How To Spot A Psychopath

OK, so you've got your Lego automatic transmissions, and they're pretty awesome. And there are a number of Lego continuously-variable transmissions, some of elegantly simple design, and those are impressive too.

And then somebody comes along and makes a seven-speed-plus-reverse sequential Lego gearbox, and puts it in a fully remote-controlled Lego Veyron.

With, of course, working steering, engine pistons, disc brakes...

Oh, and it's the targa-top version of the Veyron too, just to pack another darn mechanism in there.

Like someone whose unsettling dreams about becoming the world's greatest badass have been dissipated by an encounter with Raven, all of the rest of us are now under no pressure at all for high achievement in Lego engineering.

(The gearbox is only an expanded and improved version of the 8448 gearbox, mind you, so clearly this is not really that much of a big deal. Also, I think you'll find that Mount Rushmore isn't actually a very large mountain.)

When I read that Neil Fraser's Meccano lava-lamp centrifuge only rotated at 42 revolutions per minute, I didn't think it sounded very impressive.

I take that back.

Just as
not everything that appears on Photoshop Disasters is an actual Photoshop disaster, and not
everything on The Daily WTF is uncontroversially WTF-y, so too not everything on There, I Fixed It is actually a half-assed repair job.

These wheelchairs, for instance, may look gimcrack, but (as commenters quickly pointed out) they’re actually real, functional and sorely-needed “appropriate technology“.

(If it’s stupid but it works, it isn’t stupid.)

I think quite a lot of the other There, I Fixed It posts have a similar charm, especially to people like me who actively prefer shabby things to shiny ones. (I am not being sarcastic when I say cat-scratches “improve” furniture.) I like things that look totally ramshackle, or even obviously broken, but actually work, or can pretty easily be made to work.

This desk support, for instance, rather appeals to me.

You could make it properly structurally sound, too. Just gather enough unimportant documents - not, I think you’ll find, a difficult task for many people - and pile them up one sheet at a time, putting a circle of white glue on each sheet. Then put the desk or something back on top of the pile to clamp it while the glue dries.

You could make a desk that stood on four of these things, a coffee table on four short ones, a single one as a display plinth for your Office Space collectibles…

You could even make the stack lightweight, if you did something like core out the middle inside the glue-rings and replace it with a length of large-diameter PVC pipe. And then you could, of course, hide booze in it!

I invite readers to nominate their own examples of constructions and contraptions in this sort of improbable-yet-functional, broken-yet-working category.

(With pictures, if possible! Commenters can’t use image tags, but if you just put the URL of the image, Flickr page or whatever in your comment I’ll picturify it, provided it doesn’t make my Civil Defense Lemonparty Survey Meter beep too loudly.)

I just got to watching The End of Time, the two-part final instalment of Russell T. Davies’ writing stint on Doctor Who (he’s been at it since the series was reborn in 2005).

Spoilers below, et cetera.

Again, not very good. I pretty much agree with Frank at Cathode Ray Tube. And with the whingier commenters, too.

I even almost agree with the “gay agenda” criticisms this time. In the coda where the Doctor takes a moment to see all of his buddies for the last time, saving a life here, handing someone 20 million quid there, he stops in to a polyglot space cantina on Earth Music Sung In English Night to… set Cap’n Jack up with a hot guy.

Who Jack may need to be with in order to save the universe or something, but way to agree with fundamentalist preachers about the one and only focus of all gay men, Russell. Jeez.

The bit my inner fanboy latched onto as particularly obnoxious, though, was after Earth suddenly found itself populated by 6.7 billion Masters, at the end of the first instalment.

The next bit’ll be rich, said I. A planet filled with billions and billions of “I am the Master and you will OBEY ME!!” megalomaniacs! It’ll instantly granularise into millions of tiny warring fiefdoms, everyone scheming against everyone else, everybody with access to three tin cans and a bottle of bleach cooking up mind-controlling super-viruses, demons being raised right and left, legions of clanking K1s fighting pitched battles against pithed Silurians with Dalek beam-guns grafted onto their arms all slaved to the brains-in-jars of as many Masters as one lucky other Master managed to catch in a stasis trap…

But… no.

All of the Master-duplicates cheerfully stayed in exactly the position in the world’s countless chains of command that the human they’d replaced was previously in. And they all happily took orders from the Masters above them. And said “Yes, sir!”

The new Masters in Donna’s house didn’t even seem to sodding move from their spots next to the dining table.

One can only presume that the Masters who took over the bodies of burger-flippers didn’t bother to remove their paper hats.

And then they gave up all their technology and sent their ship into the sun, and a major character vanished into thin air.

(Wait. That might have been a different show.)

The new Masters had to act nothing like the actual character, of course, because otherwise the Grand Evil Scheme Davies had spent all of three minutes thinking up wouldn’t work at all, and the Reset Button at the end when the human race all turn back into themselves would be hindered by the population of the planet having dropped by a factor of 100 in a couple of hours. But I like to think that even young viewers would have been wondering why The Crazy Baddie suddenly turned into The Peaceful… Obedient-ie.

TV Tropes calls this phenomenon Writer On Board, and has many examples. This one was an absolute corker, though.

There I was, idly scanning eBay for Lego baseplates to maybe give to one or another child for Christmas (HOW CAN THEY NOT MAKE CRATER PLATES ANY MORE WHY WAS I NOT CONSULTED), and I noticed that most, if not all, of the plates on offer weren't very close to their original colour.

This reminded me of a thing from the other month about de-yellowing the casings of old computers and video games.

If you don't want to paint over the yellowed plastic, you can soak it in a hydrogen peroxide solution, with a dash of one or another kind of bleach. (Note that the popular "oxygen bleach" products are based on sodium percarbonate, which when added to water just gives you hydrogen peroxide plus washing soda.)

If you want to get fancy, you can make a gel concoction dubbed "Retr0bright", which'll stay where you put it. So you can bleach things without having to remove all the electronics so you can dip the casing, or bleach the outside of a thing but not the inside, et cetera.

Apparently even plain few-per-cent peroxide will often do the job if you leave the pieces to soak overnight. If you want faster results, you need 10%-to-20% peroxide, which you may or may not be able to get from a pharmacy.

(I must, at this juncture, digress and recommend Armadillo Aerospace's old video - 56Mb MPEG here - of what happens when you put high-test rocket-fuel-grade hydrogen peroxide on various common substances.)

Does this technique, I wondered, work on Lego?

Apparently, yes, it does! Even on clear pieces!

(Bleach can apparently attack the paint on some printed bricks, though.)

I don't think this will actually do the plastic any harm, either. Or any more harm, anyway. The reason why plastic discolours in the first place is because something - ultraviolet light and/or atmospheric oxygen, usually - reacts with one or more of the constituents of the plastic. The material that yellows may be the polymer itself, or it may be flame-retardant additives, or plasticiser, or something. In any case, bleaching already-damaged substances back to white shouldn't do any more damage.

[Update: I just remembered that a couple of years ago I wrote this piece, about the making of Lichtenberg figures in clear acrylic. It involves a rather unusual way to discolour plastic.]

You don't have to bother with this at all, of course. A yellowed Amiga 500 is still an Amiga 500, and yellowed Lego is still Lego. Some builders have even...

...used yellowed pieces to "weather" models!

Here’s something that it never occurred to me to do: Using yet another thermite reaction to make metallic sodium!

(I think that technically a thermite has to be a metal powder plus a metal oxide; in the above test of the temperature tolerance of a picnic table, the experimenter is using sodium hydroxide drain cleaner, rather than sodium oxide. But it’s clearly still a thermite-ish reaction.)

This is way more fun than the way I would have chosen to split the sodium out of sodium hydroxide, by merely electrolysing the molten NaOH, as Humphrey Davy did.

This technique is, of course, an eminently suitable first step into chemistry for Cub Scouts, very drunk people and trained chimpanzees. Preferably all at once.

If you’d like to make it a little less dull, try doing it in the rain!

(That whole page is pretty darn entertaining. See also “By good fortune the molten sodium hydroxide was so hot that it had vaporized the water in my skin and sloughed off without burning me chemically”, from a gentleman who went on to win a Nobel Prize… but not for chemistry.)

And now, a bloke whose voice doesn’t sound as if it’s really meant to be that deep, using yet more molten NaOH to dissolve some glass!

In comparison, it’s a positive letdown when all he does is stick his hand in liquid nitrogen…

…make potassium permanganate at home (take that, War On Some Drugs!)…

…freeze some acetone…

…or make a calcium acetate solution by reacting vinegar with antacid tablets, and then use it to gel some alcohol.

And finally, the piece on potassium (it’s one louder than sodium) from the inimitable University of Nottingham Periodic Table of Videos:

A quick update on the subject of the Secret Life of Machines series…

…which, for the information of newcomers, is

1: fantastic,
2: legal to download for free, and
3: large.

A couple of years ago, I made a torrent of a high-video-quality version of this excellent science series, which total 3.3 gigabytes.

Of late there have usually only been one or two seeds for the torrent, though, and one of them is me, and my little home DSL account can only upload at a peak speed of about 25 kilobytes per second. So it takes me a couple of days to send the whole bulk of the three series to someone (technically, it’s two six-episode series of The Secret Life of Machines, plus one six-episode series of The Secret Life of The Office). And when the transfer finally completes, the recipient will then usually not bloody seed it.

So if you’ve still got that torrent sitting in your BitTorrent client, I’d be grateful if you force-seeded it for a while.

(A reminder for readers who’re dubious about this, or protection-racketeers from one or another content company who’re champing at the bit to send me a nastygram: Tim Hunkin, the creator and principal presenter of this show, wants people to download it for free. He makes this clear in many places, like for example his pages for the three series of the show. The shows are still copyrighted, but free distribution is expressly permitted.)

As I’ve mentioned before, you can help out with seeding even if you don’t have the torrent in your BitTorrent client any more, provided you still have the files. (Which, by the way, are in the “M4V” iPhone format, are not nasty VHS rips, and are playable on all platforms; use VLC if you have problems.)

To seed if you’ve got the files but not the torrent, just get the torrent started as if you were going to download it again (so your BitTorrent client creates the appropriate download directory and empty files), immediately stop it again, copy the video files from wherever you’ve put them into the new download directory over the top of the new empty files, and then restart or “Force Re-Check” the download (depending on which BitTorrent client you have). Provided the files are the right ones for this iPhone-format version of the series, and have the right names, the download will now be 100% complete and you can force-seed it for a while.

Oh, and don’t worry if your BitTorrent client says the download is only something like 99.8% complete, and it has to download a bit of data before it’s “finished”. That just means your computer has modified some header data in one or more of the files, so that tiny bit needs to be re-downloaded to overwrite the changes. It doesn’t mean the files are corrupt.

(If you don’t have a BitTorrent client at all but do have the files, perhaps because someone gave them to you on a thumb drive or something, you can also help out. You just need to install a client - µTorrent, for Windows and Mac, is excellent - and then do the starting-stopping-copying-and-then-seeding thing. The default settings for a freshly-installed BitTorrent client may stop it seeding after it’s uploaded 200% of the data size of a torrent, or something; upload-ratio checking goes weird when you do the stop-copy-and-seed thing, too, because you’ll have the whole download but won’t have actually downloaded anything. Just right-click the torrent and select “Force Start” or “Force Seed” or whatever it’s called in your client, to ignore upload limits.)

Here’s a magnet link for the Secret Life of Machines torrent. (You may need to associate your BitTorrent program with magnet:… links to make this work, or manually copy and paste the link into an “Open Torrent…” dialog.)

You can also download the torrent file from isoHunt or The Pirate Bay - it was on Mininova, too, but they decided to go legit the other day and removed pretty much all of their torrents, including legal ones like this.

The BitTorrent community is moving away from .torrent files, just as it’s moving away from trackers - The Pirate Bay have actually shut their trackers down altogether now. If you’ve got the little magnet URI for the download you want - it’s ?xt=urn:btih:D62CLPSEYNRN74FRZDUC5GYVKTOOUKGE for the Secret Life of Machines torrent - then your BitTorrent client can use it to get other people who’re downloading the same thing to send you the data that a .torrent file would have given you. This may take a little longer than downloading a torrent file would have, but it shouldn’t actually fail unless there’s nobody seeding the torrent, in which case you obviously wouldn’t be able to download it anyway.

Once you’ve got the torrent info, the distributed hash table (DHT) system that all modern BitTorrent clients support can go on to give you the rest of the data from other users, without needing a central “tracker” system to keep everything organised.

And then, before you know it, you’re watching Tim stand on the accelerator and the brake at the same time, and Rex brutalising that poor innocent refrigerator.

---

Tim Hunkin has done a lot of stuff since The Secret Life of Machines. Here’s…

…some posh bird enjoying the latest in Tim’s long and inimitable line of penny-arcade amusement machines, “Whack A Banker“.

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.)

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.