You have money you didn't know about! Give us some of it!

16 November 2011 — dan

I love it when I don't have to go looking for an interestingly fishy business proposal, because some obliging organisation mails it to me.

(It's even better than unsolicited crank e-mail.)

Fishy letter

Strictly speaking, this one wasn't actually mailed to me, but to my partner Anne. It wasn't precisely aimed at her, either; they had our old address right, but if the recipient's name had been Norma Jeane Baker, the letter would have been addressed to Jeane Norma Baker.

So anyway, it's from an outfit called "CollectionPoint", and they're pleased to tell Anne that there's $AU887.50 waiting for her in an undisclosed location. Apparently CollectionPoint do debt recovery too, for a fee of 25% plus GST. They don't quote a fee for this other kind of money recovery, but I think it's safe to say it's not small.

We're not exactly rolling in dough at the moment, so a forgotten nest-egg could be quite handy.

(Do send me some money if you feel like it. We're hardly on the bread-line, though; I assure you that the lights will stay on, the cats will still get their little tins of fancy fish and the freeloading cockatoos will get their seed without your kind assistance.)

The questions that immediately occurred to me were, of course, "does this money actually exist?", and "is this outfit charging a fee for something you can do quite easily yourself?"

The answers to these questions are surprising and unsurprising, respectively.

"Unclaimed money" has been a scam-artist favourite for a long, long time. Unexpected inheritances. Prizes in lotteries you never even entered. A permutation in which the money may not actually strictly speaking be yours, but a morally upstanding person says you can still get hold of it, for a price. Some sort of purported government involvement. The list goes on.

The unclaimed-money business has even spawned meta-scams, in which the sucker pays for an information pack or franchise opportunity or something so they can start a work-at-home business finding unclaimed judicial judgements, or whatever, and creaming off a fat commission.

But CollectionPoint actually are telling us about money we really can claim. We'll claim it as soon as we can make a big enough pile of ID documents.

CollectionPoint are also, however, offering to take people's money to help them do something that is not actually difficult to do - or at least not significantly more difficult to do - by yourself.

The Australian government has a site called "Moneysmart" that'll point you at various unclaimed-money searches. Anne found the money CollectionPoint are talking about via the NSW Office of State Revenue site. Which is presumably the same way CollectionPoint found it.

So CollectionPoint do provide a helpful service. They alert you to the existence of money you probably can actually collect. And then you can throw the CollectionPoint letter away and go and collect your money the free way. CollectionPoint do not appear to be breaking any laws.

Well, they're not breaking any laws right now, anyway. The Australian Government's Department of Veterans' Affairs are happy to list CollectionPoint on their scam information page - apparently CollectionPoint sent letters to war widows claiming to be acting on behalf of that Department. And it's not hard to find other people talking about CollectionPoint in not-entirely-complimentary terms.

CollectionPoint come off pretty well in this blog post, for instance, until several allegedly separate people show up in the comments, all loudly defending CollectionPoint and all suffering from a suspiciously similar inability to construct a sentence, or in many cases even a word.

CollectionPoint also score themselves a mention in this Age article; apparently CollectionPoint have sent out follow-up letters implying - but not exactly actionably saying - that if you don't use their services, you'll miss out on the money altogether.

A commenter here says that after a CollectionPoint letter put him onto some money he could claim, and he claimed it himself without using CollectionPoint's services, CollectionPoint sent him a bill.

This bloke says CollectionPoint offered to collect $500 owing to him for a mere $160 - a 32% fee. Even Today Tonight doesn't like them.

Oh, and according (PDF) to the Consumer Action Law Centre, CollectionPoint charged a 25% fee for recovering some unclaimed superannuation money for an elderly client after he provided them with the identifying information he could have used to get the money back for free. But then CollectionPoint jacked up the 25% fee by adding another 10% GST charge (so 27.5%, altogether). The Consumer Action Law Centre took the case to court, and (another PDF) the Victorian Civil Administration Tribunal decided that CollectionPoint were indeed gouging their client, and reduced the fee payable to CollectionPoint by 45%.

The funny part, though, was that in response to this lawsuit CollectionPoint filed their own, in the same court, against the Consumer Action Law Centre's lawyers. They alleged "misleading and deceptive conduct" and an obscure kind of defamation, "injurious falsehood", which is becoming less obscure after recent reforms to defamation law in Australia.

In my non-lawyerly estimation, I think the result of this counter-suit can fairly be described as "widespread puzzlement".

So anyway, we're getting our eight hundred and something bucks.

CollectionPoint won't see a penny of it.

Posted in Money, Scams. 12 Comments »

From SLA to car

4 November 2011 — dan

A reader writes:

Having read this...

What could possibly go wrong?

...I became inspired to upgrade my UPS as it's time to replace the 5.5AH gel cell, so why not kill two birds with one stone.

Unfortunately, I don't know a heck of a lot about the ratings and other tech jargon behind what will make this all work, so I am sending this email in the hope that perhaps you could take a moment to take a look at what I have and let me know if it seems likely that it will work for a start and then what I should go out to buy to make it happen. I should at this point mention that I live in Thailand, the land where no matter what you want to buy, you can't find it. But still, given that I have a UPS unit and access to a place that sells cheap car batteries, I figured there may be hope.

Firstly, this is what I have. (The specs are in English at the bottom of the page.) The gel cell inside is a "Model AC-1255" rated at 12V 5.5AH/20Hz in case that means anything to you.

Does it seem likely that if I connect a car battery (or two) to this device I will be able to achieve similar results to what you did in your article? () Or is this UPS just not up for the task of keep a car battery or two charged and ready for the task at hand.

Out where I live power is OFTEN interrupted, but rarely more than 5-10 minutes at a time (90% of the time it's just a few seconds), but of course those few seconds are the ones immediately preceding my clicking "submit" on a 2 hour email type-up marathon. I NEED to have some form of UPS going but am not looking for hours of use after power-out. Just enough time for me to shut down the system gracefully.

I would appreciate any insight you could offer to my options and if you need any further information on the bits I have here, just let me know.

Many thanks

David

Fortunately, this is a pretty easy job. If you screw up, though, it can be quite dangerous.

Here are the ways in which you can get it wrong when hooking up new batteries, especially bigger new batteries, to a UPS:

1. A given UPS runs from 24 volts, so it wants two 12V batteries in series; you give it one, or two in parallel.

Danger: Possibly high, if you thus barbecue the batteries with too much charge voltage. You'll probably just get loud complaints from the UPS, though, and if you're not completely daft you'll disconnect the batteries before anything can go pop.

2. The opposite of the above; it wants one battery (as your particular UPS, like most small UPSes, does), but you give it two in series. (Two in parallel would be fine.)

Danger: Will probably kill the UPS. Probably will not set it on fire.

(Home/small-office UPSes are almost always 12V or 24V on the battery side, meaning one or two 12V batteries. Big serious UPSes may run more batteries in series - possibly built out of individual two-volt cells that are each bigger than the whole 12V battery in your UPS - because the higher the voltage the lower the current for a given power output, and big serious UPSes can usually deliver a lot of watts. Lower current is desirable because it means thinner wires and cheaper power transistors and other components. This is also, essentially, why big long-distance power lines run at such high voltages.)

3. You connect the battery or batteries backwards.

Danger: May or may not blow up the UPS. It's quite easy for the designers to guard against this mistake, but I've no idea how many do.

If your new battery is the same type as the old one, you have to be pretty seriously dedicated to screwing up in order to connect it backwards. It'll probably be connected with two spade lugs of different sizes; getting them the wrong way around can only be achieved if you're the sort of person who hammers a USB plug into a VGA socket.

If you're connecting a UPS to a bigger battery that has different connectors, though, it's usually quite easy to connect it backwards.

Whatever happens, this particular mistake probably won't set anything on fire.

4. You accidentally short out one or more of the batteries. Even little sealed-lead-acid "gel cells" can deliver a lot of current into a dead short, and very high current delivery is the major design goal of car batteries. The worst possible way to do this is to have a couple of batteries you're trying to connect in parallel, and to accidentally connect one of them backwards. (This is also what happens if you get the leads mixed up when jump-starting a car. In that situation one of the batteries is usually pretty flat, but a quite stimulating physics demonstration may still ensue.)

Result: From alarming to spectacular. Red-hot wires. Smoke and possibly flame. If you break the short-circuit quickly, though, the batteries themselves should be OK.

If you're building a battery pack for a cordless drill or R/C car or something, you can do it with discharged cells, which makes accidental short-circuits harmless. You generally can't do that with lead-acid batteries, because running them flat damages them. On the plus side, if you're upgrading a UPS battery you're probably not soldering any cells or batteries together; on the minus side, while you're running longer wires to connect a bigger battery outside the UPS, there are many opportunities to short the battery out.

(If you've got a liquid-electrolyte lead-acid battery, you can drain it of electrolyte while you work, which makes it harmless, just like building a battery pack from flat cells. The best solution if you're going to be fooling around with wires connected to a high-current-capacity battery is to buy a brand new battery that comes "dry", and buy your electrolyte separately. Note that lead-acid battery electrolyte is roughly 30% sulfuric acid, and should be treated with respect; battery acid won't melt the flesh from your bones, but it is still not your friend. This is all overkill for what we're talking about here, but I want to be as exhaustive as possible in writing about this stuff for the benefit of readers whose situation is not the same as yours.)

By now you are probably just about ready to throw up your hands and trade your computer for a manual typewriter, but I really did mean it when I said this job is pretty easy. You'll very probably be fine. Take your time, do not mitigate any uncertainty you feel with alcohol, and keep track of which wire's meant to be positive. If you do not own a cheap plastic multimeter, buy a cheap plastic multimeter. Some basic soldering ability will also be handy for extending power wires, but you'd get away with using wire nuts or something. (You'd probably also get away with twisting wires together and then mummifying them in leccy tape, but doing so makes the ghost of Nikola Tesla cry.)

And now, finally, specific answers to your actual questions.

I don't know whether your UPS will actually be happy running from a car battery, but it very probably will. I used to be less confident about this, but I've done it more times myself now and corresponded with plenty of other people about it, and it really does seem that most, if not all, consumer-market UPSes will work fine from much bigger batteries. They don't charge a big battery very quickly, but unless your local electricity is a ten-minutes-on, two-hours-off sort of deal, that's not a problem.

Car batteries are not an ideal choice for running UPSes, because they've got less capacity per kilo than batteries made to run, for instance, golf carts or fishing-dinghy trolling motors. Car batteries also don't like being run flat. But the price/performance ratio for low-end car batteries is much better than that of fancy deep-cycle batteries, and car batteries' shortcomings are largely irrelevant to someone like you who mainly just wants to ride out short power interruptions, and doesn't anticipate running from battery power for any great length of time.

(It also seems pretty definite now that lead-acid batteries that've "sulfated" because they were run flat and left that way can be rescued, with "desulfator" gadgets. I haven't done enough research of my own to be able to speak authoritatively about this, though.)

The specs on the side of your battery only matter if you're trying to buy a new one that'll fit inside the UPS, without having to know the exact dimensions of your old battery or the one you're buying. There is unfortunately no standardised naming for SLA batteries, so the "Model AC-1255" on the sticker is not helpful.

The most common battery in small consumer UPSes is a brick-shaped 12V unit with about a seven amp-hour capacity; the battery you've got is I think probably this size, but it doesn't matter since you're not after another weedy little gel cell.

(I've no idea what the "20Hz" on the sticker means, by the way. Batteries are not alternating-current devices, so whatever that is, I don't think it's meant to mean 20 cycles per second.)

One cheap car battery will probably do the job for you just fine. If you needed longer run time then you could add one or more extra car batteries in parallel (preferably identical batteries, by the way, though in relatively low-drain applications like this you can get away with all sorts of unsightly alternatives), but that doesn't seem to be the case.

Get a set of cheap jumper leads along with your cheap battery as I did, cut 'em up and splice them onto the UPS's existing battery leads, hook it up, and enjoy some relatively reliable computing.

Posted in Electricity, Hacks. 13 Comments »

H-two-whatever

30 October 2011 — dan

A reader writes:

I was wondering if you have come across "Water Ion Technologies" before. My skills tend towards electronics or I.T., and about the most interesting thing I ever did with chemicals probably wasn't that good for me at the time. I know you're not really a chemical science site, although, in fairness, you seem to derive some small amounts of schadenfreude from debunking some of the more obvious pseudoscience shysters that inhabit the 'net. God knows I do when you do it.

So... Should I be super excited about what they're saying, or do I need to take more of those chemicals before their vision will fit into my reality?

Richard

Usually, purveyors of magic water at least somewhat restrict their claims.

Usually, it's good for what ails you. Either it's treated with magnets or dual overhead quantum recipulating sprines, or it's just some mildly alkaline spring water that the seller declares to be Water Of Gladness or whatever. And away they go selling the stuff, come what may.

Or perhaps it's not of medical value, but you can run your car on it.

Or it's not water at all, but separated hydrogen and oxygen that for ill-described reasons has properties far more useful than the hydrogen and oxygen dealt with by boring old scientists.

Water Ion Technologies seem to have opted for "all of the above".

Their main discovery, you see, is a mystic substance called "SG Gas", which is not H2O but "O-HH", and has a long list of properties that'll pretty much overturn the entirety of molecular chemistry if they turn out to be real.

(The Water Ion Technologies "science" page also, according to ancient psychoceramic tradition, rambles on about the patents they've applied for, as if having a patent on something means that the thing works.)

But wait! If you "infuse" water with SG Gas, you get "Ultra-Pure Polarized Water", also known as the "AquaNew" product Aqua Cura "Watt-Ahh", which combines at least five forms of pseudoscience to provide 100% of your daily requirements of whatever the hell it is they're talking about.

(Actual scientists may find the Watt-Ahh "Studies" page particularly entertaining. Watt-Ahh doesn't have anything but water in it, oxyhydrogen doesn't kill cells, capacitance testing somehow proves they're really making "clustered water", now suddenly their nothing-but-water product is supposed to kill germs although that's not actually what they did with it to reach this conclusion, and now, surprise, it's a treatment for autism! And good for cut flowers. And on it goes.)

If this were the first miracle hydrogen-oxygen gas, or the first miracle water, promoted with a well-tossed salad of quantum flapdoodle, crackpot physics and claims about "hydration", "cellular communication", "detoxification", and so on, then I might be inclined to give them slightly longer shrift. Heck, they've even got one study done by a real scientist at a real university... using their own odd in-vitro protocol. But c'mon, it beats the heck out of the tests in which they forget to tell you the results.

The thing is, though, that mysterious hydrogen-oxygen gases are a long-term crank favourite. Often described as "HHO" or "Brown's Gas", they're forever allowing people to get a thousand miles per gallon or burn the gas to get back more energy than they used making it, except when some tiresome empiricist shows up and tries to actually test these claims.

And as for magic water, well, your one-stop shop for an overview of the surprisingly large number of magic-water products out there is "H2O dot con". Their page about water cluster quackery goes into claims like the "Watt-Ahh" ones in some detail; Watt-Ahh has its own little entry on the depressingly long list of similar products and devices.

Could this stuff be real? Sure, insofar as the claims made for it are even physically possible.

Since this is another potentially world-changing product that's mysteriously being sold piecemeal to individual consumers rather than turning into a multi-billion-dollar business, though, I see no reason to give it any more credence than any of the many, many, many other products in the same market sector.

Posted in Scams, Science. 10 Comments »

Oh, all right. One more fuel additive.

2 October 2011 — dan

A reader writes:

I've read all your various fuel-additive debunking pieces, and while I'm assuming that this is Just One More Of The Same, I would like your opinion:

http://www.ecofuelsaver.com/

Big, flashy web page. Graphics and embedded videos. And not only testimonials, but actual Lab Results!!!

The How It Works web page sounds awfully dodgy to me, though, and the FAQ page makes me even more skeptical. On the other hand, they go to great lengths to differentiate themselves from being just another engine cleaner, and give myriad details about how to properly do testing so you can see the results for yourself. Also, the information given in their "EPA & CARB certified Lab Results" page is big on scientific rigor, discussing the need for consistent baseline runs and blind testing so the driving habits do not affect the outcome. (Of course, it could all be made-up hooey, but that's the chance we take.)

Point is, they sound good. And the product is being sold by Canadian Tire, a very large Canadian retail outlet.

(Canadian Tire is an institution in Canada. They are a Wal-Mart like store, but have been around for some 90 years. For 50 years have a 'store loyalty' program called Canadian Tire money, where some small percentage of your purchase is refunded to you in Canadian Tire Money. This 'money' is of *very* high quality; it is, in fact, better (better paper and ink, stronger security measures) than the national currency of some countries I have travelled. It is gladly accepted by charities, frequently given in larger denominations as wedding gifts, and is often used as a sort of alternate currency, trading at par among friends or even friendly strangers. Thus endeth the lesson.)

Anyway, since Canadian Tire is endorsing the stuff, I expect that many folks are going to be trying it. I know you have seen many scams of this nature, so I beseech you to train your skeptical and knowledgeable eyes on this potential snake-oil from the Great White North.

Shane

Yeah, here we go again.

This outfit does indeed have a better spiel than most fuel-additive sellers, but there on their How It Works page is the usual claptrap about raising octane rating.

Raising a fuel's octane rating above what an engine's compression ratio and ignition timing requires will, for an absolute certainty, do nothing at all, and certainly not improve an "incomplete burn", a concept which the Eco Fuel Saver people also share with dozens, if not hundreds, of other fuel-additive companies.

Modern engines all burn very very nearly all of the fuel, or else they fail emission testing and/or set the catalytic converter on fire.

And on it goes, blah blah blah, and then there are those nifty PDF test datasheets you mentioned - which are, once again, of a quality well above the norm for these outfits, and not even from California Environmental Engineering!

This post has been sitting on my to-do pile for rather a while; when I first replied to Shane I observed that the "Gasoline" test-results document said that the tests were done in 2006. And here we were, years later, and this hundred-billion-dollar product was still being sold over the counter to individual motorists. On account, perhaps, of a Conspiracy.

Now they've got documents from 2011 on the lab-results page, though, and all they say is that their additive doesn't ruin the fuel, and in fact changes it in almost no way at all. Then, puzzled, you might try their "Results" page instead, but all you'll find there is a list of variably plausible excuses for the additive doing nothing noticeable. But don't be fooled - Eco Fuel Saver will "increase BTU, octane and lubricity in your fuel", so never mind our own PDF test results that proudly indicate an octane change, for instance, of less than half of one per cent, and the fact that even a large octane increase makes no difference unless your current fuel is causing knock or making your fancy computer-controlled engine retard its spark; just clap your hands, children, and wait for Tinkerbell.

I could dig further into this, but it's like investigating every new prophecy of the end of the world or dude who reckons he's channelling a million-year-old alien, yet is mysteriously unable to even tell you pi to ten significant digits, let alone anything of scientific interest that millions of human high-schoolers don't already know.

It's up to the makers of all of these products to demonstrate the value of their incredibly valuable, if true, claims. It's not up to us to sort through the numerous claimants and their countless claims to see whether perhaps, this time, the magical mileage elixir or perpetual-motion machine is real.

The fact that Canadian Tire sell this product indicates, I think, that Canadian Tire reckon people will buy it. Similarly, Wal-Mart sells those magical "Power Balance" wrist bands (and several similar products, not to mention a particularly spiffy-looking magical engine potion).

And just about every pharmacy sells homeopathic remedies (as does Walmart!). And so on, and so forth.

Posted in Cars, Scams, Science. 7 Comments »

Stop Worrying and Love the Global Warming

15 September 2011 — dan

Why, what an unexpected pleasure in the post today. A bank statement, a copy of one of Australia's least interesting magazines...

Galileo Movement flier Galileo Movement flier

...and a leaflet from a bunch of climate-change deniers! The front of which is one spaceship away from being the cover of an Asimov book!

The current Australian Federal government, you see, is proposing a carbon tax, the cost of which to consumers (in the form of more expensive goods and services from organisations that now have to pay for their pollution) will be offset by tax cuts. Various people have objected to this, including this mob, "The Galileo Movement".

The very name of The Galileo Movement proclaims their proud dedication to the popular Galilean version of the association fallacy. They laughed at Galileo, you see, and he was right, so since they also laugh at you, that's evidence indicating that you must also be right.

But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

(It's a bit like a Christian organisation calling itself the Pascal Society.)

The "Patron" of the Galileo Movement is the entirely laudable colourful Australian radio personality Alan Jones. Jones, like most prominent climate-change deniers, is an authoritarian conservative, very wealthy, entirely without any relevant scientific education or perceptible respect for scientists who disagree with his views, and certain to be safely dead by the time the global climate really starts going to hell.

But never mind Alan. On to the "facts" presented by this flier:

* CARBON DIOXIDE IS NOT A POLLUTANT: CO2 is a colourless and odourless atmospheric trace gas. It is essential for life on Earth.

Well, I can't argue with that. Obviously nothing can possibly be bad if it has no odour. And the dose could not possibly make the poison.

I cannot imagine why they bothered putting any more "facts" on this leaflet, having led off with a humdinger of an argument like this one.

* RESEARCH: Studies of data over very long periods confirm that C02 increases came AFTER increases in global temperature. So CO2 could not have CAUSED past periods of planetary warming.

Or, to put it another way, it could.

The little nugget of information that's missing here is that higher CO2 causes warming, but warming also causes the release of more CO2, from sources like thawing tundra. (This is happening, alarmingly rapidly, today.) So CO2 peaks can actually be expected to come after temperature peaks.

Oh, and note that here, the nice Galileo people are saying that scientists are right about past temperature and CO2 levels, though they kind of gloss over what the scientists actually say.

We don't, actually, have very good data on global temperature in the distant past, because nobody was there to record it. We can get a good idea of the composition of the atmosphere many thousands of years ago by sampling air trapped in thick ice sheets, but we cannot get a similarly sharp view of the temperature. We have to use "proxies", like the width of tree rings.

If a climate-change denier's trying to build an argument that relies on old temperature numbers being inaccurate, expect him to have a lot to say about unreliable temperature proxies.

* WARMING: Some global surface warming probably has occurred in the last century. However. despite increasing atmospheric C02, there has been no increase in the global surface temperature since 1998.

...and now they're saying scientists are wrong about present temperatures. Except not really, because they slip in that "since 1998" when they think you're not looking.

Climate-change deniers love 1998, because 1998 was unusually warm. So if you graph global temperature for the last, say, hundred years, you get a peak in 1998 and then it kind of plateaus off. At a temperature well above all previous temperatures.

Heck, the recent-temperatures graph actually goes down in a few places, like after 1940 and around 1990. Pretending that this is an actual argument against climate change, however, is like saying that Apple stock is a bad investment because it didn't do very well in 2008.

* CHINA: China produces the equivalent of Australia's total annual CO2 emissions in less than a month. Its total annual emissions will increase by 70% in the next decade to 10,000 million tonnes. Why should we sacrifice jobs and harm our economy, when our exported coal is being consumed tax-free there?

* REST OF WORLD: The Gillard Government wants to reduce our 1.5% of total global CO2 emissions. Yet China and the USA, the planet's two largest emitters, will CONTINUE TO INCREASE their emissions, together with India and most other countries.

This is the strongest argument available to climate-change deniers, and, notably, is also not actually an argument that denies that climate change is happening. One should not, indeed, expect to reduce atmospheric CO2 levels by reducing emissions from countries that don't emit that much CO2 in the first place. Especially while much bigger CO2 emitters are dramatically increasing their output.

This does not, however, mean that you shouldn't do the right thing, just because people elsewhere are doing the wrong thing on a greater scale. We're all going to have to do the right thing eventually, and rich countries like Australia can afford to be (relatively) early adopters, even if the actual direct effect of our action on the climate will be trivial.

This "why-bother argument" is, I think, analogous to the argument that voting is futile, because your one single vote will almost certainly never decide an election.

But it's not like voting, because reducing CO2 emissions is something that human societies are not very good at doing yet, so having a go at it will help us figure out which techniques work, and which don't. If humans all refused to do something because everybody else wasn't doing it yet, climate change wouldn't be a problem at all, because we'd never have figured out how to light a fire.

* NATURAL ICONS: The governments tax will not make any difference to the state of the Great Barrier Reef or Kakadu ~ both of which are environmentally healthy.

This one's a bit bloody cheeky.

The Great Barrier Reef has indeed pretty much recovered from the last major bleaching event in 2006, and clearly that's not going to happen again. I mean, it's only happened seven times since 1980, most seriously in 2002 and, yes, good old 1998.

Using this same argument, we can conclude that Australia need not worry its pretty head about bushfires any more, either!

(Note also the "I'm all right, Jack" attitude to coral reef destruction; it's uncontroversial that warmer seas correlated with mass bleaching events - which is why unusually-warm 1998 was so bad for reefs - and it's similarly uncontroversial that there are reefs all over the world that are in danger as a result. But as long as our big reef's OK, who cares?)

And yes, the Kakadu National Park does not, at present, seem to be suffering any particular climatic damage. It seems pretty likely that it will, but just because there's a man with a machete climbing in through your window is no cause for alarm. Give the fellow a moment to explain himself.

There are plenty of other forested areas in the world that are currently doing OK, too. I doubt that a lawyer would achieve much success if he argued that his client should be acquitted because, yes, OK, that incident with the machete was unfortunate, but look at all of the people in the world that he clearly has not yet murdered!

The whole point of action on climate change is to do something about it before our national parks dry out or wash away, our farmland blows into the ocean, yet more misery and death is visited upon millions of brown people we don't much care about, et cetera.

* CLIMATE CHANGE: Climate change is a natural phenomenon. It is not due to human activity. The frequency of Australia's floods, droughts, bushfires and cyclones will not be controlled by a new tax.

If this is actually true, then all of the other stuff is irrelevant.

It's sort of kettle logic - "I did not break your kettle! It was in one piece when I returned it! And the holes were already in it when I borrowed it! And I never borrowed your stupid kettle anyway, so there!"

I suppose they could have phrased it as "even if we're wrong about all this other stuff...", but that'd clash a little with their proud dedication to FACTS!, so they're stuck with these arguments that sit strangely together.

But never mind, because this one's no good, either.

CO2 is definitely a greenhouse gas.

CO2 levels are definitely much higher now than they've been for hundreds of thousands of years.

This change is definitely the result of human activity since the Industrial Revolution. The numbers are very bloody clear indeed.

All the deniers are left with is claiming that this CO2 will, for some reason, not do anything. Good luck with that.

* FUTURE: Climate model predictions of dangerous global warming are highly uncertain, as there are no established laws of climate change.

Whoops, there we go - now the scientists don't know anything, again!

It's true that we don't know exactly what climate change will do. Shifting climate will probably make some deserts bloom. Which is all very well if you own the bloody desert, but a bit of a problem if you're trying to farm a place where it doesn't rain any more. And a warmer climate is a more energetic climate with more water in the atmosphere, which most certainly does mean more cyclones and floods, though not necessarily more droughts and bushfires.

You don't need a full and accurate model of everything that might happen for the next hundred years to realise that we're changing the climate in surprisingly large ways. My personal favourite example is the sodding Northwest Passage, which is now navigable every summer. At the beginning of the 20th century, the preferred vehicle for traversing that area was the dog-sled; today, it can accommodate commercial freighters.

But oh, no; climate change isn't happening and if it is then it doesn't matter and if it does then it's not our fault and if it is then there's nothing we can do. You can't prove that any particular natural disaster was definitely the result of climate change; therefore, there's nothing to worry about.

And companies like poor little BHP, trying to somehow survive with only the biggest profit they've ever made standing between them and penury, must not be taxed even a tiny bit more or they'll lay everybody off.

Sheesh.

Posted in Science. 68 Comments »

Another piece of the homophobia puzzle

14 September 2011 — dan

I have formed a theory about anti-gay activists. Some of them, anyway.

My theory is a refinement of Haggard's Law, which states that the more you complain about homosexuality, the more likely you are to be secretly homosexual. That not-entirely-serious observation has some basis in fact beyond the numerous examples of preachers and politicians that've led us to anticipate the ending of every news story that starts with a listing of some right-wing fellow's anti-gay credentials.

I've always found it implausible, though, that secretly-gay people make up any very large percentage of the anti-gay population.

If you're a member of a stridently anti-gay fundamentalist religion, then you're likely to regard gays and atheists and members of other fundamentalist religions that outside observers insultingly claim are really very similar to your own as all being part of the vast Satanic sea upon which your brave little ark of true believers must voyage. Maybe a member of such a religion will get a bee in his or her bonnet about evolution, or Jews, or homosexuals. Not many people would claim that a noisy anti-evolutionist might secretly be reading Richard Dawkins books, or that an anti-Semite secretly celebrates Rosh Hashanah, and I think it's just as possible to be a really obnoxious gay-hater without, yourself, being gay.

You could, for instance, be very genuinely heterosexual, and therefore find gay sex a fairly repellent idea. Now, if you're unable to comprehend that anybody else in the world could not find it as repellent as you do, you'll regard homosexuals as filthy deviants who've managed to make a lifestyle out of a ghastly activity. Raping small children is also a ghastly activity, if you're one kind of horrible sexual deviant then you might very well be ready to give another deviation a go, and bingo, there's a freshly-minted all-homos-are-child-molesters argument all neatly gift-wrapped and ready to be sermonised about.

The particular thing that led me to a new piece of this puzzle (well, it's new to me; I'm sure many other people have figured this out) is that weird characteristic of so much anti-gay rhetoric - the insistence that homosexuality is not just a choice, but an easy choice. Gayness is, essentially, just laziness. Instead of having a proper, adult relationship with a woman, the homosexual chooses to have meaningless physical dalliances with other men.

Those of us who reside somewhere near the left side of the Kinsey Scale find this argument preposterous. Most heterosexual men were desperately dateless in their teenage years, when the hormonal urge to have sex is at its strongest, but not very many of us went gay as a result. (Well, not as a lifetime choice, anyway. What happens in the Navy, stays in the Navy.)

There's a strong societal component here; in the Western world it's much more socially acceptable for women to experiment with homosexuality than for men to do it, and some other societies, past and present, either accept homosexuality as being entirely unremarkable, or consider it weird if a person hasn't had some sort of gay relationship.

But if we restrict the scope of inquiry to male homosexuality in the Western world, as anti-gay demagogues usually do to make sure nobody starts asking awkward questions about the Spartans, straight men seldom consider this "choice" to be a real option at all.

So why, I wondered, do so many anti-gay people keep saying it's easy to just sort of carelessly fall into the "gay lifestyle"?

And then I realised. It's because those anti-gay people are, yes, gay - but they don't know it.

They're good, Bible-believing Christians. They had girlfriends. Now they have a wife, and children. They're pillars of the community, and may never have had any homosexual encounters at all.

But boy oh boy, do they ever want to have homosexual encounters. The cock, it calls them. It's been calling them as long as they can remember. But like a border collie that's never seen a sheep, they don't know what this urge within them actually is. For them, gayness is like the Dark Side of the Force, or the One Ring.

Now, it all makes sense. These poor men think it's like this for every man. They think that secret schoolboy assignations and sordid encounters in public bathrooms are as appealing a prospect for the rest of us as they are for them.

You're gay because you're weak, or perhaps, especially bizarrely, because you're greedy. You just have to fight it!

But straight guys don't have to "fight" an urge to have sex with men. Stereotypically, they'll fight to avoid it!

Being gay, but unaware of it, can fit quite neatly into other religious beliefs. God requires you to not be envious, to not be lazy, to not lie or cheat or steal; the Lord wouldn't have needed to tell you not to do those things if they weren't rather appealing. So gay sex must be the same. It's a sin into which one can, in weakness, fall.

If this is the way you think, then it becomes perfectly sensible to say that gay people, as a category like "Irish people" or "tall people", don't really exist at all. Saying you're born gay is like saying you're born a burglar.

I've no idea what's actually going on in the head of Ted Haggard...

...or Larry Craig...

...or Mark Foley or George Alan Rekers:

Who knows how many of these guys were, and are, well aware of their true sexuality, and just lie about it, in the same way that they've lied about many other things for personal gain.

But I think the poor people who're gay but don't know it really do help to better explain exactly how this situation's gotten so dramatically messed up.

Now we just need a catchy name for this sexual permutation of the Dunning-Kruger effect. I invite your suggestions in the comments!

Posted in Religion, Strange Tales. 16 Comments »

I'm not dead yet

26 August 2011 — dan

The day before yesterday I had chest pain, and went to hospital.

It started as a backache, then sort of expanded forward and upward as I worked my way through the three most recent episodes of Torchwood. Then, when I was no longer distracted by slow-moving Mid-Atlantic sci-fi, I noticed the pain was only getting worse.

I was alone in the house, so I decided to strike some sort of balance between actually calling the ambulance as soon as I noticed central chest pains with a feeling of pressure, and the traditional male alternative of being found dead next to your laptop, which is still displaying a Web page about what killed you.

(At least I wasn't dumb enough to take any painkillers. It is not a good idea to mask pain that may indicate something very bad.)

I've been in hospitals before, but only as an onlooker. I'd never previously been in an ambulance at all. Hell, I'd never even called 000 before. So this experience included a number of firsts for me.

Lots of leads stuck to my chest and other, whimsically selected locations, with three different kinds of mildly epilatory adhesive pad. My very own PVC. One of those idiotic gowns which may or may not give you more personal dignity than just being naked. (I got to keep my pants on, thank heaven.) The curious burning sensation you get when you put a nitroglycerine pill under your tongue. (A pill that creates that sensation without any other effects would be a fantastic placebo.)

While the ambulance blokes fed me aspirin and nitro and hooked me up to the machine that goes "ping", I seized the opportunity to compare and contrast what I've gleaned from UK ambo-blogs (the defunct Random Acts of Reality and Nee Naw, and the still-extant Trauma Queen) with the experiences of the local ambos.

("Ambos", plural of "ambo". Pronounced "am" as in "ham", "bo" as in the thing that shoots arrows.)

It turns out that Aussie ambos share their British colleagues' superstitious terror of "the Q-word". But the ambos seemed honestly puzzled when I pledged not to bite them, turn out to be completely faking my illness, or defecate in their ambulance.

I'm sure all of these things have happened to them at some point, but Australian ambulance crews seem to have to deal with less pointless bullshit from patients than British paramedics. The reason for this only dawned on me when I was a bit less concerned about maybe being about to die.

Here in Australia, you see, the public hospitals are free, but the ambulances, generally, aren't.

So Aussie ambulance crews don't have to put up with nearly as many patients who could definitely safely be driven to hospital by a family member, or could definitely safely drive themselves there, or in some cases could definitely get to the hospital on a pogo stick and stop for a picnic lunch on the way without in any way worsening their illness, if they have an illness at all.

[EDIT: I just remembered that I have been to the emergency room as a patient before, years ago when in a fit of pique I punched a door and broke my hand. I drove myself there, and asked the triage nurse to make sure I was seen after anybody whose injury was less stupid than mine.]

"Maternataxi" calls (healthy, complication-free pregnant women in labour who do not actually need to get to the hospital particularly quickly), for instance, don't seem to be a big problem for Aussie ambulances.

The ambos asked me to rate my pain on a scale from one to ten. I observed that this penalises the imaginative. When pressed, I said about a five.

Shortly after this, they put an oxygen mask on me. I'm pretty sure they just wanted me to shut up.

I've been to our local hospital in the dead of night a few times now, though only this once as the patient. I've developed a strange liking for the emergency room at three in the morning. The experience is basically tedious, of course - I get plenty of use out of my OLPC XO-1 with a shelfload of books on it (though this time the level-five pain, which hung around for several hours, kept distracting me).

But there's a sort of direct human... realness... in the emergency room that I, in my everyday life of sitting in my little office staring at a monitor, don't normally encounter.

The stories being played out around you in an emergency room often aren't very happy ones, of course. But if anything, that makes them more interesting.

This time, there was the little kid oscillating from cheerful (several adults, some in important-looking uniforms, were clearly deeply impressed when he successfully did a wee in a bottle) to inconsolable (when he discovered he wasn't going home any time soon).

And there was the bloke who'd gotten himself on the outside of rather a lot of pills, and was now disinclined to open his eyes no matter how often, and how loudly, the nice nurse requested he do so.

And then there was the old lady in the bed next to mine, whose house had caught fire, adding some unrequested particulates to her lungs, but sparing the pets.

And there was someone referred to by the staff, not unkindly, as "toothache man", whose malady did not appear to be a very high treatment priority.

(Have the Satanic atheist Muslim socialist US health care reforms reduced the number of people with chronic and otherwise non-emergency health problems who go to the emergency room because it's the only way they can afford any sort of treatment? God, I hope so.)

Anyway, it turned out my heart is fine. It was probably something I ate.

I had some pretty solid suffering time in the hospital, though, as the pain tired of living in my chest and referred itself to some other desirable residences in my torso. After I was introduced to the diverting short-term side effects of intravenous butylscopolamine (instant farsightedness, and a very dry mouth; butylscopolamine is the time-limited downloadable demo version of plain scopolamine), my overenthusiastic bowel muscles calmed down and, at dawn, I was sent on my way.

Just to annoy Anne (who'd gone home to get at least a little sleep when it became clear that my name did not need to be taken off the joint bank account), I would have walked home. Except I was wearing ugg boots, which are (a) not actually cool in any way, you American lunatics and (b) unsuitable for a four-kilometre walk.

So I got a taxi, and talked to the old bloke driving it about the numerous ways in which we'd each courted death by not seeking medical care.

Next time, I'll see if I can come down with something more interesting.

Posted in Strange Tales. 21 Comments »

Attack of the Radioactive Walking Shoes

21 August 2011 — dan

A reader writes:

So....At times things eat at my mind, it makes me good at some things, but at other times it just stresses me out. I thought you might have a point of view that would be reasonably sane on my dilemma. Though I acknowledge it's something that is far from your field of expertise, but you may have an idea... Just because radioactivity is cool.

So my flatmate visited Chernobyl. I thought that was kind of cool, but we somewhat agreed they'd discard their shoes and clothes afterwards (see where this is going? ;)

The tour got pretty close, they were standing within 100m of reactor 4. The digital Geiger counter was registering 4 mSv/h (I zoomed in on a photo.... will check that again at some point). Most of the tour group stayed on paved ground, though in some places quite broken. A few ignored the tour guides and were wandering around on the somewhat radioactive grass at one point near reactor 4. They ate at a nearby cafe, visited some of the local sites driving around in a small bus, then left the exclusion. On leaving they each went through some kind of radiation measuring device, it looked like a big metal arch, you put your hands on the sides of a console at head height and your face was pretty close to something, no one set that thing off. Though no one was really sure what it was measuring, or if your shoes were included.

Said flatmate spent another week travelling before returning to Australia, along with their Chernobyl clothes and shoes. The tour operators seem to think no special precautions needed to be taken with clothes and shoes after leaving.

Do you think particulate matter bought back poses a health risk worth worrying about? I made them leave their shoes outside the house....But on their clothes packed in the same bag as their shoes, it seems inevitable that some radioactive isotopes have made it inside. Though, they're only a problem if I inhale or digest them, damn cesium. I do acknowledge that I'm already host to unstable isotopes of carbon in measurable amounts.

I recently, fortuitously, bought a nice enough Miele vacuum cleaner which I hope effectively implements its HEPA filter.

Unfortunately I'm cynical enough about our own government's competence to have serious doubts as to whether the Ukrainian government has enforced effective safety procedures. Especially given the USSR's history at this site...

Roscoe

Summary, before I start talking about ways in which radiation can kill you horribly: Radiation is almost certain not to kill you horribly. Those clothes, especially the shoes, may be detectably contaminated, but they're very unlikely to be dangerously contaminated. And if they've been worn and washed a few times since the visit, contamination may not even be detectable any more. Even if you did big shoe-fetishist sniffs all over your flatmate's sneakers as soon as they got home, you'd probably still be at much greater risk from everyday non-radioactive air contamination.

Like you, I wouldn't have much faith in the dedication of Ukrainian Chernobyl-tour outfits to customer safety. Lord knows the Western world's airports are now full of staggeringly expensive "security" hardware that doesn't bloody work at all, so a country with a GDP per capita a sixth that of Australia, and with the usual ex-Soviet wall-to-wall government corruption, could be worse. But the tours are a regular event now, so even the defective imaginary-terrorist-obsessed Western world's governments would probably have noticed people coming back with shoes that glow in the dark.

Plus, I'm sure plenty of people have taken their own Geiger counters with them on these tours, and yet the most newsworthy result of a trip to Chernobyl remains that chick who pretended to have taken a solo motorcycle tour.

On the subject of Geiger counters, I think it's important to mention that if you decide to get yourself your very own ionising-radiation meter, be aware that there are two basic kinds on the consumer market. Both may be sold as "geiger counters", but only one of them is.

A geiger counter can measure low levels of radiation. You can, for instance, use a geiger counter capable of detecting alpha particles (which many can't) to verify that a lump of unremarkable granite measures above (but probably nowhere near dangerously above) the background level of radiation. (Unless your house is built on granite!)

The other kind of radiation meter is the "ion-chamber survey meter", which is much less sensitive. If the needle on a survey meter ever budges, you should get the hell out of there. Survey meters are only meant to be used in places with high radiation levels, like serious nuclear accidents or after an actual nuclear war.

A lot of cheap eBay radiation meters are the distinctive yellow US Civil Defense versions, which come in geiger and ion-chamber versions. If it's pleasingly cheap, it's probably a useless ion-chamber meter.

(Note also that if Australians buy a geiger counter from overseas, it may not make it through Australian Customs, especially if it comes with a mildly radioactive calibration object.)

It is unlikely that any Chernobyl/Pripyat tours go anywhere remotely hot enough to get a reading from an ion-chamber meter, though you may be able to see places that'd be hot enough, like the secured, deserted scrapyards where they parked the emergency vehicles used during the disaster, or particularly choice parts of the Red Forest.

And yes, dirt or otherwise broken ground around Chernobyl is in general more radioactive than hard surfaces, because rain washes particulates off roads and footpaths and buildings onto soil, where they accumulate. Chernobyl is a particularly delightful test case for this phenomenon, because the combination of the reactor's design and the astonishing fuck-ups that led to the disaster meant that the Chernobyl accident caused a roaring fire in its graphite moderator, spewing a vast plume of radioactive smoke into the sky and raining particulate fallout over a huge area.

(The far less disastrous Windscale fire happened in a graphite-moderated reactor too, but it was the fuel burning that time, not the moderator.)

The recent TEPCO disaster in Japan has released an amount of radioactive material comparable with Chernobyl. The Fukushima Daiichi reactors don't have much burnable stuff in them, though, so most of the escaped isotopes are just sitting around in the neighbourhood of the reactors, or washed away into the ocean where tedious scientists say they're diluted out of significance but we all know they'll really wake up Gojira.

I am, of course, kind of winging it on this answer, because I am indeed not what you'd call an expert on the particular perils of tramping around in the Zone of Exclusion. (I'd probably walk straight into an anomaly and die.) I invite readers to tell me what I've overlooked, and thereby scare the tripes out of Roscoe.

Posted in Science, Strange Tales. 10 Comments »
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