Self-adhesive super-science!

4 November 2010 — dan

A round of applause, gentle readers, for Stephen Fenech, "Technology Writer" for the Daily Telegraph here in Australia, for his unflinchingly courageous presentation of the "Q-Link Mini".

The Mini is a tiny self-adhesive object which, Mr Fenech assures us, is "powerful enough to shield us from the potentially harmful electromagnetic radiation generated by mobile phones and other electronic devices". (Q-Link themselves delightfully refer to the Mini as a "Wellness Button".)

Not for Mr Fenech the mealy-mouthed objections of hide-bound so-called "scientists", who've observed that there's no good reason to suppose that low-level exposure to non-ionising electromagnetic radiation has any deleterious effects, and that there's also no good reason to suppose that there is even a theoretical basis for low-energy EMR to harm us, and that if you block the radiation coming out of a mobile phone, the phone won't work any more.

Mr Fenech is similarly wisely unconcerned that Q-Link's most famous product, the "SRT-2 Pendant", contains a copper coil that isn't connected to anything, and a surface-mount zero-ohm resistor, which is also not connected to anything.

I'm sure Mr Fenech disregards doubts raised by this discovery because, of course, Q-Link's products are unconstrained by the foolish fantasies of orthodox "science", which has somehow come by the idiotic idea that the existence of microwave ovens, GPS satellites and personal computers might indicate a more accurate understanding of the principles by which the universe operates than that possessed by the manufacturers of mystic talismans supported by testimonial evidence, uncontrolled user tests and the sorts of studies that cause spikes in the blood pressure of "scientists" who work so hard to get their own papers published because, of course, their papers are mere tissues of lies that never mention "biomeridians" or "Applied Kinesiology"...

...which is here discussed in a way clearly calculated to underhandedly attack Q-Link's products!

If you buy something that's meant to operate by "Sympathetic Resonance Technology™" or "non-Hertzian frequencies", you should of course take it back for a refund if it turns out not to contain seemingly-meaningless components that aren't connected to anything. Those components are where the magic happens, people!

Now, I know that some of you are the sort of raving "science"-worshippers that won't take Mr Fenech's word by itself as proof that the Q-Link Mini is worth $US24.95 - or even $AU48, which for some reason is what it costs here.

Rest assured, all you Moon-landing conspirators and Nazi doctors, that Mr Fenech has diligently secured supportive quotes from the entirely unbiased CEO of Q-Link Australia, and also a naturopath called Daniel Taylor, who appears to be a practitioner of the "Dorn Method", which regrettably does not seem to have anything to do with being knocked out to demonstrate how dangerous the latest threat to the Enterprise D is.

I don't believe a study's yet been done to determine what happens if you use one of those antenna-enhancing stickers at the same time as a Q-Link Mini. Be warned that adding a battery-enhancing sticker and a Guardian Angel battery may result in headache, irritable bowels or time travel.

Posted in Electricity, Scams, Science. 10 Comments »

An undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is

4 October 2010 — dan

A reader writes:

Hi Dan,

In Melbourne we have been observing small white hand-written signs popping up on the sides of roads affixed to all sorts of posts and street signs.

The signs are all similar and say:

www.katrinamurray.com
Lucrative Business

I've had a look at the site, and my "3 scroll page alarm" went off; any page with more than 3 vertical pages makes me suss.

The site never describes exactly what the business is.

Is there a name for these things? Are they common? This is the first I have come across.

Nathan

Yes, they're common.

The deal is, there's some company like Herbalife or something with a bunch of "distributors" who, even when they strenuously protest that they aren't in the multi-level marketing business, do seem to chiefly be selling the opportunity to sell the opportunity to sell the opportunity to sell, et cetera, whatever nominal product is hiding somewhere within that vast sky-scraping trapezoid.

It's normal for all of the "distributors" to never mention the name of the particular trapezoid they're part of, but those classic endless "squeeze pages" often contain a subtle clue or two that the offer they're presenting is not quite as extraordinary as they say.

Just paste a phrase or three from such a page into Google, and see how many other people are offering the same amazing opportunity!

(It's easy to find duplicated testimonials, but you should also search for excerpts of the text allegedly written by the person who's making this particular never-to-be-repeated offer.)

"I ran my previous business for a little over 4 years and pretty much lost all my money." ("About 8,510 results" as I write this, but that's a huge over-estimate, because Google doesn't actually give accurate figures for string searches like this. Paging on through the results ends up with exactly 293 results, at the moment. Remember to click the "repeat the search with the omitted results included" link at the end of the original results, if you want to see how many pages Google actually indexes with your search string on 'em, including ones that're so similar to others that Google doesn't bother displaying them by default.)

"I left on my terms and it occurred due to this wonderful opportunity. Now I work for myself" (120 results)

"not afraid to try new things, I also had a willingness to learn" (This one actually seems to be unique to katrinamurray.com!)

"Imagine not having to beg for time off to do something so simple" (374 results, with a couple of differing opinions about what sport your putative son will be playing.)

"such a great group of people who are willingly assisting me" (Only two hits, again with variation of the words on either side; there'll be three hits when Google indexes this post. Few-hits searches like this one may be helpful in tightening the Venn-diagram intersection of all these get-rich-quick squeeze pages to figure out which of them, if any, are not trying to sell the same product.)

"further, I'd like to tell you what to watch out for. Too many" (228 results)

"bombarding them with constant sales pitches about how much money they" (268 results)

"Associates who have taken advantage of the opportunity I'm offering you have generated multiple streams of income" (215 results)

"This is a real, legitimate, Internet marketing system. The system works perfectly as long as you follow it exactly" (Well, obviously! Why would there be five thousand, one hundred and ninety copies of this text on the Web, if it weren't real and legitimate!?)

And, finally, "The testimonials presented are applicable to the individuals depicted and may not be representative of the experience of others." Wise words to live by - so very wise, in fact, that 346 Web pages contain them!

I'm absolutely 100% sure, of course, that katrinamurray.com is completely on the level and offering a real opportunity to sell worthwhile products that everybody needs.

But if you sign up for this particular incredible home business opportunity, you'll still have a problem, because there are obviously a large number of other people in the same damn business. Unless you have a scroll of genocide that allows you to annihilate all of the other functionally, and often literally, identical such opportunities floating around down in the noise floor of our wonderful capitalist world, you're likely to find that no matter how much you hassle your friends, relatives and employees, it's just mathematically impossible to get enough customers to make the big bucks you've been promised.

Perhaps the reason why the actual product is never mentioned on the squeeze page is that it's an amazing new discovery with a whole new wide-open market, and the sellers don't want to give away the secret.

When hundreds of other squeeze pages say the exact same thing, though, this theory seems a little shaky to me.

Posted in Money, Scams. 16 Comments »

Thesaurus Spam 2: The Comment Years

13 September 2010 — dan

"Thesaurus spam" tries to avoid automated unsolicited-commercial-message detection by automatically replacing words in the spam text with "synonyms". I put scare-quotes are around "synonyms" because thesaurus spam often fails to pick anything even close to a true synonym. So "we will fight them on the beaches" could, for instance, become "ourselves will affray them on the littoral".

I hardly receive any thesaurus-spam via e-mail any more (largely because of upstream filtering; it's probably still quite popular), but I do still see it. Most recently, in comments on this blog.

What happens is, a spammer comes along and creates a commenting account with a "Website" link to whatever site they want to spamvertise. Today, this was a commenter called "batterysea", linking to www.uk-power-battery.co.uk. (All evidence of this commenter has now been erased, of course.)

Then the commenter goes into robospam mode. Instead of posting the usual robospam comments that say something like "Louis Vuitton Prada best replica fakes Rolex Viagra" et cetera et cetera, with links to a Web site from pretty much every word, they create an innocuous, linkless, plain-text comment. At a glance, the new spam-comment kind of looks as if it belongs on the page. That's because it does kind of belong there, on account of being a copy of an earlier comment on the same page, but with the Thesaurus-O-Matic run over it to make the copying less obvious (and difficult, if not impossible, to auto-detect).

I've plucked a few of these ticks off the blog before, but this one this one managed to splatter a few more comments around before I stopped him, so I paid more attention. I presume these spammers try to strike a balance between getting a commercially useful amount of spam transmitted, without obviously producing tons of new comments that even a dozy admin is likely to notice. In the "batterysea" case, there were nine comments, posted at one-minute intervals on my nine most recent posts.

On this post, for instance, there's a legitimate comment from Anne that says

Clearly I am culturally deprived - I don't read magazines, I don't watch TV, and I surf the web with adblock. So where would I see these ads?

Maybe a better question is, do these ads actually sell products? I mean, if I'm trying to decide on which fan to buy for my PC, is seeing an ad in a magazine actually going to affect my decision, whether the ad has giant robots or sober statistics?

And then, at the end of the page, along came the spammer to say

Clearly I am culturally beggared - I don't apprehend magazines, I don't watch TV, and I cream the web with adblock. So area would I see these ads?

Maybe a more good catechism is, do these ads absolutely advertise products? I mean, if I'm aggravating to adjudge on which fan to shop for for my PC, is seeing an ad in a annual absolutely activity to affect my decision, whether the ad has behemothic robots or abstaining statistics?

On this post, the spammer lifted just the second paragraph of my own comment, which started out

It's possible that such a scheme would actually be legit, but it's probable that it would not, because people sending money would have the implicit assumption that they were going to get something in return, even if it was as unlikely to be valuable as a lottery ticket.

That part became

It's accessible that such a arrangement would absolutely be legit, but it's apparent that it would not, because bodies sending money would accept the absolute acceptance that they were activity to get article in return, alike if it was as absurd to be admired as a action ticket.

...in the spam-comment.

When the robospammer can't find any words to thesaurusise, it ends up just duplicating an existing comment. For instance, Fallingwater's comment on this post:

The Asus EeePC 1005HA is, I think, the device that loses its rubber feet fastest than anything else that has been produced.

My solution: melt glue. Four puddles where the feet used to be have made my EeePC stick to surfaces again. Less than when it had the rubber feet, but a hell of a lot better than naked plastic.

...was duplicated word-for-word by the spammer.

This is a really feeble kind of spamming. All commenter Web-site links on this blog, and pretty much every other blog, are nofollowed, as are links in the comments themselves. So you don't get search-engine prominence from this technique, and you don't even get any traffic to speak of, unless human readers click on your commenter-name. I presume this happens even less often than people clicking on the links in the "Dolce Gabbana Dior bags Gucci handbags Chanel Hermes..." sorts of comments.

I think the only way to make comments that really look as if a human posted them would be by creating a spambot with something resembling real, "strong", AI, like the burgeoning network-creatures in Maelstrom, the second of Peter Watts' excellent "Rifters" series (all three books of which are downloadable for free!).

In the meantime, we get aphasic thesaurus-robots, all that can be said for which is that they're more successful than the robots that make hundreds, and hundreds, and hundreds, of accounts called things like "aFZflRhBzRsYq <asdfwerj5@gmail.com>", but never manage to post a single actual comment.

Posted in Blogkeeping, Language, Spam. 14 Comments »

Real books glow

6 September 2010 — dan

A reader writes:

Seeing as you're both someone who knows his gadgets, and someone who enjoys a good read once in a while, I was wondering if you've ever considered those new-fangled e-book contraptions.

I've been considering getting one, as shelf space is always expensive, so I want to reserve that for books I'd want to re-read often, or just proudly display. Besides, the ability to carry a lot of books at less space/weight than the average paperback is quite interesting.

I live in the Netherlands, so I'd need something internationally available (which will probably go for you in Australia as well). However, since I read mostly English, something bound to a primarily English store like Amazon (Kindle) or B&N (Nook) isn't too much of a problem.

From what I've heard, the Kindle, even though it goes against my open-source instincts, is actually one of the best models for actual reading (as opposed to showing off your latest gadget).

I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.

Bernard

PS: If you recommend the iPad, I'm going to be very disappointed, as I always though you were immune to the Jobs-cult propaganda.

I don't actually have a really good answer for this one - though I will of course manage to sound off interminably anyway - but I bet some commenters will have ideas.

I'm pretty sure that one day, paper books will be rather quaint. But I'm not crazy about any of the current e-readers. Definitely not the iPad; if you need/want the various other things an iPad can do (including just delight you with its interface) then the e-reader function is just a bonus. But it's only got a normal LCD display with 1024 by 768 resolution, so if reading books is a primary interest for you, the iPad is nothing special.

A standard-geometry 1024 by 768 LCD with subpixel rendering is actually perfectly adequate for reading - maybe even a whole page at a time, depending on the text size. It's just not worth spending a lot of money on. You can of course do the same thing with any number of random laptops, including various ancient tablets and other oddball devices that let you fold the screen around. You could even use a netbook.

The downside of doing your reading on a relatively normal computer is that you can't use the online e-book stores that deliver DRM-encrusted books that can, generally, only be read on specially-blessed hardware like the dedicated readers.

Current dedicated readers can all display at least a few kinds of non-DRMed content, and you can generally bludgeon one non-DRMed format into another so you can view it on Some Damn Reader that can display PDFs but not plain text, but it's all still quite a fractured and hideous format war; don't hold your breath for one reader that works with everybody's online store and can read everything else too, including DjVu and CBR.

If you're perfectly happy with the Amazon/B&N/whoever-else online stores (which, yes, may only be accessible in North America - what e-book stores are there, besides the Amazon one, that work outside the US and Canada?), plus whatever other formats your chosen reader deigns to support, then that's fine, of course. (Provided you don't end up with the bold new version of customer-service hell that prevents you from buying books.) While the online stores are still charging new-paper-book prices for e-books that you don't really even get to own, though, they don't interest me at all.

A buck a book, I and much of the rest of the world would be happy to pay. But Amazon clearly don't find this very exciting while they're still selling Kindles as fast as they can make them.

That said, the reason why I've chosen to ramble on about e-books despite not owning any kind of dedicated reader is that I have been doing a lot of reading on a screen instead of a page, lately. To the point that I have managed to do what I presume many others have - opened a paper book while lying in bed, turned off the light, and been surprised by the discovery that I can no longer read.

I do my reading on the World's Greatest Conversation-Starting Laptop, the ridiculously cute OLPC XO-1. Which is not actually a very useful general-purpose computing device (as the original owner of the one I've got discovered...), but which makes a pretty decent e-book reader, provided you don't want to read any DRMed books.

There are a lot of free-to-download books out there. Very few current authors let you download their stuff for free, but if you like ancient sci-fi, or any of the usually-considerably-more-ancient stuff at Project Gutenberg, or the Internet Archive's rather-more-peculiar-on-average text archive, then you'll have a full reading list for rather a while.

If you can get an OLPC laptop for the same price I did (I did pay for the postage!), then it's a good option for free-book reading. The standard Reader (PDFs, etc) and Write (actually a word processor, but fine for reading plain text) interfaces are a bit of a pain, but my main complaint about Reader is that there's no way to quickly set the zoom so that the text fills the width of the screen without wasting screen on blank margins, which isn't a big deal unless you're reading numerous short pieces and have to keep resetting it. The OLPC's screen (now being separately commercialised) is one of the best things about it - it's a TV-type hexagonal-subpixel-layout colour screen normally (effective resolution as little as 588 by 441, or as much as 984 by 738, depending on how you measure it), but if you turn the backlight down to zero it changes into a 200-dot-per-inch mono display that you can read in sunlight.

This isn't quite as awesome as it sounds, because the mono-mode colour scheme is the good old LCD almost-black-on-dark-green, not nice white e-paper. But it's still handy. I think e-paper readers have the reverse problem; they're great in good light, but nobody's yet found a way to make them light up properly.

Enough of this digression; about as many of you are likely to read books on an XO-1 as are likely to read them on an eMate. The important question is: What have I missed?

Who's got an e-reader they really love?

Is there software you can run on a normal laptop or netbook that lets you buy and read Kindle/Nook/Sony-Reader books?

Is there some shameless DRM-cracking $100 option from Hong Kong? (There already are a hatful of dodgy little reader doodads at the usual crapvendors, but I'm pretty sure they can't read any kind of DRMed file, and their screens look pretty terrible.)

Anybody buy books on paper and then download illicit PDFs?

Has someone started a kind-of-legal $10-a-month all-you-can-download e-book emporium yet?

Posted in Books. 32 Comments »

Psychoacoustics again, again, and again

4 September 2010 — dan

Today's addition to my ongoing Psychoacoustics Archive comes courtesy of Ben Goldacre.

When listening to the exact same recording, apparently being played by similar-looking but differently-attired female violinists, evaluators consistently thought the music was better when the performers were more "professionally" attired.

This turns out to be an entirely uncontroversial finding. Until I read this Bad Science post, I didn't know that orchestra auditions are now usually blinded (the auditioner plays behind an opaque screen). This is because unblinded auditions have repeatedly been demonstrated to create unfair discrimination, even when frank racism is not involved. Even listeners who apparently honestly don't consciously believe that, for instance, women are worse musicians than men, will often rate female performers lower. And that's before you even start to consider attire and physical attractiveness. (Witness the recent global astonishment when an unattractive woman, apparently against all that science and art has ever told us, turned out to have a decent singing voice.)

The evaluators in this latest study were just music students and professional orchestral musicians, though, not audiophiles. I'm sure audiophiles would have done much better.

Posted in Music, Science. 10 Comments »

Needs more green ink

27 August 2010 — dan

My partner felt a need to contribute to the blizzard of postal spam that preceded the Australian election of last weekend. So she signed her name to a letter declaring her belief, and that of some other women here in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, that Australian Liberal Party Prime-Ministerial candidate Tony Abbott is, among his many other fascinating qualities, no friend to women.

I can save you the trouble of reading those last few links, by just saying that Tony's a conservative Catholic. He actually studied to be a priest before deciding to switch to the less stigmatised profession of journalism, and thence to the even more upstanding life of a politician. The current watch-this-space, don't-get-too-attached-to-her Labor leader Julia Gillard is, downright astonishingly by the standards of modern Western politics, an admitted atheist.

The upshot of the election was a hung Parliament, in which the two major parties fought each other to a standstill, leaving Gillard as a "caretaker Prime Minister" and a few independents, plus exactly one Green, holding the balance of power.

Voting - well, technically just getting your name ticked off on the list, and then doing something which resembles voting - is mandatory in Australia. (The penalty for not getting your name checked off exceeds nineteen dollars!) But the process is enlivened by our preferential voting system. This allows one to at least indicate who one would like to run the country instead of the ratbags of Major Party A or the scumbuckets of Major Party B, while still being able to say that if you have to have ratbags or scumbuckets, you'd prefer the ratbags. Or the scumbuckets.

Which is to say, I don't think it's excessively presumptuous to say that the women who signed the anti-Abbott letter are not delighted beyond all human reckoning with the Labor alternative. They'd just prefer it.

Yesterday we received a letter, about the anti-Abbott letter. I find this second letter delightful in every way, and I wish its anonymous author - who's phoned us too, but regrettably only been able to leave a message - another 73 years of good health and Apoplectic Capital Letters.

I suppose I should show you the actual anti-Abbott letter first, but it's kind of boring while the reply is hilarious, so here's a compromise: Read on for the original letter, or click here to skip straight to the reply!

(My few additions below are in [square brackets].)

Dear [recipient's name]

We are writing to you as concerned members of the community. This election is critical and we are asking all women to seriously consider how they vote.

Australia is at serious risk of returning to an ulta-conservative Abbott-led Government. Women need to consider Mr Abbott's track record on a range of issues that impact women and their lives.

Whilst Mr Abbott has tried to distance himself from comments he has made by shrugging them off as a joke, we don't believe they are a joking matter.

Over the years Mr Abbott has made his views clear on the role of women in our society:

"I think it would be folly to expect that women will ever dominate or even approach equal representation...simply because their aptitudes, abilities and interests are different for physiological reasons".
[to a reporter, back in 1979]

"For myself, I don't support "women's" causes. I support conservative causes."
[posted by Mr Abbott on his Web site in September 2008]

"I won't be rushing out to get my daughters vaccinated against cervical cancer."
[from 2006]

Just last week Mr Abbott said at a press conference:

"Are you suggesting to me that when it comes from Julia, 'No' doesn't mean 'No'?"
[August 2010]

This is a clear reference to the anti-sexual assault campaign slogan. Mr Abbott should know that sexual assault is never a laughing matter.

We believe that Mr Abbott and his Government would take back all the gains that women have achieved over the last 50-odd years. Please consider how you vote on August 21 - don't send Australian women back to the kitchen.

Yours sincerely,

Marg Acton, Helen Chapman, Kate Cooke, Irena Kesa, Naomi Parry, Sharon Dart, Libby O'Donnell, Jude Cooke, Chrissy Girard, Ashleigh Cummings, Anne O'Grady, Jackie Manners, Mary Travers, Angela Cleary, Samantha Clarke, Gay Thew, Kathy O'Hara, Susie McMeekin, Reenie Kuypers, Sarah Terkes, Xanthe Stavrakis, Genie Melone, Jo Hibbert, Susan Ambler, Sam Thompson, Lesley Sammon, Deanne Dale, Lorraine Vogel, Suzanne Langford and Sara Rose.

Residents of the Blue Mountains.

Authorised by Elizabeth O'Donnell, 9 Vale Street, Katoomba, 2780.

And now, the response!

(The links in the text below were added by me. Everything else was in the original. It was, sadly, just two sheets of plain photocopied 24-pin dot-matrix printout, with no green ink or underlining. I have taken care to reproduce its exact content, though.)

To The LABOR Women of the Blue Mountains

What a lot of misguided people you all are. To align yourself with the Labor Party tells me that you are possibly not very well educated, domineering, rather spiteful and definitely 'Greenies' — who believe in the scam of 'Global Warming' which is actually caused by Natural Solar Processes which also control the Ocean Tides — the Change of Seasons — the Sun Shining — Winds blowing — Earth Quakes — and Volcanos

The Labor Party — the Unions — the Greenies or anyone else does not have the Power to change the way the Universe has 'worked' since time began. Nothing Julia Giilard can do will make any difference to the Atmosphere --- but it will make a huge difference to your Bank Account in a NEGATIVE way but - will boost the Bank Account of Magabi's personal Bank balance plus the Bank Accounts of Leaders of Third World, Asian and African Countries.

I am amazed how low you women have gone to dig deep into some garbage back in 1979 to 'print a portion' of something Tony Abbott said when he was a very young 20 to 22 year old. I would hope he would have different ideas now as a very responsible adult - than he had when he was in his twenties — it is a pity you women don't learn from him.!

I did think very carefully before I voted and made very sure I put Labor no. 84 and the Greens no.83 on the big voting sheet — it was a task to fill out all the numbers but well satisfying.

Tony Abbott is well aware of womens needs being a married man with three beautiful daughters --- Julia Giilard will NEVER have the insight into womens needs as Tony Abbott does — being a Husband and Father of three daughters,

I was born at Wentworth Falls in 1937 - went to school at Wentworth Falls Primary and then Katoomba High — when it was in Parke St Katoomba .

My Father had a business at Wentworth Falls.

I have four Children and eleven Grandchildren and five Great Grand Children and have seen many changes over the years including a number of Prime Ministers and Politicians including the Great Sir Robert Menzies and John Howard. Then came the hateful — spiteful Labor Party who are so manipulative and eventually 'stabbed their own Leader in the back' so as Julia Gillard could fulfil her aspirations as Prime Minister --- and this is the Party you want people to vote for --- you must be joking.!

I think YOU lot, are the ones who should be giving a lot of thought about the Politicians you are so wrapped in.

Sincerely

Mountain Nanny

(After a bit of redistribution, the previously-safe-Labor seat in which we live went to the Liberals.)

Posted in Strange Tales. 18 Comments »

From the "any publicity..." file

23 August 2010 — dan

Imagine my delight at receiving the following:

From: "Clink Admin" >admin@clink.com.au<
To: dan@dansdata.com
Subject: A review?
Date: Sat, 21 Aug 2010 15:21:37 +1000

Hi Dan,

I was wondering if you would do a review of something on my website, address in signature.
Not sure if anything on there is along the lines of stuff you would normally but think there may be a couple of items that fit in.

Would love if you would do a review of my Vortex Analogue Interconnects, these have proven very popular cable.
http://clink.com.au/audio/stereo.htm (bottom of the page)
So would be great to get an independent and unbiased view of these.
Would only ask you to do a cable review though if you feel it is something that has an impact on audio quality.
If your of the school of thought that they have no impact then prefer not to have a review done as it would be very short, probably in the under 10 words variety of short.

Gregory
Cinema Link, Sales
675 Elizabeth St
Waterloo NSW 2017
Ph: (02) 9698 4959
www.clink.com.au

[There was a bit more to this e-mail; I've corresponded with Gregory previously. He asked if I'd like to check out one of his HDMI switches, which I don't actually have the equipment to test but which seem quite handy; by linking to them and other pages of his without so much as a nofollow, I hereby repay Greg for what's going to happen to him in the rest of this post!]

My answer:

Yeeeahhh... you haven't read much of my site, have you :-)?

(Or this blog, for that matter.)

It's the "school of thought" part that I think is the problem. There's no need to separate people into pseudo-religious "schools of thought" over a question that can be settled by scientific means.

We know, with the same certainty that we know that the GPS system and personal computers work and for many of the same reasons, that none of the conventionally-measurable electrical characteristics of analogue cables have any effect on the sound. Well, except in particularly pathological cases where some truly bizarre cable architecture adds substantial reactance or something, in which case it only makes a system sound better if there was something wrong with the system in the first place. Like, your speakers have 14 drivers wired in parallel and thus have far too little impedance for your amp to happily drive, so hooking them up via carbon spark-plug leads or something that add a lot of resistance un-ruins the sound.

(See also those occasional fringe-audiophile products that are actually quantifiably bad, like this amplifier, plus a veritable cavalcade of dreadful valve amplifiers. All of which have users who insist that they sound GREAT.)

[Oh - in case you're wondering, yes, Cinema Link have fancy digital cables, too...]

The analogue-cables-sound-different response to the electrical-engineering argument is to say that DC-to-daylight frequency and phase analysis just doesn't measure some special something that they know when they hear it, science doesn't know everything, et cetera.

But a vanishingly small percentage of the people who say this ever bother to do even a simple single-blind test to see if they, themselves, can actually hear any difference between their special cables and lamp cord. Such tests really are not difficult to do at all - all you need is a trustworthy friend to flip coins, swap cables and make notes, some very elementary experimental design, and a spare afternoon - but they're amazingly unpopular. Un-blinded tests remain immensely popular, but it's trivially demonstrable that those don't work.

This is my favourite recent example, but there are countless others, covering the entire breadth of live and recorded sound. Vision and hearing are subject to an immense amount of processing by the brain before consciousness gets to perceive them.

(Another favourite of mine: Famous concert violinists are often certain that they can tell the difference between a priceless antique violin - especially if it's their Stradivarius or whatever - and a high-quality modern instrument. But when you do a blinded test, the results, once again, drop to chance levels! They can probably pick the Strad blindfolded if they're actually holding it in their hands, but that's all.)

Some audiophiles go so far as to say that no matter how perfect the experiment design, with no possibly-sound-colouring ABX switchboxes or skull-resonance-changing blindfolds involved, these sorts of differences just can't be detected by science, in the same way that God will never permit Himself to be detected by scientific investigation. Exactly how these people figured out that the new cables sounded better is, in these cases, something of a mystery.

(The people who insist that cables need "burn-in time" have a particularly neat way out of blinded tests; they can just assert that the... phlogiston, or whatever... leaks out of burned-in cables when you disconnect them. But I'd be willing to bet quite a lot of money that swapping out their expensive burned-in wires for hidden $2 interconnects and bell-wire speaker cables would pass entirely unnoticed.)

I'm inclined to go easy on people who buy fancy cables and reckon they sound good. We all fool ourselves frequently, which is why science is so important, but a fooling of oneself that leads to essentially harmless happiness is not a major crime.

But I really must insist that people who're in the business of making and selling fancy cables have no right to make any claims about the "sound" of their products, if they haven't at least hired a few first-year electrical-engineering students to spend a day doing an independent test.

If, when blinded tests were done, they at least reasonably frequently showed that fancy cables sounded better, then it'd be no big deal to sell such products without doing the tests yourself. But what we instead keep seeing is that in a blinded test people can't tell the difference between Monster Cables and (literal) coat-hanger wire. (Monster products may be overpriced and often sold in a blatantly dishonest way, but surely they ought to beat coat-hangers!)

Given this, I cannot help but consider the basic rationale for products such as your cables as being as unproven as the notion that a chiropractor can cure diabetes, or that all poor people are poor because they do not adequately desire wealth.

It's not the Middle Ages any more. We know where lightning comes from, we have machines that routinely fly hundreds of people thousands of miles in (relative) comfort, and our doctors have figured out that it's a good idea to wash your hands before operating. Every day, people in First World nations are surrounded by proof of the effectiveness of scientific inquiry that's so bright, loud and ubiquitous that we, apparently, have developed the ability to tune it out when it suits us. But that doesn't make it a good idea to do so.

You're not a quack, and I don't think you're a scam artist, either. Your cables aren't outrageously expensive relative to the price of the components and assembly - they might as well be free, when compared with the truly out-there cable vendors. And you don't sell $1000 power cables, either (...do you? Tell me you don't!). But this doesn't mean that sending samples of new cables to your existing customers and using their testimonials in advertising is an acceptable way of proving your claims.

If testimonials were a good way of proving the scientifically dubious, I'd be torn between devoting all my time and money to Transcendental Meditation in order to develop the ability to fly and walk through walls, or devoting just as much time and probably even more money to Scientology in order to develop the ability to control space and time.

At the end of the day, I suppose you do end up with "schools of thought", but the members of those schools are not "people who reckon special cables sound better" and "people who don't" (or "people who reckon Uri Geller has paranormal powers" and "people who don't"; I'm sure you can provide many of your own examples). They're "people who believe this question is amenable to rational investigation" and "people who don't care".

You're allowed to not care. Everyone's entitled to his opinion. But nobody's entitled to be taken seriously.

Gregory replied:

Thanks for taking the time to reply in depth, and for the informative links.

I've taken a little more time this time to read some of the pieces on your site and understand a little more of your thoughts on audio cables.

So I'll take that as no, or at least I'll take it as something that would be detrimental to my business health.

To which I replied:

...and you are thus acknowledging that if you made an attempt to figure out if your fancy cables worked, you'd find that they didn't? :-)

[Greg's, regrettably, not yet found time to reply to that.]

As I said, for hi-fi this really doesn't make a whole lot of difference either way. Even the really wacky Shun Mook or Peter Belt (...or just about anything else that 6moons thinks is fantastic...) sort of hi-fi cultism doesn't really hurt anyone - certainly not by the standards of the usual kind of cult. Some nut out there has probably bought speaker wire instead of nutritious food for his children, but that is hardly a probable situation.

That doesn't mean that the same patterns observable in truly harmful things like crazy cults and medical quackery aren't valid when you see them in other contexts, though. One I find particularly common, which is very much on show in the audiophile world, is the peculiar and inexplicable situation in which the better you investigate something - eliminating extra variables, reducing experimenter bias, reducing the ability of subjects to fool themselves - the less effect that something turns out to have.

When "lousy test" shows "huge effect" and "better test" shows "medium effect" and "further-improved test" shows "not much effect at all", it may be that the latter two tests were false negatives.

But it usually does actually mean that "perfect test" would show "zero effect".

Posted in Electricity, Music, Science. 20 Comments »

Parallel to serial to ST-506 to 5-bit teletype to...

12 August 2010 — dan

A reader writes:

This seemed right up your alley. I saw this on Gizmodo this morning:

Plug-adapter chain

I initially dismissed it as totally fake. After all, it's just a string of pin adapters, and you can't get a flash drive to talk to a parallel port.

But then I thought some more. What if one were to replace the crystal in the USB drive with one of a much lower frequency, and then write a virtual device driver which implements USB using the parallel port pins? This would, of course, make the USB device useless on a regular USB interface, but it seems like it would be possible. And there's also the question of "why on earth would you want to?", but if you're the type to ask that question, you probably wouldn't have seen it in the first place.

Do you have any insight as to why such an approach would or would not work technically?

Ammon

Improbable assemblage

(Anyone can do it!)

This reminds me of the hardware dongle, one of the many wonderful creations of the copy-control industry. Nowadays I think copy-protection dongles are all USB, but there was a time when some lucky users had to daisy-chain multiple parallel-port doodads in order to run multiple protected apps at once.

As you say, there'd surely be some way to connect a USB thumb drive to a parallel port, but not with standard computer-store products. (No, you can't just take a USB-to-parallel adapter and turn it around.)

I'm sure this sort of trick has actually been done many times, to connect modern storage to legacy systems. I don't think it'd be a huge job for one of the modern easy-to-program microcontrollers (Arduino, etc). If you've got some 35-year-old industrial computer that still works fine except its moving-parts storage keeps crapping out when the mining dust or machine-shop shavings get into it, hacking up some way to replace its ancient hard (or floppy, or optical, or tape) drive with Flash RAM is attractive.

There's more than one part of the hack-as-presented that couldn't possibly work, but what I immediately noticed was the green USB-to-mini-DIN adapter, which is probably one of those standard adapters for connecting a USB mouse to a PS/2 port, several of which can usually be found in the desk drawers of anybody who's been using a PC for the last ten years.

Those mouse adapters are, as you say, just pin-adapters, containing no logic; you could in principle do the same job with paper-clips and tape. Mice that work with these distinctive green adapters all have USB and PS/2 compatibility built in, and use one or the other depending on what they reckons they're plugged into. I think any of the green adapters will work with any such mouse, but they won't work with a USB-only mouse, and they definitely won't work with USB devices in general.

This sort of thing is one of the standard causes of support people banging their heads on the desk.

Theorem: The guy who's daisy-chained adapters so he can plug his XT keyboard into his iPad is preferable to the guy who's managed to plug a PCI card into a memory slot by just pushing really, really hard.

Discuss.

Posted in Hacks, Strange Tales. 11 Comments »
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