How To Spot A Psychopath

I am indebted to commenter Bruce for the information that I am currently Google’s number one hit in a search for “rough tongue bald pussy”. Which search you can perform, if you are not at work or if you work somewhere rather mellow, by clicking here. I await with enthusiasm the inevitable torrent of funny-smelling AdWords cash.

If you turn SafeSearch on, though, the results become much more disgusting, since they’re now mostly about bald spots on people’s tongues.

There. That ought to clear your palate again.

I just received the following:

Date: Mon, 26 Mar 2007 11:32:33 -0700 (PDT)
From: Rick Head
Subject: Big Money for your Endorsement
To: dan@dansdata.com

I want my site for my electric supercharger reviewed on your site, specifically for the “volt and amps reveiwed” section of http://www.dansdata.com/danletters105.htm
* If you can put a two line statement that approves of my product and has my link, I would be happy to throw $500 dollars your way. Let me know if this is a possibility, my site is http://www.electricchargers.com and my e-mail is stventures55@yahoo.com

I wonder if his name’s actually Richard Head. The domain’s registered to a “Jesse Bushong”.

Never mind - Dick Head is a great name for him. There’s your link, Dick! For free! Enjoy!

As I explain on the page where Dick for some reason wants an ad (but which he clearly didn’t read - he didn’t even get the title of the letter right), devices like his are a big old waste of money.

They may - may - add a few per cent to your car’s power, over at least some of the rev range (less and less as the engine turns faster and faster). But the very fact that you can just bolt these things on and drive away without messing with your engine management system indicates that nothing much is happening. If you add any real forced induction system to a modern car, it’ll freak out the engine electronics.

Dick is, to be fair, only charging $US99.95 plus shipping for his fan, versus the $US300 or so that you can easily pay for what appears to be much the same thing from bolder dealers. But hey, who knows; it’s not as if Dick even provides any specifications for the device in question. There could be a computer fan in there for all I know.

It doesn’t really matter either way. Pretty much anything that runs directly from 12 volts isn’t going to be powerful enough to noticeably boost any current automotive engine. You just can’t suck enough amps out of a normal car’s electrical system - for a proper electric supercharger you need 24V or higher power (to keep the current down), from separate batteries.

(The scam-warning page I link to above, by the way, is from these people, whose $10 electro-charger plans sound quite plausible. You can tell, because there’s work involved.)

Oh, and Dick also offers you the amazing chance to “receive another 20HP” by buying a new ECU chip to go with your similarly useless electric blower! What a deal!

And so, here’s my endorsement:

Shoreline Technologies’ electric supercharger is not “the only quality Supercharger on the net”. It is one among many, and all of the simple bolt-on versions are pretty much a scam.

Shoreline seem to know this, and so seek to promote their products not by proving that they actually work, but by bribing people to endorse them.

(Oh, and by using forum spam. Classy!)

Shoreline’s attempt to pay me off suggests to me that they are either unable to read, or simply under the impression that everybody is as dishonest as they are.

Do not buy their products.

(I am, of course, still perfectly happy to receive donations from Dick, or anyone else. I encourage anybody who’s impressed by my honesty to shower me with riches forthwith.)

In homage to dansdata.com’s humungous altindex.html, this blog now has a full index page.

I know the formatting’s a bit wiggy at the moment, but at least it’s there. It ought to help Google straighten out their results, too; currently there are various odd feed pages and such that come higher in Google results than the actual straightforward post pages that people want to find.

Yeah, like all you dorks haven’t seen it already.

It could only be better if it had legs.

That, of course, would slow it down enormously. As it is, it makes pretty good time for a 20 pound model, thanks to four-cylinder steam power. Which is largely responsible for the weight, of course. (Welcome to engineering, please attempt to enjoy your stay.)

Needless to say, this is another creation from I-Wei Huang.

(At first glance I thought he’d committed the sacrilege of butchering an old Tamiya Bruiser, but the chassis is actually from the new F350 High-Lift, which is superficially similar.)

On cheating in motorsport.

Water-filled tyres, five-gallon fuel lines, wafer-thin body panels, nitromethane boiling out of the engine oil and into the air intake, cars that can run just fine when their engine isn’t meant to be able to get any air at all, and apparently pretty much everything Smokey Yunick ever did.

If you’re not doing something that makes them change the rules next year, you’d better be doing something that at least forces them to clarify them. Angrily.

A short piece from Salon on the debasement of the word “fun”, when applied to activities for children which obviously bloody aren’t.

(In case you don’t know, this URL has, for months now, been the quick way to convince the Salon site that you’ve sat through the ads that qualify you for a “day pass”.)

Here is Millie the cat, looking quite normal.

Change the angle, though, and…

Aaah! Baldy-cat!

(Those wrinkles are normal, by the way. I think every housecat has them when its ears are pointing forward, but they’re only noticeable when there’s no fur in the way. This confused me the first time I saw a Devon Rex; I thought he’d been shorn with a very coarse clipper, or something. Then I noticed all of the other wrinkles.)

How this happens is, Millie thwacks another cat, usually Mickey, on the head.

Or Mickey thwacks her.

They seem to take turns starting it.

Then they get into it a bit, usually in the completely-silent-except-for-the-thump-of-furry-bodies-on-the-floor way that means that nobody’s taking it too seriously.

And Millie, because she don’t take no crap, sticks with the wrestling and thwacking until Mickey gives up and wanders off.

The result, now and then, is a small claw injury on Millie’s head.

(Injuries on the head: Brave cat. Injuries on the bottom: Cowardly cat.)

This little scratch would heal perfectly normally, if left to itself. Cats can’t clean the tops of their heads very well, but you don’t often see an abscess developing elsewhere than around the ears either, even in cats that get in fights every night.

Joey, however, believes it is his duty to keep Millie’s head very very clean. Or he just likes the taste of scab, or something. Anyway, he comes along and grooms the living bejaysus out of Millie’s head, day after day after day. And his rough little tongue expands the injured area until Millie looks as if she head-butted a disc sander.

This has happened twice now.

After a week or two of the feline horror show - which does not appear to actually bother Millie at all unless you touch the ouchy bits - it all heals over and she’s just left with a bald spot, which gradually fills back in with fur.

(There could be a vicious circle thing here, too, in which Millie’s ouchy head causes her to be more aggressive when Mickey idly thwacks her on the head in passing, thus encouraging more injuries.)

Oh, and for the benefit of the search engines: Bald pussy.

Thank you.

Herewith, some outstanding video clips (as in, not a whole series of something) that everybody linked to when they were new and exciting (years ago, in one case).

But you, gentle reader, may have missed out on one or more of them. So I don’t feel too guilty about this Outside-Scoop blog post.

The title links go to the pages where you can find the big full-resolution versions of each for download.

Big Brother State:

Buggy Saints Row: The Musical:

Mercury Joe:

Rockfish (soon to be a major motion picture!):

There’s a new file-dump site called Wiki Upload, which is currently in a somewhat rough and ready state (for instance, the “country” field in the sign-up page is a long list of Zimbabwes). But it appears to be functional enough, with one caveat that I’ll get to in a moment.

It’s the usual deal - upload files for anyone to download, no stuff you’re not meant to share allowed. But Wiki Upload seems to be less encrusted with arbitrary limitations than most of the other file-dumps. And, as the magic “wiki” word implies, it’s aiming to be community-based, with uploads policed for legality by the other users who want the site to succeed.

The only major limit, in fact, for the basic free accounts is that files that nobody downloads for 30 days will be deleted. They promise longer periods in the future - and I guess if there’s no pressure on their storage space, they may well keep stuff for longer anyway. You get 4.66Gb of storage space with a free account, too, so you can upload a whole single-layer DVD, copyright permitting.

Oh, and the crummy uploader permitting, too. It’s your basic Web form arrangement, as used by various other sites, with no resume if the upload fails or stalls. And it currently reloads the page constantly to update its completion bar, which gets old fast.

Also, there’s a bug at the moment which, once you’ve uploaded a file, changes all of the links in your list of uploaded files to be… that file. So if you make an account and upload file1.foo and then file2.bar, your uploaded files list will now contain two entries for file2.bar and nothing for file1.foo any more.

You can work around this by making your own list of the download URLs for each of your files after you upload them. If you don’t do that, and you haven’t given your files descriptions and tags when you upload them, there is at present no way to find them without just fishing back through the http://www.wikiupload.com/download_page.php?id=[number] URLs until you find yours.

So, you know, Wiki Upload is a little bit beta at the moment. And it could melt away like the morning frost if it doesn’t manage to cover its costs, which will be considerable if it becomes popular.

But what the hey, it’s worth trying in the meantime, for stuff that is not of earth-shaking importance.

I have, therefore, uploaded the original MPEG 4 video files for a couple of the Google Video clips from this post, for the benefit of anybody who’s interested in seeing the unmolested video quality of the Xacti VPC-C6, or just interested in seeing whether their download speeds from Wiki Upload are better than eight bytes an hour.

Thanks to the file list bug, I currently have no idea what the URL for the first file I uploaded is. The second one’s here, though.

On ruining really expensive lab equipment, from organic chemist Derek Lowe’s blog.

I find something very soothing in these sorts of tales of personal disaster. Chemistry ones tend to be juicier than information technology ones; the latter may involve halon dumps but seldom include any gaseous hydrogen chloride.

The chem stories, like metalworking stories, are also usually not so technical as to be incomprehensible to those of us whose chemistry expertise extends not much further than the ability to tell bromine from packaging peanuts.

Lowe’s whole Org Chem Horror Stories category is here.