I’m not one for patriotism. In this rapidly shrinking world I feel that the idea of ‘belonging’ to one country or another is as silly as forever waving a flag for the town where you were born ((Goulburn, NSW.)) But sometimes, sometimes, along comes an event that makes me truly proud to be Australian.
This morning I read in the Guardian of one such event. Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to announce to you, direct from Australia … Space Beer.
That’s right friends, the 4 Pines Brewing Company in Sydney, Australia, is proposing to go where no brewery has gone before by concocting a malty beverage fit for astronauts.
Humanity loves beer. We always have and always will. The Space tourism market is emerging and will take off in less than 2-years, with thousands of screaming, happy space fans booked on suborbital flights. Guaranteed some of them will want the option to enjoy a brew while looking at our big Blue Globe. Why deny them the chance?
Why indeed?! To this end, Jaron Mitchell and Jason Held from 4 Pines have developed their Vostok 4 Pines Stout, which, like good scientists, they have tested under the conditions in which it will be consumed.
A microgravity expert from the non-profit organization Astronauts4Hire (A4H) provided the test subject. The tester, who also works part-time as an in-flight coach for ZERO-G, had over 300 parabolas in microgravity. The tester consumed nearly 1-litre of the beer during weightless portions of the flight, while recording basic biometric data to track effects of the experiment.
This obviously gives the ‘vomit comet’ a whole new level of potential.
Making a brew suitable for consumption in zero gravity is not all beer & skittles though. There are a few obstacles to be overcome:
Beer aficionados will notice two differences when drinking in space. First, the sense of taste is reduced due to mild swelling of the tongue. Second, drinking beers can be uncomfortable—bubbles do not rise to the top, because there is no “top†in space. Gasses and liquids don’t like to separate. So if you have to burp, you will burp both beer and bubbles.
Hmmm. Beer-bubble-burps. Not something you might like to inflict on that groovy zero-g chick you have your eye on.
Undaunted, 4 Pines has pushed on to address these problems by re-engineering one of their previous award-winning beers to create the new highly-flavoured space stout.
This is not a “novelty beer†with the same bland taste as your normal stuff. This is a craft beer. It is meant first for people who love beer so it MUST TASTE SUPERB on Earth.
Of course you don’t need wait for your Virgin Galactic flight to sample Vostok 4 Pines – it’s already available Earthside. But only for Australians. Sorry foreign folks: that’s one of the perks you get for living in a country of innovation! ((I may have to acquire a few bottles and report back…))
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 ….
Up to 10 per cent of people who watch 3D images on television, at the movies or while gaming suffer ”cyber sickness” symptoms such as blurred vision, nausea and dizziness, health experts have warned.
Those experts! If it wasn’t for them, the world would be a much cheerier place. But wait! It’s WORSE THAN YOU THINK:
But they say the number of people affected by cyber sickness could rise to unknown proportions with the advent of the 3D TV era…
Did you hear that? UNKNOWN PROPORTIONS! It could be a veritable cyber-sickness pandemic. Forget getting immunised for swine flu – if these experts are right we’ll all be taking major doses of stereoids to fend off the 3DTs.
The article gushes breathlessly onward:
Virtual reality pioneer Mark Pesce, an honorary lecturer at the University of Sydney, said the majority of occasional 3D viewers would love the experience, but he warned that the health effects of heavy use of 3D media – which trick the eye by changing the depth perception of a person’s vision – had not been tested.
Um… actually, that’s not how 3D works at all – there is no ‘tricking the eye by changing depth perception’ Mr… who wrote this damned thing… let’s just scroll back up to the by-line… oh, WHAT a surprise. It’s Stephen Cauchi, King of the the Non-News at the wheel again. Geez. Have they hired this guy specifically to reduce the Age’s credibility or something? ((I swear I’m not witch-hunting this guy. I literally did what I just wrote – I was reading the article and thought ‘Man this is terrible!’, looked at the byline…)) Anyway, to continue, 3D works by exploiting the effect of stereopsis which is the natural way we achieve depth perception. What Mr Cauchi just said is word fluff. It is completely free of actual meaning.
Like last post’s Government Weather Control article that we saw from Mr Cauchi, as the story continues the sensible people start to appear, and we find Victorian Eye and Ear Hospital ophthalmologist Lionel Kowal saying that the number of people who reported problems with 3D is ‘probably closer to 5 per cent than 10 per cent.’ Then, we hear from Kathryn Rose, an associate professor in orthoptics at the University of Sydney, who thinks that ‘about 3 per cent of the population would not be able to watch 3D TV’.
3 percent? 3 percent? Do I hear 2 percent? 2 percent over in the back? 1.5 percent? Can I get a 1?
The article ends with a quote from Newcastle University neurobiologis Alan Brichta:
‘Right now we don’t have all the information but my gut feeling says [cyber sickness] is not going to be a major issue.’
Are you with me here in this insanity, dear Acowlytes? We’ve gone from an epidemic of ‘cyber sickness’ of UNKNOWN PROPORTIONS to ‘er.. actually, not a major issue…’ in the space of one information-free waffle fest.
Like the Government Weather Control story, I propose this whole air-headed notion could have been summed up in one short sentence:
A tiny minority of people might find 3D media a little unsettling but most people won’t.
Again, short on pizazz, but it’s exactly the same content and it would have saved precious digital bits for something that was actually worth calling NEWS.
I just love it when event transpire such that I can bring you two of my favourite subjects in one Tetherd Cow Ahead post. Today’s is such a post and it’s brought to you by the Melbourne Age which is carrying an article that combines the stupidity of the newspaper business with the beliefs of a loony. It runs under the headline ‘Weather has conspiracy theorists strung out’
INEXPLICABLY odd images ((Why, why, why do reporters continue to use this kind of language? The images are ENTIRELY explicable in any number of ways. They are ONLY inexplicable in the mind of Colin Andrews. Stephen Cauchi, you are an IDIOT.)) on Bureau of Meteorology radar. Cyclones off the Australian coast and the most intense storm to hit Melbourne in living memory. A controversial US military facility in Alaska suspected of research into weather control … It sounds like the plot of a sci-fi conspiracy thriller.
Yes, there’s no quibbling there – that’s exactly what that hodge-podge of unrelated factoids sounds like (although I’d be inclined to add the word ‘bad’ just before ‘sci-fi’). So the implication here is that it’s going to turn out to be The Truth, right, as opposed to the fiction of a ‘sci-fi conspiracy thriller’? Well, you’d be totally wrong if you were thinking that.
The story goes on to detail the following points:
•The Bureau of Meteorology radar has been recording ‘a number of very strange patterns – rings, loops, starbursts’ around Melbourne.
•There have been some big storms here.
•The High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) facility in Alaska has powerful transmitters and radars.
From this, the correspondent spins up a vacuous story that says in essence that websites ‘specializing in pseudoscience’ have ‘leapt on the notion’ that the three things above are connected and the ‘government’ is trying to control the weather.
Is anybody else feeling the need to stick their head in a bucket of ammonia?
To simplify: this is a story which is actually just a free plug for the nutty ideas of lunatics, while all the while pretending to ‘news’ by distancing itself from aforementioned lunatics. And, to put the icing on the cake, the story is embellished with an image of the recent SpaceX Falcon 9 launch, which has exactly NO relevance to anything at all.
As I’m reading this, I find myself thinking ‘Who the hell is responsible for this guff and how do they get to be working on a news desk?’ So I scroll up to the byline. It will probably come as no surprise to you at all to find that the literary genius behind this story is none other than reporter Stephen Cauchi, who has provided us with much mirth previously here on The Cow with his non-news style of journalism.
Which brings me to the second of my favourite Tetherd Cow subjects – insane people. Mr Cauchi’s main source for the above-mentioned conspiracy turns out to be someone who is very familiar to anyone who’s spent time around the pseudoscience traps – a fellow who goes by the name of Colin Andrews. Now, just to set you up, Mr Andrews has about ZERO credibility as any kind of authoritative source. In fact, if you were actually trying to find a less credible spokesperson (for anything except nutty ideas I guess) you’d have your work cut out for you.
Colin Andrews first came to prominence as an ‘expert’ on crop circles back in the 1980s, and contrary to all common sense, still believes that they are made by ‘aliens’. Since that time, he has advanced all manner of implausible conspiracies across numerous disciplines. In this case, Mr Andrews’ ‘government weather control’ paranoia centers on some ‘anomalous’ radar screen captures from earlier this year when the south coast of Australia suffered some unusually fierce storm activity. This is a couple of them:
Well, yeah, sure, these ones are from the Bureau of Meteorology radar in Broome in Western Australia, but close enough, right?
These are the ‘inexplicably’ odd radar images to which Mr Cauchi refers in his first paragraph. Rather than conclude (as might any rational person) that the radar images are simply quite explicable as imperfections in the way that a meteorological radar functions, Mr Andrews’ brain oscillates to the most wildly improbably alternative – that the images are some kind of government weather control experiment that has been cunningly contrived to appear like a radar imperfection.
Mr Andrews persists in this belief even when told as much from someone who works for the Bureau of Meteorology:
Re: The round radar prob in WA, it is a BOM Radar unit which has its lower rain level threshold setup too low, ie, too sensitive, which gives the noisy radar reading like that. Nothing to do with HAARP, which, as you know, is in Alaska. I see images like this a lot, as I work for the Bureau of Meteorology in QLD.
And you know what? You too can see images like this on Australian meteorological radars if you feel like clicking on every radar station that the BOM offers. If you think like Mr Andrews, you’re likely to find a LOT of government hanky panky. It’s a wonder the government has any time for actual governing.
After giving plenty of airing to Colin Andrews’ hair-brained ideas, the Age article goes on to seek opinions from authoritative skeptics, who quite reasonably call the idea ‘silly’. We could have started with that conclusion and made the whole story one sentence long, viz:
We asked a sensible person, Mr Tim Mendham (president of the Australian Skeptics), what he thought of noted loony Colin Andrews’ idea that the government is controlling the weather, and he said it was silly.
I guess that doesn’t make for ‘pizazz’ but the content is exactly the same as the story as it stands.
Anyhoo, after a lot of stupid waffle, the article rounds off with:
The Sunday Age tried to contact Mr Andrews, who is based in the US, but there was no reply. That could be because, according to his website, he was in Oregon for last weekend’s 11th annual UFO Festival.
Smirk smirk smirk. Well if that’s your attitude Mr ‘cynical’ Stephen Cauchi, why are you making this nitwit’s ideas out to have any credence at all?
It makes me feel quite nauseous to note that this was No. 1 on the ‘most read’ list of Top National Articles in The Age today.
Well done Melbourne Age! Another pin on the board for the Great De-Braining of the Human Race. ((Or, one optimistically hopes, another nail in the coffin of the old news media.))
UPDATE: At the time I wrote this yesterday, there were no comments on the article. Now there are 19. After reading them I actually feel like walking over to the train line near my house and throwing myself in front of the 10:15 to Flinders St Station. WHY WAS I BORN INTO A WORLD WITH THIS MUCH STUPID?!
The comments are now closed and the one I left was evidently deemed unsuitable for inclusion – evidently it made a little too much sense.
There are in the world some truly detestable human beings, and Fred Phelps, pastor of the Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas is one of them. This poisonous hate-filled individual is about as repugnant as anyone living on this planet can possibly be. His peculiar Fascist-Calvinist view of Christianity holds that Christ died so that only a few ‘elect’ people will be ‘saved’ and believes he is one of the elite on Earth who is worthy of God’s Grace. You decide what kind of a God might want to claim this man:
That’s one seething humanity-loathing mess of a person. That’s a man who has hate infused so thoroughly in his being that I doubt he can experience much else. I imagine that being inside his head is like living in a perpetually mouldy rat-infested sewer. How does someone get to be like this? More to the point, how does a person like that get through their obviously misery-saturated day? If ever I need to remind myself how much I love life, living, my friends, my family and this wonderful experience of EVERYTHING around me, I think I need only watch that video again.
You’ve been reading Tetherd Cow Ahead: proudly brought to you from the Land of the Sodomite Damned.
A man is in critical condition in Sydney after taking a dare to eat a slug, the ABC reports. The 21-year-old caught rat lungworm disease which is caused by Angiostrongylus cantonensis, a parasitic worm that is carried by slugs and snails.
Personally, I am all for letting natural selection take care of these things. Maybe he’ll come around here and lick my fungus.
Anomalous Radar Activity Around Melbourne
