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(via email)
Contribute To The Environment Unconsciously With The Magic Power System!:
What would you say to a £34.99 ($53.75) device that plugs into your car’s lighter socket and gives you 10-30% better fuel economy, cleans the entire car electrically and improves audio sounds? We totally believe all those claims, and those are just a few of the benefits offered by the Magic Power System, aka Power Bar. How do you suppose this device works? Blood-magneto suction drums? Electrical system acupressure? Charm quark intimidation?
What would I say? Flushing £34.99 ($53.75) down the loo (toilet) would have the same effect on you car’s fuel economy…
(via Pharyngula)
Ken Miller doesn’t like Expelled.
He must be one of those atheistic scientists, or not.
(via Pharyngula )
Russell T Davies: Return of the (tea) Time Lord:
The evolutionary biologist and best-selling author of The God Delusion will appear as a guest star in the new series of Doctor Who, which began last night. “People were falling at his feet,” says Davies, creator of the BBC’s flagship show. “We’ve had Kylie Minogue on that set, but it was Dawkins people were worshipping.”
(via email)
Do Coat Hangers Sound As Good Monster Cables?
We gathered up a 5 of our audio buddies. We took my “old” Martin Logan SL-3 (not a bad speaker for accurate noise making) and hooked them up with Monster 1000 speaker cables [ed. Monster Ultra Series THX 1000 Audio Interconnects] (decent cables according to the audio press). We also rigged up 14 gauge, oxygen free Belden stranded copper wire with a simple PVC jacket. Both were 2 meters long. They were connected to an ABX switch box allowing blind fold testing. Volume levels were set at 75 Db at 1000K Hz. A high quality recording of smooth, trio, easy listening jazz was played (Piano, drums, bass). None of us had heard this group or CD before, therefore eliminating biases. The music was played. Of the 5 blind folded, only 2 guessed correctly which was the monster cable. (I was not one of them). This was done 7 times in a row! Keeping us blind folded, my brother switched out the Belden wire (are you ready for this) with simple coat hanger wire! Unknown to me and our 12 audiophile buddies, prior to the ABX blind test, he took apart four coat hangers, reconnected them and twisted them into a pair of speaker cables. Connections were soldered. He stashed them in a closet within the testing room so we were not privy to what he was up to. This made for a pair of 2 meter cables, the exact length of the other wires. The test was conducted. After 5 tests, none could determine which was the Monster 1000 cable or the coat hanger wire. Further, when music was played through the coat hanger wire, we were asked if what we heard sounded good to us. All agreed that what was heard sounded excellent, however, when A-B tests occurred, it was impossible to determine which sounded best the majority of the time and which wire was in use. Needless to say, after the blind folds came off and we saw what my brother did, we learned he was right…most of what manufactures have to say about their products is pure hype. It seems the more they charge, the more hyped it is.
Speaker cables made from any reasonably good conductor should be good enough. I’m not necessarily advocating using wire coat hangers to hook up stereo components, but premium cables are a rip-off.
A free energy scam gets by the spam filter…
From: “Water Powered Cars” <smtp@nineivory.com>
Date: 07 Feb 2008 12:50:37 -0600
Subject: We Open The Door For You To FREE-ENERGY
We offer a cost effective, immediate solution to
the “energy crisis” and pollution - right now.
If you actually had an effective, immediate solution to the “energy crisis” and pollution, I seriously doubt you’d to sell it via spam.
Something YOU can do NOW, using water technology
provides you with a great ENTRY-LEVEL solution you can install in a few minutes without
engine modifications, you start driving, and the
next thing you know - you start thinking: “Hey,
something CAN be done about it!”
I don’t expect you to believe in 100% watercars.
You see, your belief level has to rise step by step. Free energy is hard to believe until it’s actually happening under your own hood. Until you see it in your energy bills. In April 2006 I was skeptic too. So start with this first easy step.
Free energy is hard to believe - There’s a pretty good reason why free energy is hard to believe.
We open the door for you - Welcome to FREE ENERGY!
[URL removed]
You May Remove Yourself From Our Mailings By Visiting HERE
[another URL removed]
or write to:
Pink Zebra Marketing
231 S Bemiston Ave
Suite 800
St Louis, MO 63105
The deleted URL’s point to web pages in the domain, nineivory.com (the URL’s were encoded in such a way that following them would have verified the email address this scam was sent to). The contact information for nineivory.com is the same as the contact information for Pink Zebra Marketing.
John Scalzi goes to the Creation Museum so you don’t have to.
ON THE CREATION MUSEUM
By John Scalzi
Here’s how to understand the Creation Museum:
Imagine, if you will, a load of horseshit. And we’re not talking just your average load of horseshit; no, we’re talking colossal load of horsehit. An epic load of horseshit. The kind of load of horseshit that has accreted over decades and has developed its own sort of ecosystem, from the flyblown chunks at the perimeter, down into the heated and decomposing center, generating explosive levels of methane as bacteria feast merrily on vintage, liquified crap. This is a Herculean load of horseshit, friends, the likes of which has not been seen since the days of Augeas.
And you look at it and you say, “Wow, what a load of horseshit.”
(from the There’s One Born Every Minute dept.)
(via email)
James Randi’s Swift - September 28, 2007
MORE CABLE NONSENSE
Several readers alerted us to yet another hilarious and preposterous situation in the “audiophile” business, which we have referred to frequently simply because if some of their claims were true, they would be paranormal. Here’s another such.
Monster Cable – a company that turns out a fine line of products, but not untinged with the woo-woo flavor, sells a set of $80 HDMI [High Definition Multimedia Interface] cables, designed to handle new signals brought about by the advent of High Definition TV. I thought that was a heavy price to be asking – no, I didn’t invest! – but now we see that the Pear Cable company is advertising a pair of 12-foot “Anjou” audio cables for $7,250; that’s $302 a foot! And, as expected, “experts” were approached for their opinions on the performance of these wonders. Excerpts:
…way better than anything I have heard…Simply put these are very danceable cables. Music playing through them results in the proverbial foot-tapping scene with the need or desire to get up and move. Great swing and pace – these cables smack that right on the nose big time.
…simply way better than anything I have heard prior to their audition.
Well, we at the JREF are willing to be shown that these “no-compromise” cables perform better than, say, the equivalent Monster cables. While Pear rattles on about “capacitance,” “inductance,” “skin effect,” “mechanical integrity” and “radio frequency interface,” – all real qualities and concerns, and adored by the hi-fi nut-cases – we naively believe that a product should be judged by its actual performance, not by qualities that can only be perceived by attentive dogs or by hi-tech instrumentation. That said, we offer the JREF million-dollar prize to – for example – Dave Clark, Editor of the audio review publication Positive Feedback Online, who provided the above rave review. If Mr. Clark should choose to apply for the prize, he would be unlike John Atkinson of Stereophile Magazine – see randi.org/jr/121004science.html#11 – who made great noises about being ready to snap up the million, then got distracted by things such as gullible readers who accepted his claimed abilities, and backed out. But we’ll see…
Monster cables are already overpriced, but asking $7,250 for a pair 12 foot audio cables is beyond ludicrous. I doubt anyone can tell a difference in a blind test.
Opportunity for geologists!
If you want to ruin your career, you can always get a job at Answers in Genesis. Check this out from their Statement of Faith page:
No apparent, perceived or claimed evidence in any field, including history and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the Scriptural record.
On their front page, AiG asks the question: “Is the Creation Museum anti-science?” Simply based on their statement of faith, the answer is “Yes, the Creation Museum is definitely anti-science.”
(via email)
(via What’s new by Bob Park - Friday, May 18, 2007)
1. DOE POLYGRAPH PROGRAM: COUNTER INTELLIGENCE TAKEN LITERALLY.
A 30 Apr 07 memo notified Los Alamos employees that random polygraph tests
of 8,000 personnel in high-risk categories will be conducted by the DOE as
part of a new counter-intelligence program. Three years ago, a National
Academy of Sciences study done at the request of the DOE, The Polygraph
and Lie Detection, (WN 18 Apr 03)
concluded that the high incidence of false positives made the polygraph
worse than useless. Nothing indicates it will work any better for randomly
chosen personnel. The polygraph, in fact, has ruined careers, but never
uncovered a single spy. If you have an orgasm while being tested and lie
about it, the operator can probably tell. For anything else, it’s a coin
toss.
More:
I'm pretending that we're all watching PHIL SILVERS
instead of RICARDO MONTALBAN!
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