How To Spot A Psychopath

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, 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 The Secret Life of The Office). And that someone 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.

(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 also 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 won’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“.

The fewer blades a propeller - or helicopter rotor - has, the more efficient it is. (Essentially, this is because the more blades you have, the more turbulent becomes the air each blade’s trying to push around. Helicopters with lots of rotor blades have so many because a rotor with fewer blades would be unmanageably large, or require a radical redesign.)

So, ridiculous though this sounds, one-bladed propellers are actually the most efficient kind. Just one blade sticking out from the hub, on one side. Like a football rattle.

I think one-bladed props have actually been used in ultra-fast control-line model planes for ages, with just a counterweight on the other side of the prop from the blade. (And yes, they do also use pulse-jets!) There’s at least one swishy-looking counterweighted one-bladed ceiling fan, too.

If you want large size or high power from a one-bladed prop, though, you’re out of luck, because the single blade creates unbalanced thrust that’ll wear your shaft bearings away in no time. (You may also have some difficulty finding test pilots.)

The single-bladed helicopter may be coming into its own, though, now that we’ve got tiny, powerful jet and electric motors, and somewhat better batteries, and low-power super-lightweight computerised control systems.

All this means we can now make a one-bladed helicopter, on the “samara” or “sycamore seed” principle, except powered - it’s spun by a little normal propeller, on an outrigger.

In the olden days there’d be no way for an aircraft like this, whose whole airframe spins, to do anything very useful. But nowadays… well, just look:

It’s probably not even tremendously difficult to shoot video from such a thing, today. In the olden days it would have required a nicely constant rotational speed, at the very least - but now if you want to look in a particular direction, it’s pretty easy to just grab a fast frame at roughly the same spot in the rotation each time. Then you rub a little cheap digital signal processing on the output, to stop it jiggling from side to side or “tearing” as the platform spins too fast for the sensor chip to grab a whole square frame.

It probably wouldn’t even be hard to run a few-hundred-frame-per-second camera (or a few cheap 30fps ones) with no position detection at all, and just stitch all the video together into a 360-degree panorama, with variable frame rate in all directions, back at base.

I have this image of some game-company 3D artist trying to get a thing like this put in, as a recon tool, in a sci-fi shooter set in the year 2100, and everybody telling him it was way too crazy. I bet powered sycamore seeds will actually be dropping bugs through people’s windows inside five years.

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.)

On this blog and dansdata.com I’ve written about mercury, and, thanks to the very independent thinkers at Life Technology, also alchemy.

So I suppose I was just asking for this correspondence, from yesterday:

Respected Sir,

I have visited your website and then I am writing to you. so If you dont’t mind then give me some opinon abuout mercury after reading below datail:

I have making mercury into solid shape in Zink and then I want to give it into golden color, I have packed it in a Copper small pots shaped ” Male Female” and then put it into a ceramics Cup, then cover the Copper port with wett soil. when I heat it. after heating I made it cool and open the copper pots then I saw that due to leakage the mercury has flew up, only zink was in the pot.

I want to ask you that I want to block the leakage of copper pots so that mercury should heat and boiled but should not evaporates from the copper pots

what should i do to stop the the leakage from copper pots.

please give me some cheapest opinion. I am waiting for your good response.

Abdul

My reply:

I’m not exactly sure what you’re trying to do here, but:

1. If you actually manage to seal the containers solidly, they may explode when heated. Mercury’s boiling point is low enough to make this possible with relatively little heating.

2. You don’t need to heat mercury much, or at all, to get it to form an amalgam with any of the many metals with which it will amalgamate. (This includes, by the way, the copper from which you are making the vessels…)

Warming the mercury over boiling water should be as much as is ever necessary, and I wouldn’t even bother with that unless I’d already tried it at room temperature and it hadn’t worked.

The mercury does need to directly touch the metal, though. Mercury amalgamates readily with, for instance, bare aluminium, but it will not amalgamate with ordinary zinc or copper, because of the thin layer of carbonate and oxide (respectively) on the surface of those metals. Brush the metal with a little dilute hydrochloric acid, though, and the mercury will suddenly “wet” it, and amalgamate. Metals that take a while to dissolve in mercury will dissolve faster if you chop, grind or file them into small pieces, to increase their surface area.

3. I presume you’re doing this somewhere with good ventilation - preferably a standard laboratory “fume hood“, but just doing it outdoors is a lot better than nothing.

You should not be doing any experiments with mercury in a poorly-ventilated area, or science will become harder and harder for you to understand, because your brain will be rotting away.

Abdul replied:

thanks for reply me. Actually I want to speak truth to you for more guidance. I belong to a poor family, and I have got a knowledge to make Gold with the combination of Zinc, Mercury with the normal temprature of Sulphur.
I have make Silver with the cmbination of Zinc and Mercury, the last Step is to Give this combination into Golden color. I have put the Prepared Silver into copper ( Male Female Pots) and then make plaster to copper with mud. then I heated the pots.

result is nearly to success but when I open the copper pots I saw there was no Mercury only burned Zinc was in the pots.

Please guide me if you can help me I will pray for you for the betterment of the world and the hereafter.

Thanks

Abdul

My reply:

Uh… do you mean you’re making something that looks like gold, but isn’t? You can’t do that with zinc, mercury and sulphur, but there are a number of scams that’re a bit like this. I’m sure, for instance, that some “alchemists” used fire-gilding, where you make a gold/mercury amalgam, rub that on what you want to gild, then boil off the mercury. That can make a lead brick look like a gold one. People have also hollowed out lead bricks and filled them with mercury, because it’s a bit denser than lead and gives a fake gold brick a slightly more realistic weight.

If you think you’re actually making gold, though - or have actually already made silver - then I am afraid you are mistaken.

Every possible combination of commonly-available substances under every possible combination of domestically-attainable conditions, and then some, has already been tried by alchemists, over many centuries. And all of them failed.

The alchemists didn’t know why they never managed to come up with the Philosopher’s Stone, but now we do; it turns out that there are very good basic physical reasons, supported by very, very large amounts of evidence including the functionality of devices which most of the world’s population use every day, why turning base metals into gold is impossible.

(Well, OK, you can do it with a particle accelerator, but that requires immense amounts of electricity to make minute amounts of gold.)

Anybody who still tries to make alchemy work is like someone who declares that they don’t care what astronomers say, stars really are just holes in the sky that let light through from heaven.

I feel I must repeat my warning about mercury poisoning. Alchemists who decided mercury was the key to finally making the Philosopher’s Stone never made any gold, but did quite often give themselves mercury poisoning.

If you don’t believe me, I suggest you take your “silver” to a precious-metals dealer and see if they want to buy it.

Abdul has not yet replied. I like to think that he’s actually seeing if he really has made silver from base metals.

UPDATE: Abdul’s latest, and I hope last, e-mail to me:

Respected Sir,

Thanks for reply me with kind attention.

Actually A herbal pharmacist purchased the that is called ” Mercury with copper heated M aterial” at the rate of equal with gold.

My brother in law has adviced me and give me the procedure to prepare the Mercury.

I have prepared Mercury amalg with zinc but when I heat this thing in copper pots the result is opposite to his remarks.

my brother in law said that your copper pot should be leak proof so that Mercury should boiling in it but it should not evaporated or not leakage from this pot.

but I could not stop this leakage . every time all the Mercury leaked out of the copper pot when it boiled or heated.

if it is possible to stop leakage without any welding. then please guide me

I have seen that people prepare many things with Mercury then how is it possible? and how can we control Mercury and mould it in any shape or color.

I will be thankful to you.

Abdul

I told him again that these ideas are thousands of years out of date, and that we now know down to the subatomic particles why they cannot work, and that he might as well be trying to construct a ladder to the moon. I then asked him to think about why it might be that his brother-in-law is not the richest man in the world.

Perhaps it’ll make some sort of impression upon him. As with this bloke who was using his twilight years to try to construct a perpetual-motion machine, I hope he finds something better to do with his life. Which could, of course, be drastically shortened if he spends a lot of time in a cloud of mercury vapour.

I wonder if there have actually been millions of people, over the millennia, who’ve thrown their whole life down the dry well of the Philosopher’s Stone or the quest for the Fountain of Youth or perpetual motion. I suppose it’d have to be many millions, if you count all of the people whose extremely demanding religious observances leave them with little time to themselves, and few things their gods will allow them to do in their leisure time anyway. (Even if one agonising ultra-orthodox faith is actually correct, that only makes things worse for followers of all the others.)

When I finally got around to making myself some thermite, which like all right-thinking people I’ve been meaning to do since about the age of 10, the thing that surprised me was how bright it is. The combustion temperature of standard aluminium/iron-oxide thermite is about the same as the operating temperature of a light-bulb filament, and that’s how bright the whole burning mass shines.

Here’s a nice video of the process of thermite welding, which has for more than a hundred years been used to join train tracks together.

There are lots of other thermite welding videos on GooTube, though not all of them let you see the aftermath, when they remove the crucible, knock the mould sectors away and shape the still-glowing weld.

People who do this trick frequently clearly get rather blasé about it after a while, and hang around close to the crucible, or even do stuff like lighting cigarettes off the top of it. I don’t think that is actually a very good idea, unless you are absolutely 100% bet-your-eyes-on-it certain that there’s nothing on, or even under, the crucible that may unexpectedly flash to vapour when heated to these extreme temperatures.

Classically it’s water, or even damp stone, that causes thermite to “explode”, but many other substances will too. As I’ve mentioned before, many metals will boil at thermite temperatures, and there are all sorts of other usually-considered-inert substances that also don’t play well with thermite.

Like, for instance, asbestos. The molten iron from a thermite reaction may have cooled enough to not even melt an asbestos mat, but if you put a chunk of asbestos in with the thermite, it will definitely melt and quite possibly boil.

(This ought, at least, to render the asbestos harmless. Asbestos is basically just silica in an unusual shape, so if you melt it and then allow it to cool, you get a lump of non-toxic glass.)

I discovered yesterday that, early this month, Hulda Regehr Clark died.

In the same way that the Westboro Baptist Church and its astonishingly ghastly leader, Fred Phelps, are an excellent choice if you need an example of a religious organisation that pretty much nobody sane could like, so Hulda Clark was the archetypal example of an out-there quack. She wrote a number of books, which include The Cure for All Cancers, The Cure for HIV/AIDS and The Cure For All Diseases. And she was, so far as anyone can tell, quite sincere; unlike scam artists like Kevin Trudeau, Hulda really was telling us all how to cure every disease in the world, in her opinion.

But Clark was more than just a good example of a sincere quack. Fred Phelps is a raving loony with very little popular following, but Clark’s similarly deranged ideas have attracted a surprising number of true believers, and a steady stream of desperate people heading to her clinic (relocated, after some unpleasantness, from the USA to Mexico…), to piss away the last of their money and/or life.

Hulda’s ideas included a firm conviction that vast swathes of human disease are caused by liver flukes, and that the flukes can be killed by a little electrical “zapper” device of her own invention. Whereupon your nonresectable pancreatic cancer will go away. This very clear sort of objectively-provable cause and cure makes Clark’s theories a useful example of whacko quackery; in order to believe Clark, you’re required to be utterly ignorant of, or convinced of the invalidity of, fundamental elements of scientific medicine that’ve been around for at least a hundred years.

Orac of Respectful Insolence has put old Hulda pretty comprehensively to bed in his Requiem for a Quack, so I’ll try not to ramble on too long about What This All Means and how it’s another example of why critical thinking is important and yadda yadda yadda.

(I bought another couple of copies of Why People Believe Weird Things the other day. One is already earmarked for a young relative.)

As Orac says at the end of his post, and as many other people have said - where are the people Clark cured, if she ever cured anyone? There ought to be hundreds, maybe thousands, of people who were once gravely ill but are still alive and well today, because of her.

It’s like faith healers. If they really are healing people of their lameness and diabetes and who knows what else, there ought to be tons of these healed people all over the place, happy to leap up on their de-withered and even re-grown legs and testify with all the wind their now-cancer-free lungs can deliver regarding the validity of their chosen televangelist, Christian Scientist or psychic surgeon.

But faith healers are famously reluctant to even keep lists of the people they’ve healed.

You’d think that healed people would be the very best candidates for the donations that so many faith healers seem so perpetually to need. But nope.

(There’s an ingenious subversion of the follow-up idea, in which the faith healer solicits testimonial reports of healing miracles from followers, but carefully avoids the awkward process of seeing if the “healed” people even had the disease they reported in the first place, much less whether any real diseases are really cured.)

Hulda Clark had a neat solution to the tiresome problem of following up on her “cures”.

The Cure for All Cancers has a bunch of “case histories” in it, you see, which include 103 people who allegedly had their cancer cured by Clark. The way she verified that a cure had taken place, though, was by a blood test for a growth factor which, according to Hulda, indicated the presence of the deadly-liver-flukes-that-cause-all-cancer in the patient’s body.

If you tested positive for that growth factor, you had cancer, even if regular doctors couldn’t find it.

(The majority of patients in Hulda’s case studies were only diagnosed as having the disease by means of Hulda’s unusual blood test.)

If you tested positive, and Hulda Zapped you, and you subsequently tested negative, you were now cancer-free, again regardless of what conventional medicine might think.

And since you were now definitely 100% cancer-free, there was no need for Hulda to waste her valuable time looking into five-year survival rates, or any of that other nonsense to which the brutal and chaotic practitioners of Conventional Oncology are reduced.

If a patient died of cancer a year after being cured by Hulda, after all, then it must have been because the liver flukes re-infected him! If Clark told other patients about this, all it’d do is fill them with unjustified uncertainty about the validity of the treatments which Clark knew, with absolute religious certainty, worked!

I think this is quite a succinct version of the impregnable circular logic that supports all sorts of weird beliefs.

UPDATE: According to Hulda’s death certificate and her own Web site, the woman with the Cure for All Cancers, the Cure For All Advanced Cancers and the Cure for All Diseases did, indeed, die of cancer.

Clearly, this can only be another example of the terrible power of malicious animal magnetism.

Gerard Ryle is the Sydney Morning Herald journalist who did most of the work of exposing the Firepower fiasco (it was linking to Ryle’s SMH articles about Firepower that got me tangled up in the whole thing).

Ryle was on the Radio National mini-show Ockham’s Razor the other day; Robyn Williams called his book “riveting”. (Unfortunately for Gerard’s bank balance, that’s Robyn Williams the Australian science journalist and host of Ockham’s Razor, not Robin Williams the comedian and movie star.)

Ryle’s paraphrasing his book in the Ockham’s Razor piece (available as a text transcript and a less-than-15-minute podcast), but he hardly talks about Firepower at all, and isn’t just trying to get you to buy the book. Instead, he gives some highlights of the long and miserable history of fuel-saving gadgets here in Australia. Even in just this one country, there have been several stops on this particular railway to nowhere.

It’s not all pills, magnets and crystals, either. There’s also that hardy perennial, the Miracle Engine.

Miracle Engines share with perpetual motion machines - and ordinary everyday automotive technology, come to think of it - the handy quality of being difficult for laypeople to understand. Especially if you make ‘em complicated enough. There are plenty of unusual engine designs that actually do work quite well, after all; those workable engines provide useful cover under which bogus Miracle Engines can sneak up on the consumer. The Miracle Engines often don’t look any less plausible to the average Joe, or even to the experienced mechanic, than a Wankel rotary - but they often don’t work at all, let alone actually have the potential to revolutionise the whole field of automotive blah blah blah.

As with perpetual motion machines, Miracle Engines have been devised that contain every conceivable combination of rotors, pistons, opposed pistons, free pistons, swing pistons, shape-changing combustion chambers, exhaust turbines, planetary gears and a whole Victorian engineering textbook worth of other mechanisms and linkages.

Miracle Engines have the great advantage that, if a misguided-engineer or plain-old-scam-artist goes to the trouble of making a not-quite-working model of one, nobody can easily test his claims and show them to be bollocks. Sellers of magic fuel pills have to make sure people never actually test their products, but Miracle Engine inventors can just keep sucking up “development” money from investors and quite plausibly string said investors along, explaining that there’s still a niggling little problem with the panendermic semi-boloid stator slots, but that’s all that still stands in the way of the 500-horsepower 200-mile-per-gallon automobile you’ve been promised, and it’s nothing another hundred thousand dollars can’t solve!

First in Ryle’s short-list of Aussie fuel-saving ventures is the essentially useless Sarich orbital engine (I was going to edit in some links from one or both of those little Wikipedia articles to the radio-show transcript, but then I detected a certain similarity between the two already, which suggests that such a reference would be circular…). The Orbital company still exists, selling a fuel-injection system that seems to have been the only part of the Sarich engine that actually worked. (Ralph Sarich himself cashed out years ago, but the legend of his engineering genius and the automotive-industry conspiracy that kept the poor man down will never die. Note that the definition of “poor man” here includes “a personal worth of several hundred million dollars”. Almost makes me wish I could invent an engine that doesn’t work.)

And then there was Rick Mayne’s “Split-Cycle Technology”, another miracle engine that amounted to nothing. Mayne had the balls to enlist Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs to help promote his technology; this sort of grand cheeky gesture seems to be common in the automotive miracle business.

Splitcycle.com.au has been around for more than ten years now; it was promising great things in 1999, then passed to the ownership of someone unimpressed with Rick Mayne who promised a “Re-Emergence of SplitCycle Engine Technology” in 2005. But now the site is sadly reduced, to what appears to be an empty server.

(Is the Michael Papp who wrote that splitcycle.com.au editorial the same Michael Papp who went on to sell “Spark EV” electric vehicles that didn’t, if you want to get all nitpicky and technical about it, exist? Apparently, as of June this year, the Spark EV story was due to “get very interesting in the next month or so”, and the electric cars did too exist, and all the mean kids who made fun of Michael Papp and Spark EV would be so, so sorry. As of September ‘09, spark-ev.com is completely gone.)

A little bit further into Ryle’s tale of woe we encounter “Save The World Air Inc”, which offered a little fuel-saving nasty-emission-eliminating gizmo allegedly invented by Pro Hart, of all people.

Regular readers may remember Save The World Air from this post, in which I started out thinking that a new “electrorheology” fuel-saver idea actually didn’t look like just another textbook scam, since it was plainly presented with all the information necessary for other researchers to attempt to replicate the alleged findings. But then I noticed that the gadget had been licensed to Save The World Air, which dropped it straight back into the “obvious scam” category, if you ask me. And lo, here we are a year later, and electrorheological combustion enhancement ain’t changed the world yet.

Ryle couldn’t do a piece like this without mentioning Aussie racing legend Peter Brock and his religious belief - maintained right up until his 2006 death in a racing accident - in the “Energy Polarizer”. The Polarizer added crystals to magnets, to allegedly achieve the usual wonderful things. (The only measurable effect the Energy Polarizer ever actually had was on Brock’s relationship with Holden.)

Perhaps, one day, all this nonsense will have faded away like patent medicines - but I doubt it’ll happen soon. Even if we’re all driving electric cars that’re charged by too-cheap-to-meter solar or fusion power - or being driven around in autonomous electric cars - there’ll still be carpetbaggers selling magnetic crystals that’re meant to improve motor power.

With any luck, though, the sheer size of the stinking jet of bloody phlegm that sprayed all over Australia when the Firepower boil was finally lanced will at least slightly dampen enthusiasm for the next couple of fuel-pill scams.

In other Firepower-related news which I have shamelessly scraped from Gerard Ryle’s blog, there’s been some pleasing developments in the life of the delectable John Finnin, former Austrade official, former CEO of Firepower, et cetera.

One, the fact that this gentleman’s full name is “John Cornelius Alphonsus Finnin” has become public knowledge.

And two, Finnin’s been found guilty of 23 child-sex charges, and gone down for eight to twelve.

(This may or may not have something to do with the fact that Finnin brillantly decided to represent himself in court.)

I actually think eight years, followed by the usual Registered Sex Offender life-ruining, is a bit of a rough sentence for someone who’s only been found guilty of having a consensual relationship with a 15-year-old rent boy. But Finnin played a big, and it seems to me obviously knowing, role in the shovelling of taxpayers’ and naïve investors’ money into his own, and Tim Johnston’s, pockets.

So, you know, screw that guy.

(In case you were wondering, Tim Johnston himself continues to Skase it up overseas, deaf to the cries of creditors large and small.)

I’m busy writing stuff, so let’s see if I can’t get you all to generate a bunch of content for me in the comments.

So I’m spinning the Wheel of Contentious Topics, buzz buzz buzz, around and around it goes, it’s slowing down now… “gun control”, “abortion”, “religion”, “Kirk or Picard”… and it’s stopped on “health care in the USA“!

The previously-mentioned TechSkeptic just wrote an excellent post about the bizarre US health-care-reform situation. In brief, opponents of real reform are standing next to their rusted-out AMC Gremlin and insisting that all it needs is a lick of paint and some new seat-covers to be as good as any other car in the world today. And you shouldn’t believe what people from other countries tell you about the cars over there, because that’s all Communist propaganda.

I’m on the other side of the planet, and so don’t actually spend a lot of time thinking about the plight of sick Americans. But I do watch The Daily Show, and the US health-care situation is an interesting example of a common problem.

I wonder if the USA will ever find its way out of this mess, where elected representatives choose talking points that are blatantly counterfactual, safe in the knowledge that a bunch of right-wing authoritarian voters (I strongly recommend Bob Altemeyer’s book The Authoritarians, which is a free download) will believe them. This “authoritarian follower” population gives the cheerful promulgators of all sorts of lies guaranteed support from that ironclad 30% of the US population that never gave up on Dubya. And, often, a lot more than 30% of the US voting population fall into line.

(The 2008 presidential election had a very large voter turnout, by US standards, but almost four out of every ten eligible voters still didn’t care enough to turn up. Here in Australia we probably have just as many people who don’t care who gets elected, but we make them vote at least pretend to vote anyway, if they want to avoid a small fine.)

I don’t mean to suggest that purest BS raining from on high upon a grateful populace is a phenomenon limited to the USA. The whole world has always had this same problem. But mass acceptance of definite and objective governmental lies seems to me to have reached its fullest flower during the Dubya administration, and it hasn’t died back much now that he’s finally gone.

(While I’m recommending books you can read for free, allow me to point you to Harry Frankfurt’s much-less-frivolous-than-it-sounds On Bullshit. Every modern human should also own a copy of How to Lie with Statistics, but I’m afraid you’ll probably have to pay for that.)

Right-wing authoritarians, as described by Bob Altemeyer, do actually understand the concept of being lied to, and also understand that their chosen authorities are often motivated to lie to them. But, often, authoritarian followers simply ignore this knowledge when they’re listening to their chosen authorities.

This is the same sort of compartmentalisation that allows so many Americans to be perfectly fine with food stamps, bank-deposit insurance, unemployment benefits, Social Security and the threadbare safety net of Medicaid - especially if they’re the beneficiary - but vehemently opposed to “socialism”. The broadness of the definition of socialism that people use in these arguments makes pretty much every taxpayer-funded, universally-available government service technically “socialist”, and therefore presumably abhorrent. Nobody seems to have a big problem with fire brigades, garbage collection, highways, bridges or public libraries, though. But, just as a segment of the US population would be perfectly happy to be ruled by a king (or a Bond villain, for that matter) as long as he wasn’t called a king, many Americans are perfectly happy with “socialist” policies as long as nobody calls them socialist.

Apply no “socialist” government controls to any market you like and the result will invariably be corruption, cartels and frank fraud, giving rise to endlessly repeated boom-and-bust cycles, a minor example of which you might just possibly have noticed recently.

(On this subject, Upton Sinclair’s classic The Jungle is another free book you might like to read. See also Charles Mackay’s even older Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.)

There’s a lot more behind the weird American authoritarian hatred for anything-called-socialism than mere common-or-garden cognitive dissonance, though. Bob Altemeyer has, for more than 40 years now, been doing psychological research on why authoritarian followers and their usual leaders, “social dominators“, behave in the way that they do. He’s ended up with a very large stack of evidence of far higher quality than is usual in the social sciences, and discovered some very surprising things. Once again - read the book. I found it entirely fascinating, and often blackly hilarious.

Aaaaanyway, getting back to the subject of the USA’s adoration of dreadful health care, it is obvious that the USA could randomly throw a dart at a list of other countries in the developed world (and a few less-developed countries…), adopt the health-care system of whatever country they hit, and have a guarantee that it’d work better than what they’ve got. Provided, that is, that the USA actually managed to implement the new system properly. All bets are off if the new system turns into one of those military-industrial-political boondoggles the USA is so good at, where Congressmen and Senators secure re-election by making sure that every state gets a finger in every pie. The EU bows in awe at America’s ability to add such amazing amounts of open avarice to every kind of normal bureaucratic friction.

To people in other countries, like for instance Australia where I live, it’s difficult to even believe that for a significant fraction of the US population, the best health-care option available is to join the crowd in the hospital emergency room - whether or not your condition actually constitutes an emergency, of course - and hope for the best. We foreigners are similarly staggered by the fact that for an even larger segment of the US population, contracting a serious illness makes it probable that you will end up bankrupt.

We Aussies have a pretty standard underfunded-but-more-or-less-functional public-health safety-net. We pay half as much per capita for health care as the USA, and outlive you by around 2.8 years. I don’t think it’s just the Vegemite that’s responsible for this.

The UK’s population only outlives the USA’s by a bit less than a year, but despite that segment of the UK’s population who use the free ambulances as taxis, their National Health Service only costs them about 41% as much per capita as Americans pay.

And the list, of course, goes on. And on. And on.

So, despite what I now know about authoritarian believers, I’m still staggered by the sheer balls of the legislators and other talking heads who claim that the US health-care system is actually a good one.

It’s as if they’re standing up and baldly declaring the USA to be a Buddhist nation, and all of their buddies are going along with it.

Hmm. It’s possible that my “get readers to write stuff so I don’t have to” strategy has gone slightly awry. Commenters may have some difficulty in out-rambling the above.

Do, nonetheless, feel free to try.

The other day, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter took pictures of the Apollo landing sites. This gave various news organisations the chance to remind us all that if you ask the man in the street if he believes there was ever a man on the moon, there’s a discouragingly decent chance that he’ll tell you he doesn’t.

The new pictures won’t make any impact on the conspiracy theorists. You could bundle them into a flying saucer, fly them to the moon, and hover 10 feet above the footprints and Apollo descent stages, and they’d say you obviously must have come there in that same saucer half an hour ago and set all this stuff up. I mean, it’s been 40 years and the footprints haven’t even blown away yet! How dumb do you think we are, man!

Clearly, the only way we’re going to stop hearing from these people is if we give them something to talk about which they find more exciting. Ideally, I’d like them to become convinced that this supposed “moon” doesn’t actually existd at all, but I think that’d be a tough sell. If we guide them carefully, though, we may still be able to make the next We-Never-Actually-Did-X conspiracy theory much more entertaining than the unutterably depressing moon-hoax one.

How about this, then:

We never split the atom. The Manhattan Project was a fake.

Or it was real, but it was actually a collaborative research project between the US Government, Henry Ford, Walt Disney, Howard Hughes and the reptilian cabal that really ruled both Britain and Nazi Germany. Under the cover of so-called “atomic” research, this covert “xenofascist” project developed the occult death-from-a-distance technology that was what really killed Kennedy, when he was planning to spill the beans on that disappearing destroyer.

This, naturally, means that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not hit by atomic bombs. It’s possible that there was actually a huge conventional bombing program using giant pyramidal strategic bombers, flying from their bases just inside the South Phantom Pole, and given almost unlimited range and maneuverability by the use of a hybrid orgone/Vril fuel source, with antigravity lifters for propulsion. It’s clearly more likely, however, that the Hiroshima and Nagasaki events were actually the result of an earth-penetrating electrical seismic concentrator, based on Nikola Tesla’s well-known power-broadcast and earthquake machines.

Tesla refused to help the xenofascists combine his technologies, which is why they had him killed in 1943. If he had helped, the earthquake gun would presumably have avoided the embarrassing misfire on its first activation. That shot missed not only by 3,900 kilometres in distance, but also by some 37 years in time, and caused the Tunguska event.

(So Tesla and Tunguska are connected - just not in the way everybody thinks!)

Where was I? Oh, yes.

“Nuclear power” is actually produced by means of black magic, but it’s hard to tell exactly which kind, on account of the Malicious Animal Magnetism that so horribly destroys anybody who looks inside one of the “reactor vessels”. This explains why the original promises that nuclear power would make electricity too cheap to meter came to nothing; it turns out that the sheer quantities of alchemical ingredients, large animals, human blood and, of course, babies you need to keep the Old Things from escaping a “nuclear” power plant make such plants very expensive to run.

Oh, and “nuclear medicine” is also a hoax. The supposed “shielding” around “radioactive” items is just more camouflage for sacred geometries and resonant crystals.

And as for nuclear magnetic resonance imaging, which has the word “nuclear” in its name and so must have to do with radiation and atoms splitting and stuff, those supposed “superconducting magnets” do have liquid nitrogen in them, but it’s just to stop anybody from using a hacksaw to discover what the device actually contains. Inside, there are actually carefully broken-in audiophile-grade power cables, wrapped in a helix to match human ethereal DNA, and all running from a single button cell covered with so many battery-boosting stickers that it could power a small town.

Right. All we need to do now is boil this down into a bumper sticker.