Tetherd Cow Ahead

Sometimes teh stoopid in the world is so profound that I fear alien civilizations from other galaxies will first detect us not via radio transmissions or atmospheric chemistry signatures, but by the massive volume of idiot particles that we radiate out into space.

Take this latest ‘health’ warning from Samsung advising viewers of the potential hazards involved with watching 3D television.

If you experience any of the following symptoms, immediately stop watching 3D pictures and consult a medical specialist: (1) altered vision; (2) lightheadedness; (3) dizziness; (4) involuntary movements such as eye or muscle twitching; (5) confusion; (6) nausea; (7) loss of awareness; (8) convulsions; (9) cramps; and/or (10) disorientation.

I don’t know about you, but I frequently experience symptoms 2 through 7 (especially 5 & 6) while viewing normal 2D television, so on a 3D tv I’d be hard-pressed figuring out whether they were being caused by the 3D effect or the program content.

The Samsung advisory goes on to suggest that it is a bad idea to watch 3D tv ‘if you are in bad physical condition, need sleep or have been drinking alcohol’ instantly alienating about 75% of their possible customers. It also advises that you should not ‘place your television near open stairwells, cables, balconies or other objects that may cause you to injure yourself’.

So, to clarify: don’t watch 3D tv at the top of an open stairwell whilst drunk and sleep-deprived. It’s not the alcohol, the lack of sleep or the plummet to the marble foyer that need worry you – it’s that woo-eee-ooo spooky 3D vision!

You have been warned!

(Everyone probably knows someone who needs the kind of warning issued by Samsung, and therefore also needs a Simple Graphics Man coffee mug from the TCA Shoppe. Send them one today and help them avoid a horrible disfigurement!)

This is a Canon iP4600. To some, it might look like a printer but it is in fact a demon sent to Earth by Satan. Its very purpose on this mortal plane is to torment the souls of its victims until they lose all sanity and can be thus claimed by the Evil One as his own.

I have come to this conclusion because whenever I try to actually use the iP4600 for the purpose for which it is supposedly ‘designed’, ie, ‘printing’, it attempts to do anything but. It behaves wilfully – malignantly, even – and finds all kinds of ways to inflict misery upon me. It even communicates with me via strange taunting messages.

I attempt to print a photo and it replies:

Which it does. And then stops. And then does it again. Then, grudgingly it spits out a mangled copy of my picture:

Sometimes I set it running and go off to make a cup of tea, thinking that when I get back in ten minutes it will have finished. Instead:

This morning it decided, for no apparent reason, to glob ink all over some CD artwork.

And it is entirely futile to try and just ‘print off a quick document’…

It will behave for an entire day, and then, just as I’m trying to finish up and go off to dinner…

Pray for me, Acowlytes. I feel my soul slipping into its icy mechanical maw.

 

The day before yesterday, Cow Central was besieged by enormous thunderstorms that lasted several hours throughout the afternoon. It was spectacular and scary. I had the great idea of attempting to record the thunder – it was the best rolling, echoing thunder I’ve heard in a long time. As I set my machine into record a phenomenal tearing shriek of thunder made me jump about three feet off the ground and sent The Spawn scurrying under the house. Here’s what it sounded like:

Download KABOOM!

– only a million times louder. Whatever did that, also knocked out the power to my house and brought down my internet. My net connection is not managed by the dreaded and appalling Telstra, but instead by Optus, another of our laughable telcos. I don’t have cause to ring Optus much – generally our net connection stays up – but since I was still completely cut off from the world when I woke up yesterday morning, I picked up the phone…

Oh crap. Now they have a robot too. It’s a little more brusque than the Telstra one, and a little less obsequious, but it’s still STUPID. But not as stupid as the real life operators, it seems, when I finally got through to one…

ME: Hello – my internet connection went down in the big storms yesterday and I was wondering if you could give me some idea when it will be up again.

CANDY: ((Her real name. Or at least the one she told me)) OK. Where are you situated (I tell her). OK. I’ll check for you.

♫ …tall and tan and young and lovely, the girl from Ipanema goes walking and wh… ♪

CANDY: It looks like all the connections down there are affected by the storms.

ME: Yes I know that.

CANDY: On your modem, can you see a flashing light?

ME: Yes. There’s a line error.

CANDY: But is it an orange flashing light?

ME: Yes. Well, it’s a green flashing light on my modem, but yes, it tells me the line is out.

CANDY: Well that orange flashing light is the reason you don’t have internet.

ME: No, Candy, surely the reason I don’t have internet is that the line is down because of the storms. The flashing light is just an LED that tells me what’s going on.

CANDY: …bzzz..t..bz..tsszz….bzzzz… (I swear I could hear her brain making that kind of noise) Well, it looks like there are problems with the internet because of the big storms down there.

ME (wondering if garrotting is still a popular form of murder): Right. So, can you give me any kind of idea when the problem will be fixed?

CANDY: No, I’m sorry. When the orange light stops flashing the problem will be fixed and your internet will be working again.

Two Hours Pass.

I call again. This time the robot is unable to parse my sentence. When I try and explain that I want to talk about an internet outage, the machine doesn’t ‘understand’ me and goes through the process of trying a bunch of alternatives. It’s like playing a guessing game with a monkey. No, scratch that. It’s like playing guessing games with a lobotomized monkey.

After it finds that it can’t guess what I want, it says ‘Hmmm. I’m not understanding you.’ Jesus fucking Christ. ‘Hmmm.’??? Someone has programmed the damn thing with attitude!

I really hope they’ll eventually give it a nose, so I can punch it.

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.