THIS BLOG HAS MOVED - click here for new site!

The fellow who made the Lego 3D scanner that worked by poking things with a needle has now made the more conventional kind of 3D scanner.

With a laser.

As with the last scanner, he's using it to import funny-shaped Lego pieces, like Fabuland heads and trees from 1969, into LDraw.

And, needless to say, the new scanner is once again made out of Lego. It's less of a mechanical achievement than the last one, because the Lego isn't much more than a supporting framework for the DAVID 3D Scanner software, that works with a line laser and a webcam.

It's way faster than the pokey-scanner, though, and has startlingly good resolution. Lego isn't generally much use for making precision mechanisms, but this one seems to work great.

I'll just leave this here.

Design a model in LDD using any of 95 brick types, send it to this "factory", and it makes it.

(Via, needless to say.)

Remember when the Sydney Morning Herald published that article saying how awesome the Moletech (or possibly MTECH) Fuel Saver was, when that device was of course actually just another useless magic talisman?

And then the online version of the article was erased, in a rather weird way?

And then the paper favoured me with a ten-word non-explanation about what had happened?

(I’m still waiting for Asher Moses, the author of the Moletech article, to reply to my e-mail about it. It’s been almost three years now.)

Well, that’s how newspaper Web sites work these days, apparently. ‘Cos, a couple of days ago, the Daily Telegraph (another Australian paper) published that paean to the all-round gosh-darned fabulousness of the “Q-Link Mini” self-adhesive radiation-absorbing tiger-repelling antigravity eternal-life cure for the common cold.

And now they’ve… unpublished it again.

Ze page, she is not found.

It was foolish of me to think that a major publication wouldn’t be so shameless as to do this, after I’d already seen a different major publication do it. Next time, I’m keeping a backup of the page. (Google still indexes umpteen traces of the article on other dailytelegraph.com.au pages, but the text of the article itself is lost.)

This is the normal way in which defamatory or otherwise objectionable material is dealt with on the Web. We all know about the Streisand Effect vastly increasing the readership of any material that someone unlikable wants kept secret. But in situations when someone has valid grounds for objection to something on the Web, the outraged party usually just shouts at the offender a bit, whereupon the offender takes down the page full of lies about the sexual habits of Joe Bloggs, or the review that was copied wholesale from someone else’s site, or whatever. There often isn’t even a legal nastygram involved.

But this is not how it should work for major publishers. Even if the Q-Link Mini piece was never published on paper (I don’t read the Telegraph - anybody see it on the actual fishwrap?), the greater public respect that “proper” publishers are meant to have (I’ll wait for the laughter to die down…) means that, at the very least, they should do one of those one-square-inch-on-page-19 retraction/apologies. Not just silently delete the Web page.

I wonder, as a commenter on the last post pointed out, whether attention from the Mirror Universe evil twin of Media Watch had anything to do with this unannounced retraction.

[Update: As pointed out in the comments, Media Watch has covered the story now as well!]

As that Crikey piece points out at the end and as this Crikey piece explains in detail, it turns out that Stephen Fenech’s footballer brother Mario is paid to promote Q-Link products. Which, to be fair, Mario probably sincerely believes are effective. This continues the great tradition of incisive critical thinking we’ve come to expect from sports stars.

(The second Crikey article also links to this page, where someone wades through the alleged scientific support for Q-Link claims, so you don’t have to.)

Entertainingly, a search for the names of the two brothers currently turns up rather a lot of people talking about this Q-Link nonsense. You could probably piece the whole article back together from the sections of it quoted on blogs and Twitter.

While I waited for an apology from Stephen Fenech and/or the Daily Telegraph (or Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, for that matter, because that seems about as likely), I was wondering what the heck Stephen was thinking when he wrote that piece. Did he, I wondered, imagine that the preposterousness of the product would distract people from the giant conflict of interest? Perhaps Mario’s the smart one in that family?

But no, that wasn’t it. Stephen actually thought he’d get away with this because he’s done it twice before.

Here and here, courtesy of the Australian Q-Link site’s “In The Media” page, are Mr Fenech’s two previous proud declarations of belief in the incredible powers of Sympathetic Resonance Technology. Both published in the Telegraph.

How often do you have to do this to be eligible for a Lifetime Achievement Bent Spoon Award?

A round of applause, gentle readers, for Stephen Fenech, "Technology Writer" for the Daily Telegraph here in Australia, for his unflinchingly courageous presentation of the "Q-Link Mini".

The Mini is a tiny self-adhesive object which, Mr Fenech assures us, is "powerful enough to shield us from the potentially harmful electromagnetic radiation generated by mobile phones and other electronic devices". (Q-Link themselves delightfully refer to the Mini as a "Wellness Button".)

Not for Mr Fenech the mealy-mouthed objections of hide-bound so-called "scientists", who've observed that there's no good reason to suppose that low-level exposure to non-ionising electromagnetic radiation has any deleterious effects, and that there's also no good reason to suppose that there is even a theoretical basis for low-energy EMR to harm us, and that if you block the radiation coming out of a mobile phone, the phone won't work any more.

Mr Fenech is similarly wisely unconcerned that Q-Link's most famous product, the "SRT-2 Pendant", contains a copper coil that isn't connected to anything, and a surface-mount zero-ohm resistor, which is also not connected to anything.

I'm sure Mr Fenech disregards doubts raised by this discovery because, of course, Q-Link's products are unconstrained by the foolish fantasies of orthodox "science", which has somehow come by the idiotic idea that the existence of microwave ovens, GPS satellites and personal computers might indicate a more accurate understanding of the principles by which the universe operates than that possessed by the manufacturers of mystic talismans supported by testimonial evidence, uncontrolled user tests and the sorts of studies that cause spikes in the blood pressure of "scientists" who work so hard to get their own papers published because, of course, their papers are mere tissues of lies that never mention "biomeridians" or "Applied Kinesiology"...

...which is here discussed in a way clearly calculated to underhandedly attack Q-Link's products!

If you buy something that's meant to operate by "Sympathetic Resonance Technology™" or "non-Hertzian frequencies", you should of course take it back for a refund if it turns out not to contain seemingly-meaningless components that aren't connected to anything. Those components are where the magic happens, people!

Now, I know that some of you are the sort of raving "science"-worshippers that won't take Mr Fenech's word by itself as proof that the Q-Link Mini is worth $US24.95 - or even $AU48, which for some reason is what it costs here.

Rest assured, all you Moon-landing conspirators and Nazi doctors, that Mr Fenech has diligently secured supportive quotes from the entirely unbiased CEO of Q-Link Australia, and also a naturopath called Daniel Taylor, who appears to be a practitioner of the "Dorn Method", which regrettably does not seem to have anything to do with being knocked out to demonstrate how dangerous the latest threat to the Enterprise D is.

I don't believe a study's yet been done to determine what happens if you use one of those antenna-enhancing stickers at the same time as a Q-Link Mini. Be warned that adding a battery-enhancing sticker and a Guardian Angel battery may result in headache, irritable bowels or time travel.