Tetherd Cow Ahead

Portrait of the Artist as a Casualty of a Quantum Anomaly.

I had cause today to phone an insurance company and when I got through heard the following message:

Your call is important to us and has been placed in a priority queue.

Priority queue? Priority queue? Wha? Wha?

So now, apparently, there’s (at least) two kinds of queues that you can get on people’s switchboards? Since I just dialed in using a number from the phone book it got me to wondering just how insignificant you’d have to be to get the normal ‘non-priority’ queue.

I waited and waited on the priority queue. But at least I eventually got through. Some schmuck is still hanging on…

The Tetherd Cow Ahead Horoscope of Infinite Detail™
with Iotas Scrivener
Week Commencing August 27, 2007

Aries ~ The Ram

Well Aries – the Moon is in the Seventh House and Jupiter aligns with Mars in no uncertain terms this coming week. You know your office mate that stole the pencil sharpener last Thursday? The one with the cheeky smile? Well consider yourself in like Flynn! Yep, before the week is out you two are going to be under the covers and going at it like rabbits. To cap off the week, when you eventually turn on your phone after three days of hot sex, you will discover that you have inherited nearly a hundred million dollars from a fond uncle. You will also receive an erroneously calculated gas bill and find termites in the east corner of your house. Your lucky number is 17 – why not buy a lottery ticket – you’ve siphoned all the luck out of some other poor bastard’s universe, may as well go for broke!

Taurus ~ The Bull

Few weeks of your life will be quite as boring as this one. When you accidentally kick over a cartoon of orange juice on Flinders St on Tuesday, it will seem like an earth-shattering event to you. None of your friends will think so, however, especially Aries. Other than that, you will watch a re-run of House on tv, pick your nose twice and notice that all the cars in your street have number plates ending in 3 or 7. On Thursday you will get out of bed on the opposite side to the one you normally do.

Gemini ~ The Twins

With your sign under the influence of Uranus, this will be a real arse of a week for Geminis. An electrical fault in your car ignition system tomorrow will cause you to break down in the middle of commuter traffic. When you get out of your car to lift the bonnet so you can pretend that you actually have a clue what goes on under there, a passing motorist will call you a ‘pugnacious lemon-brained froth-sucker’. At least that’s what it will sound like as they speed past. After you have trudged to work in a relentless drizzle you will remember that it was your day off anyway. The rest of the week is a little better, with a nice warm day on Tuesday and a particularly tasty chicken salad sandwich for lunch on Wednesday. Your lucky colour is off-white and your lucky fruit is cumquat.

Cancer ~ The Crab

There’s no business like show business Cancer, and that’s no business for you to contemplate for even a second. Monday evening brings the temptation to go centre stage at an after-work karaoke escapade, a temptation to which you will quickly wish you hadn’t succumbed. The video clip taken by a workmate will be posted on YouTube and will receive 172,980 viewings. Most of those viewers will be laughing at you, not with you. You will not go into work on Tuesday, which will turn out to be a wise decision. On Wednesday you will receive news of a distant relative’s win on the lottery. You will eat a mediocre pasta dish on Thursday evening and drink a little too much red wine. On the weekend you will see a bizarre accident involving a person dressed in a bear costume and a clothes rack. Your sleep will be disturbed by dreams of escaped bees.

Leo ~ The Lion

On Monday you will be crushed to death by an unsecured piano falling out the back of a furniture truck.

Virgo ~ The Virgin

With Neptune high in the sky and Mercury on the ascendant, the next few days bring many exciting small things for Virgos. Early on there will be a letter in your name with a ten dollar voucher at K-Mart. On Tuesday a man in Liederhosen will goose you on the bus. Wednesday morning sees the commencement of a subscription to National Geographic and the afternoon brings an offer of scones and jam. Thursday you will be given a small parcel by a Middle Eastern man. It will contain Turkish Delight, a packet of cardamom pods and some spools of maroon thread. Over the weekend there will be some nice weather. You will see something funny on the tv that will cause you to snort Coca Cola over a clean shirt.

Libra ~ The Scales

After last week, you’ll be wanting to sit down and take it easy you Librans! Which is what you’ll attempt to do, and fail. You face a week of constant interruptions, aggravations and stomach ailments. You will try to avoid being contacted by switching off your mobile phone, but that won’t work – news of a relative’s recent windfall (an inheritance due to the death of a wealthy uncle) will reach you by singing telegram. A car will break down in front of you in peak-hour traffic and you will uncharacteristically shout obscenities at the poor sod looking under the uplifted hood. You will witness an horrific accident in which a person is crushed to death by a piano.

Scorpio ~ The Scorpion

Scorpio! What a week you have ahead! You know how you’ve always wanted to parachute out of plane at 3000 feet? No? Well that’s what you find yourself doing anyway. It’s not at all fun. Later in the week you will hit your head very hard on the sharp under-edge of a cabinet. There will be a lot of blood. But fear not! Romance is in the air! A tall dark mysterious stranger wearing a cape will give you flowers (an attractive selection of gerberas, daisies and lilies) at the bus stop. Unfortunately they will trigger your hayfever and you will spend the rest of the week in bed. An email sent to you by Bill Gates, offering you a million dollars, turns out to be spam. Your lucky number this week is 1.232 and your lucky woodworking tool is an awl.

Ophiucus ~ The Serpent Bearer

As usual, people will fail to take any notice of you this week, and you will feel transparent and insignificant.

Sagittarius ~ The Archer

A trip to deep thermal vents in a submersible is on the cards for lucky Sagittarius this week. You probably don’t think that’s likely, but it is a damn site more likely than the discovery of the alien civilization at the bottom of the ocean which follows. You find yourself front-page news along with the other 500 million Sagittarians who were down there. Your lucky colour is taupe and your lucky grain is barley.

Capricorn ~ The Sea-goat

Remarkably, this week for Capricorns is exacty the same in every detail as last week.

Aquarius ~ The Water Carrier

Aquarius can look forward to a letter in the post this week. It will contain some news from Peter Popoff, with a lot of writing and a piece of The True Cross. Later in the week brings a visit from a Greenpeace representative wanting you to join up. She will give you a leaflet and a sticker. You will have a very spicy curry on Wednesday night, and some garlic naan bread. A noisy neighbour will keep you awake on Thursday by playing seemingly endless repetitions of ‘My Sharona’ on their hi-fi. Your lucky vegetable is a swede, as is your lucky National representative.

Pisces ~ The Fishes

As the week commences Pisceans might start to think that they’re going insane. As, in fact, they are. By Wednesday the hallucinations will have well and truly set in, and you’ll all be completely bonkers by 3pm Thursday. Your lucky colour is paisley and your lucky medication is Valium.

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As mentioned last week, Iotas Scrivener, The Cow’s resident astrologer, claims that the accuracy of these predictions is better than 99.72%. Iotas uses state-of-the-art quantum processors to compute simultaneous outcomes in an infinite number of parallel universes. Whilst the precision of the results is guaranteed, the TCA Horoscope of Infinite Detail™ cannot be held responsible if the outcome of the prediction is not applicable to the universe in which you reside.

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About a year ago here on The Cow we had cause to examine the Irish company Steorn and their announcement of the discovery of a remarkable way of creating unlimited amounts ‘free energy’.

As you may remember, Steorn was challenging scientists to disprove their claim that the laws of physics are entirely wrong and promising that you’d never ever have to put your mobile phone on charge again.

Well, Steorn are still chugging along (powered by some kind of energy – mostly produced by hot air I’m guessing) and have wheeled out a gadget to silence the naysayers once and for all! Catchily titled ‘Orbo’, early photos show that the machine looks like nothing so much as a few plastic pipes and some Meccano.

And guess what Cow Fans? They have a working model ready for ALL THE WORLD TO SEE! Well, actually, not so much. You see, Steorn recently announced that Orbo would be unveiled for public scrutiny at the London Kinetica Museum on July 4th. This event was to coincide with a simultaneous streaming on the Steorn site (presumably from somewhere deep withing the Steorn Free Energy Complex) of live video of a ‘simpler’ (their word) version of the machine ‘lifting a weight’. But, darn, golly gosh, just as everyone was tensing up for the complete re-writing of human history, a few problems seemed to have materialized out of nowhere and, well, they had to cancel the viewing and the web demo at the last moment. Colour me surprised.

It seems that heat from the lights in the room where Orbo was to be exhibited at Kinetica somehow interfered with its capacity to create unlimited energy, delicate little thing that it is. One hopes that the consumer model will be a little more robust if Steorn’s plans to roll out Orbo as part of their scheme to solve all the problems of Africa aren’t to appear a little dismal. It gets a little warm in Africa from time to time, or so I’m told.

It isn’t explained anywhere why the Kinetica ‘heat-from-the-lights’ setback should have had any material effect on the planned webcam stream but there you go.

It’s interesting to observe that Sean McCarthy has now come down unequivocally on the side of claiming to have disproved the Laws of Thermodynamics. He says as much on the Steorn site:

This is an extraordinary position to attempt to defend. I can’t even say it’s controversial – it’s BEYOND controversy.

Scanning through the Steorn website is a perplexing experience. It seems that these guys really do believe in what they’re doing. One is forced to contemplate the following possibilities:

1. They have rewritten the Laws of Physics as we know them.

2. A fairly large group of well-presented and reasonably intelligent people have somehow fooled themselves into believing Possibility #1.

3. They’re pulling our collective legs.

4. They are consummate swindlers, hoping to profit by pulling in the dollars from gullible suckers.

5. There’s something else going on.

Taken in order: Possibility #1 is by far the most unlikely of events. It is true that there have been occasional turbulent upheavals in scientific thinking, but very very few of those come entirely out of the blue without any indications at all from the prevailing body of scientific knowledge. To clarify, the principles that Steorn are suggesting they have discovered overshadow any other scientific revolution you can name. On the other hand, Steorn is in the company of almost countless numbers of people who have thought they had discovered such miracles.

Which brings us to Possibility #2. I guess it is feasible, but I find it hard to believe that none of these people are aware that they are the latest in a very long line of people to have made such claims to their detriment. But I never underestimate the capacity of human beings to comprehensively delude themselves if the conditions are favourable.

Possibility #3: If it’s a joke they’ve dragged it on for an awfully long time, and we all know the secret of good humour – it’s in the timing.

Possibility #4: Where I’m placing my money. Although there’s one further possibility that hadn’t occurred to me until recently…

Which is Possibility #5. Something else. It came to my attention on Tech Blorge last week that the whole Steorn thing might actually be something other than what it seems, specifically, some kind of viral marketing test or information dissemination experiment. The favourite in this field would appear to be a viral for Halo 3, but in my opinion that seems unlikely. It just doesn’t feel right. But there is definitely something fishy about the Steorn site – as the Tech Blorge guys say, it looks more like it’s been put up by some slick advertising types than the usual free energy type of nitwit. It is feasible that Steorn is wheeling in a Trojan Horse.

Are they idiots? Are they conmen? Are they having a jolly old time running everyone around in circles?

Sean McCarthy seems happy to grasp the bull by the horns:

Yes Sean. You’ve done everything EXCEPT actually demonstrate that your idea works. Really. If your machine does what you say IT’S A SPECTACULAR RESULT. It’s not a maybe-it-does-maybe-it-doesn’t kinda scenario surely? Show us the money Steorn, that’s ALL you have to do!

UPDATE: This video on YouTube clinches it for me – they are swindlers. This is the most nonsensical piece of rubbish and misdirection I’ve seen in a long time. Wait till the bit where Sean says “…and that’s the science!” and consider what’s gone before. That’s the science? Sean, that was a humungously cretinous piece of waffle. That’s not science by a long shot.

That’s snake oil.

Does anyone else find it kinda unsettling to see signs with animals advertising the delights of consumption of their own flesh?

Consider this example. Why is the word ‘meet’ in quotation marks? What does the cow mean by this?

The American rapper Snoop Dog has been banned from entering Australia where he was due to host the Australian MTV Awards this weekend because he was deemed by the Australian Department of Immigration as being of ‘unfit character’.

“He doesn’t seem the sort of bloke we want in this country,” said Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews.

Oh no sirreee! We only admit persons of much higher moral fibre. Like, oh, er… this guy!