How to Spot a Psychopath

Keeping Australia safe from cat toys

11 September 2008 — dan

The other day, I bought two little laser pointers on eBay, for a grand total of $US3.76 delivered.

I intended to use them as cat toys, since the only red pointer we've got here that doesn't run from those useless button batteries is a bit flaky.

I chose those particular pointers because they were the very cheapest AAA-powered lasers I could find. They were promoted as "Ultra Powerful Red Laser Pointer Pen Beam Light 5mW", but they almost certainly actually had an output of only one or two milliwatts, like almost every other cheap pointer.

This power level presents pretty much zero eye risk, according to the rather complex risk calculations I explained at great length in my review of a much more powerful pointer.

A genuine five-milliwatt laser certainly can damage your retina if you stare into it from close range, and it's theoretically possible for glance exposure to cause eye damage at ten to maybe twenty metres, given the beam characteristics of cheap lasers.

A cheap two-milliwatt laser can't possibly hurt your eyes if you're more than ten metres away - probably closer, actually - and the one-milliwatt output you'll get from the very cheapest lasers and from those ubiquitous button-cell keyring lasers when the batteries have more than a few minutes of use on them will probably not hurt you even if you do stare into them at zero range.

Not that you should do it just to see, but the hazard calculations start looking pretty stupid as you drop below 5mW.

Naturally, Australian Customs chose to protect the Australian people from these terrifying devices, by seizing them under subsection 203B(2) of the Customs Act.

(This only the second time this has happened to me. The other time was when Ron Toms tried to send me an inexpensive Airsoft gun along with a box of other toys for review. The Customs guys left me the instruction manual, battery and charger, so I presume they really did incinerate the gun itself.)

Should I wish to contest the seizure, it would appear my first step would be to obtain Form B709B from the Firearms Registry of the New South Wales Police, which I could of course not actually do, after which I would be able to lodge a "B710 Application to the Minister for Permission to Import Weapons", which he would of course not grant.

At least I didn't have to go to bloody Clyde to pick up the package, as I've had to a couple of previous times when Customs were doubtful about something I'd bought.

(The second of those times, the item in question was a Gerber multitool. The nice Customs lady went into the back room to make sure it wasn't actually a switchblade or something. Her experience with tools in general may have been somewhat limited, since she came back bleeding. But she was very good-humoured about it, especially after I gave her one of the Band-Aids I keep in my wallet where less practical, or perhaps just more interesting, people keep a condom.)

This foolishness happened, of course, because a couple of geniuses shone green lasers at planes coming in to land here in New South Wales. And, immediately, our sagacious elected protectors made new laws which caused ordinary laser pointers - including low-powered red ones that have almost no ability to dazzle anyone more than a stone's throw away - to be classed as weapons.

Now, anything with output above one milliwatt is a prohibited import.

Actually, in New South Wales and elsewhere, it would appear that all lasers above one milliwatt output are now Controlled and/or Prohibited Weapons, like military flame throwers and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. The maximum penalty for merely possessing a perfectly normal office laser pointer would, therefore, now appear to be fourteen years in prison.

I'd like to say that I'm sure that a judge would recognise that the assortment of silly ninja weapons and quite inoffensive items - like ordinary handcuffs, for instance, or even a home-made cardboard replica of a Sidewinder missile - that one or another drum-beating politician has added to the list of prohibited weapons, are not the same as an actual working RPG-7. And that of all the ridiculous things on the list, a $2, 2mW, laser pointer may be the most ridiculous.

But you shouldn't be up in front of a judge over just owning a 2mW laser pointer anyway. And, given the way things have been going lately, I don't know how much sanity is left in the system.

You'd think that even the docile beta apes who can be counted on to support frank fascism when presented with the simple stimuli so famously explained by Hermann Goering would, by now, have started to realise that just this once, for the very first time in human history, they are being lied to.

But no. Not so much.

Hating everyone and everything that's slightly different from you still seems to play pretty damn well out in the sticks where they marry their cousins and have sex with the cows. By which I mean, a one hour drive from the Sydney Opera House.

We still do not seem to have reached the point where any electable candidate for public office in Australia - or, of course, in the USA - will come within a hundred miles of saying that making little old ladies take their shoes off is not an essential measure to prevent conquest of the world by radical Islam.

Oh, and do note that while 2mW laser pointers are now super-illegal death rays here in New South Wales - instantly making felons of, what do you reckon, maybe a third of the population? - laser diodes with the same or more power which happen to be part of ultrasonic tape-measures, laser levels, Blu-Ray players, barcode scanners or any of approximately one billion other classes of device are all still perfectly legal, and expected to stay that way. Because we all know that terrorists do not own screwdrivers, or know how to find Instructables.com.

I remind you, at this juncture, that Wicked Lasers and their spin-off TechLasers continue to offer a 100% delivery guarantee for lasers the size of a billy-club that cost a thousand dollars and have at least a few hundred times the output power of the ones Customs seized from me.

Techlasers have a "100% Money Back Guarantee if for ANY reason your product cannot be delivered to your door, no questions asked", while Wicked Lasers will give you your money back plus a hundred dollars if a laser doesn't make it to you.

So I think it's safe to say that Australian Customs isn't perfectly watertight as regards even lasers with which you could beat a man to death.

But they sure confiscated the hell out of those cat toys of mine. Well done, lads!

The only even slightly rational justification for the new laws is that it's now possible for police to confiscate a laser from you if you cannot give a good reason for having it on your person. So the cops don't have to prove that this particular dork they just caught is the same one who was shining a laser at an air ambulance an hour ago, and can at least take his laser away even if they can't charge him with anything.

(Although the 1mW legal limit seems to mean they can charge you with a serious offence just for owning almost any laser pointer. Does anybody know whether this has actually been done yet?)

But even if you feel that this particular security-versus-freedom trade-off is a fair one, it doesn't justify stopping everybody else from even buying a plain old $2 cat-toy laser.

I, for the record, do not believe this to be a fair trade-off. There are similar laws here in New South Wales covering knives; if you cannot give a good reason for having even a tiny Swiss Army knife in your pocket if challenged by a policeman, he can confiscate it. But it is easy to justify having any normal sort of pocket-knife, and I do not strongly object to confiscation of a steak knife from some goon wandering around outside the cinemas on George Street in Sydney on a Saturday night, whether or not he's actually suspected of doing or intending to do something bad with it.

I don't think the knife laws have actually achieved a damn thing, but I also don't think they're a great assault upon our freedom, since all they really do is increase the number of ways a policeman can make your life miserable, if he chooses, from a million to a million and one.

The NSW laser ban, in contrast, is an excellent example of the new wave of arbitrary, fear-based laws to Protect the People from the Movie-Plot Tactics of the Scary Domestic Terrorists who Don't Actually Exist.

The practical results of the ban, despite the outrageous classification of harmless tiny lasers as being like flamethrowers, appear to be mundane and minor; nobody's being hauled off to be tortured in Syria over possession of Laser-Guided Scissors.

But I think the mundanity of the ban is what makes it a particularly good example of the Death by a Thousand (Laser-Guided Scissor!) Cuts that's being suffered by the civil liberties of citizens of Western nations.

One little thing after another's being taken away, none of them a big deal by themselves. Day by day, it further restricts the kind of life that's legally permissible, and makes us more and more accustomed to living in this slowly-tightening straitjacket. The idea is to make us all keep our heads down and do anything and everything we're told, lest we slightly annoy a policeman and then actually be charged with some of the new and ridiculous "crimes" which we cannot avoid committing.

Posted in Strange Tales, Toys. 55 Comments »

News flash: Fuel cell even more forgettable than I thought!

9 September 2008 — dan

The other day, I concluded that the Medis 24-7 Power Pack fuel-cell gadget-charger wasn't a very interesting product, based on its specifications. The spec sheet didn't make it look as if the fuel cell could do anything you couldn't do with much cheaper conventional batteries.

I'm now indebted to blogger Techskeptic, a man after my own heart except less lazy. He, as he mentions in the comments for the original Medis post, actually bought some Medis power packs and tested them thoroughly.

The results are explained in great detail in Techskeptic's final testing report, replete with the kind of graphs that I only bother to make when I'm testing something completely hilarious.

Techskeptic tested three Medis Power Packs, and found that they actually managed to deliver only about nine to 13 watt-hours into real loads. Medis claim twenty watt-hours in their literature, and it's that figure on which I based my own unimpressed response.

So these things actually appear to be even worse than they seemed.

The lousy real-world performance could be due in part to Medis optimistically listing the amount of energy the fuel cell actually (sorta-kinda) delivers on the sticker, rather than the amount of energy that makes it out of the Power Pack, down the cable and into the device you're charging. There's a DC-to-DC converter, you see, that takes the very low output voltage of the fuel cell (less than one volt) and boosts it to a gadget-charging level. And that converter turned out to be only about 70% efficient at best. Into a one-watt load, it dropped to about 60%.

So Techskeptic concluded that the Medis device didn't even beat a pack of six alkaline AAs. Actually, you'd probably get better results than the fuel cell if you hooked a similar voltage-booster up to a single humble D battery.

(Little kits to make that sort of converter, usually to allow you to replace low-capacity 9V batteries with beefier but lower-voltage cells, have been around for ages. Here's one that'll boost the output of two cells to 9V; I'm sure I've seen single-cell versions as well, but can't find one right now.)

So Medis' numbers would appear to be, at best, sort of like the old gross horsepower measurements that told you how much power a nude engine - no transmission, no air filter, no exhaust system, no alternator, no nothin' - on a test-stand once managed to deliver. This did not have very much to do with the amount of power that would make it to the rear wheels of a car powered by the same model of engine.

Posted in Electricity, Nerdery. 4 Comments »

Light-Bulbs Of DOOOOOOMMMM!

4 September 2008 — dan

I just got an image-use request from the rather interesting NowPublic news site. They wanted to use one of my pictures of my 85-watt compact fluorescent to illustrate this article, about the dangers of mercury exposure from broken compact fluorescent lamps.

As regular readers would expect, I said no, and started in on an interminable explanation of why. It got long enough that I turned it into this blog post.

Executive summary: The second you read someone saying that metallic mercury is an incredibly potent neurotoxin, you know you're looking at bullshit.

ORGANIC mercury compounds are indeed ultra-poisonous, but metallic mercury quite simply is not. It ain't good for you; there ain't no Vitamin C in there. But breathing a bit of metallic mercury vapour really is not a big deal.

And the amount of metallic mercury in a domestic CFL is tiny - only a few milligrams. And it's all likely to be in the vapour state. So if you break the bulb anywhere with remotely normal indoor ventilation levels, the vapour will just blow away, in minutes at most. You'd have to smash the bulb and immediately stick your nose into the shards and inhale to get any measurable mercury dose at all.

If there were epidemiological support for the idea then the lack of a plausible mechanism of action wouldn't matter so much, but there isn't, especially after you filter out the unsourced ravings of people who're sure that tiny mercury doses from fillings or vaccinations cause every disease under the sun.

(Fools! Don't they know it's really aspartame we should be worrying about?!)

The NowPublic piece does have a source for the idea that tiny non-chronic metallic mercury exposure is bad for humans; it's the "study of workers" mentioned at the top of the article.

That study is not, by the way, the same as the "Maine scientific study" the article mentions next, which in fact concluded that existing cleanup methods were OK.

The "study of workers" is quoted hither and yon, but usually, as in this case, without a footnote saying where and when it was actually published.

It was published in the journal "Environmental Research" in 1993; here's the abstract. The study was done by the Department of Occupational Health at Shanghai Medical University, and it concluded that exposure to 33,000 nanograms of mercury per cubic metre of air seemed to have a measurable effect on people's mental abilities, with only a very small chance that this difference was a mere fluke.

But the average duration of exposure in the Shanghai study was TEN-POINT-FOUR YEARS.

The Maine study, I remind you, considered a "short excursion" of mercury concentration above 25,000 nanograms per cubic metre, as a result of a broken CFL, to be large. It found contamination briefly reaching more than 100,000 nanograms per cubic metre was "possible", but presumably didn't actually manage to measure it, on account of the very brief duration of such contamination as the trace of mercury vapour swirled away.

Mercury vapour exposure times from a broken CFL are likely to be measured in minutes, at most. There just isn't enough mercury in a domestic fluorescent lamp to keep a significant volume of air at the Shanghai study's dosage - far above the 300ng/m^3 Maine Ambient Air Guideline - for more than a few minutes.

I mean, even if you've got five milligrams of mercury in your CFL - you probably don't, but let's say you do - then that's five million nanograms, so it can contaminate 151.5 cubic metres of air to 33,000 ng/m3. Open a window or two and a lot more air than that is likely to blow through the room in an hour (the heavy mercury vapour can also just leak out through the floorboards of a "sealed" room). I cannot imagine how someone in a normal domestic or commercial setting could manage to keep the contamination level of a room in the tens of thousands of nanograms per cubic metre level for more than a few minutes, if they've only got a few milligrams of mercury vapour to do it with.

Given that there are more than half a million minutes in a year, I think it's clear that the exposure times in the Shanghai and Maine studies are not even remotely comparable. The NowPublic article puts the results of these two studies right next to each other as if they're both talking about the same thing, and doesn't even tell readers where to find information about the studies so they can discover the imposture.

And, on top of that, the Environmental Research study was just that one study, done by Shanghai Medical University fifteen years ago. There've been many other studies of chronic low-level mercury exposure, and it's easy to find ones that conclude that it has little to no effect, even after many years. And, I repeat, years of exposure comprise hundred of thousands, and quite possibly millions, of times the mercury exposure you can get by breaking a CFL.

So right now, there does not appear to be any reason to be particularly concerned about breaking even large fluorescent tubes indoors, let alone little CFLs. And the Maine study in fact supports this conclusion, because it found that breaking CFLs cannot create the chronic exposure which the subjects of the Shanghai study had suffered.

So it would appear that the mysterious CFL Bandit is not, in fact, a menace to public safety.

Posted in Science. 27 Comments »

Preparation for the rugged outdoor life I intend never to lead

4 September 2008 — dan

I never go camping, we have very reliable gas for cooking, and there are several overdue reviews I should be working on.

So I, naturally, just made a little camp stove, after reading about it on Cool Tools.

It's called the Super Cat, because it's made from a small cat-food tin. Since this household goes through small cat-food tins so rapidly that I really should have made some sort of belt-feed system for them by now, the raw materials were not difficult to procure.

And all you have to do to make a Super Cat is poke some holes in said tin.

That's it. You're done.

And it really does work. Mine worked perfectly first try, getting three cups of water from 15°C to a rolling boil in about seven minutes, which is when it ran out of its first shot-glass of methylated spirits (denatured alcohol) fuel. It won't work that well if there's a breeze or it's colder, but a couple of cups quickly boiled per shot of fuel ought to be possible in all sorts of real-world situations.

It's not the safest possible cooker, of course. It'd be easy to set your camp-site, or yourself, on fire if the little tin fell over or the pot on top overbalanced. (You should rest the pot on three rocks, or make a support out of coat-hanger wire or something.) And there's no heat adjustment - it runs full blast for several minutes, then goes out.

But if you're going to cook with an improvised naked-flame device, going with alcohol for fuel is not a bad idea. It doesn't burn hot enough to instantly cook you if you get some of it on you, and you can extinguish it easily with water.

Then again, the flame's invisible in sunlight, which can be a little risky. If you see someone crash a methanol-fueled racing car then leap out and start dancing around and screaming, he may not just be angry.

But c'mon, whaddaya want from a cooker you can make in fifteen minutes by candle-light with only a nail for a tool?

Posted in Hacks, Handicrafts, Toys. 16 Comments »

Firepower link-dump

1 September 2008 — dan

My "what?!" for today was prompted by a Perth Now piece titled, wait for it, "Johnston builds new Firepower".

Yep - Tim Johnston, creator of the whole Firepower debacle, is "...trying to buy Firepower stock and assets for overseas-registered company Green Power Corporation".

(The piece goes on to point out that the Green Power Corporation in question is not this one in Thailand. So don't hassle them unless their Web site suddenly starts sprouting ads for magic fuel pills and/or expensive franchised engine-cleaning machines.)

[UPDATE:: "Firepower chief back to try again". Such grit! Such determination! In the face of such skepticism! The actual newspaper reports are now frankly calling Firepower's products "fake", but that does not deter Mr Johnston!]

While we're all waiting for a more pleasing headline - I suggest "Johnston gets twenty years stamping numberplates for conventionally-powered cars" - here's a selection of other recent coverage of the Firepower saga.

"Anderson in shares scandal" is another Perth Now piece, about the "colourful" Western Australian property developer who apparently bought a bunch of Firepower's not-quite-legally-issued shares and sold them on for a profit of more than four million bucks. (Here's a longer piece from The Australian on this subject. I presume Anderson is still eager to opine that Tim Johnston is not a criminal.)

How much of that four million, and all the other millions poured into getting a share of Firepower's worthless products, can the naïve investors expect to get back, I hear you ask?

That's right: Not a cent. Small investors are, as usual, screwed the hardest.

Firepower's largest single creditor (of a cast of thousands) continues to be Tim's former business partner Ross Graham, who I mentioned in this post.

The Firepower site still says Ross was very pleased to be involved with Firepower, on account of its amazingly valuable products and rock-solid business fundamentals - but what he's actually doing now is spending another hundred thousand bucks to get a liquidator of his choice appointed to the now-very-dead company, so as to maximise the chance that he'll get back at least a little of the ten million bucks he says he's owed.

I continue to wish Ross no luck at all in this venture. If you take an active role in a scam and then find that you're one of the people that ends up ripped off, you deserve what you got.

(Previously, there were hopes that Firepower could somehow be "rescued". Those hopes were of course dashed. The idea that Firepower was even worth rescuing was based on the incorrect assumption that the Firepower products were good for something, and not just the latest version of an old, old scam. That same scam had been run by the same guy on previous occasions, for Pete's sake.)

Slightly earlier: Firepower financial info 'goes missing'. Apparently Firepower kept some rather important salary information on one computer, with no backups. That computer apparently, like the Luggage, followed Tim Johnston to his current undisclosed, but probably lavishly furnished, location.

Said undisclosed location apparently has rather unreliable telephone service. Tim hasn't even been able to talk to creditors on the phone.

My occasional correspondent Gerard Ryle, still working on his book about the Firepower story, wrote "Firepower collapse fallout" for the Sydney Morning Herald. Apparently the sportspeople and teams who got stiffed for sponsorship money Firepower owed them, and the other sporting schmucks who invested in Firepower and lost the lot, were the lucky ones.

The unlucky ones are the ones who actually got money from Firepower - after it was already insolvent. They have of course generally spent that money, but may now have to repay it, because the creditors want it.

There's a point worth making: It's not even safe to accept payment from a rip-off artist. If the money he pays you turns out to not have been his to give, you can end up in a much worse situation than if he hadn't paid you at all.

Earlier, Tim Johnston was "reported to the Australian Securities and Investment Commission for further investigation". I expect ASIC to take three, or maybe seven, years to generate a very thorough report indeed on the several most reliable ways in which stable doors might, in future, be bolted.

To be fair, ASIC apparently started investigating Firepower late last year, after previously ignoring warnings. And shady companies like Firepower can pretty much always slither past government regulators for a while, partly because they simply don't file any of the legally-required paperwork, and so don't appear on the regulators' radar until plenty of suckers have already paid up. But it wasn't until July this year that they took real concrete action. Casual basketball fans figured the situation out earlier than that.

So it really does seem that ASIC were very slow to react to the quite obvious shonkiness of this very high-profile company. I suppose the fact that Firepower had leverage with Austrade didn't hurt.

Posted in Cars, Firepower, Scams. 4 Comments »

Miracle Juice or Alien Race?

1 September 2008 — dan

In the shadowy netherworld of multi-level marketing, a lot of people are trying to sell juice.

It isn't ordinary juice, though. You wouldn't get far trying to shift orange, apple or grape juice via the trapezoid. The same multiple commission stages that make Amway floor polish too expensive would crank the price of your juice up far past the supermarket price of similar products.

The juice the network-marketers are trying to sell is much more special. Allegedly. It's usually from one or another improbably-named tropical tree or Chinese berry, and it's supposed to be good for what ails you.

Not that the companies that make the juices will say that. Oh, no. They're all hiding behind the US Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994, a.k.a. the DSHEA, which allows makers of "nutritional supplements" to sell pretty much whatever they like, without being required to prove efficacy or safety. As long as they don't make any therapeutic claims.

The great thing about multi-level marketing, for the people behind these programs, is that they can stay clean and avoid making illegal claims about their "dietary supplements", while their desperate-for-a-buck "distributors" say all sorts of outrageous things to try to shift product. It's like the white-van speaker racket, where a company brings crappy speakers with names similar to those of real speaker companies into the country, then hands them over to the guys in the vans. And, at the end of the day, takes their (large) share of the money. The speaker importers, like the MLM "supplement" companies, take pains to point out that they can in no way be blamed for what certain bad apples among their distributor base may do to turn product into profit.

Somehow, this promotional card ended up in our house. It's obviously for a US program; I think it got to us here in Australia packed into a box with an eBay purchase.

This card is perfectly representative of the basic claims made for the phalanx of MLM miracle juices. Apart from ticks for a few of the boxes on the Twenty-Five Ways to Spot Quacks and Vitamin Pushers list, there's:

* Indistinct-enough-to-be-legal health claims.
* A frank statement that this miracle juice is better than all of the other miracle juices. (I'm pretty sure they all say this. It's like the Caliph whose wives were each more beautiful than the last.)
* MAKE BIG $$$MONEY$$$!!! CALL NOW!!!!

This particular juice has a strangely normal name, "Vibe". Close analysis of the better-than-everyone-else part, though, will turn up three of the big names in this field: "Xango" (I'm sorry - "XanGo"), "Goji" and "Noni".

And there's more. "Vemma" (which is allegedly based on mangosteen juice, like XanGo), "Monavie", "Zrii", "NingXia" and "eXfuze". And probably more; that's just all I could Google up before I got bored.

All of these juices are probably better, at least, than Kinoki foot pads, because they do actually have some nutritive value. But the reason why they're supposed to be worth more per bottle than quite fancy wine is that they're all allegedly made from "superfruits". Those are edible (in some cases only technically...) fruits or berries with unusually high "ORAC" scores.

The proud statement that this juice is "ORAC Certified" at first, of course, caused me to think that the Respectful Insolence guy was running a little sideline in dietary supplements. But it's actually talking about "Oxygen Radical Absorption Capacity" measurement. In this case, from "Brunswick Labs".

Surprisingly enough, the ORAC test is actually a real one, and it's quite possible that Brunswick Labs, despite a plethora of not-quite-medical claims on their own Web site, are quite kosher and actually doing real ORAC tests. They don't, at least, look like one of those pure quack-labs that'll analyse a sample of your hair and invariably then discover that you're in life-threatening need of whatever service is provided by the alternative practitioner who commissioned the test.

High ORAC values tell you that there are lots of antioxidants in a given foodstuff. It's common knowledge that antioxidants are terribly good for you, and especially good at slowing the aging process. There's not actually much reason to suppose that this is in fact the case, but common knowledge does not appear to care.

Result: Umpteen funny-named MLM-sold super-expensive ultra-juices that do not necessarily do anything for you that a glass of far cheaper OJ won't.

(And if you buy orange juice instead, you probably won't be endlessly pestered by whoever sold it to you to start selling it yourself, so you can get your share of the failure.)

Here's the other side of the Vibe promotional card:

"Just ONE POTENT OUNCE OF VIBE is EQUIVALENT to nutriends** found in..."

That double-asterisk is presumably supposed to direct you to the two single-asterisk notes about Brunswick Labs ORAC testing, but neither of them explains what a "nutriend" is.

Such amazing nutrient levels don't actually necessarily sound like something you'd want, anyway. Apart from the well-established fact that taking lots of vitamins generally just gives you very expensive wee, one ounce of this stuff is supposed to give you "11 tomatoes worth of vitamin A".

One medium whole tomato should give you 20 per cent of your daily Vitamin A requirement. So slurping down tons more of that vitamin may give you something in common with Douglas Mawson.

(The juice-pushers will, of course, tell you that the Recommended Daily Allowances for vitamins are far too low. I refer you, once more, to the Twenty-Five Ways.)

And then there's "30 broccoli". 30 broccoli whats? The tiny little florets? 30 stalks from ground level up? 30 pounds?

And "Certified Organic Aloe Vera Gel", quantity not specified. But since I don't think anybody's ever demonstrated aloe to have any particular nutritional constituents that can't be found in greater concentrations in something that doesn't taste nearly as horrible, I presume a little goes a long way.

And so on.

But don't worry - even though it's so darn packed with nutrients, drinking Vibe will somehow make you thinner... on account of how "energized" you'll be!

("More energy" would appear one of those just-fuzzy-enough claims that "supplement" companies love to toss around. Searching Google for "more energy" juice mlm currently turns up well over 10,000 hits. Some of these MLM-ed supplements are packed to the gills with caffeine and not-necessarily-legal-any-more ephedra, of course, but I doubt that's the case for most of the super-juices.)

It's the names of all these miracle juices that really get to me, though.

Xango! Zrii! Goji! Vemma!

Someone should make a "Multilevel-Marketed Miracle Juice or Star Trek Alien Race?" page, like the "Porn Star or My Little Pony?" one.

Posted in Scams, Science. 4 Comments »

Yet more SupCom destruction-orgy eye-candy

30 August 2008 — dan

This video - self-effacing announcement post here, 261Mb high-definition version here - features pretty much all of the new units in the current version of Supreme Commander, which is pretty neat by itself, especially in the HD version.

But it also rips off the Megadeth Duke Nukem theme, recently featured in an incredibly moronic Duke Nukem trailer. Which, for those out of the loop, was just a clip-art slideshow from older Duke Nukem games.

But it had pretty great music.

So here that music is, along with something far better to look at.

Posted in Games, Nerdery. 1 Comment »

An excellent, and simultaneously terrible, tool

26 August 2008 — dan

The P-38 can opener is something of a design classic. Tiny, inexpensive and extremely reliable, it's been cracking cans open since the Second World War.

But I'd never even seen one, and was interested to find out how well this iconic military tool actually worked.

So I bought four of 'em, for $US2.25 plus $US4.50 postage to me here in Australia, from this eBay seller. Their only sin was that they packed a worthless cell-phone booster sticker in with the can openers. But that was free.

(Here that seller is on ebay.com instead of ebay.com.au.)

[UPDATE: That seller's gone now, but there are tons of other eBay dealers with P-38s and their larger cousins, P-51s, for sale.]

Herewith, my in-depth review of the P-38:

It does, indeed, open cans.

It does so quantifiably better than would a sewing needle, a rubber chicken, or a silver dollar.

Opening a can with a P-38 is, I'm fairly sure, on the whole generally preferable to starving to death.

The P-38 is, however, a quite serious pain to use. Clip onto can rim, twist hard to make initial puncture, slide a little, twist again. Repeat many times. It requires considerable strength, and you can just feel the repetitive strain injury growing in your hand.

But the P-38 is only an inch and a half long, folds flat, weighs close to nothing, and can be manufactured in great quantities very cheaply. Given these limitations, I can't imagine how you could make a more elegant or effective opener for all sorts of cans.

So, fair enough. Case closed, right?

Wrong.

I'm told, you see, that P-38-type can openers are actually the normal kind of opener, for everyday domestic purposes and not just camping and the military, in some countries. Finland, for instance, and apparently also Brazil.

The versions they use are generally non-folding solid-metal types...

...which are more durable than the lightweight P-38, and are often also a bit bigger, for better leverage and less pain. (There's a larger version of the P-38 as well, called the P-51.)

But, based on my experience with the P-38, I'm here to tell you that making this same device somewhat larger and from one piece of heavier metal will not solve its serious problems.

This sort of opener is a bloody awful thing to have to use.

Why in heaven's name would significant portions of the population of any even slightly affluent country prefer it, and - as is apparently also the case in Finland and Brazil - often believe that the much faster and far easier-to-use turn-the-knob "rotary" type of can opener is likely to be an unreliable piece of crap?

Well, unreliable-piece-of-crap rotary can openers definitely do exist. There's one in this house, which I've had to use when I couldn't find the MagiCan.

Even though that crappy opener tends to lose the thread and have to be restarted a couple of times to puncture the lid all the way around, though, I solemnly attest that it is still better than the P-38. I think it'd beat a bigger, one-piece P-51-type opener too, though that might be a close-run thing.

You do not, however, have to spend a lot of money to get a rotary opener which, like the MagiCan, will open many hundreds, if not many thousands, of cans quickly, easily and completely reliably.

Yes, electric can openers for domestic use are stupid if you're not afflicted with arthritis or severely short of the most popular number of fingers, and the very cheapest dollar-store clones of the good rotary openers are not reliable.

But the can-opener design problem has been a thoroughly solved one for many years now. For the first half-century of the history of the can, they were made from such thick metal that no hand-held opener short of a hammer and chisel would do to open one. It didn't take terribly long after the metal got thinner for a variety of purpose-built openers to be designed, though. The first rotary opener was invented in 1870.

If people in Finland and Brazil think that a P-38-ish opener may perhaps open even more cans, without breaking, than a high-quality rotary type, then I suppose they may be right. But the number of cans you'd have to open with your twisty spiky thing to see the difference would, I think, have long since led you to employ that pointy little blade to slit your own throat.

I invite enlightenment on this subject from any readers who live in places where twist-spike openers are the norm.

(If you want to buy a P-38, they start from approximately no dollars on eBay. The P-38's larger and less painful cousin, the P-51, is also easy to find on eBay, for approximately no dollars plus 20 per cent.)

Posted in MiniReviews, Strange Tales, Toys. 34 Comments »

« Older posts

Newer posts »