» 2008 » September How to Spot a Psychopath

K-9 will tell him if you say anything important

30 September 2008 — dan

Why did this not already exist?

(I'm not counting this, which is obviously inferior. This, however, is brilliant. I found the source image on the BBC's K-9 wallpaper gallery. Please leave a comment if you make a prettier version.)

I think the original Captain Kirk version - which can be motivational or demotivational depending on which way you look at it - is one of the finest ever made. But, c'mon, if it came to a fight Jim would find it pretty hard to captain that starship of his, what with his grandfather never having met his grandma.

(In case you don't spend a lot of time on teh internets, and this is all Greek to you: The Despair Incorporated Demotivators became a lolcats-like DIY phenomenon a while ago, and now there are about a billion of them, often riffing on previous efforts. See this one, for instance.)

I made the poster with the despair.com Motivator, which looks suspiciously similar to the Big Huge Labs Motivator. I presume one of them licensed, or ripped off, the other.

"Wow. Moth balls. So, what's for dinner?" "Plastique."

29 September 2008 — dan

This MetaFilter post reminded me that just owning a common Casio wrist watch is now being used as evidence of terroristic intent. The post links to this Seattle Post-Intelligencer article, in which a retired FBI agent points out that this "evidence" is every bit as preposterous as you'd think.

That model of watch may be popular for use as a bomb timer, but there are hundreds, if not thousands, of other watches - and non-watch timer devices - that'd work just as well. The Casios show up so often merely because Casios are easy to find, and cheap.

Similarly, most terrorists have eaten bread on several occasions before committing their crimes. So if you find some bread in the kitchen of a guy called Achmed... do I have to draw you a picture, people?

At the end of the article, though, the ex-FBI guy goes on to say "You give me a half-hour in a supermarket and I can blow up your garage."

It's great to point out that bad people cannot be prevented from doing bad things by banning certain commonplace but allegedly magically dangerous items. But I think claims like this don't help. The idea that any kid can find a recipe for an honest-to-goodness building-smashing bomb on teh internets and be blowing up their school tomorrow is a common one, and it fans the fire of unreasoning fear that's screwing the Western world up so badly.

I'm ready to be corrected, but I don't think it is, actually, possible to build a proper bomb out of stuff from the supermarket. No matter how easily Kyle Reese did it in The Terminator.

(Note that the above does not apply if your local "supermarket" is a Wal-Mart that sells guns and ammo.)

I think the closest you could get to a genuine "supermarket bomb" would be fertiliser (if your supermarket actually has some fertiliser product that's reasonably pure ammonium nitrate) and motor oil. But then what're you going to use as an initiator? I don't remember seeing a "Blasting Caps" aisle the last time I was in the supermarket.

The most feasible initiator would probably be the dangerous but widely-used TATP, which you can almost make from supermarket supplies.

The problem with TATP - and HMTD too; HMTD is what the rather implausible "liquid bombers" apparently intended to use as their main explosive - is that you need concentrated hydrogen peroxide to make it. I don't think there's any way to concentrate "drugstore" peroxide - which tops out at about 6% concentration - that's easier than synthesising peroxide (which is hardly a complex molecule, after all) from scratch.

Apparently the unsuccessful London July 21st bombers thought they could concentrate peroxide by just boiling it down, but I think that's hopeless. Hydrogen peroxide will constantly decompose into water and oxygen even at room temperature, after all; the hotter you make it, the faster that happens, leaving you with nothing but water. Perhaps you could concentrate hair-bleaching 6% peroxide a bit by simmering it, but you need to get it up past 50% concentration to make it useful for whiz-bang sorts of applications. That's just not going to happen on the stove.

(The result of the July 21st bombers' incompetent work was, of course, that none of their bombs went off. So much for "supermarket terrorism".)

There are various other teenage-mayhem sorts of possibilities with supermarket ingredients. You could make rather nasty gas - though not any sort of explosion - with ammonia and bleach. Pool chlorine plus anything acidic will give you chlorine gas; that's poisonous too, and if you cork the mixture up tightly the bottle will explode, though not with enough force to damage anything bigger than a badly-built doghouse. And there are umpteen different supermarket flammables with which one could simply burn a garage down.

But I don't think that even if you visited the supermarket and then the hardware store, you'd be able to make anything more deadly than a pipe bomb full of match-heads. Which you wouldn't want to go off under your chair, or anything, but which isn't going to blow away a garage either.

If all you've got to work with is off-the-supermarket-shelf ingredients, I think the most impressive result you can hope for is that achieved by that schmuck who hoped to destroy Glasgow Airport by setting his Jeep on fire.

Some or all of the above has been independently discovered by every 14-year-old boy who's ever downloaded the notoriously incompetent "Jolly Roger's Cookbook". The take-home message for them, and for everybody else, is simple:

Yes, ordinary household products can be dangerous, as has been discovered by many people who mixed ammonia and bleach and then woke up in hospital. Or didn't wake up at all.

But there's no reason to wet yourself in terror if you come home early and find your kid mixing drugstore peroxide and nail-polish remover in the kitchen.

People who intend to commit crimes of violence via a method that can't possibly work - "I'm going to kill the Prime Minister using my powers of mental telepathy!" - should still be investigated, because it's possible that after trying the telepathy thing for a few weeks, they'll just go and buy a rifle.

But worrying about terrorists making bombs out of groceries is foolish.

Explosives are actually difficult to make, and domestic terrorists in the Western world are (a) clearly not very bright and (b) so rare that even if their idiotic schemes worked every time, you'd still be far more likely to die because you fell off something.

Relax.

Posted in Strange Tales. 22 Comments »

Not your everyday fuel-saving gadget

28 September 2008 — dan

"A Temple University physics professor has developed a simple device which could dramatically improve fuel efficiency as much as 20 percent", says this report on PhysOrg.com.

A couple of readers pointed the report out to me, observing that at least this one doesn't claim to be using reverse-spin antiunicorn particles, magnetising the unmagnetisable, or cracking water into hydrogen and oxygen then reacting them to somehow give more power than went in.

Next, the report turned up on Slashdot, and some more readers pointed it out to me. These readers were less complimentary.

Once again, yet again, this gadget is supposed to give "more efficient and cleaner combustion". This is apparently because the fuel's viscosity is reduced by an electric field, but it doesn't matter how the heck the "more efficient combustion" happens, because there's almost no room for improvement there.

As regular readers who've been subjected to my snowstorms of links to Tony's Guide to Fuel Saving will already know, modern engines in anything vaguely resembling a decent state of tune only fail to burn a few per cent of their fuel, at the very most.

If you're only blowing 2% of the fuel out of the exhaust valve in the first place, improving combustion can only gain you a maximum economy and/or power increase of that same 2%.

If a fuel-saver inventor bothers to address this unfortunate fact, they usually start banging on about how functionally all of the fuel might be getting burned in the engine, but their invention makes it burn faster, or more evenly, or something.

I am pleased to say that no such nonsense is being put forward by the inventors of this latest gizmo. They're streets ahead of most of the other purveyors of magnets and crystals and stickers and mothball pills, for one reason: These people are actually doing proper science. They have written up and published their research. And they're not selling anything.

You just don't see this sort of... honesty... from most mileage-gadget inventors. These guys are telling the world exactly what they did, and inviting replication of their results. This is what proper scientists always do, but it's almost unknown in the mileage-gadget world. The closest mileage-gadget people usually get is encouraging hundreds of dudes in garages to all try to finally make the first Joe Cell that actually works.

The Temple University paper is titled "Electrorheology Leads to Efficient Combustion"; it was published in Energy & Fuels, a journal of the American Chemical Society. The whole paper is available online. It's only four pages, so I read it.

I don't know whether their basic idea - that applying an electrical field to fuel actually does reduce its viscosity - is correct. They say that this definitely does work on liquids which contain suspended particles, and that the larger molecules in gasoline or diesel fuel can be regarded as (very small) suspended particles. That sounds fishy to me - molecules do not, of course, behave at all like normal visible-under-a-microscope "particles" - but the paper contains a neat graph in which a sample of diesel apparently did decrease in viscosity, from 4.6 centipoise to as little as 4.2, after electrical treatment.

(I'm assuming that they kept the fuel's temperature steady. All sorts of petroleum products become less viscous when you warm them up, and their electrical gizmo will slightly warm the fuel. But only an idiot, or scammer, would fail to control for temperature in this situation.)

If their gizmo really does reduce fuel viscosity, then it's uncontroversial that it'll also improve atomisation when the fuel's squirted out of an injector in a diesel or fuel-injected petrol engine. They tested for this anyway, and got positive results.

But now we strike a problem. Devices to improve fuel atomisation are not new. They've been around for ages. And, as Tony points out on the above-linked page, even if the fuel is a vapour when it's introduced into the combustion chamber - if it's petrol that's been pre-heated by a fuel-saving gizmo, or if the engine's running on LPG or CNG - there's only a very small efficiency gain, if any at all.

According to the paper, the inventors of the electrorheology viscosity doodad tested it on a diesel engine in a lab for a whole week, and got readily measurable economy and power gains. Then they tested a Mercedes 300D on a dynamometer, and again got a clear improvement - though they say the power output improved from an average of "0.3677 hp" to "0.4428 hp", which suggests they've either slipped a decimal point or there's some large divisor here that I'm missing. The engine would be producing substantially more power than that even if it was only idling.

(They say, by the way, that their device ought to work just as well on petrol engines as on diesel. They've only tested it on diesel so far, though. The worthless atomisation-improvers on the market today are almost always for petrol engines.)

After that, the paper says they did "continuous road tests" on the same Mercedes and found even better improvements - 12 to almost 20% better mileage. But just driving a car around is, of course, not a proper test. There's just no way for a person driving a car to drive it exactly the same way every day, and people can very easily unconsciously drive more gently when they're all excited about the new fuel-saving thingummy they just installed.

You could maybe get some better-than-nothing data if you blinded a driving-around test - nobody driving the car knowing whether your doodad was operating or not - but the paper doesn't say they did that.

The paper as a whole, though, looks almost entirely kosher to me. It seems that these people really did this stuff, and really got these results. The very low 300D dyno power figures concern me - they don't seem to make any sense at all - but that's the only part of the paper that looks really dodgy.

Research like this is all about replication - other people reading the paper and then performing the same experiment. This irons out the effect of errors and dishonesty, and over time leaves us with the truth, or as close to it as we can get. Anybody who wants to can duplicate the Temple University experiment; the electrifier device should be very easy to build, and it contains no exotic materials or physics-defying woo-woo components.

But it seems to me that the electrifier's claimed means of operation, at the very least, can't be right. Improving fuel atomisation just doesn't improve combustion, or anything else. Modern petrol and diesel engines already atomise fuel as well as is necessary, and burn very nearly all of it at the right time, in the right place, and at the right speed.

If this device actually does work - and it'd be fantastic if it did - it seems to me that it must be for some other reason.

UPDATE: When I first wrote this piece, I missed the end of this press release, which mentions that the new electronic viscosity device has already been "licensed" to an outfit called "Save The World Air".

STWA's current mainstay product appears to be the "MagChargR", which looks to me like an entirely straightforward magnetic "fuel saver". The Temple University researcher who's come up with the new electronic viscosity doodad appears to be involved up to his hips in STWA. This immensely reduces my opinion of him and of the value of his research. It seems clear to me now that he is actually in this for the money, even if he has published his method and results.

(The STWA test-results page, tellingly called "testimonials.htm" gives you the usual collection of hard-to-trace allegedly-independent tests to support the claims made by the company. As usual, in order to see if the tests are actually kosher you'd need, at the very least, to check with testing outfits identified only by a cryptic name {"CP Engineering", no Web site, address or phone number given}, or located in non-English-speaking countries - in this case Thailand and China. Or just believe the pretty graphs, which contain no information about their provenance at all.

I've taken plenty of time to look into this sort of stuff before, and I'm sick of it. Screw every single God-damned one of these people with their devices that'd be worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year if they actually bloody worked but which, strangely, they've never taken the time to have properly tested by contactable organisations in the countries where they do business.)

Unlike most magnetic fuel gadgets, the MagChargR goes around the carburetor or fuel-injection equivalent rather than being clamped to the fuel line. But, as has been demonstrated from the level of quantum physics up over decades, if not centuries, hydrocarbons are just as immune to magnetism no matter where you throw it at them. I'm pretty sure that magnets for every part of every engine have been marketed at one time or another. We'd probably know if they did anything (besides collect shavings in the bottom of the sump...) by now.

If the STWA device works as well as every other magnetic fuel saver anyone has ever tested, it does not work at all. This could explain why STWA was in 2002 enjoined by the Securities and Exchange Commission against making further fraudulent representations about their products and commercial prospects.

This action was resolved in the usual way: STWA settled out of court and didn't admit anything. It would appear that this event did not put a big dent in their business.

If I were selling a legitimate fuel-saving device, I would not choose to go into partnership with a company which, currently, proudly offers what looks to me exactly like an illegitimate fuel saving device.

Posted in Electricity, Science. 15 Comments »

The Gakken Cross Copter: Two rotors for twenty-seven dollars

28 September 2008 — dan

This is a Gakken Cross Copter, which can be yours, as it was mine, for 1886 yen plus delivery from HobbyLink Japan. (It's something like $US27 including the cheaper Surface Air Lift shipping, as I write this.)

The helicopter itself has two contra-rotating rotors, which are driven by one minuscule electric motor. The motor is tethered to a hand-powered generator, which you must crank with considerable enthusiasm to get the Copter airborne.

I was glumly contemplating a 600-take video session (with the cats, who find the Copter utterly fascinating, banished from the room...) to try to get some decent footage of the Copter in action. But fortunately, some people from Make Magazine got the chance to play with a prototype:

The prototype seems bulkier than the production Copter, and has a longer cable. But the principle's the same.

Because the power wire tugs on the bottom of the Copter, it tends to pull the bottom of the aircraft toward you, which causes it to fly away from you. This can rapidly get out of hand. Fortunately, you can just stop turning the handle and let the copter fall and dangle from the wires without damage. It seems to be pretty tough, too, considering its gossamer construction; the two interleaved rotors often end up mis-meshed after a crash, but if they haven't managed to get completely jammed, just twitching the generator handle back and forth a little will usually sort them out.

The generator's quite beautifully coupled to the tiny motor in the Copter. You only need a slight turn of the crank handle either way to get the rotors turning. It acts more like a drive shaft than an electrical linkage.

As with the immortal Vertibird (which actually did have a drive shaft from the power unit to the tethered helicopter), the Cross Copter's remote power source makes it lighter. The Copter by itself, not counting the tether wire, weighs only about 8.5 grams (that's 0.3 ounces). The whole 110cm (3.6 foot) length of the power wire adds only about one more gram.

The Copter's smaller than I expected, though. The diameter of each four-bladed rotor is a bit less than 12 centimetres (4.7 inches).

You also have to assemble the Cross Copter yourself, but this will only take a few minutes. As with so many Japanese hobby products, the packaging is beautiful - in this case a box with a short instructional magazine for a front panel. The instructions are all in Japanese, but the pictures are more than adequate to figure out how to click the few parts together. You need to squeeze rather hard to get the landing skids to click onto the bottom of the Copter frame, which could be beyond the hand strength of a small child, but the rest of the assembly should be no problem for any intelligent kid.

Getting the Copter to take off from a surface is dodgy at best, because of the wire-making-it-fly-away-from-you problem. If you've got someone to hold the chopper for you while you get it up to speed, though, you'll be fine.

(If you go for hand launching, you could also delete the two skids on the bottom, dropping a little more precious weight. It's not as if you're ever likely to use the skids for landing, after all. It's probably not completely physically impossible to get the Cross Copter to land, but I'm buggered if I know how you'd go about it.)

You can, these days, get a proper self-contained remote-controlled tiny helicopter for not much more than the price of the Cross Copter. The Interactive Toy Concepts Micro Mosquito, for instance, is a highly insectile (it has eyes!) twin-coaxial-rotor beastie that weighs only about fifteen grams and seems to cost only around fifty bucks. And it seems to be quite controllable...

...which is more than can be said for its predecessors, the foam-bodied Picoo Z and its endless clones - some decent, some awful, all very cheap.

For proper airlift-a-sugar-lump-to-your-tea control, you need something like the incredible Pixelitos or the Proxflyer prototypes that led to the mass-market Micro Mosquito, but you can at least try to control even the worst Picoo clones. The Cross Copter pretty much just goes where it feels like going.

(The Cross Copter actually has a similar stability system to the Prox/Picoflyer; its rotors are rigid, but loosely connected to the drive shafts, so they can flop around to counter movement of the Copter's body.)

If you want a helicopter, you don't want a Cross Copter. But if you want a neat little not-too-expensive toy that's half science project, half party novelty, the Cross Copter's the only game in town.

Not a lot of people seem to be buying the Cross Copter from HobbyLink Japan, because as I write this the "People who bought this item also like" section on HLJ's Cross Copter page contains nothing but items from my own last HLJ order!

I hope, faithful readers, that you'll at least manage to add that little Sherman to the end of the page.

Posted in Nerdery, Toys. 2 Comments »

Mini-tank du jour

27 September 2008 — dan

Tamiya make excellent radio-controlled tank kits; I have two. Their 16th-scale kits all cost several hundred dollars, though.

Here, in contrast...

...is one that should be well under $200, delivered.

It's the upcoming #48207 Sherman, a reduced-size version of the 16th-scale Sherman that Tamiya have been selling in different versions, on and off, for decades now.

This Sherman is 1:35th scale, an immensely popular scale for military models, so it ought to be about 16.7 centimetres (6.6 inches) long. And, like the 1/16th Kubelwagen Tamiya sold a few years ago, the 35th-scale Sherman comes with radio gear.

It's still a proper R/C kit that needs to be assembled and painted, so yes, there's more to buy. But you have to buy at least a radio set for a normal R/C kit; the 35th-scale Sherman has one in the box. And its major electronic and mechanical components seem to come pre-assembled. You shouldn't need anything but basic hand tools and glue to build it, actually, if you're happy with whatever colour the parts are when you snip them off the sprue.

The list price for the new Sherman is $US213 or something, but list prices for R/C kits are always ridiculous; you shouldn't find it actually costs more than about $US150 from a hobby shop. As I write this, HobbyLink Japan (with whom I do not, in case you were wondering, have an affiliate deal) have the new Sherman available for pre-order for only 13,110 yen (that's about $US124, $AU150 or 85 Euros, as I write this). That doesn't include delivery, but this isn't a big kit; it shouldn't cost more than another 5000 yen to ship anywhere in the world. So the total should come in well under $US200.

The pre-order price is a 5% discount on the 13,800-yen normal price. The kit's slated to be in stock in mid-October.

Tamiya have made several other 35th-scale R/C tanks, but in their typical treat-customers-mean-keep-'em-keen fashion, you're not going to find most of those kits in the shops any more. They released two other 35th-scale R/C tanks this year - a Panzer IV and a Panther G - and you may just still be able to find those for a reasonable price.

These current 35th-scale tanks are more expensive than the ones that were on sale a few years ago, but that's because they've got turret traverse and gun elevation. I think they have proper articulated tracks, too, not unrealistic and power-sapping rubber belts. If the above-pictured Sherman has rubber tracks, they're incredibly detailed, with proper sprocket drive.

You don't get sound effects or flashing "firable" guns, but you do get a lovely scale model with full Dalek motion control. What's not to like?

Posted in Nerdery, Toys. Leave a Comment »

Never mind the quality, feel the price!

26 September 2008 — dan

A reader sent me the following early this month:

I've been a long time reader of your site, and seeing as you have a fascination for interesting cut-price electronic stuff, I thought this site might interest you:

www.dealextreme.com

I'm not affiliated with it in any way; I just think it's an awesome place to get things for silly low prices. Obviously build quality isn't great, but I've bought some interesting little gadgets of there for pittance. Also check out their diddly RC helicopter section - they're quite a bit cheaper than most other places!

I buy random incredibly-cheap stuff from Hong Kong eBay dealers all the time, so I just had to try out DealExtreme too. Like several other Hong Kong gadget dealers - USB Geek, for instance - shipping to anywhere in the world is included in DealExtreme's prices. So you don't have to do the usual overseas-shopping thing where you look for other stuff you can barely justify buying, to prevent shipping being 80% of the total order cost; if all you need is a ninety-eight-cent screwdriver, you won't be ripped off if that's all you buy.

I ordered a selection of entertaining objects from DealExtreme on the fifth of September, but the parcel didn't arrive until the 24th. That's because it took DealExtreme until the 16th before they actually sent it. And the package was stuffed too tight, so the pair of novelty tea infusers I'd ordered were both broken.

But DealExtreme's support people replied almost instantly to my request for a replacement, and I've no reason to suppose I won't receive it. Although it may, of course, take another nineteen days.

(The DealExtreme "Customer Service Express" contact form makes you include pictures. This is fair enough, but it makes you feel a bit stupid when it means you're taking 20 minutes out of your day to get a $2 item replaced...)

You can find most of DealExtreme's stuff on sale on eBay and elsewhere, but they stock some items that genuinely are hard to find elsewhere. Their Nintendo DS accessories, for instance, include not only dirt-cheap tri-wing screwdrivers for the little screws that hold a DS together, but also several flash carts for running homebrew (or, of course, pirated) software on your DS.

Flash carts are notoriously hard to find on sites like eBay, but DealExtreme have a bunch of them. They probably even work, too, despite the fact that some of them are cheap clones of the R4 cart I use in my own DS. Apparently future R4 firmware may deliberately break the cloned carts, or even DSes using them.

Many of the other cards are R4 clones too, with a panoply of similar-yet-different names - ND1, M3, N5, K6 - and your guess is as good as mine as to which one's best. But at least you can buy the darn things, and get your DSOrganize, Pocket Physics, Colors! or whatever on.

And DealExtreme do indeed have a ton of other fascinating things. Toys, tools, bare electronic components (including lots of high-power LED paraphernalia), deadly terrorist laser weapons, stationery... you name it.

They also have an affiliate scheme, for which I've signed up. So if you go there from my links, I ought to get a cut!

Posted in MiniReviews, Nerdery, Toys. 17 Comments »

Firepower: Just a fricking misunderstanding

26 September 2008 — dan

"You will see: we will eventually be vindicated and our investors will be well rewarded", claims Firepower boss Tim Johnston in an interview with The Australian. He also insists that he hasn't been hiding at all. (He just hasn't been anywhere the people who want him to pay what he owes have been looking. Oh, and not answering the phone, either.)

Johnston insists he's perfectly innocent, all of those never-shown-to-do-anything Firepower "products" work fine, Four Corners' report was a vile calumny, the investors will all get their money back, et cetera.

He also, at one point, is reported to have used the word "fricking".

And now, another link-dump of news stories about Firepower that've come out since my last update, in roughly chronological order, newest first:

Apparently Rose and Willie Porteous, or maybe only Rose, also bought into Firepower, and are as a result now one step closer to the penury which anybody which who cares to read up on them will, I think, agree they deserve.

The Australian High Commissioner in Pakistan is reported to have "acted unwisely" when she bought 200,000 shares in Firepower, but has been judged to have suffered enough, and so kept her job.

And there was a brief flap over a gaggle of Australian Defence Force chiefs who, apparently, invested in Firepower, and then became rather kindly disposed to the company. To the point where they let Firepower use the Navy frigate HMAS Sydney for a function in 2006, for free.

The function was to launch the basketball season for the Firepower-sponsored Sydney Kings, who followed Firepower down the plughole and no longer exist.

(The above Herald report is excellent, except for the part where it says "Firepower employees at the function literally swept from one person to the next generating confidence". One would think they used brooms for this purpose, but they were on a ship, so perhaps they swabbed the deck with mops.)

Firepower, by the way, gave people attending the above Frigate Function goodie bags including some of their magic pills, the unimpressiveness of which started the ball rolling at the Herald.

The previously-mentioned Warren Anderson said that people who'd lost money on Firepower were just "greedy". This statement was received with a certain amount of astonishment by the company's liquidator, who pointed out that expecting an investment to appreciate is kind of... the only reason why anybody invests.

Anderson's point was that many Firepower investors had "accountants and bloody lawyers and Christ knows what", and so should have been able to tell that the company wasn't on the level. And, one presumes, should then have sold on their foolishly-purchased shares for a handsome profit before Firepower folded. You know - like Warren Anderson himself did.

The above-linked article isn't primarily about the liquidator; it's about some un-named "Sydney man" who's alleged by a large group of small shareholders (presumably not including the ones who had "accountants and lawyers"...) to have embezzled five million bucks from Firepower. And therefore impeded Firepower's efforts to keep all of that money for itself.

The creditors are chasing this guy because, according to local litigation-funding company IMF, they've got bugger-all chance of squeezing any cash out of Firepower's entirely straightforward and above-board international operations. The liquidator previously said that unless the investors find someone to sue, they're not going to get a penny.

And then there's one Frank Timis, described in The Australian as "a colourful Romanian-Australian businessman", who says he's starting a new business that'll repay (plus ten per cent!) all of the ripped-off investors.

Timis and his new company, the entirely-unconfusingly-named "Greenpower" (or perhaps "Green Power"), scores a mention in the recent Johnston interview piece, too. Apparently Tim and Frank will be issuing free shares in the new company to shareholders in the old, so don't you worry about that.

(About 25 seconds after Timis said investors would be paid back, the IMF litigation-funders pointed out that this promise might just possibly not be worth an awful lot. IMF, like others, advises investors to consider their money to be gone, gone, gone.)

Posted in Firepower, Scams, Strange Tales. Leave a Comment »

What does pink taste like?

20 September 2008 — dan

Musk sticks are, I think, a peculiarly Australian sweet.

Actually, I think the whole "musk" flavour may only exist here.

I used to love musk sticks when I was a kid.

(I'll spare you the tediously wholesome story about carefully buying lollies with my pocket money on the holidays and making them last as long as I could and the milkman's cheery whistle and so on.)

So I bought some, the other day. Every Australian supermarket has them.

It turns out that I still like musk sticks. But because the sticks I ate when I was a kid had been sitting, unwrapped, in the shop for some time, I prefer them a bit dried out and crusty. The second comment on this post about musk sticks at Candy Blog indicates that I am not alone in this preference.

(I found that putting the sticks in a colander on top of a heating vent for a couple of hours dried 'em out nicely.)

That Candy Blog post, though, and the previous one about musk Life Savers, alerted me to the strangeness of these sweets.

Here in Australia, there are musk sticks, and musk Life Savers, and little hard musk pellets too. They're all pink, and they all taste the same, and I cannot for the life of me tell you what they taste of.

"Musk", here, does not indicate some flavour that started out being squeezed from some animal's glands. Well, not unless that animal had a sort of... flowery... smell, anyway.

I haven't actually smelled any natural musk, so perhaps it's amazingly similar to the candy smell. People grasping for words to describe lolly-musk often say it's "perfume-y", after all, and natural musk was used as a perfume component.

But since natural musk is alleged to smell "animalic, earthy and woody", I don't think it can really be much like the lolly musk.

I agree with the memorable observation that musk lollies smell a bit like an old lady's handbag.

But that doesn't really get it right, either.

Musk sticks actually smell, and taste... like musk sticks.

If pressed, I might venture the opinion that they taste pink.

It's sort of like that weird "bubble-gum flavour" that emerged as an entity unto itself at some point.

If you've never tasted "musk" and get the opportunity - without having to pay $25 for an air-mailed bag of the things, of course - I highly recommend it. You probably won't be crazy about the taste, but this is not one of those confrontational "local delicacies" like salted liquorice. (Which is, of course, not salted with mere sodium chloride - it's got ammonium chloride in it!)

The taste of a musk stick will hang around in your mouth for rather a while, but you probably won't be unhappy about that. It's pretty inoffensive.

This all reminded me that here in Australia, we really don't have any big guns in the "local delicacy" wars.

No hákarl...

...no lutefisk, no hundred-year-old eggs or casu marzu or balut.

OK, there are witchetty grubs, but it's not as if most of the Australian population have ever even seen one of those. And in any case, I'm told that witchetty grubs are actually quite delicious, if you can get over your irrational fear of eating an arthropod that doesn't happen to live in the sea.

Vegemite is the ISO Standard Weird Australian Food, but I'm here to tell you that it's really not that peculiar. Wipe a smear of Vegemite on a cracker and bite into it and you'll be experiencing an odd savory foodstuff, not some incredible brain-flipping toxic creation.

I was born and raised on Vegemite and so spread it on my bread like mortar on a brick, but in more moderate amounts, Vegemite is really not that big of a deal.

And I think that's pretty much it for weird Aussie food. I mean, what else is there for even the least adventurous tourist to get bothered about? Meat pies? Pie floaters? Sausage rolls?

Heck, even Chiko Rolls aren't that bad if, as with the witchetty grubs, you don't think too hard about what you're eating.

And not a lot of people find themselves retching after being cruelly forced to eat a lamington or pavlova, or even a Moreton Bay bug.

Am I forgetting anything? Has Australia actually managed to come up with any truly confronting food?

Posted in Strange Tales. 37 Comments »

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