How To Spot A Psychopath

A reader writes:

I was wondering if you have come across “Water Ion Technologies” before. My skills tend towards electronics or I.T., and about the most interesting thing I ever did with chemicals probably wasn’t that good for me at the time. I know you’re not really a chemical science site, although, in fairness, you seem to derive some small amounts of schadenfreude from debunking some of the more obvious pseudoscience shysters that inhabit the ‘net. God knows I do when you do it.

So… Should I be super excited about what they’re saying, or do I need to take more of those chemicals before their vision will fit into my reality?

Richard

Usually, purveyors of magic water at least somewhat restrict their claims.

Usually, it’s good for what ails you. Either it’s treated with magnets or dual overhead quantum recipulating sprines, or it’s just some mildly alkaline spring water that the seller declares to be Water Of Gladness or whatever. And away they go selling the stuff, come what may.

Or perhaps it’s not of medical value, but you can run your car on it.

Or it’s not water at all, but separated hydrogen and oxygen that for ill-described reasons has properties far more useful than the hydrogen and oxygen dealt with by boring old scientists.

Water Ion Technologies seem to have opted for “all of the above”.

Their main discovery, you see, is a mystic substance called “SG Gas“, which is not H₂O but “O-HH”, and has a long list of properties that’ll pretty much overturn the entirety of molecular chemistry if they turn out to be real.

(The Water Ion Technologies “science” page also, according to ancient psychoceramic tradition, rambles on about the patents they’ve applied for, as if having a patent on something means that the thing works.)

But wait! If you “infuse” water with SG Gas, you get “Ultra-Pure Polarized Water“, also known as the “AquaNew” product Aqua Cura “Watt-Ahh”, which combines at least five forms of pseudoscience to provide 100% of your daily requirements of whatever the hell it is they’re talking about.

(Actual scientists may find the Watt-Ahh “Studies” page particularly entertaining. Watt-Ahh doesn’t have anything but water in it, oxyhydrogen doesn’t kill cells, capacitance testing somehow proves they’re really making “clustered water”, now suddenly their nothing-but-water product is supposed to kill germs although that’s not actually what they did with it to reach this conclusion, and now, surprise, it’s a treatment for autism! And good for cut flowers. And on it goes.)

If this were the first miracle hydrogen-oxygen gas, or the first miracle water, promoted with a well-tossed salad of quantum flapdoodle, crackpot physics and claims about “hydration”, “cellular communication”, “detoxification”, and so on, then I might be inclined to give them slightly longer shrift. Heck, they’ve even got one study done by a real scientist at a real university… using their own odd in-vitro protocol. But c’mon, it beats the heck out of the tests in which they forget to tell you the results.

The thing is, though, that mysterious hydrogen-oxygen gases are a long-term crank favourite. Often described as “HHO” or “Brown’s Gas”, they’re forever allowing people to get a thousand miles per gallon or burn the gas to get back more energy than they used making it, except when some tiresome empiricist shows up and tries to actually test these claims.

And as for magic water, well, your one-stop shop for an overview of the surprisingly large number of magic-water products out there is “H₂O dot con“. Their page about water cluster quackery goes into claims like the “Watt-Ahh” ones in some detail; Watt-Ahh has its own little entry on the depressingly long list of similar products and devices.

Could this stuff be real? Sure, insofar as the claims made for it are even physically possible.

Since this is another potentially world-changing product that’s mysteriously being sold piecemeal to individual consumers rather than turning into a multi-billion-dollar business, though, I see no reason to give it any more credence than any of the many, many, many other products in the same market sector.

A reader writes:

I’ve read all your various fuel-additive debunking pieces, and while I’m assuming that this is Just One More Of The Same, I would like your opinion:

http://www.ecofuelsaver.com/

Big, flashy web page. Graphics and embedded videos. And not only testimonials, but actual Lab Results!!!

The How It Works web page sounds awfully dodgy to me, though, and the FAQ page makes me even more skeptical. On the other hand, they go to great lengths to differentiate themselves from being just another engine cleaner, and give myriad details about how to properly do testing so you can see the results for yourself. Also, the information given in their “EPA & CARB certified Lab Results” page is big on scientific rigor, discussing the need for consistent baseline runs and blind testing so the driving habits do not affect the outcome. (Of course, it could all be made-up hooey, but that’s the chance we take.)

Point is, they sound good. And the product is being sold by Canadian Tire, a very large Canadian retail outlet.

(Canadian Tire is an institution in Canada. They are a Wal-Mart like store, but have been around for some 90 years. For 50 years have a ’store loyalty’ program called Canadian Tire money, where some small percentage of your purchase is refunded to you in Canadian Tire Money. This ‘money’ is of *very* high quality; it is, in fact, better (better paper and ink, stronger security measures) than the national currency of some countries I have travelled. It is gladly accepted by charities, frequently given in larger denominations as wedding gifts, and is often used as a sort of alternate currency, trading at par among friends or even friendly strangers. Thus endeth the lesson.)

Anyway, since Canadian Tire is endorsing the stuff, I expect that many folks are going to be trying it. I know you have seen many scams of this nature, so I beseech you to train your skeptical and knowledgeable eyes on this potential snake-oil from the Great White North.

Shane

Yeah, here we go again.

This outfit does indeed have a better spiel than most fuel-additive sellers, but there on their How It Works page is the usual claptrap about raising octane rating.

Raising a fuel’s octane rating above what an engine’s compression ratio and ignition timing requires will, for an absolute certainty, do nothing at all, and certainly not improve an “incomplete burn”, a concept which the Eco Fuel Saver people also share with dozens, if not hundreds, of other fuel-additive companies.

Modern engines all burn very very nearly all of the fuel, or else they fail emission testing and/or set the catalytic converter on fire.

And on it goes, blah blah blah, and then there are those nifty PDF test datasheets you mentioned - which are, once again, of a quality well above the norm for these outfits, and not even from California Environmental Engineering!

This post has been sitting on my to-do pile for rather a while; when I first replied to Shane I observed that the “Gasoline” test-results document said that the tests were done in 2006. And here we were, years later, and this hundred-billion-dollar product was still being sold over the counter to individual motorists. On account, perhaps, of a Conspiracy.

Now they’ve got documents from 2011 on the lab-results page, though, and all they say is that their additive doesn’t ruin the fuel, and in fact changes it in almost no way at all. Then, puzzled, you might try their “Results” page instead, but all you’ll find there is a list of variably plausible excuses for the additive doing nothing noticeable. But don’t be fooled - Eco Fuel Saver will “increase BTU, octane and lubricity in your fuel”, so never mind our own PDF test results that proudly indicate an octane change, for instance, of less than half of one per cent, and the fact that even a large octane increase makes no difference unless your current fuel is causing knock or making your fancy computer-controlled engine retard its spark; just clap your hands, children, and wait for Tinkerbell.

I could dig further into this, but it’s like investigating every new prophecy of the end of the world or dude who reckons he’s channelling a million-year-old alien, yet is mysteriously unable to even tell you pi to ten significant digits, let alone anything of scientific interest that millions of human high-schoolers don’t already know.

It’s up to the makers of all of these products to demonstrate the value of their incredibly valuable, if true, claims. It’s not up to us to sort through the numerous claimants and their countless claims to see whether perhaps, this time, the magical mileage elixir or perpetual-motion machine is real.

The fact that Canadian Tire sell this product indicates, I think, that Canadian Tire reckon people will buy it. Similarly, Wal-Mart sells those magical “Power Balance” wrist bands (and several similar products, not to mention a particularly spiffy-looking magical engine potion).

And just about every pharmacy sells homeopathic remedies (as does Walmart!). And so on, and so forth.

Why, what an unexpected pleasure in the post today. A bank statement, a copy of one of Australia’s least interesting magazines…

…and a leaflet from a bunch of climate-change deniers! The front of which is one spaceship away from being the cover of an Asimov book!

The current Australian Federal government, you see, is proposing a carbon tax, the cost of which to consumers (in the form of more expensive goods and services from organisations that now have to pay for their pollution) will be offset by tax cuts. Various people have objected to this, including this mob, “The Galileo Movement“.

The very name of The Galileo Movement proclaims their proud dedication to the popular Galilean version of the association fallacy. They laughed at Galileo, you see, and he was right, so since they also laugh at you, that’s evidence indicating that you must also be right.

But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

(It’s a bit like a Christian organisation calling itself the Pascal Society.)

The “Patron” of the Galileo Movement is the entirely laudable colourful Australian radio personality Alan Jones. Jones, like most prominent climate-change deniers, is an authoritarian conservative, very wealthy, entirely without any relevant scientific education or perceptible respect for scientists who disagree with his views, and certain to be safely dead by the time the global climate really starts going to hell.

But never mind Alan. On to the “facts” presented by this flier:

* CARBON DIOXIDE IS NOT A POLLUTANT: CO2 is a colourless and odourless atmospheric trace gas. It is essential for life on Earth.

Well, I can’t argue with that. Obviously nothing can possibly be bad if it has no odour. And the dose could not possibly make the poison.

I cannot imagine why they bothered putting any more “facts” on this leaflet, having led off with a humdinger of an argument like this one.

* RESEARCH: Studies of data over very long periods confirm that C02 increases came AFTER increases in global temperature. So CO2 could not have CAUSED past periods of planetary warming.

Or, to put it another way, it could.

The little nugget of information that’s missing here is that higher CO2 causes warming, but warming also causes the release of more CO2, from sources like thawing tundra. (This is happening, alarmingly rapidly, today.) So CO2 peaks can actually be expected to come after temperature peaks.

Oh, and note that here, the nice Galileo people are saying that scientists are right about past temperature and CO2 levels, though they kind of gloss over what the scientists actually say.

We don’t, actually, have very good data on global temperature in the distant past, because nobody was there to record it. We can get a good idea of the composition of the atmosphere many thousands of years ago by sampling air trapped in thick ice sheets, but we cannot get a similarly sharp view of the temperature. We have to use “proxies”, like the width of tree rings.

If a climate-change denier’s trying to build an argument that relies on old temperature numbers being inaccurate, expect him to have a lot to say about unreliable temperature proxies.

* WARMING: Some global surface warming probably has occurred in the last century. However. despite increasing atmospheric C02, there has been no increase in the global surface temperature since 1998.

…and now they’re saying scientists are wrong about present temperatures. Except not really, because they slip in that “since 1998″ when they think you’re not looking.

Climate-change deniers love 1998, because 1998 was unusually warm. So if you graph global temperature for the last, say, hundred years, you get a peak in 1998 and then it kind of plateaus off. At a temperature well above all previous temperatures.

Heck, the recent-temperatures graph actually goes down in a few places, like after 1940 and around 1990. Pretending that this is an actual argument against climate change, however, is like saying that Apple stock is a bad investment because it didn’t do very well in 2008.

* CHINA: China produces the equivalent of Australia’s total annual CO2 emissions in less than a month. Its total annual emissions will increase by 70% in the next decade to 10,000 million tonnes. Why should we sacrifice jobs and harm our economy, when our exported coal is being consumed tax-free there?

* REST OF WORLD: The Gillard Government wants to reduce our 1.5% of total global CO2 emissions. Yet China and the USA, the planet’s two largest emitters, will CONTINUE TO INCREASE their emissions, together with India and most other countries.

This is the strongest argument available to climate-change deniers, and, notably, is also not actually an argument that denies that climate change is happening. One should not, indeed, expect to reduce atmospheric CO2 levels by reducing emissions from countries that don’t emit that much CO2 in the first place. Especially while much bigger CO2 emitters are dramatically increasing their output.

This does not, however, mean that you shouldn’t do the right thing, just because people elsewhere are doing the wrong thing on a greater scale. We’re all going to have to do the right thing eventually, and rich countries like Australia can afford to be (relatively) early adopters, even if the actual direct effect of our action on the climate will be trivial.

This “why-bother argument” is, I think, analogous to the argument that voting is futile, because your one single vote will almost certainly never decide an election.

But it’s not like voting, because reducing CO2 emissions is something that human societies are not very good at doing yet, so having a go at it will help us figure out which techniques work, and which don’t. If humans all refused to do something because everybody else wasn’t doing it yet, climate change wouldn’t be a problem at all, because we’d never have figured out how to light a fire.

* NATURAL ICONS: The governments tax will not make any difference to the state of the Great Barrier Reef or Kakadu ~ both of which are environmentally healthy.

This one’s a bit bloody cheeky.

The Great Barrier Reef has indeed pretty much recovered from the last major bleaching event in 2006, and clearly that’s not going to happen again. I mean, it’s only happened seven times since 1980, most seriously in 2002 and, yes, good old 1998.

Using this same argument, we can conclude that Australia need not worry its pretty head about bushfires any more, either!

(Note also the “I’m all right, Jack” attitude to coral reef destruction; it’s uncontroversial that warmer seas correlated with mass bleaching events - which is why unusually-warm 1998 was so bad for reefs - and it’s similarly uncontroversial that there are reefs all over the world that are in danger as a result. But as long as our big reef’s OK, who cares?)

And yes, the Kakadu National Park does not, at present, seem to be suffering any particular climatic damage. It seems pretty likely that it will, but just because there’s a man with a machete climbing in through your window is no cause for alarm. Give the fellow a moment to explain himself.

There are plenty of other forested areas in the world that are currently doing OK, too. I doubt that a lawyer would achieve much success if he argued that his client should be acquitted because, yes, OK, that incident with the machete was unfortunate, but look at all of the people in the world that he clearly has not yet murdered!

The whole point of action on climate change is to do something about it before our national parks dry out or wash away, our farmland blows into the ocean, yet more misery and death is visited upon millions of brown people we don’t much care about, et cetera.

* CLIMATE CHANGE: Climate change is a natural phenomenon. It is not due to human activity. The frequency of Australia’s floods, droughts, bushfires and cyclones will not be controlled by a new tax.

If this is actually true, then all of the other stuff is irrelevant.

It’s sort of kettle logic - “I did not break your kettle! It was in one piece when I returned it! And the holes were already in it when I borrowed it! And I never borrowed your stupid kettle anyway, so there!”

I suppose they could have phrased it as “even if we’re wrong about all this other stuff…”, but that’d clash a little with their proud dedication to FACTS!, so they’re stuck with these arguments that sit strangely together.

But never mind, because this one’s no good, either.

CO2 is definitely a greenhouse gas.

CO2 levels are definitely much higher now than they’ve been for hundreds of thousands of years.

This change is definitely the result of human activity since the Industrial Revolution. The numbers are very bloody clear indeed.

All the deniers are left with is claiming that this CO2 will, for some reason, not do anything. Good luck with that.

* FUTURE: Climate model predictions of dangerous global warming are highly uncertain, as there are no established laws of climate change.

Whoops, there we go - now the scientists don’t know anything, again!

It’s true that we don’t know exactly what climate change will do. Shifting climate will probably make some deserts bloom. Which is all very well if you own the bloody desert, but a bit of a problem if you’re trying to farm a place where it doesn’t rain any more. And a warmer climate is a more energetic climate with more water in the atmosphere, which most certainly does mean more cyclones and floods, though not necessarily more droughts and bushfires.

You don’t need a full and accurate model of everything that might happen for the next hundred years to realise that we’re changing the climate in surprisingly large ways. My personal favourite example is the sodding Northwest Passage, which is now navigable every summer. At the beginning of the 20th century, the preferred vehicle for traversing that area was the dog-sled; today, it can accommodate commercial freighters.

But oh, no; climate change isn’t happening and if it is then it doesn’t matter and if it does then it’s not our fault and if it is then there’s nothing we can do. You can’t prove that any particular natural disaster was definitely the result of climate change; therefore, there’s nothing to worry about.

And companies like poor little BHP, trying to somehow survive with only the biggest profit they’ve ever made standing between them and penury, must not be taxed even a tiny bit more or they’ll lay everybody off.

Sheesh.

A reader writes:

So….At times things eat at my mind, it makes me good at some things, but at other times it just stresses me out. I thought you might have a point of view that would be reasonably sane on my dilemma. Though I acknowledge it’s something that is far from your field of expertise, but you may have an idea… Just because radioactivity is cool.

So my flatmate visited Chernobyl. I thought that was kind of cool, but we somewhat agreed they’d discard their shoes and clothes afterwards (see where this is going? ;)

The tour got pretty close, they were standing within 100m of reactor 4. The digital Geiger counter was registering 4 mSv/h (I zoomed in on a photo…. will check that again at some point). Most of the tour group stayed on paved ground, though in some places quite broken. A few ignored the tour guides and were wandering around on the somewhat radioactive grass at one point near reactor 4. They ate at a nearby cafe, visited some of the local sites driving around in a small bus, then left the exclusion. On leaving they each went through some kind of radiation measuring device, it looked like a big metal arch, you put your hands on the sides of a console at head height and your face was pretty close to something, no one set that thing off. Though no one was really sure what it was measuring, or if your shoes were included.

Said flatmate spent another week travelling before returning to Australia, along with their Chernobyl clothes and shoes. The tour operators seem to think no special precautions needed to be taken with clothes and shoes after leaving.

Do you think particulate matter bought back poses a health risk worth worrying about? I made them leave their shoes outside the house….But on their clothes packed in the same bag as their shoes, it seems inevitable that some radioactive isotopes have made it inside. Though, they’re only a problem if I inhale or digest them, damn cesium. I do acknowledge that I’m already host to unstable isotopes of carbon in measurable amounts.

I recently, fortuitously, bought a nice enough Miele vacuum cleaner which I hope effectively implements its HEPA filter.

Unfortunately I’m cynical enough about our own government’s competence to have serious doubts as to whether the Ukrainian government has enforced effective safety procedures. Especially given the USSR’s history at this site…

Roscoe

Summary, before I start talking about ways in which radiation can kill you horribly: Radiation is almost certain not to kill you horribly. Those clothes, especially the shoes, may be detectably contaminated, but they’re very unlikely to be dangerously contaminated. And if they’ve been worn and washed a few times since the visit, contamination may not even be detectable any more. Even if you did big shoe-fetishist sniffs all over your flatmate’s sneakers as soon as they got home, you’d probably still be at much greater risk from everyday non-radioactive air contamination.

Like you, I wouldn’t have much faith in the dedication of Ukrainian Chernobyl-tour outfits to customer safety. Lord knows the Western world’s airports are now full of staggeringly expensive “security” hardware that doesn’t bloody work at all, so a country with a GDP per capita a sixth that of Australia, and with the usual ex-Soviet wall-to-wall government corruption, could be worse. But the tours are a regular event now, so even the defective imaginary-terrorist-obsessed Western world’s governments would probably have noticed people coming back with shoes that glow in the dark.

Plus, I’m sure plenty of people have taken their own Geiger counters with them on these tours, and yet the most newsworthy result of a trip to Chernobyl remains that chick who pretended to have taken a solo motorcycle tour.

On the subject of Geiger counters, I think it’s important to mention that if you decide to get yourself your very own ionising-radiation meter, be aware that there are two basic kinds on the consumer market. Both may be sold as “geiger counters”, but only one of them is.

A geiger counter can measure low levels of radiation. You can, for instance, use a geiger counter capable of detecting alpha particles (which many can’t) to verify that a lump of unremarkable granite measures above (but probably nowhere near dangerously above) the background level of radiation. (Unless your house is built on granite!)

The other kind of radiation meter is the “ion-chamber survey meter”, which is much less sensitive. If the needle on a survey meter ever budges, you should get the hell out of there. Survey meters are only meant to be used in places with high radiation levels, like serious nuclear accidents or after an actual nuclear war.

A lot of cheap eBay radiation meters are the distinctive yellow US Civil Defense versions, which come in geiger and ion-chamber versions. If it’s pleasingly cheap, it’s probably a useless ion-chamber meter.

(Note also that if Australians buy a geiger counter from overseas, it may not make it through Australian Customs, especially if it comes with a mildly radioactive calibration object.)

It is unlikely that any Chernobyl/Pripyat tours go anywhere remotely hot enough to get a reading from an ion-chamber meter, though you may be able to see places that’d be hot enough, like the secured, deserted scrapyards where they parked the emergency vehicles used during the disaster, or particularly choice parts of the Red Forest.

And yes, dirt or otherwise broken ground around Chernobyl is in general more radioactive than hard surfaces, because rain washes particulates off roads and footpaths and buildings onto soil, where they accumulate. Chernobyl is a particularly delightful test case for this phenomenon, because the combination of the reactor’s design and the astonishing fuck-ups that led to the disaster meant that the Chernobyl accident caused a roaring fire in its graphite moderator, spewing a vast plume of radioactive smoke into the sky and raining particulate fallout over a huge area.

(The far less disastrous Windscale fire happened in a graphite-moderated reactor too, but it was the fuel burning that time, not the moderator.)

The recent TEPCO disaster in Japan has released an amount of radioactive material comparable with Chernobyl. The Fukushima Daiichi reactors don’t have much burnable stuff in them, though, so most of the escaped isotopes are just sitting around in the neighbourhood of the reactors, or washed away into the ocean where tedious scientists say they’re diluted out of significance but we all know they’ll really wake up Gojira.

I am, of course, kind of winging it on this answer, because I am indeed not what you’d call an expert on the particular perils of tramping around in the Zone of Exclusion. (I’d probably walk straight into an anomaly and die.) I invite readers to tell me what I’ve overlooked, and thereby scare the tripes out of Roscoe.

From Modern Mechanix:

Yes, these things are exactly what they look like. And when the design was tested, no, it didn’t work. You can’t power an aeroplane with a sail.

“Common sense”, whatever that is, says it’s impossible to make a sail-powered aeroplane. And common sense is right.

But if your vehicle has a connection of some sort to the ground, or water, it is eminently possible to sail faster than the wind. Tacking sailing ships do this routinely. Common sense doesn’t say that’s impossible, unless it’s the common sense of someone who’s never seen a boat race.

But common sense most definitely says that sailing dead downwind, with the wind exactly at your back, cannot be done faster than that wind is blowing. Obviously, whether you’re in a boat or in a land yacht (meaning a wheeled vehicle propelled by the wind, not a ‘71 Impala), when your speed and heading relative to the ground or water are the same as the wind speed and heading relative to the ground or water, there’s no more energy to be harvested and you can’t go any faster.

In this, common sense is absolutely wrong. A land yacht certainly can sail downwind faster than the wind.

The fastest one to do so thus far is called Blackbird, but there are others:

What all of these yachts have in common is a large propeller instead of a sail, and the prop has a drive connection to the wheels. Common sense says this won’t make a blind bit of difference to anything, but it does.

There have been some rather nasty arguments between people who know that this cannot be done and people who, as per the old saying, should not be interrupted because they’re busy doing it. Enjoy the comments here, for instance, if you’d like to consume rather more than the recommended daily intake of flame-war.

At this stage, anyone who still objects is in the position of a person in 1910 who still insists that aeroplanes are impossible on the grounds that he, personally, hasn’t yet seen one flying.

(Although, to be fair, some of the land-yacht runs are alleged to have been made on the dry bed of Ivanpah Lake. I’ve been there in Fallout: New Vegas and it’s clearly not nearly big enough for any such activities.)

Common sense is, in general, immensely useful. It’s what tells you that, when you want to cross the street and see a car coming, you shouldn’t just step out in front of the car, even if you’ve never subjected this belief to empirical testing by walking out and seeing what happens.

But common sense, like memory and even perception itself, is unreliable. Common sense only works on things that it’s worked on before, and the only way to expand your common sense to deal with new concepts is by making those new concepts fit into some part of the existing framework. Expanding your common-sense framework to accept genuinely new ideas is possible, but it doesn’t happen automatically.

If you’re trying to figure out whether to step out in front of a type of oncoming car you’ve never seen before, the common-sense shortcut will work. But if you’re trying to understand some new, counter-intuitive physical oddity like these land yachts, common sense will fail you miserably, just as it so often does when people try to think about tax brackets or daylight saving, and on the rather fewer occasions when people try to think about aeroplanes on conveyor belts.

I don’t think all of the people who got into shouting matches over the downwind-faster-than-the-wind idea were just emotionally invested in a position they’d not thought about at all, as is so often the case in, say, political arguments. The physics involved is decidedly non-obvious; that, plus Sayre’s Law, could account for the whole kerfuffle. And this new development doesn’t seem likely to revolutionise land transportation, or anything else.

The next time you’re inclined to take a common-sense view of some new idea that actually matters, though, try to bear in mind that common sense also says that the world is flat and the sun goes around it.

Remember when the Sydney Morning Herald published that article saying how awesome the Moletech (or possibly MTECH) Fuel Saver was, when that device was of course actually just another useless magic talisman?

And then the online version of the article was erased, in a rather weird way?

And then the paper favoured me with a ten-word non-explanation about what had happened?

(I’m still waiting for Asher Moses, the author of the Moletech article, to reply to my e-mail about it. It’s been almost three years now.)

Well, that’s how newspaper Web sites work these days, apparently. ‘Cos, a couple of days ago, the Daily Telegraph (another Australian paper) published that paean to the all-round gosh-darned fabulousness of the “Q-Link Mini” self-adhesive radiation-absorbing tiger-repelling antigravity eternal-life cure for the common cold.

And now they’ve… unpublished it again.

Ze page, she is not found.

It was foolish of me to think that a major publication wouldn’t be so shameless as to do this, after I’d already seen a different major publication do it. Next time, I’m keeping a backup of the page. (Google still indexes umpteen traces of the article on other dailytelegraph.com.au pages, but the text of the article itself is lost.)

This is the normal way in which defamatory or otherwise objectionable material is dealt with on the Web. We all know about the Streisand Effect vastly increasing the readership of any material that someone unlikable wants kept secret. But in situations when someone has valid grounds for objection to something on the Web, the outraged party usually just shouts at the offender a bit, whereupon the offender takes down the page full of lies about the sexual habits of Joe Bloggs, or the review that was copied wholesale from someone else’s site, or whatever. There often isn’t even a legal nastygram involved.

But this is not how it should work for major publishers. Even if the Q-Link Mini piece was never published on paper (I don’t read the Telegraph - anybody see it on the actual fishwrap?), the greater public respect that “proper” publishers are meant to have (I’ll wait for the laughter to die down…) means that, at the very least, they should do one of those one-square-inch-on-page-19 retraction/apologies. Not just silently delete the Web page.

I wonder, as a commenter on the last post pointed out, whether attention from the Mirror Universe evil twin of Media Watch had anything to do with this unannounced retraction.

[Update: As pointed out in the comments, Media Watch has covered the story now as well!]

As that Crikey piece points out at the end and as this Crikey piece explains in detail, it turns out that Stephen Fenech’s footballer brother Mario is paid to promote Q-Link products. Which, to be fair, Mario probably sincerely believes are effective. This continues the great tradition of incisive critical thinking we’ve come to expect from sports stars.

(The second Crikey article also links to this page, where someone wades through the alleged scientific support for Q-Link claims, so you don’t have to.)

Entertainingly, a search for the names of the two brothers currently turns up rather a lot of people talking about this Q-Link nonsense. You could probably piece the whole article back together from the sections of it quoted on blogs and Twitter.

While I waited for an apology from Stephen Fenech and/or the Daily Telegraph (or Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, for that matter, because that seems about as likely), I was wondering what the heck Stephen was thinking when he wrote that piece. Did he, I wondered, imagine that the preposterousness of the product would distract people from the giant conflict of interest? Perhaps Mario’s the smart one in that family?

But no, that wasn’t it. Stephen actually thought he’d get away with this because he’s done it twice before.

Here and here, courtesy of the Australian Q-Link site’s “In The Media” page, are Mr Fenech’s two previous proud declarations of belief in the incredible powers of Sympathetic Resonance Technology. Both published in the Telegraph.

How often do you have to do this to be eligible for a Lifetime Achievement Bent Spoon Award?

A round of applause, gentle readers, for Stephen Fenech, "Technology Writer" for the Daily Telegraph here in Australia, for his unflinchingly courageous presentation of the "Q-Link Mini".

The Mini is a tiny self-adhesive object which, Mr Fenech assures us, is "powerful enough to shield us from the potentially harmful electromagnetic radiation generated by mobile phones and other electronic devices". (Q-Link themselves delightfully refer to the Mini as a "Wellness Button".)

Not for Mr Fenech the mealy-mouthed objections of hide-bound so-called "scientists", who've observed that there's no good reason to suppose that low-level exposure to non-ionising electromagnetic radiation has any deleterious effects, and that there's also no good reason to suppose that there is even a theoretical basis for low-energy EMR to harm us, and that if you block the radiation coming out of a mobile phone, the phone won't work any more.

Mr Fenech is similarly wisely unconcerned that Q-Link's most famous product, the "SRT-2 Pendant", contains a copper coil that isn't connected to anything, and a surface-mount zero-ohm resistor, which is also not connected to anything.

I'm sure Mr Fenech disregards doubts raised by this discovery because, of course, Q-Link's products are unconstrained by the foolish fantasies of orthodox "science", which has somehow come by the idiotic idea that the existence of microwave ovens, GPS satellites and personal computers might indicate a more accurate understanding of the principles by which the universe operates than that possessed by the manufacturers of mystic talismans supported by testimonial evidence, uncontrolled user tests and the sorts of studies that cause spikes in the blood pressure of "scientists" who work so hard to get their own papers published because, of course, their papers are mere tissues of lies that never mention "biomeridians" or "Applied Kinesiology"...

...which is here discussed in a way clearly calculated to underhandedly attack Q-Link's products!

If you buy something that's meant to operate by "Sympathetic Resonance Technology™" or "non-Hertzian frequencies", you should of course take it back for a refund if it turns out not to contain seemingly-meaningless components that aren't connected to anything. Those components are where the magic happens, people!

Now, I know that some of you are the sort of raving "science"-worshippers that won't take Mr Fenech's word by itself as proof that the Q-Link Mini is worth $US24.95 - or even $AU48, which for some reason is what it costs here.

Rest assured, all you Moon-landing conspirators and Nazi doctors, that Mr Fenech has diligently secured supportive quotes from the entirely unbiased CEO of Q-Link Australia, and also a naturopath called Daniel Taylor, who appears to be a practitioner of the "Dorn Method", which regrettably does not seem to have anything to do with being knocked out to demonstrate how dangerous the latest threat to the Enterprise D is.

I don't believe a study's yet been done to determine what happens if you use one of those antenna-enhancing stickers at the same time as a Q-Link Mini. Be warned that adding a battery-enhancing sticker and a Guardian Angel battery may result in headache, irritable bowels or time travel.

Today’s addition to my ongoing Psychoacoustics Archive comes courtesy of Ben Goldacre.

When listening to the exact same recording, apparently being played by similar-looking but differently-attired female violinists, evaluators consistently thought the music was better when the performers were more “professionally” attired.

This turns out to be an entirely uncontroversial finding. Until I read this Bad Science post, I didn’t know that orchestra auditions are now usually blinded (the auditioner plays behind an opaque screen). This is because unblinded auditions have repeatedly been demonstrated to create unfair discrimination, even when frank racism is not involved. Even listeners who apparently honestly don’t consciously believe that, for instance, women are worse musicians than men, will often rate female performers lower. And that’s before you even start to consider attire and physical attractiveness. (Witness the recent global astonishment when an unattractive woman, apparently against all that science and art has ever told us, turned out to have a decent singing voice.)

The evaluators in this latest study were just music students and professional orchestral musicians, though, not audiophiles. I’m sure audiophiles would have done much better.

Imagine my delight at receiving the following:

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

Hi Dan,

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

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

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

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

My answer:

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

(Or this blog, for that matter.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gregory replied:

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

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

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

To which I replied:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More detail in these excerpts from his book.

(Via.)