How To Spot A Psychopath

The fewer blades a propeller - or helicopter rotor - has, the more efficient it is. (Essentially, this is because the more blades you have, the more turbulent becomes the air each blade’s trying to push around. Helicopters with lots of rotor blades have so many because a rotor with fewer blades would be unmanageably large, or require a radical redesign.)

So, ridiculous though this sounds, one-bladed propellers are actually the most efficient kind. Just one blade sticking out from the hub, on one side. Like a football rattle.

I think one-bladed props have actually been used in ultra-fast control-line model planes for ages, with just a counterweight on the other side of the prop from the blade. (And yes, they do also use pulse-jets!) There’s at least one swishy-looking counterweighted one-bladed ceiling fan, too.

If you want large size or high power from a one-bladed prop, though, you’re out of luck, because the single blade creates unbalanced thrust that’ll wear your shaft bearings away in no time. (You may also have some difficulty finding test pilots.)

The single-bladed helicopter may be coming into its own, though, now that we’ve got tiny, powerful jet and electric motors, and somewhat better batteries, and low-power super-lightweight computerised control systems.

All this means we can now make a one-bladed helicopter, on the “samara” or “sycamore seed” principle, except powered - it’s spun by a little normal propeller, on an outrigger.

In the olden days there’d be no way for an aircraft like this, whose whole airframe spins, to do anything very useful. But nowadays… well, just look:

It’s probably not even tremendously difficult to shoot video from such a thing, today. In the olden days it would have required a nicely constant rotational speed, at the very least - but now if you want to look in a particular direction, it’s pretty easy to just grab a fast frame at roughly the same spot in the rotation each time. Then you rub a little cheap digital signal processing on the output, to stop it jiggling from side to side or “tearing” as the platform spins too fast for the sensor chip to grab a whole square frame.

It probably wouldn’t even be hard to run a few-hundred-frame-per-second camera (or a few cheap 30fps ones) with no position detection at all, and just stitch all the video together into a 360-degree panorama, with variable frame rate in all directions, back at base.

I have this image of some game-company 3D artist trying to get a thing like this put in, as a recon tool, in a sci-fi shooter set in the year 2100, and everybody telling him it was way too crazy. I bet powered sycamore seeds will actually be dropping bugs through people’s windows inside five years.

When I’m looking at the Web site of a tradesman or small business, I actually take it as a good sign if the site looks like crap.

As long as it’s got all the information you’re looking for - often little more than basic “brochure” data - then the presence of dodgy table-based formatting, GIF animations, Comic Sans and so on just means that this particular house-painter, lawn-mower or solar-panel-installer probably hasn’t spent much time or money on site design, with any luck because they were too busy doing their job.

There are, however, limits.

Allow me to present: Biomile Australia!

Or maybe “MOTORTRONICS H20 COMPANY PTY LTD”, which is one of the bits of text peeking out from behind the two large images in the middle of the screen. If you’ve loaded the page, you’ve loaded the full-size images, which are just sized down with height=”320″ width=”240″ to fit on the home page. So I urge you to click on the second one and see it in all of its Web 0.2 magnificence.

Whoever the Biomile (not to be confused with BioPerformance!) people are, they’re in the miracle-fuel-additive business, with - once your eyes stop bleeding and you manage to read the page - the usual claims about economy, emissions, power and so on. And, also according to the standard fuel-pill script, they say that Biomile pills “have been tested and approved by the epa in the Usa”! (I choose to pronounce that as “by the eep-ah in the ooh-sa”.)

Well, the EPA does seem to know that Biomile exist, and the EPA actually has tested quite a lot of fuel-saving power-boosting gadgets and potions. But they have never found one that works. The EPA does not, in fact, endorse fuel-saving products at all.

(I was disappointed to see that Biomile pills also do not seem to have been tested by California Environmental Engineering.)

Never mind these quibbles, though. Let’s get back to that awesome Web site!

I like to browse with the text size set a bit larger than the default, which somewhat breaks the formatting of some sites. I’ve also only got Firefox and Chrome here, plus Internet Explorer 6 hanging around for testing purposes. So I wasn’t completely confident that the stunning broken-ness of the Biomile site wasn’t, at least partly, my fault.

Compare and contrast the Australian Biomile site with the US one, for instance. The US site is a giant blob of Flash, but it looks quite good. And has, you know, page titles and stuff.

So I bounced biomileaustralia.com off a selection of different browsers on the immensely useful Browsershots.org.

The results are here, and they are not good.

(I did rather like Dillo’s minimalist interpretation and Flock’s even more minimalist one, though.)

Perhaps the Biomile Australia site is a devilishly cunning scheme to actively repel intelligent people, because they’re nothing but trouble for the modern questionable-product entrepreneur.

Hmm. Probably not.

We all know what YouTube comments are like.

Exactly which site boasts the Web’s stupidest commenters is a matter for debate, but YouTube is unquestionably right up there.

You can try to ignore the comments on YouTube; if you’ve got a small enough browser window and don’t page down, you may be able to avoid seeing them altogether. You can also tell YouTube to only display comments rated “excellent (+10 or better)” until it forgets you’re logged in or the cookie’s cleared or whatever. I think that setting leaves a grand total of about eight comments visible on the whole site.

One way or another, though, most of us at least catch a glimpse of YouTube comments, out of the corner of our eyes, from time to time. Sometimes we even look there on purpose, for the same reason people look at other such… things. Every glance corrodes your faith in humanity a little more.

May I, therefore, suggest the Firefox add-on YouTube Comment Snob?

It ain’t perfect, but it’s fighting the good fight.

There are a few Greasemonkey scripts that do similar things. YouTube Comment Cleaner, for instance, and (as I write this) three scripts that replace comments with quotations, including one that hybridises with YouTube Comment Snob, replacing any comments the Snob blocks with quotes from Richard Feynman.

The Comment Snob options…

…remind me of the old Microsoft Word Hidden Settings joke:

By default, Comment Snob doesn’t block comments that include profanity, which of course is not necessarily an indicator of a lack of intelligence.

Except in fucking YouTube comments.

I have just discovered how to remove dents from table-tennis balls.

We don’t have a ping-pong table here, but we do have a lot of ping-pong balls, because we’ve got four cats and ping-pong balls are great cat toys.

When ping-pong balls are everywhere, though, you’ll often tread on one, and dent it. A dented ping-pong ball is of limited utility as a cat toy, and is of course no use at all for actually playing table tennis.

As I was making tea, it occurred to me that just holding a dented ball in tongs and immersing it in very hot water might un-dent it. Even if the heat didn’t soften the ball (which, as it turns out, it will), the expansion of the heated gas inside the ball ought to push the dents right out.

And I’ll be darned if that is not exactly what happens. The ball swells back up to perfect roundness, and once cooled and dried it seems to bounce pretty much as well as a brand new one.

The only time this trick won’t work is if there’s an actual hole in the ball, which can happen if a dent has sharp creases. Then, all you get when you immerse the ball is a trail of bubbles from the hole.

(If you subsequently immerse the punctured ball in cold water, the contracting gas inside will suck the water into the ball. This lets you partially fill a ping-pong ball with liquid through a tiny hole, but you could do that with a syringe anyway. I remember seeing a documentary about controlled burning in forestry; to reliably start fires from the air, they used a machine that took ping-pong balls that’d been pre-filled with potassium permanganate, and then syringed glycerine into them, just before dropping them.)

Interestingly, ping-pong balls also smell distinctly of camphor when you take them out of the hot water. That’s because they’re made of celluloid, which is principally composed of nitrocellulose and camphor. This is why they burn so well:

(Some very, very cheap ping-pong balls are made of plastic instead of celluloid. They’re a bit squishy, bounce about as well as a grape, and often aren’t even evenly thick all over, so they wobble when rolling. Still OK as cat toys, though.)

Sadly, it would appear that I am not the first person to have thought of this repair technique. But I’m still pleased that I thought it up all by myself. (I also invented the differential, at about the age of nine. Unfortunately, someone else had already invented that, too.)

If you read my last little piece about the delectable Tim Johnston, instigator of the Firepower magic-fuel-pill scam, and kept reloading it to keep up with the couple of updates, you would know:

1: For some reason, Tim came back to Australia, under his own name.
2: The authorities immediately took his passport away.
3: He went to court to ask for his passport back, so he could “travel for business purposes”, whereupon…
4: …the Firepower liquidators served him with papers ordering him to appear at a Federal-court civil hearing launched by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, which body has been following Tim around for a while now, bolting each door behind him after he has galloped through.

Perhaps we’ll eventually know why it was that Tim came back under his own name and then decided to appear in public to try to get his passport back; on the surface, these seem to be the actions of a crazy man. But it would appear that he’s had another moment of clarity, because now he’s decided to not turn up at the hearing.

(On the grounds that he’s suddenly too ill to travel, which isn’t very original.)

Johnston is also apparently headed for personal bankruptcy, an event that punctuates the lives of entrepreneurial scam artists with metronomic regularity.

But I like these weird, unexplained deviations from the standard scam-artist script that Johnston keeps coming up with. I wonder what he’ll do next?

UPDATE: The liquidator has now applied for an arrest warrant, to encourage the suddenly-taken-ill Johnston to actually turn up in court. Oh, and apparently Mr Johnston is currently being legally represented by a man who says he’s a lawyer, but does not appear to actually be one. I wonder what qualifications the doctor who wrote Johnston’s sick note will turn out to have?

In a further shocking development, some bloke who gave Tim $450,000 and was “confident he would get a good return” is now a bit upset. This guy made his “investment” in 2007. I could see that Firepower was obviously a scam in 2006, and Gerard Ryle’s first Sydney Morning Herald feature story about Firepower, which explained just how loudly the whole operation screamed “scam”, came out at the very beginning of ‘07.

I can kind of understand the “mum and dad” investors who sink their life savings of $5000 or so into some charlatan’s scheme without looking into it adequately. But what kind of person who doesn’t own his own Middle Eastern nation would invest almost half a million bucks in something that five minutes with Google would show him is very similar to a long line of previous products, some sold by the same guy who’s selling this newest one, that all turned out to be scams?

I started watching The Waters of Mars, the most recent Doctor Who special, a few days ago. Then I paused it after 12 minutes and didn’t resume for a few days, because I had other stuff to do and it clearly wasn’t going to be very good.

I know Doctor Who is really fantasy, not sci-fi, and I know it’s now all about heart and emotions and not so much about coherent storylines. That’s fine, if done with some imagination; I actually quite liked the episode Gridlock, for instance, which was a veritable lace doily of plot-holes if you looked at it critically.

And I know Doctor Who is primarily aimed at young viewers, and I also know that kids aren’t very discriminating and will watch any old crap.

But none of that excuses this level of crapness.

(Spoilers, naturally, follow. But I’m spoiling the bad bits, not the good ones, so perhaps you’ll come out ahead.)

The Waters of Mars reminded me of Robert L. Forward’s excellent (if you like hard sci-fi) Dragon’s Egg (the sequel’s pretty decent, too!). The only purpose of the characters in the first couple of dozen pages of Dragon’s Egg is to set up the story proper, so Forward obviously didn’t see any need to spend more than a lazy half-drunk afternoon writing the first part. (Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised if he wrote the first part last, just to give the audience a minimal on-ramp to the highway he’d already finished and was impatient to publish.)

So Forward, for instance, details exactly the garments which a young female astronomer puts on before racing off to advance the plot, but because he’s not paying attention he gives her a skirt but forgets to mention any underwear. This is forgotten once you get into the real story, but it’s somewhat startling at the time.

Likewise, in The Waters of Mars, the writers are clearly so eager to get to the, super-heavy-handed but still pretty neat, ending and teaser for the upcoming Christmas special, that they just didn’t care about the preceding story.

Robert Forward’s dodgy beginning bit was very small. In The Waters of Mars, the dodgy beginning bit takes up five-sixths of the show.

I could just about handle Mars gravity being the same as Earth gravity, when it ought to be less than 0.4G, because that’s apparently still too expensive for live-action TV to do properly. And I could barely accept explosion debris cheerfully burning away in Mars’ 95.8%-carbon-dioxide, 0.2%-oxygen, less-than-1%-of-Earth-pressure atmosphere, because, um, maybe this Mars-base was built out of bamboo packed with potassium nitrate.

But the monsters are creatures that can make water (and fusion power!) out of nothing. But they’re desperate to get to Earth, because there’s so much water here. (And they’ve got the same name as the principal villains of all of the Halo games.)

All the writers would have had to do was make the monsters express a great hunger for all of the people there are on Earth for them to infect, or specifically mention how pleased they are with Earth’s ever-shrinking ice-caps that promise a gigantic habitable area for them in their liquid form. But no. One of ‘em stands there, drooling a steady stream of water onto the floor, and just says that it’s impressed by the quantity of water that Earth already has.

And there’s not just one, but two, self-destruct mechanisms activated in this one episode.

I suppose it’s not that surprising that the systems exist - nobody puts a “Blow Up This Vehicle” button on real-world dashboards, but if you live in the land of TV sci-fi you can expect super-virulent body-snatching alien and/or supernatural monsters to pop up about every other week. The only surprising thing is how slow people always seem to be to figure out what’s going on and press that deadly button that’ll save the rest of the world.

(We should probably count ourselves lucky that only one of the self-destructs has a Red Digital Readout. And to be fair, it still isn’t your typical Acme Mechanically-Assisted Plot-Tensioner, a device which has the mystical ability to make the last 60 seconds of the countdown take up five minutes of screen time.)

As regular readers know, I am actively delighted by stupid Doctor Who monsters. But they’re meant to be stupid-looking, not just by-the-numbers Central Casting zombies plodding through a script that exists only to give the Doctor a reason to emote.

I’m quite happy with fatally-plot-holed sci-fi as long as it’s imaginative. When I finish watching some oddball anime and say “what the fuck was that all about?!”, I’m always smiling. And Doctor Who is supposed to be among the most imaginative live-action shows, because it’s got the fewest restraints. It’s not stuck on a particular starship or even a particular planet, it doesn’t take itself very seriously, and after some decades, the audience is accustomed to the fact that the TARDIS seems to independently seek out deadly peril, especially when the Doctor intended to have a little holiday.

This all makes it particularly disappointing when you get a story like this, that’s no better than the 62nd time the holodeck tried to kill everyone on the Enterprise.

The comments for my last post were split between people who were talking about the actual game that was the subject of the post, and other people talking about the ongoing dansdata.com connectivity problems.

To recap: Most visitors can see Dan’s Data just fine, but a seemingly random smattering of users from all over the world can’t see it at all. For them, it looks as if the Dan’s Data server was just turned off some time ago. Months ago, in some cases.

(If you can’t see any of the pictures in that game post, by the way, it’s probably because you can’t see dansdata.com. Most of the images on this blog are actually stored on the Dan’s Data server. Not all of them, though; the pics in this post, for instance, are from my Flickr account. If you can see pics in that post but not in the game post, the dansdata.com connectivity problem is almost certainly the reason.)

So here’s another post about this connectivity problem, which I dare to hope may now actually be fixed.

Yesterday a reader clued me in to a problem with one of the two nameservers for the domain. That bug - which would have prevented anybody whose DNS request ended up at that secondary nameserver from getting to the site - is now fixed, along with a couple of others that may or may not have been related to the problem. Now all of the online traceroute tools that used to make it all the way to fe-0-0-3-kf-br1.securewebs.com, one hop away from dansdata.com, and then die, can make it all the way:

http://looking-glass.optus.net.au/cgi-bin/nph-looking-glass.pl
http://traceroute.optusnet.com.au/?args=dansdata.com
http://www.telstra.net.au/cgi-bin/trace
http://looking-glass.uecomm.net.au/
http://www.getnet.com/cgi-bin/trace?dansdata.com
http://www.csc.fi/cgi-bin/nph-traceroute?dansdata.com
http://lg.evolink.net/

(In some cases, the last hop of the traceroute shows “beechler.com”, not dansdata.com. Beechler.com is a site that used to, and possibly still does, share the same physical server as dansdata.com. I don’t think this is a problem symptom, but what do I know.)

A traceroute, or ping, can fail when there’s nothing actually wrong with a site. All you need is some router along the way that firewalls traceroute or ping data, but lets normal Web traffic through. I think the traceroute problem has been a constant for everybody who hasn’t been able to see Dan’s Data, though, so now that it seems to be fixed, surely nothing further can go wrong, how hard can it be, could be worse, could be raining, gee it’s quiet tonight, Macbeth Macbeth Macbeth, Hastur Hastur Hastur.

Please comment below, with traceroutes and/or pings as per last time. What we’re especially looking for are people who could see Dan’s Data until recently but now can’t, or couldn’t see it until recently and now can.

You know when you read a review of a game that says that one part of the game, say the battles between spaceships, looks great and is tons of fun, but the rest of the game is kind of boring?

Gratuitous Space Battles is that part of that game, without anything else.

(And before I say anything else, note that there’s a free demo.)

You pick a fighter, frigate or cruiser hull for each of your vessels…

…you kit them out with weapons and shields and engines and so on, you deploy an armada of ships of different sorts (or all of the same sort, if you like), and then you give them all orders. Concentrate all fire, prefer to shoot enemies that’re already wounded, shoot this kind of ship over that kind, protect this ship of ours, protect any ship of ours that’s damaged, stop at this range from the enemy and plink with your long-range missiles rather than charging into beam range, et cetera et cetera.

And then you click the “Fight” button, and sit back and watch.

For the actual battle - which is fought on a 2D battlefield, though ships can go over and under each other - you’re a pure spectator. GSB is like a tower defense game, in that regard. (Many tower-defense games let you build new towers during a battle, though; GSB does not.)

You can speed up and slow down the battle, and you can zoom in and out. From a distance, the action looks like this:

(In this battle, I’m employing the Unsporting Crowd of Torpedo Frigates strategy. I’m also playing at full resolution on my huge monitor, so the full-sized screenshot is 2560 by 1600 pixels and rather a lot of kilobytes.)

Zoom in, and you can see…

…each individual weapon shot, repair drones patching flaming holes in hulls, and fighters weaving around the capital ships. (Full-sized screenshot here.)

When you win a battle you earn “honor” with which to unlock new hulls, equipment and the three whole alien races besides the one you start with, the Federation. (The big Federation ships, rather delightfully, all look like a hybrid of a Starfleet vessel and a Battlestar.)

It’s all a lot of fun, and should become even more fun as the game expands. Cliff Harris, the indie developer of GSB and a few other games, is actively patching bugs and adding stuff, and GSB is also very moddable. Fans have already, according to the ancient tradition of the first few mods for any game, created a few rough-and-ready super-battleships by just adding more module mounting points to existing hulls. Some proper high-quality mods with all-new graphics, like unto the Babylon Project mod for Weird Worlds, should be arriving soon.

So try the free demo and see what you think. The full game takes into account what you’ve done in the demo, by the way, so you won’t have to play the tutorial level again if you don’t want to, and get to keep whatever honor you earned.

(GSB is Windows-only at this point, but because it’s not a very demanding game it generally works fine on other OSes if you play it in an emulator.)

Gratuitous Space Battles is $US22.99 from the developer, or only $US20.69 on Steam.

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Note that there’s a graphical glitch in GSB that affects people who’re using an unusually high horizontal screen resolution (so, one giant monitor, or a row of smaller ones). It…

…turns a column of screen to the right into stripey repeats of the last correctly-drawn column of pixels.

I think this was meant to be fixed in the recent patch, but it doesn’t seem to have been. No problem, though; just go to the options and disable “Gratuitous Shaders”, and with very little eye-candy reduction, the whole screen will draw properly again.

On this blog and dansdata.com I’ve written about mercury, and, thanks to the very independent thinkers at Life Technology, also alchemy.

So I suppose I was just asking for this correspondence, from yesterday:

Respected Sir,

I have visited your website and then I am writing to you. so If you dont’t mind then give me some opinon abuout mercury after reading below datail:

I have making mercury into solid shape in Zink and then I want to give it into golden color, I have packed it in a Copper small pots shaped ” Male Female” and then put it into a ceramics Cup, then cover the Copper port with wett soil. when I heat it. after heating I made it cool and open the copper pots then I saw that due to leakage the mercury has flew up, only zink was in the pot.

I want to ask you that I want to block the leakage of copper pots so that mercury should heat and boiled but should not evaporates from the copper pots

what should i do to stop the the leakage from copper pots.

please give me some cheapest opinion. I am waiting for your good response.

Abdul

My reply:

I’m not exactly sure what you’re trying to do here, but:

1. If you actually manage to seal the containers solidly, they may explode when heated. Mercury’s boiling point is low enough to make this possible with relatively little heating.

2. You don’t need to heat mercury much, or at all, to get it to form an amalgam with any of the many metals with which it will amalgamate. (This includes, by the way, the copper from which you are making the vessels…)

Warming the mercury over boiling water should be as much as is ever necessary, and I wouldn’t even bother with that unless I’d already tried it at room temperature and it hadn’t worked.

The mercury does need to directly touch the metal, though. Mercury amalgamates readily with, for instance, bare aluminium, but it will not amalgamate with ordinary zinc or copper, because of the thin layer of carbonate and oxide (respectively) on the surface of those metals. Brush the metal with a little dilute hydrochloric acid, though, and the mercury will suddenly “wet” it, and amalgamate. Metals that take a while to dissolve in mercury will dissolve faster if you chop, grind or file them into small pieces, to increase their surface area.

3. I presume you’re doing this somewhere with good ventilation - preferably a standard laboratory “fume hood“, but just doing it outdoors is a lot better than nothing.

You should not be doing any experiments with mercury in a poorly-ventilated area, or science will become harder and harder for you to understand, because your brain will be rotting away.

Abdul replied:

thanks for reply me. Actually I want to speak truth to you for more guidance. I belong to a poor family, and I have got a knowledge to make Gold with the combination of Zinc, Mercury with the normal temprature of Sulphur.
I have make Silver with the cmbination of Zinc and Mercury, the last Step is to Give this combination into Golden color. I have put the Prepared Silver into copper ( Male Female Pots) and then make plaster to copper with mud. then I heated the pots.

result is nearly to success but when I open the copper pots I saw there was no Mercury only burned Zinc was in the pots.

Please guide me if you can help me I will pray for you for the betterment of the world and the hereafter.

Thanks

Abdul

My reply:

Uh… do you mean you’re making something that looks like gold, but isn’t? You can’t do that with zinc, mercury and sulphur, but there are a number of scams that’re a bit like this. I’m sure, for instance, that some “alchemists” used fire-gilding, where you make a gold/mercury amalgam, rub that on what you want to gild, then boil off the mercury. That can make a lead brick look like a gold one. People have also hollowed out lead bricks and filled them with mercury, because it’s a bit denser than lead and gives a fake gold brick a slightly more realistic weight.

If you think you’re actually making gold, though - or have actually already made silver - then I am afraid you are mistaken.

Every possible combination of commonly-available substances under every possible combination of domestically-attainable conditions, and then some, has already been tried by alchemists, over many centuries. And all of them failed.

The alchemists didn’t know why they never managed to come up with the Philosopher’s Stone, but now we do; it turns out that there are very good basic physical reasons, supported by very, very large amounts of evidence including the functionality of devices which most of the world’s population use every day, why turning base metals into gold is impossible.

(Well, OK, you can do it with a particle accelerator, but that requires immense amounts of electricity to make minute amounts of gold.)

Anybody who still tries to make alchemy work is like someone who declares that they don’t care what astronomers say, stars really are just holes in the sky that let light through from heaven.

I feel I must repeat my warning about mercury poisoning. Alchemists who decided mercury was the key to finally making the Philosopher’s Stone never made any gold, but did quite often give themselves mercury poisoning.

If you don’t believe me, I suggest you take your “silver” to a precious-metals dealer and see if they want to buy it.

Abdul has not yet replied. I like to think that he’s actually seeing if he really has made silver from base metals.

UPDATE: Abdul’s latest, and I hope last, e-mail to me:

Respected Sir,

Thanks for reply me with kind attention.

Actually A herbal pharmacist purchased the that is called ” Mercury with copper heated M aterial” at the rate of equal with gold.

My brother in law has adviced me and give me the procedure to prepare the Mercury.

I have prepared Mercury amalg with zinc but when I heat this thing in copper pots the result is opposite to his remarks.

my brother in law said that your copper pot should be leak proof so that Mercury should boiling in it but it should not evaporated or not leakage from this pot.

but I could not stop this leakage . every time all the Mercury leaked out of the copper pot when it boiled or heated.

if it is possible to stop leakage without any welding. then please guide me

I have seen that people prepare many things with Mercury then how is it possible? and how can we control Mercury and mould it in any shape or color.

I will be thankful to you.

Abdul

I told him again that these ideas are thousands of years out of date, and that we now know down to the subatomic particles why they cannot work, and that he might as well be trying to construct a ladder to the moon. I then asked him to think about why it might be that his brother-in-law is not the richest man in the world.

Perhaps it’ll make some sort of impression upon him. As with this bloke who was using his twilight years to try to construct a perpetual-motion machine, I hope he finds something better to do with his life. Which could, of course, be drastically shortened if he spends a lot of time in a cloud of mercury vapour.

I wonder if there have actually been millions of people, over the millennia, who’ve thrown their whole life down the dry well of the Philosopher’s Stone or the quest for the Fountain of Youth or perpetual motion. I suppose it’d have to be many millions, if you count all of the people whose extremely demanding religious observances leave them with little time to themselves, and few things their gods will allow them to do in their leisure time anyway. (Even if one agonising ultra-orthodox faith is actually correct, that only makes things worse for followers of all the others.)

Via TechnicBricks, yet again:

This magnificent contraption is not new - the clip's from 2007, and Make noticed it in early 2008. But I think you'll agree that its creator, "superbird28", could do with some more publicity.

If you'd prefer a more compact version:

This reminded me of another Make find, just the other day:

This is a system used in real factories, to reduce the machinery needed to handle different goods, or the same goods at different stages in the manufacturing process. Note that the cylinders and the cubes don't mix.