Perpetual claims, perpetually continued

24 February 2010 — dan

A reader writes:

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

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

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

Andrew

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in Scams, Science, Strange Tales. 5 Comments »

Next on Discovery: Alchemy for beginners!

24 February 2010 — dan

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

Sure you would!

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

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

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

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

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

(As usual, The Onion says it best.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in Scams, Science. 16 Comments »

Your weekend Firepower update

30 January 2010 — dan

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

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

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

Posted in Firepower, Scams, Strange Tales. 3 Comments »

This fuel pill for sure, Rocky!

27 January 2010 — dan

I'll try to keep this brief.

A reader has brought the melodiously-titled "Shot In The Gas" to my attention.

Shot In The Gas sell fuel additives - pills, and a liquid - which are, for the usual highly implausible reasons, supposed to improve fuel economy, reduce emissions, et cetera.

And, also as usual, these additives are supposed to work in both petrol and diesel engines, despite the large difference in operational principles.

Shot In The Gas's "Test Reports" page tells us that a truck achieved a massive 56% fuel-economy improvement when its fuel was treated with their liquid additive.

They say the truck was driven by a man called Brian.

And that's about all they say, as far as information about how well the test was controlled goes.

(There is, of course, also a page of testimonials. I don't see why they didn't put all of those on the Test Reports page, since they're all equally untraceable, and equally don't even pretend to be a properly controlled test.)

Apparently Shot In The Gas's products "have been tested for millions of driven miles" (emphasis theirs). But, as usual, nobody has at any point done any proper independent rolling-road, or even ad-hoc blinded, tests.

Such tests could unlock literally billions of dollars a year of income for whichever of the dozens, if not hundreds, of these miracle-fuel-additive companies actually turns out to be telling the truth.

But none of them ever do the tests.

The USA alone consumes about 380 million gallons of gasoline per day. That adds up to about a billion US dollars per day, even at the USA's low petrol prices, a bit more than $US2.50 per gallon at the moment.

If some miracle fuel additive reduced this consumption by a mere ten per cent, it'd be saving about a hundred million dollars a day, or around thirty-five billion US dollars per year.

(And this is just in the USA, and just gasoline. World petrol plus diesel consumption is of course quite a lot higher.)

But wait - Shot In The Gas have an explanation!

"This is not new technology. It has been around for 30 to 40 years". But "it wasn't cost effective to use the product until gasoline reached $2.00 a gallon".

Oooh, nice dodge!

Except... petrol has cost more than $US2 a gallon in most of the civilised world for, oh, a decade or three, right? I think petrol prices in the UK have, if you correct for inflation, never been below two US dollars per gallon. They've definitely almost never been below two inflation-adjusted UK pounds per gallon (PDF).

So even if Shot In The Gas hadn't been around to make a mountain of money in Europe for the last "30 to 40 years", one would presume someone would have.

Someone?

Anyone?

Posted in Cars, Firepower, Scams. 20 Comments »

Your worthless fuel pills, or your life!

21 January 2010 — dan

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

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

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

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

You may have seen this procedure in a movie.

(If you haven't, allow me to recommend "The Magician"!)

Mr Nairn says that nothing of the sort ever happened.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in Firepower, Scams, Strange Tales. 4 Comments »

The allegedly-wireless allegedly-RCA "Airnegy" alleged charger

13 January 2010 — dan

A reader writes:

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

Airnegy charger

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

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

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

Tim

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

(I am, unsurprisingly, not alone.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in Electricity, Scams, Science, Strange Tales. 10 Comments »

The £795,000 paperweight

19 December 2009 — dan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Expensive rock

For... this.

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

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

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

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

Posted in Scams, Strange Tales. 6 Comments »

Welcome back to Year 1 of the thrilling Firepower hearing

16 December 2009 — dan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in Firepower, Scams, Strange Tales. 6 Comments »
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