How To Spot A Psychopath

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?

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.

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?

The sadly neglected “Things I Won’t Work With” category of Derek Lowe’s organic chemistry blog (previously) now has another entry, as a result of an innocent inquiry regarding what chemicals will, if you dump sand on them to try to stop them burning, start cheerfully burning the sand.

It turns out that chlorine trifluoride (merely discovering that one Cl and three Fs can in fact be squished together should send shivers up the spine of anyone who was paying any attention at all in high school chemistry) is a party looking for a place to happen.

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.)

A reader pointed this page out to me, about the recent Greener Gadgets Design Competition $1000-second-prize-winning Gravia “floor lamp powered by gravity”.

It’s a funky looking thing, which was widely reported around the gadget blogs, and was alleged by its designer, Clay Moulton, to give the equivalent light output of a 40-watt incandescent bulb for four hours from the energy of a weight dropping about four feet, or 122cm. When the weight gets to the bottom, you just lift it back to the top and away you go again.

Now, it stands to reason that a mere 1.2-metre drop isn’t going to give you forty actual watts for four hours unless the weight is incredibly heavy. Ignoring losses, it would by definition take forty watts of power over another four hours to lift the weight back up again, which is 160 watt-hours, which is quite a lot. A normal adult human in reasonable shape can manage about 75 watts of output when pedalling away on a bike connected to a generator; it’d take more than two hours of such pedalling to raise that weight back to the top of the Gravia light’s tube, if the weight were heavy enough to make a constant 40 watts on the way back down.

So I just assumed the lamp’s brightness was greatly overstated, and wasn’t even four-watts-of-LEDs-that-are-sort-of-equivalent-to-forty-watts-of-incandescent. But since they’d clearly actually made the thing and it’d won an award, I presumed it did work, if only as a night-light. Fair enough.

But neither Clay Moulton nor anybody else has, actually, built a Gravia.

The damn thing doesn’t exist.

And Mr Moulton, who apparently designed the thing as part of his Virginia Tech master’s thesis, didn’t even bother to check whether his design could possibly bloody work at all, even if you built it with LEDs from ten years in the future.

Looking at the schematic for the Gravia shows that the falling weight is defined as fifty pounds, which is 22.7 kilos, which is indeed about as much as a variety of humans could reasonably be expected to be able to lift back to the top of the tube every few hours.

22.7 kilograms falling 1.22m in gravity of 9.8 metres per second squared gives you a grand total of 271.4 joules.

That, once again ignoring losses (which are likely to be considerable, seeing as there’s a ball-screw and an electrical generator in the Gravia), will by definition run a one-watt lamp for 271.4 seconds, or four and a half minutes.

If you downgrade the lamp to one tiny 0.1-watt LED night-light, you get three-quarters of an hour.

The maximum possible luminous efficacy for any kind of lamp that will ever exist - if every quantum of energy going into the thing is used to make visible photons that come out - is 683 lumens per watt. And that’s for a lamp that emits monochromatic 555-nanometre green light, not white (the world record for white LEDs in the lab so far is less than 150lm/W), but never mind that for now.

So if your tenth-watt lamp is just such a perfect device that can never actually exist, it will emit 68.3 lumens of light.

There’s no standard lumen rating for an incandescent 40-watt bulb - generally speaking, the ones that last longer have lower output - but something like 400 lumens is in the ballpark. Actually, the Gravia has been alleged to output 600 to 800 lumens, but even if you only shoot for 400, 68.3 lumens is 17% of the target.

So instead of the output of a 40-watt incandescent bulb for four hours, we’ve got the output of a 6.8-watt incandescent bulb for 45 minutes. And that’s with a perfect lamp and no other losses in the system. With the best white-light lamp that humans will actually ever be able to make and million-dollar hardware for the rest of the thing giving the lowest possible losses, I think you’d actually be talking the output of a two-watt incandescent flashlight bulb for about 30 minutes. At best.

Looking at it from another angle, 271.4 joules is 271.4 watt-seconds, 683 lumens per watt is the physical limit, so by definition 271.4 joules of energy can only produce 185,366.2 lumen-seconds of light. Four hours is 14,400 seconds; 400 lumens for four hours is 5,760,000 lumen-seconds. So 271.4 joules into a perfect lamp can only possibly ever give you 3.2% of the required light. Or 1.6%, if you take the 800-lumen ceiling figure for the Gravia’s output.

These facts have not evaded other observers, and have now also been communicated to the Gravia’s designer. That pesn.com page now features, in the comments, about a minute worth of these back-of-an-envelope calculations that anybody with a basic physics textbook could have done, and it also now features an apology from the designer of the Gravia, who now concedes that the thing could not actually be made and that he did not deserve, and will be returning, the prize.

Actually, I reckon he did deserve the prize, since the Greener Gadgets people are clearly a bunch of idiots (see also: The New Inventors) and their prize is therefore worthless.

I hereby propose magical light paint, which glows harmlessly at 200 lux for 500 years (power source: A D battery filled with the blood of saints) and costs a buck a gallon. Tah-daaah! I just won first prize in the next Greener Gadgets Design Competition! Drop me a line, guys, and I’ll tell you where to send the money!

The original press release about the Gravia on the Virginia Tech site now also contains a disclaimer from Moulton, though without any mention of him giving back the prize. I think it’s worth mentioning one line he uses on both pages, though: “I was told it was not possible given current LED’s, but given the rapid pace of innovation in low powered lighting, it would be a conceptual challenge.”

Yes, Mr Moulton, it certainly bloody would be a “conceptual challenge” to make a lamp that produces more than thirty times as much light as the laws of physics say is possible from the energy you put into it. That would be a pretty damn impressive achievement. I propose Virginia Tech not permit you to graduate until you do it. How’s that grab you?

The Gravia is very far from alone, of course. There’s a veritable plague of these entirely imaginary “concept” devices. The gadget blogs are rotten with ‘em. But usually these things have the decency to obviously just be a 3D render of some stupid concept that couldn’t possibly work (image-intensifying sunglasses, say…). Sometimes it looks as if at least a mock-up has been created. Only seldom does an impossible device actually win an award for “design innovations for greener electronics”.

(I suppose a lamp that doesn’t work is, in a manner of speaking, quite “green”. It reminds me of that Goodies episode in which string is a “safer and cheaper” subsitute for electrical wiring, “because it doesn’t work”.)

One bit on the Gravia’s design competition page is particularly priceless: “Gravia is also [a] metaphor for an understanding of social activism.”

Yes, Clay, it is. If you just sit on your arse and make shit up without paying any attention to the actual nature of the world, you will not succeed in social activism or lamp design.

Yes, this MSI motherboard northbridge fan powered by a teeny little Stirling engine is very neat.

I hope it makes it into production, and I also hope it’s well enough made that it’ll last at least as long as the crappy electric fans you usually get on a northbridge heat sink.

Small Stirling engines like this have very little power, and they need to be manufactured to very fine tolerances if you want them to run on a small-ish temperature differential - like, on top of a CRT or even LCD monitor, or on the heat of your hand for fancier models.

I’ve got one that runs fine on a cup of tea, but it isn’t smooth enough for anything better. You need something like the above engine, with glass cylinders and graphite pistons, to get really low-temperature-differential operation.

A modern motherboard main-chip, though, will easily give enough heat to run a small Stirling fan, and it shouldn’t need much wind over a good-sized heat sink like this to keep it at an acceptable temperature (actually, the Stirling fan may pretty much be just tinsel - the normal air flow through the case may be plenty to keep the northbridge cool, with a heat sink that big).

So the goofy MSI rig actually ought to work quite well even with a relatively cheaply-made Stirling engine. And if the engine craps out after a few months, you can always bodge a normal fan in there to replace it.

(Or do so immediately, so you can take the engine out and display it on top of your coffee cup instead.)

The product this little fan most reminds me of is the Heat Wave wood stove fan, which takes advantage of the large temperature differential between the top of a combustion stove and the ambient air to run a robust, long-lived Stirling engine with enough power to circulate air quite effectively, which can considerably improve the room-inhabitant-heating effectiveness of the stove. There are similar, cheaper products based on Peltier elements and boring electric motors, but c’mon, stump up the extra for the piston motor. You know you want to.

Dammit. Now I want a glass-and-graphite low-temperature Stirling engine.

Or maybe one of the Böhm kits.

Or the Gakken version, to add to my collection.

Or their steam car (note, regrettably, that neither this kit nor the Vacuum Engine car actually come with a Wondermark-ish top-hatted figurine to ride them).

(Note that all this does not mean that PC-powered steam engines are just around the corner.)