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I think I'm about as susceptible as any other human to having my opinions formed by someone else. All I have to do for this to happen is read someone else's opinion about something, before seeing that something for myself.

So when I found out about Economic Enlightenment in Relation to College-going, Ideology, and Other Variables: A Zogby Survey of Americans, by Daniel B. Klein of George Mason University and Zeljka Buturovic of Zogby International, I decided to read it for myself, properly.

The paper, you see, concludes that politically left-wing people know a lot less about economics than do politically right-wing people.

This has caused something of a stir.

I deliberately avoided reading any other analysis of the paper before I read it myself, and then wrote most of this interminable post. (Had I more time, I would have made this shorter.)

Then I put a bit on the end that links to other discussions of the paper, and summarises the stuff that I missed.

I did all this instead of writing about Lego printers or something because I've been thinking, recently, about scientific papers and their interpretation and reporting. Mass-media science reporting has, I think, never been lousier. If you really pay attention to mass-media science reports, you'll hardly have time to worry about GMOs giving you CJD and UFOs landing at HAARP, because you'll be too busy clearing out your pantry, because whatever stuff cured cancer last week has now been conclusively shown to cause it.

You can usually still get reasonable interpretations of new findings from something like Scientific American, but normal everyday news sources are worse than useless, spraying anti-facts all over the place daily.

If you want to know what some particular piece of research really means, you therefore have to go to the source yourself. This is an important skill for modern humans.

It's tempting to not read the actual paper at all - or just scan the abstract - and then read what some blogger you like said about it. But you really should dig into papers properly, at least occasionally. Now that it's so often possible to have the whole thing in front of you, for free, in a matter of seconds, there's no excuse for just reading what some newspaper journalist mistakenly thinks he read.

I suspected that Economic Enlightenment in Relation to Blah Blah Blah was just a barrow-pushing junk survey, because that's what a lot of political polling is. Complete-garbage surveys are all that various interest groups need to move their barrows along, after all. It only took Sir Humphrey a minute to persuade Bernard that he simultaneously supported and opposed the reintroduction of conscription, so why try harder? Why cover your ideological nakedness with a real fig leaf, when a scrap of paper's cheaper?

Whether or not this particular study was junk, I knew I could easily find some journalist telling me that it was. Or that it wasn't. So I downloaded it myself (PDF), and read it. Feel free to do so yourself, before reading on to have my own opinions stamped on your brain.

The Buturovic/Klein Economic Enlightenment survey has a pretty clear conclusion. To the great delight of the Objectivist playpen in the Wall Street Journal's op-ed pages, this survey found that "the left" in the USA "flunks Econ 101".

The United States has, of course, no actual left wing that any of us foreigners can identify. When US "liberals" agree with policies that were too authoritarian for Richard Nixon, then they're only "liberal" in a relative sense. (That's right - US political blocs are defined by relativism! Or relativity, or something! My god - it'll be social justice next!)

The elephant-in-the-room problem with the Buturovic/Klein paper is that although it was conducted by Zogby International, a respected and above-board organisation, the actual respondents were from an "Online Panel", not a proper random sample. Zogby invited 64,000 people to take part in the survey, and those 64,000 were of course already biased in favour of people who can access the Internet and care to be involved in surveys.

(The Zogby Online Panel appears to be something you can sign up for. Surely you don't have to actively sign up to be surveyable in this way... but if you don't, how can they contact you without spamming? If the Online Panel is actually the same near-meaningless fluff as TV ratings, then the whole project is in dire danger at the outset.)

Anyway, only 4,835 of the people invited to participate responded. That's a 7.6% response rate, which is about par for the course for entertainment-value-only Internet polls. It's a serious, serious problem for any survey that's meant to have some scientific rigour.

You can try to balance things out by weighting responses so that the responders' demographics match those of the whole population; Zogby usually seem to do that with their own Internet surveys. But the authors of this paper didn't do it, and may not actually have been able to do it, if subsets-of-a-subset problems would have left them giving large weight multiples to very, very small slices of the respondent base, giving rise to error bars taller than the whole chart.

Here, though, is one of several points where this paper doesn't follow the standard Crap-Survey script. The authors didn't weight the data, but they make it all available online, so you can see what they were actually working from, and massage it yourself if you like.

(Here's the "survey instrument" in Word DOC format; here's the results in Excel XLS format.)

You may be wondering how the "Economic Enlightenment" survey defines "Economic Enlightenment". And, indeed, how it defines "the left" and "the right".

Well, Economic Enlightenment - "EE" from now on - is meant to be your ability to understand economic reality. Like, I suppose if you can understand that if you don't have much money then it's probably better to rent accommodation than to take out a large zero-deposit mortgage, then that's an economically-enlightened decision.

I think it's uncontroversial that most people in the modern Western world don't have a lot of economic sense. The credit-card companies wouldn't be sitting on such a wonderful green gusher of cash if people-in-general realised that holding your damn horses until you can actually afford something, rather than borrowing at 20%-plus to buy it, will let you own a lot more stuff. People keep borrowing big to buy a brand new car, too; I'd put that decision on my definitely-not-EE list.

(Actually, I think there's a bit of a no-real-left-wing sort of situation in the EE world, too. Look at all of the people in the affluent West who consider it completely normal to be deep, deep in entirely optional debt for your whole adult life. In comparison, anybody with the vaguest semblance of actual money-sense looks like some sort of Oracle of Infallible Wisdom. I dunno what Warren Buffett would count as on this scale; perhaps he'd be a strongly-superhuman Banksian economic Mind.)

The EE survey admits on the first page that their "designation of enlightened answers" may be a "controversial interpretive issue", and that they specifically went out huntin' for "leftist mentalities", without asking questions slanted the other way.

This is another big and significant problem.

Their page-3 example of a survey question, for instance, is "Restrictions on housing development make housing less affordable", with the usual multiple-choice answers from "Strongly Agree" to "Strongly Disagree" and "Not Sure".

The authors use this question as an example of how they "Gauge Economic Enlightenment", because a question apparently has to have at least this definite an "enlightened" answer to be worthy of contributing to an EE score.

But they admit that there are still confounding factors, because different people will have different opinions about what the question's really asking.

What sort of "restrictions", for instance, might we be talking about? Does "affordable" relate to initial purchase price alone, or purchase price plus maintenance and making-good of a shoddily-built house, treatment for the lung disease you got from un-"restricted" asbestos insulation batts shedding fibres into the HVAC ducts, et cetera? What does it "cost" if an electrical fault burns the house down, and you die? What if an un-"restricted" housing industry forms a cartel that builds houses out of damp cardboard and forces poor people to live in them - for a price that's exactly as un-"affordable" as makes the cartel the most money - or live in the park?

The paper doesn't really go into that much detail in its brief discussion of confounding effects, which given its respondents, all living in the troubled-but-not-total-chaos current mainstream US economy, is probably fair enough. There are infinite possible wiggy reasons why someone might mean something strange by their answer to what you thought was a clear question, and if your sample's big enough and random enough (which, once again, is a problem for this paper...) you can iron most of that out.

But I think there's one confounder that should have been mentioned specifically:

Deliberate lies.

Someone who's sympathetic to the current US "radical conservative" movement may personally believe that Sarah Palin is an idiot, but tell a pollster that she's a genius, just to Fight the Good Fight. Similarly, someone who wasn't paying attention during the most recent interminable US Presidential campaigns and so was under the impression that Obama had promised to immediately end both wars and nationalise Halliburton, may tell a pollster that he's 100% happy with the President even though he's actually very disappointed.

(For the same reason, I find it difficult to believe any survey about the sexual activities of teenagers. Religious loonies often seem to get very excited when a survey comes back saying that 90% of 14-year-old boys have had sex a thousand or more times. I don't know whether I'd rather those loonies are so upset because they actually believe the survey, or if they know that it's BS and are feigning belief to advance their own agenda.)

There's definitely some slanted question-selection going on in the EE survey; they admit as much. They had 16 multiple-choice questions in the actual survey, but they chose only eight of those questions to make up the final EE score for respondents. They say they eliminated the questions that were "too vague or too narrowly factual, or because the enlightened answer is too uncertain or arguable" - but I'd say the "narrowly factual" part shouldn't be a problem at all. Ask someone what an "interest rate" or "inflation" is; if they don't know, their EE score drops. An awful lot of people don't seem to understand income-tax brackets; there's another great question for a more factual EE test.

(Perhaps such questions would measure mere economic "literacy", not "enlightenment", though.)

Several of the dropped questions also seem to me to be more likely to get "leftist" answers, since they include, for instance, "Business contracts benefit all parties" and "In the USA, more often than not, rich people were born rich".

But here, again, is evidence that this isn't a pure obviously-fake barrow-pushing trash-poll. The paper tells you they dropped the questions, and why (rightly or not), and the authors also tell you what the dropped questions were. Leaving that last detail out is exactly the sort of thing that trash-pollsters do, because that way you can avoid disclosing that they, for instance, asked 50 questions and published only the ones whose aggregate answers happened to support their thesis.

(The downloadable full results also include responses to all of the dropped questions. I'd do some analysis of that data, if this post wasn't already the size of a holiday novel.)

On page 4 of the paper, there's a list of the eight questions they used, and the answers they deemed "Unenlightened":

1. Restrictions on housing development make housing less affordable.
Unenlightened: Disagree
2. Mandatory licensing of professional services increases the prices of those
services.
Unenlightened: Disagree
3. Overall, the standard of living is higher today than it was 30 years ago.
Unenlightened: Disagree
4. Rent control leads to housing shortages.
Unenlightened: Disagree
5. A company with the largest market share is a monopoly.
Unenlightened: Agree
6. Third-world workers working for American companies overseas are being
exploited.
Unenlightened: Agree
7. Free trade leads to unemployment.
Unenlightened: Agree
8.Minimum wage laws raise unemployment.
Unenlightened: Disagree

To keep this post under the 50,000-word mark, I leave determination of all possible well-reasoned but "unenlightened" answers to these questions as an exercise for the reader. Questions 1, 2 and 8 seem pretty straightforward, if simplistic, to me.

I also at first thought it was pretty hard to reason your way to the "wrong" answer for question 3, as well - but then I realised how many ways there are to measure "standard of living", besides "number of features in your car" and "number of televisions in your house". Is "standard of living" the same as "mean household income"? If not, how not? Answers on a postcard, please.

And the rest of the questions, not to put too fine a point on it, seem to me to be wide friggin' open. Not least because of the lack of any clear definition of terms.

I know, for instance, that there are people in the USA who seriously advance the idea that no Third-World workers for US companies are being exploited in any way, because apparently being paid a quarter of a living wage toward the large debt you incurred when you started work in the crap-for-fat-Westerners factory isn't exploitation. But if you take the completely crazy position that maybe some people in the Third World are being exploited by US companies, and therefore disagree with assertion 6, you're officially Un-Enlightened.

The very next paragraph of the paper, entertainingly, says that any objection such as this is "tendentious and churlish".

I may now find myself required to challenge the pinguid, sesquipedaliaphiliac diplozoon responsible for this paper to a duel.

Let us now move beyond the lack of imagination of the authors as regards valid objections to their definition of enlightenment, and their questionable... question... selection, and move on to the demographic differences between the people who scored high, and low, in EE (whatever, if anything, the EE score actually measures).

The paper's headline "discovery" is that going to college didn't give respondents a statistically-significant higher EE score.

I imagine that tertiary education specifically involving economics - or just a weekend personal-finance-management seminar, for that matter - would have an effect on the EE score - at least, for the four questions that really do seem to have pretty clear objectively-correct answers. But since most university students wisely avoid the dismal science with the same zeal with which sane people avoid the Continental postmodernists, it's hardly surprising that just passing through a university does not cause one to pick up knowledge of economics by osmosis, without studying it.

(Colleges won't make you study it, either. Later in the paper, it points out that of "50 leading universities" surveyed by these people, exactly none had compulsory economics courses.)

It's practically a truism that knowing a great deal about one subject has little to no effect on your knowledge of other subjects. Actually, people who're very knowledgeable about one thing often incorrectly assume that they've got the right end of the stick about some completely different subject. Scam artists love Ph.Ds. (See also, "Engineers' Disease".)

Research that confirms the "obvious" is still valuable, even if it's routinely reported in News Of The Weird stories and derided by politicians who're trying to reduce "wasteful" government spending. (By, of course, taking funding away from anything that they reckon sounds a bit silly, and giving it to the people who've given them a rent-free flat.)

Still, though, EE and college education being uncorrelated doesn't look like a big discovery to me. (If the EE testing method itself is fatally flawed, of course, then no correlation, or lack thereof, means anything.)

What else you got, guys?

Well, there's the left/right thing.

One very simple way of pigeonholing people as "left" or "right" in political ideology is to just to ask them, which this survey did. Once again, the lack of a real left wing in the US political dialogue means that a reborn Dwight D. Eisenhower would now be categorised as a State-trampling tax-and-spend socialist enemy-emboldener - but never mind that for now. The survey asked respondents to categorise themselves as "Progressive/very liberal", "Liberal", "Moderate", "Conservative", "Very conservative", "Libertarian", "Not sure" or "Refuse to answer".

And lo, those who admitted that they were infected with the terrifying disease of "progressivism" scored the very worst on the EE scale, with a neat diminishing-wrongness progression as you proceed toward "Very Conservative". And then a score a little better again - though not statistically-significantly so - for the brave and hardy "Libertarians"!

Once again, this was presented according to proper scientific standards, with a full breakdown and confidence interval listed. The error bars are wide enough to, as I said, mean the Very Conservatives might actually have beaten the Libertarians, but the overall order is clear. And the authors mention, again, that questions specifically aimed at "typical conservative or libertarian policy positions" might have changed the results. (Like, I dunno, maybe "Illegal immigrants are a major drain on the American taxpayer.")

But they, again, conclude, "Naaah." (I paraphrase.)

Next we get a bunch of little tables demonstrating that people who voted for Obama have miserable EE (but people who voted for Nader or the Green Party's Cynthia McKinney score even worse - though the error bars are of course really large for these unpopular "wasted vote" candidates).

Who else scored badly? Oh, just black people, Hispanics, citydwellers, Jews and Muslims, union members, and people with no direct or familial connection with the armed forces.

Who else scored well? "Atheist/realist/humanists", people who did not consider themselves to be "a born-again, evangelical, or fundamentalist Christian", and people who go to church "rarely" or "never". I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean, but it's amusing.

Oh, and "Married" people beat every kind of single person, and beat by a wider margin people in a "civil union/domestic partnership". "Asian/Pacific" respondents scored even better than white folk. NASCAR fans scored better than others, too. (Somewhere in America there must be a married Japanese-American NASCAR-loving atheist Republican who has a perfect model of the entire world economy turning and twinkling in his mind's eye.)

And Nader and McKinney voters may have scored miserably, but people who voted for the Libertarian candidate Bob Barr got an average score even better than those wily McCain voters, though again with a big enough error bar that they might not really have scored higher in a bigger survey.

Registered Libertarian voters scored better than people affiliated with different parties, and in response to "Do you consider yourself to be mostly a resident of: your city or town, America, or planet earth", Planet Earthers scored worst, followed by "not sure/refused", then "my town", then "America". (Presence or absence of a subsequent "Fuck Yeah!" was not recorded.)

All this isn't quite the results that a modern US "radical conservative" would really want to see, but that's just because religious beliefs and a good EE score appear to be incompatible (though "Other/no affiliation" for the religion question scored even worse than those silly Muslims!). Apart from that, the results are driving straight down the radical-conservative road. In brief, the authors' thesis that conservatives and Libertarian-ish people have higher Economic Enlightenment than members of the Pinko-Green Communist Alliance was solidly supported across the board of their questions.

There were several really nice line-fits, too. I mean, check this out:

The more you make, the more economically enlightened you are! Makes sense, doesn't it, kids?

But wait a minute. Look at that tiny little error bar for those brilliant high-EE "$100K+" respondents. A smaller error bar means a larger sample. Did they really have more respondents making $100,000 or more than any of the other income brackets?

According to the raw data - yes, they did! The breakdown for the 4,835 respondents was:

No answer: 593 (12% of respondents)
Below $25K: 277 (6%)
$25-$35K: 337 (7%)
$35-$50K: 541 (11%)
$50-$75K: 941 (19%)
$75-$100K: 757 (16%)
$100K+: 1389 (29%)

Now, this was total household income, not the personal income of the person answering the survey. But the median and mean household incomes for the USA in 2004 were $44,389 and $60,528, respectively. I doubt that either figure has shot up past $100,000 in the last six years.

When 29% of respondents are making around twice as much as the average income - the number of $100K-plus responses is only marginally smaller than the $35-$50K and $50-$75K respondents put together - serious "skewed sample" alarm bells should start ringing.

The paper does have quite a bit of discussion of the problems with their testing technique, but of course concludes that none of them invalidate the study. Or mean that they should have applied weighting to try to un-skew their strange self-selected sample.

(There's also, once again, the possibility of deliberate deception. Respondents might seek to give their ideology-driven answers to other questions more weight by claiming household income much higher than what they actually make.)

On finishing reading the paper - which, gentle reader, means that the end of this epic saga of a blog post is also in sight - I figured that the main problems with it were this obviously unbalanced self-selected sample, the lack of any weighting to attempt to try to compensate for the sample bias, and the selection of the questions used to construct the EE score.

Apart from that, I reckoned this was a decent paper. It's rather sad that the best you can say about so many media-touted studies is that they conform to the minimum standards for an academic paper - presenting methodology and results, and not blatantly lying. But still, it's better than nothing.

("Yeah, that car he sold me WAS full of rust, but at least it really was a car, not just a couple of bikes covered with tape.")

Perhaps I'm so easily impressed by any paper that achieves the basic benchmarks for publication in a peer-reviewed journal because I'm so used to examining the rather different evidentiary paperwork of true out-there crackpots. Those guys often insist that their magic potion or antigravity machine has been tested by some prestigious institution or corporation - UCLA, Bristol-Myers Squibb, the US military, and of course poor old NASA. But when you ask who actually did the test, and when, and whether it was published anywhere... well, you may end up with a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy of something that might originally have been on university letterhead. Or test results from special secret scientists or car-gizmo testers who always seem to find things that nobody else can. But you'll probably only receive abuse.

Compared with that, this paper is a magnificent solid-gold triumph of the scientific method.

What, I now wondered, do people who do not bear the mental scars of numerous encounters with extremely independent thinkers make of the Buturovic/Klein study?

I returned to the page that, seemingly years ago, alerted me to the study's existence in the first place: This question on Ask MetaFilter.

Commenters there linked to this FiveThirtyEight piece by Nate Silver - who has an economics degree.

Silver has previously written that Zogby's "regular polls" were acceptably accurate in the last US Presidential election. But "Zogby Interactive", the "Internet Panel", has consistently been appallingly inaccurate. Because, yes, you really do get on the Internet Panel by just signing up at the Web site!

Knowing this, I feel I now have no option but to class any actual academic researcher who uses the Zogby Internet Panel, but doesn't weight the results and stretch the error bars accordingly, as being deliberately deceptive. There is no excuse for pretending that the Internet Panel is directly representative of anything but itself, even if you take care to ask an unbiased series of questions, which Buturovic and Klein clearly did not.

In this particular case, Silver once again points out the lousiness of the Zogby Internet Panel, and the questionability of the "Economic Enlightenment" questions. He also mentions that some of the questions do not have a clear answer even according to professional economists, "...as Klein should know, since he's commissioned several surveys of them."

This does further damage to the headline "college education doesn't teach economics" finding; actually, the more you learned at university about economics, the more likely you appear to be to give the "wrong" answer for one of the EE questions. This turns that finding into a tautology.

Nate Silver's conclusion from this is that the study is "junk science". If Silver's post had been the only thing I read about this study then I'd agree with him; having actually read the study, I still agree with him, because what he noticed lines up with what I noticed.

Another MetaFilter commenter pointed out that the questions asked will allow anybody who sticks to mainstream US "conservative" viewpoints to, regardless of their actual level of comprehension of what they're saying, get an excellent EE score.

Commenters also came up with a number of theories about why the paper is the way that it is, for instance perhaps because of a conscious or, just barely possibly, unconscious desire to contribute to the US radical-conservative echo chamber about universities being hotbeds of crazy left-wing brainwashing.

(It's true, you know. By and large, the more education someone's received, the more likely they are to hold "leftist" political views. Clearly, brainwashing is the only possible explanation for this.)

And then there's the issue of mining for correlations. If you measure a lot of things and then shuffle the data around until you find something that correlates with something else, you may have discovered a real relationship. But as a dataset increases in size, the chance of finding a statistically-significant but entirely spurious correlation in there somewhere approaches one. Hunt through the data until you find similar-looking graphs and you may indeed have discovered that G causes R, or that R causes G, or that both R and G have a common cause that you didn't measure. But G and R may also appear connected by a pure fluke.

The Buturovic/Klein poll contains a sort of back-door correlation-mining; the question selection seems to have guaranteed the overall "conservatives smart, liberals dumb" conclusions.

(Another commenter was surprised that there wasn't any Laffer Curve BS in the survey. And yet another commenter cunningly attempted to lengthen this post by mentioning a two-question ideology-versus-science test involving "deadweight loss".)

Someone also said that Zogby "is a bit of a joke among other pollsters". But I find it hard to dislike John Zogby himself:

Honestly, I could have better used the hours I spent poring over this study. You could probably have better used the time you spent reading this page.

But there is, at long last, a point to this beyond just debunking that one fatally-flawed study. It is:

The next time you see a reference to a scientific paper on a subject that interests you, if it's possible to dig up the paper without having to trek to the nearest university library or something, do so, and read it for yourself.

(If you've got a standard worse-than-useless newspaper science article in front of you and you're trying to figure out who the "scientists" are who've allegedly discovered the cure for oh-god-not-again, Google Scholar is a good place to start. Note, however, that the modern mass-media science story is based on press releases from university and corporate PR bodies, who are famous for sending puffed-up announcements about studies that haven't actually quite been published yet. If it ain't been published, you ain't gonna find it in Google Scholar, PubMed or anywhere else.)

You need advanced education to understand some scientific papers. You're probably not going to get a lot from a paper about, for instance, cryptography or particle physics, unless you're already quite knowledgeable in those fields.

But a lot of papers, definitely including many of the psychological, sociological and medical/epidemiological papers that are so popular with the newspapers, can be comprehended with nothing more than a bit of light Wikipedia use and basic knowledge about statistics and probability. That latter knowledge is, of course, useful in all sorts of other situations too.

(You can get a basic tutorial in stats and probability from Wikipedia too, or in a more structured and entertaining form from the classic How to Lie With Statistics, and/or Joel Best's much more recent Damned Lies and Statistics. John Allen Paulos' Innumeracy is also excellent.)

At the very least, it's a salutary mental exercise to understand what a good study's saying, or to figure out what's wrong with a bad one. And it can also tip you off about the reliability of different sources of information about scientific discoveries. Who knows - you may find that your local newspaper has a science reporter who's actually good!

The developed world is entirely built upon a foundation of science, and the basic interchangeable unit of scientific research is not, as one might suppose, the undergraduate lab assistant, but the published paper. To float along on the surface of the world's science and technology without ever looking at the papers from which it is all built is like eating meat daily without taking any interest in what happens in a slaughterhouse.

I've been to a slaughterhouse.

I find reading scientific papers somewhat less unpleasant.

A reader writes:

As soon as I heard about "Steve Durnin's D-Drive, [possibly] the holy grail of infinitely variable transmissions", my BS meter activated and the needle swung to "Possible thermodynamics violation".

But in his favor he's got an actual physical prototype...

...and is attempting to have a metal model made so its input and output power can be tested.

What do you think of the concept, and can you tell how on earth it works? I'm still trying to figure out how this is too different from CVT, other than maybe a wider range.

I'm still wondering if this is somehow impossible, but personally I'm open to the possibility that it's a similar step such as CVT and the in-article claims are typical science-journalism overestimations.

David

Oh no - it's another New Inventors prize-winner!

Fortunately, though, an infinitely-variable transmission (IVT) is not actually in any way related to perpetual motion. All it is, is a continuously-variable transmission (CVT) that has some way to run its variable "gear ratio" all the way down to infinity-to-one, also known as a "driven neutral".

(This is, by the way, not the same as just running the gear ratio up so much, billions or trillions to one, that the final gear in the train is functionally immobile, and could be embedded in concrete without having any effect on the load of the driving motor for some years. A true "driven neutral" could be driven at a trillion RPM for eleventy frajillion years, and never turn the output at all. A transmission that bottoms out at zillion-to-one gearing would, however, be perfectly usable as a real-world infinitely-variable transmission.)

Because it can gear down to infinity-to-one, this does indeed mean that this transmission doesn't need a clutch, which does indeed reduce complexity. Whether a real-world version of the D-Drive would be too big or too heavy or inadequate in some other more complex way for real-world duty, though, I don't know. But there's nothing crackpot-y about the basic idea.

As the video makes clear, the big deal here is making an IVT - actually, a mere CVT, that still needed a clutch, would do - that uses standard gearbox-y sorts of components, or can in some other way handle lots of power and torque without being unmanageably big, expensive and/or quick to wear out.

Normal CVTs have been available in low-torque machinery like motor-scooters for some time, and are now showing up in some mainstream, full-sized cars as well. But they're still a fair distance from ideal.

It's easy to make a CVT, you see. Here's one made out of Lego. It's hard to make a CVT that can handle lots of power. And yes, the fact that most CVTs contain some sort of friction-drive device is a big part of the reason for this.

Note, however, that there's a big difference between dynamic-friction CVTs like this one or the Lego one, in which friction between moving parts transfers power, and static-friction CVTs like this one, in which friction locks components together (as in a clutch!), and they don't wear against each other.

But even here, real-world elements muddy the water and make it hard for someone who doesn't actually work at the engineering coalface to tell whether they're looking at something genuinely new and useful, or something that's not new at all, and/or won't work. Here, for instance, is the NuVinci transmission, a friction-based CVT that spreads the friction stress between numerous relatively lightly-clamped spheres - it's related to the "ball differential" with which R/C car racers are familiar. The NuVinci's makers claim it's useful for high-power, high-torque applications. And maybe they're right. I don't know.

For an excellent example of the ugliness that can happen when somewhat specialised knowledge is repurposed by people who, at best, don't know what they're talking about, look at this particular piece of "water-powered car" nonsense, where the well-known-to-jewelers electric oxyhydrogen torch is claimed to be some sort of incredible over-unity breakthrough. This sort of thing happens all the time - it's just, usually, not quite such a blatant scam.

As the Gizmag article mentions, many commercial CVTs are also deliberately hobbled by car manufacturers. They force the transmission to stick to only a few distinct ratios, and also to want to creep forward when at rest, just like a normal automatic transmission. This isn't a limitation of existing CVT technology, though; it's just deliberately bad implementations of it.

(The manufacturers do this so that people who're used to normal autos won't be freaked out by a CVT. Those of us who'd like the superior technology we pay for to be allowed to actually be superior just throw up our hands, and cross those cars off the worth-buying list.)

I think one trap for the D-Drive could be the second motor that handles the ratio-changing - that might need to spin really, really fast in certain circumstances.

There's also the fact that this is only really an infinitely-variable transmission at one end of the ratio scale. The D-Drive can gear down an infinite amount, and right on through zero to negative (reverse) ratios. But unless I'm missing something, I don't think it can gear up at all. So the output shaft can't ever turn faster than the input shaft. This is a problem if you want to do low-power flat-highway cruising, when the engine's turning quite slowly but the wheels are turning very fast.

Normal cars have significant gear reduction in the differential, though - the "final drive ratio". Perhaps if you make the diff a 1:1 device, which shouldn't make it that much bigger, the D-Drive's output-ratio limitation won't matter.

The reason why I'm saying "might" and "perhaps" so often is that I, like the New Inventors judges, am not actually an expert on the very large number of mechanisms that the human race has invented over the centuries. The simplicity of the D-Drive makes me particularly suspicious. The D-Drive's mode of operation may be a little difficult for people who don't work with mechanisms all day to intuitively grasp, but there aren't many components in there, and none of them are under 100 years old. Actually, that's probably a considerable understatement; I'm not sure when epicyclic gearing became common knowledge among cunning artificers, but I can't help but suspect that a master clockmaker in 1650 wouldn't find any of the D-Drive's components surprising.

Sometimes someone really does invent some quite simple mechanical device, like the D-Drive, that nobody thought of before. But overwhelmingly more often, modern inventors just accidentally re-invent something that was old when James Watt used it.

To get an idea of the diversity of mechanical movements and mechanisms, I suggest you check out one of several long-out-of-copyright books full of the darn things. I think Henry T Brown's 507 Mechanical Movements, Mechanisms and Devices is the most straightforward introduction; it's a slim volume available for free from archive.org here.

(If you'd like a paper edition, which I assure you makes excellent toilet reading, you can get the one I have for eight US bucks from Amazon. Here's a version of it for four dollars.)

And then there's Gardner Dexter Hiscox's Mechanical movements, powers, devices, and appliances, whose full title would take a couple more paragraphs, which is also available for free.

Both of those books carry publication dates in the early twentieth century, but many of the mechanisms in them were already very, very old. Like, "older than metalworking" old. But several of them are still, today, unknown to practically everybody who's not able to give an impromptu lecture about the complementary merits of the cycloidal and Harmonic drives.

(You may, by the way, notice rather a lot of mechanisms in those old books that do the work of a crank. That's because one James Pickard patented the crank in 1780 - plus ça change. This forced James Watt, and many other early-Age-Of-Steam engineers, to find variably practical Heath-Robinson alternatives to that most elegant of mechanisms to get the power of their pistons to bloody turn something. Watt's colleague William Murdoch came up with a kind of basic planetary gearing to replace the crank. Planetary gears have, in the intervening 230-odd years, found countless applications - including the D-Drive!)

Getting back to Mr Durnin and The New Inventors, they both currently allege that the D-Drive is a "completely new method of utilising the forces generated in a gearbox". According to this Metafilter commenter and this patent application, that may not actually be the case, since 18 of the 19 formal Claims made in the application appear to have been turned down. But, again, I could be getting this wrong, because somewhere behind the impenetrable thicket of legalese I suspect the "Written Opinion" may be saying that the final Claim actually is patentable as a separate worthwhile thing. (See also this forum thread.)

This all has me thinking, again, about the repeatedly-demonstrated gullibility of The New Inventors. When I can bring myself to watch the show, I keep thinking - OK, actually sometimes shouting - about how I'd spoil the party by asking at least one out of every four inventors "would you be willing to make a small wager that your device is not fundamentally worthless, or a duplicate of something that's been in production for years?"

(Sometimes, I'd just say "Have you always dreamed of being a rip-off artist, or is it a recent career development?")

The New Inventors seem to not have much of a peer-review system to keep the show free of crackpots, scammers and ignorant inventors who're unaware that their baby was independently invented in 1775. Or maybe there's just a shortage of interesting inventions, like unto Atomic magazine's shortage of interesting letters, so they let even the dodgy ones onto the show as long as they look impressive.

Perhaps the people on the judging panel just studiously avoid saying anything that might attract legal action from an inventor outraged that someone dared to point out that his magic spark plugs strongly resemble 87 previous magic spark plugs out of which the magic appeared to leak rather quickly.

Personally, I suspect that some insight into the newness or otherwise of the D-Drive may lurk in the various kinds of differential steering used in tanks. (Many of those have also been implemented, needless to say, in Lego.) And don't even ask about differential analysers.

It doesn't even take a lot of searching to find other IVTs. Here's one that, like the D-Drive, has no friction (or hydraulic) components. Its highest input-to-output gear ratio is quoted as "five to one", which is weirdly low; perhaps it's meant to be the other way around.

I hope, I really do hope, that the D-Drive turns out to be a proper new and useful device. We can always use another one of those.

But I remain very unconvinced that something this simple, aiming to do this straightforward a task, really is useful, let alone new.

UPDATE: As mentioned in the comments, Gizmag have a new post about this.

To summarise: The D-Drive does not remove all friction components from the drivetrain, because it can only ever be a part of that drivetrain, and needs supporting stuff that'll probably need friction components. And yes, it would need a motor just as powerful as the "main" one to drive the control shaft.

And Steve Durnin is apparently proud of independently coming up with a system similar to Toyota's Hybrid Synergy Drive "Power Split Device". I must be missing something, there, seeing as if this is the case then the D-Drive probably isn't patentable, and probably wouldn't even be particularly marketable.

A reader writes:

Can you do some research on this amazing device, which claims to be a superconductor. Is it for real? If so it is the most advanced scientific device on the market.

Company: KESECO
Device: ULTRA Current Improvement System
This claims not to be Power factor correction, rather it is a superconductor!

It has relevant patents and scientific explanations. I am having a hard time discrediting this, maybe it is for real
Check it out Dan:

www.Keseco.com
www.Enerwise.com.au

Andrew

Keseco do seem to be using some words having to do with superconductivity, don't they?

They go on to talk about "rotating electromagnetic waves" being converted to and from "far infrared", and the "crystal structure" of the wire. This is all far too advanced for little old me.

(I bet it does wonders for air and musicality, though.)

OK, yes, superconductivity would save power, if you replaced all of the transmission wires with superconductors (as is, very occasionally, actually done). But whatever Keseco say they're doing, that isn't it. Their gadget connects in parallel with your existing wiring.

(Even if you could magically turn all of the conductors in your home into superconductors, while simultaneously sprinkling everything with the pixie dust it'd need in order to still work with zero conductor resistance, you'd save only a tiny amount. Where electricity is lost as heat in the home, it's almost all meant to be lost as heat, either directly as in a toaster, or indirectly in the course of causing some motor, CPU or loudspeaker to work.)

Oh, and no superconductor yet discovered operates at a temperature above -138 degrees Celsius.

But I'm sure these minor quibbles are all thoroughly dealt with somewhere in Keseco's complicated explanations.

The Keseco devices may have an unusual theory of operation - whatever it is - but in appearance and installation they're pretty standard magic energy savers. You just connect the Keseco device in parallel with your existing wiring in the breaker box, and that's it. Whatever it does, it does it to any combination of devices inside the building, without necessarily even being in there itself, much less being electrically coupled or configured to them in any readily apparent way.

Never mind that, though; you can't argue with success. And Keseco's devices are very successful. Just ask them!

Don't ask anyone actually in the electrical-device-analysis business, though. As is usually the case with these sorts of devices, Keseco does not appear to be in any hurry to do any independent tests of their power-saving claims. Neither are these Enerwise people here in Australia, as far as I can see. The Enerwise site uses terms like "proven" and "the results are in!", but the actual evidence is just the usual wall of testimonials. (I eagerly await the publication of Enerwise's "Big Book Of Brag"! Surely that will be where we'll find the long-awaited independent controlled tests!)

Keseco-slash-Enerwise have, of course, apparently been on the news. And as we all know, they won't let you say something on TV unless it's true.

But wait - Keseco's "Certificate" section has an actual "Test Report"! It's reproduced so small as to be almost illegible, but I managed to decipher it!

It's a RoHS test, that certifies that the Keseco products pass poisonous-chemicals tests. Not that they work.

And then, also in the Certificate second, there's some more paperwork, but in Korean.

(This also seems to be par for the course in the miracle-energy-product world. If there are tests, they'll often be from labs in far-flung parts of the world where they don't speak English, even though they're being used to support claims made for products that're sold in English-speaking countries. Even energy-saver companies that are based in English-speaking countries sometimes, somehow, manage to do this.)

For the squinting-and-translating-Korean convenience of my readers, here are direct links to the largest images available from the Keseco "Test Report" page:

page 1
page 2
page 3
page 4
page 5
page 6
page 7
page 8
page 9
page 10
page 11
page 12

In among the Hangul there's what that looks like a statement that... something... used two-point-something per cent less power after... something else happened. But I'm not sure.

None of it seems in any way connected to Keseco's "guarantee" of a 5% power saving.

The "Performance Report" on keseco.com makes bolder claims, and is another entirely typical document for this sort of outfit. Bare numbers, no info on how the test was controlled, and further silence on the all-important question of whether the tester was on the Keseco payroll or not.

This sort of proof-by-assertion is standard for makers of energy savers, magical mileage-improving fuel additives, magnetic anti-arthritis bracelets, ultrasonic pest repellers, literally-magic "money magnets" and so on. There are hundreds - heck, probably thousands - of companies of this sort, big and professional enough to put together a sales package like Keseco's. But even when these companies manage to get large amounts of money from canny investors, they never, ever do the proper tests that would let them actually prove their claims and take the giant step up to their rightful place high up the Fortune 500 list. Instead, they sell (or attempt to sell) their products one at a time, direct to consumers whose own standards of evidence are satisfied by the testimonials presented.

(Often, there's a hybrid middle level between the company-that-should-do-some-proper-tests and the gullible consumers. That level is occupied by the gullible distributor, who liked the product so much he bought a franchise, but who has not yet realised that there's no good reason to suppose the product really does work.)

Keseco's PDF catalogue, and their "Products info" page, also cheerfully claim "Preventing Harmful Electromagnetic Waves" as a feature of their system. I suppose that means your microwave stops working, too. If mobile phones, by some freak chance, do turn out to be bad for you, I suppose your Keseco box will also suck up all of their emissions.

The site and catalogue also say the Keseco boxes "prevent" static electricity. Somehow. Somewhere. And then the catalogue has a picture of what looks like a molecular model of DNA, and then something about Fermi energy. I'd have been completely convinced if only they'd worked in Bose-Einstein condensates and particles with imaginary mass.

The Keseco catalogue also has a number of examples of another standard marker for this sort of business, Irrelevant Certifications Offered As If They Have Something To Do With Whether The Product Works.

There's a Korean patent! A registered design! A trademark! A corporate insurance policy of some sort! Alleged CMA, CE, ANCE, ISO 9001 and RoHS conformance! None of which means the product bloody works!

(Just to make this clear one more time, because it comes up so very, very, VERY often: The Patent Offices in various countries make no attempt whatsoever to determine whether an idea presented for patenting is actually good for anything at all. You don't even have to provide a working model. There's usually some basic screening to keep out blatant perpetual-motion devices {possibly with a caveat that you can patent such a device, but only if you do bring a working model!}, but that's all. All the patent office cares about is whether the idea is sufficiently different from other things that already exist to be worthy of a patent - and most patent offices are so overworked these days that they don't even do this very well. So despite what thousands of crackpots and swindlers have claimed over lo, these many, many years, there is no connection whatsoever between patentability and functionality.)

I remind you, gentle reader, that all of the wonderful effects Keseco products are supposed to cause are, somehow, created by a box that you just stick in or near the building's breaker box, and wire in parallel with the building's circuits. Whatever those circuits are, and whatever business you're in. It would be entirely churlish to suggest that this is analogous to making a "water saver" that hangs off a T-fitting next to your water meter, thereby impeding or encouraging the water's flow in no way at all. So I won't do that.

I suggest, Andrew, that you just put up with your present electricity bill for another year. By then, either Keseco will be a household name, one of the most profitable corporations in the world, with Nobel Prizes in the pipeline for their engineers... or they'll still be grubbing around with all the other retail sellers of worthless "power saving" talismans.

But oh, dear - the proudly-displayed accreditations in Keseco's catalogue go all the way back to 2004! The site itself has been around since 2002!

(It used to have an awesome flash intro.)

And yet still, no Keseco boxes in every electrical substation. No Keseco boxes the size of Winnebagos hanging off the side of every aluminium smelter. No Nobel Prizes.

I just can't work it out.

Herewith, one of the most pleasing correspondences I've ever had with someone who originally contacted me with bold new scientific ideas.

Usually, such exchanges go kind of like this. This went much better.

And it turned out I was talking to someone famous, to boot!

From: Tom
To: dan@dansdata.com
Date: Mon, 8 Mar 2010 02:15:07
Subject: Magnetic healing?

I'm on some kind of similar path as you. In any case, really appreciated your summary of kinds, costs and usage of neodymium magnets.

I came across a guy who explained to me that microbes have a tough time living in changing magnetic fields. Germs, viruses... Perhaps that's one reason exercise is beneficial. The electricity delivered in pulses to muscles, causes pulsing magnetic fields all along the way.

This guy and his pals were making "Thumpers" (maybe spelled differently). They were buying Radio Shack strobe lights, then attaching coils in place of lights, and maintained that pulses of magnetism could cure bacteria deep within the body. His wife, for example, had some sort of deep sinus infection that he'd healed.

I talked long distance to the guy via telephone (back in a day where it made a difference that phones were far apart) and compared notes on power. I asked him to describe the results when he applied his thumper pulses to his television screen... again, this was before flat screens so that you'd wiggle a magnet in front of a computer monitor or TV and it would produce all kinda weird patterns. His thumper was effective within a foot or so. Meanwhile, I was twirling a couple of not all that strong cylindrical magnets two feet from my screen and it was going nuts. My magnets were like the size of a pack of Life Savers. These were suspended from my fingers by a loop of rubber band which I could then twirl. Wind and then it would unwind, kind of thing.

Point is, experiment with infected sores by waving the sore part back and forth by a neo magnet. Or, build a little rubber band twirler and try it out next time you have, say, a toothache. Twirl it by your teeth and see if it kills off the tooth caries.

Tom

My reply:

I don't think it's true that magnetic fields kill microbes. And if the incredibly weak magnetic fields from natural electrical activity in the body made life "tough" for microorganisms, walking past an electric oven would kill all the beneficial flora in your gut.

With regard to the magnetic "thumpers", the big question is, "How do the pulses know good bacteria from bad?"

(It turns out that magnetic "thumpers" are also known as "pulsers", and are quite popular among people who usually also believe that Hulda Clark and/or Royal Rife could actually cure just about everything with their electrical "zappers".)

If sinus infections never went away by themselves, then curing one with some gadget would be impressive. When you're dealing with diseases that do go away by themselves, and don't even have clear endpoints or objectively measurable symptoms, though, it's not a great idea to conclude that whatever you did before the disease went away must have cured it. This sort of uncontrolled test may point you toward a real phenomenon that you can then investigate properly, but all it proves by itself is that whatever you did before the disease went away didn't stop the disease from going away.

The "thumper" idea has the same problems as many other half-baked alternative-medicine theories. Magically targeting bad bacteria while leaving good ones, a simple scientific process with Nobel-Prize-worthy effects that would have been discovered by accident ten thousand times before 1910, et cetera.

Yes, CRT monitors are very sensitive to magnetic fields. Which is good, because otherwise the dot would just sit there in the middle and you'd have to wave the whole monitor around really fast to make an image! (You could, to be pedantic, use oscilloscope-style electrostatic deflection instead of magnetic deflection. But electrostatic deflection can't bend an electron beam nearly as sharply as a magnetic field; a 26-inch electrostatic-CRT TV could easily be six feet deep.)

Magnetic fields affecting electron beams are a real physical effect, discovery of which was an important, and inevitable, part of the development of human knowledge about electromagnetism. William Crookes (of the eponymous radiometer, among other things) probably did the magnetic-deflection trick first, but if he hadn't, someone else would have (and, indeed, did), well before the end of the 19th century.

Magnetic fields of modest strength affecting biological organisms, on the other hand, is a claim frequently made, which could easily be tested in a kitchen with less than a hundred bucks worth of basic scientific equipment, but which has never thus been proved.

(You can set up a pretty respectable molecular biology lab for under $US1000, these days. Praise eBay!)

If you walk through a really monstrous magnetic field - the kind with big warning signs about not entering the room unless you've ditched every metal object on your person, even if you're willing to sign an affidavit saying that those objects are not ferromagnetic at all - then you're likely to feel funny. Focused and pulsed magnetic fields directed into the brain can also create peculiar effects. Pulsed magnetic fields may even improve healing, though the verdict isn't quite final on that one yet.

But even magnetic fields so powerful that the feeble diamagnetism of water becomes sufficient to levitate living creatures do not, so far as anyone can see, kill so much as one lowly bacterium.

The notion that field strengths that aren't sufficient to rip a belt buckle clean through the leather could somehow kill germs is, thus, exceedingly difficult to defend.

I cordially invite you to set up some Petri dishes and conduct your suggested tooth-decay experiment. You may be the one who makes the breakthrough!

Tom replied:

I appreciate your thorough and helpful reply. However, I'm not coming from any place of proof. Just suggesting a possibility. As to selectively killing bad flora, that idea never entered my head. The point is that possibly there's something in the idea to consider rather than criticize.

As to a notion you seem to entertain I'll paraphrase as, "If that idea was any good, it would already have been invented". This is a very discouraging idea. The fact is, that in 1850 a bill was put before Congress to close the Patent Office because they thought everything of worth had already been invented. Wrong. Looking back from say the year 3000 we'll see that relatively little had been discovered by 2010.

As to the use of alternating magnetic fields as a deterrent to bacterial buildup (good or bad), I'd be willing to bet that in the not too distant future, it will be determined that the relatively strong magnetic fields used for MRI are curative of certain chronic disorders.

As a youth, my mother told me repeatedly that my ideas were probably already thought of. However, in 1971 I thought up something called the boogie board, and created its manufacturing process. 20-50 million of them have since been built.

Anyhow, best wishes. Tom

Thanks for not flying off the handle over my typically "thorough and helpful reply" :-).

You may not be "coming from any place of proof", but neither is anybody who's postulating some new scientific claim.

I've explained why the "possibility" you mention is extremely implausible. It would be easy to test, people have tested similar claims many times, and as far as I know, it's never panned out. People have incidentally tested these claims countless times, actually; any time germs and a magnetic field are together and someone checks on the germs later, that's a test of your claim.

I mean, just to pick one example, "magnetic stirrers" are a normal piece of lab equipment. A rotating magnetic field from below a container spins a little stirring rod inside the container. Such stirrers are used in biology labs, and have been for decades. To my knowledge, no germicidal properties from the magnetic field have ever been noticed.

And, again, this'd be Nobel-Prize material. Even if you can only kill germs on inanimate objects by subjecting them to magnetic fields, that'd be a billion-dollar discovery. It'd be a wonderful alternative to autoclaving and chemical disinfectants.

So sure, possibly there's something in the idea. Possibly, Elvis is alive, and currently serving as Emperor of All the Underground Cities of Mars!

[UPDATE: Magnetotactic bacteria actually do respond to magnetic fields, and can in practice be manipulated to do strange things under magnetic control. This doesn't have anything to do with disease control, though.]

On top of the fact that this idea has been tested zillions of times - mainly accidentally, but I'm sure also deliberately; the idea that magnetism is somehow therapeutic is an old one - I've also explained why your friends with the magnetic strobe-circuit doodads are making inconsistent claims in the first place. Somehow, the magnetic fields kill "bad" bacteria while leaving the "good" ones alive.

The magnetism obviously doesn't kill the good bacteria, because otherwise anybody who passed through a strong magnetic field - or used one of these "thumper" things, in case it's field gradient or pulse frequency or something that's critical, not just field strength - would develop the same diarrhoea you get if antibiotics kill off your gut flora.

If you managed to confine the field to your armpits, though, it'd cure underarm odour!

There are quite a lot of beasties that live in and on the human body, more than a few of which would cause obvious effects if you killed them all off. And yet people who spend their whole working life right next to giant superconducting magnets, and people who work in magnet factories, and people who work next to the giant busbars in power stations and blast furnaces, do not exhibit any signs of loss of bacteria. (I'm also willing to bet that if you swab the bus bars, the surfaces of the magnets, et cetera, and culture what you find, there won't be any fewer, or any different species, of microorganisms than you'd expect.)

See also, for instance, people who believe that "colloidal silver" is some sort of cure-all. In that case they've at least got some factual basis for their claims; metallic silver has real antiseptic properties. But they go from that to saying that tiny silver particles (or concoctions that they just allege contain tiny silver particles...) will, if you drink them, be Good For What Ails You, and magically not kill any good bacteria. Which is the point where they and empirical evidence part company, and also the point where they stop making even logical sense.

David Hume's famous statement that "A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence" does not mean that everybody should shut up and just believe whatever scientific orthodoxy, or the government, or some church, says. You're allowed to seek your own evidence, and to judge what evidence presented by others is plausible. You don't need a diploma to be a scientist. A scientist is just someone who does science.

But this doesn't make all claims plausible, or worthy of investigation. Life's too short to follow up on every possibility, no matter how unlikely.

Regarding the "bill to close the Patent Office" - now, see, that's not true either!

This urban legend is usually presented as "a US Patent Office guy in the 19th Century said that everything that could be invented already had been". The version of the story that says it was a Bill to close the patent office also exists in numerous versions. Nobody can decide what year this was supposed to have happened!

Sure, maybe in the future we'll look back on our skepticism about therapeutic magnetism and wonder how we could ever have been so wrong. But nobody's noticed any germ-killing effects yet, though. And lot of people have had MRIs. And most of those people have been sick.

Scientists all over the world are combing through every possible statistical source to find something publishable. A correlation between people having MRIs and infections clearing up would be a brilliant one. No luck so far, though.

I think the relevant saying is "it's good to have an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out".

Regarding your mother's incorrect assumption that your ideas probably weren't new - indeed, the man who says it can't be done should not interrupt the man who is busy doing it. But this does not mean that the man who says it can't be done is the one who has to put up or shut up!

I'm reminded of this:

Small child: "My mummy says when I grow up, I can be anything I want to be!"
Adult: "What do you want to be, then?"
Small child: "I'm going to be a GIRAFFE!"

You might not actually choose to dash the child's hopes at the time, but you can still be pretty sure that kid's not going to grow up to be a giraffe, a fire engine, a jumbo jet, et cetera. This certainty does not make you close-minded.

However, in 1971 I thought up something called the boogie board and created its manufacturing process.

Wait - you're "the" Tom Morey?! Awesome! If you were here in person I'd ask for an autograph!

(This still doesn't make you exempt from having to prove your scientific claims, though!)

I should have known I was talking with an engineer :-). Take care that you don't come down with "Engineers' Disease", though - the tendency for people with a high level of technical knowledge to decide that their knowledge must be applicable to specialised fields that they don't actually know a lot about. The world teems with distinguished engineers who're spending their later years in futile pursuit of perpetual motion, antigravity, cure-alls and so on.

Now, just because someone is an engineer, and now thinks they're onto something big that isn't quite in their area of expertise, doesn't mean they're wasting their time. But this does seem to be a common failure mode for human minds, and I shudder to think how much hard work has been ploughed into these sorts of hopeless pursuits.

Tom replied:

Dan, Thank you for all the kind attention. You've developed a very thorough and convincing mind.

Interestingly, you hit quite a few nails on the head. Example: Yes... at age 75 now, having dabbled in way many things, more recently I've made up my alleged mind to spend the rest of my days of developing practical transatmospheric "flight" for the common man. Although I'm making progress and excitedly so, I certainly could be pissing into a windmill or whatever the phrase is. Then again, what FUN!

Health and healing...? About all I've really figured out so far is that not smoking, not drinking, plus getting into the ocean more often than not, exposing myself to ONLY moderate exercise and yet semi-regular doses of cold water shower finishes... has kept me fairly healthy.

Even so, right now I feel like the second half of the avocado that was perfect a couple of days ago when you ate the first perfectly flavored and textured half; then put this second half in the fridge. Now, spoon in hand, ready to dive in... fridge door still open and, "Hey! Where did those stringy things come from"?

Your arguments about all the folks who are regularly working with magnets, stirring fluids in labs etc, were very thought provoking. Thank you.

The whole topic reminds me of a curious event a few years back when our apartment was inundated by ants. In fact the suckers were EVERYWHERE for blocks around; no stain or crumb was left un-munched by the buggers. Funny thing was a good many took up residence in, or at least were staying alive in, the microwave oven! I'd swing the door open, stick in a cup of hot water for tea, and notice dozens of ants meandering around in there. Too busy at the time to do away with any of them, I'd simply shut the door, set the timer for two minutes and bzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Then open the door, take out the boiling hot tea... and damn if they'd changed at all. Still milling around, none of their little feet up in the air.

Go figure?

Anyhow, thanks for your patient ponging of my pings. Aloha, And good bye. Am going off line for the next couple of weeks, So Cal is too cold for the bones. Heading for Cabo to drink in lots of light... roll in the sand and slosh around in the sea.

Tom

The ants survive because they're too small to be affected by the microwaves, which are "micro" by radio-wave standards, but still have a quite large wavelength. That's why you can see into the oven through that perforated metal on the door, without any microwaves getting out. Note that the perforations are similar in size to an ant!

You can actually drill quite a large hole through the metal around a microwave oven, to for instance install a "lipstick" camera, without any radiation escaping.

If you just put the camera inside the oven and turn it on, the camera's electronics will die almost instantly and obvious macroscopic sizzling and sparking will be happening within seconds.

If the camera's on the other side of a hole big enough to stick your finger through, though, it'll be fine.

(Most cockroaches are juuuust big enough for a microwave to fry them, if you give it a little while. The bigger the roach, the more trouble it'll be in.)

See also the magnificent series of Unwise Microwave Oven Experiments by Bill Beaty, who's one of my heroes.

I've microwaved many CDs, but haven't yet done the fantastic beer-bottle stunt!

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

I take that back.

A reader writes:

I've just read an article in Popular Science about Sun Catalytix' "artificial photosynthesis" being used to power houses.

Which got me questioning, is it even viable? Using water as an energy source, as you've said previously, involves electrolysis, and the power it can generate won't exceed what was used in the electrolysis process.

He is using sunlight as the energy source, so I guess it's not one of those water-powered-car scams. But wouldn't it be easier if we use batteries to store the electricity from the solar panel?

And where does the photosynthesis comes in?

Please enlighten me here.

Andhika

The photosynthesis is supposed to replace the electrolysis. See, electrolysis is really inefficient, and batteries aren't awesomely efficient either, and you need a pretty darn big battery bank, which wears out, to run a whole house. But photosynthesis can manage efficiency as high as 8%, so... uh...

Look, buddy - "photoelectrochemical cell" is 24 letters - 25, including the space. We're already really pushing the brainpower of the voting public with the word "photosynthesis", all right?

I started doing a series of actual calculations about this, then stopped, because there's not enough information in the article, the marginally-more-informative Scientific American article, or...

...the less-than-entirely-satisfying accompanying video, for any really solid numbers to be made.

(You can't say that that video doesn't alert the viewer to the fact that it's not aimed at people who know a single damn thing about anything. "In the next forty years, you're going to need more energy than is available from every source you can imagine", says actual MIT professor Dan Nocera. Never mind that decreasing human energy consumption, while continuing to improve quality of life, is a real and serious goal; I can also "imagine" fusion power, dude. So clearly I'm not part of this clip's intended audience. Paging Mr Bush; Mr Bush to the coal-fired courtesy phone, please...)

In neither the Popular Science nor the Scientific American piece does the writer seem to have paid any attention to that core "30 square metres of solar cells in Boston making 30 kilowatt-hours in four hours" claim. It seems fishy to me. As does the idea that this magical catalyst is actually a useful breakthrough.

I'd be willing to believe that this was a real, if slightly oversold, option, if it weren't explicitly about a system that you're supposed to install on your roof to run your house. This didn't, early in the Scientific American article, seem to be the case - "We emulated photosynthesis for large-scale storage of solar energy", says Dan Nocera.

And yeah, you might perhaps actually be able to get the stated output from the stated area of cutting-edge panels at Boston's latitude if they're all on expensive sun trackers and/or overpumped by extra reflectors and water-cooled. Which they can be, relatively economically, if they're part of a municipal solar farm and not stuck on someone's roof.

No matter how good the magic catalyst is, though, nothing's going to give you all of those 30 kW/h back again, and Mr Nocera goes on to say "...We need to do it the old American way of making one small one and then manufacturing that system to give it to the masses."

Which brings us back to the cheerful notion of an easy $35,000 worth of cutting-edge solar panels and sun-tracking hardware on everybody's roof, much of which will need repairs after every storm. Unless you ditch the trackers, reflectors, cooling system, et cetera, in which case the stated energy output becomes impossible with even maximum-efficiency commercial solar cells of the stated area. You're likely to need something like twice that area for well-aimed never-shaded cutting-edge commercial cells, an easy three or four times the area for cheaper panels installed on a real-world roof...

A couple of commenters on the articles, and on this Engadget writeup, managed to briefly poke their heads above the SOCIALIST TEA PARTY MASONIC JOHN BIRCH GRR comments to point out some of these issues.

Fortunately, even if Mister Nocera is being outrageously misquoted (occasionally by himself!), his company is only about the hundred-thousandth-worst outfit to have had US taxpayers' money sprinkled upon it lately. And who knows, maybe there's something to this, even if it depends upon solar panels that haven't yet been invented, or something.

I wouldn't rush out to place a deposit, though.

Regular readers will know that the world currently teems with "power saving" devices, which are alleged to use Power-Factor Correction to save you money on your electricity bill.

These things are absolutely excellent, except for four minor flaws.

One, little plug-in PFC gadgets don't actually correct power factor at all, two, little plug-in PFC gadgets don't actually correct power factor at all, three, domestic electricity customers aren't billed by power factor anyway, and four, domestic electricity customers aren't billed by power factor anyway.

I realise that, technically speaking, that's only two flaws, but I thought they were such big ones they were worth mentioning twice.

At the other end of the commercial spectrum from the BS plug-in power savers, there are big industrial units designed to correct the atrocious power factor of certain particularly serious offenders, like really big electric motors, or really large numbers of smaller motors. Usually these sorts of correction setups are just capacitor and/or inductor banks carefully matched to the load; sometimes they're "smart" devices that adjust themselves to correct varying power factor, which is what you'll get if, for instance, you've got a factory full of big motors that keep changing speed and load.

This sort of PFC, and similarly large-scale PFC that's implemented by the actual power companies (typically in the form of big capacitor banks at substations and other distribution transformers), is entirely genuine, quite useful, and very expensive. But if you're billed by power factor, or if you're a power company that wants to minimise the mass of metal in your whole distribution network, PFC is essential.

In between the little rip-off plastic home-user things and the vast custom capacitor banks in power stations are, as you'd expect, PFC devices for medium-load applications. Yesterday I corresponded briefly with someone who's trying to sell such devices,

Regular readers won't find anything very new and exciting in this correspondence, and I wouldn't blame any reader for only lightly scanning at least the first giant block of quoted text. I'm posting this mainly so that Google searchers will be able to find a little more info about this field in general, and this product in particular.

(Also, I've suffered for my art, so now it's your turn.)

From: Tim Otto <tim@powerceosales.com>
To: dan@dansdata.com
Subject: Active and dynamic PFC.
Date: Wed, 3 Mar 2010 20:15:51 -0600

Dan, I was reading your article and wanted to share with you our new technology. I agree with you on a residential level that the current PFC units don't save you money ,but when you take PFC and only put it in the circuit and remove it there is a savings. I am reaching out to all the blogger on the net and am asking them just to consider that what I'm saying is real. We have seen savings and when the product which just went to mass production get here I am reaching out to all bloggers on all continents to get a unit in their hands. I don't want to sell it to you. It will sell its self when you see it work. On the business side the meters do read different here in the states and the savings is much greater. Please take time to read the PDF study and when we hit your continent we can get one installed for your testing.
Why is power factor correction an important part of reducing co2 emissions and is there any new technology available to ad to the global effort? Yes, let me explain where this large void is occurring. Large industrial power users (demand side) have been using power factor correction (pfc) for years on large motor driven equipment because its too costly paying the power providers for this wasted reactive energy (poor p.f.). There is a demand (penalty) charge on their monthly bill including all commercial users. Several companies build PFC units by incorporating capacitors in various amounts to match the loads of running motor(s) to offset this penalty. These units are large and tailored to do a cost saving job for this industry. The user and power provider both see a power usage benefit.

Home and commercial users share the burden of poor power factor and extra power must be provided to offset this waste. Air conditioning, furnace blowers, refrigerators, freezers, washers, dryers, fans, garbage disposals, dishwashers, lighting with ballast or transformers, pool pumps etc all ad to the burden. Whitby Hydro Energy Services of Canada did a series of test in 2005 by taking a group of homes and using pfc devices with a set amount of capacitance. Their conclusion: ‘The result of the pilot indicated that the addition of capacitance indicate that installation of the units on mass will reduce the generation requirements through the province and we recommend that the findings of this pilot be shared with the government officials as a viable means to help address the supply and transmission issues within the province”. The full 15 page PDF report is attached.

[The above quote isn't quite what the report actually says, but it's basically correct. Yes, the report does actually use the term "on mass". Hey, give 'em a break - they're in Ontario. Nobody speaks French there.]

No doubt Whitby Hydro could save on power generation so why not mandate to use pfc units on homes and business and save a new power plant from being constructed? To make this possible a pfc unit would have to turn on and off when motors and ballast/transformer type lighting were operational and make constant capacitance adjustments to correct the different loads and voltage fluctuation drops caused by peek demands. A good pf correction is .95-.96 and going higher can cause frequency modulation problems. Present pfc units are fixed or variable and cannot perform the computerized functions that would be required. This is where Power-CEOtm (Computerized Energy Optimizer) fills this gap. Our patented (USA and most countries) power factor correction units is the first to incorporate the proper technology for global usage. Here is what the patent-holder has to say: “We are confident that our patented “Power-Factor-Correction” technology is light years ahead of the other PFC systems. By and large, most PFC systems are either “Static” (designed for a specific amount) or a hybrid of “Limited Automatic,” designed around several variables and are thus referred to as automatic. However, our power-factor-correction technology is fully and completely Dynamic/Automatic in that it will turn on precisely the amount of correction required in order to attain a PF of .95 and not only that, in the event an additional load turns on or is introduced into the system requiring additional compensation, our Smart System will automatically and instantly adjust to the new required setting. When any load which was requiring the compensation either turns off/on or changes its setting (for example, motors with varying loads), our PFC system will readjust and continue to readjust as needed in order to provide as near to a PF setting of .95 continuously as is feasible.
The current US President, as well as our previous President both stated when talking about the Kyoto Protocol and Copenhagen Meeting on the Environment, that they believe technology will be developed which will help us reach ascertainable goals without significantly hampering commerce. As you will see, Power-CEO™ is one of those technologies.”

Midwest Research Institute, a Government funded institute, has been involved since
2001 helping with technology issues until Power-CEO was completely viable and ready to market, and UL approval has been met. Plamen Doynov the senior engineer from MRI has this to say: I am intrinsically familiar with the technology. I was involved in the development of the original analog implementation during a contract with McDaniel brothers. Consecutively, we performed performance testing of the digital implementation of the technology. A copy of the performance report can be provided. In the report one can see that the testing of the technology confirms that it performs very well as a dynamic power factor correction unit. I am not writing this email as a representative of MRI. As an independent, not-for-profit, contract research institute, MRI has a strict policy not to endorse products, technologies, or cervices. Given an opportunity, MRI has the capacity to test and evaluate very broad technologies and systems. Should you need assistance from MRI in testing, evaluation, or further enhancements of the Power-CEO, I can facilitate the arrangements. Plamen Doynov

Power-CEO is ready for production and can comply to any world specification. Power-CEO is ready to meet the demands of lowering power consumption.

[Attached was a PDF report from Whitby Hydro Energy Services, "Power Factor Correction at the Residential Level - Pilot Project", which is available from here, and quickly viewable in-browser here.]

My reply:

I agree with you on a residential level that the current PFC units don't save you money ,but when you take PFC and only put it in the circuit and remove it there is a savings.

I'm not sure what you mean by that. By definition, there's only a saving for people who are billed by power factor, or for people who are in the business of generating and transmitting electricity.

On the business side the meters do read different here in the states and the savings is much greater.

I'm also not sure what you mean by this :-).

There is a demand (penalty) charge on their monthly bill including all commercial users.

Really? How's a "commercial user" defined, then?

The local corner store here is unquestionably a commercial electricity user. I don't think they're billed by power factor.

Home and commercial users share the burden of poor power factor

Yes, in the indirect sense that power in general is made more expensive when electricity utilities have to cope with higher kVA than kW. But no home user will achieve any direct savings by improving their own power factor.

Whitby Hydro Energy Services of Canada did a series of test in 2005

...in which, according to the PDF you attached, they had to install special meters at the homes in order to see any difference, because of course the standard electricity meters do not measure power factor.

Even if all of the houses connected to the tested transformers were directly billed by power factor, though - so if your power factor is 0.9, you pay 1.11 times as much as someone with a PF of 1.0 - the reported improvements in the two transformers with the PFC added would only reduce consumers' power bills by less than 5% and less than 3%, respectively [I averaged out the five tested months in the PDF report].

There'd have to be a penalty rate far in excess of the actual extra volt-amps used to make it attractive to install a PFC system that cost more than a very small amount.

What does your product actually cost? How large would a customer's current power bill need to be to pay your product off in, let's say, five years, assuming it somehow allows that customer to reduce their power bills by even 5%?

No doubt Whitby Hydro could save on power generation so why not mandate to use pfc units on homes and business

Uh, because people don't want to buy expensive things that won't save them, personally, any money :-)?

I am unconvinced that widely-distributed household PFC installations, as opposed to the PFC systems already being installed in electrical substations, are a cost-effective proposition, even if you make them mandatory and have the taxpayer pay for them.

As a "retail" product for voluntary installation by homeowners, they appear to be a total non-starter.

A good pf correction is .95-.96 and going higher can cause frequency modulation problems.

Wait - so now you're saying that the 99.22% and 97.5% five-month average figures from the Whitby Hydro transformer study (versus 94.7% for an unmodified transformer) are undesirable?

The Power Medix device mentioned from page 11 of the PDF you sent apparently went considerably above 96%, as well. I find the figures there rather questionable, though; uncorrected power factor is way down in the .75 to .80 range at night. If that's the result of a water heater or geothermal heat pump or something, clearly that one something is what the power company should be giving that household a free power-factor corrector for, not the whole house.

If your special patented product carefully keeps the PF close to 0.95 at all times, I don't see that there's much of an improvement to be gained. Even if domestic consumers people start being billed by power factor. Which I doubt will happen any time soon, since it's hard enough to even explain what power factor IS to people, much less get them to re-elect someone who took their money because of it :-).

The current US President, as well as our previous President both stated when talking about the Kyoto Protocol and Copenhagen Meeting on the Environment, that they believe technology will be developed which will help us reach ascertainable goals without significantly hampering commerce.

I wouldn't say that in the press release, if I were you. We both know that few-per-cent improvements in power factor are not at all the sort of thing that heads of state are talking about when they make speeches like that.

Your repeated use of the word "patented" as if patents are only awarded for worthwhile inventions seems to me to be another unfortunate tactic.

Power-CEO is ready to meet the demands of lowering power consumption.

Another claim I think you should stop making.

A poor power factor, BY DEFINITION, does not mean that ANY more power is actually being consumed, except for the amount lost to resistance from higher current flows. That's significant for a power company, but vanishingly small for a home user. And even for most industrial users; they only care about PFC if they're billed by power factor.

In reply to this, all Tim sent me was:

Hears a link ,see what the power company has to say.
Also has anybody done a test where every item was corrected in a structure ?

http://www.psnh.com/Energy/ReduceBill_Business/PowerFactor.asp

My reply:

Hears a link ,see what the power company has to say.

That page says:

How correcting power factor can save money
The PSNH demand charge is based upon kva demand for LG customers and upon 80 percent of the kva demand for GV (Commercial and Industrial) customers who have a power factor of less than 80 percent. Power factor correction may offer a savings opportunity for some customers.

"LG" is one of PSNH's "Large Business" tariffs, for "demands in excess of 1,000 KW" (PDF; domestic power consumption is more like 1 to 2 kilowatts, depending on what sort of "average home" you're looking at).

Small businesses are only even possibly affected by these issues if they actually have a low power factor, which outfits that aren't running lots of low-power-factor gear - typically, large motors without PFC capacitors already on them - will not have.

Stores with a huge bank of fluorescent lights may have a lousy enough power factor to be interested by this, but I think modern electronic ballasts have largely solved that problem. The same goes for computers; PCs used to have a pretty consistent 0.7 to 0.8 power factor, which could add up for a whole office full of them, but nowadays most PC PSUs have PFC built in, for exactly this reason.

Also has anybody done a test where every item was corrected in a structure ?

Only if the power factor is actually low enough to make the cost of correction attractive, which in normal domestic situations it is not.

Homes that draw a lot of power often draw it for things like electrical heating, which is almost entirely a simple resistive load with a power factor of 1. And in any case, to say it one more time, no homeowner is going to be interested in PFC if they're not billed by power factor. I am not aware of any nation in which private homes are billed by power factor. You'd think that there'd be some huge housing developments that were billed that way, but if there are, I haven't discovered any.

Since you did not choose to answer my questions, I can only presume that you have no answers for them. Sorry, but I cannot take further time to correspond with you if you're not actually offering anything new.

---

I don't know what the deal is with people like Tim. He doesn't seem to be deliberately running a scam, but he also keeps saying that products like his are for some reason going to become popular for home and small commercial electricity users. Those users don't actually have any reason to install a power-factor corrector unless they feel philanthropic toward the power company.

And if you do want to do the power company, or the planet, a favour by taking some load off the electricity grid, a much better idea for domestic power consumers is to look into a grid-connected solar system, which can genuinely reduce your power bill.

In many countries, new home solar-power installations are heavily subsidised by the government, for either purchase price, feed-in tariffs, or both. You may also be able to get a subsidy if you install a solar water heater, which is a simpler and less expensive investment than a photovoltaic solar electricity system.

Even if you can get a power-factor corrector for free, though, there's absolutely no point installing it unless you are for some reason using quite a lot of power, with a lousy power factor. Even houses that use a lot of electricity - electric heating in cold climates, big air-conditioners in hot countries, a giant bank of metal-halide lamps in the garage for some reason - don't necessarily have a lousy enough power factor for any add-on PFC to be necessary.

A reader writes:

I am super sceptical about Steorn’s claims of over-unity, but can you please decipher their latest video? I just don’t understand the testing methods and the physics involved – I just want an easier to understand explanation. The video is here http://www.steorn.com/ and I’ve read the explanation and comments here http://www.nolanchart.com/article7327.html and some really interesting (but over my head) replication experiments here http://jnaudin.free.fr/steorn/indexen.htm.

I can’t see anyone showing exactly how it doesn’t work, or anyone easily explaining how it does. Can you please devote a blog entry or page to it?

(Just re-read my email – I sound like I’m promoting them, but I am just interested and looking for explanations)

Andrew

Well, I’ll devote this blog post to it, but it won’t be quite what you asked for!

Until Steorn start handing their devices over to testers that aren’t on their payroll, there is nothing to explain. For the same reason, most people don’t spend a lot of time analysing the amazing ability of Transcendental Meditators to levitate, turn invisible and walk through walls, because they have never actually demonstrated that they can do these things, in anything remotely like a test that eliminates blatant, basic, wouldn’t-fool-a-five-year-old cheating.

I mean, what did Steorn even actually show in that video? Something going round and round, and a man saying that it was an over-unity device? That Hutchison Effect guy seems to have done a lot more presentation work.

Steorn are either about the ten-millionth free-energy scam artists, or about the ten-millionth “free energy pioneers” to fail to correctly measure what’s going on, because they don’t measure RMS power, mistake voltage for power, put their lopsided antigravity machine on a bathroom scale that can’t properly weigh something that’s vibrating, et cetera.

(Whenever a perpetual-motion huckster mentions “back EMF“, you’ve got a pretty ironclad guarantee right there that he needs to buy some more expensive multimeters.)

To believe otherwise is to watch Transcendental Meditators bouncing around on their bottoms, and immediately rush to sell all of your Boeing stock.

Don’t worry, though. I’m sure all of your questions will be answered with great enthusiasm in an upcoming Discovery Channel special called “The Exciting New Science Of Perpetual Motion”!

Hey, would you like to see a really dumb piece of science TV?

Sure you would!

Yes, the narrator appears to have no idea what “ironically” means, but never mind that. I find it pretty impressive that the voiceover proudly announces that it will cost nothing to fill up an air car, even as the guy they’re interviewing explains that the engine runs on air that has been compressed somehow, and explicitly states that the air is just an energy carrier, not an energy source. (See also “hydrogen wells, nonexistence thereof”.)

At the end of the clip, the voiceover grudgingly admits that it will take “some energy” to compress the air… and then immediately boldly postulates an absolutely classic, in-as-many-words perpetual-motion machine, in which the car carries around its own compressed-air-powered air-compressor.

Seriously. That’s what he says. In a science show.

That’s right - this clip is not from some podunk local news station, or promotional material from some scam artist. It’s from an episode of the Discovery Channel’s “NextWorld” series.

Which spurs me to ask, “How the fuck did this ever make it to air?”

(As usual, The Onion says it best.)

Setting aside the gibbering idiots who apparently now pass for science journalists in the USA, the vehicle they’re talking about is the good old MDI Air Car, which for some years now has been right about to make it to market.

MDI first claimed to be right about to start producing cars in 2000. They’ve made similar claims several more times over the intervening years. I puzzled over the Air Car in 2006. But no cars have yet rolled off a production line.

Apparently the Tata Motors MDI-powered car will be going into production at the end of this year. I am assured of this.

MDI’s most recent technological advancement is to change the name of the Air Car. It’s now called Xe Altria FlowAir.

The FlowAir’s claimed performance remains highly questionable. It seems that the massive range numbers that MDI have trumpeted these last ten years were arrived at by taking an actual tested range of less than ten kilometres, and applying a bunch of fudge-factor multipliers to take into account the great improvements that MDI promise to make when they actually make a working car.

Oh, and one of the MDI car’s big features is that it’s supposed to have some sort of heater doodad that boosts the air pressure going into the engine to give long highway range. So in order to get the “200 miles on one tank” the Discovery voiceover guy was so impressed about, you have to burn a fuel to run the heater. Which means that not even the minor claim that the car makes no emissions when driving around is actually true.

But don’t worry - I’m sure there’s some chemically trivial way to get the heater to run a little machine that makes more heater fuel.

A reader writes:

After an idle evening reading the comments section (I know) on the blog of the BBC’s US correspondent, Mark Mardell, I came across this … interesting perspective.

258. At 04:12am on 09 Feb 2010, KingLeeRoySandersJr wrote:
I can answer why electrical power in most of the USA is above ground. The reason is simply in the USA power lines are carrying much more voltage and current than in Great Britain for the most part and travel greater distances. Electricity doesn’t simply flow through the wire but on the outside of a wire. The circumference of the wire carries the power if it were underground much of it would be lost in the ground.

Now here is something you don’t know. Power companies use different transformers under different conditions. Ever plug in a device and the wire gets warm but other times it doesn’t? That happens because when there is a great power demand the power companies try to fool the public that there is adequate power by simply supplying the voltage and the device works.

But this is not what they are telling you. The voltage is there but not the current the device demands in it’s productive use of wattage to function. It can’t obtain it on the gauge of wire it is designed for and the wire gets hot, homes burn down, lives and possession are lost! Simply because inadequate power is produced. Voltage ratings exist but only because current is decreased. This creates the illusion of adequate electrical power.

[…]

I can’t identify a single thing in that comment that appears to be true. Am I wrong?

Jonathan

Yes, “KingLeeRoySandersJr” does appear to have a very independent mind. Perhaps he read something about power factor somewhere, and then took further guidance from disembodied voices.

But no, he’s not wrong in everything he says. I guess, for instance, that if you were to run un-insulated power lines underground, you probably would lose a lot of power. For analogous reasons, jet fighters without windscreens do not work very well and cars without wheels have disappointing top speeds. Humanity waits patiently for the genius who can unravel these mysteries.

(Fortunately, the extra weight of insulation ceases to be a problem when you no longer have to hang your wires from poles. A lot of people find it surprising that overhead power lines are almost always un-insulated; this often seems to be because they don’t know the difference between insulation and shielding. My learned colleagues at Harmonic Energy Products had this problem many years ago, and the confusion also cropped up in connection with this gloriously stupid audiophile power cable.)

The first thing KingLeeRoySandersJr says, about current flowing through “the circumference of the wire”, is also not complete nonsense. He’s talking, assuming he’s got some connection with consensus reality, about the “skin effect“, in which the higher the frequency of the AC you’re trying to push through a wire, the shallower will be the depth into the wire in which significant current flow occurs. This has to do with eddy currents, which cancel each other out in the middle of the wire but increase current flow on the surface.

Some huge power-transmission lines are DC, which has an infinite skin depth, and some transmission lines for exotic applications - like particle accelerators - run at high frequencies. But changing the frequency of AC is as difficult as changing its voltage is easy, so the vast majority of high-voltage long-distance lines run at the same 50 or 60Hz as the rest of the grid. “Skin depth” - the depth at which current density is one-on-e, or about 37%, of the current density at the surface - at 50Hz is around 9.3mm for pure copper and almost 12mm for pure aluminium, unless the calculations I just did based on Wikipedia’s tables of permeability and resistivity are based on subtly vandalised numbers. At 60Hz the depth drops a little, to around 8.5 and 10.9mm, respectively. If you’re for some reason shifting 1kHz AC, your skin depth falls to 2.1 and 2.7mm, respectively.

Audiophile nitwits sometimes bang on about skin effect, and pay big bucks for cables with zillions of tiny separately-insulated conductors, maybe woven like Litz wire and maybe just floating around as a cloud, in order to defeat it. The theory is that skin effect increases cable resistance for high frequencies, so you lose treble - or “musicality”, or “coherence“, or whatever it is they’ve made up now - if your cables are too fat.

But even if your golden ears have the mystic ability to perceive 40kHz sound, an octave higher than the usual rule-of-thumb 20kHz upper bound for human hearing and higher still than the maybe-14kHz that’s the highest most young-ish adults can perceive, skin depth in copper wire will still be around a third of a millimetre at that frequency. This gives plenty of copper to conduct your line-level or speaker-level signals, at all audio frequencies, in just about any cheap cable you care to name, and a resistance difference for 40kHz versus 10Hz of three-fifths of bugger all (a technical term), even if you hook everything up using the now-nearly-proverbial coat-hangers.

(God help me, I just searched for “skin effect” and “digital interconnect” and yes, right there on the first results page are people selling a carbon-fibre RCA cable for digital data that’s supposed to be better because, among numerous other brain-hurting explanations, it ain’t got no skin effect. It can be yours for a mere $US225!)

Clearly, at normal mains frequencies you need a pretty darn thick conductor before skin effect makes much difference. Big power-transmission cables are pretty darn thick conductors, though, so yes, it affects them. Most aerial power cabling is aluminium (which has higher resistance per unit area than copper, but lower resistance by weight, which is very important for cables strung from towers), but I think it’s quite common for those cables to have thin steel wires in the middle to improve their strength. Steel is a pretty terrible power-transmission material, having a skin depth of less than a millimetre at mains frequencies (and yet mild-steel coat-hanger wire keeps passing those blinded audio tests!), but it doesn’t matter when skin effect confines most of the current to the outer, aluminium portion of heavy power-transmission cable.