Tetherd Cow Ahead

OK. Now I’ve found something that tops even the Steorn bozos’ concepts for sheer technical daftness. Or downright thievery – you decide.

Over at Creative we find this offering for those who don’t have two brain cells to rub together (but plenty of excess cash, I guess) – the ‘Xmod X-Fi Module’ for your PC that actually ‘improves’ your lousy computer sound to an ‘experience beyond studio quality’.

Let me just rephrase that for the slow learners: you stick this gadget in between your mp3s and your speakers and the sound comes out better than the studio recording of the original track!

Shit, I’m going to buy twenty of these and give them to all my Pro Sound buddies. If it can make mp3 sound better than studio recording, then it follows that it can make studio recordings sound better than angels singing the glories of God and His Creation!*

Consider this assertion on the website:

•Restore the details and vibrance that your music lost during MP3 compression

Disregarding first of all that ‘vibrance’ is not actually a real word, let’s examine this claim. First of all, a simplified technical lesson: mp3, or MPEG Audio Layer 3, is a format which is known in the business as a ‘lossy’ form of compression. What this means is that some clever technical hocus-pocus is used to take an audio file and compress it in such a way that some of the less important original data can be thrown away to make the file smaller but (hopefully) without a listener being able to notice too much of a reduction in fidelity.

The key term here is thrown away. To get an audio file (say a CD quality file) down to a much smaller sized mp3, savage and ugly chopping has to be done and the unwanted data is irretrievably blitzed. Chucked. Trashed. Flushed. Things from the original audio file no longer exist in the mp3 file.

Our friends from Creative are claiming that they can somehow reconstitute this no-longer-extant data – raise it from the dead, so to speak – and set it walking among the living once more. Not only that, they are saying that the mp3 will not only sound as good as the CD you ripped it from, but better than that.

There’s a highly technical term for this kind of thing, and that term is CRAP!

In order that they might convince you of their highly dubious hyperbole, Creative offer you the chance to actually hear X-Fi in action. Going on the provided example I might make the suggestion that they should abandon the waffly try-hard ‘X-Fi’ moniker and go for the much more accurate ExcrementSoundâ„¢ label. Using a breathtakingly cliched Flash presentation, the Creative people show us how their X-Fi system can take a perfectly ordinary and dull piece of music and sound like a perfectly ordinary, dull, and sibilant piece of music. Huzzah! They’ve discovered the treble control. Now instead of that fuzzy futzing aliasing of the high frequencies in an mp3 you can have nicely fizzy, ear-scouring futzing aliasing. Wow. Better than studio sound! I know – I try every day to get my sound to be this unpleasant, but fail comprehensively.

Oh, I just can’t go on. The only thing that’s creative about Creative is their ability to effectively recycle that old saw: Never give a sucker an even break.

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*This is a colourful image for comic effect. I do not believe in Creation, angels or God.

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The Battle of the Magic Waters

SCENE 1: Int. fancy modern office. Day.

DAVID COPPERFIELD, famed stage magician, is talking to his agent on the phone.

DAVID (angry):

Whaddya mean Madonna’s got magic water? She’s a pop star for crying out loud! What does she know about magic?

(Offscreen sound of agent through phone filter)

DAVID (steam coming out ears):

Oh yeah, is that so? Well I’ll show her!

SCENE 2: Ext. The Copperfield helipad, Bahamas. Day.

DAVID climbs from his chopper and strides purposefully to his waiting limo.

DAVID (under his breath):

Does she have any idea who she’s dealing with?

SCENE 3: Copperfield Private Island in the Exuma Chain. Day.

DAVID is dropping DEAD LEAVES into a fountain. His beautiful assistant LOURDES sits nearby.

DAVID:

Do you see that? Do you see? The dead leaves are ALIVE again! ALIVE, do you hear me! The water from the fountain is RESTORING THEM TO LIFE. I have discovered THE FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH here on this private island that I bought for $50 million dollars. What an astounding coincidence that I, DAVID COPPERFIELD, World Famous Illusionist, should be the one to find the SECRET OF ETERNAL LIFE! It’s truly amazing that no peasant farmer has stumbled across this MIRACULOUS FOUNTAIN!

LOURDES (smiling adoringly at DAVID):

David, do that thing with the handkerchiefs again. I love it when you do that.

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Sigh. Yes it’s true. David Copperfield thinks he’s discovered the Fountain of Youth on his private Island in the Bahamas. I swear, I could sit here for a week and never come up with stuff as bizarre as this. What happens with these people? They make untold wealth and then their brains just fall out? Or maybe I’m being generous in attributing brains to them in the first place.

My thanks to Fighting For Science where I discovered this new worrying example of a world gone mad. Go visit them and tell them The Cow sent you.

I remember reading an interview with Madonna some years back in which she claimed that she had given up all the wacky belief systems she’d been into and now had taken up Kabbalah. ‘Cos, like, that’s not a wacky belief system, right?

So of course she wouldn’t endorse some loopy scheme involving pouring ‘blessed’ water into lakes polluted with nuclear waste to ‘cleanse’ them, right?

And she wouldn’t be lobbying the British Government to approve the scheme, right?

Yes, loyal Acowlytes, I can see that you’ve grasped the rhetorical nature of those questions. Madonna is indeed trying to persuade government officials that enchanted magic water will eliminate the problem of radioactive contamination.

Here’s a quote from Madonna in which she casually attempts to hint that, in spite of what we all thinks she spends her days doing, she’s actually been hangin’ out with the geek crowd:

“I mean, one of the biggest problems that exists right now in the world is nuclear waste,” she said. “That’s something I’ve been involved with for a while with a group of scientists – finding a way to neutralise radiation, believe it or not.”

Yep, Madonna has been beavering away behind the scenes in the lab with her egg-head homies solving all the world’s problems while you have been doing what? Just pirating her mp3s and dropping E, I’ll wager.

It occurs to me that there is a scientific equation that can be solved here. Madonna is rich and, with very little acumen about just how it might be done, wants to save the world. On the other side of the plus sign, the Steorn crackpots are looking for gullible air-heads with plenty of spare cash. If only someone would put them together – then they might amuse one another for years and eventually disappear up each other’s magnetic vortex.

You know, I really hate to admit it, but in light of all this I have really developed a new respect for Bill Gates.

Speaking of laughing…

A company based in Ireland going by the name of Steorn claims to have invented a method for generating free energy. Oh dear. The old Something-For-Nothing perpetual motion delusion comes up for another breath.

You can see a comprehensively information-free piece of hype from the company here in which various Steorn personnel demonstrate the benefits of regular visits to Blarney Castle. Here’s CEO Sean McCarthy explaining why existing energy sources are problematic:

“Most of the hydrocarbons in the world, oil gas and so on, happen to be in dangerous places, they happen to be in places that are politically and economically unstable…”

Er, duh Sean. They happen to be in those places? Like there’s some kind of coincidence at work there buddy?

He goes on to divulge the secret of Steorn’s incredible new accomplishment:

“The technology is the ability to construct certain magnetic fields, that when you travel around the magnetic fields starting and stopping at the same position, you’ve suffered a net gain of energy. Quite simply the analogy would be, you walk to the top of the hill and then you walk back down to the bottom of the hill, but in doing that you’ve gained energy.”

Wow, cool analogy. Like, I’m convinced. So, if I’m understanding it correctly (bear with me, I’m not really good with all this scientific stuff) putting it another way it’s like opening doors in a hallway, and then shutting them again, and in doing so you’ve gained energy! Or, maybe, like sticking a pipe-cleaner through one ear, pulling it right through your head and out the other ear, and in doing so you’ve gained energy!

If you’re falling behind with all this technical stuff, don’t worry – the Steorn movie includes a little piece of animation that clarifies the principles at work. In it, a little green whirlpool goes round and round between some magnets:

See? Could the science behind this astonishing discovery possibly be any more persuasive?

This from Richard Walshe, Steorn’s Marketing Manager:

“There’s an ecological advantage to it, absolutely. There’s a cost saving to it, but ultimately for me, the advantage is convenience. The advantage is never having to plug your mobile phone in.”

OK. So Steorn has invented a revolutionary way of creating entirely free energy thus instantly solving all the world’s industrial, travel, pollution and communications problems as well as knocking global warming on the head (not to mention rewriting the tenets of physics in the process) and Richard is most excited about the fact that he won’t have to remember to stick his phone on charge?

I guess it’s not that unusual for the marketing arm to completely miss the point. One does wonder, though, how Steorn, with the best product EVER (forget sliced bread, forget the mousetrap, forget the wheel), has managed end up with a nitwit like Richard as their strategist.

Then again, maybe the members of Steorn are crazy like foxes. The company has taken out an ad in The Economist challenging scientists to prove them wrong. You’ve gotta give them points for chutzpah. With some major scientific hoo-hah and a few serious-sounding names in the fray they could spin this hogwash out for, hey, maybe a couple of years and bring all kinds of investment money on board.

And they’re no strangers to that game.

My advice? Before you throw your hard-earned cash into Steorn’s Magical Magnetic Moolah Magnifier, take a trip to The Museum of Unworkable Devices and ponder the old saw ‘There’s no such thing as a free lunch’.

It holds just as true for the Laws of Physics and investment strategies as it does for interpersonal relationships.

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There’s No Such Thing as a Free Lunch. What’s the Catch?

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Why Are You Using So Many Capital Letters and Exclamation Marks?

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†And while you’re at it, how about some product endorsements in the Comments?

Do not all charms fly
At the touch of cold philosophy?
Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine –
Unweave a rainbow…

So wrote John Keats. As many idealists and romanticists have done ever since, Keats was putting on his Smock of True Art, levelling his pistol at the ‘cold unfeeling heart’ of science and plugging away.

Once upon a time, many years back, I probably would have leant to the side of Keats. In fact, to this day I sympathise with Keats, and I understand, as only someone who has been on both sides of the fence can, his fear and from whence it comes.

But these days I disagree in a most profound way with his assessment that philosophy (by which he means science in keeping with the manner of his time), “empties the haunted air” by “unweaving the rainbow”.

See, the mistake that Keats makes, and one that I very nearly made in a desire not to lose a sense of mystery from my life, is to think that the intent of science is to explain everything, and by inference, trivilalise it; to pit the marvels of the universe against the measure of man. This is a view of science that is fundamentally and seriously wrong.

Science, as practiced by real scientists, is a tool with which we can examine the universe and make assessments that are not based on the way we would like it to be but on the way that it tells us it is. This is one of the most rigorous intellectual and philosophical challenges that any human can undertake. Religion can’t do it, art doesn’t feel the need to do it, and capital ‘P’ Philosophy sits on the fence. Only science seeks to look squarely at the truth and endure its harsh blows.

In a private email about my recent post on homeopathy, a correspondent suggested that I was ‘narrow-minded’ in my view. I explained that to the contrary, my open-mindedness about homeopathy was what convinced me it was bogus; I once used to think that it should be considered as a complementary medicine (and yes, I even used it myself), but my wide reading about it, my willingness to entertain both sides of the argument, was what led me to doubt its efficacy. I still read about research into homeopathic claims. If someone can give me some substantiation that homeopathy works in the manner in which it is suggested that it does, I promise I will change my mind. But you see, so far no-one has been able to do this. The support for homeopathy is anecdotal and diffuse and minimal at best.

On the other hand, if I want to demonstrate that clonal science effectively keeps millions of people healthy every day, it is a trivial exercise.

Is this any less marvellous, just because we understand exactly why it works?

Keats, like many artists, was afraid that science would strip our world and our lives of mystery. If he had been willing to spend a little bit of his time with science, he might have discovered, as so many scientists have, that the deeper you look into the universe, the more mysterious it becomes.

This does not mean that we need to invoke supernatural beings like gods and demons to explain it. It just puts us in mind of the one thing of which we should always be aware: we are tiny parts of an extraordinarily complex machine of which we know so very little. Only hubris in the form of bad science or bad religion even attempts to suggest that we can understand it all.

And if you want mysteries, try these:

★Why does the number phi (1.61803399…) appear in so many seemingly unrelated places, from plant structure to the event horizons of black holes?

★Where is your conscious self? Where does it go when you fall asleep?

★Why do we dream?

★Would the universe exist if we weren’t here to see it?

★Why do alcoholic drinks retain their aroma longer than non-alcoholic drinks?

★Is the string of numbers in pi completely random forever?

★Will the internet ever become sentient? Would we even know if it did?

★How does memory work?

★Why do normal body cells go berserk and multiply out of control in cancers?

★Why is it that some people can be hypnotized not to feel pain, and some people can’t?

No-one knows the answers to these questions. It is possible that someday, we might know something of some of them. But then again, we might not. The crucial thing to understand is that by asking questions about these things, we don’t diminish ourselves, or our dreams. Of one thing you can be sure: for every question we answer, another two will arise.