» Toys How to Spot a Psychopath

A crafty religious ambush

26 March 2013 — dan

The other day a reader contacted me (I'll identify him if he asks me to). He'd read my piece about collecting old technology, and in lieu of a donation sent me a Diamond Mako for free.

How cool is that?!

The Mako is a Psion Revo with different stickers on it. So it's a fold-open PDA, marginally bigger than a really humongous modern smartphone. It dates from those peculiar few years when having a phone-book on a digital device that couldn't make phone calls was normal.

The Mako/Revo is about the cutest thing ever to be decorated with a QWERTY keyboard. The battery in this one is pretty clapped-out, though; I'll need to replace it if I don't want to charge the thing, via this well-thought-out setup...

...pretty much daily.

Along with this PDA-I-might-take-notes-on-one-day-if-I-can-get-it-to-IrDA-to-a-modern-computer, though, also came that most earnestly offered and least frequently appreciated of gifts...

...a religious tract!

Fair enough.

New rule: I'm perfectly happy for anybody to proselytise at me, as long as their religious literature is accompanied by an interesting piece of superannuated technology.

I haven't quite worked out my full schedule of fees yet, but an Amiga 600 that can run Speedball II from a CompactFlash-card "hard drive" will earn you complete perusal of a volume of religious literature not exceeding 100 pages. Give me a working NeXT cube and I will attend any service, no matter how long, at any church you specify within 150 kilometres of my home.

This tract is pretty standard stuff, but my correspondent asked me to read it and tell him what I thought, so that's what I'm going to do, in my usual buys-ink-by-the-tanker-load style.

I can't imagine that I'll be telling him, or any of you, anything you've not heard or thought before. But the fact that he sent me this thing, presumably in the expectation that it might cause the scales to fall from my eyes and the majesty of Jehovah to sweep me away, bothers me more, the more I think about it.

Just saying why this tract, to spoil the ending, does not persuade me at all, may be worthwhile.

(I did Google and Tineye image searches on the rather gaudy cover picture, to see if this particular tract is online anywhere else; I didn't get any matches, though Google's "Visually similar images" are pretty darn spectacular, and probably include Captain Goodvibes somewhere. Searching for a chunk of the text of the tract, which I'll include in this post for the convenience of future searchers, turned up one hit, at "Evangelical Tract Distributors". They have this tract with a boring non-psychedelic cover, "on sale" for zero dollars and zero cents. They'll send me in Australia up to a thousand similarly free tracts for only a $US20 shipping fee. It's twenty bucks for one tract too, though.)

Side one of religious tract

Side 2 of religious tract

Mercifully, this tract has only four small pages, making the old-technology-gift to religious-enthusiasm ratio pretty darn favourable, if you ask me.

Legibly larger versions of pages one through four are here: One. Two. Three. Four. And here's the text:

SEARCHING, probing, questioning, people are always looking for answers. From the vastness of outer space to the tiny world of microcircuits, all questions demand answers. But there is one question, life's greatest question, that many avoid. This question darkens the brow and fixes the gaze on eternity for it asks, "Where will I go when I leave this world?"

As people get older they often try to escape this question. Nonetheless, the question remains and all must face it [all underlining my correspondent's, not the tract's]. Perhaps you are avoiding it because you are not sure if there is an answer.

There Is an Answer

God has assured us in His Word that we may know the answer. Here is God's statement about it: "He that hath the Son hath life; and he that hath not the Son of God hath not life. These things have I written unto you that believe on the name of the Son of God; that ye may KNOW that ye have eternal life" (I John 5:12-13).

So we see that we may know where we are headed after this life and that there are only two possible choices. We may know if we are safe in Christ having eternal life and on our way to heaven, or if we have rejected Christ and are on the way to the terrible place awaiting all those who despise God's offer of salvation.

He that "hath the Son" hath life, eternal life. He that hath not the Son of God as his Savior hath NOT life. It is not a question of how good a life you have lived. It is a question of God's Son. Do you have Him as your personal Savior? Can you truly say that you know Him, that you have come to Him, that you have placed your faith in Him? "Acquaint now thyself with Him. and be at peace" (Job 22:21).

In Which Class Are You?

"For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us who are saved it is the power of God (I Corinthians 1:18). So again you can see, God's Word describes some people as "them that perish," and others as those "who are saved." In which class are you?

Perhaps you are living a good. respectable life, and you feel that you are good enough already, and do not need a Savior. Or perhaps you are in the opposite class, and feel that you are too bad to be saved. God's answer in either case is plain: "...There is none righteous, no, not one" and "...there is no difference: for all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:10, 22, 23). We are all sinners. God's Word says that we are all "dead in trespasses and sins." We all need a Savior.

"But God commendeth His love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8).

And God's invitation of mercy and salvation goes out to all alike. For He so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, that WHOSOEVER believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life (John 3:16). We beseech you to receive Him into your heart as your Savior. For "as many as received Him, to them gave He power to become the sons of God" (John 1:12).

It Is Up To You [handwritten: "Daniel Rutter!"]

You, yourself must decide the answer to Life's Greatest Question, "Where will I spend eternity?" It all depends on what you do about God's Son. For, "He that believeth on Him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God" (John 3:18).

Answer the great question today; believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and KNOW that when you leave this old world that you will spend eternity in the presence of your great God and Savior, Jesus Christ.

GRACE BIBLE CHURCH
152 W. Prairie Ave.
Coeur d' Alene, ID 83815
772-2717

[This would appear to be that church.]

Oh, boy.

Here's what this tract says, boiled down:

"If you accept the Christian belief system, why don't you accept the Christian belief system?"

That's it. That's all it's got. It says that you have to be a Christian to go to heaven and avoid hell, and it says that again, and then it says it a couple more times.

And, in the immortal tradition of all religious certainty, this tract cheerfully ignores the fact that several of its claims aren't even agreed upon by all Christians.

There are plenty of Christians who don't believe hell exists, for instance. This is not surprising, since it is exceedingly difficult to imagine why a loving god would visit hideous screaming flaming-sulfur acid-burning fingernail-peeling eye-gouging lye-drinking tooth-ripping knee-smashing genital-mincing torture for a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion et cetera years on Adolf Hitler, much less people who just thought religion was a load of claptrap and lived a good life.

(This tract actually has a bit of a bet each way there, because it doesn't actually mention hell, or lakes of fire or eternal torment - it just talks about a "terrible place" or where one might "spend eternity". This is compatible with the idea of eternal death being the only non-heaven option, rather than eternal punishment.)

There are also plenty of Christians who believe heaven, if it exists, is where good people go, whether or not they've kept any particular day holy or prayed on any particular schedule while pointed in any particular direction. Again, it's difficult to figure out why a loving god made us with this demonstrable inability to determine which, if any, of our thousands and thousands of contradictory religions, is the one true path to paradise. But this tract says he did, and we'd better choose right, or else.

And then there's the odd modern invention of the concept of a "personal relationship with god". This, also, is very far from universally accepted, even among Christians.

If you've got a personal relationship with someone they probably at least occasionally say things to you, after all.

It can also be argued that the very notion of a human having a personal relationship with the infinite creator of the universe is far, far more ridiculous than the notion of an E. coli bacterium having a personal relationship with the human whose gut it inhabits.

Now, this is all just part of the miraculousness of the Lord, of course. He's someone you can have a chat with, even if he doesn't seem to say anything back in a way that can't be blocked by appropriate medication. And he's simultaneously someone who sees the totality of reality spread out before him like a vast polydimensional tapestry, yet you also have free will, unless you're a member of one of the religions that says your eternal destination is known to God before you are born.

And so on, and so on, and so on.

If your religion were true, then just showing someone a tautological tract like this one would be likely to convert them in a flash of spiritual magic. You should be just dripping with miracles, like all of those people in the Bible. Some or all of the true believers should, to give one way in which a true religion might manifest itself, be able to speak in tongues - which is to say, your words should be comprehensible to everyone who hears them, no matter what language the astonished listeners speak.

Instead, religious people who "speak in tongues" have decided that it's actually just babbling away nonsensically in ways usually linquistically connected to languages of which the speaker has experience. It's often alleged that this is the language of angels, and it can be understood by some other members of the congregation, who stand up dramatically to "interpret" the doodly boodly boo boo boobly. (Or maybe it's a "private prayer language", whatever that means.)

I presume you're not a glossolalist, though. You probably have some sort of cessationist explanation for why the sun no longer stops in the sky and bushes no longer spontaneously combust and then start talking. You probably think people who do believe in ongoing but silly-looking modern miracles of one kind or another are misled. Perhaps to the point where the ones who say they're Christians are in fact not true Christians at all, any more.

But how can you tell?

What is it that suggests to you that the mainstream Christian ideas in this tract are the correct ones?

The tract, once again, presents no argument.

One wonders why such a thing as this tract even exists in the Western world, where we all know the basic Christian beliefs.

Even if we manage to avoid organised religious instruction, after all, those of us who live in societies where Christianity is commonplace are entirely familiar with the highly sensible idea that God sacrificed himself to himself in order to expunge the stain of original sin upon all humanity which was there because God allowed the most persuasive liar in the universe access to God's favourite creations and then they disobeyed God and ate something which apparently made evil suddenly exist or something and God then punished not only Adam and Eve but also arbitrarily decided that their disobedience would now sin-stain all of those first humans' offspring even though the offspring were not the ones who committed the sin but it's all right now because the temporary death of the human-like aspect of God during which that aspect might or might not have visited hell or some place like it freed all humans from the abovementioned arbitrary damnation brought upon us by God because of one bad act by our distant ancestors provided we follow the appropriate rules during our life which may or may not involve cutting off a piece of one's penis or being very respectful towards special little biscuits.

For some reason, many people outside the Western world find it hard to take this stuff seriously.

If you've been marinated in it all your life, though, then you definitely already know about these basic Christian beliefs, along with blatantly ahistorical nonsense like Caesar Augustus bizarrely deciding that for tax and census purposes everybody in the Roman Empire had to return to wherever their distant ancestors lived.

People who don't believe evolution is true - who are often quite convinced that God has communicated the truth of creationism to them via another of those "personal relationship" deals - sometimes ask "if we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?"

This argument fails for at least two reasons, but applying the same logic to religion does not, because religions usually claim to have invalidated previous faiths.

Christianity, for instance, says it superseded Judaism. But if that is the case, why are there still Jews?

And Islam says it superseded Christianity. But there you Christians still are, and the Jews, and the Muslims. And don't you Abrahamic siblings all just get on like a house on fire. (Or a church, or a temple, or a mosque, the setting-on-fire of all of which is apparently often also strongly encouraged by God in those personal conversations people keep alleging they have with him.)

And all this time the Hindus and Buddhists have been sitting there too, not being persuaded by any of you guys. People convert one way or another from time to time, usually to the great alarm of conservative members of whatever faith they converted from, but the overwhelming determinant of your lifelong religion remains the religion of your parents.

Which, once again, is exactly what we'd expect to see, if all religions were fictional.

If one religion were true, with an all-knowing, all-powerful and benevolent deity, then that religion should be more persuasive. Its followers and prophets should be distinctly different too. You certainly shouldn't see everybody in every faith bumbling around in the same way, and every faith producing the same few great people, few terrible people, and great mass of ordinary people.

And yet, that's what we do see.

Most religious followers have plenty of stories of events that plainly prove that they're on the right track. When I worked with Jehovah's Witnesses, for instance, many of them had stories of encounters with the malevolent spirits that constantly strive to tempt us from righteousness. Some Catholics hold forth about the effectiveness of their various sacramental adornments, many Scientologists have seen their "tech" work wonders, many Muslims think you might as well drive with your eyes closed because they've seen many times that you'll only crash if Allah wills it, believers in reincarnation from the Hindu to the New Age think the evidence couldn't be more clear, evangelicals are surrounded by miracles and portents every day, and umpteen religions claim some great practitioner didn't need to eat or didn't rot after they died.

The closer you look at such claims, though, the more tenuous they become. Most religious claims are exceedingly difficult to test in any empirical way, but the very fact that most religions say they have hard evidence that they are the only correct religion indicates that, as in the case where two men say they're Jesus, most of them must be wrong.

For pity's sake, even the three flavours of Christians whose job it is to mind the place where Jesus was allegedly crucified and interred keep getting into fistfights when someone moves a chair. And heaven forfend anybody shift the Immovable Ladder. I am not making this up.

I also have to quibble with the tract's statement that "all questions demand answers". The question of the preferred sock colour of François Mitterrand does not, to my knowledge, keep many people up at night. And this isn't just me snarking; I find "it doesn't matter" is a perfectly satisfying answer to that question, and to many others, some much more important to religious people than the sartorial preferences of deceased Gallic statesmen.

Take, for instance, the question, "do gods, which do not intervene in the universe in any way, exist?"

The logical answer to this question is "it doesn't matter", because a god who does not interact with the universe is a god who might as well not exist.

This is not the sort of god that Christians believe in, of course. Some Christians believe Jehovah interacts with the world in profound and obvious ways, because otherwise humans and roses and organ music and the laughter of little children and preachers who can cure terrible diseases by magic - though, again, not in any empirically-verifiable way... - would not exist.

Many Christians believe Jehovah stopped performing miraculous party tricks many centuries ago, but that he does still definitely interact with the world, once again because of that direct personal relationship with their deity which they solemnly believe they have. This would be impossible if that deity did not interact with at least the minds of his followers, in some way.

This is a pretty solipsistic justification for belief, though. "I feel God's presence in my heart and mind" is all very well as a justification for your own belief, but it won't convince anybody else unless they independently find such thought processes going on for them as well.

And this certainly isn't a reason for any unbeliever to believe in any particular one of the hundreds of different allegedly-holy scriptures out there. If your only evidence is your God-filled heart, then what answer have you to someone who apparently feels as internally convinced as you, but says that God has called upon him to spread the new doctrine of invisible pink unicorns and eating nothing but geranium leaves, and heretics must be put to the sword?

(Or, of course, someone who starves their baby to death on the grounds that he's insufficiently pious, and then waits patiently for him to resurrect and the murder conviction to thus be quashed. They honestly believed it! Who are you to say the baby won't pop back up any minute now?)

This tract doesn't even make it to the level of Pascal's Wager. All it says is, "We reckon heaven exists. Why don't you want to go there?"

Given the paucity of this question, I shall conclude with the answer I most enjoyed delivering to the more dim-witted Jehovah's Witnesses who asked me, "Don't you want to live forever?" I don't believe it, of course, but at least I was doing them the favour of inserting a new idea or two into their brain.

No, I don't want to live forever.

Forever is a long time. Forever is a trillion trillion trillion trillion googolplex trillion trillion, et cetera, years.

If you could carry one atom at a time, at walking pace, you could move the whole observable universe from where it is to somewhere far, far beyond its borders, and still have made no inroads whatsoever on forever.

God, presumably, has lived, and will live, forever.

Christians seem pretty definite about that.

God needed to keep himself amused.

So he made the world, and maybe many other worlds. And heaven, and that's where he lives, and he'd like you to come and join him.

To be in heaven with him.

Forever.

He could let you die, but he won't.

Have you ever wondered why God didn't just kill Satan, given that Abrahamic doctrine makes clear that he could have done so any time he liked?

God's not going to let the bastard die.

All Jehovah has left is sharing the misery.

Posted in Nerdery, Religion, Strange Tales, Toys. 25 Comments »

Magnificent marble machines

18 March 2013 — dan

In which I shamelessly knock off a couple of videos from this page on Matthias Wandel's site.

More at woodgears.ca. Other marble machines, including Matthias' own ones, are here.

Posted in Hacks, Toys. Leave a Comment »

Sharp edges are just good aerodynamics

2 March 2013 — dan

Here's something I didn't know existed.

Behold, the rocket monocopter!

It's a wing on one side, and a rocket pointing horizontally on the other.

Or, in the case of this monstrous one...

...two J engines and a K in succession, as this spinning surfboard wanders the sky looking for heads to lop off.

It doesn't seem very difficult to build a small rocket monocopter, from scratch (a spare R/C helicopter rotor blade is helpful...) or a kit.

It's apparently possible for these things to get themselves into a nice flat autorotation spin on the way down, too, so you don't need a parachute.

Well, that's the theory, anyway.

One-bladed propellers are actually very desirable, essentially because the more blades you have, the more turbulence each blade must cope with from the blades in front of it.

The obvious problem with dropping to one blade is that if it's mounted on a shaft and developing thrust, then that thrust will be off-centre, spinning around the shaft with the blade, and thus ruining the shaft bearings quite quickly. So you only see single-bladed props in oddball applications like these monocopters, and extremely tweaky ultra-speed control-line models, and certain rather expensive ceiling fans.

There are also propeller-driven monocopters, where a motor and prop takes the place of the rocket in the above contraptions. With modern digital control and image-processing systems, monocopters may be useful as unmanned aerial vehicles:

Posted in Hacks, Toys. 2 Comments »

More magnets

9 November 2012 — dan

The mysterious Professor X, from that post the other day about scaling up little toy sculpture magnet things to evade bans on such toys, has contacted me again:

Now that I'm not headed to bed and can really read the post, thanks again for such thorough and useful info. The comment to your post was useful, too.

I assume that if the sphere size stays the same and the flux factor goes down, they're just not going to be as effective for sculpting because they won't hold as well, and they won't have the same satisfying snap, etc. The lack of a workable alternative is just as good for me as a teaching point as a workable alternative would be; I'll have fun with this. I appreciate your assistance to total stranger.

I find it funny, after reading your post, that the CPSC in its Notice of Proposed Rulemaking says, "Thus, it might be possible for manufacturers to make magnet sets that contain strong magnets so long as the magnets are sufficiently large, although the large size could reduce their utility."

Well, that's an understatement, apparently.

Professor X

To get a, literal, feel for how these things behave, I do strongly recommend you hit eBay and get some cheap magnets there, both the little strong silver ones and the black shiny "rattlesnake egg" type (which can be had as spheres as well as elongated ovals).

The eBay seller I got some of my element samples from, "The Mists of Avalon" (here on eBay Australia, here on eBay UK) has some interesting magnets too, including irregular "tumblie" versions of the rattlesnake-egg type.

Plus, of course, these things really are some of the greatest fiddle-toys ever created. Just don't put them in the same pocket as your credit cards!

I used to also have to warn people to keep strong magnets away from CRT monitors and TVs, but that's way less of a problem these days, of course. To demonstrate rare-earth magnets' their ability to wipe other magnetised things, get a standard flexible rubber fridge magnet of the sort given away as promotional items, scrub it all over with a smallish rare-earth magnet, and behold that it now can't stick to a fridge at all.

This is because those rubbery magnets are set up with a "one sided" array of alternating parallel rows of magnetisation - that's why only one side of them sticks to the fridge, and also why they stick to each other in such an odd, "lumpy" way.

You can also use magnetic field viewing film (a small piece of which can be yours for less than $10 delivered) to see this oddness directly.

When a strong enough external field re-aligns these parallel poles so they all go one way, the essentially feeble magnetic material can no longer hold up own weight.

There's a lot to be said for ferrofluid, too.

The cheapest ferrofluid on eBay is in tiny squeeze sachets, for topping up the coolant in tweeters. But you can get thirty grams for less than $US25 delivered; that's enough to have some fun with.

There are also several dealers selling sealed vials with ferrofluid and possibly also some immiscible liquid inside, to keep the ferrofluid clean and, perhaps more importantly, prevent other objects, people and pets from being stained by it. Regrettably, you can only get some of a ferrofluid stain out of your clothes with a magnet.

Also, if physics demonstrations at all interest you, those little magnets can be great for those, too!

Posted in Nerdery, Science, Toys. Leave a Comment »

Too much of a good thing

7 November 2012 — dan

A reader writes:

I've tried to find the answer to this on my own, but I'm struggling. I'm hoping the question will be easy for you to answer and interesting enough that you'd like to answer it.

I teach products liability, so I've been interested in the Consumer Products Safety Commission's notice of intent to ban Buckyballs and other, similar magnet sets meant to be adult desk toys. The CPSC would like to ban magnet sets that contain magnets that have a flux index of over 50 and are so small that they fit within the CPSC's small parts cylinder. Most of the magnets in these sets are 5mm in diameter, although some sets have smaller magnets.

To be too big for the cylinder, the magnets would have to be more than 31.7mm in diameter.

So, to have an intelligent conversation with my students about this product, I need to know what would be the effect on the utility of these magnet sets if the spherical magnets are made too large to fit in the cylinder. These are NIB magnets. Would the magnet sets with larger magnets still work effectively as desk toys, or would their properties change in a way that would make them less effective? Or are they just less fun if they're that much bigger? Any thoughts you're willing to share would be greatly appreciated. And thanks for reading this far.

Professor X (not his, or her, real name)

Oh, man. That would be such a bad idea. So gloriously, horrifyingly, hilariously bad. But possibly rescuable with some serious design changes, on top of the larger size.

On the plus side, making novelty-toy rare-earth magnets more than 30mm in diameter probably would reduce swallowing incidents to zero.

On the minus side, the per-unit bulk price for rare-earth magnets that big is probably about $5, making a set of more than a few of them rather expensive.

And on the second and rather larger minus side, such a toy would hunger implacably for your blood, bones and cartilage.

(I'm not sure what shape this one-plus-sided, two-minus-sided object I'm describing is. Perhaps it's like the skewed dice.)

As a general rule, large NIB magnets are Serious Business and Absolutely Not Toys. They can clamp onto ferromagnetic objects, and especially onto each other, with terrifying force. If all you lose is the end of your finger, you should count yourself lucky.

Every now and then I actually have some application for my old...

...2-by-1-inch cylinders, or two-inch-square truncated pyramid...

...like for instance finding and extracting the end of a broken felting needle from the enormous ball of shed cat fur which I am making because why not.

When I have such an application for one of those magnets, I treat the damn thing like a 70-year-old hand grenade. I would not even consider any activity that required me to use two of them at once. And they're not even all that big. Sort your eBay search highest-price-first and, among the bulk-lot listings for large numbers of smaller magnets, you'll find some real nightmare fuel. Six-by-four-by-two blocks, for God's sake.

Under the shiny coating, rare-earth and conventional ferrite magnets are also quite a fragile ceramic, so two large NIB magnets allowed to smash into each other can easily, essentially, explode.

Spherical NIB magnets are a particular problem, because the contact patches between them are very small. Little 5mm sphere magnets work as toys because their attraction to each other isn't nearly strong enough to be dangerous, and the coating on the outside (usually silvery nickel) is thicker, proportionally speaking. (I think quality NIB spheres may have thicker-than-normal coatings, too.) But large NIB spheres - like, anything from about 10mm up - start to become a pretty serious pinch hazard, and will damage the coating at their contact points quite quickly.

To get around all this for a toy with large magnetic spheres, you could make the spheres out of something non-magnetic, and embed smaller rare-earth magnets in there. Perhaps a 20mm magnet centred in a 35mm block of plastic, for instance, or multiple little magnets in a plastic block, or just a really, really thick epoxy coating. I don't know how well it would work, but at least it wouldn't actively desire your destruction.

The popular shiny black ovoid "rattlesnake egg" magnets can safely be allowed to fly at each other and chatter together, because they're made from durable artificial hematite, and perhaps a bit stronger than ordinary ferrite magnets, but still not nearly as strong as commonplace neodymium-iron-boron magnets. Magnets of this sort might also be a good choice as "giant Buckyballs".

I continue to strongly recommend that people buy a ton of little rare-earth magnets for pennies on eBay; they really are excellent toys, not to mention useful for all sorts of odd things from hanging up tools to clamping small items until the glue sets.

They're just not for little kids, because little kids are idiots.

(Not Safe For Work, possibly Not Safe For Life, example.)

Posted in Toys. 5 Comments »

TEA NOW

24 October 2012 — dan

Alarm clocks are awful. Get one of these instead.

Even if your alarm clock is one of those Zen alarm clocks with melodious metal chimes, or it's your phone playing New Age music at gradually increasing volume, an alarm clock is still not offering you anything. It's just invading your rest and causing you to start your day with a little slap of sadness and irritation, arguably made even worse by the snooze button's empty gift of a few more minutes of half-sleep. Which you'll probably only spend trying to integrate your interrupted dreams with wakefulness.

(It is, at least, pleasant when I realise for the umpteenth time that I am not, in fact, still in high school.)

Or you may just lie there, living in fear of the return of the cursed alarm.

I shudder to think how much human misery those millions of little morning insults have added up to, over the centuries since humans first invented a water clock that would make a noise at a particular time.

Presuming you can't just rearrange your life so it doesn't matter when you get up, the best option in the pursuit of timed wakefulness is, clearly, a butler. A butler who brings you a cup of tea, even as he murmurs his apology for the regrettable necessity that you be conscious.

(The celebrated Stephen Fry alarm clock seems to no longer be in production, and it would also appear that more people paid for them than actually, strictly speaking, received a product in return. One can only hope that the Bible-verse version of the same product is similarly defunct. I would very much like to see a combination of the two.)

Failing that, what you want is a teasmade.

This one's mine. It's not a particularly elegant or collectible example, but it does the job.

The modern teasmade - the term has become a genericised trademark, in Britain at least - is essentially an electric kettle controlled by an alarm clock. When the alarm time is reached, the kettle element turns on, and a few minutes later boiling water is delivered to the tea-leaves.

Or to anything else you put in the little teapot, for that matter. If you want alarm-clock instant soup or Bovril or anything else you can prepare by putting it in a pot and pouring boiling water on it, you can have that too. (Might be a bit of a challenge eating soup out of the little teapot, though, if there are bits in it too big to exit the spout. You could also make a hot-milk-based beverage in a teasmade. But possibly only once.)

Most Automatic Food Machines, especially the ones that look like the coolest thing in the universe, have problems. They don't work in the first place, or they work only for a little while without unfeasible amounts of maintenance, or they're uncleanable, or their sole desire is to maim or murder their operator.

For every good gadget like the blade meat tenderiser or Aeropress coffee maker, there are a dozen crappy As Seen On TV wastes of time and money.

(There's also a small sub-category of wonder food gadgets that can only work by breaking laws of physics.)

A teasmade is not like that.

It is easy for a tired person to set up of an evening, it does what it's supposed to do without fuss, it has no moving parts except the control buttons, and its cleaning requirements are close to zero.

(Classically, you are never meant to do anything more than rinse a teapot; the accumulating tannin stains are supposed to make the tea taste better, though I'm pretty sure that claim doesn't stand up to double-blind testing. If you've got unusually hard water or use a teasmade for a long time then you may also need to clean lime-scale out of the boiling vessel and tube, but just running the teasmade with water and vinegar in the boiler should take care of this.)

The earliest alarm-clock tea-makers were created in the late nineteenth century. They were shiny and clockwork, with alcohol burners and a match-striker or other similarly implausible mechanism to light the burner when the alarm went off. These devices were less of a threat to life and limb than one might imagine, but were still less than entirely convenient to operate, and also rather expensive. And, to be fair, if there's one thing that'll wake you up even more effectively than a nice cup of tea, it's a fire on your bedside table.

The modern teasmade is electric, safe and reliable, and quite cheap. I bought mine used on eBay in 2003, and it cost me only $AU37.85 delivered. That was an unusually good deal - one just like it is on ebay.com.au as I write this, for $AU90 plus delivery - but working and pretty-safe-looking used teasmades routinely sell for well under $US100 delivered, and you can get a brand new one for less than 60 UK pounds delivered within the UK, $AU160-odd delivered to Australia, or around $US165 delivered to the States. Or less, if you buy the version with no radio, of which more shortly.

And yes, American buyers are likely to have voltage problems, because the teasmade is largely unknown outside the UK and as far as I know nobody makes a 110-volt one. More about that in the "buying one" section, below.

How it works

As you can see in the above picture, the modern teasmade really is essentially just a combination of an alarm clock - often, as in mine, a clock-radio - and an electric jug. It's quite easy to use.

The alarm clock in my teasmade works in the same way as every cheap plastic clock-radio. You set the time, you set the alarm, you tune the radio, and you select how you want the thing to wake you up.

In addition to the standard clock-radio options of an awful alarm noise or a tinny radio, though, my teasmade lets you select "tea" alone. You will then be awakened by the sound of boiling water, and the smell of a mildly caffeinated beverage.

My teasmade is rated at 600 watts at 240 volts, which is on the low side by electric-jug standards; here in Australia our mains electricity is a nominal 230 volts and a usual actual 240, so electric jugs with a power rating of 2000 watts or more are common.

My teasmade's water capacity is only about 650 millilitres - that's about 2.6 metric cups. Or a couple of good-sized mugs, or more than three dainty little teacups. The 600-watt heater takes about seven minutes to boil this full capacity; proportionally less if you don't fill it completely. You should of course take account of this boiling delay when setting the alarm time.

The initial heating process is quiet; it'd probably wake me up if I were sleeping without earplugs, since I'm a pretty light sleeper, but most people would sleep through it. The part where the boiling water is transferred to the teapot, though, is quite dramatically loud, and should be an effective alarm for most people all by itself.

The reason for the noise is the way in which my teasmade, like pretty much all others, transfers the boiling water from kettle to teapot. When you put the filling cap back on the boiling vessel, the boiler is sealed except for a metal tube that goes almost to the bottom of the vessel, and arches over to point at the middle of the lid of the...

...distinctive hole-topped little teapot. (If you find a junk-shop teapot that looks like this, you now know where it came from.)

When the water boils, the pressure of the steam pushes the water through the tube and into the pot. It takes no more than ten seconds for my teasmade to transfer a full pot-worth of water through the rather narrow tube. Hence the noise. When the reservoir's empty, it heats above the boiling point of water and a thermostat shuts off the heater. (There's also a switch that disables the heating element if the teapot isn't in place, so night-time absent-mindedness will not result in an unconfined spray of boiling water the next morning.)

If you need more of an alarm to wake you up then, ideally, you'd be able to set the horrible alarm noise or irritating radio station of your choice to go off when the water transfers, or even after the tea's had a few minutes to steep. But my teasmade can't do that; the alarm/radio goes off when the
heating element turns on, at which point a single cup of tea is at least five minutes away, and a full pot is ten.

Some teasmades have more sophisticated alarm settings, so the alarm can go off when the boiling is completed, not when it starts:

OK, that alarm takes us straight back into the Land of Horrible Awakenings. But at least there is tea.

Going along with its cheap-clock-radio nature, my teasmade has no backup battery, and reverts to that good old flashing "12:00" and no memory of previous settings if there's even a momentary power cut. You can solve this problem by running the teasmade, and for convenience also your bedside lamp, from a small uninterruptible power supply. A pretty beefy UPS will even be able to run the tea-making element; a cheap one won't be able to do that, but will at least ensure continuity of timekeeping if the element doesn't try to click on from UPS power.

I'm hardly an authority on teasmades, though; there are a lot of different models, even if you disregard the pre-electric W. Heath Robinson versions.

(Image source: Flickr user James Mooney)

Here's a Goblin with a removable boiler, as well as teapot, presumably for ease of filling.

(Image source: Flickr user James Mooney)

(Image source: Flickr user Martin Deutsch)

I wish mine had a TEA NOW button.

(Image source: Flickr user leo.j.turner)

Another picture of the same model of teasmade, or at least one with the same buttons. It appears to have won an award. Good for it.

(Image source: Flickr user MarkyBon)

This one just screams Fawlty Towers.

(Image source: Flickr user gruntzooki, a.k.a. Cory Doctorow)

Another just like it, and some others, on display in the London Science Museum. It's apparently circa 1945.

The integrated lamps can be rather nice:

(Image source: Flickr user ebbandflo_pomomama)

(Image source: Flickr user Simon Harriyott)

This one looks as if it ought to be mystifying Jacques Tati in Play Time.

Buying one

A simple search for "teasmade" (which may or may not correctly geo-target to your country; here the same search is on eBay UK, and here it is on ebay.com) gets 20 relevant hits on eBay.com.au as I write this, plus a few isolated teapots and a Bjork remix with "Teasmade" in its title.

There are some decent deals there, but I probably got my teasmade so very cheaply - under $AU40 delivered - because it was described as "Alarm clock/radio with teapot -RARE", which barely describes it and is almost impossible to search eBay for. I've no idea how I ever found it.

Even if all you throw into the eBay search box is some generic "tea maker" sorts of terms, it's pretty much impossible to filter out umpteen ordinary electric jugs, teapots with infusers in them, teapot-shaped kitchen timers and so on. Here's my best effort at making such a search across the whole of eBay.com.au with possible geo-targeting to other eBay sites; if that doesn't work, here's one for ebay.co.uk and here's one for ebay.com.

The easiest way to get a teasmade today is to just buy one new. For a while I think this may have been impossible unless you found a dealer with "new old stock", but now it's quite easy to buy a Swan teasmade online.

You may or may not care for the Swan's magic-lantern styling and LCD analogue clock, but on the plus side, you know the appliance hasn't been sitting in someone's garage for fifty years, maturing into a truly world-class fire hazard.

The Swan teasmades list on their site for £79.99 (about $US128 or $AU124, as I write this) ex delivery. They don't ship outside the UK, though.

The Swan teasmade is also on sale at this Union-Jack-waistcoat of a site, which is very excited to announce that the "Teasmade Classic is now £48.99 and the Radio Teasmade is now £69.99!". But they, also, only ship within the UK.

There are Swan teasmades on eBay; a US buyer could get the basic no-radio model for $US132.05 plus a mildly suspicious only $US6.00 for shipping, and an Australian shopper could get the same model for $US142.05 delivered.

That's not cheap, but at least the Aussie shopper would only need a plug adapter to connect a UK-sourced teasmade to Australian mains power.

(Until quite recently, it was normal for UK appliances to come with a power cable that terminated in bare wires, because the UK contained an incompatible mixture of the old BS 546 and new - in the sense of "after World War II" - BS 1363 wiring and plug standards. You had to buy a plug separately and screw it onto the cable yourself, or get someone in the shop to do it for you if you were a wuss. Nowadays BS 1363 is dominant enough that I think pretty much all UK appliances come with a BS 1363 plug moulded onto the end of the cable. Chopping that plug off and replacing it with one to suit your own country's mains, so you don't have to use an adapter, is unwise if you don't know what you're doing, but is legal in most countries.)

If you live in the USA, Canada or some other 110-to-120-volt country, though, you have a problem. Some teasmades wired for 110V are alleged to exist, and converting one wouldn't be an insoluble problem for an electronics hobbyist or repair-person, but you ain't gonna get one off the shelf.

So there's nothing stopping someone in the Americas from buying a teasmade from the UK or Australia, but it'll be the wrong voltage and you'll have to run it from a quite beefy step-up transformer.

Your beefy step-up transformer will very probably be an autotransformer, and very probably come with a piece of paper listing a wide variety of devices they strongly recommend you never plug into it on account of autotransformers' poor isolation qualities. A teasmade is likely to fall into at least two of those forbidden categories.

That said, two-pin sockets and cheater plugs do not yet seem to have killed most of the American population, and those are more straightforwardly dangerous than a teasmade running from a step-up transformer. Modern teasmades also have no exposed metalwork, so you're not really living too dangerously if you use one from a step-up transformer. I'd do it. But I am known for making poor decisions.

You can also get fully electrically isolated step-up transformers; they're more expensive, but solve the safety problems. And if your American house has a 240-volt circuit for a clothes-dryer or other high-powered electrical appliance, you can just plug the teasmade into that. (Running an extension cord from the one 240V outlet in the bathroom all the way to your bedroom may negate the safety benefit.)

The frequency of US 240V will be 60Hz instead of the 50Hz the teasmade expects, which will cause old-style electric clocks to run six-fifths as fast as they should. If you get an old teasmade with an analogue clock then there's a good chance it depends on the mains frequency to keep time, and will thus be essentially useless from the wrong frequency. You could run it from a frequency converter, but by now we're getting well out into the crazy-weed.

As long as there's no mains-synchronous clock in your teasmade, a different mains frequency shouldn't be a problem. A newer teasmade with a digital clock will very probably have a quartz oscillator that's immune to mains frequency changes.

Alternatives

By this point, American shoppers intrigued by the teasmade idea but disinclined to subscribe to British Appliance-Fancier Monthly will probably be thinking there must be a simpler way to do this. I mean, you could just plug an electric kettle into a timer switch and get something approximating the same functionality.

It occurs to me that if you get a coffee-maker that has a timer function, put tea leaves in it in place of coffee (and, if you want to get fancy, also replace the paper filter with a mesh strainer screen), you could get very close to a teasmade's functionality without all of the international-voltage bother.

The design of the typical modern no-moving-parts bubble-pump coffee-maker (which, incidentally, uses as a pump the same sort of device that propels a pop-pop boat)...

...is not ideally suited to making tea, but it'd more or less get the job done. A coffee-maker may not quite make Tea According To Orwell, but I'd drink it.

(Oh, and cheap drip coffee makers' primary purpose appears to be to make coffee snobs almost as apoplectic as percolators do, but a teasmade actually makes pretty close to optimal tea. It doesn't pre-heat the teapot, which is a mark against it, but it does deliver really scalding water onto the tea leaves, which is generally agreed to be Correct. Coffee benefits from being made with less-than-boiling water; tea does not. The fact that water boils at only 174°F at 20,000 feet {79°C at 6100 metres} is clearly a far greater problem for British mountain-climbers than any piffling shortage of oxygen.)

Cheap coffee-makers with timers require you to reset the timer every night, because they can't tell whether there's already coffee in the carafe or not, and want to avoid disasters that a forgotten full carafe could cause the next morning. (Leaving the water reservoir empty shouldn't be a problem, though, because even the very cheapest of coffee-makers should have a reliable overheat cut-off.)

You'd think you could get a coffee-making teasmade-analogue with an actual alarm-clock brewing function for a reasonable price, but I'm not sure if you can. I think you can do it with expensive plumbed-in models like this one, but few mere counter-top models seem to have such a feature.

I think this inexpensive Black & Decker model may qualify, though. I managed to find a manual for it online and it does seem to have a repeating alarm-coffee function. If you definitely know of such a thing, please do tell us all about it in the comments.

(On the subject of different approaches to the problem, check this out. Once again, some concept designer has supported my previously-expressed opinion of the breed, in this case by reinventing the teasmade and making it much, much worse. Apart from apparently being carefully designed to set itself on fire from the middle out, this concept design expects you to, first thing in the morning, drink tea out of a hemispherical E-Z Spill(TM) cup with no handle. This design also requires you to put a tea bag in cold water the night before and let it sit there for hours before the water is heated, which I can only presume will cause the ghost of Queen Victoria to manifest, reach into your chest and crush your worthless heart.)

Posted in Electricity, MiniReviews, Toys. 27 Comments »

It might cause some damage to the pinsetter

14 October 2012 — dan

Modern industrial society has provided us with numerous nicely standardised massive objects. Batteries. Golf balls. Beer cans (consume beverage, re-fill with concrete).

And bowling balls.

They're really just asking for it, aren't they?

These bowling-ball and beer-can mortars are being demonstrated during either a very determined celebration of the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution, or the Battle of Stalingrad.

I find it hard to believe that the person who designed this one's ignition system was sober at the time. (Questions may also be asked about anybody who stands calmly in front of the muzzle.)

At lest they didn't shoot it straight up, though.

(I suppose if that's good enough for the anvil shooters...)

The alarming noises at 1:35 of this video may just be the bowling ball's finger-holes whistling as it spins. Or perhaps the whole thing shattered into a shrieking cloud of polyester shrapnel.

A bit long-winded, but some physics calculations at the end.

The 2011 MythBusters bowling-ball cannon would probably have had similar explanations...

...had this not happened.

Fellow Discovery Channel program American Guns did it in a somewhat less highbrow manner.

And now for something almost completely different:

Posted in Hacks, Strange Tales, Toys. 1 Comment »

Bianca Lamb And Her Unstoppable Pastel Death Machine

8 October 2012 — dan

I've been not writing blog posts while worrying about finishing my next Atomic columns, and not writing my next Atomic columns while worrying about finishing blog posts.

So here are some Fabuland mecha.

(Image source: Flickr user lego_nabii)