Category: Entertainment

You Are Incredibly Logical

Move over Spock – you’re the new master of logic You think rationally, clearly, and quickly. A seasoned problem solver, your mind is like a computer! How Logical Are You?  (hat tip to Terrance)

You Are Scooter

Brainy and knowledgable, you are the perfect sidekick. You’re always willing to lend a helping hand. In any big event or party, you’re the one who keeps things going. "15 seconds to showtime!" The Muppet Personality Test

A heartwarming story – Dame Edna at last gets honoured by her hometown of Melbourne. And at the same time it’s a slightly worrying indication of the march of time – it came as something of a shock to me to read that Barry Humphries is 72.

I recently mentioned my scepticism about the so-called "free energy" breakthrough by the Steorn company. By way of comparison, Lyle Zapato draws our attention to the Water Energy Generator invented by John Q. St. Clair, who really is in a class of his own with his inventions.

 

His generator ‘uses low density hyperspace energy produced by a magnetic vortex wormhole generator to "soften" water molecules, breaking their atomic binding and causing the hydrogen nuclei to decay into a cascade of electron pairs, which are collected and turned into electricity’.

 

Easy-peasy. He’s even got a US patent on his invention. Which probably only goes to show that you can patent any old codswallop if you’ve got the brass cheek to do so. A lesson that may not have gone unnoticed by certain Irish companies.

An Irish company – Steorn – is claiming that they have developed a technology that produces free, clean and constant energy. Sigh, here we go again, perpetual motion machines are perpetually being touted. The company has even issued a challenge, and placed an advert in The Economist, to recruit 12 scientists to test its claims.

 

Let’s think about this for a moment – why is the company seeking to select only scientists? And note, too, it is the company that will pick and choose the 12 scientists. As James Randi says,  "Authority does not rest with scientists, when emotion, need, and desperation are involved. Scientists are human beings, too, and can be deceived and self-deceived". It would seem to me to be better for Steorn to submit its technology to Randi’s Million Dollar Challenge. That way, not only would the company have its claims subjected to intense scrutiny by skeptics, but it would also receive a cash injection of a million dollars, should the first law of thermodynamics be proven to be broken.

 

My bet is that the first law will not be broken and that this is yet another hoax.

 

Steorn’s video makes for entertaining viewing as well. Lots of fairly unsubtle playing on the fear that nasty people control our precious oil, or that it’s only available from difficult places. That latter point was underscored with a drawing showing an oil pipeline and two penguins. Er, oil exploration in the Antarctic is banned by international treaty for 50 years, and if that’s supposed to be the Alaskan oil pipeline, then someone should tell them that there ain’t no penguins in Alaska. 

 

I classified this entry under the category of Entertainment, since Science doesn’t strike me as being accurate.

Another quiz to pass the time…

My (unsurprising) result was: