Tetherd Cow Ahead

I really love science. No matter how much stuff there is to know, there is always some more to find out, and as we saw in my recent science experiment, even the simplest of ideas can be full of rich and surprising consequences. Today I hope you will join me as we venture into the world of magnetism, electricity and digital information.

Part 1

For this part of the experiment we will need:

•A small amount of fine iron powder or iron oxide
•A magnet
•An old credit card or similar swipe card
•A magnifying glass

You can get some iron powder by filing down an old key (an iron or steel one – brass or aluminium won’t work), or even easier, by finding some iron oxide – commonly known as rust – and scraping it into a small container. You don’t need too much, but it should be as fine as you can make it.

Now, I don’t think you will find it at all surprising that iron oxide is magnetic. If you take a magnet like this:

And hold it near the iron oxide, you will quite quickly see that the magnet attracts it:

The strip on a credit card is also magnetized. Here is one I’ve acquired for our experiment.

I don’t think Gilbert will mind us using his Virgin Frequent Flyer card (he doesn’t travel much anymore, after a clairvoyant told him he was going to die horribly in a plane crash). Gilbert’s card is fairly worn from carrying it around in his wallet, but we should not worry too much. The magnetic strip on a credit card is very robust and has been designed to cope with repeated handling. Although it is possible for the strip to be damaged by a very strong magnetic field, or through many years of wear and tear, the information recorded on it has a usefully long lifespan under most conditions, as I’m sure any of you with credit cards will know.

The strip on Gilbert’s card is actually really just a magnetic field that is recorded in various strengths to reflect a coding system for digital data. It is, in fact, just a magnetic field version of the common barcode with which I am sure you are familiar. The barcode records its data as a series of light and dark stripes, and the information of a swipe card is recorded in pretty much the same way, only with bands of varying magnetism. It follows then, that if we were to sprinkle something made of very fine metal powder, such as our iron oxide, onto the magnetic strip on Gilbert’s card, we would be able to see the particles sticking to the more magnetic parts of the strip.

Let’s try it!

Let’s have a closer look at that with the magnifying glass!

Amazing! The fine particles clearly delineate the data on the card! What we’re seeing here tells us lots about how a credit card works. First of all, you will notice that Gilbert’s card has three horizontal magnetic bands. This is the standard for all swipe cards. In most cases, information is recorded on one, or sometimes two of these bands. The two outside bands are called high density tracks and contain data at 210 bits per inch. If you know anything about computers, you will realise that the term ‘high density’ here is relative: 210 bits per inch, by modern data standards, is pretty damn lousy. To give you some idea, one of these tracks can carry about 79 x 6bit alphanumeric characters. Your credit card would typically have, on track 1, your name, your card number and an expiry date. That’s it. Not much.

The middle strip is called the low density track and is able to carry only 40 x 4bit characters. Often, the data is similar to what is on the first track, typically a repeat of the card or account number, and the expiry date. The third track is recorded at a lower bit rate than track #1 so can carry 107 characters at 4bits each.

The important thing to note here is that a magnetic strip can carry, on all of the three stripes combined, a total of roughly 1000 bits of data. ((1062bits, if you do the sums)) You may be more familiar with that as 1k. That data is encoded to be read as alphanumeric characters, and we’re talking about, at maximum capacity, 226 letters, numbers and punctuation symbols.

That’s about the same amount of information you can send in one single SMS ((SMS messages are encoded in 7bit characters: 160 x 7bits = 1120bits))

Part 2

For this part of the experiment we will need:

•Iron oxide powder (as above)
•A Shoo!Tag™ card

(You’re really glad you stuck with me, now, aren’t you?)

Shoo!Tag™ cards are available from some pet supply places. ((Just an aside here – when I purchased my ShooTags I asked the sales assistant whether they sold many. ‘Nah’, she said ‘They’re rubbish.’)) They are small plastic credit-card style tags that the makers claim use ‘a three dimensional or trivector signature imprinted onto the magnetic field of a three field magnetic memory card to create a protective barrier from pests.’ The Shoo!Tag™ ((I’m fairly certain that they don’t actually have a trademark for Shoo!Tag, but we shall see how that pans out)) vendors don’t explain anywhere how this amazing feat is accomplished.

Here’s one I acquired earlier. It’s supposed to be for keeping ticks off cats:

You’ll notice I’m handling it very carefully. I don’t want to damage any of the fragile ‘electro-hoodjy-goodjy vibes’ that the maker insists accompany this card. This is the packaging in which the Shoo!Tag arrived:

It’s a mylar anti-static bag, which, as you probably know, is designed to protect sensitive electrical components from static charges.

Now, static electricity has next to no effect on magnets. ((Unless we’re talking about lightning, which is a kind of static electricity. But no mylar bag is going to protect your ShooTag if it gets struck by lightning, I can assure you.)) And, as far as I can tell, there are no electrical components of any kind in the ShooTag card. ((Unless they are very very thin – alien technology, maybe? Well, that’s at least as plausible as the cards having any effect!)) What, then, is the purpose of this mylar bag? Has your American Express card ever arrived in the mail in a mylar bag? Does your bank advise you to keep your credit card in a mylar bag when not in use? They do not. Furthermore, you can build up a very decent static charge by scuffing your shoes on the carpet of your lounge room – enough to cause sparks to jump from you hand to a doorknob – but it will not effect the information on any of the credit cards in your wallet.

Ever.

But perhaps the magnetic strip of a ShooTag isn’t actually magnetic! Maybe it’s some other clever kind of technology that IS affected by static electricity. Surely it couldn’t be plain ol’ garden variety … magnetic data…

I can tell you’re ahead of me. Have you got your iron oxide powder at the ready?

Well look at that. The magnetic strip on a ShooTag is just what you’d expect to find on a standard swipe card – three tracks encoding some data. Just like any ol’ credit card. Or a barcode. Let’s take a closer look at the actual data area of the code:

You can clearly see the actual encoded data – it forms the little segments that stand out in the middle of each of the three tracks. The uniform areas on either side, where there is no variation, are the ‘zero’ bits – null areas where the digital information message says ‘there is nothing here’.

I’ll outline it a little more clearly for you:

By my estimation, the actual area of the the magnetic strip that’s actually encoded with data is about a third of the total area. ((I’m being generous – it’s probably even less)) And, as you can see if you go up to the first ShooTag picture above, this card – the one for cats – is about one third the size of a standard credit card. So the information encoded on a ShooTag for cats is one third of one third of the amount of information on a standard credit card.

That’s one third of one third of the information you can send in an SMS. Roughly 17 characters.

This much:

FLEAS! PISS OFF!! ((The spaces count as characters))

Even if you assume that the digital information is not in the form of words or numerals, the total amount of data is only around 102bits. This, supposedly, is the sum total of the data used by ShooTag’s ‘physics, quantum physics and advanced computer software technology’ ((Verbatim from their ‘Science’ page)) to create the three dimensional electromagnetic field that gives it the awesome power to repel insects. Not only that, but the data also targets different insects according to which kind of card you have. Of course, this may all be explained by ‘the advanced computer software technology’ that the ShooTag creators claim they use, but in that case they are seriously in the wrong business; with data compression routines that impressive, they are trifling with a few dollars made of the back of plastic cards – they could be earning billions in Silicon Valley!

Let’s pause for a second and try and understand what kind of mechanics are supposed to be going on with these things. There is a reason, and only one reason, that information is encoded onto a magnetic strip on a plastic card. It’s a basic, practical and easy-to-understand reason: it’s so that you can swipe it through a card reader. Otherwise – seriously – WHAT IS THE POINT of recording magnetic information in this fashion? What the ShooTag people are asking us to believe is that some kind of magic happens when information is transferred onto a ShooTag magnetic strip that allows it to be scanned by… what?… the Universe? Fleas with miniature EFTPOS machines? God?

On their site the ShooTaggers say that there are ‘frequencies’ embedded in the magnetic strip ((because we can see the data, we have to assume they mean ‘recorded on’ rather than ’embedded in’)) which, using ‘earth energies similar to Schumann Waves’ (a piece of idiocy that we have discussed previously), somehow communicates with the supposed ‘bio-energetic field which surrounds all living things’. ((This is also silly doublespeak undoubtedly inherited from the misunderstandings surrounding Kirlian photography and other similar ‘proofs’ of ‘bio-energy’)) What possible mechanism could allow that? There is nothing known to science that says that a few trivial bits of magnetic data could meaningfully influence anything other a purpose-built magnetic card scanner (or some iron oxide particles, I guess). It’s nonsense of a truly breathtaking magnitude.

You will recall that I mentioned that I received 2 cards in my ShooTag package. The one we’ve been examining above is supposedly designed to repel ticks. Well, we don’t have much of a tick problem here, so I have been able to sacrifice any spooky vibes it may have had to our science experiment. The other ShooTag in my package is for the dispersal of fleas. I have been extremely careful with the other card. It has remained in its packaging and, as you saw, I have used cotton gloves whenever handling the mylar package containing the tags.

That’s because this experiment has a Part 3, and, with a certain feline helper, we are going to run our own field trial with the ShooTag. And I can assure you I will be undertaking this part of the experiment with as much rigour as any of the people who have submitted glowing testimonials on the ShooTag site.

Stay with me, won’t you?

In the last post we had a surprise visit from a proponent of ShooTag who, for some reason, opined in a lengthy diatribe that I would not ‘dare to bring yourself to publish (it) on your relentless “Ode to Yourself”‘. Au contraire my clueless friend. I’m not in the least afraid of your witless opinion. Indeed, I’ve decided to bring you to the front page of Tetherd Cow Ahead, where all might witness your risible babbling.

For those who missed it, this is the comment that ‘Kookaburra’ left:

Good Day, Mate! Greetings from your neighbor out in the bush. I have read the endless put-downs and verbal diarrhea you have so relentlessly put into this crusade against the shoo!tag product. It must be very, very threatening to you, for you to spend countless time and energy into trying to disclaim them. It makes people more and more interested in the product, since you seem to be so obsessed with it. I can only assume you are either:
1. A competitor in the industry of pest repellant’s.
2. Actually paid by shoo!tag to keep the controversy and interest in the product at a fever pitch.
Your undying attention and allegiance to this cause is kind of creepy, otherwise.
Anyway, because of all the attention, controversy and spotlight you have put on this product, I have just ordered the tags for myself, my horses and my dogs and will try them myself in the outback. The tags are being sold all over Australia, I have discovered…and in 5 other countries. I did my own investigating of the company, read a report where a major Venture Capitalist group has just invested several $100,000.00 in the company. Being a businessman, in the field of marketing, that does not speak to me as failure, or hoax, or voodoo. In closing, speaking to you from the heart – as a fellow Aussie, please do not makes all us blokes out to be so cruel, ignorant and close-minded. And since you obviously know so much about how this product does not work, please tell me exactly which tag you tested for yourself?
Apparently you have never had reason to use the tags, since you obviously never leave your spot in front of your computer monitor. Our country is vast and beautiful. Take a hike and clear your head and discover the beauty of actually LIVING your life, instead of trying to demean other’s.
Let’s see if you can dare to bring yourself to publish this on your relentless “Ode to Yourself”.

Well, as King Willy so quickly pointed out, it takes about an attosecond for a real Australian to see that the person writing this is not one.

For a start, we just don’t start conversations with ‘Good Day Mate’, especially in correspondence. You might proffer a cheerful g’day to someone on the street, and you might even call them ‘mate’, but as a written appellation… sorry chum, you screwed it on the first three words. You also conflate the two ideas of ‘the bush’ and ‘the outback’ speaking as if they are one thing. Any real Australian knows the difference between those two concepts, especially someone who lives in one of those places. Kookaburra‘s idea of how Australians behave comes from the same lame ‘How To’ guide that brought you Outback Steakhouse. Kookaburra also manages to spell ‘neighbour’ and ‘diarrhoea’ in the American fashion, something that he can’t blame on an American spellcheck because his incorrect spelling of ‘repellents’ ((Let’s not even mention the egregious apostrophe)) plainly demonstrates that he isn’t using any kind of spellcheck at all. I think this duplicitous behaviour is a pretty good indication of the kind of people we’re dealing with here

However, Kookaburra, since you evidently think you have some kind of point let me dispel some of the illusions under which you appear to be labouring: ((See how I spelled that with a ‘u’? That’s how we do it here, for future reference))

•I am obsessed with ShooTag.

The ShooTaggers shouldn’t flatter themselves that they are anything special. They are not my sole concern when it comes to pseudoscientific rubbish. If you’d bothered to read my blog at all, you would know that ShooTag is just one of the many daft ideas that comes under my scrutiny. I object to all people who use worthless, unscientific quackery to fleece other people. You might like to read my thoughts on free energy, ‘power’ bracelets, homeopathy and magic water to see what kind of company I consider ShooTag to be in.

•I somehow find the product/concept/discussion (fuck, I don’t know) threatening.

Er. What? It’s a dumb little piece of plastic that does nothing. How is that threatening to anything (except people’s wallets of course)? Or do you mean it’s threatening to my worldview or something? Ha. There are thousands of scams like ShooTag – I’m not so much threatened as just plain disappointed with the greed and stupidity of certain members of the human race.

•It makes people more and more interested in the product.

I sincerely doubt that. If they bother to read what I say, I think they get a very good idea of what kind of product ShooTag is. Indeed, aside from comments from people affiliated with ShooTag, I receive mostly positive affirmations of my exposure of this silly item.

•I spend ‘countless time and energy’ (oh, the trashing of the language – it hurts, it hurts…) trying to ‘disclaim’ ShooTag (I think the word you’re looking for is ‘declaim’).

And yet I manage to have a productive career, tend to a lovely family and get to the movies occasionally. How do I do it?! Maybe it’s because it only takes a second to refute such ridiculous claims? Yeah, that’s gotta be it.

•I am a ShooTag competitor.

No I’m not.

•I am a ShooTag promoter.

Now see, you’re really not paying attention.

•Interest in ShooTag is at fever pitch.

Bwahahahahaha! Whatever you say.

•I’m kind of creepy.

Is that meant to be an insult?

•The tags are being sold all over Australia and in other countries.

So are homeopathic remedies and bottles of ‘vibrational’ water. It doesn’t make them functional or useful.

•A major venture capitalist group has just invested ‘several $100,000’ in the company and that doesn’t speak of failure, or hoax, or voodoo.

Really? And you say you’re a businessman? As far as I can see it this means only one of two things: either the investors are completely stupid, or they’ve scoped the huge untapped market of gullible pet owners and are happy to rip them off. It’s hardly impressive. Having money has never meant a person either has scruples or is smart.

•I am portraying ‘us blokes’ ((This oleaginous chumminess is about as puke-making as I can imagine. I am not your mate, mate – you are ignorant, foolish and deceitful. I choose my company a lot more carefully)) as cruel, ignorant and close-minded.

I say this every time I tangle with you people (oh, let’s just give up the pretense – this Kookaburra person is quite obviously someone from the ShooTag cartel) ((The ShooTaggers are quite prepared to pretend to be other people in a number of other forums)): you can convince me instantly that your product is effective by just showing me your science. If your tag works, you can prove it beyond all reasonable doubt by having a third disinterested party do some controlled double-blind experiments. It’s a basic requirement of all new scientific principles to satisfy this one criterion. It’s not even a hard thing to do. And yet you are unable to offer up any such data. Why is that? Because there is none!

My mind will be changed instantly when I see such conclusive proof. I am, in fact, totally open-minded in that respect. Where I am close-minded is when you try and tell me guff about ‘trivector energy fields’ and ‘quantum fractal geometry’ and ‘Schumann Waves’ – all of which constitute high level nonsense. To anyone with even a little scientific knowledge you are quite plainly pulling all this stuff out of your ass. You don’t have the foggiest clue what you’re speaking about.

As for ‘cruel’ – show me on my blog where I’ve been ‘cruel’. Sure, I’ve had fun demonstrating your absolute lack of science acumen, but hey, if you’re making these outrageous claims you’d better be able to deal with criticism or you’re toast.

As for ‘ignorant’, well, let me refer readers back to this post so they can make up their own mind which of us is the one who has never read a science text book in their life.

•I should ‘take a hike in ‘our’ vast and beautiful country and clear my head and discover the beauty of actually LIVING my life’.

Cobber, I’ve plainly seen a lot more of this country than you have with your fake online Australian accent and your shabby virtual Driza-bone. I don’t know who you are ((Although I have a pretty good suspicion)), but your presumption in telling ME to take a hike is as pathetic as it is transparent. I have to ask what it is that you feel threatened by, to undertake these sad little masquerades to defend your product.

If it worked, the simple fact is that you wouldn’t care what a lone Australian blogger thought.

•I haven’t tested the tags myself.

Oh, stay tuned my friend. I’ve got some really interesting things to reveal about ShooTag.

Tetherd Cow Ahead celebrates World Homeopathy Awareness Week!

You don’t have to be a complete idiot to get the best out of it, but it really helps.

Acowlytes! I stand before you a stunned and humbled man. I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but on visiting the Steorn website this morning I was presented with incontrovertible proof that their Orbo engine is about to revolutionize the world! Never before have I seen evidence of an extraordinary claim laid out so compellingly, or been swayed by a concept so utterly mind-blowing!!!

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Hands up who believed me for even a second?

Nope. No hands there.

The images above are from Steorn’s much hyped video ‘Proving Overunity’, today posted on their site for all to see. The audience in the bottom snap is watching in awe disbelief as Steorn CEO Sean McCarthy trots out exactly the same old guff that has already been up on the Steorn site for ages. This is the sum total of the PROOF that Steorn promised the world, that their machine would be shown creating more energy than it consumes.

Needless to say both myself and the folks above were comprehensively underwhelmed. We watched as Mr McCarthy, in finest waffling form, yakked on and on about the Orbo motor’s wondrous abilities as he poked periodically at gauges and meters. As in the other ‘explanatory’ videos on the Steorn site, he seems particularly hung up on making us aware that Orbo has no ‘back EMF’ – really, it does not matter one whit about such electrical engineering-speak if the machine is able to show a 200% increase in energy output as has been claimed. The tedious ‘technical’ talk is there to cover up the fact that what Steorn actually needs to demonstrate is mind-bogglingly simple. In fact, it is as simple as 1+1=2. I can outline it to you in a paragraph:

Imagine feeding the Orbo 1 watt of power. According to McCarthy, the miraculous technology behind Orbo can take that 1 watt and use it to generate 2 watts. Are you with me? Now, this is all that needs to be done to show a miracle: take the output of the Orbo and divert 1 watt of that power back into the Orbo’s input. Now the motor is powering itself and you have 1 spare watt ((Actually, if you believe Sean McCarthy, 1 watt is small potatoes – there is NO LIMIT to how much extra power you can get…)) of energy with which to do anything you damn well please. Let us, for example, hook up some LEDs to this extra power (a single LED typically uses way less than what we have at our disposal). What we now have is the Orbo motor, running itself and powering some lights with no other external source of power! THIS would be a truly astonishing and unequivocal verification of Steorn’s claims. No-one could argue with such a direct experiment. In his circumlocutious descriptions of the Orbo technology McCarthy himself has said that such a feat is feasible. ((“We’re recharging batteries and you will see… we’ll be lighting lights and all that kinda stuff later on…))

That’s all that has to be demonstrated. But really, they can’t show anything like that because it can’t be done. Instead, in the manner of every perpetual motion swindler throughout history, Mr McCarthy ((Actually, Maybe Sean McCarthy is a personified demonstration of overunity – he certainly seems to run perpetually on excess amounts of his own self-generated hot air.)) is obliged to obfuscate and complicate with abstruse methodology and meandering reasoning. ((You will have seen this behaviour in just about every snake-oil salesman we’ve had cause to examine here on The Cow. The ShooTAG! scammers do the very same thing))

So after all that, let’s see how Steorn is doing on the Tetherd Cow Ahead Interest-O-Meter…

Enough said. We won’t be mentioning Steorn again here on Tetherd Cow unless they do something a lot less monotonous.

Visiting Steorn is like stepping momentarily into another dimension – one with leprechauns and rainbows and pots of gold. As you will recall from yesterday, today was the day when their video showing final proof of their Orbo motor demonstrating overunity was to be posted for all the world to see.

Well, I wearily dragged myself over to their digs for what I expected to be another round of disappointment and I wasn’t disappointed. That is, I was not disappointed to see that they were happy to disappoint me again. Instead of the world-shattering demonstration that was promised, I was greeted with a new-look website, further exhortations to join up with the Steorn Knowledge Development Base (for a fee, surprise surprise), and the above announcement:

(The) Proving Overunity video will be published on Ist Feb.

It strikes me that we’re getting pretty close to April Fool’s Day.

Well, I don’t know about you guys in the North, but down here in Oz it was way too late to watch the Steorn cavalcade at the scheduled broadcast time, so I missed the actual moment that marked the re-writing of History As We Know It. Damn.

But as soon as I woke up, I tuned into The Guardian this morning to read about the massive shock and disbelief of scientists around the world as they came to the cruel realisation at just how wrong they’d been to dismiss Steorn as a bunch of conniving swindlers. Alas – not so much as a whisper about Steorn’s miraculaous achievement. There were just more boring stories about the iPad. So I jumped across to the Steorn website for the lowdown, and to watch the video of the ground-breaking demonstration to find that… they’re going to post it tomorrow.

Oh heck. I guess that the universe has waited this long for its physical laws to be broken that one more day won’t hurt. While I was at Steorn, I watched some other videos that they have, including a six part demonstration of absolutely fuck all. Mr Slippery himself, Steorn CEO Sean McCarthy, was there with plenty of claims about how great their Orbo motor was, and the wonders it could accomplish:

“The electromagnetic components themselves return more energy and/or heat than is put into them!”

“It can achieve from 150 to 200% efficiency!”

“The faster you go, the more powerful the device is. In theory there is no limit to the energy it can produce.”

And as I watched the long-winded and banal technical demonstration (that was so full of misdirection and waffle that even my untrained engineering mind could spot it) I kept wondering “If the thing does what it says, why don’t they just show it powering a toaster or something?”

Indeed, in the Q&A afterwards a sensible gentleman asked just that. Here is the exchange verbatim (my thoughts highlighted), complete with Sean McCarthy’s squirming ((Some of his oleaginous tone does come through in the text, but to get the full effect you will, unfortunately, have to watch the clip)):

Bearded Gentleman: “So you say the reason that you don’t have a prototype that demonstrates load is that it’s cost prohibitive?”

Sean McCarthy:”No, I didn’t say that.” [Uh oh. Someone with some brains snuck into the demo. How did that happen?]

BG: “Well… why don’t you have one?”

SM (looking as if the guy has just spoken to him in Esperanto): “Sorry?” [Seems like a reasonable question to me you pillock]

BG: “Why don’t you have one then?”

SM: “Oh, wh… um.. wha? You mean showing load? We’re recharging batteries and you will see… we’ll be lighting lights and all that kinda stuff later on… [That’s ALL we want to see, dropkick.] but… you’re misunderstanding what we’re about. [You know, I think the Bearded Guy has a very good idea of what you’re about…] As a busi… we’re not, we’re not going to be next week selling generators down here just to charge your iPhone” [Who asked if you were?]

BG: “I think the problem though is that this isn’t really very convincing”

SM: “To whom?” [Oh, let’s see… to ANYONE you brainless halfwit!]

BG: “To the general public”

SM: “Um… we’re not… we’re interested in the development community. [OK, well show it to THEM then you simpleton]”

BG: “OK, but you’re broadcasting it on the internet”

“Absolutely (smug laugh)… we’re look… as I said… you understand our business model is engaging with the b… we’re not selling anything to Joe Public. Y… I mean, there’s no box of tricks we’re going to sell [Wow, they’re not even selling the box. Just the tricks.], we’re saying, we’re trying to sell this to the product development community and, if they understand the experiments, and they believe them [Yeah, now see, this is the crux of the problem Sean – NO-ONE BELIEVES THEM. Hence the reason we want to see your daft device actually doing what you claim it does!], um, that’s the next step for us to engage with the product development communities. [Waffles with syrup, anyone?]

(I’ll spare you anymore of the blow-by-blow – it’s exceptionally tedious – but if you think I’m exaggerating you can watch it to verify what comes next: Mr McCarthy goes on to say it’s cost prohibitive to build a demonstration Orbo motor, ((Um.. actually, what the FUCK, then, is the thing in the video clip that’s spinning around and around with all the measuring gadgets hooked up to it? My brain is exploding here Steorn! If you can’t build one, then the gadget you’re showing us is what, exactly? Why are we here again?)) comparing it to building just one hard disk drive ((I fail to see how the analogy is even remotely relevant – the reason people will put money into building millions of hard disk drives is because the science behind them works and is completely understood. If you’re claiming you can do miracles, then you have to produce a miracle, or at least very convincingly explain how your miracle works. Not just tell everybody how cool your miracle is.)) “… but even if I had a billion dollars, we still wouldn’t build one…”. Well, no, because even though you are a complete moron, you know it would be completely fucking stupid to waste a billion dollars on building something that doesn’t actually DO anything.)

So, examining the above exchange, we see Sean McCarthy first saying that the reason that Steorn can’t show us a working version of Orbo has nothing to do with it being cost prohibitive. Then he promises that ‘later’ they will be showing it ‘recharging batteries and lighting lights’. In the same sentence he negates himself and says that they won’t be making ‘a generator to charge things’, ((A small point here – the use of this example “We won’t be making a generator to charge your iPhone” – is a favourite trick of practitioners of woo: trivialize a critic’s good question by mocking them with a daft re-phrasing of it. The man simply asked why Steorn didn’t have a demonstration that would do what they claimed – ie, show overunity. This could be as simple as their Orbo motor, under its own power, lighting a simple LED. Since they say they have a working Orbo motor, which can deliver ‘up to 200% efficiency’, then this should be absolutely and utterly straightforward.)) and then, a few sentences later explains this as being ‘because it’s cost prohibitive’. Go back and plug Mr Bearded Guy’s original question in here, and see how long you can go around this loop before you fall off. ((Fractionally longer than the Orbo will remain in rotation without a power supply, is my guess))

Sean McCarthy has not been merely kissing the Blarney Stone, he’s been chewing off dirty big chunks. I’m really looking forward to tomorrow’s video.