How To Spot A Psychopath

I just received, complained about and deleted an unsolicited commercial e-mail promoting “The Highland Hypnotist, Scott Burke”.

I needn’t post it here, because you can read the whole thing for yourself on prlog.org, one of those sites where people can upload press releases about whatever they like.

It’s pretty standard woo-woo claptrap. Mysterious Scottish wizard Has The Power to Cure What Ails Ye, et cetera. Except for the headline.

Which is, just in case you’ve not yet read the prlog.org page: “Highland Hypnotist Uses His Powers To Avenge Bad Health….or Your Money Back!“

Avenge bad health?

So, what, he finds the guy who made you sick and beats the hell out of him?

I suppose that could account for the money-back guarantee - “OK, you’ve still got diabetes, but you didn’t see the part when I totally avenged the dickens out of it!”.

(Actually, money-back guarantees like this are de rigueur for quacks of all colours. Some of them just never return anybody’s money, of course, but most rely on the low number of warranty claims that’re likely to turn up when your audience is self-selected for gullibility and you’re treating variable illnesses with indistinct end-points.)

Behold, the “Virtual Wall“!

It’s a “barrier made up of plasma laser beams depicting pedestrians” to alert drivers to people crossing, more effectively than could a normal red light.

A magnificent idea, with only two minor drawbacks.

One, there’s no way to make lasers do this, and two, there’s no way to make lasers do this. I know that technically speaking that’s only one drawback, but I thought it was such a big one, it was worth mentioning twice.

(OK, perhaps a “plasma laser” can do it. Who knows, since they don’t exist. I bet a phased array of Star Wars blaster emitters would make a pretty good signage device too!)

A few of the commenters on the Yanko Design page have pointed out that you can’t make a laser beam that’s, I don’t know, fatter in the middle, or something, unless you put optics out there in the display area. You’d either have to do that, or otherwise cause the lasers to scatter more light from one part of their beams than from another. This can’t be done unless you blow something like smoke into the beam, and somehow magically make it hang there in the air in the shape of the image you want to create.

There are “displays” that do something rather like this with drops of water…

…metered out by solenoids in a sort of a giant skinny inkjet print head. But you can’t do that with lasers unless you’re happy with your images zooming across the display at the speed of light, which is generally a little too quick for motorists to notice.

I know that most designers are not blithering idiots, but there seems to be an endless supply of things like this, and that idiotic Gravia lamp, trying to persuade me otherwise.

Surely the absolute bedrock of design has to be making sure that what you’re designing can actually exist in the real world. If you can actually get good marks in a design course by pulling the basics of your product out of your fundament and then concentrating on the packaging and presentation, aren’t you really just doing marketing?

On the subject of people believing imaginary stuff, did you know that it is possible to buy “haunted dolls” on eBay?

I knew that people occasionally sold allegedly-haunted paintings or dolls or whatever on eBay. Big deal; people sell all sorts of goofy crap there, now and then.

But “haunted dolls” appear to be becoming a mainstream product, now. There are more than a hundred of the darn things on ebay.com right now. And a “Completed Items” search shows that this isn’t just some nutty seller who never gets a sale. People buy these things quite routinely, for average prices around $US30. Occasional outliers, with unusually florid all-caps gibberish in their descriptions and unusually blurry product shots, sell for more than a hundred bucks a doll.

Given that the dolls probably come from thrift stores and so cost close to nothing (old dolls are cheaper, and they look creepier! It’s a win-win!), this looks like a pretty neat business to be in.

To realise your $US25-plus of profit per item, you do apparently need to write at least a thousand words describing all the creepy stuff each doll is supposed to do. But I’m sure a certain amount of copy-and-paste will pass unnoticed by the extremely sophisticated customers for these items. And it’s not as if anybody daft enough to buy one in the first place is likely to demand a refund on the grounds that the doll they received is insufficiently imbued with otherworldly energies.

This is a pretty new market, though. I’m sure there’s some room to optimise the business.

How about haunted rocks?

I mean, they’re millions of years old; just imagine how much more haunty-ness they’ve soaked up over all that time!

Get ‘em while they last!

Exactly once in my life so far, I have met someone who seemed to be certifiably bonkers, and talked to him about his beliefs, and then actually witnessed him changing his mind.

(The fellow in question thought, among other things, that Chinese tanks were massing on the Mexican border, a charmingly antiquated piece of nuttery which really doesn’t hold up well at all these days. When he thought about it a bit, apparently for the first time in his life, he agreed that this really couldn’t be right. And the conversation actually got better from there!)

I had nothing better to do while we were waiting for the bus that day, but I still wish I hadn’t bothered to talk to that man. Because that tiny success ignited within me a spark of hope that other people who seem on the surface to be completely batty can, in fact, be talked to in a rational way, and perhaps thereby pulled a little closer to consensus reality, nearness to which is strongly correlated with life-enhancing experiences like not waking up naked in an alley, or not shooting John Lennon.

In every single subsequent conversation with those of a psychoceramic persuasion I have, however, been utterly unsuccessful in changing anybody’s mind about anything at all. Yet on I strive, driven by my one, increasingly distant, success, to the great frustration of both myself and my mentally unusual correspondents.

But at least now I can get a blog post out of it.

It’s been a while since I heard from the good folk at Life Technology; the last time was almost a year ago, here. I must insist that any of you who haven’t checked out the Life Technology site go and do so right now, because the assortment of products available there really is very hard to match anywhere (though they have, regrettably, retired the Flash banner thing that made a trippy New Age gong sound whenever you loaded a page. I miss that).

Life Technology is like Brooklyn Superhero Supply, except Life Technology aren’t just trying to encourage imagination.

Mr, or possibly Ms, AURUM SOLIS™ (I think the capitals and trademark symbol are important) decided to favour me with another communiqué on the first of April. Were the message from anybody else, that’d mean it’d be a joke. But not so with AURUM™, who continued our correspondence over the next few days.

The correspondence follows. I bet it’ll attract some really spiffy Google ads.

DANIEL THIS IS WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT WHITE POWDER GOLD THERE IS AN ORCHESTRATED CAMPAIGN BY THE POWERS THAT BE TO FRIGHTEN PEOPLE AWAY FROM THIS PRODUCT SCARE STORIES INVOLVE REPTILIAN ALIENS AND ARE OBVIOUSLY FALSE SO DONT LET SUCH NONSENSE PUT YOU OFF FROM FINDING OUT THE PLAIN TRUTH ABOUT THIS VERY IMPORTANT SUBJECT REMEMBER BRISTOL MYERS SQUIBB RESEARCH PROVED THAT WHITE POWDER GOLD DOES EVERYTHING THAT THE PHILOSOPHERS STONE IS ALLEGED TO HAVE DONE IE REPAIR DNA AND INCREASE LONGEVITY WE WOULD BE HAPPY TO SEND YOU A 1GRAM SAMPLE FREE OF CHARGE IF YOU ARE INTERESTED IN TRYING THIS THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION DANIEL

AURUM SOLIS™

[And then AURUM™ quoted the content of this blog post. Do feel free to read as much of it as you can handle.]

I remind you that the thing the Philosopher’s Stone was most often alleged to do was transmute base metals into gold.

Does white powder gold do that?

The Philosopher’s Stone was also, by pseudo-logical extension, commonly alleged to be able to make you immortal. You would not age, and would not sicken for any reason, which implied that you would also be immune not only to ordinary physical diseases, but also to poison and physical attack.

Does white powder gold do that?

Your idea about the magic substance “correcting” anything in one’s body that is “incorrect” is entirely in line with what the old-time alchemists said about the Philosopher’s Stone. It was their belief that gold was the most perfect of metals (I imagine because they didn’t know about the platinum group; platinum was at the time regarded as an unwanted, unmeltable contaminant sometimes found in silver). If they’d known about DNA they’d no doubt say that the mystic Stone would “perfect” that as well.

The tricky bit is defining what “perfect” means. Many diseases, like for instance autoimmune disorders, are the result of normal bodily processes working too well. Every second alternative medicine is supposed to “boost” the immune system; if they actually do that, they should all come with warnings about how they may cause rheumatoid arthritis as a side-effect.

What, in fact, does white powder gold do? Where’s this Bristol-Myers Squibb research you allude to - or, indeed, any research that doesn’t just ramble on, as you always do, about mystic vibrations and extradimensional harmonic ascension?

If white powder gold has no effects that people who don’t believe in it can detect, then it is no more interesting than any of the hundreds of similar potions and religions.

I do enjoy these occasional e-mails from you, though.

DEAR DANIEL DONT BE TAKEN IN BY THE SCEPTICS WE KNOW YOU ARE A GOOD MAN BUT SOMETIMES THE DARK SIDE HAS MISLED YOU ABOUT CERTAIN THINGS YOU ARE A SPIRITUAL BEING LOVED UNCONDITIONALLY BY THE CREATOR AND SINCE BIRTH MATTER IS ALL YOU HAVE KNOWN BUT THERE IS MORE THAN MERELY MATTER LAST NIGHT AFTER I CONSUMED THE WHITE STONE I COMMUNICATED WITH INTELLIGENT BEINGS FROM SHAMBALLA AND I WAS EDUCATED BY THEM IN THE SUBJECT OF THE KUNDALINI ENERGY AND BECOMING AN ASCENDED MASTER. PLEASE SEND YOUR ADDRESS FOR A COMPLIMENTARY FREE SAMPLE.

But how do you know I’m “a good man”? How, if what most humans call external reality is as ephemeral as a ghost, ready to blow away so that you can perceive greater realities when you take your magic potion, do you know that I’m even here at all?

Perhaps I’m a manifestation of the universe, here to enlighten you to yet another layer of reality. Perhaps this whole exchange is purely a figment of your imagination. Once you say that words like “is” and “exists” and “meaning” can have different… meanings… you lose all ability to say, or think, anything about anything.

You said that your product does what the Philosopher’s Stone is said to have done. That, first and foremost, means it must turn base metals - classically lead - into gold. Now you say that instead it sends you on some sort of psychedelic spiritual journey. Well, OK, great, but nobody in antiquity said anything about the Philosopher’s Stone doing that. It was meant to turn lead into gold, and it was meant to make people immortal. Those are the two big things that the Philosopher’s Stone was meant to do.

You said, in as many words, that white powder gold does what the old alchemists said the Philosopher’s Stone did. Now you say that it actually doesn’t.

If I can expect consumption of this substance to make me as confused as you, I will stay very far away from it, thank you very much.

If your product instead reveals the truth of the universe or some such, then it is a different thing from the Philosopher’s Stone. It is also indistinguishable from numerous psychedelic, hallucinogens and dissociative drugs, none of which show any signs of actually giving their users superhuman powers, or allowing them to figure out things about the mundane world everybody else inhabits that they could not have figured out otherwise. On the contrary, habitual use of powerful consciousness-altering drugs tends to make people much less able to operate in the mundane world.

I do not, of course, actually believe that whatever experiences you have are actually happening to you because of the white powder gold concoction. I think it’s likely to have no effect at all, and your own mental peculiarities are what’re allowing you to talk to the extradimensional space gods or whatever.

Does everybody who takes white powder gold have the powerful experiences you mention? Or do you have to be a believer already? If you slip some into someone’s drink without them knowing, will anything happen to them? Have you tried such a basic test to see whether you’re making this all up (on purpose or otherwise)?

http://spiritofmaat.com/mar08/white_powder_gold.html

LINK WHICH PROVES DAVID HUDSON IS TELLING THE TRUTH ABOUT WHITE POWDER GOLD

This lengthy ramble is, when it tries to say definite things about chemistry and physics, nonsense. Apart from the frequent use of words which do not exist - many of which I suppose could be the fault of the transcriber - it alleges, if I’m reading it right, that gold likes to hang around in two-atom molecules, like hydrogen, and that the element drastically changes in state if you manage to separate those atoms, becoming your magic potion.

Gold does not in fact form diatomic molecules. At all. The only “metal” that does is hydrogen, which is only metallic in very extreme circumstances. All other metals form metallic bonds between atoms, which can involve any number of molecules; it is also quite easy to separate individual atoms from those bonds, by for instance dissolving a metallic salt in water (giving a solution of ions), or by “sputtering” a piece of the solid metal (giving honest-to-goodness separate atoms flying around separately).

Gold sputtering is used routinely in, for instance, the preparation of samples for viewing under an electron microscope. Individual gold atoms are knocked off a piece of gold, and condense in a super-thin layer on the subject, where they return to their normal polyatomic metallic bonding.

I don’t expect you to pay any attention whatsoever to this, because I know that when you talk about “atoms” and “molecules” and just about every other noun used at http://spiritofmaat.com/mar08/white_powder_gold.html, you do not mean the same thing that everybody else means. But I wonder why it is that you think that anybody else would find this “evidence” convincing, since you and your friends do not use the same dictionary as the rest of us.

Does http://spiritofmaat.com/mar08/white_powder_gold.html also comprise your “Bristol-Myers Squibb evidence”? The only mention of the company there is that “over the last four or five years, there is tremendous research going on with precious elements and cancer treatment. The precious elements have been found to inter-react with the cell by a vibrational frequency or by a light transfer to correct the DNA. Any incorrect part of the DNA is corrected by the precious element.”

This looks to me, not to put too fine a point on it, like pure fiction. I challenge you to present this “standard literature” talking about “correcting DNA” by “vibrational frequencies”.

DEAR DANIEL YES YOU ARE CORRECT IN STATING THAT REALITY IS RELATIVE TO PERCEPTION THAT IS THE KEY ALSO YOU SHOULD KNOW THAT WHEN YOU PRAY YOU SHOULD PRAY WITH SINCERITY AND FAITH NOT MERELY HOPE HOPING DENIES THAT YOU ARE GOD AND IN CONTROL OF YOUR CREATION THE STONE DOES NOT INDUCE A PSYCHEDELIC EXPERIENCE IT BREAKS THE BOND OF DUALITY IE THE ILLUSORY PERCEPTION OF SELF AND OTHER GOD IS IN A STATE OF ONENESS PS THERE IS NO ACTUAL PROOF FOR ANY FACTS EVEN THE BEST EVIDENCE IS RELATIVE TO THE INDIVIDUAL (FLAWED) MIND OF THE OBSERVER THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION DANIEL GOD BLESS YOU

At this point, I gave up on our little chat. I’m sure AURUM™ will have something similarly enlightening to say to me in another year or two, though.

A certain subset of the Craigslist user base has a well-documented lack of reasoning skills. This may explain why all you have to do to get someone’s house completely ransacked by a bunch of freeloaders is post a Craigslist ad that says something like:

“I, John Smith of 123 Acacia Avenue, Chickenmilk, Wisconsin, am aghast about the cancelling of the Bionic Woman TV series, and will be setting myself on fire this afternoon to protest it. So I’ve no further use for any of my possessions. Come and get them! Everything’s free! If the house is locked, just break a window!”

The first time this happened was a year ago. That ad was apparently placed by a disgruntled recently-evicted tenant. The ad only survived for about an hour and a half, but that was long enough to attract plenty of avaricious house-wreckers to thoroughly trash the joint in question.

This second example has a bit more meat to it. Apparently this time the ad was posted by a couple of people who’d stolen some stuff from one Robert Salisbury’s house a few days before. Then they decided to cover their tracks with the fake-ad scam, inviting other random people to steal everything else - including a horse, about which the scammers posted a separate ad.

The perpetrators of the Salisbury scam have now been caught. But the only reason that happened was because, with the idiocy so characteristic of the amateur criminal, they used their own highly traceable computer to post the ad.

If I were them, I would have posted the ad from an Internet cafe. Or, for extra evil points, from some poor suburban sucker’s open wireless access point. I just checked to see if Craigslist accepts Mailinator addresses - yes, it does!

Malicious ads themselves are not new. The classic example is an ad for a brand new Porsche for only a hundred bucks, allegedly placed by a wife whose husband cheated, or something. Such ads have been filling victims’ weekends with phone calls and irate visitors for many years.

If you’re posting a malicious ad just about anywhere but Craigslist, though - in the newspaper, for instance, or on eBay - then you’d have to pay for it somehow. That payment can often be traced.

But Craigslist ads are free.

This no doubt accounts for the host of other scams that pop up, however briefly, all over the site.

(I’ve never actually used Craiglist for anything, so I might have missed something obvious that makes this scam harder to pull off. Tell me in the comments if I have.)

The interesting part about this sort of hoax/scam is that it has two levels of perpetrator. The main perps are the people who post the malicious ad; the secondary perps are the people who then come and take everything, in good faith or not.

I wonder if you could pull off the same scam without using the magic anonymous Internet - by, for instance, sticking flyers on telegraph poles around the neighborhood, or dropping leaflets in letter boxes?

Various commentators have remarked on people reading the Craigslist ad who apparently figured “it’s on the Internet, so it must be true“; some of them brought printouts of the ad to wave at poor Mr Salisbury when he was trying to stop them driving off with his belongings.

You’re never going to go broke by underestimating the intelligence of Internet users, so I’m quite sure some of those people were entirely sincere. But I think many of the people just figured the ad made a good excuse for what they were doing.

The Skeptic is the official publication of the Australian Skeptics. It’s edited by Barry Williams, who has kindly made the digital version of this year’s Autumn edition (The Skeptic is published four times a year, and it is of course now autumn here in Australia) available for free. That’s an eleven Australian dollar value, at the standard one-year subscription rate!

In this edition: A Psychic Course On How To Contact Missing Persons And The Deceased, The Placebo Effect Explained, Vitalism and Mystical Energies and, as they say, more.

The PDF file is only 5.75Mb, and I’ve made a torrent of it to save Barry from his previous distribution method, which was manually e-mailing the file to people who asked for it. And yes, he specifically asked me to do this, just as Tim Hunkin asked everyone to distribute The Secret Life Of Machines.

Y’all can download the torrent right here.

(If you, like Barry, are still a bit hazy about what this BitTorrent thing actually is, this beginners’ guide should help you out.)

Modern Mechanix has been so good as to reprint the Popular Mechanics article BEWARE The Gasoline DOPE Racket, describing a bunch of worthless fuel additives which are, in promises and even in composition, the same darn thing that umpteen companies are still selling to suckers today. (Regular readers of this blog may be able to name at least one of these companies.)

The date of the article?

November, 1936.

(See also “Impossibility of Perpetual Motion Shown at Chicago Fair“, from September 1934.)

More videos that you’ve probably already seen, but which are new to clueless me (via):

The punch was what really sold it for me.

Mr Flare also had a large role in Babylon 5.

An excellent guide to the practical skeptical outlook.

Including something Amazing in the sky.

A great summing-up of this recent story, albeit with some disturbing attention paid to YouTube comments.

He really needs to stop reading those comments. Set the comment threshold to “excellent (+10 or better)” and all of that troublesome text will just… go away.

More at Captain Disillusion’s YouTube channel.

Should I participate in a link exchange program with http://kundaliniforyou.com/, the Web site for Robert Morgens’ Kundalini Awakening Program?

Robert’s e-mailed me twice asking, now [and he’s now sent me a third “reminder”, on the 15th of March]. Clearly, he not only noticed my never-ending stream of approval for linking schemes, but also saw how keen I am about New-Age alternative medicine of all sorts (this page is ten years old now…), and is confident that I therefore do not consider every damn thing Robert’s done since he left school to be pure poison to anything that’s decent in the world.

Kundalini yoga is apparently supposed to enrich you emotionally, intellectually, physically and spiritually, so I’m sure Robert’s enlightened mind gave him some sort of gestalt awareness of the raving quack that lives within me, despite my pathetic attempts to deny it in every single page where I said anything at all about anything remotely related to everything Robert says is true.

Robert is, I and he hasten to add, a Reiki Master who holds a Black Belt in Hoshinjutsu. He’s also the founder of Work From Home Magazine (perhaps this one, perhaps not), Harmony Magazine (your guess is, again, as good as mine), Combat Hapkido Journal (which appears to be the world’s only “Ezine” that does not have a Web site…) and not one but two Kundalini Awakening Podcasts! (How awakened does the serpent coiled at the base of your spine need to be?)

Oh, and he’s also apparently a professsional network marketer! I’m sure you all know how much I love marketing people!

And, as if that weren’t enough, he is - or at least was - eager to help you Apply the Law of Attraction!

So I’m in a quandary. Should I send him lots of traffic, or not?

A few people have e-mailed me to mention this Consumerist post, which links to an Audioholics forum post which I could have sworn I myself linked to a while ago, though I may be mistaken. All of the “audiophile” bulldust kind of merges together in my mind after a while.

Anyway, the gist of the post is that fancy Monster-brand speaker cables “sound” the same as wire coat hangers, as any electrophysicist would tell you they would, but as the entire fancy-audio-cable industry insists they would not.

(Wire hangers are not, of course, actually very practical for most speaker-cabling tasks. Numerous less dramatic tests have demonstrated that so-called audiophiles can’t tell the difference between fancy cables and lamp cord.)

But wait, there’s more.

Here is a test of wire hangers versus fancy cables for home theatre digital interconnect applications, which turned up similar results. Again, this is entirely unsurprising from a physics point of view, but is completely contrary to the heated claims from many magic-cable vendors.

I invite you to link to any other, similar tests in the comments.

(Actually, despite this post’s headline, I’m pretty sure that someone actually has tested rusty old barbed wire against “audiophile” cables of one kind or another. I do know for a fact that sending hundred-megabit Ethernet over barbed wire was a pretty well-known demo back in the days when 100BaseT was super-technology.)