How To Spot A Psychopath

Pretty much every time a new update appears in the Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories RSS feed, I am reminded of my own hateful indolence and miserable lack of talent.

Windell and Lenore have really outdone themselves this time, though.

(I think the next kit I get around to building will actually be a ThingamaKIT. If, that is, you don’t count the trapezoidal loudspeakers and giant box of medieval wood from Ron Toms that’ve been awaiting my attention for lo, these many months.)

The latest CrabFu robot-made-out-of-servos is…

…the robot fish out of water.

(Previously here, here and here.)

A reader brought my attention to Cracked’s 6 Retarded Gas Saving Schemes (People Are Actually Trying). I’ve could make a couple of minor technical complaints about it, but overall it’s great. The more people point out the idiocy of things like running your car on water and magic gasoline pills, the better.

I got a kick out of the Khaos Super Turbo Charger (KSTC), which apparently made as big a splash in the Philippines as Firepower did here in Australia. The KSTC has its very own page on fuelsaving.info; there’s another page about air-bleed devices in general.

Fuel scammers often seem to take the thirty-something per cent thermodynamic efficiency of internal combustion engines to mean that sixty-something per cent of the fuel isn’t being burned, when the actual amount of fuel that escapes the engine unburned or only partially combusted is a few per cent, at the very worst. For most vehicles today, it’s well under one per cent, as I noted when Firepower tried the same line on me.

Cracked’s number one Retarded Gas Saving Scheme is “Water4Gas” from one “Ozzie Freedom”. It’s a particularly elaborate kit of parts - including various aquarium components, and not one but two jam-jars - that’s meant to let you run your car at least partially on, that’s right, water.

I mention this in hopes of attracting some more of those hilarious Google ads from the several other water-fueled-car companies out there, all of which have mysteriously failed to make the trillions of dollars you’d expect.

(This is, of course, because of The Conspiracy. Which somehow doesn’t stop these people from selling their ridiculous kits to soon-to-be-disappointed customers.)

Oh, and meanwhile it’s come to light that the list of people to whom Firepower promised money and never delivered includes the Liberal Party of Australia.

At this stage I’m surprised that Tim Johnston - who in the photo accompanying the article has a hairstyle that looks not unlike a Brylcreemed ballsack - didn’t go door-to-door slipping IOUs into people’s letter boxes.

Because I have a small element collection, I occasionally troll eBay for interesting metals.

Recently, I’ve noticed people selling “copper bullion”.

This, for those of you not up on precious-metal terminology, is a contradiction in terms. Bullion (”No, not the little cubes you put in hot water to make soup.“) is, by definition, precious metals. Gold, silver, platinum, palladium; a metal that’s rare enough that it can be used as a reasonably portable means of exchange in its own right, not just struck into coins that can be used to purchase goods worth far more than the coins’ intrinsic metal value.

Copper, on the other hand, is a “base metal“. It’s common enough that trading it by the ounce is ridiculous. As I write this, the spot price for copper is about $US3.85 per pound, not per ounce.

(It occurs to me that this may be the heart and soul of the copper bullion scam. Just charge as much per ounce as the metal is actually worth per pound, and wait for some Modern Jackass to take the bait.)

What people are trading for $3.85 a pound on the base metal markets may or may not be .999-purity “fine” copper, but it’s actually quite easy to buy very pure copper from engineering suppliers, or indeed your local hardware store. You generally have to pay more to get copper that’s been alloyed with something else.

Today, the price of copper has risen enough that many small-denomination copper coins are now worth more intrinsically than their face value. I’ve got a roll of fifty of the old, now withdrawn, Australian one-cent pieces here; it weighs about 132 grams, which at $US3.85 a pound makes this “fifty cent” roll worth about $AU1.15 right now.

That’s still not a lot, though, and the notion of selling copper as bullion remains silly. There’s no real market for it. If you go into one of those heavily-armoured shops that buys and sells gold and silver bullion and try to sell them a slab of copper, they’ll laugh and send you on your way.

Precious-metal prices always rise whenever one or more of the world’s great economies are in bad shape, so the USA’s current enthusiastic attempt to commit economic suicide has created a big spike in gold and silver prices. As I write this, gold is worth around $US970 per troy ounce, and silver’s around $US19. As recently as 2000, gold was worth less than $US290 per troy ounce, and silver was around five bucks an ounce.

One troy ounce of copper, at the moment, is worth about 26 US cents.

Even if you’ve got a tonne of copper, it’ll still be worth less than $US8500 at the moment. $US8500 worth of gold currently weighs six-tenths of a pound.

And yet… there are people selling “copper bullion”. EBay’s rotten with ‘em at the moment.

I just did a “completed items” search for “copper bullion” on eBay, and turned up one 1055-gram bar that went for $US34.05 ex delivery (value at $3.85 per pound: $US8.97), a one-pound bar that went for $US18.51 (and is now worth, that’s right, $US3.85), and an overstruck US copper penny (you could still see the ghost of “ONE CENT” and the Lincoln Memorial through the crudely-restruck eagle and “1/10 TROY OUNCE .950 COPPER”…), which sold for $US3.25.

If that penny was genuinely a tenth of a troy ounce - which sounds near enough - then the 95% copper content in it might actually be worth as much as 2.5 cents now.

And on it went. Before I got too depressed to go on, I found at least one successfully-sold “MASSIVE!! 3 KILOS .999 Fine Copper Bullion Bar/ Ingot”… for $US140 plus delivery.

It’s worth $US25.46.

I did like the little ingots (available in copper and silver!) stamped with an image of Martha Mitchell holding a telephone, though.

Even if you decide to get in on the ground floor by buying a hundred of the one-troy-ounce “Australian Copper Bullion” ingots currently on offer on ebay.com.au, what you’ve actually just bought is 6.86 pounds of copper, worth less than $US27.

As I write this, the eBay Buy It Now price for one of those packages of a hundred little ingots is $AU350 - about $US340 - plus delivery.

So even if the price of copper rises by a factor of ten, you won’t have made your money back, unless you manage to find yourself a greater fool on whom to unload your zillions of little copper bookmarks.

I have a nice 25 by 15 by 250mm offcut of copper bar - I bought it from this seller, now on OZtion instead of eBay. It’s great for demonstrating eddy-current magnetic braking, with a rare-earth magnet. But it weighs 827.5g, which is 26.6 troy ounces - ninety-three dollars and ten cents, at the $3.50-an-ounce “bullion” price!

I also bought a bunch of 3.5-inch copper boat nails a while ago. (Copper’s used for boat nails because it won’t corrode, and you can drive work-hardened copper nails through wood with no trouble; when I annealed one of the nails, though, I could bend it with ease.) I’ve given a few of the nails away, but have about 950 grams of ‘em left, and I think they’re quite pure copper.

The copper in the nails is worth only about eight bucks at the current spot price, and they cost me about forty Australian bucks delivered - but if I melted them down into fancy little ingots and sold them for $3.50 a troy ounce, they’d bring me well over a hundred dollars!

Heck, I’ve got a whole box of old CPU coolers, many of which have solid copper heat sinks! I’m a MILLIONAIRE!

(Oh, and I wrote the title for this page before I discovered that at least one eBay seller actually is selling “lead bullion“. Oy.)

This scam’s a weird one, though it’s apparently been around for a while; Google for “copper bullion” and you’ll find quite a lot of exceedingly dodgy Web sites trying to get you to buy the stuff. (One of the sites I found also linked to one of those “run your car on water” sites that always show up in the Google ads whenever I write about how you can’t run your car on water.)

The scam would also appear to be quite well-known among people who spend a lot of time trading metals on eBay.

With any luck, this blog post will save at least one person from blowing their kids’ university fund on vastly overpriced copper door-stops.

The other day I was reading, as you do, the Wikipedia entry for “entomophagy“. Which means, of course, the eating of insects, on purpose or… otherwise.

The “unintentional entomophagy” section of that article is all about that schoolyard gross-out favourite: The allowable levels of insects, insect eggs and “insect filth” in common foodstuffs.

As the US FDA says, “it is economically impractical to grow, harvest, or process raw products that are totally free of non-hazardous, naturally occurring, unavoidable defects.” Like bits of bugs. So certain levels of bug-bits are OK with the FDA.

They have determined, for instance, that no health hazard is presented by fewer than five fruit-or-other-fly eggs per 250 millilitres of canned citrus juice. And they also prohibit, I’m happy to say, any maggots at all in that juice.

You’re allowed to have an average of no more than 60 insect fragments per hundred grams of chocolate; no more than 30 per hundred grams of peanut butter.

And on it goes, until the entry for hops - the bitter green flowers used in beer brewing.

The Wikipedia article said that ten grams of hops can have two thousand five hundred aphids, and still be considered acceptable.

This struck me as a clear example of subtle Wikipedia vandalism, so I had a little look around. But I’ll be darned if the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition Food Defect Action Levels list did not say exactly that.

The hop aphid, Phorodon humuli, is fortunately a tiny little creature that probably weighs about the same as a similarly sized ant - about 0.1 milligrams.

(It may mean something that the question of what an ant weighs has previously commanded my attention.)

So even if there are 2500 such aphids in ten grams of hops, that’s still only a quarter of a gram of aphids. Hops outweigh aphids by a factor of forty to one.

But this blogger’s estimate of 528 aphids being permitted to go into a single sixteen-fluid-ounce (0.47-litre, 0.83-Imperial-pint) can of not-especially-hoppy beer, however, remains valid.

It’s not really that bad, of course. As the Action Levels document also says, typical contamination levels are generally far lower than the maximum permitted level.

I think the “2500 aphids” figure might actually be pretty much picked out of the air, since I think it’s likely that even if you just stirred buckets of aphids into your beer-wort instead of buckets of hops, the resultant beverage would probably still present no danger to human health whatsoever.

(And, given some previous evidence, a certain segment of the market would probably demand more aphids.)

But this sort of sensible disclaimer has no place in the schoolyard gross-out arms race, or indeed in similarly themed conversations during the big game’s ad breaks. 2500 aphids per ten grams of hops are, indeed, allowed.

Drink up!

I’ve managed to go almost a month without saying anything about 2008’s uncontested See What Happens When You Don’t Pay Attention In Science Lessons, You Idiots gold medal winners, Firepower.

So here’s an update.

The Independent in the UK has a pretty good overview of the whole debacle, in “A miracle pill, a sports team and the most wanted man in Australia“. The New Zealand Herald has “Hunted fuel-pill peddler made same claim in NZ 16 years ago” - which wasn’t exactly a secret, but still the hopeful investors came thick and fast. For, I remind you, the chance to own their own little slice of a product that was not just different in no way at all from Firepower head Tim Johnston’s own previous scam in New Zealand, which was also different in no way at all from hundreds of previous products from other scam artists.

Meanwhile, making-a-career-out-of-Firepower Gerard Ryle co-authored the Sydney Morning Herald’s most recent piece, “Firepower’s Phileas Fogg steals away“. In which Tim Johnston manages to add a couple more creditors to the list by, for instance, skipping out on his flat in Hampstead with a month of rent still owing.

Also at the Herald, there’s “Western rugby joins the ruckus“, in which whoever at Western Australian Rugby Union drew the short straw glumly joins the hunt for Tim, because he owes them money too. Oh, and one Ross Graham, which the Firepower Web site is still happy to inform us is “the founder of Executive Traders and the owner of various private mining related companies”, is apparently personally owed nine point seven six million dollars.

I really hope Graham never gets a penny back. Look at him in that press release, saying “I sent members of my team to check out Firepower’s operations in Russia and Asia. They were impressed with what they saw, and realized these great products would enable Firepower to grow into a very successful business”.

I know that “quotes” like that in press releases are always written by the press guy and just initialed by the person who’s supposed to be “saying” it. But Graham nonetheless did approve the quote, took an active role in the Firepower scam, and never actually did do any due diligence despite saying that he had. No sane person could actually think the Firepower products worked if they really did “check out” Firepower’s essentially nonexistent Russian and Asian “operations”.

So, you know, screw that guy.

Moving on, the Herald also has “Firepower creditors home in on wife’s $5m property” and “Firepower boss rejected plan to restructure” (…possibly because part of that plan involved Tim Johnston turning himself in).

And, more juicily, “Firepower used fake tests to woo Russians“. Apparently after the faked tests were discovered and the Russian Railways network immediately cancelled their upcoming deal, Firepower had new tests done… and apparently correctly, too, because the new tests showed no effect. Oddly, these new tests weren’t added to Firepower’s motley collection of promotional literature.

Earlier, there was another Gerard Ryle piece, “Firepower offers pill franchise“, in which my friend Stephen Moss attempts to unload Firepower International, the company he used to be so proud of and which still, against all reason, has that picture of Stephen putting a pill in that bloody million-dollar Rolls-Royce on its front page.

Stephen says he’s owed money too - oh, poor baby! - and denies any involvement, blah blah blah.

Amazingly enough, Firepower franchises currently seem to be about as salable as Enron stock. Oh, and I couldn’t put it better than Ryle: “By coincidence, Bill Moss [Stephen’s dad…] was part of a Macquarie Bank consortium that sold the Sydney Kings to Johnston for $2 million last year. The deal gave the consortium a 500 per cent profit on the $400,000 it spent buying the Kings in 2002. The Firepower parent owes hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid endorsements to the Western Force and some of its players.”

So once again, Steve - if you’re short of a buck or two, try hitting up your dad for a loan!

Let’s see, what else have we got?

Magnate’s bid for Firepower fails (A mining zillionaire is one of the Firepower creditors and for some reason wanted to buy a controlling interest, but Tim Johnston popped up from his Undisclosed Location for long enough to say no.)

Owner of Sydney Kings faces arrest (Yep, that’s Tim again. It’s Firepower’s liquidator who wants Johnston arrested.)

There were two attempts to revive the Sydney Kings basketball team (the previous jewel in Firepower’s sports-sponsorship crown); they both failed, and there’s squabbling over the remnants.

Meanwhile, have you heard about the amazing Moletech Fuel Saver?

This time, for sure!

From: Sharon Williams <sharon_williams29@yahoo.com>
Date: Thu, 10 Jul 2008 09:56:31 -0700 (PDT)
To: dan@dansdata.com
Subject: LCDs Purchase

Hello Sales,

I hold LCDS Store,So I will like to purchasing your Items Product,which is:

LCDS………………………………….5Pieces

So kindly e-mail me back with the Total Cost and plus the Shipping Cost together to London,E16 4SP ,So as to have you paid with my Credit Card# for you to charge for the Order from you there on your behalf.
Hope to hear from you back today.
Thank you..

Regard,

Oh, you’d like five LCDs, would you? Any preference? Five seven-segment calculator displays, five thirty-inch Dells… all the same to you, eh?

Every day for these scammers must be a new adventure. They’ve literally got no idea at all what might be turning up from the sort of ultra-gullible schmuck that’d fall for their “orders”.

The last shreds of my faith in humanity depend on nobody at all falling for this one, though.

Despite the mention of a London address, I think this is probably yet another Nigerian, or perhaps Romanian, scammer. They get a sucker at the stated address to send everything on to them, then the sucker ends up carrying the can when the goods vanish into Africa or wherever and no money comes back.

I don’t think any actual forwarding company will fall for this any more (this piece is almost six years old), but there’s still a pretty good supply of individual suckers who’ll believe what a brother in Christ has to say.

What does capitalism mean?

I’ll tell you what capitalism means.

It means this.

(Via.)

Y’see, there was this one fireworks store, and then another one opened up across the street.

And then it kind of turned into a theatrical performance.

Here in Australia, the only place where you can still buy proper fireworks - we DREAM of these sorts of things (from the same site as the video) - is in the Australian Capital Territory, a strange little place where the high-level politicians live, and which is also the only place where hard-core porn is still legal.

You may draw from this whatever conclusions you wish.

I recently had to edit my Firefox persdict.dat file to remove a misspelled word which I’d added to the dictionary by mistake. It’s not very hard to edit the dictionary, but Firefox apparently provides no graphical-interface way to do it. This is a bit of a pain for “normal” users.

(Note: If Firefox is still running when you edit the dictionary, it’ll keep rewriting the old version of it over the corrected one.)

Aaaanyway, this gave me the chance to view my personal Firefox dictionary. I found it entertaining:

Sitemap
nameservers
theremin
Photoshoppery
Gizmodo’s
overcurrent
phish
AVI
faq
lumens
href
rechargeables
milliamps
AdSense
that’re
Headshot
YouTube
commenters
cockie
nameserver
AAC
PCMCIA
Tamiya
DSHEA
Thermite
plugpack
Crabfu
IrDA
dansdata
signage
DLL
scammers
OLPC
Winamp’s
plugpacks
phishes
animatronic
Austrade
oobleck
botnet
WinXP
combinations
subwoofer
NSFW
northbridge
aluminium
there’d
Radeon
WAV
VDC
pissy
that’ve
incher
Azureus
Seraphim
difluoroethane
polycaprolactone
biodiesel
unsubscribing
permanganate
anybody’s
buggerload
prefetch
Metafilter
autofocus
Slashdot
eMate
Schneier’s
phish’s
dodgy
widerange
PVA
Mitsuwa
Athlon
ISPs
Prius
lux
mA
Gizmodo
Gretchin
zoom’s
DSL
gizmos
autoerotic
GeForce
spidered
SupCom

Full disclosure: The above does not include several Commonwealth-spelling words which I’d added to the dictionary because I hadn’t yet switched to the English-Australian dictionary.

Changing dictionaries in Firefox is another thing that’s not as simple as it ought to be, but it’s still pretty easy. If you want a non-US-English dictionary, you just download and install it, like any other add-on.

I like how the Australian dictionary shows up in the add-on list:

As regular readers will know, I’m actually pretty much on the fence about Commonwealth/Australian versus USA spelling. This ambivalence extends to language usage in general.

“Pretty much”, for instance, smells American - so, often, does “pretty” by itself - but I’d much rather use it instead of “by and large“.

(And, conversely, “much rather” is a Commonwealth-smelling term. “Rather” by itself is pretty darn English, even if you don’t split it into “rah-THERR!”)

I spell “humour” and “valour” and “colour” with a U, but not because I think it’s some sort of badge of, um, honour. And I often write “I guess” instead of “I suppose”, because I think “guess” conveys the meaning of the term more effectively, even if it’s generally agreed to be a distinctly American coinage.

There are also several Commonwealth spellings that’re simply ridiculous. Like “programme”, which England adopted in the 1800s because, at the time, it was cool to sound French. America never got that memo, so they stuck with the older, far more sensible, “program”.

Likewise, “analogue” pains me every time I write it.

Feel free to paste your own amusing user-dictionaries, or heretical personal unpatriotic usage preferences, in the comments.

A reader who’d noticed my affection for “the hideous, terrifying combination of polycaprolactone and robotics” just pointed me to…

…XRobots’ Android 10. Which is, I think, not entirely unlike what you’d see in the workshop of a necromancer. Especially if he’d read a book about tensegrity lately.

Next project: Polycaprolactone Sedlec Ossuary, please!