim that the US health-care system is actually a good one.

It's as if they're standing up and baldly declaring the USA to be a Buddhist nation, and all of their buddies are going along with it.

Hmm. It's possible that my "get readers to write stuff so I don't have to" strategy has gone slightly awry. Commenters may have some difficulty in out-rambling the above.

Do, nonetheless, feel free to try.

Posted in Science, Strange Tales. 140 Comments »

Have you ever SEEN an atom split?

19 July 2009 — dan

The other day, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter took pictures of the Apollo landing sites. This gave various news organisations the chance to remind us all that if you ask the man in the street if he believes there was ever a man on the moon, there's a discouragingly decent chance that he'll tell you he doesn't.

The new pictures won't make any impact on the conspiracy theorists. You could bundle them into a flying saucer, fly them to the moon, and hover 10 feet above the footprints and Apollo descent stages, and they'd say you obviously must have come there in that same saucer half an hour ago and set all this stuff up. I mean, it's been 40 years and the footprints haven't even blown away yet! How dumb do you think we are, man!

Clearly, the only way we're going to stop hearing from these people is if we give them something to talk about which they find more exciting. Ideally, I'd like them to become convinced that this supposed "moon" doesn't actually existd at all, but I think that'd be a tough sell. If we guide them carefully, though, we may still be able to make the next We-Never-Actually-Did-X conspiracy theory much more entertaining than the unutterably depressing moon-hoax one.

How about this, then:

We never split the atom. The Manhattan Project was a fake.

Or it was real, but it was actually a collaborative research project between the US Government, Henry Ford, Walt Disney, Howard Hughes and the reptilian cabal that really ruled both Britain and Nazi Germany. Under the cover of so-called "atomic" research, this covert "xenofascist" project developed the occult death-from-a-distance technology that was what really killed Kennedy, when he was planning to spill the beans on that disappearing destroyer.

This, naturally, means that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not hit by atomic bombs. It's possible that there was actually a huge conventional bombing program using giant pyramidal strategic bombers, flying from their bases just inside the South Phantom Pole, and given almost unlimited range and maneuverability by the use of a hybrid orgone/Vril fuel source, with antigravity lifters for propulsion. It's clearly more likely, however, that the Hiroshima and Nagasaki events were actually the result of an earth-penetrating electrical seismic concentrator, based on Nikola Tesla's well-known power-broadcast and earthquake machines.

Tesla refused to help the xenofascists combine his technologies, which is why they had him killed in 1943. If he had helped, the earthquake gun would presumably have avoided the embarrassing misfire on its first activation. That shot missed not only by 3,900 kilometres in distance, but also by some 37 years in time, and caused the Tunguska event.

(So Tesla and Tunguska are connected - just not in the way everybody thinks!)

Where was I? Oh, yes.

"Nuclear power" is actually produced by means of black magic, but it's hard to tell exactly which kind, on account of the Malicious Animal Magnetism that so horribly destroys anybody who looks inside one of the "reactor vessels". This explains why the original promises that nuclear power would make electricity too cheap to meter came to nothing; it turns out that the sheer quantities of alchemical ingredients, large animals, human blood and, of course, babies you need to keep the Old Things from escaping a "nuclear" power plant make such plants very expensive to run.

Oh, and "nuclear medicine" is also a hoax. The supposed "shielding" around "radioactive" items is just more camouflage for sacred geometries and resonant crystals.

And as for nuclear magnetic resonance imaging, which has the word "nuclear" in its name and so must have to do with radiation and atoms splitting and stuff, those supposed "superconducting magnets" do have liquid nitrogen in them, but it's just to stop anybody from using a hacksaw to discover what the device actually contains. Inside, there are actually carefully broken-in audiophile-grade power cables, wrapped in a helix to match human ethereal DNA, and all running from a single button cell covered with so many battery-boosting stickers that it could power a small town.

Right. All we need to do now is boil this down into a bumper sticker.

Posted in Humour, Science, Strange Tales. 23 Comments »
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