Tetherd Cow Ahead

I like to think my money is as good a quality as any one else’s. My council obviously doesn’t consider it so.

How hot has it been here? This is a bag of tea-light candles that I fished out of a box in our attic. Candle wax melt temperature for ‘cool’ candle molds is supposed to range from around 55 – 65° C (130 -150° F).

Quite a few days ago*, two advanced, state-of-the-art, gadgets-coming-out-of-your-ears, sonar-that-can-detect-a-fly-at-two-miles-in-a-fog nuclear submarines belonging to the British and the French navies, collided in the VAST EMPTY Atlantic ocean.

Collided (in case you missed that). Had a prang, to use an Australian colloquialism. The accepted explanation seems to be that ‘modern anti-sonar technology is so good it is possible neither boat “saw” the other’.

Sometimes it’s just too darn easy to put up an argument for good ol’ low-tech windows.

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*It has, of course, only just now come to the greater world’s attention. I guess that both sides have been deliberating about whether to tell anyone at all (considering that, well, how would we ever know…), but have figured it’s best to spill the beans before it leaks from one or other of the crew, and the video goes viral on YouTube…

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Remember Steorn, the Irish startup who claimed to have invented a machine for creating energy out of nothing? We examined their preposterous claims on The Cow almost two years ago, here, and then again, after they comprehensively failed to reveal their stunning breakthrough to the world, here.

I’ve checked in on them from time to time, but aside from the very occasional appearance with famous personages*, there’s been absolutely no action on the Steorn Free Energy front.

Until this week.

Given the deafening silence that resulted from Steorn’s attempt to convene a panel of experts to vindicate their claims, I was pretty sure that, like so many others throughout history who’ve vaunted perpetual motion machines, the company was dead and buried. Unfortunately I was mistaken. Like a zombie that’s been struck so many times with a shovel that its spinal cord is hanging out, Steorn has staggered from the Graveyard of Improbable Claims to walk among the rational once more. Actually, they’re more like vampires come to think of it – they’ve risen freshly reconstituted, with a website makeover, and a coven of new faces, to feed again on the blood of the gullible. But the unpleasant smell of decay still lingers under the paint job.

But enough of the colourful Hammer Horror metaphors. Surely Steorn wouldn’t be brazen enough to come back with the same old crap. Surely by now they’ve got something to substantiate their preposterous claims. Well let’s see…. there’s a graph…

…and a plastic doo-dah…

And they’re even selling a USB Hall Probe† (at 250 quid it’s a steal – yep, that’s right – them stealing from you). But aside from that, it’s all the same crapola. They’ve made a video that features a trio of luminaries extolling the virtues of Orbo (Steorn’s supposed free energy ‘engine’) without really saying anything more profound than ‘Gee whiz! Ah woonta believed it unless I sawr’n it with me own eyes!’. Unsurprisingly (to me at least) none of these boffins turns up on the first five pages of a ProprietarySearchEngine™ search. C’mon Steorn! If you’re going about spruiking your new Solution to the World’s Problems™, get some people with credibility to wave your flag! That is, of course, unless you can’t…

What else have we got… oh yeah! There’s an explanation of how Orbo works! Hang on now:

Orbo is based upon time variant magnetic interactions, i.e. magnetic interactions whose efficiency varies as a function of transaction timeframes.

It is this variation of energy exchanged as a function of transaction time frame that lies at the heart of Orbo technology, and its ability to contravene the principle of the conservation of energy. Why? Conservation of energy requires that the total energy exchanged using interactions are invariant in time. This principle of time invariance is enshrined in Noether’s Theorem.

Aha! [Slaps hand on forehead] So obvious! In other words, what you’re saying is:

‘Crap crap crap crapola, crappity crap, big words, confusing technical jargon, more crap and then some crap.’

It all seems so simple in retrospect! If only I had thought of using magnets to make things go round and round forever and generate electricity in the process! Oh wait… I DID! In third grade! And then one day (the next day, as I recall) I learned from my science teacher, Mr Smythe,‡ that science is not what you want to happen, but what actually happens, and I gave up my dream of becoming the Henry Ford of the Free Energy Age.

So. What’s the game with Steorn? Can they possibly be the stellar kinds of bozos that they seem? Or have they simply outsmarted everyone with a hi-tech shell game? They’re certainly getting plenty of publicity, and now they’re selling training courses, so I’m sure they’ll fleece enough idiots of their cash to keep annoying us for at least another couple of years.

But one thing Steorn ain’t EVER going to do, is make a machine that outputs more energy than is put into it. Ever. Come back in ten years and tell me I’m wrong Steorn. Twenty, then. What the heck, I’ll give you a hundred!

Now, back to my workshop. The antigravity machine is a-l-m-o-s-t finished…

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*The woman in the middle of the photo is Mary McAleese, the President of Ireland. Steorn’s CEO, Sean McCarthy, is the man with the smug grin standing to her left.

†It’s basically just a gadget for measuring magnetic field strength. Ho hum.

‡Very curiously, Mr Smythe was a Christian. It was from this point that I understood that even very intelligent people could be hoodwinked, if they weren’t brave enough.

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What kind of Friday the 13th would it be without a black cat crossing your path. Or clinging to your ceiling?

WooWoo Beliefs – A TCA Educational Series: Episode #4

This is Danny Nalliah. Danny is some kind of flavour of Pentecostal Christian, and believes (or says he believes) that the Bible is the literal Word of God. Danny is a most irksome person at this very moment, because he also believes, and has made public his belief, that the terrible bushfires that are raging not more than 20 miles from my home are the result of divine retribution from God. Danny says God has done this because Victoria, my home state, recently decriminalized abortion.

On the website for his appropriately named ‘Catch the Fire Ministries’* Danny says that in November last year he had a dream in which he “saw fire everywhere with flames burning very high and uncontrollably”.† He interpreted the dream to mean that God had “removed his conditional protection on Australia, and in particular on the state of Victoria for approving the slaughter of innocent children in the womb”.

Danny Nalliah epitomizes what I despise about religion. His self-righteous posturing, and despicable ignorant proselytizing is primitive and dangerous. He has told his followers that if they pray for forgiveness, God will deliver them from this horrific tragedy, and spare further fires. Of course, Danny wins whether or not the fires stop or worsen; if they die back, then the prayers are successful, if they flare up again, then God is still pissed. This is not a new game to Nalliah – before the last Australian elections he prophesied: “I will boldly declare that Prime Minister John Howard will be re-elected in the November election (if the Body of Christ unites in prayer and action) and pass the leadership onto Peter Costello sometime after.”

Of course, he was plain wrong, but sadly, for some reason religion is rarely called to answer for blunders of such magnitude. I guess that’s what happens when you write an escape clause into everything you ‘predict’.

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*I’m certainly not linking to this reprehensible organization – they don’t deserve the honour.

†As prophetic dreams go, this is pretty standard fare – there’s no specific prediction of a bushfire (it could just as easily have been a bomb blast, an industrial accident or an incident of arson, or riffing metaphorically, any of a hundred other things), and there’s no specified time limit (so it could be in a month, or in a year, or a decade). You see how this goes – a fire of some kind, at some time, is hardly much of a prophesy. Especially in a land that has bushfires every summer, to a greater or lesser degree of damage.

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