How To Spot A Psychopath

It’s been a while since I last wrote about the fine and upstanding fuel-additive company, Firepower.

We left them threatening my long-suffering blog hosts because I made available for download some promotional literature which Firepower’s Australian CEO instructed me to make available for download. That, you may recall, was after he himself had decided not to sue me after all.

That second threat - from some Firepower representative who still hasn’t had the courage to actually contact me - didn’t work out too well for them, as anybody who’s spent a minute or two on teh intarwebs could have predicted.

But I’m sure Firepower have worse things to worry about now. Because, amazingly enough for a company whose fuel-saving products would obviously be worth hundreds of billions of dollars a year if the claims made for them were true, Firepower now appear to be on the verge of collapse.

Offices abandoned, boss-man uncontactable, angry creditors (including the basketball team Firepower so famously bought) trying to get their money… it’s a sad, sad scene, which observers of the burgeoning magic-fuel-pill industry haven’t witnessed since, oh, the last magic-fuel-pill company came along.

(The Firepower debacle has been very bad for the entire Australian National Basketball League. Not only did they buy one of the front-running teams and then just kind of… not pay anybody, but they apparently got one of their mates into an advisory position for the whole League.)

Oh, yeah - remember those financially brilliant sportsmen who so eagerly invested in Firepower? On account of how they saw a video in which some chimneys were producing black smoke, and then it turned white, and if that isn’t hard scientific evidence then I don’t know what is?

Bad news for them too, I’m afraid.

Yes, I’m a bit gloat-y about all this. But overall I’m just… tired.

Over and over and over, this shit happens. Some bloke in a thousand-dollar suit turns up with a PowerPoint presentation and some dodgy supporting documentation from conveniently far-away nations, claiming to have a magic substance that causes internal combustion engines to do thermodynamically implausible things. If he’s telling the truth then he’ll be the richest man in history by a couple of orders of magnitude… and yet, instead of making his case to General Motors or Exxon, here he is in a rented serviced office, selling shares for cash.

And people hurl money at him, completely ignoring the fact that the same damn scam has been run hundreds of times before. Heck, they don’t even care if the same guy has run the scam before.

And there’s much excitement and news reports and press conferences, and extravagant displays of wealth and power (it’s fine to spend millions on a basketball team; oddly enough, though, they never remember to spend a few grand on a proper test of their claims…), and anybody who dares point out that it’s all obvious bullshit gets threatened with legal action.

And then… they take the money and run.

Again.

(Find all of my Firepower posts here.)

This Toolmonger post about a novel right-angle socket adapter led me to the interesting concept of Hobson’s Coupling, in which round rods bent to a right angle transfer torque around a ninety degree corner, because they’re all free to turn in their mounting holes on each leg of the coupling.

Hobson’s Coupling is, as any fool can see, an obvious candidate for adaptation into a steam/air-pressure engine. The result is called an Elbow Engine, and it’s a thing to behold:

There are several more on GooTube. If the concept’s still not clear to you, this page about making a ten-cylinder version (only seven moving parts!) from scratch may fill you in.