How To Spot A Psychopath

A reader, coincidentally also called Dan, just sent me this:

Holy CRAP! How did we miss this amazing revelation?

[I’ll spare you the enormous forwarded e-mail Dan tacked onto his message, but it started with the words “Do You Want To Know RIGHT NOW How You Can Drive Around Using WATER as FUEL and Laugh At Rising Gas Costs, While Reducing Emissions and Preventing Global Warming?”]

P.S. I didn’t even bother to read through the whole thing, my obviously limited knowledge of chemistry, thermodynamics, entropy etc. made me feel like I had been purposely misled by my professors to support the great Oil Companies’ conspiracy.

The text you forwarded is from the Easy Water Car site, but it’s been copied all over the Web.

These scams are old, old, old, though they’ve gained new life as oil prices rise.

They always include some bulldust about electrolysis or fuel cells, then usually something about “HHO” gas or “Brown’s Gas” (supposedly a magical special combination of hydrogen and oxygen that can somehow give you more energy than you used cracking water to make it), and then you make some gadget that pumps its tiny gas output into your engine’s fuel input, and it doesn’t do a damn thing, and that’s about it. Unless you decide to tinker with the thing until you die of old age, which seems to be the choice of many people who’re enthusiastic about this stuff.

I’ve written about the “HHO” sorts of scams before, here. There’s a bit more about car-on-water scams, in the similarly ancient “turning water into gasoline” variant, here.

The versions of the scam that try to run the whole car off an electrolysis gadget always fall at the first hurdle, of course. It’s theoretically possible, but you might as well take the tons of electricity needed to make enough gas to run an engine and use it to drive an electric car directly. Anything that can run off a normal car’s alternator will not, duh, run a normal car.

The “hybrid” versions of the scam, though - which, like the Easy Water Car version, claim to use the mystic hydrogen generator to greatly decrease the fuel consumption of a normal car - can run just about as well as an unmodified car, because that’s basically what they are. So there are plenty of options for the creative scammer to make a demo machine that looks as if it’s working. Any slightly experienced race-car mechanic could make a car look as if it’s running on nothing in a hundred ways.

Despite that, many of the scammers put on a very poor show. One of the front-runners, who’s been pulling stuff like this for many years, is Dennis Lee.

A lot of the current “water car” excitement also has to do with the “Joe Cell“, a rich and abundant source of very high-energy pseudoscience.

In the USA, marketing of “dietary supplements” - which pretty much means all over-the-counter edible “alternative medicines” in the USA - is regulated by the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994, known for short as the DSHEA.

The DSHEA restricts the ability of the US Food and Drug Administration to regulate these “dietary supplements”. It, essentially, means that the people who make and sell supplements do not need to demonstrate that their products are effective, or even safe. There is no pre-market testing at all. No effort whatsoever is made to determine that dietary supplements do what they’re meant to do, or even that they contain what they’re meant to contain.

This laissez-faire approach has had pretty much the effect you’d expect it to. Never mind debates over whether St John’s Wort is actually of any use in the treatment of depression, or whether echinacea is any good against colds; it’s perfectly normal for pills allegedly containing a given quantity of those substances to contain far more, or far less, or none at all. And until someone notices and makes a fuss, not a thing will be done about it. The FDA won’t investigate by itself, because the DSHEA says it can’t.

I present all this by way of an explanatory preface to this little Consumerist post, in which the manufacturing processes of one modern dietary supplement manufacturer are explained.

(The DSHEA is a clearly codified lack of regulation, but realistically speaking you don’t seem likely to be able to buy better “supplements” in most other nations. Here in Australia, one major pill-maker was busted heavily in 2003 - but that’s very much the exception rather than the rule.)

I just got a press release about an exciting new technology called “SmileCheck”. It’s supposed to give a digital camera the ability to look for “facial features associated with smiles” in the live viewfinder view. So, if you’ve got your camera in SmileCheck Mode, you press the button when everyone’s in frame, but the shutter will only actually click when it reckons everybody in the frame is smiling.

This doesn’t sound like the most useful camera gimmick ever, but it’s more useful than “sepia mode”. If it works.

The PR company helpfully included “before” and “after” pictures, to show what a sterling job SmileCheck could do.

Here’s the kind of picture that SmileCheck will, allegedly, prevent you from taking:

And here’s what it’ll let you take instead:

The more I think about this PR company’s choice of images, the more my facial expression comes to resemble that of the kid on the left.

UPDATE: They’ve now produced a second press release, showing off the same technology but this time coupled with the camera’s self-timer, and calling it “FaceTime”. So you activate that mode on your camera, and it waits the usual several seconds (so you can get yourself into the frame) and then starts looking for smiles, and takes the picture when it thinks it sees them. The demo pictures are less hilarious this time.

I just watched From Beyond, which Stuart Gordon made a year after the more famous, and similarly Lovecraft… ish… Re-Animator.

(There’s an animated 2006 version of From Beyond, as well, but an IMDB rating of 1.7 doesn’t tempt me.)

The movie didn’t get off to a good start. Every automatic door in a hospital - including the glass swinging doors on the exit - made the Star Trek door noise.

(This movie also turned out to be the source of the “giving them drugs, taking their lives away” sample from Empirion’s acid-house classic Narcotic Influence. Which is neither here nor there, but which I found surprising enough that I just had to mention it.)

The acting is also not a good reason to watch this movie. And the script has only the tiniest skerrick of a connection with the original Lovecraft story.

The special effects have their ups and downs, too.

(Actually, this beastie looks pretty good in motion.)

Oh, and then there’s the bondage gear. And the supernaturally-induced horniness. I don’t remember that from the original story either.

But, for all that, I quite liked it.

Like all good horror movies, From Beyond gives you the impression that there’s some method to the madness even if you can’t really figure it out. It also held my interest; there were no long predictable scenes with characters walking backwards into the grasp of a monster or failing to be believed by scornful, obviously-doomed townsfolk.

The movie’s also got classic-horror stalwart Ken Foree, amiably tolerating a bit of light blaxploitation. And the silly bits of the ending are also the funny bits of the ending, so that’s OK. I’ve watched far worse movies with far better production values.

As Neil Gaiman points out…

…visual media are not a good place to put Cthulhu Mythos stuff, because the whole idea is that the ghastly Things are as far beyond human comprehension as Jupiter is beyond the comprehension of an ant. But since this isn’t really a Lovecraft-y story, that doesn’t matter.

The version I watched is the unrated Director’s Cut released only last year, which includes a couple of bits of footage that didn’t make it past the censors when the movie was in theatres. Pay attention and you can spot the places, in a couple of particularly nutritious shots, where the recovered-from-the-cutting-room-floor footage was spliced back in.

Oh, and I made a panorama of the laboratory.

You’re welcome.

When I read Michael Ciuffo’s “Rip-off Photography” article, I did not immediately see everything wrong with the picture for which this unfortunate gentleman’s mother paid hundreds of dollars.

OK, he looks like a huge dork. But I look like a caveman in photos. Big deal.

At a glance, you can see that the lighting on his face is strangely even, and he looks significantly airbrushed too. But there’s more. Read the article for the rest. It’s as entertaining as those Celebrities Before And After Photoshop pieces, in its own way.

(Don’t miss Mike’s ultimate guide to building a minifridge into a 1998 Toyota Corolla, either!)

By the usual standards of terrible studio portraits, though, Mike got off pretty lightly. List of the Day’s Great Olan Mills Photos will scrub from your mind all memory of Mike’s embarrassment, replacing it with things indescribable.

(When I was a kid, I had hair exactly like that of one of those children. Not for a thousand dollars would I tell you which one.)

What’s a good portrait look like, you might ask?

Well, here’s a picture my friend Katy took of me in 1998.

(I’m happy to say that I still look pretty much exactly like that, if a bit fatter now.)

On film, ambient light, subject significantly toasted on nitrous oxide at the time. Perhaps that’s what warded off the Caveman Curse.

Katy’s photo doesn’t try to make me look like a matinee idol, or some insecure housewife posing for chaise-lounge-and-feather-boa “glamour” pictures. That, by itself, is half the battle.

I do feel obliged to mention, however, the pinnacle of my own experiments in self-portraiture to date.

If you click the mercifully small thumbnail, you’ll get a 1024-pixel-wide version. I’m not even going to provide a link to the 2048-pixel-wide version; edit the URL yourself if you simply must see it.

All you need is a fisheye lens, and you too can see yourself as an urRu!

The Gizmodo dudes took TV-B-Gones to this year’s Consumer Electronics Show.

There’s only one thing you can do with a TV-B-Gone, and CES is full to the brim with big-screen TVs over whose remote receivers nobody thought to put a piece of tape.

So the inevitable happened.

Frankly, I found the older Apple Remote Front Row prank more amusing, but the sight of a video wall full of advertising going dark still warms my heart.

But man, check out some of the (500-plus!) comments on the Gizmodo page. Plenty of people just think it’s funny, but there are many others accusing the pranksters of destroying the livelihood of the poor working stiffs at the show, endangering Gizmodo’s own precious press “access”, and thereby mis-serving their readers by reducing the chance that Gizmodo will be able to keep on covering the latest and most exciting developments in the world of high technology.

Bull, if I may coin a phrase, shit.

First up: Gizmodo are working stiffs too. They paid to go to the stupid show in the God-forsaken sweaty spangle-hole that is Las Vegas, and once they got there they couldn’t quite figure out why they’d bothered.

I’m only peripherally associated with the gadget-blog world, and can only imagine how spiritually corrosive it is to be right at the coalface of Western society’s ceaseless pursuit of boundless superconsumption of stupid crap, every day of the damn week.

I give a standing ovation to anybody who can cope with this strain by merely turning off a bunch of flatscreens, rather than taking systematically directed advantage of Nevada’s easygoing firearms laws.

Former Gizmodo head Joel Johnson wrote, memorably, about the issue of gadget-mania a while ago. It is, as he says, insane to ceaselessly pursue every latest new gizmo, when long experience has taught you that new gizmos are always just as buggy and disappointing and unlikely to turn your life around as every previous device.

Devices that actually can change your life for the better do exist, but they’re less than one per cent of the market, for reasons cogently explained in the above-linked Ten Reasons We’re Doomed piece. And, hell, wait five years and you’ll probably be able to pick up a bugless version for ten bucks. If you haven’t been given six months to live, mellow out and see if you can’t have just as much fun with a toy from yesteryear.

Secondly: I’m not sure exactly what Gizmodo (a site with Google PageRank eight, versus only six for dansdata.com) would have to do to get public relations people to shun them.

I don’t think urinating on each and every PR person they met would quite do it.

Stabbing them might.

Turning off their video walls? That doesn’t make the cut.

Oh, and when I used to do trade-show stuff years ago, we’d get at least one dude a day who thought it was fun to just yank cables out of the back of our gear. If the cable had a screw-in plug, you’d better leave it unscrewed, or a whole computer could be taking a ride off the top of your chintzy glass display case.

We freakin’ dreamed of an attack that could be defeated with a few squares of electrical tape.

UPDATE: Gawker staffer banned from CES OMG.

(Said “staffer” is Richard Blakely, who did indeed do the dastardly remote-control deed but is not actually even one of the standard Gizmodo writers, so won’t necessarily have any need to go back to CES anyway, even if they don’t completely forget about the ban.)

And here’s Joel Johnson again, on the subject “Do Gadget Blogs Hurt the Environment?”

UPDATE 2: Brian Lam, Gizmodo Editor, cordially invites the haters to lighten the hell up.

There’s something you don’t see every day. (Via.)

The White Glove Tracking project got a lot of people who probably should have been working to identify the location of Michael Jackson’s famous sequined white glove in every frame of his 1983 TV performance of Billie Jean.

Then they made this video.

The video is just one - relatively trivial - example of what you can do when you turn elements of moving video into separately manipulable data, and then start fooling with that data programmatically, in this case with Processing. There are several more examples on the whiteglovetracking.com gallery page.

Another, different but related, concept:

Making 3D models from video clips (via).

Thanks to a poster on the invaluable Healthfraud list, allow me to present FairDeal Homeopathy: The world’s only scientific homeopaths.

Somehow I came across this thing called PePP, marketed as a hangover cure. The web site (pepp-up.com) claims to “reduce alcohol levels by 50% within 40 minutes”, which seems like a dubious claim to me.

Short of either vomiting or pissing it out, how can this thing possibly remove alcohol from your system?

Andrew

Pepp is supposed to contain “natural digestive and metabolic enzymes”, which digest that nasty alcohol right out from under you!

(They also say it has “…various organic acids, vitamins and nutrients”, but adding those things to the enzymes won’t do anything to the enzymes except perhaps give them molecules to break down other than the alcohol. Popping multivitamins during a night on the town is not, by itself, exactly a hangover-zapping breakthrough.)

The major problem here - which applies to all of the other “enzyme” supplements as well - is that if you’re a reasonably healthy human, your body already produces as many digestive enzymes as it needs. Enzymes you eat will be destroyed in the digestion process, anyway.

So anything these pills do, they’ll have to do to alcohol that’s still in your stomach or gut. This, in itself, is not ludicrous; enzymatic digestion certainly does happen in the stomach.

I suppose it’s possible that the “recent clinical trials” they mention (PDF) actually exist. But, following the ancient tradition of makers of nonsense “supplements”, they don’t tell you where (or even if) these “studies” have been published. So who knows whether they’re just making it all up or not.

There is absolutely no valid reason for anybody citing a scientific study that supports their statements to not mention, at the very least, who did that study and in what journal it was published. “Secret” studies of one kind or another abound in the world of alternative medicine and other Weird Science; as a rule of thumb, you can take unidentified “studies” as an anti-recommendation for a claim, like when you find out Doctor Smith actually bought his doctorate for $50 from a dude in Antigua.

(If the Sydney Morning Herald is to be believed, there was only one “study”, and it was actually not so much a study as… a segment on Australian tabloid TV show “A Current Affair“. In which they sent four people out to get pissed and two of them took the Pepp pills. And then someone with a clue actually looked at what was in the pills and concluded that “nothing here that is an actual drug or an actual compound that is known to have an effect on alcohol metabolism”.)

There’s an ingredients list on that page too, which rather tellingly does include the names of six enzymes (the “-ase” compounds), but which puts them at the very end of the list. If they’re following standard ingredients-list rules - which they seem to be; the soy and rice protein pill-fillers are at the top of the list - that means that there’s less of the enzymes in the pills than of any of the numerous, and irrelevant, other ingredients.

You’d better hope the top-listed enzyme, amylase, doesn’t do anything, because the different amylases all break down starch into alcohol. Whoops - screwed that bit up (Thanks, Ubertakter!). The top-listed enzyme, amylase, actually breaks starches down into sugars. It’s still pointless in an anti-alcohol concoction, though, and including it as the highest-dose enzyme still looks to me like a very strong indication that (a) there’s actually only trace amounts, at most, of any enzymes in the pills, and (b) the makers of the pills think their customers are a bunch of idiots.

Then there’s lipase, which catalyses the hydrolysis of ester bonds in water–insoluble lipids. It’s irrelevant to alcohol metabolism, but at least it doesn’t make more damn alcohol.

Then there’s protease, which breaks amino acids apart (nope, still no good for metabolising alcohol), and cellulase, which is used for cellulose metabolism in creatures that can metabolise it (i.e. not us, but who cares, since cellulose isn’t alcohol either).

Then there’s lactase, which breaks down (wait for it) lactose, not alcohol.

And, finally, there’s something just called “Dehydrogenase” in italics. Lets be generous and say that the emphasis means that it’s actually class 1, hepatic, alcohol dehydrogenase. And yes, at long last, we now do have a compound that actually does do something to ethanol. Hepatic alcohol dehydrogenase turns ethanol into acetaldehyde.

But wait - that’s the end of the list of enzymes in the pills!

So, assuming this stuff actually works and actually converts a significant amount of the alcohol in your stomach into acetaldehyde… that’s where it’ll stop. It won’t go on to apply acetaldehyde dehydrogenase to the result and leave you with harmless acetic acid. It will, instead, leave you with a gut-full of acetaldehyde.

Acetaldehyde is the chemical considered chiefly responsible for hangovers.

People with East Asian genealogy who flush bright red when they drink alcohol and then have immediate hangover symptoms do so because they’ve got unusually effective alcohol dehydrogenase, and unusually ineffective acetaldehyde dehydrogenase.

The drug disulfiram (”Antabuse”) does essentially the same thing to people who don’t have that genetic defect.

It would appear that these pills are trying to give everybody the fantastically awful feeling of acetaldehyde poisoning.

Wow, thanks!

Except, of course, they won’t, because the (presumably alcohol) dehydrogenase is right down the end of the list of ingredients, so there’s probably pretty much none of it in the pill. Maybe literally none; if that were the case, these would be far from the first “supplement” pills that turned out to have none of the allegedly active ingredient in them at all.

The alleged PEPP “studies” are supposed to say that the pills do something if you take them while you’re drinking, and hey, maybe despite all this they actually do. Frankly, I think they’d be more likely to cause people taking them to turn into pumpkins, but what do I know.

But if you’re going to take an alcohol-destroying pill along with the alcohol you’re drinking, as the “studies” allegedly examined - why not just order friggin’ ginger ale? Or save a bit less money by buying your expensive booze and pouring it into a potplant, rather than drinking it along with some pills you bought on eBay from Thailand (only ten bucks for… at the moment they don’t say how many… pills - in “organge” flavour!) that promise to remove its effect?

What people are actually doing with the pills, apparently, is making the very wise decision to buy them for hilarious prices after they’ve already gotten drunk, then deciding they feel much better and driving home.

It is statistically unlikely that the people selling the Pepp pills will be the ones these drunk drivers run over.

But one can hope.

After my lengthy series of posts following the Sydney Morning Herald’s entertaining deconstruction of the Firepower “fuel pill” saga, a reader felt compelled to bring this new Herald article to my attention.

The article sings the praises of the Moletech - or possibly MTECH - Fuel Saver, a catalytic device that allegedly changes the properties of the petrol, blah blah blah.

I saw it mentioned on the gadget blogs, too - these upstanding businessmen must have a stand at CES ‘08. At least the Engadget piece was properly derisive.

Moletech seem quite proud of their supporting evidence from one “California Environmental Engineering laboratory”. Assuming I’ve found the right site for the lab, it looks kosher at first glance. But then you discover that the CEE lab has previously “proved” that the “Advanced Fuel Carburetor and Cat Converter” does the usual miraculous things. That was back in 2000.

And then there was the “Green Plus” fuel catalyst, also claimed to do similar things to the Moletech gadget, which the CEE lab also said worked.

And then there’s the “Rentar Fuel Catalyst“, also proclaimed genuine by CEE.

And that was just from the first page of Google results.

Gee, that oil company conspiracy that keeps all of these miracles off the market must be working pretty damn hard, huh?

There have been dozens, if not hundreds, of “fuel catalysts” marketed in the past, many of them with claims indistinguishable from those made for the Moletech gadget.

But this one’s the one that actually works. This time for sure, Rocky!

(The end of the Herald article makes reference to another report on the gadget, this time from the Australian Department of Transport and Regional Services, which has recently and very helpfully been renamed the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government. I’ve used their Publication Information Request form to ask them whether the quoted report even exists. Hope springs eternal.)

UPDATE: What do you know, they actually replied! Read all about it, including some fresh weirdness, here!