Tetherd Cow Ahead

You may remember that, in the ‘wine horoscope’ post a few days back, I said that ‘hokum flourishes in places where there is a substantial amount of subjectivity and a stratosphere of opinionated ‘experts’’. Wine is not my field, so aside from pointing out the obvious ridiculous claims made by the wine sellers in that particular case, I’m not really qualified to comment on the mechanics of the business with any technical authority.

There is another field, though, that is rife with its own 101 Flavours of Claptrap that I am qualified to take on, and that is the mysterious club of ‘high end home audio’.

It’s hard to know where to start with ‘professional’ hi fi. There is so much misinformation and gobbledegook that pretty much wherever you turn there’s some implausible gadget or other for improving your sound, from gold-plated connectors, through pens that make CDs ‘clearer’ to (quite unbelievably) expensive wooden knobs* for your amplifier. And that’s not even tippy-toeing into the world of serious audio fruitcakes.

But today I’m going to examine the simplest, and perhaps the most exploited of all hi fi components: speaker cables. The hyperbole spouted by the vendors of these products is voluminous. Their ‘oxygen free, polarized di-electric, elevated-off-the-floor, cryogenically chilled’ cables will make your muddy cloth-filtered music sound like it’s been triple-washed in Persil! It’ll come out of the speakers at a fidelity beyond studio quality!

What’s going on here? Can some bits of wire really make that much difference? Well, yes and no. First of all there’s an important point to note about speaker cables – they carry a much higher level signal than anywhere else in the audio chain because it is amplified. In practical terms, what this means is that your actual modulated raw audio signal is at its most powerful going from your amp to your speakers. Why is that important? Because at this time the electrical signal is bumped up way beyond the noise level of all the other components in the system – most of the stuff that can be done to affect the fidelity of the signal itself has already been done.†

That being said, what becomes significant is the best way to get the electrical signal from out of your amp into your speakers with the least impediment possible, and this essentially comes down to one thing: providing the happiest and least reactive conduit for your excitable electrons to travel along. Now there are some mitigating factors involved: no matter how good your path is there is some wear and tear on how well the electrons fare. They are effected by the quality of the conductor, the distance they have to travel and other electrical phenomena such as capacitance and inductance. But here is the critical point: none of these are really much of a problem in ten feet of speaker cable. In addition, even if you were able to demonstrate some non-optimal electrical artifacts over such a short distance, it is unclear what effect, if any, these have in relation to audio fidelity.‡

So. What is the most important factor to consider in getting your electrical signal to your speaker? Just one thing: lots of copper. Copper is a terrific conductor of electricity. It’s very kind to the electrons as they pass though, giving them the easiest path to travel that they could ever want. And when we’re talking about ten feet, all being said, that’s really not that much copper.

I’m now going to give you a tip that will save you hundreds of dollars and make your hi fi system sound as good as the very nerdiest of your audio-buff friends: for your speaker connections, forget all about the oxygen free, diode rectified, dipped-in-chocolate, used-only-by angels $1000-per-foot Pear cables** and instead just use a good quality twin core electrical cable.

That’s it! Use some wire like this and no-one on the planet will be able to tell the difference between it and the most expensive cable you can buy! I found the stuff above for less than $2 a metre and you can do even better than that. Sum total for speaker cable for my studio: $45. And that’s for a full 5.1 sound set up, with 6 speaker sources.

Audio buffs like to pontificate ad nauseum about the how much difference the supposed ‘high end’ speaker cables make but to those of us who work in the business they just look like idiots – we don’t use those kinds of cables! So what these people are claiming is that they can hear better sound in the reproduction of the material than we heard when we made it! That, of course, is an absurdity of the highest order.

I’d like to end with a true story. Many years ago, a hi fi aficionado acquaintance of mine invited me around to hear his new system. He had spent many thousands of dollars on components, and waxed lyrically about his new speaker cables, which, he said, had improved the fidelity of his music by an impressive order of magnitude. Knowing about my skepticality of such claims, he swore that even I would notice! He sat me down and pressed play on one of his favourite jazz recordings. Could I perceive a superior sound quality? Was I astonished at the clarity of his sound? Well, not so much – I spent a more than a few minutes coming to grips with the fact that his speakers had been wired out of phase, a much more egregious degradation of the listening experience than even speaker leads made of string would have inflicted. And something that he had not even noticed.

I’m not suggesting that all hi fi buffs would make such an obvious mistake, but the thing is, my friend had invested so much money and faith in his audio gear that he had little choice but to believe that he was witnessing superior sound reproduction. And I do suggest that this phenomenon, like that which we saw at work in the ‘wine horoscope’ hoodwink, has more than a little part to play in influencing the subjective experience of listening to recorded music…

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*It seems pretty clear to me that the most significant knobs in this equation are the ones forking out the money. Seriously – read the blurb on the link to the ‘Silver Rock ‘Signature’ knobs and tell me that the manufacturers aren’t having a very good laugh at the silly hi fi twits’ expense. You’d be forgiven for thinking it really was a joke, if this very same company wasn’t selling speaker cables for over a thousand dollars…

†Excluding, of course, what is done by probably the most important component of all – the speakers themselves. But we’re not talking about speakers for the moment – that’s a whole other ballgame.

‡Another sign of the magical thinking involved in high end audio comes in the form of the following dichotomy: hi fi buffs will argue till they’re blue in the face that analogue sound is superior to digital sound. They insist that there is something called ‘warmth’ that comes from analogue that doesn’t make it into the digital world. Why, then, are they so happy to eschew the old, simple twin core speaker cable used on nearly every analogue hi fi system ever made up until about the late 1970s (when the hi fi craze really started to take off)? What if the old cables contributed to that warmth…? Paradoxes such as these are another flag for spotting pseudoscience.

**James Randi put forward his famous Million Dollar Challenge to the makers of Pear cables, to demonstrate in a double blind test that their product would outperform a cheap good quality cable of the same length. Predictably, after first calling the Challenge a hoax, and then (as is so often the way) resorting to ad hominem attacks against Randi, Pear’s CEO Adam Blake refused to participate. This is an unequivocal admission of flim flam. If your product performs as claimed, you can only come out of the Randi Challenge looking absolutely golden (with the added advantage of $1000,000 cash in your pocket). If you back out, then this surely indicates that you are afraid that the results will not bear out the hyperbole in your marketing. This, in turn, indicates that you are deluded or a swindler.

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Oh dear. Ohdearohdearohdearohdearohdear.

Sometimes someone turns on the Stupid tap and the washer just ruptures and Stupid starts gushing out all over the shop AND YOU CAN’T STOP IT. These last few weeks have been like that, what with Melissa Rogers and her daft ShooTag™, the resurgence of Prophet Pete, and now…

The two largest supermarket chains in Britain, Tesco and Marks & Spencer, have started advising their customers to be aware on which days of the week they choose to taste wine because it will effect the taste. This breathtaking piece of utter folly is so risible that I had to check the date of the Guardian article several times as I was reading to keep reminding myself it wasn’t an April Fool’s joke.

This is the skinny (although I do advise you to read the article to get a sense of the full absurdity):

Tesco and its rival Marks & Spencer, which sell about a third of all wine drunk in Britain, now invite critics to taste their ranges only at times when the biodynamic calendar suggests they will show at their best.

The calendar has been published for the last 47 years by a gardening great-grandmother called Maria Thun, who lives in rural Germany. She categorises days as “fruit”, “flower”, “leaf” or “root”, according to the moon and stars. Fruit and flower are normally best for tasting, and leaf and root worst.

To put it succinctly – two major UK retailers are consulting and recommending wine ‘horoscopes’.

Jo Aherne, winemaker for Marks & Spencer manages to make herself look like a complete twat (and the wine tasting fraternity even more filled with blarney than it already is) by claiming:

Before the tasting, I was really unconvinced, but the difference between the days was so obvious I was completely blown away.

Once again we see the that little crack of Subjectivity in the door of Reason being jimmied open by the great big club foot of Pseudoscience. Nowhere are we offered any evidence that these taste tests were blind tests, let alone the double blind trials that a scientific assessment would demand. These people are just espousing an opinion, and, worse, an opinion based on highly subjective appraisals of something that is to most people an arcane field of expertise. This is a situation busting for pseudoscientific exploitation.*

Tesco’s senior product development manager, Pierpaolo Petrassi, says of the tastings:

It may be a little step beyond what consumers can comprehend.

Oh yeah. You’re so right there Pierpaolo old chap. I’m certainly having trouble comprehending it.

Perhaps the most extraordinary part of this Guardian article, though, is slipped in almost unobtrusively:

The Guardian tested the theory this week and tasted the same wines on Tuesday evening, a leaf day, then again on Thursday evening, a fruit day. Five out of seven bottles showed a marked improvement.

[Checks date for third time. Nope, not April 1]

The Guardian, a world class newspaper, known for its usually sober news and feet-on-the-ground reporting is endorsing this piece of flimsy superstitious mumbo jumbo! Jesus H. Christ – where did I put that shifting spanner! The basement is awash and the stuff is leaking into the hallway!

As the article trails off and the loony wagon heads into the sunset, our keen correspondent throws a small bone to the wolves:

In other quarters, doubts remain. Waitrose’s† wine department has investigated the idea and cannot see a correlation. Many scientists have little time for biodynamic wine, pointing out that the movement’s guru, Rudolf Steiner, claimed to have conceived the concept after consulting telepathically with spirits beyond the realm of the material world. Among his other works are claims that the human race is as old as the Earth and descended from creatures with jelly-like bodies, and a belief that men’s passions seep into the Earth’s interior, where they trigger earthquakes and volcanoes.‡

Uh-huh. And so, Mr Booth, Guardian correspondent, you’re lending credibility to this wine horoscope idea exactly why?

So, after digesting all that, consider the following:

•Comprehensive blind taste tests conducted by the American Association of Wine Economists have revealed that, if the variables are hidden from the testers, then for the majority of people there is no correlation between the cost of a wine and its perceived enjoyment. In other words, if they don’t know what it cost, most people can’t tell what kind of ‘quality’ they’re drinking. On the other hand:

•Other blind tests show that the perceived expense of a wine, if known, positively influences perceived enjoyment. And:

•A European Commission study from 2001 determined that in excess of 50% of those interviewed considered astrology a science. A Harris Poll conducted in 2003 found that 30% of Americans thought that the position of the stars and planets affect people’s lives.

From those three pieces of data, I leave it to you to extrapolate what’s going on here. My suggestion to readers from the UK is that you should, forthwith, buy your wine from Waitrose.

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*Much like the field of high-end domestic audio. And unlike wine-tasting, that is a province I know very well. But as I read all the hi-jinks with this wine stuff, that same peculiar odour – a blend of of fish and bullshit – starts to fill the air. You find this problem anywhere that there is a substantial amount of subjectivity and a stratosphere of opinionated ‘experts’.

†Another, obviously smarter, UK chain.

‡Well, that last bit about the Elder Ones is totally true of course.

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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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Folks! I’ve had a communication from one of the purveyors of ShooTag™ which, I think you’ll agree needs to be awarded headline status, rather than languish in the Comments on this post.

Melissa Rogers, the person credited as CEO of ShooTag™ on the About page on the ShooTag™ site, has found her way to The Cow (whilst vanity-searching her product, we must assume). Well, of course, I said things she didn’t like so she found time to mount her best and most coherent argument against my point of view.

I reprint her thoughts for you here in full.

Melissa Rogers adds:

Your response proves that you are not disaplined in physics or quantum physics. The statements that you made about frequencies being the same as a cell phone demonstrate you lack of science knowledge. There are many types of frequencies and ours are not radio frequencies. When we go from patent pending to full patent protection, then all of our sceince (all three applications) will be disclosed. Instead of making a judgement without knowledge, try it. Actually, try the people mosquito tag. If you usually get bitten by mosquitoes, you will know if you do not get mosquito bites -won’t you? If would give you more credibility to have a quantum physicist contact us and then let him explain the science to you. Otherwise it just makes you sound ignorant! Technology is changing very quickly and most people have no science background to understand how any of it works. Did you know that radios were first made with crystals? did you know that digital items are made with liquid crystals? Did you know that cell phones use fractal geometry to make a minute antenna that uses your energy field to extend? Do your homework and try the people mosquito tag. See for yourself.

Now, let’s see:

•Your response proves that you are not disaplined in physics or quantum physics.

Melissa, unlike you, I’m not pretending I am disciplined in physics or quantum physics in any formal way. I’m not the one trying to take money from people based on my ‘expertise’ and so my credentials are not the ones under scrutiny. Nevertheless, I am very well read in both physics and quantum physics, and I plainly know a great deal more about these sciences than you do. I certainly know enough to understand that your page on The Science Behind ShooTag™ is a whole lot of waffle that makes no scientific sense whatsoever.

•The statements that you made about frequencies being the same as a cell phone demonstrate you lack of science knowledge.

Whoa! Hang on there pardner! For a start, it’s your site that bandies around the the words ‘electromagnetic frequencies’ without any discrimination at all. I am completely aware of the scope of the electromagnetic spectrum and my point was that you use this catch-all description without having the vaguest idea of what it means. I don’t know whether or not your frequencies are the same as those of a cell phone because you never specify. You just claim, in the scatty manner of peddlers of pseudoscience, that your product ‘uses electromagnetic frequencies’. That’s as daft as saying it uses ‘vibrations’.

•There are many types of frequencies and ours are not radio frequencies.

Really? So you think mobile phones use radio frequencies then? Um, exactly who’s the science dummy here? So, the frequencies that your device uses – they’re ultraviolet, maybe? X-ray? Gamma ray? Perhaps they operate in the visible light spectrum? You haven’t got a clue what I’m talking about, have you?

And, may I ask, does your device have a power source? From my investigation of your site it doesn’t seem so. If this is the case, then please don’t attempt to sell me the idea that it ‘radiates frequencies’ of any kind at all. This would be flying in the face of all known physics. Unless of course it’s radioactive, and I think I’m taking a pretty safe punt that it’s not.

•When we go from patent pending to full patent protection, then all of our sceince (all three applications) will be disclosed.

Yeah, now, see, you claim your patent is pending, and if that is even the case (which I doubt), it would be because it hasn’t been awarded. We can discuss this further if you actually ever get a patent.

•If would give you more credibility to have a quantum physicist contact us and then let him explain the science to you.

Oh, I would LOVE to hear an explanation from a quantum physicist. PLEASE get one to write to me. But don’t bother if it’s Prof. William Nelson – he is NOT a quantum physicist.

•Technology is changing very quickly and most people have no science background to understand how any of it works.

Yes, I’m afraid that is entirely true. Most people have very little understanding of science. If they did, gewgaws such as ShooTag™ would never see the light of day. Melissa, what your product offers is in no way based on science. If it was, you’d be able to clearly communicate the ideas behind your device in a way that doesn’t sound completely addled to anyone with knowledge of scientific principles. You’d have conducted properly run double blind experiments, and accumulated data that confirms your results from unbiased researchers. You’d have submitted your science to peer-reviewed periodicals, and have the endorsement of real scientists instead of a lone nutcase who has a track record of ridiculous claims and refers to fictional publications (the ‘Quantum Agriculture Journal’, for example).

•Otherwise it just makes you sound ignorant!

Really? You seem strangely desperate to try and make me seem ignorant. That’s what’s called an ad hominem argument, and is usually the last resort of someone who has run out of actual facts.

•Did you know that radios were first made with crystals? did you know that digital items are made with liquid crystals?

Um, yeah, but so what? Is that supposed to impress me? Is it an example of your superior science knowledge, perhaps? What’s it got to do with anything? How does it relate to your invention?

Oh crap. Something just occurred to me – please don’t tell me that the ShooTag™ uses some kind of ‘crystals’. That would be most dismal. Or actually, do tell me that, if you like! I think that would firmly stake your credibility in this argument.

•Did you know that cell phones use fractal geometry to make a minute antenna that uses your energy field to extend?

Now, do you even have the foggiest idea what that means? Do you know, or understand any fractal geometry? What ‘energy field’ are you talking about? Extend what? How? Why?

Or is it, perhaps, that like the words ‘magnetic’ and ‘quantum’, you’re throwing in ‘fractal’ because, for you, it’s some kind of mysterious magical notion that you believe will somehow be impressive? Well, sadly, it might bluff those who know nothing about such things, but really, you’ve picked the wrong person on whom to use that kind of language. I work with fractal math. I know what it does and what it means. What you are attempting to say does not in any way sound sensible to me.

•Do your homework and try the people mosquito tag. See for yourself.

I shouldn’t need to try your product to know that it’s plausible, in the same way that I shouldn’t need to buy, oh, toaster or something to ‘see if it works’ – I know that the toaster is likely to function as its manufacturer claims because the scientific principles on which it’s based make sense.

You imply that you know more about science than I do, and yet you don’t even have the most basic understanding of scientific process. I’m not the one you need to convince. Convince people who have no vested interest in your product (that is, NOT people who’ve forked over money, or friends, or credulous tv presenters). Convince unbiased scientists, using properly conducted scientific trials. Take all the spurious anecdotal ‘evidence’ off your website and replace it with some properly endorsed rational thinking.

I reiterate what I said in my original post – if your science is genuine, and your device does what you claim, then doctors working in malaria zones all over the world will be beating your door down. That would certainly be convincing evidence.

But while you continue to invoke dubious ‘scientists’ like ‘Professor’ William Nelson, mythical gazettes like the ‘Quantum Agriculture Journal’ and spout equivocal gibberish such as that which you use in ‘The Science Behind ShooTag™’, your credibility is near zero. Your small pool of personal ‘It-worked-for-me-TOO!’ testimonials may serve to fleece gullible pet owners of their dollars, but it doesn’t constitute any kind of science.

Come back and push my face it in when you’ve solved the world’s malaria problems (which, if your device works as claimed, should be a trivial undertaking and be achievable in a scant year or so – or maybe you don’t think that’s a worthwhile use for your invention?). I promise I will make a full and humble apology in that event.

Until then, all you have to do is show me where the science is in all your claims.

Does your pet have fleas? Do you laboriously de-flea Fido or Felix every few months, dreading the inevitable infestation when summer arrives? Is your flea comb blunt-to-the-blade from the amount of use it gets? Well my friend THOSE DAYS ARE GONE! The wondrous ShooTag™ has arrived! No more chemicals! No more squishing the little blood-suckers between your nails! No more WORK! Just clip on the ShooTag™ & kick back with another mojito as the miracle of ‘science’ brings its quantum electro-dynamic guns to bear on the field of pest control!

It is to employ teh Sarcasm.

Yes folks, it’s another nutty scam from the same mindset that brought you unlimited free energy, clairvoyant pens and magic water. Swinging in with that Ol’ Reliable of pseudoscience, ‘magnetism’, ShooTag™ uses a ‘three dimensional electromagnetic static field embedded in a magnetic strip’ to rid your pet from pests for up to 4 months! I know – it sounds incredible! Because it is! Entirely incredible, as in, ‘not credible’.

Let’s examine some of the claims that the purveyors of ShooTag™ offer up on their site. This is a terrific opportunity to observe the workings of a classic con in action:

First, pick an outcome that is difficult to determine in a real world situation: Of course, you know when your pet has fleas – it’s fairly obvious. You might possibly even know when your pet doesn’t have any fleas at all – but that’s a lot harder to tell. The gamut of possibilities between those two extremes, though, is highly difficult to gauge outside a controlled laboratory setting. It’s the rich, vast exploitable landscape of anecdotal evidence. Perfect! Line the suckers up!

Next, make some extravagant but hard-to-disprove claims: ‘ShooTag™ combines cutting-edge science and technology to produce a “green” product that emits electromagnetic frequencies to keeps pests at away!’; It ‘uses electromagnetic frequencies to create a protective barrier from pests that lasts up to 4 months!.

Let’s examine some of those words: What evidence exists to say that electromagnetic frequencies keep pests away? There’s none that I could find (except on the websites of people selling products similar to ShooTag™). Why are electromagnetic frequencies ‘green’ here, but ‘toxic’ when you use your mobile phone? How come the barrier ‘lasts up to 4 months’? If it’s a magnet, shouldn’t it last forever? Or, if it is an electromagnet and has batteries, then couldn’t you replace them? Are we supposed to believe that the elecromagnetic properties of ShooTag™ sort of fade away over time? Could it be that, after four months you have to (gasp) buy another ShooTag™? And those two words ‘up to’… ‘Up to’ could be anywhere from a couple of days onward… It’s advertising-speak piled on hogwash piled on flim-flam.

The next step: blind them with science: There’s a tab at the top of the ShooTag™ home page that takes us to ‘The Science Behind ShooTag™’. Let’s see now… hmmm. ‘Atoms are mostly space…’ yes, well, OK…‘magnetic static…’ (Magnetic static? What the…?), ‘quantum and gravitational fields…’ (is this a flea-control system or a warp drive?) and best of all ‘produces an expanding barrier effect, keeping away the targeted pests’. ‘Targeted pests’? The electromagnetism has the ability to discriminate?

In case it needs to be said, the ‘science’ offered up on this page is what I shall henceforth call ‘sausage science’, ie, baloney. The fancy-sounding phrases and the faux lesson in quantum electrodynamics are as nonsensical as a jabberwocky. The word ‘quantum’ itself has become the modern equivalent of ‘magnetism’; a mysterious force that [cue theremin] ‘No-one understands!’ Heck, why shouldn’t it repel fleas!

But wait! There’s more! What’s this over in the corner here – a scientific document! It’s a pdf of a report to something called the Quantum Agriculture Journal by a Prof William Nelson. ((This has been removed from the Shoo!TAG site after my criticism. I’ll let that action speak for itself.)) Let’s do a Search™ on the ol’ Quantum Agriculture Journal… that sounds like something I might want to subscribe to! Well, well – sadly (if a little predictably), only two lonely links ((I guess I’m giving them three now…)), both of them pointing back to the ShooTag site. And as for ‘Prof’ Nelson… let’s just say that in the Quantum Hoodjy Goodjy Stakes he’s ‘got form’. ((You might, for amusement, like to look up his Xrroid Quantum Medical Consciousness Interface System. If anyone suffers from xrroids, it’s this guy, given the amount of utter crap that he generates.)); The ‘scientific’ document itself (if you can be bothered) is a hare-brained ramble through a whole mess of abracadabra, beginning with some descriptions of chaotic attractors, jumping through magnetic resonance imaging and the electrical sensitivity of sharks, and ending up with the conductivity of chemicals in cells. It’s the most meaningless agglomeration of waffle that I’ve attempted to read in a very long while. If you’ve ever even seen a scientific paper, you know this ain’t one of those.

You might think, from reading through the ShooTag™ site that this is all a bit of harmless misguided opportunism, but Faithful Acowlytes, these disingenuous swindlers must know that what they sell is crap. The language they use, the fake ‘journal’ they invoke, their diffuse claims, the meaningless testimonials ((These ‘real-life’ people (all from Texas it would seem) are credible exactly why?)) – all these things are the conjurings of cynical rip-off merchants. If they have science, they’d show it. If this thing worked, malaria doctors from Bolivia to Eritrea would be all over it (otherwise, you’ve got to be thinking they either don’t know about it… um… or they are willfully letting their patients die. Why? Oh, that’s right: it’s all an Evil Plot by Big Pharma!)

Anyways, Cowpokes, fear not. Here at TCA Labs the boffins have been hard at work to remedy this appalling situation. Stay tuned for our Part 2 of this post when we will be bringing you the TCA ShooWooWoo™…

ADDENDUM: More about ShooTag™, including a ‘defense’ of the product from ShooTag™’s CEO here.

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Thanks (if that’s the right word) to Atlas for bringing ShooTag™ to the attention of The Cow

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You will remember, dear Acowlytes, that about two months back we discussed the risible claims of Technical Remote Viewing University and their ‘magic’ pen which has the power to see into the future.

You will also remember that at that time I put an object in a box in my bedroom and challenged anyone (magic pen optional) to tell me using ‘remote viewing’ what was in it. Well, today is the day I reveal the contents of the box. Here is a picture of the box. It has a sliding lid and a cylindrical interior. ‘Remote viewing’ should easily have picked up this unusual detail. The box has been sitting, untouched, on the chest of drawers in my bedroom since I set the challenge. I have not moved it, opened it, or changed the object which I placed in it on the day of the challenge.

And this is what was inside. It is a small plastic duck in pirate drag. It is in fact, one of those little trinkets you stick on the end of a pencil. It was given to me by Nurse Myra some while back. Now this seems to me to be something that a ‘remote viewer’ would have no trouble ‘getting’. There are so many unique things about it that I’d at least have expected the words ‘pirate’, ‘little’, ‘plastic’ to be key features of a description.

Imagine my discombobulation, then, when one of the very first comments to be left on the original post was a ‘prediction’ by faithful Acowlyte and regular reader, King Willy. The King commented:

‘I reckon there’s a pirate in that box, a little plastic figure.’

‘Holy Cow,’ I hear you exclaim! ‘King Willy really does have one of the TRVU magic pens, and they really do work! He got it spot on! C’mon Reverend, even your cynical old butt has got to admit that King Willy couldn’t have stumbled upon that description by pure chance!’

Well, as amused and surprised as I was, I realised immediately I could not have asked for a better illustration of how ‘psychics’ ply their trade. On the face of it, this sounds like a truly astonishing achievement – an unassailable example of King Willy’s clairvoyant powers. He was definitely unable to physically look in the box – we live many hundreds of kilometers away from each other. He also had no other way of knowing exactly what was in the box (he could have asked Violet Towne to look in the box, for instance, but he didn’t – Violet Towne had not looked in the box when King Willy posted his comment*). I didn’t drop any hints at all in the post, and I did not tell anyone what was in the box. No-one saw me put the pirate duck in the box. And yet The King described exactly what was in the box!

So how the hell did King Willy accomplish this astonishing feat?

Well, as it happens, herein lies the whole mechanism for the success of the ‘psychic’ industry. Now, although I know that King Willy will want to lay claim to the fact that he is indeed psychic, or that his psychic pen was running hot that day (King Willy is a rather silly fellow and likes to say things like that), his powers are not what they might at first seem.

On a purely technical level, there are a few things that a shyster could have done to come some way towards appearing to know what I’d hidden away from you all. First of all, the description ‘little’ is something of a no-brainer. The thing I’d chosen had to be small enough to fit in a box on a chest of drawers in my bedroom. Even if the box had been a shoe-box, most anybody could have persuasively argued that the object in it was ‘little’. Compared to an elephant, say, sure, it would have been.

But King Willy is no shyster, and that’s not what he was doing. So, even given that ‘little’ was an educated guess, what about ‘plastic’ and especially ‘pirate’? And the combination ‘little plastic pirate’? That’s a bit too much of a stretch isn’t it Reverend? Surely King Willy can’t have inferred all those things? Well, no, I agree, he couldn’t have deduced those things from the context of what I told you. In fact, I’m pretty sure that the King was guessing that what I put in the box was this:

And that’s because King Willy and Pil gave me this ‘little plastic pirate’ as a present for my birthday in 2006! Indeed, it has featured previously on The Cow as an item that lives in Mysterious Corner.

And it’s a pretty good guess. It’s likely to have been something I might have put in the box. It’s small, and interesting, and under normal circumstances something that would have been close at hand.† Which points to another key ‘psychic’ maxim: ‘Know your victim’. King Willy knows (along with most of my friends, including all you Cow readers), that I’m partial to things piratical. So a guess in the realm of one of my personal interests was also a reasonable prospect. In fact, I made a classic experimenter error by choosing the ‘pirate’ duck – it gives away something of my personality. To be more scientifically correct, what I should have done was ask a third party to find a number of objects for me and wrap them all up so I couldn’t see what they were. I should have then chosen one at random and placed it in the box. That way, even I wouldn’t have known what was in there.

The more astute of you will also realise that throughout this post I’ve been leading you by the nose when it comes to selling King Willy’s accuracy – a little while back I said ‘And yet The King described exactly what was in the box!’

This is a classic piece of psychological manipulation. King Willy, at no time described ‘exactly what was in the box’, although, had you been consulting a psychic, this is the very impression you would have been encouraged to adopt. King Willy explicitly missed some key features of the thing in the box – aspects I would have thought a lot more significant in a broader sense than ‘pirate’ or ‘little plastic figure’. ‘Black’, for instance, springs immediately to mind, but most obviously ‘duck’. Perhaps not so evident in the photo, but definitely important, is the large ‘hole’ in the bottom of the duck which makes it so clearly a pencil decoration.

So an accurate and acceptable description of what was in the box would surely be (very simply): ‘a pencil ornament that looks like a small black duck wearing a pirate outfit’ (in fact, I’d have to say that if King Willy had used even the two words ‘pirate’ and ‘duck’ in confluence it would have been enough to have given me pause, but then, given the circumstances, I’d have been more suspicious of nefarious dealings). If remote viewing were at all possible, then plainly it is only useful if it gives you significant details, rather than a few scattered facts that could be construed in any number of ways.

Strangely (or perhaps not), there were almost no other attempts to scry the box’s secret. Atlas tried the ol’ dependable ‘air’ (an expert ‘psychic’ ploy – go for something vague that can’t be disproved), Cissy Strutt opted for ‘human tooth’ (which I told you all was wrong, and in any case, she was using inside knowledge of me and Mysterious Corner as well – she just guessed badly) and Pil hinted that she knew exactly what it was, but, as all physicists know, although she was equally right and wrong until the box was opened, she was proved most definitely wrong on that event.‡

Unsurprisingly, no-one from TRVU showed up to take a stab – a task that should surely be trivial for remote viewing ‘experts’ who can look into the mind of Osama Bin Laden.

Maybe someone tried but they got distracted by the little pirate duck waggling around on the end of their pen?

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*In fact, she never looked in the box until I opened it. Of course, scientifically-speaking the possibility that she could have would completely negate the results of a genuine experiment. It is conceivable that King Willy & Violet Towne conspired, and VT sneakily opened the box when I wasn’t looking.

†As it happens, Mysterious Corner is still packed away in my storage, so the little pirate was very unlikely to be the thing in the box.

‡And Glitch wouldn’t fit in there anyway.

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