How To Spot A Psychopath

When you toss a coin, you expect it to land heads or tails. Not on its edge.

Similarly, when two aeroplanes run into each other, you expect each of them to subsequently either land, or crash. If they thwack into each other hard enough that they cannot be separated, it is thoroughly unreasonable to expect the resultant agglomeration to do anything other than spin into the ground.

But sometimes the coin lands on its edge.

These fun glasses for kids contain low grade “starburst” diffraction gratings.

You can use them to examine the emission spectra of different light sources, which tells you about their colour rendering, which in turn helps you pick lights which give more natural output. Such lights are nicer to have around your home than lights with poor colour rendering, and they can also assist you in serious colour-critical tasks such as telling your jelly beans apart.

I’ve bought a few optically superior diffraction gratings from this eBay seller, and it’s fun looking at lights through them and shining lasers through them and so on. The ones in the kiddy-specs are uncalibrated (measure the spacing yourself!) and a bit cloudier, but they’re also big enough to cover both eyes, and they get the job done well enough.

“The job”, defined.

The light in the above picture is a normal halogen downlight, so its diffraction spectrum is a smooth rainbow, like sunlight or a candle flame. Lights with a lower colour rendering index have different spectra, and diffraction glasses make that easy to see.

This is my giant compact fluorescent, which is alleged to have an eighty-plus CRI (where 100 is perfection), but which doesn’t look that great to me. There’s a smear of blue, probably indicating at least a bit of output colour range from the blue phosphor - perhaps a darker and a lighter blue on top of each other. But then there’s quite distinct sub-images of the lamp in green and red, suggesting that it’s got quite narrow output in those ranges.

But it sure is bright, as low-CRI lights tend to be; the classic “triphosphor” fluorescent lamp is still popular, because it’s cheap and very high efficiency. It makes everybody look like corpses, but that’s just the price you pay.

(I probably would have got a better shot of the big CFL from further away. It’s so large that its sub-images overlap a lot at this distance.)

A normal modern “warm white” compact fluorescent lamp (CFL), flanked by a half-burned-out LED lamp of no particular distinction.

You can see quite distinct violet, blue, green, orange and red diffraction images, each of which ought to correspond to a phosphor flavour. Generally speaking, the more phosphor colours, the better the CRI.

Some good images from that lamp in close-up.

A different CFL. I count four bright phosphors, plus two or three dimmer ones filling out the spectrum.

Yet another CFL. Maybe only four phosphor colours in this one.

And, finally, another of those LED lamps, which really aren’t a very interesting product - the only reason to use LED lamps for general lighting so far is if you want something that’ll last 25 years, and these cheap Chinese lamps can’t be counted on to last 25 days.

It’s a nice spectrum, though. This is a normal “cool white” shade of white LED, created by putting a mixed phosphor layer over a naturally blue LED die. The result has quite good colour rendering.

I took all of these pictures with the little C6, by the way. It’s got a physically small lens, which makes it good for taking pictures through other things, like these glasses, or telescopes, or whatever.

…of things that you wouldn’t find at all remarkable if they were to fly past your office window, how about this?

It’s only about 17 feet long. You’d hardly notice it.

Zeppelin ballet.

An earlier attempt from the same guy.

The cats. Would go. Completely berserk.

I suppose the Flytech Dragonfly is more of an entothopter than an ornithopter, technically.

There’s a lot of porpoising, but it flies quite well, for a (expected-to-be) pretty inexpensive and durable toy.

This is much more elegant, but also far more fragile.

This bird’s pretty much got it down, but I bet it’s not cheap.

This one’s cheating.

You can start ornithoptering with free-flight (no remote control) rubber power…

…(note cat in this video that wants nothing whatsoever to do with the thing), then move on to something fancier…

Full-scale versions are about as practical as you’d expect:

There’s something to be cherished in those moments when people in positions of authority decide it’s time to make perfectly clear that they shouldn’t be.

So I’m happy to report that one Lionel Milgrom, on the Board of Directors of the UK Society of Homeopaths, is now, officially and unquestionably, a whiny little liar.

I was going to e-mail him and ask him why he hasn’t apologised for what I originally presumed to be, I don’t know, an e-mail sent while drunk or something, but apparently all you can expect from him in return is abuse, so I think I’ll give it a miss.

This isn’t really news, of course. Professional apologists for orthodox homeopathy must, like professional apologists for young-earth creationism, be able to accept the complete wrongness, and indeed frank dishonesty, of the basic arguments they present, and yet come out swinging again the next day as if nothing has happened. Anybody with enough moral fibre that they can’t stomach doing that is naturally replaced by someone who can. It’s like politics.

(I ramble on about homeopathy here and here.)

XXL Bio-Fuel Enhancer is an amazing development from Malaysia, where there are many palm oil plantations and palm oil costs very little. And where, by means of a secret refining process, it turns out that one can convert this palm oil into “XXL nano-molecules that can crack and reform hydrocarbon molecules in fossil fuels into high quality, powerful fuel molecules that contain vast amounts of energy and oxygen”!

And all you need is one drop per litre! Which is good, because now the palm oil costs, I don’t know, a hundred times as much? More?

See? It’s just that simple!

And in absolutely no way a gigantic pile of bollocks!

Don’t listen to those people who foolishly suggest that breaking molecular bonds to turn a compound into another with greater combustion energy is difficult without, you know, some kind of energy input. Not to mention anybody who points out that when your fuel molecules already have oxygen in them, that means they’re already partially oxidised, which means you get less energy when you burn them (that, essentially, is why alcohols have less energy per litre than hydrocarbons).

Presumably one should be careful not to add too much XXL Bio-Fuel Enhancer to one’s fuel tank, lest it crack all of the bonds in the gasoline hydrocarbons and leave you with a fuel tank full of charcoal, and a cloud of hydrogen floating away into the sky.

Here’s something you don’t see every day.

It is, however, exactly what it looks like - a metal casting that’s been poured in a mould made of Lego. Plain Lego bricks are, of course, made from ABS plastic, whose melting point is a bit above 200 degrees Celsius.

There are lines on the side of the casting that give the impression that it’s made out of bricks itself, but they’re from the bricks that moulded it - the metal is all one piece.

You could even make actual metal Lego bricks this way, if you wanted to. Just make a rubber mould of the brick, and pour the metal into that.

The reason why it was possible - easy, in fact - for me to do this without instantly destroying the mould and setting fire to the kitchen is that the metal is Wood’s metal, a bismuth-based eutectic alloy. Its melting point is only 70 degrees Celsius, and the “eutectic” part means it melts and freezes as you’d expect a normal substance to, at one temperature, rather than having one component of the alloy remaining solid or liquid while the other changes state.

Anyway, you can melt Wood’s metal in boiling water - or in a beaker sitting in some boiling water, which is what I did. Then I just poured it into the mould and left it to sit.

Here’s the casting, removed from the Lego and with the bits of flashing where the metal flowed into the gaps between bricks broken off.

Never has a brick separator been more useful. I needed pliers to get the two 2-by-1 bricks out, though.

There are a couple of obvious voids in the side of the casting, because I didn’t agitate the mould to bounce bubbles out of it. It’s usually a good idea to pre-heat casting moulds, too; the Lego was only at room temperature.

For a first attempt, though, this really isn’t bad.

It’s close enough that if I wanted to put it back together with the Lego, it’d actually matter whether the “LEGO” stamped on the tops of the blocks was the right way around.

Wood’s metal isn’t very hard or strong, so you can’t use it for most serious casting purposes. Because it’s got lead and cadmium in it, you should also be a bit careful with it, though if you wash your hands afterwards and refrain from eating any of it, you should be fine (the other constituents are bismuth and tin, both of which are safe enough; Wood’s metal overall is far less dangerous than mercury). But you can still use it for, for instance, casting up temporary holders for odd-shaped things on which you want to perform machining operations, or filling fragile tubes before you bend them. Just pour boiling water over the thing afterwards to get the Wood’s metal out.

Back on the Lego kick, Wood’s metal is pretty dense, so you could use it to increase the weight of existing bricks. This could come in handy if you were, for instance, competing in a Lego robot sumo contest and didn’t have any of the very rare official lead-weighted bricks to make your ‘bot heavier. More practically, it’s a casting alloy that you could pour into the nose of a model plane, or something, to easily put weight where it’s needed.

Wood’s metal is easy to buy from metalworking suppliers and on eBay. The stuff I got is allegedly a more precisely measured mixture than the cheaper bulk versions, which may or may not have justified its somewhat higher price; I got it from this eBay dealer, but they don’t have any on sale as I write this.

After I said rude things about an incoherently promoted automotive gadget in this letters column (as usual, it promised to give you better fuel economy, more power, and anything else they could fit on the page), one of the people who worked there sent me an e-mail.

He was, thankfully, not threatening to sue me (unlike some people mentioned in that same column…), but he did say that it was their policy to only charge customers who agree that they “feel the difference”.

He asked me if I’d ever heard of a scammer who offered this level of service. He has not replied to me since I told him “yes, just about all of them”.

Money-back guarantees are, actually, absolutely standard in this field. I’m sure some of those guarantees are fake, but they seldom need to be. People who’re willing to buy a quantum dimensional vortex optimiser for their car’s fuel line are also people who’re likely to “feel the difference” from it, even when there isn’t any actual difference to feel.

I often link to Tony Cains’ excellent Guide to Fuel Saving when I’m talking about these kinds of gadgets (and fuel additives), because he’s pretty much got the whole field covered. His page about the dangers of testimonial evidence is particularly relevant, to both this specific issue and the general subject of bogus products in which people believe.

I think the most mysterious phenomenon it’s possible to create in a domestic microwave oven is the (deservedly famous) Glowing Humming Plasma Amoeba.

It’s not hard to do. Put something smouldering, like a lit-and-blown-out toothpick, under a disposable glass or jar inside the microwave. Turn on.

Enjoy.

(Plain old flames are meant to work, too, but I haven’t had any luck.)

It may have excellent comic timing, though.

(There are plenty more where these came from.)

Stuff I Did Years Ago But Am Only Blogging About Now:

I microwaved a light bulb.

I took pretty ordinary pictures of it at the time, but in this modern age, it’s easy to find video of this trick…

…among others.

The milk is not actually specifically necessary, though it is a good idea to put a glass with some water in it in the oven along with anything weird you intend to nuke, so that the microwave can sink some energy in the water. A light bulb or CD or grape or whatever looks like nothing to a microwave oven, and it’s not good for them to run them empty.

Bill Beaty’s Unwise Microwave Oven Experiments remains the classic reference on this subject.