How To Spot A Psychopath

Using a roof ventilator as a wind turbine (I think this is the home site of the video creators) is a neat idea. It’d really work, and make a great science fair project - just hook up a little brush motor to the rotor, connect an LED (or several) to it, and see how much wind you need before your LED pops.

This design will not, however, really give the advertised “cheap” power on a dollars per watt basis, since I doubt you could put more than a few watts of generator braking on one of those roof turbines without stalling it in anything short of a gale.

A roof-ventilator turbine could still be useful for charging a battery to run minor stuff occasionally, like a radio and a small light in a shed somewhere where the wind blows but the sun doesn’t shine much. Or as a supplemental charger for a system that has a solar panel as well. Plus, you could still use it as a roof ventilator.

There’s a reason why you don’t see a lot of vertical turbines, though. Yes, they’re simple - most importantly, you don’t need a mechanism to make them face into the wind, and power take-off is very easy when you’ve got a simple vertical shaft to work with - but they just don’t work very well. This is not just because they don’t suck as much energy out of the air as a propeller-type turbine does (see also: Paddle-Wheels, And Why We Don’t Use A Lot Of Them Any More), but also because they usually don’t turn fast enough.

Slow-turning turbines can be good if you want to direct-drive a pump or something, but generators usually want more RPM, and gearing up a wind turbine is a great way to make it stall.

There are other vertical turbine designs that’re very quick to make and have a lot more blade area for the wind to push on. The “Savonius” versions made from oil drums cut in half (technically, roof ventilators are a multi-bladed Savonius turbine) are the price/performance winners for small jobs, I think. But the world is not short of other ideas.

There are also commercial vertical turbine designs, the domestic-sized versions of which have a tendency to be scams.

Tank neat. Diorama neater.

Also: Here are some tentacles.

And, furthermore: The Tank-Pod!

The cool kids appear to have moved on from the separate season torrents for The Secret Life Of Machines/The Office (previously), and are now sharing an all-in-one torrent. You can get it, for instance, here. If that one’s dead now, hit ScrapeTorrent or something to find it.

The all-in-one torrent contains the exact same video files, so there’s nothing new to see here if you’ve got these ordinary-but-watchable rips already. If you’re at 86% on one of the other series and are wondering what happened to all the seeds, though, here’s your answer.

More fancy footwork from the good folk of Firepower (previously).

Oh, and Firepower’s chief executive apparently had something to do, at least peripherally, with the AWB’s delectable handing over of $AU290 million in humanitarian funds to Saddam Hussein, to use for his own no doubt very philanthropic purposes. Lots of other people paid these kickbacks as well, in order to get their slice of the pre-Gulf-War-2 Iraq pie. But thanks to AWB Limited, we Aussies were the single biggest contributor.

This has, therefore, been something of a scandal down here in Oz-land, despite the government’s insistence that it didn’t happen and was no big deal anyway and had nothing to do with them and they didn’t know about it and even though they did know about it there was nothing they could do.

(Back in June last year, by the way, the Sydney Morning Herald were suckered by Firepower’s tall tales about death threats from oil interests over Firepower’s amazing, and amazingly untested, fuel saving products. So they’re probably a bit annoyed now.)

From one of my recent favourite sites (the homopolar motor’s a classic), there’s now this response to the subject of yesterday’s post:

Dry ice can be had from various places. The Evil Mad Scientists apparently got theirs at the grocery store, but industrial gas suppliers, catering joints, ice cream wholesalers and so on can be useful if your grocery store ain’t that hip.

Hit the phone book - suppliers of water ice may sell dry ice too, and should know where you can get it if they don’t. It’ll keep for a while if you put it in an unsealed (that’s important) cooler/Esky in your domestic freezer (and probably save you some electricity, since it’ll keep the freezer cool all by itself - dry ice is a useful emergency measure if you’ve got a broken fridge full of valuable food, or there’s a lengthy power outage, and aberrant cables are not an option).

All the dry ice is for, in this case, is the creation of a blanket of cold carbon dioxide. So it’s conceivable that you could substitute in some other CO2 source. A welding CO2 tank set to just trickle the gas out, for instance, or a similarly restricted fire extinguisher (CO2 extinguishers can also be used to very wastefully make a little pile of dry ice, as can be seen in one of the Secret Life of Machines episodes).

Or even, possibly, ye olde bicarbonate of soda and vinegar.

Don’t expect a little soda and vinegar to make enough CO2 to be useful for this trick. But a whole kilo box of bicarb in the bottom of a bucket, with a couple of litres of the supermarket’s finest, cheapest white vinegar dumped on it, might do the trick. Ice cubes to cool the gas and encourage it to make an orderly layer may or may not help further.

The soda-vinegar reaction can also be used as a pressure source to power rockets.

Add a giant wobbly solar bag (which is filled with air, not CO2), and you’ve got a grand day out.

A reader suggested to me that this demonstration of the density of sulfur hexafluoride gas was cool.

I concur.

(As normal for gases denser than air, talking with a lungful of sulfur hexafluoride does indeed make your voice deeper, the opposite of the “helium effect”. Been there, done that.)

Some more from the Bonn Physics Show:

This is essentially the same principle as is used by thermal lances.

Note the pale blueness of liquid oxygen. And the gratuitous use of the Terminator theme.

On the subject of unlicensed music…

…nerds will be nerds.

Find more, including a bloke in a Faraday cage, the Doppler effect demonstrated by swinging a speaker around your head, a liquid nitrogen bomb, hydrodynamic propulsion and the good old ping-pong balls and mousetraps, here.

A reader asked me what I thought of Nokia’s N73 and Sony Ericsson’s K800i, two fancy mobile phones with autofocus 3.2-megapixel cameras in them, which make them quite different from the awful crunchy fixed-focus phone-cams of old.

(Note: Picture not to scale. I just stuck two press photos together.)

I can’t honestly say that I can recommend either of them.

I thought they both looked pretty decent when I started writing this, and I still agree that they’re better than run-of-the-mill cameraphones. But I think you’d have to place an unreasonably high premium on single-unit integration to make them really worth having - especially considering how much they cost (immediately when purchased outright, or eventually in service fees).

This isn’t to say that either of them are rubbish, though.

Most of the sample pics I can find from the N73 look OK. There are some problems, though. The N73 doesn’t seem to have a huge amount of exposure latitude, so you get blown-out highlights in a lot of pictures:

(Click through to the larger versions to see what you’re meant to be paying for in these more expensive cam-phones.)

When there’s less image brightness variation to worry about, though, it’s quite good:

Note that it’s doing the standard consumer-camera thing of punching up colour saturation in every image…

…which can sometimes combine with exposure problems in unfortunate ways:

…but, by and large, it seems to be up there with lots of OK cheap compact digicams.

Except for the lack of optical zoom, of course.

One other pitfall in many consumer cameras is that they have lousy light-gathering ability - a high minimum F-number. Since small-sensor digicams also can’t do high ISO settings without lots of noise, this can matter a lot for many ordinary medium-to-low-light situations, including most indoor photography.

Nokia don’t seem to even publish the F-number for the N73’s lens, which is extremely remiss of them; I had to look at the press photo of the lens to read the “2.8/5.6″ from around it.

I presume that means it can do f2.8 wide open and f5.6 with an aperture reduction doodad switched in, and that’s it. That means max aperture f2.8, focal length 5.6mm (real focal lengths for small-sensor cameras with reasonable field of view are very small; that’s why they’re usually specified in the marketing bumfodder with “35mm equivalent” focal length specifications, which leave purchasers mystified when they notice that the lens itself has some tiny number printed around it.)

F2.8 is OK, but it means that non-flash indoor shots, even during the day, will be grainy, blurry, or possibly both.

On to the K800i, which gives some great examples of this.

Its F-number is a freakin’ secret, too. Again, I had to turn to press pics to find it. F2.8, again (that’s what the “1:2.8″ around the K800i’s lens means).

I’m being careful not to make snap judgements from Flickr pics, because people may have processed them poorly or fiddled unwisely with camera settings. When cameras only have digital zoom, though, it’s possible to make truly awful pictures by using lots of said zoom.

Dear god.

Ignoring those sorts of pictures, there are plenty of decent K800i pics, too.

This is pretty good - not horribly crunchy or blurry:

Mildly blown highlights, but they’re no biggy.

Here we go again with the highlights, though:

And look at the crunchy stuff and noise reduction artifacts in this, when you view the larger versions:

Then again, this is quite good:

Again, it’s got unnaturally high colour saturation (though the reason why consumer cameras do that is that people like these “punchy” results out of the camera, even if they throw detail away), but there’s only a little blue fringing on the high-contrast edge at the top of the building, and no horrible distortion or sharpness loss at the edges.

But then again, look at this.

It was obviously not dark when this picture was taken, but look at the big version and you can see that all of the fine detail has been “watercoloured out” by noise reduction, because the camera decided it needed to keep its shutter speed up by cranking the ISO (the EXIF data says only ISO 80; if that’s the truth then something really awful is going on…), and then noise-reduced the result.

And bang, there goes most of your resolution.

You can get lost in all the technical bulldust about cameras and ignore the fact that the above picture really is a very good photo, which you unquestionably would not be able to take if your phone was just a phone and that was all you were carrying.

But when your camera deliberately destroys most of the detail in the pictures you take, leaving you with something that can’t be printed any bigger than an old 110 negative without looking strangely flat, you may still feel ripped off.

And when there’s no zoom, this is more important, because you’ll be cropping pictures more often. (The digital zoom crops the picture for you, of course.)

Regarding the deadly combination of low ISO sensitivity and high F numbers, check this out:

It’s a daylight shot (unless I, and the camera time stamp, am very much mistaken), but the camera still went to ISO 200 and 1/13th of a second for it, and as a result created a blurry mess.

This comparison figures that the K800i is more like a real camera than the N73 or N93, but their example pictures are pretty bloomin’ ordinary. They’re what I’d expect from a good compact camera in 2001, at best.

Overall, the most I’d pay for the camera portion of either of these cam-phones, in today’s market, is $US100. OK, there’s the one-device convenience factor that might make the camera worth much more to you - but you can buy really excellent compact cameras for $US300, these days, and the over-the-counter price for the K800i is, what, $US500? The Nokia’s not much cheaper.

Given that there’s an embarrassment of choices in the ultra-compact-under-$US200 market sector these days (go nuts with the DPReview comparator…), I really couldn’t justify paying any significant premium for a camera of the quality of the ones in these phones.

I mean, you can pay less than $US200 and get a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX8 (combined review of it and its siblings here) these days. That’s got not only real zoom, but also a proper optical image stabiliser, not just one of those phoney baloney high-ISO modes, which Sony brazenly try to palm off on you with the K800i.

Yes, these cam-phones do beat the hell out of old-style fixed-focus cameraphones with no flash, plastic lenses and webcam sensors. But so does a Box Brownie.

It sucks when you like someone’s artistic work and then find out that they’re a jackass.

Piracy helps, of course. If you just can’t stomach making some mad religious bigot richer every time you see one of his movies or listen to one of his albums - rip ‘em off!

That’s harder with books. I suppose you can do it if you buy them second hand, but that can be tricky for books that are (a) recent and (b) not rubbish.

I was all set, you see, to write a happy clappy post about how much I’ve enjoyed a couple of Neal Asher books.

Neal, I presume, wanted to tell some bloodcurdling tales of the sea. But nothing that’s ever happened on any sea here could possibly be bloodcurdling enough for him, so he invented a planet, “Spatterjay”.

Spatterjay’s fauna is almost constantly brutally violent, its human inhabitants get tougher and tougher as they get older and older (and older…), and all sorts of entertaining things happen there. Plankton that eats people, people that don’t die even when they’ve been eaten, treacherous alien slavemaster crabs, cybernetically animated corpses, giant robot pterodactyls…

It goes on. It’s a lot of fun.

I’ve only read a couple of Ashers so far. “The Skinner” was the first one set on Spatterjay, then came “The Voyage of the Sable Keech”, which isn’t as good (and doesn’t seem to have been nearly as well proofread…), but is still a rollicking old tale of blood, guts and hundred-ton-sentient-mollusc rape.

Then I noticed that Neal Asher has a blog.

And everything went downhill.

Look, if you can be coherent about your bitter right-wing realpolitik throat-slitting, I’ll read it with a song in my heart and a smirk on my face. But if you keep trotting out arguments that I could see didn’t work when I was using FidoNet at the age of 16, you’re letting the free speech side down.

Neal reckons that it’s bad that governments want to tell us what to do, but we should definitely let them kill us. Before we’re convicted, if at all possible.

He doesn’t know much about climate change (what a shame there isn’t someone you can ask!) but he does know it isn’t happening and if it is then it doesn’t matter and if it does then it’s not our fault and if it is then there’s nothing we can do.

And then, there’s this.

It’s not that he says things I disagree with. He says many things with which I agree. It just seems that he doesn’t think too hard about anything he says, and I don’t like encouraging that sort of thing by helping to make his books bestsellers.

I don’t ask for much from the authors I like. A bit of coherent thought now and then, an affection for orangutans, a few obscure references to Tony Hancock, a recognition that AK-47s for everybody is not necessarily a great way to run a railroad.

Or, of course, just telling your adoring fans to bugger off while you write another vast tome involving hot-swappable mistresses.

That’ll do.

Neal Asher does not make the cut.

I propose that the sci-fi-writer version of this Creative Jackass Syndrome be referred to as The Orson Scott Card Problem.

Thanks to a reader, I now know the solution to all of the world’s energy problems!

Well, actually I don’t, because I didn’t watch the whole thing.

I watched a few minutes, though, because you have to wait that long before the talking head gets around to saying the name of the company. But then there it is - “Better World Technologies“, your gateway to the long-running scams of Dennis Lee.

Even the people who believe these kinds of stories don’t believe Dennis, since he’s been promising real working free-energy machines to people who stump up money to reserve one for at least the last ten years. He has, of course, not delivered. But he’s taken a lot more deposits.

Anybody’s welcome, no matter how close they are to the breadline. Basic “sign up” fees are five to twenty bucks US - well within the reach of people poor enough that electricity bills are a problem for them.

It is, of course, usually easier to take money from the poor than from the rich. Poor people are less educated, less connected, more desperate, and what’re they gonna do about it, anyway - hire a lawyer?

You just have to be the kind of guy who can stomach making a living that way.

(See also the end of this column.)

I just received this via e-mail:

Dear Sir/Madam,
We are a Spanish company and we would be interested in your Batterylife AG for its sale and distribution in Spain and Portugal.
In the first buy, we are interested in 500 or 1000 pcs.
Please, be contacted by me in soporte@anunciae.com
Thank you very much for your attention.
Alvaro Fernandez-Arroyo
Anunciae.com

It’s kind of like when that Nigerian dude wanted to buy CPUs from me that I made up for a joke. Only the Batterylife Activator actually exists. It’s just that it, you know, doesn’t work, as a quite superficial reading of my review would reveal.

Alvaro is, alas, not only asking the wrong guy to sell him worthless battery enhancing stickers, but also kind of late to the party. The Batterylife Activator no longer appears to be on sale.

I’m also happy to say that Batterylife AG, in general, appear to ‘ave run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisible, even though that means all of those convincing university test results they promised to send me back in 2005 will now, I fear, never arrive.

Their German and Australian sites are both now toast. Archive.org reckons the main site stopped responding to hails in April, 2006.

(The good folk at BatMax still appear to be selling their superficially identical product, though.)

This archived copy of the batterylife.com.au page not only links to my review - which might perhaps have something to do with why they went out of business - but also still allows you to download a video clip from the “Sunrise” show on Channel 7 here in Australia. In it, you can witness the magnificence that is Peter Blasina, The Man Who Recommends Everything And Is, As A Result, Much Better Off Than Me, Or Indeed Than He Himself Was Back When I Knew Him And He Was Running A Video Camera Magazine With Some Sort Of Journalistic Integrity.

Peter is, of course, heartily recommending the Batterylife stickers, on behalf of batterylife.com.au and another outfit that’s now gone.

I hope their cheque cleared before they went broke, Pete!