(This post probably won't be of much interest to many of you, but my answer to this e-mail got long enough that I figured I should make a post out of it.)
A reader writes:
I realise that this doesn't fall into one of the usual categories of your on-line works, but surely it's not as strange as asking which shampoo you use?
I am fortunate enough to soon be travelling from the UK to Sydney. Whilst there my girlfriend and I thought that we would take a trip up into the Blue Mountains, most likely by taking the train to Katoomba [where I live -Dan]. Whilst there we plan to do the usual touristy things such as taking panoramic photos of the Three Sisters and admiring thewaterfall.
Seeing as this is your neck of the woods, I was hoping that you might be kind enough to offer any other recommendations for a couple of car-less tourists who don't mind a bit of a walk? Any recommendations would be gratefully received, from a nice place to stop for lunch to a good public spot where we might be able to see some of the flocks of birds that terrorise you each day, or somewhere that has particularly nice views over the mountains.
Thank you,
Richard
I'm sure I'm forgetting some stuff, but here are some semi-random thoughts:
On the way from Sydney to Katoomba or back, if you want to see numerous Australian animals up close (plus various random things like peacocks), go to Featherdale Wildlife Park, which is moderately close to the station.
Featherdale is pretty much a whole day out by itself, but you could go there in the morning and then on to Katoomba in the evening and stay overnight, or something.
There's a very friendly flock of cockatoos that hangs around the Royal Botanic Gardens in central Sydney, too; there's no guarantee they'll actually be there when you are, but take some bird seed and if they're there, you will be covered with them. Long sleeves recommended.
The Gardens also have a zillion fruit bats and ibises.
The first will make a lot of noise but ignore you, the second will try to steal your lunch.
The ibises will eat from your hand, and their super-long beaks mean they are essentially unable to harm you even if they want to.
Back in Katoomba, there are numerous restaurants and cafes. "Fresh" is good, but only do breakfast and lunch. When I go there I only ever order the BLAT (BLT plus avocado), because it is a perfect BLAT.
Chork Dee is in my not very humble opinion the best Thai restaurant. The Chork Dee Chicken is great if you like coriander; the Chork Dee Chicken with no coriander is great if you do not like coriander.
Three Sisters BBQ is your standard cheap and decent Chinese place. Arjuna is unfortunately a bit of a walk from the centre of town, but is an excellent "authentic" Indian restaurant, which makes it bad for me because I only like Westernised fake Indian food.
The Common Ground Cafe has good, cheap food, but you should not go there unless you like supporting a religious group that forbids completion of high school, says men are better than women, and hits children. Every other restaurant in town hates the Common Ground, because they achieve such low prices by the simple expedient of not paying their workers.
Returning to the happier topic of colourful birds, you should probably go on the Scenic Skyway, run by Scenic World; they now have a Skyway car with a liquid-crystal floor that goes transparent to scare tourists even more. At the Scenic World end of the Skyway they do bird-feedings of some description; birds will come and sit on you and munch seed, and almost certainly not try to take your ear off. I'd get some seed at the supermarket in case the Scenic World people try to sell it at a markup.
The other end of the Skyway is easy to reach from town and as good a place as any to start a walk along the cliff path. The path from there to Echo Point is I think still officially closed after last year's bushfire (in which we came pretty bleeding close to losing our house), but it's perfectly passable. You just have to step over the supports for a couple of bits of boardwalk that burned up. There's no more opportunity to fall to your death than there was before the fire.
The cliff walk continues past the Three Sisters and on towards Leura, Home of Almost Nothing Affordable, or you can go down the Giant Stairway into the valley, from which sane people return to Scenic World on the very steep tourist railway thing that plays the Indiana Jones theme every time it operates and strangely does not seem to have turned any of its operators into serial killers as a result.
(Scenic World also has the world's lamest revolving restaurant - it's a normal restaurant with tables on a big turntable that slowly turns them past the windows. Probably a rip-off too, though I haven't seen the menu. Likewise, do not buy anything, at all, at Echo Point. Buy stuff in town.)
As far as views go... views are bloody everywhere around here. Can't avoid 'em.
Well, unless you come on a Fog Day. Those are rarer in summer, but sometimes it happens. You can still walk the paths and feel a sort of general sense of immensity even if all you can see is stuff inside your own eyeballs, but it's obviously a bit disappointing. You still see the tourist buses trundling around (a day pass could be a handy thing if the walking gets a bit too much...); I can only imagine the driver's saying, "and on your left, nothing; on your right, A TREE no sorry you missed it, more nothing on the left again..."
Sometimes you turn a corner on the path and just walk straight out of the cloud and suddenly have a view again, though.
One other place you might like to go to, especially if you decide to walk to Arjuna, is the old raceway at Catalina Park.
It's a strangely peaceful place where locals walk their dogs and no tourists ever go. Not far from town, but adjacent to nothing except the swimming pools and the aforementioned Arjuna restaurant.
This was all just off the top of my head; I may add another thing or two, and I'm sure there's some stuff I don't even know about. Commenters are welcome to recommend other interesting things to see and do. See how outlandish you can make an entirely fictional tourist attraction before I notice!
I've tried to find the answer to this on my own, but I'm struggling. I'm hoping the question will be easy for you to answer and interesting enough that you'd like to answer it.
I teach products liability, so I've been interested in the Consumer Products Safety Commission's notice of intent to ban Buckyballs and other, similar magnet sets meant to be adult desk toys. The CPSC would like to ban magnet sets that contain magnets that have a flux index of over 50 and are so small that they fit within the CPSC's small parts cylinder. Most of the magnets in these sets are 5mm in diameter, although some sets have smaller magnets.
To be too big for the cylinder, the magnets would have to be more than 31.7mm in diameter.
So, to have an intelligent conversation with my students about this product, I need to know what would be the effect on the utility of these magnet sets if the spherical magnets are made too large to fit in the cylinder. These are NIB magnets. Would the magnet sets with larger magnets still work effectively as desk toys, or would their properties change in a way that would make them less effective? Or are they just less fun if they're that much bigger? Any thoughts you're willing to share would be greatly appreciated. And thanks for reading this far.
Professor X (not his, or her, real name)
Oh, man. That would be such a bad idea. So gloriously, horrifyingly, hilariously bad. But possibly rescuable with some serious design changes, on top of the larger size.
On the plus side, making novelty-toy rare-earth magnets more than 30mm in diameter probably would reduce swallowing incidents to zero.
On the minus side, the per-unit bulk price for rare-earth magnets that big is probably about $5, making a set of more than a few of them rather expensive.
And on the second and rather larger minus side, such a toy would hunger implacably for your blood, bones and cartilage.
(I'm not sure what shape this one-plus-sided, two-minus-sided object I'm describing is. Perhaps it's like the skewed dice.)
As a general rule, large NIB magnets are Serious Business and Absolutely Not Toys. They can clamp onto ferromagnetic objects, and especially onto each other, with terrifying force. If all you lose is the end of your finger, you should count yourself lucky.
Every now and then I actually have some application for my old...
...2-by-1-inch cylinders, or two-inch-square truncated pyramid...
...like for instance finding and extracting the end of a broken feltingneedle from the enormous ball of shed cat fur which I am making because why not.
When I have such an application for one of those magnets, I treat the damn thing like a 70-year-old hand grenade. I would not even consider any activity that required me to use two of them at once. And they're not even all that big. Sort your eBay search highest-price-first and, among the bulk-lot listings for large numbers of smaller magnets, you'll find some real nightmare fuel. Six-by-four-by-two blocks, for God's sake.
Under the shiny coating, rare-earth and conventional ferrite magnets are also quite a fragile ceramic, so two large NIB magnets allowed to smash into each other can easily, essentially, explode.
Spherical NIB magnets are a particular problem, because the contact patches between them are very small. Little 5mm sphere magnets work as toys because their attraction to each other isn't nearly strong enough to be dangerous, and the coating on the outside (usually silvery nickel) is thicker, proportionally speaking. (I think quality NIB spheres may have thicker-than-normal coatings, too.) But large NIB spheres - like, anything from about 10mm up - start to become a pretty serious pinch hazard, and will damage the coating at their contact points quite quickly.
To get around all this for a toy with large magnetic spheres, you could make the spheres out of something non-magnetic, and embed smaller rare-earth magnets in there. Perhaps a 20mm magnet centred in a 35mm block of plastic, for instance, or multiple little magnets in a plastic block, or just a really, really thick epoxy coating. I don't know how well it would work, but at least it wouldn't actively desire your destruction.
The popular shiny black ovoid "rattlesnake egg" magnets can safely be allowed to fly at each other and chatter together, because they're made from durable artificial hematite, and perhaps a bit stronger than ordinary ferrite magnets, but still not nearly as strong as commonplace neodymium-iron-boron magnets. Magnets of this sort might also be a good choice as "giant Buckyballs".
I continue to strongly recommend that people buy a ton of little rare-earth magnets for pennies on eBay; they really are excellent toys, not to mention useful for all sorts of odd things from hanging up tools to clamping small items until the glue sets.
(He found it via Hack A Day, where I would eventually have seen it myself, but I've got 234 unread articles in the Hack A Day feed, so it could be a while before I get to it.)
The transformer's secondary winding looks like a suspension component from a large four-wheel-drive vehicle.
You could moor a ship with this stuff.
There is, I must warn you, a certain amount of profanity in the video.
I think it is entirely justified, given that in this gentleman's estimation thirty thousand amps does not qualify as "serious amps".
"I've got a screwdriver what goes round corners, now!"
I note that the transformer also seems to be running from a variac that makes my 500VA one look very, very inadequate.
The immense current capacity of the transformer causes anything shorting the outputs via small contact points to instantly lose those contact points in a most impressive explosion of sparks. But since the transformer in its present configuration tops out at only about four volts open-circuit, the hazard it (as opposed to its mains-voltage power supply) poses to its operator is only one of burning yourself on hot conductive objects, not electrocution.
"Don't touch anything electrified" is one of those general rules of thumb like "don't put metal in a microwave oven" that are easy to explain to people, but which do not actually apply in every situation.
I still wouldn't want to walk around this guy's house blindfolded, though.
UPDATE: A terribly nice chap asked me to take this post down. I didn't.
In among the supermarket flyers that fell out of today's issue of the local newspaper was this intriguing single glossy page:
Note the subtle change from a promise of FREE TREATMENT for your Arthritic Pain at the top of the page, to "you may be entitled to a FREE TREATMENT", boldface mine, in smaller print further down.
Note also the invaluable diagram to remind any forgetful elderly readers of the parts of their body which they might care to concentrate on, in hopes of feeling some pain there:
The reverse of the flyer:
(I've put the plain text of the flyer at the end of this post, to help searchers find it.)
These people may be 100% kosher, and their promise of some undisclosed kind of pain relief that may or may not be free may be given in entirely good faith.
I am a horrible, cynical person, though, so I have my doubts.
Pain relief is the gold-standard undisputed champion of things that placebos, and woo-woo alt-med nonsense that is in truth actually just a placebo, can treat.
This is a good thing. If you believe your pain is reduced, then your pain is reduced. Hurrah!
It's not like believing a small electrical gadget is curing your cancer when it isn't. Tumours are objective things, but pain is subjective. If you think it's gone, it's gone.
For one thing, someone making this sort of offer may not be selling a true placebo. The classic example in alt-med arthritis treatment is TraditionalChineseMedicine arthritis pills, often called "black pearl" pills, which have on many occasions been found to simply contain plenty of normal non-Traditional-Chinese-Anything painkillers and anti-inflammatories.
On the plus side, this makes those pills work really well. But unknowingly taking large doses of steroidal anti-inflammatories, benzodiazepines and plain old paracetamol (a compound whose sole shortcoming as a painkiller is a rather narrow therapeutic index, the difference between an effective dose and a toxic one...) is a good way to end up unexpectedly hospitalised, or dead. Especially if you're as old as the average buyer of arthritis medication.
(The sellers of such medicines usually refer to the presence of real medicines in their woo-woo pills as "contamination". It is a wonder which passeth all understanding that "contamination" of alternative medicines always seems to involve substances that do what the alternative medicine is supposed to do. Never speed in the sleeping pills, never codeine in the erectile-dysfunction pills. A mystery, indeed.)
And then there are the alt-med treatments which are actually activelyharmful. Poisonous, but otherwise placebo, anti-pain medicine may actually work better against pain than a sugar-pill placebo; if it's got obvious unpleasant side effects, then it must be powerful stuff!
(See also, sellers of worthless medicines who put warnings on them that say, for instance, that they should not be taken by pregnant women. And sham surgery, the most powerful placebo there is!)
Elderly people are ideal customers for a lot of scam artists. The perfect customer is someone who's losing their marbles but unaware of it - the dottier you become, the less qualified you are to detect your dottiness, and the more likely you are to conclude that you've made a solid deal when someone more compos mentis than you can see you're being thoroughly ripped off.
(Just this moment I myself received a very attractive e-mail offer from "MR.ALEX GOODWILL", who appears to be quite a prolific philanthropist.)
And, of course, there are also many older people who are just desperate for something, anything, to stop everything from hurting all the time. They may be as suspicious of a "Free treatment! Honest!" flyer like this as I am, and just as sure that whatever it is, it probably won't actually be free, but they're willing to try it anyway, in pursuit of even a slim chance of making their life a little more worth living.
Personally, the second I saw this flyer I was ready to bet money I had borrowed from Jimmy the Toecutter that this offer, whatever it was, was some sort of alt-med woo-woo BS.
But again, who knows, it might be totally legit. So I did a little digging.
When I searched for chunks of text from the flyer all I found was this Word document on a server belonging to the New Zealand Advertising Standards Authority. It's a complaint about a very similar-sounding flyer, including the helpful body diagram. But that flyer actually named the provider of the alleged treatment - "Niagara Healthcare".
(Niagara's response is a pretty great piece of weaseling, and a successful one, too; the complaint was not upheld!)
Perhaps my flyer had nothing to do with Niagara, though. So I searched for "Digitalpop", the name of the company on the postage-paid response thing, and "niagara". And hey presto, DigitalPop are listed as the ad agency for Niagara here in Australia.
I don't know if that'd stand up in court, but it's good enough for me. And even if this flyer by some quirk of fate doesn't have anything to do with Niagara, I think they're still a mob worth writing about.
Niagara are, you see, in the motorized-massage-gizmo business. Here's their Australian site. They sell handheld massagers, chairs with motorized rubby things in the upholstery, and other such things, including adjustable chairs and beds that help the infirm to get up, and so on.
They don't actually list any prices, though. Not on their Australian site, not on their UK one, and not on this US site either. That last site does have this Sale page proudly offering a ten-inch-thick queen-sized memory-foam mattress for a mere $US699, down from $US1499. I'm sure it is far, far better in many very convincing ways than the superficially strangely similar memory-foam mattresses you can get for three to four hundred dollars on eBay. Doubtless those are all cheap crap that will fall apart in no time.
(I bought the cheapest memory-foam pillows I could find on eBay, more than ten years ago now. They are still in perfect working order.)
Apart from that, the Niagara sites are... priceless. If you want the price of a chair, for instance, then on the Aussie site you have to fill in this quote-request form.
That is seldom a good sign.
It would appear that you can pay 1600 New Zealand dollars (more than $US1300, as I write this) just for a handheld Niagara massager, and I don't know what the chairs cost but there's a used one on eBay Australia right now with bids starting at seven and a half thousand dollars. There's a "Niagara Platinum 6 Electric Massage Therapy Bed" on offer, too; a snip at $AU5000 Or Best Offer!
(There's also a Niagara chair on eBay.com.au for less than $200, but it's only heated, not a massager.)
Niagara's Australian "key benefits" page quotes four alleged studies supporting the usefulness of their "Cycloid Vibration Therapy". I was surprised to discover that the second and the third studies on the list actually seem to exist and be published and everything. There doesn't seem to be much in the way of replication of their results, and neither study is of pain relief, and although the Niagara page calls them "recent studies", they're actually 28 and 31 years old, respectively. But they're still well ahead of the usual "studies" that are supposed to support unconventional therapies. For whatever that's worth.
I could find no evidence of the existence of the last-mentioned study at all, though. And the closest I could find for the first one was this study, which seems to have been done by the same guy quoted on the Niagara page and to be studying much the same thing quoted on the Niagara page, but which is singing the praises of "LPG Endermologie" rather than "Niagara Therapy".
"Endermologie" buzzes your flesh around to make you look slightly younger, and actually does work, for suitably small values of "work". (I'm sure all the ladies on the Endermologie Web site are actually in late middle age and displaying the miraculous results of the therapy, because it'd be a serious insult to their customers' intelligence if they depicted their products being used by heavily Photoshopped and distinctly underweight 20-year-olds.)
For some reason, the little list of studies on the Australian Niagara site doesn't include this 2002 study, which is the only abstract I could find in the whole of MEDLINE that actually refers to "cycloid vibration therapy", which is what Niagara call their great discovery.
That study's abstract says it found that cycloidal vibration along with compression bandaging helped the healing of venous leg ulceration. Except that doesn't seem to really be what it found at all, because there was no control group, just 21 patients getting their bandaged injuries buzzed. A better study would have some patients bandaged without massage, some patients bandaged and vibrated the expensive Niagara way, and some patients bandaged and vibrated with the finest, cheapest electric massager the nearest sex shop had to offer.
What, I wondered innocently, have other people had to say about Niagara?
Ricability, a UK consumer-research charity, gives Niagara special attention in this PDF, titled "Sharp selling practices in the selling of assistive products to older people".
And, interestingly, the UK Advertising Standards Authority did not uphold a complaint (in this PDF) about a "free trial" of Niagara products not lasting long enough.
In Niagara's successful response to the complaint, they said that their free trial lasted "approximately 45 minutes". It seems clear to me that this "free trial" is the "free treatment" that my flyer is offering, if you send in the form. A salesman "medically trained consultant" comes to your house and sets up a buzzy thing, you get to use it for a little while, then he tries to sell you a handheld massager that costs as much as 25 Hitachi Magic Wands, or a chair or bed that costs as much as a good used car.
(Niagara's response also says that they've sent 500 million mailings about their products in the previous 20 years. I don't have much to say about that, I'm just boggling a bit. No wonder their scientific evidence is thin on the ground, even though they proudly say they've been in business since 1949. They've been far too busy printing advertising material to ever clearly demonstrate their very expensive massage doodads do anything that far cheaper, but suspiciously similar, ones do not.)
Maybe the Niagara gadgets all work great, and are more than worth their hefty, semi-secret price tags. Maybe this flyer doesn't even have anything to do with Niagara, despite the many points of similarity. Maybe we are all actually brainsinjars. Who knows?
What this looks like to me, though, is an offer of "free treatment" from a company whose products are actually so astonishingly expensive that they'll only tell you what the things cost if you consent to talk to a trained salesperson. They market these expensive products to elderly people, who may be more amenable to tricky sales techniques, or unaware of cheaper alternatives. And Niagara's products may be more effective at relieving arthritis pain than far cheaper massage devices, but they present no evidence that this is the case, despite a proud claim of having been in business for more than sixty years.
One of my personal rules of thumb is, "nothing worth buying is sold door-to-door".
I now add another one: "If a product is a secret, you probably shouldn't buy it".
And now, a transcript of the flyer, to make it easier for searchers to find this page.
Are You Living With...
Arthritic Pain?
Is Pain impacting your daily lifestyle...
Complete this application today to receive your
FREE TREATMENT
DON'T put up with it any longer!
Have you been diagnosed with?
Arthritic Pain
Tension
Poor Circulation
Fatigue
Cramps
Fluid Retention
Sciatica
Swollen Joints
Where is most of your pain?
Neck
Hips
Shoulders
Legs
Back
Knees
Arms/Hands
Feet
Thank you very much for your co-operation.
By completing and returning this form you may
be entitled to a FREE TREATMENT.
SEND NOW FOR
YOUR FREE!
TREATMENT
The other side:
FREE TREATMENT
Happiness is nothing more than good health, Mobility and Quality of Life
We respect your privacy
Your privacy is important to us. We are committed to ensuring that any personal and health information you provide us is handled properly and with all due care. In addition, we comply with the National privacy principles and the Privacy Act 1988. Collecting health information is necessary to ensure we provide you with an excellent service. We will only use or disclose your health information to the extent you have consented to such use or disclosure.
Digital Pop ABN 87 136 922 551
Important If symptoms persist, sees your doctor or health care professional. Use only as directed.
TUCK IN AND POST
Simply fold along the dotted vertical line marked First Fold, make the second fold, then tuck the third fold into the back of the second fold and post.
Even if your alarm clock is one of those Zen alarm clocks with melodious metal chimes, or it's your phone playing New Age music at gradually increasing volume, an alarm clock is still not offering you anything. It's just invading your rest and causing you to start your day with a little slap of sadness and irritation, arguably made even worse by the snooze button's empty gift of a few more minutes of half-sleep. Which you'll probably only spend trying to integrate your interrupted dreams with wakefulness.
(It is, at least, pleasant when I realise for the umpteenth time that I am not, in fact, still in high school.)
Or you may just lie there, living in fear of the return of the cursed alarm.
I shudder to think how much human misery those millions of little morning insults have added up to, over the centuries since humans first invented a water clock that would make a noise at a particular time.
Presuming you can't just rearrange your life so it doesn't matter when you get up, the best option in the pursuit of timed wakefulness is, clearly, a butler. A butler who brings you a cup of tea, even as he murmurs his apology for the regrettable necessity that you be conscious.
This one's mine. It's not a particularly elegant or collectible example, but it does the job.
The modern teasmade - the term has become a genericised trademark, in Britain at least - is essentially an electric kettle controlled by an alarm clock. When the alarm time is reached, the kettle element turns on, and a few minutes later boiling water is delivered to the tea-leaves.
Or to anything else you put in the little teapot, for that matter. If you want alarm-clock instant soup orBovril or anything else you can prepare by putting it in a pot and pouring boiling water on it, you can have that too. (Might be a bit of a challenge eating soup out of the little teapot, though, if there are bits in it too big to exit the spout. You could also make a hot-milk-based beverage in a teasmade. But possibly only once.)
Most Automatic Food Machines, especially the ones that look like the coolest thing in the universe, have problems. They don't work in the first place, or they work only for a little while without unfeasible amounts of maintenance, or they're uncleanable, or their sole desire is to maim or murder their operator.
(There's also a small sub-category of wonder food gadgets that can only work by breaking laws of physics.)
A teasmade is not like that.
It is easy for a tired person to set up of an evening, it does what it's supposed to do without fuss, it has no moving parts except the control buttons, and its cleaning requirements are close to zero.
(Classically, you are never meant to do anything more than rinse a teapot; the accumulating tannin stains are supposed to make the tea taste better, though I'm pretty sure that claim doesn't stand up to double-blind testing. If you've got unusually hard water or use a teasmade for a long time then you may also need to clean lime-scale out of the boiling vessel and tube, but just running the teasmade with water and vinegar in the boiler should take care of this.)
The earliest alarm-clock tea-makers were created in the late nineteenth century. They were shiny and clockwork, with alcohol burners and a match-striker or other similarly implausible mechanism to light the burner when the alarm went off. These devices were less of a threat to life and limb than one might imagine, but were still less than entirely convenient to operate, and also rather expensive. And, to be fair, if there's one thing that'll wake you up even more effectively than a nice cup of tea, it's a fire on your bedside table.
The modern teasmade is electric, safe and reliable, and quite cheap. I bought mine used on eBay in 2003, and it cost me only $AU37.85 delivered. That was an unusually good deal - one just like it is on ebay.com.au as I write this, for $AU90 plus delivery - but working and pretty-safe-looking used teasmades routinely sell for well under $US100 delivered, and you can get a brand new one for less than 60 UK pounds delivered within the UK, $AU160-odd delivered to Australia, or around $US165 delivered to the States. Or less, if you buy the version with no radio, of which more shortly.
And yes, American buyers are likely to have voltage problems, because the teasmade is largely unknown outside the UK and as far as I know nobody makes a 110-volt one. More about that in the "buying one" section, below.
How it works
As you can see in the above picture, the modern teasmade really is essentially just a combination of an alarm clock - often, as in mine, a clock-radio - and an electric jug. It's quite easy to use.
The alarm clock in my teasmade works in the same way as every cheap plastic clock-radio. You set the time, you set the alarm, you tune the radio, and you select how you want the thing to wake you up.
In addition to the standard clock-radio options of an awful alarm noise or a tinny radio, though, my teasmade lets you select "tea" alone. You will then be awakened by the sound of boiling water, and the smell of a mildly caffeinated beverage.
My teasmade is rated at 600 watts at 240 volts, which is on the low side by electric-jug standards; here in Australia our mains electricity is a nominal 230 volts and a usual actual 240, so electric jugs with a power rating of 2000 watts or more are common.
My teasmade's water capacity is only about 650 millilitres - that's about 2.6 metric cups. Or a couple of good-sized mugs, or more than three dainty little teacups. The 600-watt heater takes about seven minutes to boil this full capacity; proportionally less if you don't fill it completely. You should of course take account of this boiling delay when setting the alarm time.
The initial heating process is quiet; it'd probably wake me up if I were sleeping without earplugs, since I'm a pretty light sleeper, but most people would sleep through it. The part where the boiling water is transferred to the teapot, though, is quite dramatically loud, and should be an effective alarm for most people all by itself.
The reason for the noise is the way in which my teasmade, like pretty much all others, transfers the boiling water from kettle to teapot. When you put the filling cap back on the boiling vessel, the boiler is sealed except for a metal tube that goes almost to the bottom of the vessel, and arches over to point at the middle of the lid of the...
...distinctive hole-topped little teapot. (If you find a junk-shop teapot that looks like this, you now know where it came from.)
When the water boils, the pressure of the steam pushes the water through the tube and into the pot. It takes no more than ten seconds for my teasmade to transfer a full pot-worth of water through the rather narrow tube. Hence the noise. When the reservoir's empty, it heats above the boiling point of water and a thermostat shuts off the heater. (There's also a switch that disables the heating element if the teapot isn't in place, so night-time absent-mindedness will not result in an unconfined spray of boiling water the next morning.)
If you need more of an alarm to wake you up then, ideally, you'd be able to set the horrible alarm noise or irritating radio station of your choice to go off when the water transfers, or even after the tea's had a few minutes to steep. But my teasmade can't do that; the alarm/radio goes off when the heating element turns on, at which point a single cup of tea is at least five minutes away, and a full pot is at least seven.
Some teasmades have more sophisticated alarm settings, so the alarm can go off when the boiling is completed, not when it starts:
OK, that alarm takes us straight back into the Land of Horrible Awakenings. But at least there is tea.
Going along with its cheap-clock-radio nature, my teasmade has no backup battery, and reverts to that good old flashing "12:00" and no memory of previous settings if there's even a momentary power cut. You can solve this problem by running the teasmade, and for convenience also your bedside lamp, from a small uninterruptible power supply. A pretty beefy UPS will even be able to run the tea-making element; a cheap one won't be able to do that, but will at least ensure continuity of timekeeping if the element doesn't try to click on from UPS power.
I'm hardly an authority on teasmades, though; there are a lot of different models, even if you disregard the pre-electric W. Heath Robinson versions.
This one looks as if it ought to be mystifying Jacques Tati in Play Time.
Buying one
A simple search for "teasmade" (which may or may not correctly geo-target to your country; here the same search is on eBay UK, and here it is on ebay.com) gets 20 relevant hits on eBay.com.au as I write this, plus a few isolated teapots and a Bjork remix with "Teasmade" in its title.
There are some decent deals there, but I probably got my teasmade so very cheaply - under $AU40 delivered - because it was described as "Alarm clock/radio with teapot -RARE", which barely describes it and is almost impossible to search eBay for. I've no idea how I ever found it.
Even if all you throw into the eBay search box is some generic "tea maker" sorts of terms, it's pretty much impossible to filter out umpteen ordinary electric jugs, teapots with infusers in them, teapot-shaped kitchen timers and so on. Here's my best effort at making such a search across the whole of eBay.com.au with possible geo-targeting to other eBay sites; if that doesn't work, here's one for ebay.co.uk and here's one for ebay.com.
The easiest way to get a teasmade today is to just buy one new. For a while I think this may have been impossible unless you found a dealer with "new old stock", but now it's quite easy to buy a Swanteasmade online.
You may or may not care for the Swan's magic-lantern styling and LCD analogue clock, but on the plus side, you know the appliance hasn't been sitting in someone's garage for fifty years, maturing into a truly world-class fire hazard.
The Swan teasmades list on their site for £79.99 (about $US128 or $AU124, as I write this) ex delivery. They don't ship outside the UK, though.
The Swan teasmade is also on sale at this Union-Jack-waistcoat of a site, which is very excited to announce that the "Teasmade Classic is now £48.99 and the Radio Teasmade is now £69.99!". But they, also, only ship within the UK.
There are Swan teasmades on eBay; a US buyer could get the basic no-radio model for $US132.05 plus a mildly suspicious only $US6.00 for shipping, and an Australian shopper could get the same model for $US142.05 delivered.
That's not cheap, but at least the Aussie shopper would only need a plug adapter to connect a UK-sourced teasmade to Australian mains power.
(Until quite recently, it was normal for UK appliances to come with a power cable that terminated in bare wires, because the UK contained an incompatible mixture of the old BS 546 and new - in the sense of "after World War II" - BS 1363 wiring and plug standards. You had to buy a plug separately and screw it onto the cable yourself, or get someone in the shop to do it for you if you were a wuss. Nowadays BS 1363 is dominant enough that I think pretty much all UK appliances come with a BS 1363 plug moulded onto the end of the cable. Chopping that plug off and replacing it with one to suit your own country's mains, so you don't have to use an adapter, is unwise if you don't know what you're doing, but is legal in most countries.)
If you live in the USA, Canada or some other 110-to-120-volt country, though, you have a problem. Some teasmades wired for 110V are alleged to exist, and converting one wouldn't be an insoluble problem for an electronics hobbyist or repair-person, but you ain't gonna get one off the shelf.
So there's nothing stopping someone in the Americas from buying a teasmade from the UK or Australia, but it'll be the wrong voltage and you'll have to run it from a quite beefy step-up transformer.
Your beefy step-up transformer will very probably be an autotransformer, and very probably come with a piece of paper listing a wide variety of devices they strongly recommend you never plug into it on account of autotransformers' poor isolation qualities. A teasmade is likely to fall into at least two of those forbidden categories.
That said, two-pin sockets and cheater plugs do not yet seem to have killed most of the American population, and those are more straightforwardly dangerous than a teasmade running from a step-up transformer. Modern teasmades also have no exposed metalwork, so you're not really living too dangerously if you use one from a step-up transformer. I'd do it. But I am knownformakingpoordecisions.
You can also get fully electrically isolated step-up transformers; they're more expensive, but solve the safety problems. And if your American house has a 240-volt circuit for a clothes-dryer or other high-powered electrical appliance, you can just plug the teasmade into that. (Running an extension cord from the one 240V outlet in the bathroom all the way to your bedroom may negate the safety benefit.)
The frequency of US 240V will be 60Hz instead of the 50Hz the teasmade expects, which will cause old-style electric clocks to run six-fifths as fast as they should. If you get an old teasmade with an analogue clock then there's a good chance it depends on the mains frequency to keep time, and will thus be essentially useless from the wrong frequency. You could run it from a frequency converter, but by now we're getting well out into the crazy-weed.
As long as there's no mains-synchronous clock in your teasmade, a different mains frequency shouldn't bea problem. A newer teasmade with a digital clock will very probably have a quartzoscillator that's immune to mains frequency changes.
Alternatives
By this point, American shoppers intrigued by the teasmade idea but disinclined to subscribe to British Appliance-Fancier Monthly will probably be thinking there must be a simpler way to do this. I mean, you could just plug an electric kettle into a timer switch and get something approximating the same functionality.
It occurs to me that if you get a coffee-maker that has a timer function, put tea leaves in it in place of coffee (and, if you want to get fancy, also replace the paper filter with a mesh strainer screen), you could get very close to a teasmade's functionality without all of the international-voltage bother.
The design of the typical modern no-moving-parts bubble-pump coffee-maker (which, incidentally, uses as a pump the same sort of device that propels a pop-pop boat)...
...is not ideally suited to making tea, but it'd more or less get the job done. A coffee-maker may not quite make Tea According To Orwell, but I'd drink it.
(Oh, and cheap drip coffee makers' primary purpose appears to be to make coffee snobs almost as apoplectic as percolators do, but a teasmade actually makes pretty close to optimal tea. It doesn't pre-heat the teapot, which is a mark against it, but it does deliver really scalding water onto the tea leaves, which is generally agreed to be Correct. Coffee benefits from being made with less-than-boiling water; tea does not. The fact that water boils at only 174°F at 20,000 feet {79°C at 6100 metres} is clearly a far greater problem for British mountain-climbers than any piffling shortage of oxygen.)
Cheap coffee-makers with timers require you to reset the timer every night, because they can't tell whether there's already coffee in the carafe or not, and want to avoid disasters that a forgotten full carafe could cause the next morning. (Leaving the water reservoir empty shouldn't be a problem, though, because even the very cheapest of coffee-makers should have a reliable overheat cut-off.)
You'd think you could get a coffee-making teasmade-analogue with an actual alarm-clock brewing function for a reasonable price, but I'm not sure if you can. I think you can do it with expensive plumbed-in models like this one, but few mere counter-top models seem to have such a feature.
I think this inexpensive Black & Decker model may qualify, though. I managed to find a manual for it online and it does seem to have a repeating alarm-coffee function. If you definitely know of such a thing, please do tell us all about it in the comments.
(On the subject of different approaches to the problem, check this out. Once again, some concept designer has supported my previously-expressedopinion of the breed, in this case by reinventing the teasmade and making it much, much worse. Apart from apparently being carefully designed to set itself on fire from the middle out, this concept design expects you to, first thing in the morning, drink tea out of a hemispherical E-Z Spill(TM) cup with no handle. This design also requires you to put a tea bag in cold water the night before and let it sit there for hours before the water is heated, which I can only presume will cause the ghost of Queen Victoria to manifest, reach into your chest and crush your worthless heart.)
How did Felix Baumgartner break the sound barrier by falling? I've always thought there was some kind of maximum velocity because of drag, even for someone trying to minimize it, in the vicinity of 200km/h.... Is this simply because the atmosphere is sparser up there? (Which would explain the bother about getting 42km off the ground when the max speed is reached after 40 sec.)
In the same vein, to what extent could an astronaut bail out of the ISS, Kursk-style?
The usually-quoted human terminal velocity - as you say, around 200 km/h for a skydiver in "star" pose, well over 300 km/h for a skydiver in a head-down pose with limbs tucked in - applies only to normal skydives, which don't start at such a high altitude that the divers even need supplementary oxygen, much less an actual pressure suit.
15,000 feet (about 4.6 kilometres) is a high jump altitude for a recreational skydiver. At that altitude atmospheric pressure is still above 50% of what it is at sea level. Unacclimated people won't be able to get much done at that pressure and will probably start feeling pretty miserable if they stay there for a long time, but if you're just sitting in a perfectly good aeroplane out of which you shortly intend to jump, it's not a huge problem.
5,000 feet (about 1.5 kilometres) is a much commoner skydiving altitude. At that altitude you've still got 80% of sea-level air pressure. The excitement of the impending jump will have much more effect on you, at that pressure, than the thinning of the air.
EDIT: As per ix's comment below, 13,000 feet is actually quite a common skydiving altitude for, as arkikol's comment explains, regulatory-loophole reasons.
(Katoomba, where I live, is about a kilometre above sea level, which is high for Australia; this country's pretty geologically inactive, so for a very long time erosion's been wearing the mountains down and nothing's been pushing them up. A thousand metres is still enough to drop atmospheric pressure to about 87% of that at sea level, though. I therefore get a very mild sort of altitude training any time I go to the shops, or take Alice the Wonder Dog, who needs more exercise than our friends who own her can quite manage to supply, for a walk.)
You need a pressure suit above the "Armstrong limit" (named for Harry George Armstrong, not Neil), which is the pressure where water boils at human body temperature. There is no way to survive for more than a minute or three above the Armstrong Limit, even if you've got pure oxygen to breathe.
The Armstrong limit is around 19.2 kilometres (about 63,000 feet above sea level, 2.2 Mount Everests), depending on the weather. Felix Baumgartner's Red Bull Stratos dive started from a little more than 39 kilometres above sea level.
At that altitude, the air pressure is about four thousandths of an atmosphere. That's 3.9 hectopascals, or 0.056 pounds per square inch. A home experimenter would be pretty pleased to own a mechanical vacuum pump able to pump down that low.
When the air is this tenuous, there is obviously not much air resistance to slow down a falling body. The terminal velocity of a skydiver (or a feather pillow, for that matter) will thus be far higher than it is for a human falling at normal skydiving altitudes.
The speed of sound in a gas, including air, depends on the gas's density, pressure and temperature. For the earth's atmosphere, this results in a rather odd variation of sound-speed with altitude, conveniently displayed in this graph I just ripped off from Wikipedia:
You can see that temperature is the major factor - the shape of the blue speed-of-sound line closely matches that of the red temperature line. This is because density and pressure decrease together with altitude, and cancel each other out.
You can also see, once again, that at 39 kilometres up where Baumgartner's dive started, there ain't much air left at all. The higher you go, the more perverse it therefore becomes to be concerned about the speed of sound at all, from the point of view of a skydiver.
Breaking the sound barrier at "normal" altitudes is a big deal. Even aircraft that only want to come vaguely close to the speed of sound, like jumbo jets, need special design features to prevent alarming things happening when they get above about Mach 0.75.
("Alarming things" include stuff like "the controls not working any more". Quite a lot of World War II airmen lost their lives when a power-dive pushed them fast enough that air was passing over certain parts of their aircraft at transonic speed. Some aircraft designs also helpfully went into a dive all by themselves if flown too fast.)
When the air's so thin that a paper plane would drop like a rock, though, all the same transonic shockwave stuff may be happening, but the forces involved are too feeble to worry about.
So yes, Baumgartner broke the speed of sound, but it wasn't that big a deal, because he was starting from so high up that he would probably have fallen at least a couple of hundred metres per second even if he'd opened his parachute the moment he jumped.
OK, on to bailing out from the International Space Station. This is problematic.
The ISS is in orbit, so if you jump out of it, you'll just be in orbit too. Whatever relative velocity you can give yourself with your legs will not be enough to make a significant difference. In order to actually fall into the atmosphere, you'll have to kill some of your orbital velocity with some sort of thruster - this is how spacecraft "de-orbit".
Let's presume you have a magical reactionless thruster doodad that lets you bring yourself to a halt relative to the surface of the earth directly beneath you, just as if you'd jumped out of a balloon that'd somehow made it to the ISS's altitude. Presumably you planned to further employ your reactionless lift belt or boots or whatever to float down majestically at whatever speed you wanted. But when you pressed the button to kill your orbital momentum, the device burned out, and now you're falling.
The ISS's low Earth orbit is about 400 kilometres above sea level. At that altitude, there's still enough of a trace of atmosphere to cause the ISS's orbit to decay by a couple of kilometres per month, so it requires frequent "reboosting" to stop it falling into the ocean ahead of schedule. From the point of view of someone who just told his fellow cosmonauts that he's just going outside and might be some time, though, it's a vacuum at 400 kilometres.
Low earth orbit is high enough that the Earth's gravity is somewhat attenuated, but only from about 9.8 metres per second squared to about 9.0.
So, starting at 400 kilometres and accelerating at nine metres per second per second, with both gravity and air density slowly rising as you fall. I don't know exactly how this'd work out, but I think that by the time you'd fallen 300 kilometres and passed the 100-kilometres arbitrary "start of space" altitude, you'd be falling at about 2.5 kilometres per second.
That's a pretty darn impressive speed, but it's much more manageable than actual orbital velocity. The ISS's orbital velocity is about seven kilometres per second; when the Shuttle Columbiabroke up into flaming particles, it had managed to slow down to around six kilometres per second. Since energy increases with the square of the speed, an object travelling at seven kilometres per second that's trying to slow down has 7.8 times as much energy to get rid of as one travelling at 2.5 km/s.
2.5 km/s at a hundred kilometres altitude would probably be survivable, perhaps with some sort of ribbon parachute or similar drag device to bleed off speed steadily as the air got thicker.
But all of this is a bit silly, because it assumes that you've somehow managed to get rid of the several kilometres per second of your initial orbital velocity. That, there, is the big problem. If an orbiting spacecraft had enough reaction mass to kill its orbital velocity while it was still in space, it could then use wings or pop a gigantic parachute or three and sail down quite serenely, with no need for troublesome heat shields at all.
(This is why the Virgin SpaceShipOne and Two don't need heat shields. They're suborbital spaceplanes, not "real" spacecraft. They go very high by aircraft standards, then they fall back down again, never gaining or having to dispose of actual orbital velocity.)
I've been keeping a lazy eye on your site for a while now, never realizing that it was literally built over the top of an older civilization. It was fascinating to briefly visit, and compare the modern versus ancient artwork and architecture.
_
[yes, this correspondent's name is an underscore. I would have rendered it "_", but that looks like some kind of emoticon]
I started Dan's Data in late 1998. That small collection of earlier Web pages started in 1997, and couch-surfed for hosting on a semi-random series of servers, ending up on dansdata.com in 2002.
Back in the Nineties, this sort of thing was topical humour:
..."EMPower Modulator" universal electronic magic Good For What Ails You device. (Years later, I got a chance to look inside one, and found pretty much what you'd expect from thesesorts of products.)
A big part of the evidence for the Modulator's effectiveness in curing everything from allergies to rainy days came from an electrodiagnostic device called the "Omega Acubase", an enthusiast about which was not at all happy with me.
Do you think a single, low-expense person can actually, really make a living with a site such as yours in 2012? I'm talking referrals, sponsorships and such, not living off donations (not that I'd mind, but I think you'd need a Wikipedia-like amount of readers, and possibly Jimmy Wales' creepy face, to pull that off).
I think you definitely can, even without staring into the soul of everybody who visits one of the most popular Web sites ever.
(Should I decide to try that, I would of course use...
...this picture.)
That doesn't mean it's easy to make money with a Web site these days, though.
The main problem is that there's no way for a review site or similar enterprise to make a decent amount of money from the beginning. If it's a review site, every review can make you a small but non-trivial amount of money for the first week or so of its life, and then long-tail off into cents per day. But if you've got a thousand pages each making you 15 cents a day, you'll be doing OK. When you've only made it to the 50-page mark, though, you could easily be grossing no more than 25 bucks a day, which ain't gonna pay the rent in most of the Western world.
If you're in Africa or eastern Europe or something then this could of course still be a very workable proposition, but making affiliate deals with local businesses, generally on a per-sale basis, is a major way for small sites to get going, and local businesses in Uganda have a lot less money to throw around. There may also be major obstacles to getting money from richer countries sent to you in a poor one; I don't know.
I have always had it very easy. This is partly because I was smarter with my money during the dot-comnonsense than some of my friends. (Shiny new car and inner-city apartment? Nope, I'll go with rusty used car and living with mum, thanks. I did blow a surprising amount of money on this toy, though - brushless motors were EXOTIC back then.)
My easy ride was also partly because I for some reason am good at writing, and at understanding computers.
(I think MichaelBywater was partly responsible for this. He wrote the computer column in Punch in the eighties, giving me the chance to read comedic writing about Lotus 1-2-3 when I was a small child with absolutely no understanding of what this software actually did, but he also anonymously wrote the gonzo-ish "Bargepole" column, which I also didn't really understand but which connected some of my neurons in quite novel ways.)
I've had it so easy mainly because I was lucky, in the abstract sense of being born white and male in a rich country, and in the less abstract sense of just having job opportunities fall in my lap. The small publisher that was my first gig turned out to be based walking distance from my house (or, more accurately, from my mum's house), and my fairly brief gig with the Dark Lord Murdoch came via a headhunter. I think I had to ask one or two magazines to let me write for them, but mainly they asked me.
You don't need this sort of implausible good fortune to make a Web site that makes a modest but live-on-able amount of money, but you do need a way to ride out the period of time while you make the site big and well-known enough for that income to build.
To do this, presuming you're not already wealthy or a kid living at home, you need to start the site as a hobby in parallel with a real job. Preferably the kind of real job that lets you sneakily work on your Web site while you're there, which can actually be done legitimately if you're a parking-station attendant or late-night petrol-station cashier or something, so a significant portion of your job description is "sit right there, and remain awake".
You also, of course, have to come up with some sort of idea for your site that can make money. The mass affiliate deals like Amazon or eBay are unlikely to be adequate, even if you do loathsome Sell Sell Sell stuff, as described in books that use the word "monetize". You need more direct deals with advertisers and retailers to make it work, as I did with Dan's Data and Aus PC Market. I made decent money when I reviewed Aus PC products; I made not much when I reviewed stuff from elsewhere. (And no, I didn't sell the free review product when I was done.)
Because of this, Dan's Data does not make me much money these days, because I burned out on reviewing computer gear years ago, and Aus PC gear reviews were my principal money source. If I were still writing about cases and CPU coolers and monitors all the time then Dan's Data would by itself still make me a passable living, but I just couldn't face another PSU or video card after a while, so now Dan's Data makes pocket-money only.
If you can start a site that covers some niche that (a) isn't already utterly saturated with high-quality journalism (or whatever you plan to do) already, and (b) lets you hook up with a business or three for mutual benefit, you absolutely can still start and run a Web site for a living.
Hell, if you're good enough you can even make adequate money from plain old ads; that's how the superlative Rock, Paper, Shotgunworks. They accept donations as well, but I only now discovered that, since their donation page is harder to find than my cunning combined e-mail/donation scheme.
(I think the excellence of Rock, Paper, Shotgun and numerous other big game-review sites qualifies that market as "utterly saturated with high-quality journalism"; I wouldn't pin too much hope on a new game-review site making its owner much money these days. If you write good stuff, though, you can at least count on sites like Rock, Paper, Shotgun and news sites like the extremely venerable Blue's News to link to you fairly often. Starting a site that competes with Blue's News, Slashdot and other news sites that've all been taking body blows just from direct review-site RSS feeds a while ago, then Diggand now Reddit is, needless to say, not likely to be an express train to boundless wealth.)
, or a chair or bed that costs as much as a good used car.
, put tea leaves in it in place of coffee (and, if you want to get fancy, also replace the paper filter with a mesh strainer screen), you could get very close to a teasmade's functionality without all of the international-voltage bother.
, but few mere counter-top models seem to have such a feature.
may qualify, though. I managed to find 
