Tetherd Cow Ahead

Seeing red? Feeling blue? Got aches and pains that just won’t go away? Tried whisky and aspirin and bonox and nothing seems to work anymore? Why not shed some light on the problem: the iPhone Pocket Pain Doctor is here!

Yes, dear Acowlytes, no matter what your problem, it can be solved by an iPhone app. And if your problem is a kinda sorta non-specific-type general one, then the right kind of app will obviously feature as its main operating principle – all together now – woowoo!!!

(The YouTube video has been removed for some reason. You have to imagine a long spiel from an unappealingly pushy man who shows you how you can make the iPhone shine coloured light on your skin. It’s far from persuasive).

That’s right Cowmrades – just by shining red or blue light on yourself using your phone, Pocket Pain Doctor will relieve all kinds of pain, make you more alert and cure your acne! Or, on the other hand, it might not. The bottom of the Pocket Pain Doctor site features this disclaimer:

BluWave and RedWave are not intended to treat or cure any disease. None of the statements on this website have been evaluated by the FDA.

(The Pocket Pain Doctor site has now been pulled, sadly. But unsurprisingly).

See, that’s the REALLY GREAT THING about woowoo! You can have your cake and eat it too! Your product may or may not work but people still pay you money for it. Marvellous!

Oh. But what’s this? There’s some references to ‘Clinical Studies‘ on the site! Hooray! This is bound to be enlightening… let’s see what we have. First a link to PubMed. OK, that’s impressive. It’s a draft of a paper (supposedly) called Seasonal Disorder & Body Effects Of Blue Light. ((It’s actually called “Action spectrum for melatonin regulation in humans: evidence for a novel circadian photoreceptor.” Do these people think that potential Pocket Pain Doctor customers are stupid? Oh.)) Hey waiddaminute! That’s got nothing to do with ‘Seasonal Disorder’ or blue light! It’s about the effect of light on melatonin suppression. OK – here’s another one from Modern Medicine: Blue Light Kills Acne Bacteria. Wow… so it appears. That is, if it’s catalyzing a chemical called 5-aminolevulinic acid! I wonder if the iPhone squirts some of that out too?

How about red light then? Here’s a link to a NASA article: Red Light Therapy Relieves Pain Naturally. Oh looky! It’s actually about how infrared light helps cell regrowth in a certain type of cancer, minimising the pain as a result. What about Red Light Relieves Arthritis Pain & Muscle Injuries? Well, that’s a link ((On a site called Healing Light Seminars – now that really looks reputable.)) to a pdf that appears to be a list of double blind clinical trials – but not including the findings of those trials! And anyway, they are trials of an entirely unrelated kind – various methods of infrared laser treatment. Just in case anyone isn’t clear on this – your iPhone does not emit infrared laser light. I’m astonished that anyone can get away with this kind of complete fakery.

In a comment on the home page of the Pocket Pain Doctor site, the person who created the app complains that over on Engadget they gave his toy a bit of an unfair bashing. From his tone, one might even come to the conclusion that this guy believes in what he’s pushing. But that’s a little hard to accept when you see the duplicity involved in those links to ‘scientific evidence’ that he has provided. At best he misunderstands what he’s reading and actually thinks his sources offer some kind of substantiation of his idea. At worst, his ‘corroboration’ is deceitful.

In any case, it’s all about to become academic. Down in the Tetherd Cow Ahead labs, the boffins have been hard at work on this very concept, and I’m sure it will not surprise you at all to hear that they have perfected a new technology which we call ChromaCow™. Incorporating the technology behind the TCA Virtual Glass of Water™, ChromaCow™ offers you everything that you get with Pocket Pain Doctor, only IT’S ABSOLUTELY FREE! Best of all, TCA Labs is introducing a third, even better alternative to RedWave™ and BluWave™ – YelloWave™! With TCA YelloWave™ active on your computer, we UNRESERVEDLY GUARANTEE ((Guarantee may not be guaranteed.)) that the true nature of your innermost self will be revealed to you!!! Simply click on the icons below for the complete ChromaCow™ experience! (Make sure you do them all in order or your spectral chakras may become misaligned, resulting in mood swings, sour milk or even anal haunting).

So off you go Faithful Cowpokes – tell all your friends that they need no longer waste their money on woowoo in the iPhone app shop when they can get it here at Tetherd Cow Ahead FOR NOTHING!

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(Thanks once more to Atlas for putting me on the trail. I suppose that now I really am going to have to give him a prize for the Pickled Herring Poetry Contest.)

I’ve become completely addicted to this little app for the iPhone called CameraBag. It basically lets you take iPhone snaps and apply various filters to them. It’s nothing you couldn’t do in Photoshop, and the quality is kinda crap, but there’s an immediacy and grit to the whole process that reminds me of my old Polaroid days. Except it’s about a billion times cheaper.

(Seriously! Does anyone remember how expensive Polaroid film was? I think for my treasured SX-70 Alpha I got ten shots for something like 15 or maybe even 20 dollars. And that was a lot more money in those days…)

Computers have become so powerful now that it is possible to do things that are quite mind boggling. I have no doubt that you’re all aware of what’s going on in the realm of digital image, but us sound dudes can do some pretty cool stuff too.

Let me tell you about convolution reverb.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that no matter what your level of vocal talent, you will always sound better singing in the shower. The technical reason for this is that bathrooms have nice shiny reflective tile surfaces, and the reverberation off those surfaces allows you to hear your voice more clearly. ((It’s pretty hard to ‘hear’ your own voice in your head. When you sing, you are using reflections off the space in which you happen to be to judge your pitch – this is the reason that people often sing out of tune when they’re listening to music in headphones.))

It follows logically, then, that if you sound good in the shower, you’ll sound really good on stage at, say, the Sydney Opera House, with all its great reverberant reflections and acoustic properties. Of course, it’s not possible for you or me just to whip up an a capella version of Copacabana on the Sydney Opera House stage on a whim… or, at least it hasn’t been possible until now! Yes folks, not only can you now hear how your best Barry Manilow impersonation would sound onstage at the Sydney Opera House, but we can precisely simulate your performance in any acoustic space – caverns at Carlsbad… Wembley Stadium… Abbey Road studios… in a glass jar, a metal bucket or even a broom cupboard (where Barry Manilow would, arguably, sound most appropriate).

All this thanks to fast computer processing and ‘convolution’ mapping of acoustic spaces (stick with me folks, it’s pretty damn cool…)

As I’ve already mentioned, we gauge the details of the sound of a room by the reflections off surfaces in that room. Our ears are able to hear very small variations in frequency, and our brains, by comparing the information from one ear with the other, determine the exact aural characteristics of the environment we’re in. Quite obviously, every acoustic space is completely unique – it has an acoustic ‘fingerprint’ if you like – and we are able to very accurately judge aspects such as size, shape, harmonic frequencies and surface qualities of our surroundings. All this happens completely automatically of course – you don’t think ‘Ooh, I’m in a room thirty metres long with a fundamental harmonic frequency of 160Hz and plasterboard walls!’, but rather ‘This is a big hollow space!’ or ‘This is a cupboard!’

So, how does that become useful? When we record instruments of voices in a studio, we mostly strive to get the ‘cleanest’ most unaffected-by-the-environment recording we can, so that we may add acoustic effects such as reverberation and delay at some later date. This is done for two reasons – one is that any reverberant characteristics originally recorded with an instrument are ‘stuck’ to it – you cannot remove them. A flute recorded in a big church will always sound full and awash with reverb – nine times out of ten, that’s not desirable. The second reason that we prefer a ‘clean’ recording, is that we can apply reverb and other effects judiciously as we need, to make for a better and more pleasing balance in the audio mix.

When it comes to music recording and film sound, then, you can understand that being able to call up particular audio characteristics on demand has significant value. Up until now we’ve relied on artificially created approximations of real environments – good enough to fool your ear, but nothing like the real thing. Now, we can get so close to the real thing that even experts have trouble picking the difference. In other words, we can now use on our recordings the beautiful, real, rich ambiences that have been created in performance spaces and studios around the world. Or, if we need to, the sound spaces of interior cars, hallways, schoolrooms, water towers, aircraft hangars or jam jars – you can see how we film people might like that kind of thing.

So how is this impressive audio magic done? Well, if I don’t go into too much technical detail, it’s actually quite simple. We take a sound – optimally a tone sweep ((This is basically a sound that starts off really low in pitch and ‘sweeps’ to really high over a few seconds. A sharp transient sound like a pistol shot, or an electrical spark or a balloon pop can also be used – hence the term impulse response that you’ve heard me use.)) – and play it in the environment we want to model, re-recording it in high quality within the acoustics of that place. Then, using some fancy software, we compare that with a ‘pure’ version of the tone sweep. The software calculates the difference between the two sounds and uses that to build a map of the frequency responses and delays of the actual space. It takes my computer about a second to process the file – incredible. From this I get a ‘convolution map’ that I can then use in my audio software to apply to any other sound.

As I mentioned in my most recent post about Masthead Island, the Pisonia forest in the middle of the island had some very nice acoustic characteristics. I wasn’t able to take up equipment for making tone sweeps, but I recorded some ‘make-do’ resonses with sharp hand claps.

So, after such an exhausting technical lesson, I know you’ll want to hear some demonstrations of what I’ve been yammering about, and, lucky for you, I have prepared some earlier! So first of all, we need to start with our source sound, and I’m sure you’re way ahead of me with what that might be…

1. Here we have a duck’s quack as you might hear it in a field, with no acoustic reflections:

Download Raw Duck

2. Now, a duck as you might have heard it in the Pisonia forest on Masthead Island:

Download Forest Duck

3. Next, a duck on stage at the Sydney Opera House (as you might hear it from the stalls):

Download What’s Opera Duck?

4. And finally, a duck recorded in a washing machine just before you throw the spin cycle switch:

Download Washed Duck

There were, alas, no actual ducks on Masthead Island, but I can assure you, if there were, they would sound much like #2 above.

So, faifthful Acowlytes, that’s the TCA Crash Course in convolution spatial mapping. Your task for this week is to listen. That’s it: simply listen. As you walk about your daily lives, listen to the way your voice sounds in different rooms. Listen to the ambience on the street as sirens sweep by. Listen to yourself singing in the shower. Listen to how the sound of your voice changes as you walk from one room to another.

And marvel with me that we can now reproduce the acoustics of all those experiences exactly.

Good morning Acowlytes all. Speaking of things that are so absurd that I couldn’t have made them up in my wildest flights of fancy, I ask you to cast your mind back in time to Sunday April 27, 2009. Can’t remember what you were doing on that day? Well then, you evidently haven’t been using your Special One Drop Liquid. If you don’t recall that particular milestone of scientific progress, I urge you to go back and refresh your memory before reading on…

…because I have been contacted by someone who quite obviously has a stake in Special One Drop Liquid. Entropy0 left this comment on that post:

Wow. What a glorious display of just how stupid and ignorant you all are. Attacking a product you’ve never even looked at with your own eyes, with infantile mockery and ridicule. A product someone had to find for you on the net. A product who’s operating principles you’ve demonstrated to be too stupid to understand. Not only have none of you morons ever tried the product you’re bashing (you kids obviously couldn’t afford it anyway), you’re all too dumb and insecure to have even tried the free tweaks you’re bashing. You are the same unevolved cretins who back in time, lambasted a surgeon with mockery and ridicule for being so silly as to wash his hands before surgery. How nice to see some haven’t evolved beyond their ancestors in hundreds of years. Luddites literally so scared of science, they prefer to revel in their own ugly ignorance and display it before the rest of the world; rather than try to understand the world better. I mean really! Aussies. Is there any race on earth stupider? Given that you people are known to chainsaw your own arm off to win a bet, it’s hard to imagine. Thanks for making me laugh in the middle of my day. LOL! Now go back to slapping each other on the back for squashing a bug.

Well, after the inevitable pinging noises in my brain settled down, I decided we should scrutinize some of Entropy0‘s points. After all, there’s nothing I like better than a good reasoned argument.[tippy title=”*”]OK, OK, I know I shouldn’t engage in Loon Bashing, but really, they bring it upon themselves…[/tippy]

First of all Mr 0 (may I call you Entropy?) infantile mockery and ridicule is not something I dispense lightly here on The Cow. Oh no, I save that for very special grades of stupidity – like Breatharians and people who believe their anus is haunted or that lizard men rule the Earth. What these things have in common with the claims of the purveyors of Special One Drop Liquid is that they defy the rational, normal commonsense with which we navigate the world.

Now, let’s examine some of your criticisms:

•I haven’t looked at the product with my own eyes.

No, that’s true. But I don’t need to try and live on nothing but air for a month to know that idea is an unparalleled piece of stupidity either. Nor do I need get myself bled to get rid of an illness, nor feel the need to sacrifice a goat when the moon eclipses the sun in order for the light to return. Why? Because I’ve made an effort to understand the world through rational thought. Unlike yourself.

•Someone ‘had to find’ the product for me on the net.

Er. No. Your implication is that I was looking for it. I could never have anticipated something as daft as Special One Drop Liquid in my most bizarre dreams. It was brought to my attention by someone as something I would find amusing, which I do.

•We ‘kids’ couldn’t afford Special One Drop Liquid.

Well first of all, that would have to be the first time I’ve been called a kid in forty years or so. I’m flattered. Oh, I see, it was meant to be condescending! Silly me. And I actually could afford to buy it, but the measure of my sanity (not to mention my robust financial situation) is that I choose to spend my money sensibly.

•I don’t understand Special One Drop Liquid’s ‘operating principles’ because I’m too stupid.

I don’t understand Special One Drop Liquid’s ‘operating principles’, that’s for sure. But it’s not because I’m too stupid – it’s because the claimed ‘operating principles’ defy any kind of cogent thought processes. Allow me to quote a small segment of the press release:

To ascertain the effect of the One Drop Liquid on any object, it is only necessary to initially stand the small bottle containing the Liquid on the face of the object.

So, to paraphrase: if I stand a bottle of SODL on an object, I will be able to ascertain from that act the effect of the liquid itself on that object.

Without even entering into any discussion of what Special One Drop Liquid does, this claim is manifestly absurd (well, except if the liquid does nothing at all I guess, in which case the proposition is self-evident).

•I and my readers are ‘too dumb to try the free tweaks we’re bashing’.

Oh, would they be the things like: A piece of blue paper placed under a vase of flowers will improve the sound of music played in the same room? Or: Tying a reef knot in the power cord of my music system will improve the sound?

Just to prove I’m not ‘too dumb’ (or perhaps to prove that I actually am) I tried both of these things. As I expected, there was not one whit of noticeable effect on my music. So how are you going to explain that, eh? (let’s just forgo the old pseudoscientific party-line that my ‘skeptical vibes’ stopped the effect from being activated – it’s the lamest get-out-of-jail-free card of all time).[tippy title=”†”]And I will point out here that I am a very experienced sound engineer, and eminently qualified to assess any ‘effect’ on the music that might have been taking place.[/tippy]

There is no reasonable explanation that you can offer that these things would work, and there isn’t one on the Special One Drop Liquid website either.

•I and my readers are ‘the same unevolved cretins’ who would not have scoffed at medical hygiene in previous eras.

Ignoring the rather desperate and sad name-calling (of which you seem inordinately fond – excellent debating technique sir!), the conjecture is unprovable and irrelevant; show us proper science behind the absurd claims for Special One Drop Liquid and we will believe it! It’s simple.

•I and my readers are Luddites.

Do you actually know what a Luddite is? Let me quote from Dictionary.com:

Lud·dite (lÅ­d’Ä«t)
n.
1. Any of a group of British workers who between 1811 and 1816 rioted and destroyed laborsaving textile machinery in the belief that such machinery would diminish employment.

2.One who opposes technical or technological change.

Now I assume you are not accusing me of being a 19th century mill worker, so you must, somehow, think I am a person who opposes technological change. If you’ve bothered to read any of The Cow you will know that’s an absurd and erroneous claim (except when it comes to robots, it goes without saying). Mr 0 – I am not opposed to technology or change. What I am opposed to is ludicrous piffle that poses as science.

•Australians would chainsaw their own arm off to win a bet.

Aside from demonstrating your incredible gullibility (the chainsaw bet is a much-loved yarn, pal) you are using the most pathetic of ad hominem attacks: damning one person on the basis of a racial stereotype. Nice work.

On a serious note, Cowpokes, people like Entropy0 confuse, frustrate and sadden me. It is plain that unlike the Steorn swindlers, or the ShooTag crooks, Mr 0 and the sellers of Special One Drop Liquid are not fully attached in this reality. His tendency to name-calling and ad hominem vilifications is a measure of his inability to fully engage with the lack of any real rationality in the claims of a product like Special One Drop Liquid. I find it hard to take his vitriol personally (like I most certainly do with the badly-educated Melissa Rogers from ShooTag).

It makes me wonder what a strange world Mr 0 inhabits, where things like turning up the corners on a curtain in a room or placing CDs overnight in the freezer have magical effects on music quality. Is he just deluded and imagining the effects? And does that actually matter if he thinks the music ‘sounds better’? Has he ever bothered to try a blind test, where, over a series of trials an impartial person randomly determines whether or not to place blue paper under a vase in his ‘listening area’? And if he did, and found that he actually couldn’t tell the difference, how would he respond?

Your task for today is to try one of the methods for ‘improving’ your music suggested on the Special One Drop Liquid site. They’re all pretty simple and cost nothing at all. If your music sounds better – or even different in any way at all – make sure you let me know.

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*OK, OK, I know I shouldn’t engage in Loon Bashing, but really, they bring it on themselves…

†And I will point out here that I am a very experienced sound engineer, and eminently qualified to assess any ‘effect’ on the music that might have been taking place.

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Make your own!

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Via Matt’s Musings. Thanks Matt!

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I learnt from a very early age that it’s bad form to kick someone when they’re down. But heck, some rules are made for the breakin’. And yes, I confess, The Reverend really doesn’t like to be called ‘ignorant’ (unless it’s by someone who’s earned the right to do that by being more knowledgeable than I am, in which case I will humbly take my smackdown).

Anyway, in this particular case, the victim is kicking herself (harder than I ever could), so all I need to do is sit back and watch.

Melissa Rogers, (CEO of the woo-powered ShooTag™ you will remember), has evidently been hitting the PR circuit hard, and her daft device is getting coverage from here to Weldon Spring Heights. In doing so she’s left a trail of howlers in her wake, including the risible:

It doesn’t hurt the flea, it doesn’t hurt the pet and it doesn’t hurt the planet.

…which are, come to think of it, probably the only true words she’s spoken about ShooTag™ because it’s pretty likely it doesn’t actually do anything. Still, it’s really nice to know the fleas are OK, even if one does wonder how OK they’ll be when they run out of a food source and die horribly of hunger. But enough of insect empathy – the thing that really caused me to choke on my cheese fries was the following priceless, almost frameable quote from the comments in the Pet News section of ZooToo.com (in full, just so you know I’m not lifting it out of context):

Melissa Rogers:

I would say that any pet that is not scratching or chewing at fleas is a happy pet! Shootag only adds a frequency to the already expended energy field of the pet. Take a look at Geoffrey West’s work and the science E=M 3/4.

Unbelievable.

Ms Rogers’ comments throughout the ZooToo site are so numerous and filled with exhortations to ‘go-shootag.com-and-buy’ that they verge on spam. Pretty much every statement she makes is farcical, but that particular one takes the cake. For a start, she’s pulled Einstein’s famous mass/energy equivalence formula totally out of her ass, getting one of the most legendary equations in history (and simplest to remember, I might add) completely wrong. Even if it was right, it means absolutely nothing in this context, and one must speculate it’s the only scientific equation she (half) knows*. How she thinks it sounds even a fraction of the way to being impressive simply beggars belief.

In addition, she gushes about ‘energy fields’ – a staple of smoke-and-mirrors pseudoscience – making some kind of fatuous claim in regard to a pet’s ‘already expended energy field’ (what the crap does that mean?) and, worst of all in my book, completely misrepresents scientist Geoffrey West from the Santa Fe Institute, who is doing some extraordinary, clever, cutting-edge biological thinking, and who would NEVER endorse a preposterous trinket like ShooTag™. This is, no doubt, from where she gets the idea of ‘fractals’ that she mentioned in her previous comment on The Cow – West, a former particle physicist, has advanced some very interesting science that deals with mathematical scaling laws in biology, particularly in metabolic behaviour as related to organism size and lifespan. With a colleague, he hypothesises that these scaling laws are related to the hydrodynamics of living systems, which in turn are delegated by networks that assume fractal structures. Rogers has probably picked up on the vibe that West is a bit of a maverick and his ideas are challenging to mainstream science.† But this does not make him a kook – he is still a scientist of some reputation, and follows proper scientific protocol.

It’s a depressing experience trudging around the ShooTag™ PR trail in the footsteps of Ms Rogers & co. Credulous tv shows looking for filler give her product a favourable airing; trade shows spruik her wares without so much as a critical blink of the eye; the press repeats the ShooTag™ promotional propaganda verbatim. No wonder these kinds of flim-flam scammers do so well – they’re selling stuff to people who have no brains to think for themselves!

And nowhere, nowhere, is there any serious, informed discussion of the outrageous claims made about ShooTag™. Ms Rogers says in several of her comments that the science behind ShooTag™ ‘will be revealed’ in due course, but I have no doubt that she and her cohorts will be long gone with their cash before that day ever comes.

Addendum:

‘Creates and invisible force field!!!’‡

As if to taunt me, this morning’s email spam contained something I’ve not seen before: an ad for a ‘pest control system’ that works on the same principles as ShooTag™ (ie, magic posing as science):

Simply plug in a single Crappex unit and it immediately turns the wiring in your home into a giant digital pest repeller creating an invisible digital force field. Chase mice, rats and roaches from your home by interfering with their nervous systems.

Here, the manufacturers are using ‘digital’ as their magic word, and asking us to believe that their ‘invisible digital force field’ is as holy-water-to-a-vampire for mice, rats and cockroaches (ie, things we consider ‘pests’) but, by inference, somehow discriminates in favour of cute little kitties and puppies. HOW??? WHY!!!???

Even hungry zombies would reject the brains of people stupid enough to buy these things.

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*It’s depressing beyond belief that no-one in the comments section of this site even takes her to task on this vapid nonsense. On the contrary, many of the contributors seem entirely prepared to take her at face value, happily digesting her ‘green’ solutions claptrap and raising a ‘you go girl!’ fist in agreement.

†The Santa Fe Institute and the Los Alamos National Laboratory, both of which West calls home, are known for their encouragement of challenging thinking.

‡Another ‘Detection of Hokum Rule of Thumb’ must surely be: ‘Watch for terrible spelling and bad copy proofing’.

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