How to Spot a Psychopath

The Anti-Randi Marching Band

13 April 2009 — dan

This stuff keeps coming back.

Someone cheerfully declares something to the effect that "Telepathy and other 'Psi' phenomena have been demonstrated conclusively so many times that if they were a dieting pill it would have been on the market fifty years ago". So it's a bit odd that even in our kee-razy capitalist world, the only 'psi'-based commercial products continue to be frank scams, isn't it, but never mind.

The usual next move in this common opening to the chess-game of reason versus woo is someone mentioning the fact that any psychic (or aura-seer, or astral traveller, or dowser, or therapeutic toucher) could make a million dollars by simply demonstrating the ability to do even some small subset of what they claim they do with little effort every day.

Next, without fail, someone else says there's "fine print" in the Randi challenge, and Randi's a big cheat, and so on and so forth.

(There sure is fine print in the Challenge! Well, more of a FAQ, really, which explains the 1500-word Challenge itself in plain terms, so that busy communicators with the dead can get the gist in a hurry. But that print is still fine if you set your browser text size small. And it says things like, you have to agree on what you promise to do at the beginning, and since you get to set your own terms in cooperation with the James Randi Educational Foundation before taking even the not-passed-by-anyone-yet preliminary test, it's fine for Randi to be a thousand miles away during the testing if you think he's a big cheat. So you can see how people might object to it. It's obviously a total screw-job.)

More than nine years ago now, I observed an expanded version of this time-honoured square-dance in progress on Usenet, and wrote the following:

At 23:50 4/12/99 -0500, [someone else on the Skeptic list] wrote:

Garrison Hilliard [whose Web page has a picture of a naked woman on it, if you scroll down. So don't go there, or scroll down, if that sort of thing bothers you] started a few threads on the alt.out-of-body newsgroup. It's been pretty interesting, and especially some of the apparent anger at the questions.

Please feel free to visit the place, or at least review it through dejanews. [I told you this was old!]

For those who haven't had time to review the discussion (there are a few hundred relevant messages), allow me to condense it:

Garrison: Please provide evidence that Out-of-body Experiences are anything other than delusions, hallucinations, or outright lies.

Someone Else: Hey, man, try it for yourself, you'll see!

Garrison: I have. I didn't see anything.

Someone Else: Well, we don't need to either, then!

Garrison: Huh?

Someone Else: You can't prove you like having orgasms, so we don't have to prove nothin'!

Garrison: <scratches head> Uh, well, gee...

Someone Else: ACUPUNCTURE IS REAL! VISIT MY SITE!

John Stone: Naff off.

Someone Else: OOBEs are a parallel reality, different from ours.

Garrison: How's that different from a hallucination?

Someone Else: Kirlian photography shows they're real!

Garrison: Oh, give me a break.

Someone Else: Get fucked!

Garrison: Eh?

Someone Else: You're doing the work of Satan, you know!

Garrison: Pardon?

Someone Else: <WEBTVHTMLBLAHBLAHBLAHBLAH>Let's ignore <BIG><BIG><BIG><BIG>Garrison.</BIG></BIG></BIG></BIG><BLINK>He's</BLINK>rude.<EMBED sig_with_a_midi_file_in_it></WEBTVHTMLBLAHBLAHBLAHBLAH>

Someone Else: I agree.

Someone Else: Me too.

Someone Else: How profound.

Someone Else: Yes, I have killfiled that rude asshole.

Someone Else: I always killfile anyone who flames me by asking me why I believe what I believe.

Garrison: I'm still heeeee-re!

Someone Else: That's because, in your heart, you know the world is flat. Uh, no, I mean...

Someone Else: Photocopiers can't see colour, which explains perfectly why OOBEs don't let you read things you couldn't ordinarily see.

Someone Else: That's it in a nutshell.

Someone Else: Yup, you got it.

Someone Else: That oughta shut him up, huh!

Someone Else: Anyway, if we read some piece of paper in another room, that might just prove we're telepathic or remote viewers. It wouldn't necessarily be an OOBE at all. So it'd be no good for anything!

Garrison: <cough, splutter>

Barry Williams (not that one): All of this is amusing me enormously.

Someone Vaguely Sensible: Uh, doesn't Garrison kinda have a point?

Someone Else: Does not!

Someone Vaguely Sensible: Does too!

Garrison: This isn't an argument.

John Cleese: Yes it is.

Someone Else: Go away! Leave us alone! What do you care, anyway!

Garrison: I'm researching OOBEs. You could [the fateful moment!] make a million dollars, you know.

Someone Else: I'm not in this for the money.

Garrison: What, you couldn't think of ANYONE to give it to?

The Anti-Randi Marching Band: There is no money/there is too little money/there is too much money/I want to see the money in a pile/proximity to cash compromises my spiritual enlightenment/Randi is a powerful anti-psi ray emitter/Randi is a cannibal and I am afraid of him/Randi would just say we were never in our bodies to start with/the FBI will forcibly change my gender if I win/I want it in Tongan Pa'anga, not US dollars/money is an illusion/property is theft/I'm a teapot! I'm a teapot!

James Randi: Bring it on, girlymen.

Someone Else: You're not James Randi.

Someone Vaguely Sensible: Yes he is.

Someone Else: No he isn't. See, I'll e-mail him, and... oh. Sorry.

Someone Else: ISN'T ISN'T ISN'T ISN'T ISN'T!

Someone Vaguely Sensible: OK, so minds go flying around without bodies, but James Randi can't possibly post to a newsgroup?

Someone Else: Ah, but there's lots of evidence that minds fly around without bodies.

Garrison: <vein stands out on forehead> Well, if you'd care to PRESENT it...

Someone Else: Child molester!! Look! Look! A nudie pic on Garrison's Web site! [Which, as mentioned above, is still there!] My pubic-hairometer clearly identifies her as underage!

Various Appreciators Of The Female Form: Phwoar.

Gary Glitter: Run for your life, man. [This was topical humour at the time.]

Someone Else: I badly misunderstand the laws of thermodynamics.

Someone Else: T HATS NOTHING!!!!!!!! ICANT'' EVEn typE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Various people: Standard spelling and punctuation thread #1.

Someone Else: What's Garrison doing here, anyway?

Someone Vaguely Sensible: Discussing OOBEs, just like the rest of us.

Someone Else: He is restricting our freedom of speech! Let's complain to his ISP and get him gagged!

Someone Else: I so totally would rather have the blue pill than the red one.

Postscript:

People who dismiss the Randi Challenge out of hand usually aren't just nuts. They're actually using deductive reasoning, from a less-than-solid premise:

A: Everybody knows that paranormal phenomena are real.

B: Nobody has ever passed even a preliminary test for the Randi Challenge.

Therefore, the Randi Challenge must be rigged.

This reasoning works perfectly for the few challenges out there that really are rigged, and impossible for anybody to win, even if they could pass with flying colours a fair version of the test. Kent Hovind's evolution challenge, for instance, and Jock Doubleday's vaccine challenge.

[This attracted Jock Doubleday's attention and led to another couple of posts about his challenge, which are here and here.]

I also like the example that's currently in the Wikipedia article about deduction:

All fire-breathing rabbits live on Earth.
All humans are fire-breathing rabbits.
(Therefore,) all humans live on Earth.

You do, to be fair, now have to have a "media presence" of some sort in order to apply for the Randi Challenge - there have to be newspaper or other media stories about your amazing abilities. You also now need to come up with "at least one signed document from an academic who has witnessed the powers or abilities", but this shouldn't be very difficult to achieve, if you're doing whatever paranormal thing you do all the time. (These rules are relatively new, I think; they're there to discourage all the people with delusional disorders who can't even convince their local newspaper that they have paranormal abilities, yet invariably figure that the Randi Challenge will be a piece of cake.)

Posted in Science, Strange Tales. 15 Comments »

Nine 0.455-inch guns

12 April 2009 — dan

Behold: Jumpei Mitsui's minifig-scale Yamato (via).

Six years in the making, 6.6 metres long, 150 kilos. (It's only a "waterline" model, of course; it'd weigh even more if it had the whole keel.)

You know, at this scale - about 1:39.8 - a Star Destroyer (a normal one, not some special-order version) would only be about 40.2 metres long (132 feet).

I'm just sayin'.

Posted in Nerdery, Toys. 5 Comments »

LED-Brite

10 April 2009 — dan

A reader writes:

I live in Taiwan, and I just came across a new LED device which seems very cool.

First, here is a link. It's all in Chinese, unfortunately, and I can't read it to translate for you, but there are at least some photos to give you an idea.

[Here's a goofy machine-translation, which gives the thing the name "Aurora", which sounds good enough to me. The price, 1699 Hong Kong dollars, is as I write this about $US220.]

Basically, this works like a Lite-Brite, but with LEDs. There is a black PCB, entirely pierced through with holes. It has no wires, and there are no visible electronic components except for the DC input at one corner. You can plug in LEDs on either side, front or back, in any pattern you like. It's powered by either a wall-wart, a small battery pack, or a USB power connector.

A friend of mine here showed it to me tonight, and it was very impressive. Water-resistant, even - he poured a beer all over both sides of one with many lit LEDs, and there was nary a flicker.

Anyway, if you're interested, I could probably find out more about it.

Doug

I immediately, and completely wrongly, picked the Aurora as a cheaper clone of the Bandai Luminodot (dodgy translation), which was all the rage on the gadget blogs a few months ago. Some hipster has presumably bought himself a Luminodot for $US200 delivered on eBay by now, but I sure ain't.

Doug was quick to point out, though, that this thing is not a backlit-plastic-pegs device like the Lite-Brite or Luminodot, but a bunch of little powered breadboard-ish holes, into which you can plug as many or as few LEDs of whatever colour you like, and have 'em all Just Work with no fooling around with supply voltages or current-limiting resistors or fancy driver pucks.

(I think a cheaper version of the Bandai doodad might be makeable with a laptop CCFL backlight panel and little black shutters that open to let light out when you push a peg though them. Or you could do it the Lite-Brite way, and put a new sheet of black paper over the light for the pegs to puncture every time you want to make a new picture.)

Undaunted, I immediately developed total certainty regarding the Aurora's similarity to another light-array gadget.

That gadget is the open-source "Peggy" invented by Evil Mad Scientist Labs, which is now up to version 2, and available as a kit.

The different Peggy versions are capable of various kinds of animation, and can even be used to display (very low-res) video.

The array Doug saw may, like the Peggy, only actually light one row or column of LEDs at a time, but cycle through them too fast for any flicker to be visible. (It may or may not do the same devious multiplexing as the Peggy, and is almost certainly a lot less "hackable".)

The Aurora is clearly being promoted as being useful for commercial signage, as an alternative to the custom-made, ultra-bright LED-array signs that I've seen sprouting around the place.

Doug was under the impression that the retail price "for a board about a foot square" was only around $US30, plus another $US10 for the power supply. That'd make it worth buying just for the amusement value, but doesn't line up with the $HK1699, $US220-ish price on the product page.

Never mind, though; when an odd toy starts being sold on any Web site ending in .tw, its price will probably be in free-fall soon.

Posted in Electricity, Hacks, Toys. 13 Comments »

Mecha-snippet du jour

9 April 2009 — dan

The people who made Hangar No. 5 have achieved an extraordinary feat. They successfully made a chunk of live-plus-CGI action cinema, on a shoestring budget. Their success continues even to the point of getting wrong the stuff that action movies so often get wrong - Gatling guns that go rat-a-tat-tat instead of BZZZZZ, and gold bars that appear to actually be made of cardboard. ("It's gold! It's gold!" "No it's not! It's obviously not!"*)

But I'm just carping. Sling 'em a couple of bucks if you like it. (You can download the HD version even if you don't donate.)

The third-smallest hard drive

8 April 2009 — dan

(Don't worry - he's an anti-static cat.)

I had this little "20Gb" 1.8-inch hard drive, as seen in older iPods, just sitting around. It actually has a formatted capacity of only 18.6Gb, but that's still several gigabytes bigger than my "out" directory that contains pretty much everything I've ever written, including pics. So the little drive looked like a good place for me to make another backup of "out".

(I could also use a 16Gb flash drive, which would be a much tougher backup device, and not very expensive - just today, DealExtreme listed a 16Gb Kingston USB drive for less than $US35 delivered. But I already had the little Toshiba, and it's not going to be my only backup of this data.)

I attached the little drive to my computer via two adapters. The thing at the back with the cable plugged into it is the WiebeTech FireWire Super DriveDock that I reviewed back in 2003; the FireWire cable can provide more than enough power to spin up this little drive, so I didn't need to plug in the DriveDock's plugpack.

The circuit board between the DriveDock and the drive is a Toshiba-1.8-inch to parallel ATA adapter. Like other such doodads - CompactFlash-to-PATA adapters like the one I reviewed way back in 2000, for instance - these adapters are now dirt cheap from Hong Kong dealers. EBay's full of 'em, but I got this one for $US3.49 delivered from DealExtreme.

If you're thinking of doing this yourself, because you've got a junked MP3 player or some such with a perfectly good 1.8-inch drive in it, or because you just bought such a drive on eBay for $3, bear in mind that there is more than one kind of 1.8-inch drive. (This information is also important for people who want to replace the drive in their iPod or other small hard-drive MP3 player.)

Two-point-five-inch drives are the normal type used in laptops, and also in pocket-sized portable hard drives. 2.5-inch SATA is also the form factor that many Flash-RAM Solid State Drives use. 2.5-inch PATA and 2.5-inch SATA drives all have the same pinout, regardless of manufacturer, and differ only in height. So you can put pretty much any 2.5-inch device in pretty much any laptop, USB box or what have you, as long as

1: you don't try to mix PATA and SATA (you can get PATA-to-SATA adapters, but there won't be room for one in a laptop or USB-drive-box), and

2: you're not trying to fit one of the uncommon, unusually-thick kinds of 2.5-inch drive into a destination device that only has room for the common 9.5mm-thick kind.

1.8-inch drives come in SATA and PATA versions as well, but the PATA ones - which are the only ones you're likely to find cheap or free in 2009 - come in different flavours.

The two main types of PATA 1.8-incher are Hitachi (née IBM) and Toshiba. Toshibas have a female connector on the back of the drive, and Hitachis have a male. Apart from that I think they're very much the same, so you can probably get PATA adapters that come with two cables and can work with both types of drive. If you're buying a $3.49 adapter, though, make sure it's got the right connector for your drive.

You can also find 1.8-inch drives with one or another kind of zero-insertion-force (ZIF) ribbon-cable connector. Once again, Toshiba and Hitachi have implemented slightly different versions of the same thing. So, again, all you need to plug these into a standard ATA device is a pin adapter (in this case a "contact-pad-to-pin-adapter"), but you have to get the right one. (Here's an adapter to give you a Toshiba 1.8-inch pin-connector from either kind of ZIF 1.8-incher.)

You may also find 1.8-inch drives in disk packages made to slot into a laptop PCMCIA/PC Card slot. I think there'll probably be a standard Hitachi or Toshiba PATA drive in those which you could dig out with a bit of careful surgery, but if I were you I'd leave the drive in its little armoured package and access it via a laptop, or a PC with a PCMCIA-socket card.

(If you want to dig the drive out of a PCMCIA package because you need to bring a dead iPod back to life, and you don't need a zillion gigabytes of storage, I suggest you try a CompactFlash card in a CF-to-Toshiba-1.8-inch adapter instead. Once again, though, remember that newer iPods use the ZIF-connector type of 1.8-incher, which requires a different adapter.)

Amazingly enough, there are two hard-drive form factors that're even smaller than the 1.8.

The only really "standard", widely available type that's smaller than a 1.8 is the jewel-like CompactFlash "Microdrive" (360-degree Quicktime view here). Microdrives are called "1-inch" drives by IBM/Hitachi, I think because that's the approximate diameter of their platters, but Samsung call them "1.3-inch". They're the same size as a standard Type II (thick) CompactFlash memory card, 42.8 by 36.4 by 5mm (about 1.7 by 1.4 by 0.2 inches).

Microdrives were pretty hot stuff back in the day, but even though you can buy an 8Gb Microdrive these days, they've still been made obsolete by bigger and bigger, and cheaper and cheaper, Flash RAM.

The very smallest hard drives ever made even littler, though. They're made by Toshiba, and are 32mm by 24mm by 5mm (about 1.3 by 0.9 by 0.2 inches) and officially called "0.85 inch" devices. Toshiba have managed to pack "4Gb" into one (real formatted capacity about 3.7 "real" gigabytes), as I write this.

The 0.85 drives actually have the exact same height and width as an SD memory card, as used by most digital cameras, though they're more than twice as thick. They're apparently supposed to be for bulk data storage in mobile phones and other small devices, but I don't think they've actually been used for much; Flash RAM has streaked past them, too.

Posted in Hacks, Nerdery. 6 Comments »

Time to ask for a pay rise

8 April 2009 — dan

They like me! They really, really like me!

But seriously - thanks to everybody who voted for me in Atomic's Issue #100 poll.

I could only be more pleased if my runaway victory actually won me a prize.

(Perhaps I'll get a mouse!)

Posted in Shop talk. 13 Comments »

April Fools roundup

1 April 2009 — dan

Since I've once again failed to come up with an idea for an April Fools article - I really have, this isn't me trying to sneakily slip one past you - I shall list neat ones I notice today in this post.

Trossen Robotics had the first joke I noticed today, with their revolutionary Keepon USB.

The only one that's really grabbed me so far, though, is Hexus.net alerting us all to a new "dead-pixel pandemic", nicely done with a ton of class="deadPixel" DIVs instead of the lame background image I would have used if I'd thought of it.

Other neat jokes I notice will be added to the post here:

1: Pre-eminent zombie-apocalypse browser-game Urban Dead has a corker; I think you see it the first time you re-visit Urban Dead after the start of the 1st.

Basically, everything is back to normal and it was all just a horrible dream.

2: Famous hive of scum and villainy eztv.it is currently redirecting to ezsports.tv - "Your source for the best sports!"

3: Gmail Autopilot^TM.

4: Retro Thing Ceases Publication of Color Edition.

5: Winner of the "most highbrow" award - "Time variation of a fundamental dimensionless constant".

6: A series of joke woodworking items from Lee Valley, some more obviously preposterous than others:

Variable Gang Saw
Full-Round Spokeshave
Honing Guide Mk.XXXXII
Pouchless Tool Belt
Dodeca-Gauge
Low-Angle Jack Plane

They have a distinct Chindogu aspect to them, and are very well done.

(Feel free to point out any good ones you've found in the comments!)

Slashdot always do an online-jokes roundup article in addition to their annual front-page-of-nonsense-and-unicorns, but it of course isn't quite time for that yet, since it's still March 31st in the States - actually, as I write this, it's just barely April 1st on the East Coast of the USA. It's already the afternoon of April the 1st here in Australia, though.

There are a few April-Fools-type articles (not all of which were actually published on the appropriate day) on dansdata.com. My favourites are the kitten review and my campaign to Save The Unsecured Access Points.

Dig back, though, and there's the one that gave this blog its name, "Black Computers Faster - It's Official", "U.S. Marine Corps announces new 'Geek Corps'", the New Intel "Sextium" processor, and that picture of me wearing the Errorwear Guru Meditation shirt back in October 2001:

Guru Meditation T-shirt

(You could probably make a shirt that actually did that, now.)

And then there's the EMPower Modulator, Wine Clip, Batterylife Activator, Guardian Angel battery and so on which, like the Firepower pills, ought to be jokes, but aren't.

Posted in Humour, Strange Tales. 16 Comments »

ABS plus celluloid

30 March 2009 — dan

Yep, that's a Lego movie projector all right. The frame-rate's a bit short of 24fps and the film moves a bit while the light's on - but c'mon! Lego movie projector!

Via TechnicBricks, again. That post also mentions the first TechVideo from this year...