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I wrote, in 2010, about the miraculous Keseco Current Improvement System. It’s a power-saving device that’s claimed to work because of, in brief, technologies unknown to science.

I like this kind of power-saving box. Most power-savers are claimed to be some sort of power-factor corrector. Ones like the Keseco devices that’re supposed to work by “rotating electromagnetic waves” or “non-Hertzian frequencies” are more fun. They still don’t work, but at least they’re more original.

When I saw a new comment on the Keseco post today, I presumed it’d be one of the spammers who occasionally get through the net and spray ads for handbags or wristwatches all over my old posts.

I was wrong, though. It was this:

We are representing Ultra device, made by Keseco in EU market.
We do agree that claims to achieve superconductivity in wires seem to be unrealistic. And we partly agree with that. However we confirm that we have tested Ultra in various cases: domestic and industrial. We have used Chauvin Arnoux ca 8335 power analyzer to measure w,kva,kvar,Amps, U, harmonics, cos fi, etc. We confirm that Ultra device really works in reducing active power, reactive power, slightly improving cos fi.It reduces total consumption by 5-12%. The saving % depends on a number of factors.It does not turn wires into superconductors, but reduces energy loses in them.Detailed reports can be send upon request. Currently Keseco obtained SGS, TGM reports on saving. The patent they have for energy saving device is real.It is not for design, it is for energy saving.See: http://www.wipo.int/patentscope/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=WO2003061097&recNum=1&docAn=KR2003000104&queryString=AN:PCT/KR03/00104&maxRec=1 . Ultra device really saves energy For more information on research works we have done with ultra,please, send request to :info@energita.lt.

Energita

If it’s all the same to you, unnamed Energita representative, I’ll just wait for this miraculous device to make you the billions of dollars you so richly deserve. Then I’ll be able to learn about it from, say, the paperwork for the Nobel Prize the Keseco designers have won, or the sticker on the side of the Keseco box that I, like everyone else in the world, will have purchased.

Just look at that patent. It’s for a box…

…with some busbars in it, the busbars only being connected to power at one end, and the inside of the box provided with some mysterious ceramic coating and “conductive plates” that aren’t electrically connected to anything.

And that’s it.

Conventional electrophysics says that this box, plugged in parallel with household mains power, will do nothing. It’s not even part of a circuit.

You allege that you have real evidence that it’s a power saver.

So now all you have to do is send these patented boxes to universities, technical colleges and appropriate governmental bodies until someone takes notice, and then here comes all that money and that definite Nobel Prize, for the staggering discovery of how “rotating electromagnetic waves” make the magic happen.

(Or the people who invented it could, after patenting their discovery, have written it up as a scientific paper. Get it published and the results replicated, then sell licenses, and you could become billionaires without having to actually manufacture anything at all.)

You’d think that in the several years the Keseco device has been around, they’d have managed to do this. But instead, just like every other magic power saver or magic gasoline pill, the devices are sold piecemeal to whatever end-users can be persuaded to buy one.

Electrical components that aren’t connected to anything are strangely popular in scientifically… novel… devices and talismans.

Inside the “EMPower Modulator“, for instance…

…are three aluminium plates that aren’t connected to anything.

The “Q-Link Pendant“…

…is similarly electrically innovative. And now we’ve got this Keseco box-of-nothing, too.

Energita sell a few other odd devices (machine-translated English version).

This power-monitoring system (translated) seems kosher, as do these light bulbs (translated), and I think this gadget (translated) may be OK too; it seems to be some sort of improved thermostat for freezers.

But then there’s something called a “Fuel Activator” (translated), magnetic fuel improvers (translated) and, of course, the Keseco doodad (translated).

I’m never sure what to think when someone who sells these sorts of products remonstrates with me. I presume they quite often, especially when they’re a reseller instead of the originator of the product, actually believe what they’re saying. They’re seldom abusive or clearly mentally peculiar.

There but for the grace of critical thinking, I suppose.

A reader writes:

Having read this…

…I became inspired to upgrade my UPS as it’s time to replace the 5.5AH gel cell, so why not kill two birds with one stone.

Unfortunately, I don’t know a heck of a lot about the ratings and other tech jargon behind what will make this all work, so I am sending this email in the hope that perhaps you could take a moment to take a look at what I have and let me know if it seems likely that it will work for a start and then what I should go out to buy to make it happen. I should at this point mention that I live in Thailand, the land where no matter what you want to buy, you can’t find it. But still, given that I have a UPS unit and access to a place that sells cheap car batteries, I figured there may be hope.

Firstly, this is what I have. (The specs are in English at the bottom of the page.) The gel cell inside is a “Model AC-1255″ rated at 12V 5.5AH/20Hz in case that means anything to you.

Does it seem likely that if I connect a car battery (or two) to this device I will be able to achieve similar results to what you did in your article? () Or is this UPS just not up for the task of keep a car battery or two charged and ready for the task at hand.

Out where I live power is OFTEN interrupted, but rarely more than 5-10 minutes at a time (90% of the time it’s just a few seconds), but of course those few seconds are the ones immediately preceding my clicking “submit” on a 2 hour email type-up marathon. I NEED to have some form of UPS going but am not looking for hours of use after power-out. Just enough time for me to shut down the system gracefully.

I would appreciate any insight you could offer to my options and if you need any further information on the bits I have here, just let me know.

Many thanks

David

Fortunately, this is a pretty easy job. If you screw up, though, it can be quite dangerous.

Here are the ways in which you can get it wrong when hooking up new batteries, especially bigger new batteries, to a UPS:

1. A given UPS runs from 24 volts, so it wants two 12V batteries in series; you give it one, or two in parallel.

Danger: Possibly high, if you thus barbecue the batteries with too much charge voltage. You’ll probably just get loud complaints from the UPS, though, and if you’re not completely daft you’ll disconnect the batteries before anything can go pop.

2. The opposite of the above; it wants one battery (as your particular UPS, like most small UPSes, does), but you give it two in series. (Two in parallel would be fine.)

Danger: Will probably kill the UPS. Probably will not set it on fire.

(Home/small-office UPSes are almost always 12V or 24V on the battery side, meaning one or two 12V batteries. Big serious UPSes may run more batteries in series - possibly built out of individual two-volt cells that are each bigger than the whole 12V battery in your UPS - because the higher the voltage the lower the current for a given power output, and big serious UPSes can usually deliver a lot of watts. Lower current is desirable because it means thinner wires and cheaper power transistors and other components. This is also, essentially, why big long-distance power lines run at such high voltages.)

3. You connect the battery or batteries backwards.

Danger: May or may not blow up the UPS. It’s quite easy for the designers to guard against this mistake, but I’ve no idea how many do.

If your new battery is the same type as the old one, you have to be pretty seriously dedicated to screwing up in order to connect it backwards. It’ll probably be connected with two spade lugs of different sizes; getting them the wrong way around can only be achieved if you’re the sort of person who hammers a USB plug into a VGA socket.

If you’re connecting a UPS to a bigger battery that has different connectors, though, it’s usually quite easy to connect it backwards.

Whatever happens, this particular mistake probably won’t set anything on fire.

4. You accidentally short out one or more of the batteries. Even little sealed-lead-acid “gel cells” can deliver a lot of current into a dead short, and very high current delivery is the major design goal of car batteries. The worst possible way to do this is to have a couple of batteries you’re trying to connect in parallel, and to accidentally connect one of them backwards. (This is also what happens if you get the leads mixed up when jump-starting a car. In that situation one of the batteries is usually pretty flat, but a quite stimulating physics demonstration may still ensue.)

Result: From alarming to spectacular. Red-hot wires. Smoke and possibly flame. If you break the short-circuit quickly, though, the batteries themselves should be OK.

If you’re building a battery pack for a cordless drill or R/C car or something, you can do it with discharged cells, which makes accidental short-circuits harmless. You generally can’t do that with lead-acid batteries, because running them flat damages them. On the plus side, if you’re upgrading a UPS battery you’re probably not soldering any cells or batteries together; on the minus side, while you’re running longer wires to connect a bigger battery outside the UPS, there are many opportunities to short the battery out.

(If you’ve got a liquid-electrolyte lead-acid battery, you can drain it of electrolyte while you work, which makes it harmless, just like building a battery pack from flat cells. The best solution if you’re going to be fooling around with wires connected to a high-current-capacity battery is to buy a brand new battery that comes “dry”, and buy your electrolyte separately. Note that lead-acid battery electrolyte is roughly 30% sulfuric acid, and should be treated with respect; battery acid won’t melt the flesh from your bones, but it is still not your friend. This is all overkill for what we’re talking about here, but I want to be as exhaustive as possible in writing about this stuff for the benefit of readers whose situation is not the same as yours.)

By now you are probably just about ready to throw up your hands and trade your computer for a manual typewriter, but I really did mean it when I said this job is pretty easy. You’ll very probably be fine. Take your time, do not mitigate any uncertainty you feel with alcohol, and keep track of which wire’s meant to be positive. If you do not own a cheap plastic multimeter, buy a cheap plastic multimeter. Some basic soldering ability will also be handy for extending power wires, but you’d get away with using wire nuts or something. (You’d probably also get away with twisting wires together and then mummifying them in leccy tape, but doing so makes the ghost of Nikola Tesla cry.)

And now, finally, specific answers to your actual questions.

I don’t know whether your UPS will actually be happy running from a car battery, but it very probably will. I used to be less confident about this, but I’ve done it more times myself now and corresponded with plenty of other people about it, and it really does seem that most, if not all, consumer-market UPSes will work fine from much bigger batteries. They don’t charge a big battery very quickly, but unless your local electricity is a ten-minutes-on, two-hours-off sort of deal, that’s not a problem.

Car batteries are not an ideal choice for running UPSes, because they’ve got less capacity per kilo than batteries made to run, for instance, golf carts or fishing-dinghy trolling motors. Car batteries also don’t like being run flat. But the price/performance ratio for low-end car batteries is much better than that of fancy deep-cycle batteries, and car batteries’ shortcomings are largely irrelevant to someone like you who mainly just wants to ride out short power interruptions, and doesn’t anticipate running from battery power for any great length of time.

(It also seems pretty definite now that lead-acid batteries that’ve “sulfated” because they were run flat and left that way can be rescued, with “desulfator” gadgets. I haven’t done enough research of my own to be able to speak authoritatively about this, though.)

The specs on the side of your battery only matter if you’re trying to buy a new one that’ll fit inside the UPS, without having to know the exact dimensions of your old battery or the one you’re buying. There is unfortunately no standardised naming for SLA batteries, so the “Model AC-1255″ on the sticker is not helpful.

The most common battery in small consumer UPSes is a brick-shaped 12V unit with about a seven amp-hour capacity; the battery you’ve got is I think probably this size, but it doesn’t matter since you’re not after another weedy little gel cell.

(I’ve no idea what the “20Hz” on the sticker means, by the way. Batteries are not alternating-current devices, so whatever that is, I don’t think it’s meant to mean 20 cycles per second.)

One cheap car battery will probably do the job for you just fine. If you needed longer run time then you could add one or more extra car batteries in parallel (preferably identical batteries, by the way, though in relatively low-drain applications like this you can get away with all sorts of unsightly alternatives), but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Get a set of cheap jumper leads along with your cheap battery as I did, cut ‘em up and splice them onto the UPS’s existing battery leads, hook it up, and enjoy some relatively reliable computing.

Thanks, once again, to all you readers and your ceaseless campaign to make me sad and irritable, I now know that a couple of days ago that jewel in Australia's investigative-reporting crown, A Current Affair, ran a story about yet another bloody "power saver".

You can see the five-minute ACA segment here.

(Pleasingly, as I write this, the comments on that page are overwhelmingly negative. I've only clicked the "10 more comments" button a couple of times, but thus far it's the sanest comment thread I've ever seen on a mainstream-media site.)

This latest magic electricity talisman is the "Oz Power Saver", the Web site for which is immensely proud of the ACA story, but oddly bereft of further information. You can't even buy one. All you can do is "register your interest".

The basic claims on the site are par for the energy-saver course, though. "Save up to 25% off your electricity bills", "reduces energy usage", and the inevitable "guarantee".

That ACA video fills in the rest of the blanks, with the same stuff we've seen over and over from other magic-box salesmen.

Like the guarantee, for instance, which this time says that they'll refund the purchase price if you don't save at least the Oz Power Saver's purchase price in three years.

It would be churlish and tendentious of me to point out that scam-gadgets, definitely including "power savers", almost always have alleged money-back guarantees, and that power-saver hucksters have a tendency to spawn new businesses rather more frequently than once every three years.

So I shall, of course, not point that out.

On goes the video, dum de dum, it's "already a huge hit in the US and Europe", here's a testimonial from the "one lucky family" in all of Australia who've had the chance to try the thing out, here's no testimonial from anybody equipped to test it properly, "big energy users like factories and hotels have been using this technology for years"... all right, I reckon we're ready for an atrociously mangled explanation of power factor, and power-factor correction, now.

Ah, there it is.

The ACA explanation actually starts out well, with a double-sine-wave depiction of the voltage/current phase relationship, but then spears off into the bushes with some gibberish about the phase relationship getting messed up as the electricity "travels to your home". (Later on, they tell us that the further you are from a distribution transformer, the worse your power will be.)

It's actually reactive loads that mess up power factor, not the length of wire between your house and a pole-pig transformer. But, more importantly, the people who worry about power factor are the suppliers of the electricity, not its consumers.

To try to get my umpteenth repetition of this lecture out of the way as quickly as possible:

1: There are many, many "power saver" products on the market. Most are little plug-in things, but there are also versions like the Oz Power Saver that are hard-wired in the breaker box. Actually, there are some that're very, very like the Oz Power Saver, to the point of looking exactly the same, as we'll see in a moment.

2: There is no known way for devices like this to work. Power-factor correction is a real thing, but it is completely impossible for it to save a domestic power consumer any money at all, even if their house has a lousy aggregate power factor, which it almost certainly doesn't.

3: The reason why it can't save you any money is that domestic (and most commercial) power consumers aren't billed for a bad power factor. Domestic (and most commercial) power meters can't even detect a bad power factor. Promoters of these gadgets always come up with some sort of tortured pseudoscientific word-salad that suggests that your electricity meter actually measures the "bad electricity" or "dirty power" or whatever that the magic box cures, but this is not actually the case unless you're running a factory full of motors, and it's not always the case even then.

Back to the Oz Power Saver.

I applied the terrifying black-hat hacker firepower of the TinEye image search to...

...this picture of the product, on the Oz Power Saver site. Whaddayaknow, there was the same image...

...being used on numerous sites selling the good old Power-Save 1200!

Now, the Oz Power Saver can't be the exact same thing as the Power-Save 1200, because the Power-Save 1200 is a US product, and Australia's mains voltage is twice that of the USA.

(Well, OK, it could be the exact same product, if it contains auto-sensing multi-voltage circuitry, or no circuitry at all, which latter situation turns out to be not far from the truth for certain products in this market sector. I don't think either is likely in this case, though.)

One quite marked difference between the Oz Power Saver and the Power-Save 1200 is price. The Power-Save 1200 is about a $US300 product, while the Oz Power Saver, according to the cheerful distributor in the ACA story, revels in a price of eight hundred and ninety-five Australian dollars, which is about the same number of US dollars, as I write this.

But it's guaranteed to save you at least that much in three years, et cetera et cetera.

In the ACA-story demonstration of the Oz Power Saver's incredible qualities, we get to see the traditional Wooden Partition with Wires and Motors On It, and the similarly traditional Cheap 'N' Dodgy Power Meter (sometimes replaced by one or more $10 multimeters) giving its imaginative impression of the power factor of a load.

The demo load manages to achieve a truly miserable power factor of 0.39 according to said meter, which leaps to 0.87 when the Oz Power Saver's activated.

These power-factor numbers may actually be accurate, since the test load appears to be a free-spinning unloaded AC motor, which can be counted on to have a crappy power factor. AC motors that're matched passably well to their load, like most AC motors in the world, can be expected to have a much better power factor. Power tools - electric drills, angle grinders - may have a lousy PF when they're spinning free, but you'll have to spend rather a lot of time standing there grinning at a free-spinning drill bit for that load to make any significant difference to your residence's aggregate power factor.

More realistically, washing machines and tumble-dryers may sometimes have lousy power factor, because different loads of washing mean different loads on the motors. But you'd, again, have to do rather a lot of washing for this to make a significant difference to your home's aggregate power factor, and even if you do, it won't cost you any more money, because residential customers aren't billed by power factor. (Just in case you forgot that.)

Shortly after the cheap-electricity-meter demo, A Current Affair's piece on the Oz Power Saver suddenly switches to an update on a story from last year, about some blokes who make a whole different power-saving thingy, the "Futurewave Energy Saver". Which I immediately, of course, assumed would be another box of pure uncut pixie dust. But which I suspect is actually kosher.

The Futurewave device is alleged to reduce the power consumption of swimming-pool pumps, and some other similar motors. It isn't a magic power-factor box, though; it's a speed-control device, that according to the FAQ saves actual real power, instead of confusedly-described apparent power, by just running the pool pump at reduced speed for most of the pool-cleaning cycle, when full power isn't actually required.

This seems as if it might actually work. I don't know if it does, but it seems to have no arguments with the laws o' physics, or of electricity billing.

Next, the ACA story whiplashes back to the Oz Power Saver, and cheerfully informs us that the Oz Power Saver will "do the same" for "anything with a motor".

So presumably you'd be a total idiot to buy the Futurewave product, that only works for pool pumps.

God, I'd be irritated if I were the Futurewave people. It'd be like taking the time to build a comfortable and safe 80-mile-per-gallon car, and then finding yourself lost in a vast mob of hucksters selling cars that run on water.

I'm not holding my breath for a regulatory agency to do anything about the Oz Power Saver. It is, for a start, not actually on sale yet, and the regulators are overworked and understaffed. Scams that don't actively kill people often don't get a very high priority.

Here, to cheer us all up a bit, is the Australian government slapping down one of the many plug-in power savers, called the Enersonic Power Saver, which I mention here and here.

The Australian Consumers' Association were so impressed with another plug-in power saver, the "Reegen Micro-Plug" that they gave it a Shonky Award. And here are those nice people who sold one of these things until they realised it was a scam, then said sorry. They, along with some non-Australian examples are mentioned at the end of this old post.

My offer from the end of that post still stands. If the Oz Power Saver people want to contact me about installing one of their boxes at my house, preferably with a nice Frankenstein knife switch so I can switch it in and out of the circuit at will just as they do in their demo, I will test it with various household motor loads and will immediately recant all of the above if the Oz Power Saver turns out to do a damn thing.

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.

Imagine my delight at receiving the following:

From: “Clink Admin” >admin@clink.com.au<
To: dan@dansdata.com
Subject: A review?
Date: Sat, 21 Aug 2010 15:21:37 +1000

Hi Dan,

I was wondering if you would do a review of something on my website, address in signature.
Not sure if anything on there is along the lines of stuff you would normally but think there may be a couple of items that fit in.

Would love if you would do a review of my Vortex Analogue Interconnects, these have proven very popular cable.
http://clink.com.au/audio/stereo.htm (bottom of the page)
So would be great to get an independent and unbiased view of these.
Would only ask you to do a cable review though if you feel it is something that has an impact on audio quality.
If your of the school of thought that they have no impact then prefer not to have a review done as it would be very short, probably in the under 10 words variety of short.

Gregory
Cinema Link, Sales
675 Elizabeth St
Waterloo NSW 2017
Ph: (02) 9698 4959
www.clink.com.au

[There was a bit more to this e-mail; I’ve corresponded with Gregory previously. He asked if I’d like to check out one of his HDMI switches, which I don’t actually have the equipment to test but which seem quite handy; by linking to them and other pages of his without so much as a nofollow, I hereby repay Greg for what’s going to happen to him in the rest of this post!]

My answer:

Yeeeahhh… you haven’t read much of my site, have you :-)?

(Or this blog, for that matter.)

It’s the “school of thought” part that I think is the problem. There’s no need to separate people into pseudo-religious “schools of thought” over a question that can be settled by scientific means.

We know, with the same certainty that we know that the GPS system and personal computers work and for many of the same reasons, that none of the conventionally-measurable electrical characteristics of analogue cables have any effect on the sound. Well, except in particularly pathological cases where some truly bizarre cable architecture adds substantial reactance or something, in which case it only makes a system sound better if there was something wrong with the system in the first place. Like, your speakers have 14 drivers wired in parallel and thus have far too little impedance for your amp to happily drive, so hooking them up via carbon spark-plug leads or something that add a lot of resistance un-ruins the sound.

(See also those occasional fringe-audiophile products that are actually quantifiably bad, like
this amplifier, plus a veritable cavalcade of dreadful valve amplifiers. All of which have users who insist that they sound GREAT.)

[Oh - in case you’re wondering, yes, Cinema Link have fancy digital cables, too…]

The analogue-cables-sound-different response to the electrical-engineering argument is to say that DC-to-daylight frequency and phase analysis just doesn’t measure some special something that they know when they hear it, science doesn’t know everything, et cetera.

But a vanishingly small percentage of the people who say this ever bother to do even a simple single-blind test to see if they, themselves, can actually hear any difference between their special cables and lamp cord. Such tests really are not difficult to do at all - all you need is a trustworthy friend to flip coins, swap cables and make notes, some very elementary experimental design, and a spare afternoon - but they’re amazingly unpopular. Un-blinded tests remain immensely popular, but it’s trivially demonstrable that those don’t work.

This is my favourite recent example, but there are countless others, covering the entire breadth of live and recorded sound. Vision and hearing are subject to an immense amount of processing by the brain before consciousness gets to perceive them.

(Another favourite of mine: Famous concert violinists are often certain that they can tell the difference between a priceless antique violin - especially if it’s their Stradivarius or whatever - and a high-quality modern instrument. But when you do a blinded test, the results, once again, drop to chance levels! They can probably pick the Strad blindfolded if they’re actually holding it in their hands, but that’s all.)

Some audiophiles go so far as to say that no matter how perfect the experiment design, with no possibly-sound-colouring ABX switchboxes or skull-resonance-changing blindfolds involved, these sorts of differences just can’t be detected by science, in the same way that God will never permit Himself to be detected by scientific investigation. Exactly how these people figured out that the new cables sounded better is, in these cases, something of a mystery.

(The people who insist that cables need “burn-in time” have a particularly neat way out of blinded tests; they can just assert that the… phlogiston, or whatever… leaks out of burned-in cables when you disconnect them. But I’d be willing to bet quite a lot of money that swapping out their expensive burned-in wires for hidden $2 interconnects and bell-wire speaker cables would pass entirely unnoticed.)

I’m inclined to go easy on people who buy fancy cables and reckon they sound good. We all fool ourselves frequently, which is why science is so important, but a fooling of oneself that leads to essentially harmless happiness is not a major crime.

But I really must insist that people who’re in the business of making and selling fancy cables have no right to make any claims about the “sound” of their products, if they haven’t at least hired a few first-year electrical-engineering students to spend a day doing an independent test.

If, when blinded tests were done, they at least reasonably frequently showed that fancy cables sounded better, then it’d be no big deal to sell such products without doing the tests yourself. But what we instead keep seeing is that in a blinded test people can’t tell the difference between Monster Cables and (literal) coat-hanger wire. (Monster products may be overpriced and often sold in a blatantly dishonest way, but surely they ought to beat coat-hangers!)

Given this, I cannot help but consider the basic rationale for products such as your cables as being as unproven as the notion that a chiropractor can cure diabetes, or that all poor people are poor because they do not adequately desire wealth.

It’s not the Middle Ages any more. We know where lightning comes from, we have machines that routinely fly hundreds of people thousands of miles in (relative) comfort, and our doctors have figured out that it’s a good idea to wash your hands before operating. Every day, people in First World nations are surrounded by proof of the effectiveness of scientific inquiry that’s so bright, loud and ubiquitous that we, apparently, have developed the ability to tune it out when it suits us. But that doesn’t make it a good idea to do so.

You’re not a quack, and I don’t think you’re a scam artist, either. Your cables aren’t outrageously expensive relative to the price of the components and assembly - they might as well be free, when compared with the truly out-there cable vendors. And you don’t sell $1000 power cables, either (…do you? Tell me you don’t!). But this doesn’t mean that sending samples of new cables to your existing customers and using their testimonials in advertising is an acceptable way of proving your claims.

If testimonials were a good way of proving the scientifically dubious, I’d be torn between devoting all my time and money to Transcendental Meditation in order to develop the ability to fly and walk through walls, or devoting just as much time and probably even more money to Scientology in order to develop the ability to control space and time.

At the end of the day, I suppose you do end up with “schools of thought”, but the members of those schools are not “people who reckon special cables sound better” and “people who don’t” (or “people who reckon Uri Geller has paranormal powers” and “people who don’t“; I’m sure you can provide many of your own examples). They’re “people who believe this question is amenable to rational investigation” and “people who don’t care”.

You’re allowed to not care. Everyone’s entitled to his opinion. But nobody’s entitled to be taken seriously.

Gregory replied:

Thanks for taking the time to reply in depth, and for the informative links.

I’ve taken a little more time this time to read some of the pieces on your site and understand a little more of your thoughts on audio cables.

So I’ll take that as no, or at least I’ll take it as something that would be detrimental to my business health.

To which I replied:

…and you are thus acknowledging that if you made an attempt to figure out if your fancy cables worked, you’d find that they didn’t? :-)

[Greg’s, regrettably, not yet found time to reply to that.]

As I said, for hi-fi this really doesn’t make a whole lot of difference either way. Even the really wacky Shun Mook or Peter Belt (…or just about anything else that 6moons thinks is fantastic…) sort of hi-fi cultism doesn’t really hurt anyone - certainly not by the standards of the usual kind of cult. Some nut out there has probably bought speaker wire instead of nutritious food for his children, but that is hardly a probable situation.

That doesn’t mean that the same patterns observable in truly harmful things like crazy cults and medical quackery aren’t valid when you see them in other contexts, though. One I find particularly common, which is very much on show in the audiophile world, is the peculiar and inexplicable situation in which the better you investigate something - eliminating extra variables, reducing experimenter bias, reducing the ability of subjects to fool themselves - the less effect that something turns out to have.

When “lousy test” shows “huge effect” and “better test” shows “medium effect” and “further-improved test” shows “not much effect at all”, it may be that the latter two tests were false negatives.

But it usually does actually mean that “perfect test” would show “zero effect”.

In which Theo Gray makes some acrylic Lichtenberg figures rather bigger than the ones I can afford.

More detail in these excerpts from his book.

(Via.)

This post from 2007 was about a highly entertaining YouTube clip of some people pulling arcs from a long string of nine-volt batteries. With those neat little clip connectors, 9V batteries are just begging to be clipped together into very long, very dangerous daisy-chains. And, in that particular case, they had 125 batteries in series, by my count. That adds up to a nominal 1125 volts DC.

(The 9V terminals are also, of course, clearly intended to make them easy to lick.)

But now, unfortunately, that video's been removed.

So I went hunting for more experiments of this type.

Here's a string of 19 (for 171 volts DC, nominal) running a compact fluorescent lamp:

The experimenter boldly holds the thin-insulation alligator-clip leads in his bare hands, but that's as exciting as this video gets. Interesting to see that these lamps run from DC as happily as from AC, though.

Here's some fun with 52 batteries:

That'd give 468V if the batteries were all at their nominal 9V, and could easily make it to 500V with fresh batteries. But apparently these were discarded "8.4... ish" cells of unknown provenance (my money would be on a company replacing the batteries in all of its smoke detectors). 52 times 8.4 gives a mere 437 volts, open-circuit.

(All of these voltages will plummet when you close the circuit, to start striking arcs, because the more current you ask for the further the terminal voltage will sag, and alkaline nine-volters aren't meant to deliver more than a very little current. Energizer, for instance, don't provide a maximum-current rating on the datasheet [PDF] for their standard alkaline nine-volters, but the maximum current on the load-versus-capacity graph is half an amp, at which discharge rate the capacity drops from a 25mA-load maximum of more than 600 milliamp-hours, to a little more than 300mAh. If you buy a Big Bag of Innocent Unsuspecting 9V Batteries the cheap way, by getting carbon-zinc "super heavy duty" batteries instead of alkalines, the rated current [PDF datasheet] is now only about 5mA, and the highest current on the performance graph is only 25 milliamps. You're not going to be able to pull a multi-amp arc out of a string of those poor little things for long. Ex-smoke-detector alkaline batteries will probably work a lot better for this sort of Unwise Experiment than will brand new carbon-zincs.)

Here we have 48 batteries in series - so, maybe more than 460 volts open circuit - molesting a coin:

(With, again, not as much attention paid to safety as might have been.)

Here, though, is what we've been looking for!

Four hundred and ninety 9V batteries, baby!

They're good for quite a lot of arcing before the chain's weaker links started breaking, too. I hope somebody was at least wearing a couple of pairs of sunglasses simultaneously.

490 times nine volts gives 4410V; fresh batteries would add up to more than 4700V. These are more ex-smoke-detector batteries, though; the video description says they only added up to "almost 4000V".

Even four thousand volts can't strike a very long arc by itself. The dielectric breakdown strength of dry air is about 33 kilovolts per centimetre (around 84 kilovots per inch). So four kilovolts, even with humid air helping it (and hindering electrostatic experiments...), can only strike an arc a few millimetres in length, at the very most.

Once you've struck a spark with the terminals close together, though, you can draw it out into a much longer arc, because the ionised air between the terminals - which may include vaporised matter from the terminals - is much more conductive than un-ionised air. That's how arc welding works (and Jacob's Ladders too, for that matter), and that's what's happening in the video clip.

If I ever do something like this, I think I'll leave the striking of arcs and burning of batteries for the grand finale, and do some low-current high-voltage stuff first.

A reader writes:

Can you do some research on this amazing device, which claims to be a superconductor. Is it for real? If so it is the most advanced scientific device on the market.

Company: KESECO
Device: ULTRA Current Improvement System
This claims not to be Power factor correction, rather it is a superconductor!

It has relevant patents and scientific explanations. I am having a hard time discrediting this, maybe it is for real
Check it out Dan:

www.Keseco.com
www.Enerwise.com.au

Andrew

Keseco do seem to be using some words having to do with superconductivity, don't they?

They go on to talk about "rotating electromagnetic waves" being converted to and from "far infrared", and the "crystal structure" of the wire. This is all far too advanced for little old me.

(I bet it does wonders for air and musicality, though.)

OK, yes, superconductivity would save power, if you replaced all of the transmission wires with superconductors (as is, very occasionally, actually done). But whatever Keseco say they're doing, that isn't it. Their gadget connects in parallel with your existing wiring.

(Even if you could magically turn all of the conductors in your home into superconductors, while simultaneously sprinkling everything with the pixie dust it'd need in order to still work with zero conductor resistance, you'd save only a tiny amount. Where electricity is lost as heat in the home, it's almost all meant to be lost as heat, either directly as in a toaster, or indirectly in the course of causing some motor, CPU or loudspeaker to work.)

Oh, and no superconductor yet discovered operates at a temperature above -138 degrees Celsius.

But I'm sure these minor quibbles are all thoroughly dealt with somewhere in Keseco's complicated explanations.

The Keseco devices may have an unusual theory of operation - whatever it is - but in appearance and installation they're pretty standard magic energy savers. You just connect the Keseco device in parallel with your existing wiring in the breaker box, and that's it. Whatever it does, it does it to any combination of devices inside the building, without necessarily even being in there itself, much less being electrically coupled or configured to them in any readily apparent way.

Never mind that, though; you can't argue with success. And Keseco's devices are very successful. Just ask them!

Don't ask anyone actually in the electrical-device-analysis business, though. As is usually the case with these sorts of devices, Keseco does not appear to be in any hurry to do any independent tests of their power-saving claims. Neither are these Enerwise people here in Australia, as far as I can see. The Enerwise site uses terms like "proven" and "the results are in!", but the actual evidence is just the usual wall of testimonials. (I eagerly await the publication of Enerwise's "Big Book Of Brag"! Surely that will be where we'll find the long-awaited independent controlled tests!)

Keseco-slash-Enerwise have, of course, apparently been on the news. And as we all know, they won't let you say something on TV unless it's true.

But wait - Keseco's "Certificate" section has an actual "Test Report"! It's reproduced so small as to be almost illegible, but I managed to decipher it!

It's a RoHS test, that certifies that the Keseco products pass poisonous-chemicals tests. Not that they work.

And then, also in the Certificate second, there's some more paperwork, but in Korean.

(This also seems to be par for the course in the miracle-energy-product world. If there are tests, they'll often be from labs in far-flung parts of the world where they don't speak English, even though they're being used to support claims made for products that're sold in English-speaking countries. Even energy-saver companies that are based in English-speaking countries sometimes, somehow, manage to do this.)

For the squinting-and-translating-Korean convenience of my readers, here are direct links to the largest images available from the Keseco "Test Report" page:

page 1
page 2
page 3
page 4
page 5
page 6
page 7
page 8
page 9
page 10
page 11
page 12

In among the Hangul there's what that looks like a statement that... something... used two-point-something per cent less power after... something else happened. But I'm not sure.

None of it seems in any way connected to Keseco's "guarantee" of a 5% power saving.

The "Performance Report" on keseco.com makes bolder claims, and is another entirely typical document for this sort of outfit. Bare numbers, no info on how the test was controlled, and further silence on the all-important question of whether the tester was on the Keseco payroll or not.

This sort of proof-by-assertion is standard for makers of energy savers, magical mileage-improving fuel additives, magnetic anti-arthritis bracelets, ultrasonic pest repellers, literally-magic "money magnets" and so on. There are hundreds - heck, probably thousands - of companies of this sort, big and professional enough to put together a sales package like Keseco's. But even when these companies manage to get large amounts of money from canny investors, they never, ever do the proper tests that would let them actually prove their claims and take the giant step up to their rightful place high up the Fortune 500 list. Instead, they sell (or attempt to sell) their products one at a time, direct to consumers whose own standards of evidence are satisfied by the testimonials presented.

(Often, there's a hybrid middle level between the company-that-should-do-some-proper-tests and the gullible consumers. That level is occupied by the gullible distributor, who liked the product so much he bought a franchise, but who has not yet realised that there's no good reason to suppose the product really does work.)

Keseco's PDF catalogue, and their "Products info" page, also cheerfully claim "Preventing Harmful Electromagnetic Waves" as a feature of their system. I suppose that means your microwave stops working, too. If mobile phones, by some freak chance, do turn out to be bad for you, I suppose your Keseco box will also suck up all of their emissions.

The site and catalogue also say the Keseco boxes "prevent" static electricity. Somehow. Somewhere. And then the catalogue has a picture of what looks like a molecular model of DNA, and then something about Fermi energy. I'd have been completely convinced if only they'd worked in Bose-Einstein condensates and particles with imaginary mass.

The Keseco catalogue also has a number of examples of another standard marker for this sort of business, Irrelevant Certifications Offered As If They Have Something To Do With Whether The Product Works.

There's a Korean patent! A registered design! A trademark! A corporate insurance policy of some sort! Alleged CMA, CE, ANCE, ISO 9001 and RoHS conformance! None of which means the product bloody works!

(Just to make this clear one more time, because it comes up so very, very, VERY often: The Patent Offices in various countries make no attempt whatsoever to determine whether an idea presented for patenting is actually good for anything at all. You don't even have to provide a working model. There's usually some basic screening to keep out blatant perpetual-motion devices {possibly with a caveat that you can patent such a device, but only if you do bring a working model!}, but that's all. All the patent office cares about is whether the idea is sufficiently different from other things that already exist to be worthy of a patent - and most patent offices are so overworked these days that they don't even do this very well. So despite what thousands of crackpots and swindlers have claimed over lo, these many, many years, there is no connection whatsoever between patentability and functionality.)

I remind you, gentle reader, that all of the wonderful effects Keseco products are supposed to cause are, somehow, created by a box that you just stick in or near the building's breaker box, and wire in parallel with the building's circuits. Whatever those circuits are, and whatever business you're in. It would be entirely churlish to suggest that this is analogous to making a "water saver" that hangs off a T-fitting next to your water meter, thereby impeding or encouraging the water's flow in no way at all. So I won't do that.

I suggest, Andrew, that you just put up with your present electricity bill for another year. By then, either Keseco will be a household name, one of the most profitable corporations in the world, with Nobel Prizes in the pipeline for their engineers... or they'll still be grubbing around with all the other retail sellers of worthless "power saving" talismans.

But oh, dear - the proudly-displayed accreditations in Keseco's catalogue go all the way back to 2004! The site itself has been around since 2002!

(It used to have an awesome flash intro.)

And yet still, no Keseco boxes in every electrical substation. No Keseco boxes the size of Winnebagos hanging off the side of every aluminium smelter. No Nobel Prizes.

I just can't work it out.

A reader writes:

I’ve got a couple of cats, had ‘em for a couple of years. I have trouble motivating them to chase their toys, ping pong balls, etc - it works once or twice a week, but otherwise they just ignore it. So I’ve decided to bring out the big guns and get a laser pointer.

It seems they’re much harder to get in Australia since all those airplane shenanigans, even though I hardly need a galactic-range pointer.

Was wondering if you had a suggestions for where to nab a laser pointer appropriate for kitteh?

Jack

It’s still pretty easy to buy your basic button-cell keychain laser pointer from electronics stores here in Australia. I think there might have been a brief drought when the new Think Of The Children Or The Pilots Or the Puppies Or Something OMG JUST BE AFRAID EVERYONE law was passed, while the stores made sure that the humble cat toys they were selling yesterday hadn’t suddenly been transmuted into illegal death rays.

But basic laser pointers are easy to find now. Here’s one at Altronics, here’s one at Jaycar (Jaycar have several other options, too).

[There are cheaper pointers on eBay, from sellers who at least say they’re in Australia, which means they shouldn’t be sending your purchase through Australian Customs to be confiscated by our ever-vigilant protectors. People may still be selling cheap pointers at the markets, too. If you believe price equals quality, on the other hand, note that the writhing transporter-accident creature that absorbed both Dick Smith Electronics and Tandy (Radio Shack) in Australia will be pleased to sell you a keychain pointer for $36.98 - at “DSE” here and at “Tandy” here!]

Altronics and Jaycar both want $AU14.95 for a bloody keychain pointer, which is of course a frankly insulting price. For little more than twice that much at current exchange rates a nice man in China will sell you a whole non-contact infrared thermometer, that incorporates an aiming laser. But which I’m sure will whistle through Australian Customs, just like all of the “laser-guided” circular saws, ultrasonic distance measurers, scissors, et cetera.

I chose not to choose a $15 keychain laser. I chose something else.

This prison-shiv of a laser pointer…

…took a lot longer to photograph than it did to make.

It’s pleasingly bright at around 25mA current - much brighter than your standard button-cell cheapie, but not bright enough to pose any real eye hazard. It has an egg-like shape that feels good in the right hand, with a nice clicky steel switch-bar under the thumb. It has adjustable focus, so you can widen the light out into a splodge of quantum speckle at will. And it had a total parts cost about the same as the abovementioned stupidly-expensive keychain lasers. You could easily make something similar for less than $10, including the two AA batteries.

(It’s quite hard to find laser pointers that take AA batteries, these days. Those little button-cell pointers are churned out by the zillion, and many pen-shaped pointers use a couple of AAAs - but if you want the substantially higher capacity-per-dollar of AA power, I think you may have to assemble your own pointer. Or, at least, hack bigger batteries onto a smaller pointer.)

The key component in a do-it-yourself laser pointer is a laser diode, lens and heat-sink assembly - commonly referred to as a laser “module”, or “package”.

Well, that’s the key component unless your DIY ethic requires you to build the module from scratch, as well.

(The state of the DIY art has not, to my knowledge, yet reached actual home-made laser diodes. It’s surprisingly easy to make your own very dim LED, though!)

There’s no financial reason to build your own laser module, because you can buy ready-built modules in various shapes and sizes - even in colours other than red - startlingly inexpensively on eBay, or from dealers like DealExtreme. And no, Australian Customs won’t confiscate your laser module, either - or, at least, they didn’t confiscate any of mine.

Because, like an IR thermometer, a laser module is demonstrably not a laser pointer. And it is laser pointers that are illegal here, don’t you know.

(I haven’t tried importing a genuinely dangerous high-powered laser module, of the type used in hefty laser “pointers” that were already illegal in Australia before the current ridiculous laws went through. I would make a small wager that you would have no trouble importing such a module at all, though. But don’t worry - as we all know, those scary domestic terrorists who we keep being warned about, but who mysteriously never seem to actually commit any acts of terrorism, must be so impotent on account of how they are too dumb to figure out how to connect a multi-watt invisible-beam IR laser module - you know, a laser that’s actually dangerous - to a battery.

Ahem.

The question for the non-terroristic cat-toy maker is which of the (very) numerous cheap red laser modules will actually suit your purpose. I am happy to announce that I’ve done the legwork for you, here, for DealExtreme’s range at least. I bought a few of their finest, cheapest red laser modules, and this one, yours for a princely four US dollars and six cents delivered to anywhere in the world, is the one you want.

It’s got a nice big sturdy heat-sinking case, it’s usefully, though not dangerously, bright from modest power, and it’s got the abovementioned adjustable collimating lens, too.

The other components of a DIY laser pointer:

1: Batteries. Two AA alkalines, in this case; feel free to use some other combination if you like. (Three D cells would give you outrageously long run time.)

The batteries you choose determine which…

2: …resistor you should use in series with the laser module.

Laser diodes, like their older relatives, the LEDs, need some kind of current limiting to prevent them from going into thermal runaway and dying very quickly. Inline resistors are usually the simplest option.

I found that the four-dollar DealExtreme module ran nicely, but not excessively, brightly from two AAs through three 91-ohm resistors in parallel, for an aggregate 30.3 ohms. I couldn’t find a roughly-30-ohm resistor for the final assembly, so I used a couple of 16s in series. Small laser diodes draw only tens of milliamps, so little quarter-watt resistors are more than good enough.

If you buy some other laser module, don’t just trust the “2-4.5V” or whatever that was listed on the eBay auction, hook it up to two AAs, and kill it. You’ll need to put a multimeter in milliamps mode - which, remember, has a little resistance of its own - in series with the module and fiddle with batteries and, initially, larger resistance values, to find a suitable value. (That’s how I ended up with three 91s in parallel - I started with one 91-ohm, which gave a very dim beam, then put another one in parallel, et cetera.)

The quick and dirty way to figure this stuff out for a laser module of unknown provenance is by starting with resistor values that’re clearly much too high - by themselves, across the power supply, they’ll let much less than the module’s rated current flow - or by using a bench power supply that lets you limit voltage and current. Then you reduce the resistor value (or gingerly wind up the current knob) until the dot stops getting noticeably brighter. Wind it back a bit from that point and you should have a safe value. Or just stop when the dot’s still getting brighter with more current, if it’s already bright enough for your purpose.

Or you can, of course, sidestep all of this and just buy that DX module, and run it from two series 1.5-volt cells and about 30 ohms.

3: A battery holder. Little black plastic holders like the one I used are almost free on eBay, or you can bodge something up yourself. (Thumb-tacks make good battery contacts, by the way.)

4: A switch. I used a microswitch I had sitting around, which gives a pleasing tactile feel. Any old switch will do, though. Momentary, like my microswitch, if you want the usual hold-down-the-button kind of laser pointer, or standard “unbiased” if you want a pointer that stays on by itself.

(For about the same almost-free price as a black plastic AA-battery holders, you can get a black plastic AA-battery holder with an unbiased switch built in.)

5: Stuff to hold it all together. Solder and glue, for a more professional result; tape and positive thoughts, for a less professional one.

The weird organic-looking white stuff on my pointer is a couple of blobs of polycaprolactone plastic, about which I must digress, because it’s brilliant stuff.

At room temperature, polycaprolactone is a tough white plastic, like nylon. But above about 60°C it becomes a pliable, bouncy, transparent putty-like material.

(This is the laser assembly before the second blob of polycaprolactone had fully cooled. It’d be fun if it stayed like that, but you can’t have everything.)

You take polycaprolactone granules, and you put them in boiling water, and they turn clear and stick to each other. Just stirring the growing blob around a bit will pick up any loose pellets. Then you fish the spongy blob out and squeeze the hot water out (a slightly painful procedure), and then form the blob to suit your task, usually by just sticking it onto something and squeezing it into shape. Hot polycaprolactone sticks well to all sorts of surfaces, but not so well that you can’t peel it off if you make a mistake. And you won’t get scalded while doing this, because unlike water, the plastic is lousy at transferring heat to your fingers.

(If you heat polycaprolactone above 100°C, by, for instance, microwaving it instead of putting it in water, it apparently becomes a lot stickier, as well as much more able to burn you. So you might want to leave those higher temperatures to the rapid fabricators. I needed to smooth a little bit of my polycaprolactone blobs, so I wafted a small butane flame past the plastic. But then I smoothed it over with a damp screwdriver, instead of my finger.)

As polycaprolactone cools, it clouds up and stiffens, but does not appreciably shrink. If you haven’t gotten your new plastic part shaped right before this happens, just pop it back in the water to re-soften. It’s easier to re-shape polycaprolactone than it is to shape it in the first place, because there’s less water to squeeze out. You can re-heat the plastic as many times as you like, too, and any excess can go back in the bag for later.

Polycaprolactone in the molecular weights that make it behave in this useful way is manufactured in vast quantities by at least two companies, Solvay and Dow Chemical. Which is great to know if you need a ton of the stuff, but not so much if you just want to replace a missing knob on a radio. (That was my first polycaprolactone project. It worked beautifully.)

Other companies repackage polycaprolactone in smaller quantities at large markups. “Polymorph“, “ShapeLock” and “Friendly Plastic” are all polycaprolactone. The first two are very much the same; Friendly Plastic comes in a white-pellets version too, but is also available in a wide range of more-expensive coloured versions. You can colour polycaprolactone yourself, but if you need even, repeatable hues and/or metallic effects, and you don’t need a huge amount of the stuff, then you’d probably do better just buying Friendly Plastic.

(The bone-white version is of course preferable, if you want to make creepy biomechanical thingummies.)

If you’re in Australia and you just want to see what polycaprolactone is like, get yourself a hundred grams of “Polymorph” from Jaycar for $AU11.50. (Plus delivery, if you buy it online rather than over the counter.) That may go a surprisingly long way; I didn’t weigh the Polymorph that went into my laser pointer, but judging by volume it was probably no more than 25 grams.

If you’re in the States, there are lots of retail polycaprolactone sources. Try the Maker Shed.

If you’re outside the States and want a larger, but not vast, amount of the stuff, many companies stand ready to rip you off.

You can place an international order at Shapelock.com and pay for it, with a pleasingly low shipping fee - and then they’ll refund your money, because they don’t actually ship overseas. And then they’ll tell you to order from Jameco instead. Jameco’s international shipping fees aren’t mentioned on their site; you can place an order and give your payment info and wait for the delightful surprise, or you can e-mail them, whereupon they will inform you that their cheapest price to send a $US24.95 half-kilo of Shapelock to Australia is $US39.

Sorry. Just had to get that out of my system.

OK, here’s how people outside the States - and possibly inside, actually, depending on how all the prices shake out - can buy polycaprolactone at a non-stupid price. Go to this eBay dealer in the UK (on ebay.com, on ebay.co.uk), who’s currently on holiday until the 8th and has invisibilised their auctions, but will actually still let you place an order via this listing. They’ll sell you 500 grams of Polymorph-branded polycaprolactone for £9.50 plus quite reasonable delivery, with a microscopic discount for multiple half-kilos.

[UPDATE: As pointed out in the comments below, that eBay dealer has a separate Web site too, from which you can download a great PDF about what you can do with Polymorph.]

To make sure I get my order in before all of y’all, I just ordered a key, man, for a total of £32.75 delivered to Australia. That’s about $AU54.20, or $US49.80, as I write this.

A kilogram of polycaprolactone is quite a lot - especially when you consider the near-infinite reuseability of the stuff. Unless I suddenly start building sizeable structures, I don’t anticipate having to buy any more for some years.

Jaycar offer discounts for bulk purchase, but a kilogram of Polymorph from them is still $AU89.50 ex delivery. So the eBayer in the UK looks like a good deal.

Hm. This post started out being about making a laser, and ended up about making freeform plastic bones. Eh - it’ll do.

Do feel free to discuss either subject in the comments!

One Jiang Gonglue has come up with this brilliant idea:

(Via.)

Never mind the fractured English - these passthrough piggy-back plugs, called “Infinite USB”, are clearly a work of genius.

And I’m not the only person who thinks so. Infinite USB won Mr Jiang an “iF Design Concept Award!

The only problem, really a very minor one, hardly worth mentioning, is that each of these cables is presumably a two-port bus-powered hub. And the USB spec forbids plugging one bus-powered hub into another one.

The official specs for USB also prohibit plain extension cables, mind you, and most extension cables actually work fine with most devices, provided you aren’t greatly exceeding the five-metre cable-length limit. And, similarly, in reality you often can plug one bus-powered (or “passive”) hub into another and have it work, more or less. You may not be able to use all of the ports - which is less of a problem if there are only two, of course. And you’re quite likely to find you only get a USB-1-speed connection. But passive-hub into passive-hub will usually sorta-kinda work. Especially if the powered port your illegal chain of bus-powered hubs is plugged into can deliver more than the half-amp of current that the USB spec says it should.

The reason why daisy-chaining passive hubs works at all, by the way, is that many bus-powered USB hubs report themselves as being self-powered. A real self-powered hub is one with its own DC power supply, which allows it to deliver the full 0.5A of current on each of its ports. But there’s nothing, except the ethics of the manufacturer, stopping a bus-powered hub from declaring itself to be self-powered, whereupon it’ll at least attempt to work if plugged into another passive hub. A passive hub that admits that it’s passive won’t work at all if you plug it into another, similarly-truthful passive hub.

(Most self-powered hubs will work even if you don’t connect their plugpack power supply, but they’ll only be bus-powered when the power supply is not connected. I wonder how many of them report themselves as bus-powered when the plugpack’s not plugged in?)

So the Infinite USB plugs aren’t abominations like male-to-male plug adapters and such. They might work. A bit.

I’d be pretty surprised if even the green-striped #3 one in the above picture worked, though. I’d bet money that the apple-cart would have been thoroughly upset at least by the time you plugged the #4 grey one in. Oh, and if the Infinite USBs reported themselves honestly then, of course, none after the original #1 blue plug would work.

But, as we’ve seen before, trivial considerations like whether the product could ever possibly work are not an obstacle for hard-working design students and the institutions that give them awards.