Tetherd Cow Ahead

It appears that, no matter how many times perpetual motion (or ‘free’ energy) machines are wheeled out, exposed and taken back in shame to the sheds where they were nailed together, there will always be another one waiting in the wings. And usually, another one that claims to use exactly the same discredited working principles of every one that’s come before it – invariably involving magnets. Here on The Cow, we’ve waited several years for those Irish spruikers over at Steorn to show us their wonderful machine, which, in the grand vision of their marketing manager, will mean that you need never put your phone on charge again. ((There’s nothing quite like thinking big.))

We’re still waiting.

In the meantime, this morning I bring you a website that offers to sell you plans to build your own free energy machine which its purveyors say will provide you with limitless free energy! It wasn’t easy for them but they…

…finally succeeded in creating a website which offers the Do-It-Yourself instructions for building such a device

God, tell me about it. Creating a website is such a fucking bitch!

Anyway, the site that they finally succeeded in creating is called Magniwork. The Magniwork logo, subtitled The Energy of Tomorrow in Your Home Today!, features, as the ‘i’ in Magniwork, an energy-efficient light globe.

Yeah, now see, the absolute irony of this is that if you have a machine that produces endless clean energy as the website claims, you don’t need to worry about energy-efficient appliances. It surely doesn’t matter. In fact, what your logo should really be offering is the kind of electrical abundance favoured by vendors of electricity at the fin de siecle ((The 19th C fin, that is.))

That’s better! The promise of SQUILLIONS of volts carelessly squandered.

OK. Tell me about how I can have my own free energy machine Magniwork! I’m eager to cast off the shackles of dirty coal and even dirtier uranium!

Using our easy-to-follow guide, you will be able create a Magnetic Power Generator which creates absolutely free energy, and doesn’t require any resource like wind or solar energy to function. The magniwork generator creates energy by itself and powers your home for free. The generator works fully off the grid. ((An ambiguously worded claim if ever I read one. Works fully off the grid? As in, it works fully powered by the grid? No? Oh, you meant it works independently of the grid! I see!)) Take a look at the following diagram to get an idea of how it works:

Whoa. That’s a little technical, so for the laypeople, let me just try and give you an easy-to-understand explanation of what’s going on.

First, the Power Source (1) feeds into the thingamabob (2). This in turn is fed to the gadget with numbers (3) and the battery (4). Of course this requires a whoosamacallit (5) to transfer back and forth between the doodah (6), the whatsit (7) and the gismo (9), with additional input from the red doohickey (8). COMPLETELY FREE ENERGY is thereby delivered to your house (10). So, did that give you an idea of how it works? Yes! That’s right, it is completely powered by FLIM-FLAM! Genius.

This method has been researched for a long time, but due to suppression of this idea from the big corporations, the plans for building a free energy generator which could change the world have never been out on the open.

Ah. The ‘big corporations’. Yes, I can see how the ‘big corporation’s would be quaking in their boots after seeing ‘the method’ laid so daringly bare in that diagram. ((The ‘big corporations are hiding it from us’ plea is a sure marker of pseudoscientific thinking. People: big corporations can be greedy and self-serving, sure. Evil, even. But one thing they are not is stupid. Any ‘big corporation’ in the world would give their metaphorical first child for this kind of technology if it worked. Think about it, Mr Free Energy Machine Inventor: a ‘big corporation’ could take your machine, make vast powerplants with it, and sell the power to consumers at ridiculously under-cutting prices, thereby doing the one thing that all ‘big corporations’ love to do most – put all the other ‘big corporations’ out of business. The assertion that they would take this idea and suppress it is nonsense of the highest order.))

The Magniwork website offers, as an endorsement of its wares, a Sky News video featuring Queensland free-energy proponents John Christie and Lou Brits, who are known in this arena for their Lutec 1000 generator, a device that has, in the manner of the Steorn ‘Orbo’, consistently failed for over a decade to live up to the hyperbole of its inventors (the failure for the Lutec 1000 to gain traction is, of course, due to the Machiavellian influence of the ‘big corporations’, rather than because of the small technicality that it doesn’t actually work).

Magniwork trots out the same misguided claims that we encounter with Messrs Christie and Brits and all ‘free’ energy technology advocates:

You can eliminate your power bill by 50% or even completely, depending on how you implement the magniwork generator.

Eliminate it by 50%? Um. I think the word ‘eliminate’ is kind of absolute. You can’t partially eliminate something. You’re probably searching for the word ‘reduce’, here. Even so, the 50% saving that Magniwork boasts involves accepting a fatal logical non-sequitur based on the concept of ‘overunity’ energy generation. As a special service to Tetherd Cow Ahead readers (and all people everywhere who like things explained in diagrams) I have created a page here that outlines, in simple terms, the logical flaw inherent in overunity. You don’t even need to understand physics to see how such a scheme must always fail.

The free energy devices have been suppressed by the corporate world because such devices, would allow people to create their own energy for free, which would ultimately shut down the big energy corporations, because people won’t need to pay anymore for electricity to fill their pockets.

It’s an intriguing image, people walking around with pockets full of electricity.

Our easy-to-follow guide will show you how to construct the Magniwork free energy generator, which will run infinitely and create free electric energy. This method has been thoroughly researched, and is currently considered as a possible mean of completely solving the energy crisis.

Only by idiots.

The magniwork free energy generator, can be efficiently used to power your home with almost zero costs on your side. Furthermore, the generator is eco-friendly and doesn’t produce any harmful byproducts.

Well, that’s probably true. Because it doesn’t produce ANYTHING.

We predict that the technology will rapidly spread, and some industry-insiders even predict that the magniwork free energy generators will be the energy in the future. These experts estimate, that by 2020 energy companies will start implementing this technology in order to create cheaper and more environment friendly energy.

OK, well I predict that in 2020 you’ll still be wheeling out the same old crap about your ‘invention’ being suppressed by the ‘big corporations’. Let’s see who’s the better predictor.

The Magniwork free energy generator is safe to use and operate. It doesn’t produce any harmful byproducts or gases, and there isn’t any hazard concerning the generator itself. Even if you have little children, they may freely walk in the close vicinity of the generator.

Although that might not be entirely safe, because they might point out that you’re violating the laws of thermodynamics and thus expose you as a nitwit.

Anyway, it goes on and on like this for a bit, with some testimonials that hold about as much credibility as a Shoo!TAG science experiment, before signing off with another convincing video about the evil plan by ‘the big companies’ to hide this amazing technology from us dumb suckers.

Hahahahaha! Dear Acowlytes! This is where the Magniwork site becomes very special and dear to my heart. The snippets of video featured in this ‘report’ are from a spoof documentary called ‘Conspiracy’ for which I wrote the music! In a fantastic metaphorical echo of the preposterousness of the overunity feedback loop, this ‘meta’ documentary, which was designed as an agglomeration of as many absurd free energy claims as we could stack together in one place (coupled with great Cold War-style black and white propaganda footage) has now come back to life as an endorsement of the the things it was sending up!

Just as overunity energy production pulls itself up with its own bootstraps, it seems that the free energy community is boosting its credentials with parodies of its own credentials! It is to laugh.

⊗∴—∴⊗∴—∴⊗∴—∴⊗∴—∴⊗∴—∴⊗∴—∴⊗∴—∴⊗∴—∴⊗∴—∴⊗∴—∴⊗∴—∴⊗

Well, that turned out rather more long-winded than I expected. What happened, you see, is that I connected a Magniwork generator to my computer, and before I knew it, I was producing unlimited free energy fuelled postings. In much the same way as the unbelievable claims of the free energy movement, they just go on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and ….

Infinitely.

♫ Everybody’s talks about a new world in the morning… new world in the morning so they say-ee-ay-ay… ♫ I myself don’t talk about a new world… Hey! WTF! What are you all doing here? Weren’t you killed by the earthquakes and the volcanoes and the asteroids? Goddamnit! Do you mean to say that I spent all that money on a Vivos Underground Fallout Shelter for nothing? You’re not going to tell me that noted astrologer Richard Nolle, who predicted apocalyptic events as the FULL moon approached perigee, and who was quoted on Space.com, ((Who, I hope, are still sitting in the corner with their dunce cap on…)) was wrong? Son of a bitch!

Yes loyal Cowpokes, it’s true. Once again, the unhinged blathering of a woo personage turns out to be categorically and unequivocally wrong. I’ll just say that again:



WRONG.

You can read about Space.com’s embarrassing article (which tries to pretend it’s not really quoting an astrologer), here, but for the real meat of this sandwich you need to read what Mr Nolle said, in his own waffly words:

Of course you can expect the usual: a surge in extreme tides along the coasts, a rash of moderate-to-severe seismic activity (including magnitude 5+ earthquakes, tsunami and volcanic eruptions), and most especially in this case a dramatic spike in powerful storms with heavy precipitation, damaging winds and extreme electrical activity. Floods are a big part of the picture in this case, although some of these will be dry electrical storms that spark fast-spreading wildfires. ((Gee, care to add anything else to that, Mr Nolle? Just in case that wide net misses something?))

No doubt Mr Nolle will do what all purveyors of this kind of nonsense do when they are shown to be WRONG, and start claiming everything in the vicinity as an endorsement of his prediction, including the recent tragic Japanese tsunami.

That makes this [the date of the ‘extreme supermoon’] a major geophysical stress window, centered on the actual alignment date but in effect from the 16th through the 22nd.

Geez. Even when he hedges his bets with the dates, he’s WRONG. ((I’m posting this on March 20, Australian time, so there are are still three more fudge days to go, but you know what? I’m saying here and now that in those three days nothing at all of any geophysical significance will happen. I’m sure Mr Nolle is well on his way, though, to claiming that what he REALLY meant by his predictions was that the UN would endorse military strikes on Libya. That’s the way this stuff invariably works…)) The Japanese tsunami occurred on March 11. Of course, that won’t stop him!

The March 19 SuperMoon is by far the most significant storm and seismic indicator this month, but it’s not the only one. Lesser geocosmic shock windows also up the ante for unusually strong storms ((‘Unusually strong’ could mean anything more than a bit of blustery wind.)) and moderate to severe seismic activity ((Moderate to severe? That’s really narrowing it down.)) (including ((Including??? There’s a weasel term if ever I heard one – the addition of ‘including’ actually means that this sentence says in effect: “Any earth movements of any kind”)) magnitude 5+ earthquakes, subsequent tsunami, and volcanic eruptions). These lesser windows include March 1-7 (surrounding the new moon on the 4th), March 23-26 (bracketing the lunar south declination peak on the 25th), and from late on the 31st on into early April. ((Into early April…? When’s ‘early’? April 5th? April 10th? Fuck me.))

Hahaha. Look at all that risible equivocating (I’ve enumerated all the hedging for you in the footnotes). That covers just about every possible day in March and every possible earthquake above a magnitude 5. Since the planet experiences more than 1500 earthquakes of magnitude 5 and above every year (divide that by 12 months and you get over 125 magnitude 5+ earthquakes somewhere in the world every month) Nolle can make a prediction like this with complete impunity. When you include his dates for the Super Moon, Nolle has every day in March covered except March 8 – 15 and March 27 – 30! That’s predicting 20 whole days of March might possibly have an earthquake of magnitude 5+ somewhere in the world! And he still missed March 11! Whoopsy. I guess a fucking ginormous earthquake that causes massive tidal surges and kills thousands of people is easy to overlook with that extreme spike in electrical storms and amongst all the floods and volcanic eruptions. Oh wait. None of those happened on March 19 either. ((I’ll just note here for the sake of amusement, the introduction to Mr Nolle’s pages which says in part “If you were expecting some kind of sun sign nonsense, forget about it. This is real astrology for the real world, not some mystical mumbo-jumbo word salad.” Got that? No mumbo-jumbo in this town, no way!))

So, let’s just see what scientists predicted for the approach of the Super Moon. John Bellini, a geophysicist at the U.S. Geological Survey:

Practically speaking, you’ll never see any effect of lunar perigee. It’s somewhere between ‘It has no effect’ and ‘It’s so small you don’t see any effect.’

Oh, lookit that. Once again, science is…



RIGHT.

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Earthquake chart purloined from IRIS with thanks. I’m pretty sure that, in the interests of proper science, they will be OK with it.

Acowlytes! The End of the World is nigh! Really! OK, yes, I know I’ve said it before, but this time it’s going to happen! I swear! And a full year before the Mayans said it would! ((Dammit. I haven’t got my End TImes accomodation organized yet! I thought I had another whole year.))

On May 21st, 2011, according to a Christian broadcasting ministry called Family Radio, God is going to finally wipe the slate clean and remove from the face of the planet the festering disease that is humanity. ‘Judgment Day May 21, 2011. The Bible guarantees it!’ they holler – it’s written in no uncertain terms in Ezekiel 33:3!

Let’s just dial that up, shall we?

If when he seeth the sword come upon the land, he blow the trumpet, and warn the people.

Er… hmm. No May 21 date there, as near as I can tell. Just more of the same ol’ same ol’ as far as ‘end times’ prophecy goes. But Family Radio claims they have Infallible Proof of the date and they’ve set it all out here. ((Really, don’t bother. Your brain will just collapse in on itself.)) There you go. Judgment day written in stone for May 21, 2011.

Mark the day in your diary, because you can be sure we’ll be visiting them to get their explanation for the no show of God and his Heavenly Hosts. Will it be a mathematical error? Will it be a misinterpretation of the biblical prophecy? Or will it be that God has just given the lot of us away as a bunch of no-hoper losers?

Stay tuned to Tetherd Cow Ahead End Times Radio for the Countdown to Apocalypse!

(Seriously, I wonder how these people, many of whom have given up their entire former lives to ‘spread the word’, are going to cope when Judgment Day doesn’t happen. How does a brain resolve an absolute prediction like that not coming true?)

___________________________________________________________________________

Big thanks to Atlas for the find.

Cow Commenter DaveD brings to my attention the latest shenanigans from the makers of Shoo!TAG, the ridiculous superstitious trinket that is supposed to keep insect pests away from your pet (and now from humans too).

Regular readers of The Cow will be familiar with my call to Energetic Solutions (the company behind Shoo!TAG) to show us the science (that they keep boasting they have) that substantiates the efficacy of their ludicrous little piece of plastic. Well, we still haven’t seen any results from the ‘European trials’ that they have bragged about in the past, ((These supposed trials were either a lie or they produced negative results that Energetic Solutions don’t want people to see. Otherwise, why not provide the data? I’m betting that the former proposition is true.)) but it appears my niggling has made them realise that no-one will take them even remotely seriously if they can’t provide some proper scientific results to back up their claims.

Only one small problem… they don’t actually understand what science is.

The Shoo!TAG site is now making the following announcement:

Texas A&M University monitors Field Trial
74% reduction in mosquito bites with shoo!TAG™!

How many of you understood this to mean that Texas A&M University had something to do with these tests? Well, it won’t surprise you, I’m sure, when I tell you that you’re wrong. How many understood it to mean there were successful, properly run scientific trials that showed some amazing results? Wrong again.

Let’s re-word the Shoo!TAG announcement in a more factually correct manner, shall we?

Poorly-constructed Shoo!TAG™ test prompts an independent observer to suggest (on Texas A&M University letterhead) that results are statistically meaningless!

Ah, yes. The actuality doesn’t sound nearly so impressive, does it? But this scenario is nothing more than we’ve come to expect from Shoo!TAG: don’t let a bit of truth get in the way of some duplicitous self-aggrandizing! What, you think that the Shoo!TAG people couldn’t possibly be that disingenuous? Hahaha! You haven’t been paying attention!

But, for the sake of science, let’s examine the Shoo!TAG experiment and the actual conclusions of Dr Rainer Fink, the independent observer who viewed the proceedings.

The full report of the Shoo!TAG trial written by Shoo!TAG CEO Carter McCrary is here. In a few sentences from the begining of the abstract we get to this:

The Purpose of this Initial Field Test is to verify the claim that the shoo!TAG® significantly reduces the number of mosquito bites to humans when worn as instructed.

Whoopsy. Oh well, he’s not a scientist I guess, so you expect that kind of thing. Did you spot it?

‘The Purpose of this Initial Field Test is to verify the claim…‘

Uh-uh, Mr McCrary. You’ve scuppered your scientific credibility ((OK, I know I’m being generous in allowing that these people have any scientific credibility in the first place…)) in the very first paragraph of your abstract. Science is not done like that. Scientific tests are not set up to endorse something you’ve already decided to be true. If you approach science like this, you’re already demonstrating something that real scientists go a long way to avoid: bias. I don’t suppose you have the faintest clue how this works though, so I’ll forge on to some of the more egregious problems with your trial.

The ‘Methods’ section of the abstract outlines the procedural method of the test:

The study consisted of six participants who were divided into two groups.

You what? SIX people? Surely you’re not going to tell us that you’re going to attempt to do meaningful statistical science with a group of six people? ((Divided into two groups? Can three people even be considered a group?)) Oh. You are. Right. But that’s going to be really difficult for a double-blind trial… Oh, what’s this… it’s not double-blind. OK, you can still do worthwhile science with a blind trial… Oh… lookit that. It’s not a blind trial either.

Um. OK. Do you Shootaggers know anything at all about science, other than what you’ve seen on the SyFy channel?

OK, Acowlytes, let’s take a look at some of the other howlers in this escapade. I’ll synopsize a bit, but I urge you to read the pdf of the trial yourselves in order that you might see that I, at least, am not playing fast and loose with facts.

The next thing that happened is that the test subjects, 3 of whom were wearing Shoo!TAGs, and 3 of them not, were put in separate tents with mosquitoes. Bites were counted. Then there was some baffling shuffling of tags and people in and out of tents during which time mosquitoes also apparently were free to come and go.

It must be noted that a portion of the mosquitoes in the Group 3 tent escaped during the change-out or had already bitten the participants, thus the number of available mosquitoes was estimated to be only 250 during the second set of testing – the data was corrected by an estimated x2 factor to compensate.

Hang on, surely that can’t be right. I’ll read it again. An estimated number of mosquitoes flew away, an estimated number were excluded due to satiation and an estimated factor of magnitude was added in to ‘compensate’ for these estimations? If there were worse things you could do in a science experiment, its hard to imagine them. Especially in an experiment with a subject sample size of six people. ((Humans are notoriously bad at estimating. Try to imagine, if you will, estimating the number of mosquitoes flying around in a tent… could you tell the difference between oh, a hundred and two hundred? Try five hundred and six hundred?))

Quite incredibly, the Shootaggers then go on to attempt a statistical analysis of all this spurious data.

A total of 362 bites were recorded. The mean number of bites experienced by participants with the shoo!TAG® was 18, with a standard deviation of 15.87. The mean number of bites experienced by participants without the shoo!TAG® was 67.5, with a standard deviation of 22.45. There is a significant difference between the mean number of bites of subjects with the shoo!TAG® present and those without the shoo!TAG® present. The P- Value for the two-sample unpooled t-test between the means of bites is approximately 0.00538.

Let me translate that into something that makes more sense:

Numbers; more numbers; some more numbers; some fancy statistical language that sounds impressive but means nothing in this instance; completely fanciful conclusion.

Or, in one single word: bullshit. If you know anything at all about statistical data correlation, this whole exercise is one laughable step after another. The waving around of a P-Value is completely berserk in this ridiculously small sample. If the point of this experiment is to gain scientific credibility for the effectiveness of ShooTAG, it is a piece of unparalleled buffoonery.

But we all know, of course, that the point of the experiment is nothing of the sort. The real purpose behind these farcical proceedings is to fool people who know nothing of science into thinking that science has been done.

The Shoo!TAG report goes on to fluff out the abstract by adding in all kinds of equations and tables – none of which have any real meaning given the experimental protocol – and then ends with the most entertaining bit of all: two ‘references’ that are contextually irrelevant, and three attached ‘exhibits’, the first two of which are the Shoo!TAG packaging. It is to laugh. They think this is science?

The third ‘exhibit’ is the letter from the ‘independent observer’ of the experiment, one Dr Rainer Fink, and it is here that we find the real meat in the sandwich of this whole exploit. Dr Fink appears to be a bona fide scientist. According to his credentials on the letter, he is an associate professor (of what it doesn’t say) and a ‘director’ in an engineering department of Texas A&M University. Let’s give his credentials and his independent status the benefit of the doubt – he hasn’t disgraced himself in our eyes yet. His full report, in the form of a letter on Texas A&M University letterhead, is here.

First of all, I want to point out that Dr Fink details his ‘independent’ status quite clearly at the end at the end of his letter:

I have no financial interest in and have not been promised any financial interest in Energetic Solutions LLC, or in the product Shoo!TAG. I received no payment or incentive for my participation. My motivation was purely scientific.

Of course, having no financial interest in something doesn’t guarantee you don’t have some other interest – you might want to see your pals do well in their business, for instance, or you might hold unusual beliefs of your own that you’d like to see substantiated. ((I’m not suggesting at all that this is the case for Dr Fink, just making it clear that there are many kinds of motivations other than money.)) Certainly, Dr Fink’s professed motivation of science seems quite peculiar when, in his first paragraph, he makes the same partisan mistake as Mr McCrary.

The object [of the Shoo!TAG Field Test Study] was to prove [my emphasis] Shoo!TAG’s ability to repel mosquitoes from humans…

Interesting language for a scientist. Shoo!TAG’s ability to repel mosquitoes has never, ever, been scientifically established, so, as you can see, Dr Fink is already demonstrating bias. Which is, again, quite interesting given that his #2 self-reported reason for his involvement in the proceedings is given as:

2. [To] Oversee the Field Test Study to ensure it remained unbiased such that independent results are obtained.

Well, of course, as we have seen, this ‘experiment’ fairly reeks of bias from all quarters, so Dr Fink is already on the back foot.

Dr Fink outlines the experimental progress, and several episodes are detailed that don’t appear to have made it into Mr McCrary’s relating of events. This one is particularly good:

…during the time interval between exiting from Control Group 1 and entering the tent as Control Group 3, participants were asked to use their cellular phones to attempt to dissipate any remaining frequency based interferences remaining from the time they were wearing the Shoo!TAG.

Excuse me? What? Cell phones were waved around to dissipate ‘frequencies’ that were… what… hovering in the air. Or something? As an independent scientific observer, Dr Fink is starting to look like a prize idiot. He reports this as if it was an acceptable – conventional, even – scientific procedure. ((Even if you were dumb enough to buy into the sheer daftness of these concepts, representatives from Shoo!TAG have said in their own words right here on Tetherd Cow Ahead that the ‘frequencies’ that Shoo!TAG uses have nothing to do with cell phone frequencies.))

Oh boy. A loon ‘independently’ verifying, on University stationery, the antics of other loons. I’m sure you’re getting a vivid picture here.

Dr Fink goes on to relate all manner of other things, including completely unsubstantiated personal speculations such as this:

Once the participants left the tents, mosquitoes that had either escaped through the tent opening or were physically attached to the study participants aggressively attacked all the study contributors and observers with a complete lack of interest in study participants still wearing the Shoo!TAG. Leading to a possible conclusion that the Shoo!TAG caused the mosquitoes to preferentially feed on unprotected or less protected individuals in the area before biting Shoo!TAG wearers.

Such terrible subjective observations and conclusions are no better than the vapid testimonials that Shoo!TAG has trumpeted on their web site as ‘evidence’ that the daft thing works. It is most profoundly not the language you’d expect from someone calling himself a scientist.

But probably the most damning thing about Rainer Fink’s analysis of the whole affair are his conclusions. No matter how predisposed he is toward helping the Shootaggers out, he is smart enough to know that there are some things you just can’t put on the letterhead of your employer without risking your job. After some tabling of the numbers gathered in the test, he writes:

‘…… it must be noted that the size of the study conducted was insufficient to evaluate the statistical significance of the results.’

…and, again later in the report:

… the scale of the test was insufficient to establish the efficacy of Shoo!TAG performance to be supported by statistical data analysis.’

In other words, any actual data gathered from the experiment (as questionable as it is), is, in Dr Rainer Fink’s opinion, completely useless. In fact, the only outcomes that Dr Fink consider affirmative are of the spurious subjective kind that Shoo!TAG has already promoted ad nauseum as ‘scientific’.

One must question once more, in that light, the Shoo!TAG website boast of ‘74% reduction in mosquito bites with Shoo!TAG’ and their attempt to promote statistical success in their own reading of the data. They have again, as they have done many times in the past, just pulled a completely fictitious ‘fact’ from their asses and are using it to promote their product. ((This 74% figure is remarkably close to the ‘75%’ figure that Energetic Solutions has already bandied about a year or more ago. It seems to me that they had already decided this number WELL before this experiment was carried out; a number big enough to be impressive, but not so big that it rules out the odd usual flea that someone spots on their pet.))

So, to succinctly recap the some of the numerous problems with Shoo!TAG Initial Field Test:

•The test is riddled with bias: the conductors of the test expected to see positive results before they commenced the experiment. In short, they had already made up their minds about what was going to happen – the experiment was not about gathering impartial data.

•The trial was completely unblinded: experimental blinding is specifically designed to counteract bias. A lack of blinding combined with evidence of bias (as above) are strong indications of corrupt procedure and would, by themselves, get any serious experiment kicked out on its ass.

•The subject sample size was insignificant: an experimental base of six subjects is preposterous (and we don’t even know how the subjects were chosen – my bet is that they are all friends of the experimenters)

•The ‘experimenters’ made subjective assessments in numerous areas: there was no rigorous control of most vectors of the experiment. Guesses were made of variables and then taken as fact. This is a scientific dog’s breakfast.

•The ‘experimenters’ made spurious subjective data alterations: data was altered by ‘guessing’ and making unguided assumptions. Way to screw up your dataset.

•There is NO endorsement by Texas A&M University of this trial, although that is heavily implied: Texas A&M University is not shown to be endorsing this test. The test was not carried out on the premises of Texas A&M University nor with Texas A&M University supplied protocols. It certainly does not have the imprimatur of Texas A&M University. The fact is that a person who works at Texas A&M University was called on to be an observer and provided his observations on a University letterhead.

•The scientific credentials and bias of ‘impartial’ observer are questionable: Dr Rainer Fink’s statement exhibits bias and subjectivity as well as irrational thinking.

•The scientific endorsement of the trial is equivocal: The only definite conclusion made by Dr Fink is that there isn’t enough data to make any kind of meaningful sense from the results. In any other scientific situation this would mean that the test was useless and a better experiment was required.

In Shoo!TAG’s world, though, this translates as an outstanding success worthy of trumpeting on their website.

Here on Tetherd Cow Ahead, the call for Shoo!TAG to ‘show us some science’ has been frequent and firm. The Shootaggers vocally insist, at every opportunity, that their product is based on scientific principles, and is not (as I contend) just a pseudoscientific trinket that smacks of magical thinking. Critics might say that this first Shoo!TAG ‘Field Trial’ is at least an effort by Energetic Solutions to attempt to gather some scientific data on their product. I say it’s nothing more than a publicity stunt designed with the express purpose of deceiving potential customers into believing that there is some science behind Shoo!TAG when there is none.

Setting the hopeless errors of procedure aside, the mere fact that Energetic Solutions is leading people to believe that this test has the endorsement of a university, or has produced data that shows anything at all is a testament to their world view. They don’t care whether or not their product works, they just want your money.

And they’re prepared to lie to get it.

Acowlytes! Atlas has sent me some astonishing new evidence that demonstrates beyond all reasonable doubt that Shoo!TAG actually works! Yes, yes – I realise that after all my previous skepticism on this topic this about-face will seem completely unexpected, but… you see… Oh dammit, words can’t really do the job. I’ll hand over to the following YouTube presentation to do the explaining:

So, you see, putting it in scientific terms, there’s this, like, blurry light, that, like, makes a sort of glow all around the person and, like, all around the Shoo!TAG and it’s AMAZING! And when the Shoo!TAG gets close to the person, it’s all, like, glowy and yellow and white and stuff. Freakin’ awesome! That proves that there’s auras around Shoo!TAG! And those auras prove that Shoo!TAG keeps insect pests away from your pets! OMG! If that doesn’t convince you close-minded skeptics, well, I don’t know WHAT would!

What’s that you say? Some double blind scientific trials would be more convincing? Than an aura movie? Oh, come ON! Aura movies are the bomb. Why, I have a snap here that PROVES that Tetherd Cow Ahead HQ is haunted:

Pretty definitive, right?

The Shoo!TAG aura movie comes to the world courtesy of a product called WinAura, and although that sounds like the outcome of a psychic chocolate wheel, ((I wanted to put a link to an explanation of what a chocolate wheel is, for all the non-Australians, and it seems there is no actual definition available on teh internets. That’s amazing. So, for your enlightenment, let me inform you that a chocolate wheel is a kind of spinning wheel that is common at fétes and church fairs in Australia and New Zealand. It has numbers around its face, and participants are able to buy a ticket that is attached to a number. The numbers correspond randomly to prizes. When all the tickets have been sold, the wheel is spun (sometimes once, or sometimes three times), and when it stops on a number, the owner of that ticket collects their prize. Of course, most prizes are worth less than the price of the ticket, and there are usually only one or two decent prizes.)) it is in fact a gadget that supposedly captures movies of your aura. If you are so inclined, you can visit the home of WinAura and find out all about machines that photograph your aura. Or, you could just stay here and I could save you from wasting precious minutes of your life by telling you that these shonky devices merely use coloured LEDs, software algorithms and blurred overexposure to trick very gullible people into believing that what they see has some kind of mystical explanation. For an exorbitant price, naturally. ((I defy anyone to be able to find, anywhere on the AuraPhoto site, an indication of how much you’re going to be out of pocket for one of these things. I reckon you can infer from this page that they’re not cheap.))

On the other hand, if you did go to the AuraPhoto site, you could visit the What Color Is Your Aura page and get something just as useful as the results from an Aura Camera without spending a penny. That’s what I did! Here is a picture of my aura:

According to my aura reading I have a lot of lavender in my chakras (or something). Evidently I have some in my Third Eye as well, which does help explain why I was having trouble seeing out of it. The interpretation of my results says, in part:

Others are instantly attracted to you as you sparkle and glow with a mysterious inner light. You also seem to be a magical, fairylike creature, born of another world.

You’d rather talk about miracles, magic, and pots of gold at the end of the rainbow than anything ordinary or mundane. You want to share your miraculous visions with others. The beautiful world of fantasy, art, and the imagination is where you feel safest and happiest. You create a magical environment for yourself and others in which to live.

How accurate is that?!!! I think everyone would totally agree that I truly am a sparkly glowing fairylike creature who attracts admirers like a roo light attracts Christmas beetles. And there can be no dispute whatsoever that my my magical playground, filled with fantasy and art, is nothing other than the Realm of the Tetherd Cow! (I feel I should also point out that the lavender colours go extremely well with the TCA colour scheme).

As far as I can see, though, it doesn’t matter what colour your aura is on the AuraPhoto site, it’s impossible to come away with a reading that says anything that could be construed to be negative. Such as, for instance:

You’re a duplicitous and morally compromised swindler who is quite prepared to sell rigged computer software and tweaked camera hardware to credulous nitwits in exchange for exorbitant amounts of cash.

If we had a picture of that person’s aura, I imagine there’d be a lot of Dead Salmon and Cat Breath in their chakras. And probably a pronounced squint in their Third Eye.

I was reading back, this morning, over my discourse with Man on the Bus in the comments on my post Gene Bunk, and realised that to many late-comers in my life I probably sound like a crotchetty and disagreeable old codger when it comes to matters of, shall we say ‘fringe’ science. People who know me in real life understand that, while I may be curmudgeonly on occasion, I am in fact a pretty tolerant person in a general sense. So why do things like homeopathy, UFOs, ESP research, ShooTag, ‘energized’ water, free energy and so many other pseudoscientific claims tick me off quite so much? It is certainly true that these days I have virtually no indulgence for these non-mainstream ideas. It wasn’t always like that, though.

Just to recap: Man on the Bus took exception to my impatience (via a reference in the Footnotes) with the so-called ‘precognition’ experiments recently published by Cornell University psychologist Daryl Bem. I gave Man on the Bus rather shorter shrift than he deserved – he was, after all, making the very reasonable point that the results of Bem’s experiments will stand or fall on replication of the results by other researchers. So what, exactly, is wrong with ‘waiting for the jury to come back in’, as MotB puts it?

At the end of our discourse, he snippily bid me return to my scatological poems (in which I had been indulging with Atlanski and others) and I jokingly replied that:

Scatological limericks have longevity. ESP research doesn’t. It’s a matter of how one’s time is best invested.

Probably rude and flippant, but it is, for me, essentially the pivot of the matter.

When I was a teenager, I was absolutely enthralled by all things ESP. I made myself a hand-drawn deck of Zener Cards and conducted experiments on my friends.

I spent many a long hour tabulating the results of those experiments, and sometimes even thought I’d discovered trends that just couldn’t be coincidence! ((I hadn’t. In those days I really had no idea of experimental protocol, and it has to be said that it is probable that I was just finding patterns I wanted to find…)) I also had an ad-hoc UFO watcher’s group and even experimented with Tarot cards and the I-Ching. In short, ‘I wanted to believe’. There was no question that I had that very thing which I’m often accused of not having these days: an open mind.

So why did these things not ‘stick’ for me? Why is it that I don’t still default to the belief (like so many millions of other people) that there is ‘something to it’ – this weird world that seems always hovering just outside the laws of reality as we have come to understand them?

Well, it turns out that that’s what happens when you actually do keep an open mind; you begin to entertain arguments that are not merely the appendages of ‘belief’. Indeed, I started to realize that the earnestness of my desire to believe had exactly no bearing on how likely something was to be true.

In essence, my change of position on fringe beliefs came down to a huge amount of open-minded reading and the realization of three things:

1. How easily I (and by inference, anyone else) could be deceived. ((Either by self-deceit, or by someone who had a suitable agenda. The combination of these two is especially powerful.))
2. That people actually want unusual things to be true, even if ((Perhaps ‘especially if’…)) belief in them breaks all the laws of common logic.
3. The completely unimpressive nature of the accumulated data, considering how much of it there was.

I remember roughly the time that my mind started ‘closing’. Or opening, depending on which way you want to look at it. It was 1975. I was in my teens, and Israeli psychic Uri Geller was in all the news media. Geller is such an obvious and audacious fraud when you look back on him these days, ((Unbelievably, even after his tricks have been exposed time and time gain, there are still people today who continue to think Geller’s ‘powers’ are real. There truly is no dissuading someone who wants to believe.)) but in 1975 he was something of a phenomenon. To see him perform on television – his charisma alone casting a kind of magical spell over talk-show hosts – was to think that maybe here, at last, was the ‘proof’ we’d all been waiting for that there really might be something to this ‘psi’ thing. I bought Andrija Puharich’s book, Uri – a scientist’s account of Uri Geller’s powers and, although the bits about aliens from Spectra (a talking spaceship from Hoova) sounded a little wacky to even my teenage science-fiction-loving brain, it seemed that here at last was the possibility of some scientific substantiation for this stuff that in my heart-of-hearts I believed was true.

My friends and I were convinced that we, too, should be able to teach ourselves to bend spoons like Uri could – indeed, Uri himself encouraged everybody to believe they could do anything he did, if they only could harness the power of their minds! So to that end, we sat around rubbing spoons into the late hours, willing them to bend… and… they never did, of course. And then, one night on television, I saw an interview with a bearded chap who was saying (Heresy!) that Geller’s powers were nothing more than tricks! You have no idea how much I wanted to disbelieve that bearded man. But then he did an impressive thing – he bent a spoon exactly like Uri had done! And then showed us how he did it. My teenage brain was doing a flip-flop. ‘Maybe,’ I thought, ‘this guy is doing a trick but Uri is real!’ But then, I had another thought, and it was a very, very profound one: ‘If that’s the case, though, how could I tell for sure that Uri was NOT doing a trick?’

And I decided, that, all things being equal, I simply couldn’t. If the bearded guy who I’d never heard of could fool me with a trick, then it was equally likely that Uri Geller could fool me with a trick. And, really, why should I believe Uri Geller, a person I didn’t know, over the bearded guy? Just because I wanted to? It didn’t seem like a good enough reason.

Well, it turns out (as I’m sure you’ve guessed) that the bearded chap was James Randi, and Randi was more than just some guy – he was forming a bit of a history with Uri Geller, and, dammit, he was putting forward a convincing case that Geller was pulling everybody’s legs. The striking thing was that it was very apparent that not many people wanted to hear what Randi had to say, which I found MOST peculiar. He was making good points – why were the talk-show hosts and interviewers giving him such a hard time? That’s when I first started getting an idea of how strongly a personal conviction can influence the way someone can view their world. You will see that both observations 1 & 2 that I made above, were starting to form in my mind. ((In addition to this, I became quite interested in Uri Geller’s attempts to take legal action against James Randi. This was quite confusing to me – I had seen Randi on numerous occasions challenging Geller to demonstrate his powers under controlled situations which he and Randi would agree on beforehand. This seemed extremely reasonable behaviour to me. If Uri Geller really did have extraordinary powers, how could he possibly object to this? All he had to do was demonstrate that Randi was wrong. Unless… he couldn’t…. It seemed to me that there was only one logical explanation for Geller attempting to silence Randi legally: because he was hiding something.))

Now it’s pretty damn hard to hold a belief and then abandon it in the face of a rational argument. A belief is part of your personality – you formed it for a reason, and letting it go is admitting that you made bad decisions. No-one wants to admit to having made bad decisions. And yet, that ‘letting go’ is exactly what anyone must do to achieve any kind of intellectual rigour. The thing is, once you’ve made this kind of step once, it’s a lot easier the second time, and easier still the third time. And so I found myself revisiting a lot of the stuff that I’d previously had an inclination to take at face value. UFOs? What was the evidence? Eyewitness reports? Well, it was becoming plain that that wasn’t a good way of getting accuracy. There was a lot of data about UFO sightings, but it all amounted to the same kind of thing – personal testimony that was at best vague and rarely corroborated, and at worst contradictory, inaccurate and fanciful. In the UFO business, hard facts were, as my father used to say, ‘as rare as hen’s teeth’.

Tarot card readings? I-Ching? Well, if I looked at it truthfully, it seemed that the cards and the coins, although colourful in pedigree, were really just another way of making vague predictions that could mean anything at all, depending on how ambiguous you wanted to be. And I’d already found from experience that people would agree with mostly anything I said, as long as I didn’t get too specific. It was getting harder to convince myself it was because I was a brilliant psychic.

And then there was the ‘science’ associated with all these things. Through the 60s, 70s and into the early 80s it seemed that there were thousands of experiments running with the sole aim of providing some small statistical indication that precognition, telepathy, telekinesis, remote viewing and a dozen other fringe ‘sciences’ had some validity. For many years I figured that here, at least, was a firm basis for rooting out some solid evidence for these strange phenomena, and so I kept a hopeful eye on this kind of research. I still wanted to believe. And yet, time after time, the kind of evidence these experiments offered up just seemed vague, diffuse, inconclusive, speculative and always conditional. Anyone viewing these kinds of experiments dispassionately was forced to conclude one of two things:

1. There really was nothing there.
2. If there was something there, it behaved in a way that put it outside the way science seemed to work when examining everything else in the world.

What was impossible to conclude was that there definitely was something there. There were NEVER unequivocal results from experiments in the psi field. You know the kind of result I mean. One that says: ‘Yup. That apple always falls to the ground when it leaves the branch. No doubt about it. Every time.’ The kind of result that proper science delivers, in other words.

It started seeming to me, in fact, that psi research was more like the human consciousness sciences of psychology and cognition, where results are subjective and rules are more like guidelines. ((For very good reason, I submit. Belief in parapsychology in my view IS an area of cognitive science. It’s about how we view the world, with all the self deception and illusion that entails – not how the world behaves physically.)) Annoyingly, though, a whole army of psi researchers continued to insist that their results do reflect the physical world, even though they actually couldn’t bring forward any evidence to add weight to that assertion. They stacked tiny variations from chance on top of tiny deviations from the norm, conducted experiment after experiment and returned, always, the same ambiguous outcomes. This has been the state of psi research for decades now.

Eventually, trying to maintain an ongoing interest in this process merely becomes tiring.

Which brings us all the way back to the experiments of Daryl Bem. ((You can read Bem’s experiment here.)) On the face of it, what Bem claims to have discovered is actually intriguing. But as soon as you dive into the mechanics of it, all the same old hallmarks of psi research appear: conditional results, small (so small they are conceivably illusory) variations away from chance, protocol that has uncomfortable facets of subjectivity rolled up in it ((Bem, has noted in his paper, for instance, that the outcomes of psi experiments tend to vary according to who is involved with the experiment. Believers are more likely to produce positive results than skeptics. Even though he makes efforts to exclude this influence, should it exist, from his own experiments, it’s hard to see how it can be taken seriously as a conjecture. Quite logically this kind of influence, if there’s any substance in it, should be at work in ALL scientific experiments and it doesn’t seem to be of any consequence in other branches of science… Psi researcher are therefore setting a ‘special condition’ upon their experiments – one that applies specifically to their field. That kind of conditionality is very un science-like. Indeed, it undermines one of the very cornerstones of scientific belief; an experiment should reliably return results no matter who is carrying it out. Aside from all that, the very idea itself smacks of absurdity. Believers get positive results and skeptics get chance? Those with a vested interest get what they want to see, and proper scientists get what proper science predicts? Come on! How terribly convenient!)) and so forth.

When Man on the Bus exhorts me to wait till the jury is in, therefore, my patience to do so is mitigated by the many times I’ve waited for them to return in the past. This doesn’t mean that Bem’s experiments have no value – just that, given my experience with this subject, the likelihood that they do is well below my threshold to want to give them the scientific time-of-day. In other words, I don’t see that my investment in them is any more likely to pay off than my investment in the results of thousands of Ganzfield experiments and remote viewing sessions and telepathy tests has done in the past.

To quote a great man, extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. Bem is claiming extraordinary things. His experimental results, on the other hand, are no more persuasive than those from a mountain of other ESP research that has come before, all of which have been demonstrated to be questionable at best. Man on the Bus is appealing to my spirit of scientific fairness, and technically he is right to do so. I should wait for more evidence.

In my view though, when it comes to experiments with psi (or homeopathy or free energy or UFOs or a dozen other fringe belief systems that purport to be based on science) a body is entitled to ask to be given, along with any supposed results of the experiments, some good reasons why this particular case deserves any special attention. Reasons that set it apart from the already understood one that ‘it would be so COOOOL if it was true!’ Bem is not advancing any new framework for his supposed results. There is no proposed mechanism by which they might be occurring, nor is there any promising thread of scientific discourse that leads to them. The results are curious, sure, but no more than that.

It’s like trying to apply a scientific process to the photographing of a unicorn. The fact is that most sensible people eventually get to a point where it becomes plain, as they set up their camera just one more time on a magical moonlit night (because, after all, no-one can prove that the unicorn won’t come tonight…), that maybe, just maybe, they are wasting their time. If that unicorn doesn’t actually exist, it doesn’t matter what kind of lens you use, or how carefully you make your exposure, or how many shots you take – no amount of belief is going to imprint its image onto your film. And while the hundreds of shadowy blurs, smears of light and odd sparkles that you’ve captured over the years might be worthy of some bull sessions in the pub, they still don’t amount to the only thing that is really needed to shut everybody up once and for all: