China Acts on Funeral Strippers

What's the world coming to when a Chinese farmer can't be sent off into the afterlife with a nice striptease show?

Thank goodness strippers are still welcome at American funeral parlors. Last funeral I went to, I got such an excellent lapdance I had a boner for hours. That was such a great funeral I can't even remember who died!

Outrageous Airport Bullshit

Just follow the link. Crazy story about a guy who was confronted by security and forced to change his t-shirt before boarding his plane because it had Arabic on it. What the fuck difference does it matter what it said? I'm pretty sure that not even an actual Jedi could blow up a plane with words. And what's up with the fascist, paranoid pussies who called security on this guy? Guess what, you ignorant assholes -- in America, your most important right is the right to be offended! Get used to it! You're going to be offended all the time, and there's not a goddamn thing you can (or should be able) to do about it, except shut the fuck up and take it like a grown-up.

Reminds me of a story I saw a week or two ago about a bunch of passengers refusing to board a plane because a couple of Arab-looking dudes were waiting to get on the same flight, and they were overheard to be speaking to each other in a mysterious foreign language, which was quite possibly -- gasp! -- Arabic! Oh, horror of horrors! Nice to know there's such a vibrant, volunteer brownshirt organization out there keeping us all safe from both spoken and written Arabic. Because you know, Arabic is one of those rare gateway languages that takes its speakers on a sick and twisted journey of death and destruction.

New Rule (with apologies to Bill Maher): Anybody who calls airport security merely because they're afraid of sharing a flight with a brown person has to ride in the cargo hold. It's better for everybody, since the cargo hold is going to be much colder than the cabin, and bullshit doesn't stink as bad when it's near-frozen.

Dark Matter, zero point energy etc, etc. aside,

Below I'm just reprinting in its entirety a comment posted about a hit piece published on zdnet.co.uk, because I thought it was brilliant, and it captures the essense of what I think most intrigues me about the Steorn story, namely that the Steorn invention is a black Pandora's box of related topics that govern our lives in ways both deep and broad. If the SteornBox is real, then the sound it makes, if any, is an anxious knell to the newly Endangered energy industry. As the largest corporations in the world are the backbone of this group, and function as the board of directors for USA Inc., this invention can also substantially alter the nature of US politics and democracy. It also challenges us to ponder the stability of the scientific method's foundation, as it's currently understood by a decreasing few and defined by an even smaller self-appointed authority. It can also, just by forcing us to imagine a future with substantial differences to the present, make us imagine other positive ways the world could be changed. Or remind us that even with one problem solved, we still have plenty of other doozies to tackle. For me, it also made me look around the house and think, "all-wireless everything would be so cool." But enough of my blabbin'. Here's Rich Weber:

RichWeber
Network Engineer

Dark Matter, zero point energy etc, etc. aside, everyone seems to forget that there is a qualifier in the first and second laws of thermodynamics. They both refer to closed systems, and are born out of pure mathematics, unprovable in the real world.

Why? Because nobody can seem to find a closed system.

In fact, quantum theory, due to such principles as uncertainty, and entanglement to a lesser degree, would seem to indicate that it is impossible for a truly closed system to exist.

One may argue that the universe as a whole is a closed system. To them I say, if you can prove that, you deserve a nobel prize.

You would then have to prove that no other universes exist, or that if they do, entanglement cannot take place between particles in two separate universes, and that they cannot interact with each-other in any way (worm holes, black holes, etc). You would further have to prove that there is no causality taking place. That the very existence of one, does not cause anything in the other. Of course, then there would be no way to prove it..... would there? Because it would be completely and utterly undetectable.

Simply saying "It must be the case, because these rules seem to hold true" is not good enough. Any scientist familiar with experimentation knows that one time in a billion you may get a different result, and that one time can point out something very important.

Men like Hawking and Kaku do not rule things like this out, so why should we.

The more we learn, the less we know.

Suddenly Steorn

Found this site SteornWatch.com, and after reading a whole bunch of discussion threads on the topic over the last 24 hours, I felt incited to post this comment to their (his?) post entitled 'Steorn Actually Believes They've Done It':

They do indeed believe they’ve done it. After reading loads of material on this subject and listening to a 50min interview with McCarthy, that much is clear to me.

I understand and share everyone’s skepticism, but what I don’t quite get is some of the angry comments (made all over the place, not just here) by people who have (or at least imply they have) an education in science. For example, a common refrain is “why don’t they publish in a peer-reviewed journal?” Folks, you have to understand — these guys are not scientists. What journal is reviewed by their peers? Do you even know who their peers are? The other reason they quite sensibly chose not to attempt to publish in an academic scientific journal, it seems to me, is they are mature and intelligent enough to be aware that a peer-reviewed scientific journal would ignore or openly mock their claims. People have simply hung up on them when asked for assistance in evaluating their creation.

This brings me to a cautionary note: if you are a rational person with a firm belief in reason over faith, take care not to cling to your beliefs the way a religious zealot would. Yes, it seems inconceivable that some magnets could disprove the first law of thermodynamics, but how can one say, with absolute certainty, that it is an impossibility? What sort of a person do you suppose it makes you if you put your foot down and say this cannot possibly be because my God Science forbids it?

If you approach this puzzle from a different angle with that same cherished reason but sans dogma, you may conclude that everything the Steorn team has said and the choices they’ve made and actions they’ve taken are completely consistent with your own actions, choices and words were you in their shoes.

Clearly it is going to be some time before the science behind this, if any, is quantified. In the meanwhile, what rivets me to this story is the psychological element. Sean McCarthy is clearly sincere, and absolutely convinced that he can be vindicated. Not -will- be, because there is a danger that the Jury evaluation will either be tainted, not happen, or be ignored by the world, even if the results are favorable. Hence the ad in The Economist. These guys are begging to be proved right or wrong, so this discovery can be shared with the world (and simultaneously, hopefully, make them each filthy stinking rich). And if it is all a hoax, what possible motivation could there be for the kind of investment they’ve made? If you can crack that riddle, then your accomplishment in the field of psychology will rival that of team Steorn in the field of physics.

The 'Holy Fucking Shit!' Story of a Lifetime (maybe)

Um...

...ah...

...I don't even know where to begin with this story. It's hard to put sentences together when your mind's been blown. (And for the record, I swear I'm totally sober as I write this.)

Check it out yourself. Scan some of these stories. I'll try to nutshell it for you:

Irish company called Steorn claims that it's invented free, clean energy with magnets. With fucking magnets. And in the process of doing so, they've apparently defied the most fundamental laws of physics.

The company has been testing this technology for three years. For six months, the guys who invented this technology didn't even believe that what they'd done was possible. So they just kept testing it. They've invited other scientists to evaluate the invention, and off the record, these independent evaluators have confessed that it works. But that's the problem: no one will say Steorn is the real deal on the record. No wonder. Any scientist who publicly validated Steorn's claims would immediately flush their own credibility down the toilet, because what Steorn has claimed to have done is simply not believable. It would be like a molecular biologist claiming to have proven the existence of God.

These guys fully understand that their claim is literally incredible:

"I think the point that we're making is that this publicity stunt, and it is a publicity stunt, has one direct aim, and that is to grab the attention of the scientific world really to get them angry enough to have to deal with this.

The question we're asking is an honest question to the world of science: either prove this works or prove it doesn't work - whatever you find, and to also make absolutely sure the answer is put into the public domain. As far as we're concerned, we're not asking a question we don't know the answer to."

- Sean McCarthy, Chief Executive Officer of Steorn

All they want is for somebody -- anybody (credible) -- to test their magic energy machine and tell the world that Steorn is not full of shit. And obviously they're pretty damned confident about the conclusion that any independent audit will reach. So to that end, they took out an ad in the Economist and challenged scientists to volunteer to audit their technology. They're going to finalize a 12-member jury of volunteer skeptics sometime next month, and are hoping that the testing and evaluation will be underway by the end of the year. I don't know whether to say 'hurry up!' or 'take your time!' On the one hand, I want a definitive word that these guys really are full of shit so I stop my mind from racing through the endless myriad of ways that our lives might soon radically change for the better. On the other hand, if Mr. Magneto is right and Steorn's tech is legit, then I'd certainly want the panel to take their sweet old time to authenticate the claims better to eliminate (or mitigate) the global sigh of disbelief they are likely to confront.

Ponder for a moment the ramifications of this. Oil, gas, coal, nuclear power, solar, wind -- all would be irrelevant. With infinite clean power, what would we need to kill all those brown people for? With infinite clean power, what problem couldn't be solved? If you told me yesterday that you were hoping mankind would invent its way out of the climate crisis that is sure to damn near extinct the human race, I'd have thought you were a naive romantic or strung out on meth. Today, I'd be a lot less inclined to be so judgmental.


Truly, my head doth spin.

And yeah, after having posted this, if (or when?) this whole story turns out to be bullshit, I'll have some egg on my face, but that'll be nothing compared to the CEO and employees of Steorn. Unless, that is, Sean McCarthy becomes a legend for having perpetrated the Greatest Practical Joke of All Time.

An afterthought occurs to me: if you can purchase a device that generates mechanical power, how much damage could you inflict if you were inclined to direct the use of that product to a malicious end? If the energy generation is limitless, is not too its destructive capacity?

I keep having to update this entry. I just finished listening to an interview with Sean McCarthy (a corporate chimera: CEO and techie nerd), and near the end learned that Steorn chose not to file for any US patents because they didn't want to create an International Incident by defying Newtonian physics. The interviewer was awkward and amateurish, but by the end what I got out of it was that this dude is not fucking around. This technology actually could turn the world upside-down. Or rightside-up. A series of magnetic fields, precisely tuned, scalable, generating power from a device the size of the end of my pinky or a city block cubed. The guys from Primer, who were the cleverest geeks I'd ever heard of before today, would crap their pants.

There's also a lot of poo-flinging going on. Along with my general skepticism, Rupert Goodwins and I share a puzzlement over what the Steorn guys could possibly stand to gain after their significant investment if they're totally full of it. (Which 6th grade science tells you they most definitively are.)