How To Spot A Psychopath

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.

Gerard Ryle recaps the Firepower story in light of Tim Johnston’s sudden loquaciousness in court.

Oh, and it turns out that Tim’s Vladimir Putin Number is, at most, two.

(If Mr Putin himself turns out to have invested even one thin rouble in Firepower, I don’t think it’s likely that any other creditors, no matter how destitute, will object to Vlad getting paid back before them.)

Nothing much was going on in the riveting Firepower imbroglio, until yesterday.

Before then, the wife of Firepower former-business-partner Warren Anderson said he attacked her, during an argument about a missing computer (there do indeed seem to be a lot of missing computers in this story…). She hauled Warren into court to face those charges, and then he said he didn’t do it. Whoopee.

Now, though, Tim Johnston has said that Firepower - uh, well, the Firepower company that was selling possibly-illegal shares to Australian investors, anyway - never actually owned the intellectual rights to their products. See, it was one of the several other Firepower companies that owned the IP rights. That other company was run by a guy called Trevor Nairn, and Tim says he wouldn’t give up the rights.

So, according to Tim, the abovementioned Warren Anderson rounded up some blokes to remonstrate with Mr Nairn, by taking him on one of those stimulating little day-trips that involve one or more large gentlemen with weapons, one unwilling participant, a shovel, and an isolated area.

You may have seen this procedure in a movie.

(If you haven’t, allow me to recommend “The Magician“!)

Mr Nairn says that nothing of the sort ever happened.

This is all almost as mystifying to me as Mr Nairn says it is to him, since the Firepower fuel additives, just like the umpteen other such additives hucksters have sold over the years - and including of course the other additives that Tim Johnston himself previously sold in New Zealand - were and are completely worthless.

(Well, either that, or the people selling these things invariably try really really hard to make all of their “supporting evidence” look like a crock of crap. A product that did what their countless products are always said to do would be worth billions of dollars a year, but they never bother to take a lazy week to properly prove their claims and thus uncork the money-fountain.)

Who gives a damn if you’ve got the world rights to manufacture your placebo? Just make a new one, to a different formula, and go on with your upstanding legitimate business. No grave-digging, real or fictional, required!

Perhaps Johnston is just still trying to keep up the front that he believes his products actually work, and it’s all a giant conspiracy by the oil companies and the Freemasons and Jehovah to make him look bad, or something.

It would still, of course, be simplicity itself to hand a couple of packs of Firepower pills - I think whoever’s currently sitting on the cardboard box containing Firepower’s surviving assets might be persuaded to give ‘em up - to one of the dozens, if not hundreds, of organisations in Australia who could see if the claims were true.

I’ll hold my breath for that, if you will!

A reader writes:

You’re probably getting about a million questions on this gizmo from CES, but do you think the RCA Airnegy WiFi charger is anywhere near remotely practical?

They claim it will “harvest” energy from 2.4GHz devices, like wireless phones and WiFi devices. They say it can charge a cell phone from 30% to full in 90 minutes on the CES floor, which is confusing because of all the wireless devices on the CES floor and the fact that many cell phones report full early to make their batteries look better. Since a Wi-Fi device operates at 100mW and that shrinks with the inverse-square law, wouldn’t any Wi-Fi power be trivial?

Would this only be practical if you had a lot of overlapping Wi-Fi hotspots and/or a huge charger, or am I missing something? They’re even claiming they can integrate this into batteries in the future.

If this is a scam or borderline useless, why is RCA promoting it? I could understand this kind of trash from a fly-by-night operation like all the fuel-pill pages, but I would think RCA would want to keep some of its reputation.

Tim

Yes, I think this has to be some sort of hoax. I ain’t no RF physicist, but I don’t think the numbers add up at all.

(I am, unsurprisingly, not alone.)

The output of the very small charger for my very low-powered mobile phone (a Motorola F3) is specified as 6.4V @ 200mA, which is 1.28 watts. The output of a standard Wi-Fi access point is, as you say, limited by the spec to 100 milliwatts. And, again as you say, the laws o’ physics dictate that even if this thing contains a beautifully-engineered rectenna that hoovers up 90% of the 2.4GHz-ish RF energy that impinges upon it, it’ll still collect far, far too little power to do anything very useful. For the same reason, it is difficult for a device the size of a canoe to harvest much energy from the wake of a passing ocean liner.

It’s actually not quite as bad as you might think from a pure inverse-square law calculation, because the “impossible antennas” used in normal access points have a sort of inverse-hourglass-shaped radiation pattern, concentrating output around the antenna at the expense of output above and below it. If you’re lined up with the radiation pattern of one of the larger “omnidirectional” Wi-Fi antennas, you could easily be getting three or four times as much power as you’d get if it were a real omnidirectional antenna.

But unless the Airnegy is squished right up next to the antenna so it covers, and near-totally absorbs, some relatively large fraction of the entire radiation pattern (and, of course, thereby makes devices in its “shadow” unable to see the AP any more…), then the energy it’ll receive even from several out-of-specification half-watt Wi-Fi adapters will be extremely low. Never mind charging a phone - you wouldn’t even be able to light an LED.

(A crystal radio can run on the RF energy from its own antenna, but that’s in the microwatt range, at best.)

I suppose a device with some sort of broadband fractal antenna in it, that can suck up everything from 50Hz mains hum to high-gigahertz radar beams, might be more practical. But the Airnegy is said to be 2.4GHz-only.

Oh, and there doesn’t seem to be any mention of this product on the RCA site. And although the Airnegy CES stand looks professional, the products themselves look like quick mock-ups to me. Look at this battery, for instance. It looks as if they put a construction-paper wrapper around a standard battery.

(I presume someone’s paid to have the stand there, too, unless CES was having trouble filling the floor and let in hoaxers for free, like the funny fake ads that fill holes in newspaper classifieds.)

Note also that RCA is now, I think, one of those “zombie brands” that has been reduced to nothing but a logo that’s slapped on random Chinese flea-market gadgets. So even if it actually is a “real RCA product”, that doesn’t mean much any more.

This also isn’t a new idea. Here’s a piece about a “prototype Nokia phone” that’s supposed to somehow harvest five milliwatts from incident RF.

Can any readers who’ve got some of that fancy book-learnin’ about that thar electrickery help me out, here?

(Somebody on that Boing Boing post busted out the Friis transmission equation.)

Has anything at all like this thing ever actually been made to work?

(And no, inductive chargers don’t count!)

I get one or two e-mails a week from someone who's discovered the donation page on dansdata.com, and immediately decided that all I do is beg for money.

Sometimes they ask me what my secret is. Sometimes they ask me for a cut of the (presumably massive) take. Sometimes they try to get me to join some questionable scheme, or just send me a PayPal money request.

And sometimes... well, sometimes I get something like this.

From: "k.macleod"
To: dan@dansdata.com
Subject: google old ladies face (Eternity Stone) value estimated 96.000.000 yen CHINA currencey
Date: Fri, 18 Dec 2009 22:04:44 -0400

Dan the Man' no douth u probably make money on your site, but i am talking huge money here' C that old ladies face well i discover rock's and stone's like that, unfortunatly not near as great' but what I do have' I can honestly say 2 u r as good or better then any1 else's collection in the World and the world is a pretty big place Dan as u know' i am broke' not a cent coming in 2 my household other then my wife's income. I need a computer savvy warrior Dan' I swear 2 U' in my Heart i truly believe my treasure's r thee best in the world, there's a stone on e-bay of a alien face' asking price 795.000, now i can relate that stone 2 some of mine only i think mine r better and Dan i have countless speciman's, here Dan i will throw u a carrot 2 intice u more ? i have bernie madoff - hitler- and the big big guy (Kong) all made by the hand's of mother earth. thanks -the MimiKKing

So... "K" is in the rocks-that-totally-look-like-faces-or-something business, I guess.

K's unusual form of expression suggests to me that his world-class collection of rocks that look like things may not actually be quite as world-class as he believes.

He's right about there being rocks that look like faces and have huge price tags, though. I mean, check this one out. (That's an eBay listing, which will disappear some time after the auctions finishes; here's a local copy of the listing. And while I'm at it, it's here on ebay.com, and here on ebay.com.au.)

What you might foolishly mistake for a stone the size of a softball with a hole through it is actually a "distinctive human face/skull", and an "impressive show piece with its dazzling detail and endless enchantment". With a price tag of £795,000!

For... this.

"K", and the I-sincerely-hope-joking seller of the above rock, both profess to be very excited about this "eternity stone" thing, which seems to trace back to this story on a Chinese Web site. That story, which totals 64 words including the headline, says that a rock that vaguely resembles an old lady's face was in 2004 said, by "experts", to be worth 96 million yuan. (Or, according to the eBay listing, "£12 Million Dollars!!")

It doesn't tell us who's ever paid 96 megayuan (or twelve million pound-dollars) for this paperweight, though. This remarkable story also appears, for the last five years, to have escaped the notice of the rest of the world's news services. So has the "China Rare Stone Expo" at which the remarkable rock was supposed to have been exhibited; that seems to only be mentioned in reprints of the story about the near-priceless grandma-rock.

I fearlessly predict that if anybody clicks the Buy It Now button on the £795,000 eBay "skull" listing, that person will run giggling out of the auction-room as soon as they're asked to pay up.

Perhaps I should advise my correspondent to try selling "haunted" or other "magical" things on eBay, rather than sets of all-natural Hitler/Madoff book-ends.

Every now and then I visit RationalWiki, to see what the crazy kids of Conservapedia are up to.

(I strongly recommend doing it this way, rather than injuring your brain on Conservapedia's own Recent Changes page. For a precis, check out RationalWiki's Best Of Conservapedia!)

Yesterday, this process led me to an excellent summation of Conservapedia's core problem, which I hadn't figured out before.

It turns out to be the same core problem that many cults, dictatorships and even owner-operated businesses have.

(click for legible version)

Conservapedia is, you see, constantly besieged by "parodists", people who're only there to pretend to be "radical conservatives", when they're actually writing satire. It's like Pretend Office, except malicious.

If Conservapedia were actually what it appears to be on the surface - just another manifestation of the USA's bizarre radical-conservative movement - then this wouldn't necessarily be a fatal problem. As a general rule, vandalism of Wikis is pointless (NSFW link), because it's so easy to fix. All you need is a decent population of sincere editors, plus maybe an automated tool or two (to easily deal with blatant stuff like page-blanking, single edits that make an established article 100 times its previous size, et cetera).

Unfortunately, though, Conservapedia isn't just "Wikipedia for neoconservative nutcases". It's actually a dictatorship, ruled by Andrew Schlafly.

(Who made it onto the Colbert Report the other day! Note that Stephen Colbert actually is a Sunday School teacher, and is... intrigued... by Schlafly's recent "Conservative Bible Project". The CBP is a "translation" of the Bible that's mainly being created by people who, like Schlafly, don't actually know Hebrew or Greek or Aramaic, but nonetheless feel up to the task of making the Good Book more aligned with radical-conservative ideology. The CBP is one of those things that's pretty much beyond parody; only if you've got Colbert's chops should you attempt to satirise it.)

Andrew Schlafly's problem is the same as that of various dictators and cult leaders: He rules his domain with an iron fist, and brooks no disagreement.

If you agree with Andy 99% of the time, and don't back down over that last one per cent, he'll ban you from editing Conservapedia.

If Andy were one of the great polymaths of our age then this would be a problem - because nobody knows everything - but could still kind of work. Unfortunately, Andy just thinks he's one of the great polymaths of this (or any!) age.

So when someone happens along who actually knows stuff that Andy doesn't about, let's say, relativity, and insists that Andy is actually wrong, Andy will briefly argue with them, and then ban them. (Andy pretty much seems to think that relativity as a "Liberal" plot. I kid you not.)

The above-screenshotted commentary...

(click for legible version)

...came in the aftermath of yet another long-term, trusted Conservapedia editor "coming out" as a parodist. It points out this fatal flaw; the only people who actually will agree 100% with Andy, going along with him on all of his weird quarter-baked notions and backing down instantly at the first sign of any disagreement, are the parodists. (Well, them and people who don't actually know anything at all, who may not be exactly the people you want contributing to your encyclopedia.)

So Andy's own egotism is destroying the greatest product of his ego. It's like a tragic play, except the audience is cheering at the end.

This is even worse than the problem expressed in the classic aphorism, "First-class men hire first-class men. Second-class men hire third-class men."

(I know that's sexist, but I think the original wording more clearly conveys the antiquity of the sentiment. And that saying always conjures up, for me, an image of some Stephen-Fry-ian chap showing a young colleague the ropes over cigars and brandy at the club. I find that image fundamentally incompatible with gender-neutral pronouns.)

Even with the occasional extension "...and third-class men fire first-class men", that aphorism doesn't cover the dreadful situation at Conservapedia, where a second-class (at best...) man is in charge of the whole shebang, and utterly determined to winnow the workforce down to nothing but people who won't do a lick of real constructive work at all.

In dictatorships and cults where the man (only occasionally the woman...) in charge will tolerate no disagreement at all, the result will be a bunch of yes-men who do, at least, have some interest in advancing the project, if only so that they can be promoted into more powerful positions.

On a Wiki, though, control-freak egotism from the boss is even more of a disaster, because it's easy for anybody in the world to casually throw a spanner in the works whenever they have a spare moment. And if your Wiki is about a contentious topic - in which category "the whole of human knowledge" probably qualifies - there'll be plenty of people who're eager to mess with you.

The reason why the above advice to Andy (as I write this, it's the eighth-highest-voted entry on Best of Conservapedia) is a screenshot and not just a link to the Conservapedia talk page is that Andy's response to this criticism was the same as it always is. He erased the criticism, and banned the user.

And on it goes.

I’m sure you’ve all been waiting with bated breath to see what’s happened since my last Firepower update.

Well, for one thing, Gerard Ryles’ unassumingly-titled book about Firepower is now searchable on Google Books.

And Tim Johnston, the elusive boss of Firepower, has apparently been blessed with a complete remission of his travel-preventing illness. (Apparently, if you get arrested, it clears right up!)

Tim has duly been frogmarched into a hearing in Perth, to answer a few questions.

According to Tim, he’s pulling down ten thousand UK pounds a month for “consultancy” work for Green Power Corporation, the London-based reincarnation of Firepower that will repay all of the investors and actually have products that work and give every child in the world an adorable puppy and so on.

(You may recall Green Power Corporation, and its unimpeachable principal Frank Timis, from last year. You may also recall The Australian’s description of Timis as “a colourful Romanian-Australian businessman”. Everybody involved with Firepower is so darn colourful it’s like some kind of Pride Parade.)

Tim Johnston also alleges that he has been assaulted, and his daughter intimidated (by “cars driving around her house”), since he started giving evidence to the hearing. According to Tim, the people menacing him now are associated with his former business partner, one Warren Anderson.

Anderson has previously denied making any threats, and I presume will also deny sending the boys round (and round, and round). According to Johnston, Anderson demanded many millions of dollars of Firepower money with menaces; according to Anderson, that money was just payment for shares in Firepower, which Tim was buying from Warren, or something. (According to the ancient fuel-pill-company template, the shares probably weren’t legal to sell in the first place, but were nonetheless hungrily snapped up by numerous people who now find themselves without a nest-egg.)

Oh, and Tim says that the fact that Warren pitched in to help Tim buy an 8.5-million-dollar house one day after Tim gave Warren four million dollars is not fishy in any way.

Hmm, what else… Oh yeah: “Firepower spent millions on travel, hotels and sponsorship“. Astonishingly, the recipients of the free air tickets included Tim’s kids.

And Tim also, in a completely straightforward and non-fishy way, handed an extra two million dollars and a hatful of soon-to-be-worthless shares, on top of a settlement payment, to the former chief executive officer of one of the numerous Firepower entities after some sort of court dispute.

After revealing this, Tim suddenly found himself struck by that most terrible of afflictions, Courtroom-Related Amnesia Syndrome, regarding exactly how the various Firepower business entities interacted. The syndrome is following its usual course; the larger the amount of money involved, the more difficult the sufferer finds it to remember where it went.

According to Tim, Firepower also appeared to have a less-than-thorough data backup policy. A server containing vital information was in someone’s house, and then may have been pawned, perhaps, but Tim’s not sure, his Courtroom-Related Amnesia Syndrome’s playing up again…

We can only pray that Tim’s illness does not develop into full-blown Ashcroft-Gonzales‘ Disease.

I used to have a really big light bulb hanging in the junk-storage/photo-studio/emergency-guest-accommodation room.

I wrote about it here, very early in the life of this blog.

Unfortunately, that 85-watt compact fluorescent lamp, which we came to affectionately call “the skylight”, only lasted a couple of years. That might have been because it wasn’t very well-made, but I suspect it just didn’t like being turned on and off so often. I wasn’t in and out of the junk room a dozen times every day, but CFLs only have so many on/off cycles in them.

After the eighty-five-watter died, I sighed and put a standard boring “100W-equivalent” bulb in the dangly hacked-together socket I’d used for the big lamp. And there that boring bulb stayed, for about another year.

But then, the other day, I noticed that this eBay seller had some new-old-stock Y-adapters, for Australian light-bulb sockets.

(In the USA, the most common light-bulb socket is the “E27″, a 27mm Edison screw. Here in Australia, though, the large majority of our light bulbs use a 22mm bayonet mount, a.k.a. “BC”.)

The eBay seller turned out to have a total of nine double-adapters, some with a switch for one of their branches, some without.

I don’t like to miss a chance to go beyond the usual and construct something that’d make a home inspector turn pale and need to sit down for a little while. (The Cable that Should Not Be was the third post on this blog!)

So I bought all of the adapters.

And now I have this!

Nine double-adapters, ten sockets.

In case you’re wondering: No, this is not a good idea. Do not do it.

What you see in that picture is actually my third attempt to get everything working at once. I first tried a couple of “bushier” layouts, but the leverage of greater bulb-weight on the wider branches produced broken or, worse, arcing connections between the adapters. So I reconfigured the motley convocation into this vaguely Christmas-tree-ish shape.

The less bushy configuration puts the bottom bulb only about 204 centimetres (six feet, eight inches) above the floor. And this many stacked bayonet connectors becomes sort of… floppy. So a tall person bumping their head on the bottom bulb might manage to unplug half of the assembly. And I don’t trust all of the connections to really be free of slow-overheating-causing extra resistance or tiny arcs. So I wouldn’t leave this Photonic Agglomeration Mark I turned on when I left the house.

But, dodgy though this preposterous bricolage of brightness is, it’s actually not as dreadful as you might think.

Light-bulb double-adapters were, in the olden days, a way to buy several tickets in that special lottery where the grand prize is burning your house down.

A light-bulb socket should remain safe, you see, even if you run a few hundred watts from it. But there are plenty of ceiling lamps that’re blessed with cack-handed amateur wiring, old cables chewed by rats, old connections corroded by possum pee, ancient insecure aluminium wiring, flammable insulation batts installed right across the top of hot areas, or some combination of the above.

If you double-adapt a light-bulb socket that’s hanging down from the ceiling on a cable, then you at least shouldn’t be able to dangerously increase the temperature of the ceiling above the bulbs. But it’s still perfectly possible that you’ll overheat some wiring.

The whole point of compact fluorescent bulbs, though, is that they consume a lot less power than incandescents, for a given brightness. A “100-watt equivalent” CFL will probably draw only 18 or 20 watts. So you can double-adapt a whole bunch of CFLs onto one standard socket and run no more risk of disaster - from excess current, anyway - than you would if you’d plugged in only three or four incandescent bulbs.

In my illuminative monstrosity, there’s one 23-watt CFL, five 18-watt, one 14-watt and three 10-watt, for a total of a mere 157 watts. You can buy single incandescent bulbs that draw that much - or 200 watts, even - if they’ve not yet been banned where you live. Those big bulbs will usually work fine in normal ceiling fixtures if they physically fit, and they also often have an extremely long lifespan. That’s because they’re built for toughness, not efficiency, though, which brings us back to the subject of light-bulb bans.

(Most standard incandescents are now effectively banned here in Australia, but there are specific exceptions for bulbs for which high-efficiency replacements do not yet exist, like the little lamps in fridges and microwaves. So nobody seems to have been terribly inconvenienced. In a few years, immortal LED bulbs ought to have stepped up to fill pretty much every niche that doesn’t actually require a lamp that wastes power.)

157 watts of compact-fluorescent light is getting on for twice the power of my old 85-watt single bulb. It ought to add up to an incandescent-equivalent figure of more than 800 watts. So I whipped out the light-meter to see how the new fluorescence excrescence did.

Compact fluorescents don’t give their full brightness until they’ve warmed up, and that can take a minute or three. Some CFLs are really dim when they’re at even a comfortable room temperature, and all of them will be very dim if they’re very cold (which can be annoying if you want to use them as a porch light in a cold climate, or to illuminate your meat-locker). So I measured the brightness of the new Lamp That Should Not Be at turn-on at the ambient temperature of about 20°C (68°F), and then again ten minutes later. I taped my light-meter’s sensor to the wall about 195 centimetres from the middle of the array, looking at it from a bit below, but broadside-on. (A flat array of bulbs like this will, of course, be dimmer if you look at it edge-on.)

At turn-on, the multi-lamp managed a brightness of about 125 lux over there on the wall - already more than twice the usual brightness of domestic indoor lighting. Ten minutes later, it was 344 lux. Left to warm up even longer, it plateaued at 360 lux.

At the front of my photo-tent area (located, since the kitchen table is not available, in the second-most-traditional location for professional Web-site photography, a spare bed), the old 85W CFL managed about 205 lux. The new array manages about 345!

That’s still not bright enough for general photographic use. It’s more than enough for large-aperture portraiture, but for product shots you’ll find yourself needing one-second tripod exposures. It’s a really good light level for a workroom, though; bright enough for fine work, without the actinic glare of a 7-Eleven at two in the morning. (Which is exactly the same brightness as a 7-Eleven at ten at night, but always seems a lot brighter.)

At the standard measuring distance of one metre, by the way, the warmed-up ten-bulb Chandelier of Uncertainty manages better than 900 lux - overcast daylight brightness - when measured from a perfect broadside-on location. An edge-on view of the lamps one metre from the middle of the whole array is still about 900 lux, because the lamps at the near side of the array are now rather closer than one metre. Moving back to take that into account drops the brightness to around 700 lux.

The ten bulbs cast a rather pleasant light, too. Because the light comes from so many sources - and the sources themselves are the tubes of CFLs, not the little filaments of clear incandescent bulbs - the light casts the soft shadows that you can normally only get from efficiency-reducing lampshades or indirect lighting. And the random mix of colour temperatures from ten supermarket bulbs might drive pro photographers to distraction (because all shadows will have multiple soft fringes of subtly different colours…), but I think it makes the room look sort of sunset-ish, without actually being very yellow. The only problem is that when I come out of the junk room into the normally-lit house, I can’t see where I’m going any more.

Early compact fluorescent lamps were widely hated, for good reason. They were quite expensive, and they gave light that was qualitatively inferior to that from incandescent bulbs. Their mains-frequency ballasts gave them noticeable flicker, which in turn gave people noticeable headaches, and early CFLS also often used the cheap high-efficiency “triphosphor” coatings. Triphosphor gives lots of light per watt - it’s still pretty much ubiquitous in the cheap-straight-fluoro-tube market - but it has lousy colour rendering, so people look like corpses and you can’t tell your jelly beans apart.

But modern CFLs, even cheap supermarket ones, now have high-frequency ballasts and pretty decent colour rendering. Especially if you combine lots of different lamps into one fitting!

(Current CFLs even have a good power factor now. So my irradiative congerie shouldn’t be doing funny things to the mains waveform. They do still have mercury in them, but this is not actually a very big deal.)

Oh, here’s another way in which a Dumb Light-Bulb Trick like this could go horribly wrong: The monstrosity weighs about 1.38 kilograms (three pounds), versus maybe 85 grams (three ounces) for a single “100W-equivalent” CFL. 85 grams is already heavy for a, ahem, light bulb; I just weighed a standard incandescent hundred-watter, and it was only 31 grams.

If I’d just hung 1.4 kilos from the poor horizontal socket of the old ceiling oyster-light in the junk room, like I did with the huge 85W CFL before, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the ten-lamp contraption yanked the socket bodily off the ceiling.

So, instead, I rigged up an extender that connects a standard “batten” bulb socket to the oyster-light socket. The extender, and the rest of the luminaceous imbroglio, hangs from the threaded rod that’s meant to retain the ceiling-light’s glass lamp-shade. You shouldn’t assume that any particular fastener coming out of your ceiling is retained by more than a Rawlplug and hopeful thoughts, but this one seems pretty solid to me.

(I should probably put some tape over contacts on the top of the batten socket, seeing as it’s not screwed onto a batten and they’re just sitting there proudly naked. Nah - what could possibly go wrong?)

In case you haven’t got the message yet: Don’t do this. If you feel the need to run a ton of CFLs from one ceiling socket with a home-made contraption, make it a proper permanently-connected fitting, like a white-painted plywood circle with a bunch of parallel-wired batten sockets on it, and anchor it to the ceiling properly. “Properly”, in case you’re wondering, means “not with coat-hanger wire, sticky tape, picture-hooks or occy straps“.

And all of my usual disclaimers also apply: Don’t fool with mains-powered circuits as your first venture into amateur electronics. Don’t make your own mains gear if it’s not legal to do that where you live. Bear in mind that gimcrack electrics may not only set your house on fire, but also invalidate your insurance.

Bulb-socket double adapters are, I think, very acceptably safe if you only use one of them at a time. With CFLs, they’ll let you easily get the equivalent of 200 to 250 watts of incandescent light into a room, with only about 40 watts of actual power consumption. There are probably cheesy light-bulb double adapters from scary Chinese factories that’re unsafe at any speed, but the old-stock ones I got are all sturdy Bakelite and spotless heavy-gauge metal inside. They only become dodgy when you… iterate.

I think I’ll stick with my illumination conglomeration for a little longer, then whip up something more solid, perhaps in the Hollywood-makeup-mirror form factor.

But then again, I did also buy a lot of in-line bayonet plugs and sockets from that guy on eBay.

Perhaps I should develop something based on the classic Australian cork hat.

Recent developments in the soap opera that is legal authorities’ attempts to get Firepower principal Tim Johnston to show up in court:

Firepower boss avoids night in jail, despite a warrant for his arrest having indeed been issued. “Our client has every intention to voluntarily appear before court on Friday”, says his lawyer.

Firepower boss delusional, court told (”I’m sorry, m’lud, but it’s entirely impossible for my client to attend these proceedings. He’s hopelessly delusional, don’t you know. The man actually believes himself to be innocent.”)

Oh, and one Geoff McDonald, erstwhile spokesdude for Firepower’s liquidators, has himself been struck off for two years over a conflict of interest.

I presume there’s somebody, somewhere in the world, who had a business relationship with Firepower and wasn’t in some way crooked. But I don’t, off the top of my head, know who that somebody might be.

UPDATE: Tim’s (finally) been arrested.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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