A queen among quacks

14 September 2009 — dan

I discovered yesterday that, early this month, Hulda Regehr Clark died.

In the same way that the Westboro Baptist Church and its astonishingly ghastly leader, Fred Phelps, are an excellent choice if you need an example of a religious organisation that pretty much nobody sane could like, so Hulda Clark was the archetypal example of an out-there quack. She wrote a number of books, which include The Cure for All Cancers, The Cure for HIV/AIDS and The Cure For All Diseases. And she was, so far as anyone can tell, quite sincere; unlike scam artists like Kevin Trudeau, Hulda really was telling us all how to cure every disease in the world, in her opinion.

But Clark was more than just a good example of a sincere quack. Fred Phelps is a raving loony with very little popular following, but Clark's similarly deranged ideas have attracted a surprising number of true believers, and a steady stream of desperate people heading to her clinic (relocated, after some unpleasantness, from the USA to Mexico...), to piss away the last of their money and/or life.

Hulda's ideas included a firm conviction that vast swathes of human disease are caused by liver flukes, and that the flukes can be killed by a little electrical "zapper" device of her own invention. Whereupon your nonresectable pancreatic cancer will go away. This very clear sort of objectively-provable cause and cure makes Clark's theories a useful example of whacko quackery; in order to believe Clark, you're required to be utterly ignorant of, or convinced of the invalidity of, fundamental elements of scientific medicine that've been around for at least a hundred years.

Orac of Respectful Insolence has put old Hulda pretty comprehensively to bed in his Requiem for a Quack, so I'll try not to ramble on too long about What This All Means and how it's another example of why critical thinking is important and yadda yadda yadda.

(I bought another couple of copies of Why People Believe Weird Things the other day. One is already earmarked for a young relative.)

As Orac says at the end of his post, and as many other people have said - where are the people Clark cured, if she ever cured anyone? There ought to be hundreds, maybe thousands, of people who were once gravely ill but are still alive and well today, because of her.

It's like faith healers. If they really are healing people of their lameness and diabetes and who knows what else, there ought to be tons of these healed people all over the place, happy to leap up on their de-withered and even re-grown legs and testify with all the wind their now-cancer-free lungs can deliver regarding the validity of their chosen televangelist, Christian Scientist or psychic surgeon.

But faith healers are famously reluctant to even keep lists of the people they've healed.

You'd think that healed people would be the very best candidates for the donations that so many faith healers seem so perpetually to need. But nope.

(There's an ingenious subversion of the follow-up idea, in which the faith healer solicits testimonial reports of healing miracles from followers, but carefully avoids the awkward process of seeing if the "healed" people even had the disease they reported in the first place, much less whether any real diseases are really cured.)

Hulda Clark had a neat solution to the tiresome problem of following up on her "cures".

The Cure for All Cancers has a bunch of "case histories" in it, you see, which include 103 people who allegedly had their cancer cured by Clark. The way she verified that a cure had taken place, though, was by a blood test for a growth factor which, according to Hulda, indicated the presence of the deadly-liver-flukes-that-cause-all-cancer in the patient's body.

If you tested positive for that growth factor, you had cancer, even if regular doctors couldn't find it.

(The majority of patients in Hulda's case studies were only diagnosed as having the disease by means of Hulda's unusual blood test.)

If you tested positive, and Hulda Zapped you, and you subsequently tested negative, you were now cancer-free, again regardless of what conventional medicine might think.

And since you were now definitely 100% cancer-free, there was no need for Hulda to waste her valuable time looking into five-year survival rates, or any of that other nonsense to which the brutal and chaotic practitioners of Conventional Oncology are reduced.

If a patient died of cancer a year after being cured by Hulda, after all, then it must have been because the liver flukes re-infected him! If Clark told other patients about this, all it'd do is fill them with unjustified uncertainty about the validity of the treatments which Clark knew, with absolute religious certainty, worked!

I think this is quite a succinct version of the impregnable circular logic that supports all sorts of weird beliefs.

UPDATE: According to Hulda's death certificate and her own Web site, the woman with the Cure for All Cancers, the Cure For All Advanced Cancers and the Cure for All Diseases did, indeed, die of cancer.

Clearly, this can only be another example of the terrible power of malicious animal magnetism.

Posted in Scams, Science, Strange Tales. 15 Comments »

Fuel scams: An Australian tradition

7 September 2009 — dan

Gerard Ryle is the Sydney Morning Herald journalist who did most of the work of exposing the Firepower fiasco (it was linking to Ryle's SMH articles about Firepower that got me tangled up in the whole thing).

Ryle was on the Radio National mini-show Ockham's Razor the other day; Robyn Williams called his book "riveting". (Unfortunately for Gerard's bank balance, that's Robyn Williams the Australian science journalist and host of Ockham's Razor, not Robin Williams the comedian and movie star.)

Ryle's paraphrasing his book in the Ockham's Razor piece (available as a text transcript and a less-than-15-minute podcast), but he hardly talks about Firepower at all, and isn't just trying to get you to buy the book. Instead, he gives some highlights of the long and miserable history of fuel-saving gadgets here in Australia. Even in just this one country, there have been several stops on this particular railway to nowhere.

It's not all pills, magnets and crystals, either. There's also that hardy perennial, the Miracle Engine.

Miracle Engines share with perpetual motion machines - and ordinary everyday automotive technology, come to think of it - the handy quality of being difficult for laypeople to understand. Especially if you make 'em complicated enough. There are plenty of unusual engine designs that actually do work quite well, after all; those workable engines provide useful cover under which bogus Miracle Engines can sneak up on the consumer. The Miracle Engines often don't look any less plausible to the average Joe, or even to the experienced mechanic, than a Wankel rotary - but they often don't work at all, let alone actually have the potential to revolutionise the whole field of automotive blah blah blah.

As with perpetual motion machines, Miracle Engines have been devised that contain every conceivable combination of rotors, pistons, opposed pistons, free pistons, swing pistons, shape-changing combustion chambers, exhaust turbines, planetary gears and a whole Victorian engineering textbook worth of other mechanisms and linkages.

Miracle Engines have the great advantage that, if a misguided-engineer or plain-old-scam-artist goes to the trouble of making a not-quite-working model of one, nobody can easily test his claims and show them to be bollocks. Sellers of magic fuel pills have to make sure people never actually test their products, but Miracle Engine inventors can just keep sucking up "development" money from investors and quite plausibly string said investors along, explaining that there's still a niggling little problem with the panendermic semi-boloid stator slots, but that's all that still stands in the way of the 500-horsepower 200-mile-per-gallon automobile you've been promised, and it's nothing another hundred thousand dollars can't solve!

First in Ryle's short-list of Aussie fuel-saving ventures is the essentially useless Sarich orbital engine (I was going to edit in some links from one or both of those little Wikipedia articles to the radio-show transcript, but then I detected a certain similarity between the two already, which suggests that such a reference would be circular...). The Orbital company still exists, selling a fuel-injection system that seems to have been the only part of the Sarich engine that actually worked. (Ralph Sarich himself cashed out years ago, but the legend of his engineering genius and the automotive-industry conspiracy that kept the poor man down will never die. Note that the definition of "poor man" here includes "a personal worth of several hundred million dollars". Almost makes me wish I could invent an engine that doesn't work.)

And then there was Rick Mayne's "Split-Cycle Technology", another miracle engine that amounted to nothing. Mayne had the balls to enlist Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs to help promote his technology; this sort of grand cheeky gesture seems to be common in the automotive miracle business.

Splitcycle.com.au has been around for more than ten years now; it was promising great things in 1999, then passed to the ownership of someone unimpressed with Rick Mayne who promised a "Re-Emergence of SplitCycle Engine Technology" in 2005. But now the site is sadly reduced, to what appears to be an empty server.

(Is the Michael Papp who wrote that splitcycle.com.au editorial the same Michael Papp who went on to sell "Spark EV" electric vehicles that didn't, if you want to get all nitpicky and technical about it, exist? Apparently, as of June this year, the Spark EV story was due to "get very interesting in the next month or so", and the electric cars did too exist, and all the mean kids who made fun of Michael Papp and Spark EV would be so, so sorry. As of September '09, spark-ev.com is completely gone.)

A little bit further into Ryle's tale of woe we encounter "Save The World Air Inc", which offered a little fuel-saving nasty-emission-eliminating gizmo allegedly invented by Pro Hart, of all people.

Regular readers may remember Save The World Air from this post, in which I started out thinking that a new "electrorheology" fuel-saver idea actually didn't look like just another textbook scam, since it was plainly presented with all the information necessary for other researchers to attempt to replicate the alleged findings. But then I noticed that the gadget had been licensed to Save The World Air, which dropped it straight back into the "obvious scam" category, if you ask me. And lo, here we are a year later, and electrorheological combustion enhancement ain't changed the world yet.

Ryle couldn't do a piece like this without mentioning Aussie racing legend Peter Brock and his religious belief - maintained right up until his 2006 death in a racing accident - in the "Energy Polarizer". The Polarizer added crystals to magnets, to allegedly achieve the usual wonderful things. (The only measurable effect the Energy Polarizer ever actually had was on Brock's relationship with Holden.)

Perhaps, one day, all this nonsense will have faded away like patent medicines - but I doubt it'll happen soon. Even if we're all driving electric cars that're charged by too-cheap-to-meter solar or fusion power - or being driven around in autonomous electric cars - there'll still be carpetbaggers selling magnetic crystals that're meant to improve motor power.

With any luck, though, the sheer size of the stinking jet of bloody phlegm that sprayed all over Australia when the Firepower boil was finally lanced will at least slightly dampen enthusiasm for the next couple of fuel-pill scams.

In other Firepower-related news which I have shamelessly scraped from Gerard Ryle's blog, there's been some pleasing developments in the life of the delectable John Finnin, former Austrade official, former CEO of Firepower, et cetera.

One, the fact that this gentleman's full name is "John Cornelius Alphonsus Finnin" has become public knowledge.

And two, Finnin's been found guilty of 23 child-sex charges, and gone down for eight to twelve.

(This may or may not have something to do with the fact that Finnin brillantly decided to represent himself in court.)

I actually think eight years, followed by the usual Registered Sex Offender life-ruining, is a bit of a rough sentence for someone who's only been found guilty of having a consensual relationship with a 15-year-old rent boy. But Finnin played a big, and it seems to me obviously knowing, role in the shovelling of taxpayers' and naïve investors' money into his own, and Tim Johnston's, pockets.

So, you know, screw that guy.

(In case you were wondering, Tim Johnston himself continues to Skase it up overseas, deaf to the cries of creditors large and small.)

Posted in Cars, Firepower, Scams, Science. 7 Comments »

Authoritarianism: It's bad for your health

31 July 2009 — dan

I'm busy writing stuff, so let's see if I can't get you all to generate a bunch of content for me in the comments.

So I'm spinning the Wheel of Contentious Topics, buzz buzz buzz, around and around it goes, it's slowing down now... "gun control", "abortion", "religion", "Kirk or Picard"... and it's stopped on "health care in the USA"!

The previously-mentioned TechSkeptic just wrote an excellent post about the bizarre US health-care-reform situation. In brief, opponents of real reform are standing next to their rusted-out AMC Gremlin and insisting that all it needs is a lick of paint and some new seat-covers to be as good as any other car in the world today. And you shouldn't believe what people from other countries tell you about the cars over there, because that's all Communist propaganda.

I'm on the other side of the planet, and so don't actually spend a lot of time thinking about the plight of sick Americans. But I do watch The Daily Show, and the US health-care situation is an interesting example of a common problem.

I wonder if the USA will ever find its way out of this mess, where elected representatives choose talking points that are blatantly counterfactual, safe in the knowledge that a bunch of right-wing authoritarian voters (I strongly recommend Bob Altemeyer's book The Authoritarians, which is a free download) will believe them. This "authoritarian follower" population gives the cheerful promulgators of all sorts of lies guaranteed support from that ironclad 30% of the US public that never gave up on Dubya. And, often, a lot more than 30% of the US voting population fall into line.

(The 2008 presidential election had a very large voter turnout, by US standards, but almost four out of every ten eligible voters still didn't care enough to turn up. Here in Australia we probably have just as many people who don't care who gets elected, but we make them vote at least pretend to vote anyway, if they want to avoid a small fine.)

I don't mean to suggest that purest BS raining from on high upon a grateful populace is a phenomenon limited to the USA. The whole world has always had this same problem. But mass acceptance of definite and objective governmental lies seems to me to have reached its fullest flower during the Dubya administration, and it hasn't died back much now that he's finally gone.

(While I'm recommending books you can read for free, allow me to point you to Harry Frankfurt's much-less-frivolous-than-it-sounds On Bullshit. Every modern human should also own a copy of How to Lie with Statistics, but I'm afraid you'll probably have to pay for that.)

Right-wing authoritarians, as described by Bob Altemeyer, do actually understand the concept of being lied to, and also understand that their chosen authorities are often motivated to lie to them. But, often, authoritarian followers simply ignore this knowledge when they're listening to their chosen authorities.

This is the same sort of compartmentalisation that allows so many Americans to be perfectly fine with food stamps, bank-deposit insurance, unemployment benefits, Social Security and the threadbare safety net of Medicaid - especially if they're the beneficiary - but vehemently opposed to "socialism". The broadness of the definition of socialism that people use in these arguments makes pretty much every taxpayer-funded, universally-available government service technically "socialist", and therefore presumably abhorrent. Nobody seems to have a big problem with fire brigades, garbage collection, highways, bridges or public libraries, though. But, just as a segment of the US population would be perfectly happy to be ruled by a king (or a Bond villain, for that matter) as long as he wasn't called a king, many Americans are perfectly happy with "socialist" policies as long as nobody calls them socialist.

Apply no "socialist" government controls to any market you like and the result will invariably be corruption, cartels and frank fraud, giving rise to endlessly repeated boom-and-bust cycles, a minor example of which you might just possibly have noticed recently.

(On this subject, Upton Sinclair's classic The Jungle is another free book you might like to read. See also Charles Mackay's even older Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.)

There's a lot more behind the weird American authoritarian hatred for anything-called-socialism than mere common-or-garden cognitive dissonance, though. Bob Altemeyer has, for more than 40 years now, been doing psychological research on why authoritarian followers and their usual leaders, "social dominators", behave in the way that they do. He's ended up with a very large stack of evidence of far higher quality than is usual in the social sciences, and discovered some very surprising things. Once again - read the book. I found it entirely fascinating, and often blackly hilarious.

Aaaaanyway, getting back to the subject of the USA's adoration of dreadful health care, it is obvious that the USA could randomly throw a dart at a list of other countries in the developed world (and a few less-developed countries...), adopt the health-care system of whatever country they hit, and have a guarantee that it'd work better than what they've got. Provided, that is, that the USA actually managed to implement the new system properly. All bets are off if the new system turns into one of those military-industrial-political boondoggles the USA is so good at, where Congressmen and Senators secure re-election by making sure that every state gets a finger in every pie. The EU bows in awe at America's ability to add such amazing amounts of open avarice to every kind of normal bureaucratic friction.

To people in other countries, like for instance Australia where I live, it's difficult to even believe that for a significant fraction of the US population, the best health-care option available is to join the crowd in the hospital emergency room - whether or not your condition actually constitutes an emergency, of course - and hope for the best. We foreigners are similarly staggered by the fact that for an even larger segment of the US population, contracting a serious illness makes it probable that you will end up bankrupt.

We Aussies have a pretty standard underfunded-but-more-or-less-functional public-health safety-net. We pay half as much per capita for health care as the USA, and outlive you by around 2.8 years. I don't think it's just the Vegemite that's responsible for this.

The UK's population only outlives the USA's by a bit less than a year, but despite that segment of the UK's population who use the free ambulances as taxis, their National Health Service only costs them about 41% as much per capita as Americans pay.

And the list, of course, goes on. And on. And on.

So, despite what I now know about authoritarian believers, I'm still staggered by the sheer balls of the legislators and other talking heads who claim that the US health-care system is actually a good one.

It's as if they're standing up and baldly declaring the USA to be a Buddhist nation, and all of their buddies are going along with it.

Hmm. It's possible that my "get readers to write stuff so I don't have to" strategy has gone slightly awry. Commenters may have some difficulty in out-rambling the above.

Do, nonetheless, feel free to try.

Posted in Science, Strange Tales. 140 Comments »

Have you ever SEEN an atom split?

19 July 2009 — dan

The other day, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter took pictures of the Apollo landing sites. This gave various news organisations the chance to remind us all that if you ask the man in the street if he believes there was ever a man on the moon, there's a discouragingly decent chance that he'll tell you he doesn't.

The new pictures won't make any impact on the conspiracy theorists. You could bundle them into a flying saucer, fly them to the moon, and hover 10 feet above the footprints and Apollo descent stages, and they'd say you obviously must have come there in that same saucer half an hour ago and set all this stuff up. I mean, it's been 40 years and the footprints haven't even blown away yet! How dumb do you think we are, man!

Clearly, the only way we're going to stop hearing from these people is if we give them something to talk about which they find more exciting. Ideally, I'd like them to become convinced that this supposed "moon" doesn't actually existd at all, but I think that'd be a tough sell. If we guide them carefully, though, we may still be able to make the next We-Never-Actually-Did-X conspiracy theory much more entertaining than the unutterably depressing moon-hoax one.

How about this, then:

We never split the atom. The Manhattan Project was a fake.

Or it was real, but it was actually a collaborative research project between the US Government, Henry Ford, Walt Disney, Howard Hughes and the reptilian cabal that really ruled both Britain and Nazi Germany. Under the cover of so-called "atomic" research, this covert "xenofascist" project developed the occult death-from-a-distance technology that was what really killed Kennedy, when he was planning to spill the beans on that disappearing destroyer.

This, naturally, means that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not hit by atomic bombs. It's possible that there was actually a huge conventional bombing program using giant pyramidal strategic bombers, flying from their bases just inside the South Phantom Pole, and given almost unlimited range and maneuverability by the use of a hybrid orgone/Vril fuel source, with antigravity lifters for propulsion. It's clearly more likely, however, that the Hiroshima and Nagasaki events were actually the result of an earth-penetrating electrical seismic concentrator, based on Nikola Tesla's well-known power-broadcast and earthquake machines.

Tesla refused to help the xenofascists combine his technologies, which is why they had him killed in 1943. If he had helped, the earthquake gun would presumably have avoided the embarrassing misfire on its first activation. That shot missed not only by 3,900 kilometres in distance, but also by some 37 years in time, and caused the Tunguska event.

(So Tesla and Tunguska are connected - just not in the way everybody thinks!)

Where was I? Oh, yes.

"Nuclear power" is actually produced by means of black magic, but it's hard to tell exactly which kind, on account of the Malicious Animal Magnetism that so horribly destroys anybody who looks inside one of the "reactor vessels". This explains why the original promises that nuclear power would make electricity too cheap to meter came to nothing; it turns out that the sheer quantities of alchemical ingredients, large animals, human blood and, of course, babies you need to keep the Old Things from escaping a "nuclear" power plant make such plants very expensive to run.

Oh, and "nuclear medicine" is also a hoax. The supposed "shielding" around "radioactive" items is just more camouflage for sacred geometries and resonant crystals.

And as for nuclear magnetic resonance imaging, which has the word "nuclear" in its name and so must have to do with radiation and atoms splitting and stuff, those supposed "superconducting magnets" do have liquid nitrogen in them, but it's just to stop anybody from using a hacksaw to discover what the device actually contains. Inside, there are actually carefully broken-in audiophile-grade power cables, wrapped in a helix to match human ethereal DNA, and all running from a single button cell covered with so many battery-boosting stickers that it could power a small town.

Right. All we need to do now is boil this down into a bumper sticker.

Posted in Humour, Science, Strange Tales. 23 Comments »

The difference is as plain as the ear on your face!

6 July 2009 — dan

A reader just pointed me to this comparison of the recording quality of the Samson Zoom H4 Handy Digital Recorder, the Zoom H4n, and Sony's PCM-D50 portable audio recorders, on Brad Linder's blog.

These things are little high-quality digital audio recorders. They're smaller than most portable compact-cassette recorders - actually, they're approaching the size of an old microcassette dictation recorder - but they have sound quality that the old concert bootleggers could only dream of. These sorts of recorders come with built-in microphones, of far higher quality than the mics in any small portable recorder before low-power portable audio-processing hardware and low-cost Flash RAM made this sort of device possible. You could have put super-high-quality mics on an old cassette recorder if you wanted to, but it was pointless; nothing you could stick in even a large pocket could record good enough audio to justify expensive mics.

(Yes, I know there were some relatively small analogue-tape field recorders that gave very good results - usually because they recorded on something better than a cassette - if you plugged a quality mic into them. There was probably also some integrated-microphone doodad that recorded on small reel-to-reel tape or Type IV cassettes with Dolby S or something, about which I just haven't happened to hear. But modern digital field recorders are still amazing, all right?)

Anyway, Linder set up all three recorders next to each other, and talked and then played guitar into the built-in microphones. Then he posted the audio from the three recorders, for his readers to audition.

Overall, the commenters opined that the H4 was OK, the H4n was better, and the PCM-D50 was best. They were pretty much unanimous that the difference between the H4 and the Sony was as plain as day - compared with the Sony, the H4 was "muddy" or "muddled", "disjointed", "scrambled", or slightly noisier; one commenter called it "not even worth talking about". One guy even said he heard wow and flutter. There was general agreement that the Sony was clearly superior.

The only problem with all this - which another commenter soon discovered - was that Brad actually screwed up. Instead of pasting in the embed code for all three recorders, he pasted in the H4 code, then the H4n code... and then the H4 code again. He just labelled it as the Sony PCM-D50.

So the first, and the third, sound clips were precisely identical. On account of being the same sound clip twice. But the one that was labelled Samson Zoom H4 sounded lousy, and the one that was labelled Sony PCM-D50 sounded great.

Psychoacoustics: It ain't just a river in Egypt.

Wait. That didn't come out right.

This happy accident reminds me of the techniques James Randi has so often used on people with alleged supernatural abilities. I'm re-reading his classic Flim-Flam!, which contains a number of examples. When, for instance, a woman said she could use dowsing to find ancient ruins just by examining a map, without even a scale or North-pointer, Randi tested her on three maps in sequence, all of which were actually of the same well-explored part of Peru, but rotated and scaled differently.

Needless to say, her exceedingly vague results put "ruins" in different places every time, and not a one of 'em even managed to hit Machu Picchu, which was exactly the sort of thing she said she could find.

(Audiophiles usually seem to address psychoacoustic problems by adding as many more uncontrolled variables to their sound comparisons as they can. I presume this is some sort of demonstration that their perception of sound is not merely superhuman, but super-mega-ultra-hyper-human.)

Posted in Music, Science. 13 Comments »

If only Steorn had been taking bets

29 June 2009 — dan

To the surprise of absolutely nobody - well, OK, maybe to the surprise of some of the more enthusiastic editors at PESWiki - perpetual-motion-machine-makers Steorn haven't managed to demonstrate that their machine is any better than the thousands of other useless perpetual-motion machines.

There's a little more to this story, though. Steorn did not follow the standard script of the perpetual-motion scam artist, in which you make sure, at all costs, that nobody ever gets to examine your machine.

Instead, Steorn for some reason allowed actual scientists to examine their gadget. Those scientists have, predictably, now concluded that it doesn't bloody work.

This won't make any difference, of course. Perpetual motion, like magic car-enhancing gadgets and pills, is an evergreen scam. There'll be another one along in a minute.

(I particularly like commenter adipocere's modest proposal, on that Metafilter page, that we should create a Hall Of People Who Thought They Were Smart. Oh, and see also Adam Savage's comment on their preparation for the "Free Energy" tests on MythBusters.)

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

Useless "power savers": The saga continues

16 June 2009 — dan

From: "tan" <tan@epowersaver.com>
Date: Mon, 15 Jun 2009 14:04:39 +0800
To: dan@dansdata.com
Subject: Removing Links - Website

Hi Dan,

We have read your write up and would like to suggest that you remove the
link from your site to our website.

You can still quote some phrase BUT please do not simply add a link without
any permission.

http://www.dansdata.com/gz088.htm

Your immediate action on this is much appreciated.

best regards,

Steven

Use Power With Le$$ Cost

http://www.epowersaver.com <http://www.epowersaver.com/>

If you do not want people to link to your Web site, Steven, then don't have a Web site.

(I know this post will be a bit repetitive for regular readers, but clearly the people selling these gadgets are not giving up, so I reckon the world could do with one more page warning about them.)

Steven's company doesn't even have a stupid linking policy. I'm very disappointed. They may yet cheer me up by getting a lawyer to send me a letter, though!

The Ground Zero column that's bothering Steven is the one in which I talk about the numerous worthless "power saver" gadgets on the market today.

Some "power savers" - including some of the things currently found in my above-linked eBay search - actually work. You can, for instance, buy powerboard gadgets that monitor one socket on the board for current draw, and only turn all of the others on when you turn on that one monitored device. A setup like that can, for instance, turn on all of your home-theatre gear only when you turn the TV on, so everything else won't be sitting there in standby mode drawing a watt here, a few watts there, of "vampire" power when the TV isn't on.

The most common kind of "power saver", though, is the kind that Steven and his buddies at ePowerSaver sell. (Oh no, that's another link - whatever will they do?)

The ePowerSaver device is alleged to save you money not by turning things off, but by correcting the power factor of electrical equipment in your house.

A single small plug-in device like the ePowerSaver cannot actually effectively correct the power factor of other stuff plugged into the same circuit. Apart from the fact that the ePowerSaver is not nearly big enough to contain the hefty high-power componentry it'd need, power-factor correctors have to be matched to the load. Too little correction - which is what you should expect, if your power factor is bad enough to need correcting in the first place and the corrector you purchase is one of these wall-wart-sized "power savers" - and they won't entirely compensate for poor power factor. Too much correction - which is actually possible, even with a cheap plug-in corrector like this, since the overall power factor of a modern household can actually be very good - and they can make a bad power factor worse.

But, and here's the punchline, it doesn't actually matter whether these devices correct power factor at all, because nobody but certain large commercial electricity users is billed by power factor. Normal domestic electricity meters can't even measure it.

The plug-in power-saver idea is so dumb that even TV news can figure it out...

...although it seems that that the difference between apparent power and real power, which is the core of this issue, was somewhat beyond KUTV's Bill Gephardt.

Sellers of power-saving gadgets count on this. Their target market is all of the people whose eyes glaze over when someone who actually knows something about electricity attempts to explain that extra current flow from mains-waveform phase distortion in the starboard Jeffries-tube boson inductors is not the same as actual extra power consumption.

(Just because one TV news show managed to figure out these things are a scam doesn't mean that other stations aren't perfectly happy to repackage VNRs from "power saver" companies and call 'em news, though. I particularly enjoyed this awesome piece from an Atlanta CBS affiliate, which cheerfully advertises the previously-mentioned Power-Save 1200. The voiceover proudly states that "the US Department of Energy endorses the device", which is a piece of information which appears to be news to the Department of Energy, and indeed the rest of the US government. Nothing seems to have changed in Power-Save 1200 Land since I wrote that piece in 2006; now, as then, the closest thing they seem to have to an actual DoE "endorsement" is a report - PDF, from a Power-Save site, here - that says that improving power factor is a good idea if you're a large commercial customer, blah blah blah.)

I suppose it's perfectly possible that the sellers of these power savers are like their customers and TV-news talking heads, and don't know the difference between apparent and real power either. I mean, just look at the ePowerSaver Product Testing page, where they proudly show a bank of fluorescent lights (with, I presume, lousy low-power-factor ballasts; modern fluoro ballasts should be much better than this) drawing 1.306 amps with no "power saver", and then only 0.642 amps when the "power saver" is connected in parallel. That's the sort of reading you might perhaps get if you plugged a large enough capacitive power factor corrector in parallel with a highly inductive load, but your electricity meter will notice no difference at all.

(Note that even if you do have ancient awful-power-factor fluorescent lights in your house, then plugging a PFC-modifying capacitor gadget like this into a socket elsewhere in your house is unlikely to achieve very much, even if by some miracle it's got enough capacitive reactance to cancel out the inductive reactance of those magnetic fluoro ballasts that you should have replaced years ago. The "power" circuit and the "lighting" circuit in normal residences diverge from the breaker panel separately, so whatever electrical ebbs and flows the capacitor in the PFC gadget produces will have to interact with the ebbs and flows from the fluoros many, many metres of wire away from them. And then there are houses like mine, in which the power and lighting circuits are completely separate, coming from different wires on the pole outside. Plugging a PFC doodad into a power socket here will have precisely zero effect on the lighting circuit's power factor.)

I think it's actually rather implausible that the people selling these things have never gone so far as to see if the little disk in the electricity meter starts spinning slower when their product is plugged in. But who knows - maybe they went straight to market after doing that clamp-meter current test. And I suppose it's possible that people who are too clueless to understand that sending complaints to people who link to their Web site is not a great idea may also be too clueless to figure out that their product does not in fact work.

If you don't believe me (and Bill from KUTV and his friends from the University of Utah), here are a few other references about these devices:

The Energy Star program run by the US Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Energy would like you to know that these things are scams. (The Department of Energy unaccountably fails to mention how they absolutely 100% you-betcha approved that thar Power-Save 1200.)

British Columbia's BC Hydro and Power Authority, like many other power companies, charges large commercial customers extra if they run gear with a lousy power factor. Here's their page about power factor correction, which talks about choosing motors to match loads, installing capacitors across motors, et cetera. Note that the power bill they quote in their power-factor surcharge example is about one thousand four hundred Canadian dollars per month. If you're not running motors that cost that much a month to operate, you're probably not being billed by power factor.

The Texas Attorney General has busted the makers of the XPower Saver that was tested in the KUTV video clip.

Electricitysaver.com.au used to sell plug-in power savers, until they realised they were a scam, apologised to their customers, and handed out refunds. Now they sell one of those things that just turns off "vampire" devices.

Michael Bluejay's Mr Electricity site.

Peter Parsons' home energy cost reduction site has a section about power-factor devices. (He's also got pages about some other "green" scams, like ineffective insulation, the unavoidable fake "fuel catalysts", overpriced electric heaters like the ones I've looked at, a fuel doodad for oil-fired furnaces, and fraudulent home-power-generation schemes.)

Silicon Chip magazine here in Australia has checked out the "Enersonic Power Saver" and the less-creatively-named "Electricity-Saving Box", and concluded that both are a complete waste of money. You'll need to pay a subscription fee to read the whole reviews, but the circuit diagrams are rather entertaining (note that the second one appears to be missing a "µ" in front of the capacitor-value "F"). If you ignore the components that only exist to light LEDs and protect a capacitor from damage, you're pretty much left with... a capacitor.

In a box.

Imagine my surprise when I saw what you get when you search for "just a capacitor" power saver.

NOTE: I cordially invite any power-saver manufacturers who're now itching to send me a nastygram about this post to, instead, send me their product to review. I will test its effect on a normal household electricity meter while running various household motor loads, like an electric fan, a vacuum cleaner, a washing machine and a refrigerator.

Should your device do what you claim, I will immediately and cheerfully retract all of the above.

Posted in Electricity, Scams, Science. 20 Comments »

My two alien implants

30 May 2009 — dan

A couple of years ago, I went to the dentist. I don't go to the dentist very often, because I have no need for their services; all of my teeth are in excellent condition, presumably partly thanks to the evil fluoride conspiracy, and partly because of my enthusiasm for cleaning between them.

(I have now written more about my crackpot theory of dental care.)

This time, though, I suspected I had a supernumary wisdom tooth pushing up under one of my existing ones. That's a very uncommon complaint, but it was the only thing I could think of that explained the uncomfortable developments in my jaw. A small but definite bony protrusion was poking out of the inside edge of my left lower jaw.

It wasn't an extra tooth, though. There just seemed to be too much gum hanging on around one of my ordinary, non-supernumary wisdom teeth. This is a much more common problem, and easy to cure - numb it, carve away the excess, job done.

But my extra-tooth suspicion was partly triggered by the fact that there really was some surplus toothy stuff in there. A little shard of tooth, pushing out on my gum. It wasn't part of the wisdom tooth, it wasn't part of another tooth. The dentist and her assistant didn't know what the heck it was.

It's great when medical professionals peering into you through double eye-loupes say "Amazing!". I suggested they take it a bit further, and go for "Holy crap - what the hell is THAT?!", or indeed "Aaaa! The Antichrist! The Antichrist!".

But I digress.

My dentist's best guess was that the mystery object might have been a shard of a baby tooth that'd just sat peacefully in my jaw for twenty-something years, until my body decided to push it out, as bodies sometimes do. Many people's jaws are in a state of continental drift, as it were, that doesn't tally at all with the subjective feeling of a bunch of very hard things set very firmly in place.

But the dentist cheerfully admitted that she was just guessing, never having even heard of such a thing before.

Maybe a year later, it happened again. Same spot, same funny little shard of tooth or bone or whatever poking up out of my gum. I knew what it was this time, so I just dug it out myself with a pair of tweezers. (Unfortunately, this was before I reviewed the ETime Home Endoscope, which would have allowed me to take fascinating pictures of the little shard in-situ.)

The shard was kind of woody-feeling, not rock-hard like tooth enamel. So I suppose it might indeed have been bone, or perhaps dentin. I presume there's just a little glitchy bit of my jaw that decided to sprout a couple of these things. It's not unusual for a bit of normal tissue to occasionally grow in the wrong place, but it's only really noticeable when it has more dramatic results, like a dermoid cyst.

If I were inclined to believe in alien woo-woo or sorcery, though, I could easily have convinced myself that these strange objects were "implants", or voodoo thingummies, or some other phenomenon of great occult significance. After it happened the second time, there would have been no possible question - the Greys were clearly abducting me, shoving an implant into my jaw, wiping my memory and letting me go.

After the dentist thwarted their plan the first time, they just did it again! Clearly, it'd be time for me to find myself a "therapist" to hypnotise me into remembering the aliens putting the stuff in my mouth, not to mention all the times the witches/ghosts/aliens paralysed me as I lay in my bed, and of course that guy sacrificing giraffes to Satan in the tunnels under the day-care centre.

(Oh, and apparently you can remove alien implants with ear candles!)

Back in consensus reality, if you look closely enough at the body of anyone who's been on the planet for at least a few decades, you'll very probably find some little bits of something stuck in 'em somewhere. My girlfriend's got a tiny grey tattoo in the middle of her chest, under which somewhere is the bit of pencil lead that caused it when she managed to stick herself with it as a child. Anybody who lives an active life probably has quite a few tiny scar-encapsulated bits of wood or stone under their skin. Someone who works in a machine shop will light up like a Christmas tree in a full-body scan; heck, some of them have tiny metal turnings in their eyes that they don't know about, until they encounter a very strong magnetic field.

Given this, there's a very good chance that anybody whose mind turns to thoughts of alien abduction will be able to find disturbingly personal "concrete evidence" of said phenomenon, if they look hard enough.

Posted in Science, Strange Tales. 19 Comments »
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