Snake oil

[Kjelt]

Expensive placebo 

[CJay]

I would love to see inside one of these machines to see if they really "work by enveloping the patient's body with a special electric field made of negatively-charged static electricity [as opposed to that positively-charged static electricity]"

Or, you know, if they're just a beeper and some LEDs tied to an NE555 timer...

I'm willing to bet a small amount of money it's nothing more than an ioniser, a bog standard Cockcroft Walton multiplier Ioniser.

They may be partially correct, I believe an ioniser can kill some fungi and viruses but it may be to do with a small amount of ozone being emitted from an overvoltage or badly isolated output.

 Advertsing it as a cancer cure I think is illegal though.

[cprobertson1]

Oh, it’s ok, it very specifically says it does not kill bacteria or fungi, it works by (I’m paraphrasing as I refuse to give them another click count!) “entrapping viruses or cancer cells* in an electromagnetic field causing them to starve over time”

*Now I am a biochemist specialising in immunology – how the hell does an electromagnetic field know how to differentiate a cancer cell from a normal cell WHEN NOBODY ELSE CAN TELL THE DIFFERENT WITHOUT RUNNING GENETIC ANALYSIS!?! Not even your OWN BODY can tell the difference! (if it can tell the difference, it kills the cancer cell before it becomes actual cancer – and this happens about 10’000 times per day – bodies are awesome)

URGHARHARHA I hate false health claims based on ignorance - nothing worse!

Reminds me of those "detoxifiers" (they came up earlier in this thread - BigClive reviewed a few of them xD) - I wonder if the people who buy these know they already have built-in "detoxifiers" - and not just that - but FILTERS TOO! Oh, but I guess you can't sell livers and kidneys cheaply from china and make a killing from ignorance...


--EDIT--
I just realised I kinda wen't off the rails there - I'm going to avoid looking at spurious claims for a while and calm myself down again

Instead, I'll leave you with some audiophool grade.... socket covers...


Made from Porcelain!


"I tried the Duplex Covers with good results for wall outlets located on the side walls, but "night and day" results were obtained when a Tru Tone Duplex Cover was placed on the unused outlet located on the wall behind and between the speakers."
So you put them on unused sockets? Crikey, don't go near my lab with these - I have like twenty sockets in there! At elast they're only $30 each

"I can't believe these things actually improved the overall sound as much as they did. Is it resonance control that's lowering the noise floor? I hear greater detail in quiet passages and better front to back image definition. Very impressive!"
I can't believe it either!

[helius]

Those guys won't believe how much better their setup sounds when they replace that filthy Romex in the walls with cap and tube wiring!
Finest quality cloth woven cables and porcelain insulators, nothing but the very best.

[klunkerbus]

Maybe they like the volume cranked up so high the normal metal or thin plastic outlet covers vibrate... lol

[setq]

Maybe they're batshit

[jonwil]

Been seeing a lot of ads lately for something called a lif3 that is supposed to protect you (and your family) from the harmful radiation of a smartphone just by sticking it to the case.
Is there any truth to this or do we need to go hit that bullshit button?

[CJay]

Been seeing a lot of ads lately for something called a lif3 that is supposed to protect you (and your family) from the harmful radiation of a smartphone just by sticking it to the case.
Is there any truth to this or do we need to go hit that bullshit button?

We need a great big bullshit button.

[Cyberdragon]

Been seeing a lot of ads lately for something called a lif3 that is supposed to protect you (and your family) from the harmful radiation of a smartphone just by sticking it to the case.
Is there any truth to this or do we need to go hit that bullshit button?

We need a great big bullshit button.

We need to show the sellers what real radiation is.

[rollatorwieltje]

Been seeing a lot of ads lately for something called a lif3 that is supposed to protect you (and your family) from the harmful radiation of a smartphone just by sticking it to the case.
Is there any truth to this or do we need to go hit that bullshit button?

The concept is really old. I remember them being sold when the Nokia 3310 came out. Later they were also sold with LEDs in them and marketed as silent ring indicator, like this:

[Cyberdragon]

I've always wanted to get a pot of glowing mushrooms because I find them beautiful.

If I was to be incredibly devious I would start a farm of them and harvest the glowing mycellium. I would then package it in moist containers and market it to audiophools and free energy nuts as a "purifying ointment" for circuit boards. I mean it glows right? See where this is going?

Thus ending at least some of the stupidity with shorts and massive corrosion!

Oh don't worry, there would be a disclamer somewhere no idiot would look or read that says "you are an idiot for buying this" :-P

[setq]

You could get them to eat them

I had an idea of selling a noise free mains cable the other day. You just give them a moulded plug and an IEC plug and no wire. No cable, no  noise! I could charge them at least $500 to remove that noisy cable.

[CJay]

Been seeing a lot of ads lately for something called a lif3 that is supposed to protect you (and your family) from the harmful radiation of a smartphone just by sticking it to the case.
Is there any truth to this or do we need to go hit that bullshit button?

The concept is really old. I remember them being sold when the Nokia 3310 came out. Later they were also sold with LEDs in them and marketed as silent ring indicator, like this:

Which, oddly enough, I seem to remember made the problem worse, something to do with rectification of the radiated signal creating harmonics

[DefekC]

This made my day.. 



But in all seriousness, this is an actual measurement done on disconnected circuit! Yea, I was holding the probe with bare hands on conductive parts... 

Question here is, how the hell Agilent could even bring up this kind of result?!?
What is suggests is that I just broke physics and I deserve some kind of ultimate prize! 

[helius]

Negative resistance is not that unusual, many semiconductors exhibit it (within a subrange of the I/V graph). Not the human body though.

[cprobertson1]

I've only ever encountered that when the circuit being measured isn't fully passive - i.e a current on the circuit being measured.

Does it change if you flip the leads round?

[DefekC]

Circuit was disconnected from everything for more than 5 minutes.
Flipping around wires changed nothing. As I joked, giving everything to other person changed result to something I was expecting.
Component involved (measured) was some sort of digital temperature sensor that was "fried" (?). We were measuring if there was a short between Vcc/Data/GND. Don't remember at what occasion this result was achieved....

[cprobertson1]

Hah! Funky xD

It was a constant value, aye? I'd be willing to call that "pretty weird"

[DefekC]

Yea, value was consistent +/- 1..2%! 

[setq]

Ugh I just clicked this turd by accident: https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@dailybitcoinnews/tesla-dr-walter-russell-the-optic-dynamo-generator-and-how-it-could-revolutionize-cryptocurrency-mining-soon

[Cyberdragon]

Ugh I just clicked this turd by accident: https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@dailybitcoinnews/tesla-dr-walter-russell-the-optic-dynamo-generator-and-how-it-could-revolutionize-cryptocurrency-mining-soon

  My eyes are burning! Free energy is one thing...but this...

These people (even in their comments) believe that bitcoins are actually some form of energy that has to be created and transmitted with special machines!!! They claim it requires "too much energy" for the average person for these machines to make bitcoins! They don't even understand computers or the internet!

EDIT: At least if these people idiots actually start playing with big tesla coils...we won't have to worry about them much longer.

[cprobertson1]

Ugh I just clicked this turd by accident: https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@dailybitcoinnews/tesla-dr-walter-russell-the-optic-dynamo-generator-and-how-it-could-revolutionize-cryptocurrency-mining-soon

That was physically painful to read O_o

Your car could drive on forever. Even my great grandfather invented an engine back in the early 1900's that had such tech. but he could never figure out how to turn it off so it's been around for quite some time.

.

I'm rather fond of the economic argument for debunking these sorts of things - put simply - if phenomenon-x actually worked, why isn't there a company out there making a killing from it

Take the above example - an engine that never stops? Hook it up to a dynamo and sell the electricity; you're honestly telling me that it's "easy to do" and no energy supplier ever thought of doing it? Really?

In fact, I'm going to call you out on your own B.S. (Bovine Stercus), you're telling me your grandfather made an engine that he couldn't turn off, and he never once thought to himself: "hmm, I could sell this!"?

[setq]

That's when the energy conspiracy is used as a defence. I know some people who worked "for the energy conspiracy companies" as this lot would say and they'd 100% be the first people selling it if it worked. In fact it would change society overnight. The glory of this I suspect is the motivator.

What REALLY annoys me about these grand idiots is that we live in a rather unique bit of the universe in a time where much energy has been invested in us over billions of years by generations of death and destruction (coal, oil) and violent galactic events (atoms heavier than helium, nuclear elements, solar energy). We're only here because of these events. The only thing we do is skim the top off the easy to convert energy and convert it into something useless after it is used. And these buggers are just converting into harder to use energy by breathing

[cprobertson1]

It truly is amazing: as James Randi once said - "Ignorance is both hereditary and contagious".


TL;DR - don't worry, this is just a rambling - feel free to skip by it to the free energy stuff at the end!

Interesting enough, one might argue that this part of the universe might not actually be that unique - and that gives me some hope for us - though this is purely speculation. Let us assume that space is big (see "Douglas Adams") - and that there are multiple civilisations out there, even if they are spread too thinly throughout the universe to ever contact each other before their tiny pockets of existence fade...

Even if there are other civilisations - there will always be ignorance, just as there is intelligence... Hopefully the intelligence and the forward-thinking of society overall will outperform ignorance in the majority of situations - even if its only an intellectual minority that's pushing society forward.



NOW for the fun, free-energy nonsense: I seem to recall that free-energy nuts seem to think that electricity can "remember" how it was generated - and that electricity from "free energy" sources are cleaner - not because of carbon neutrality in its generation - but because when it is used, it improves the efficiency of the device using it (some even claim the device using it wastes no energy as heat whatsoever).

I'm still trying to rediscover the source for the above nonsense - it's a painful search, will post it once I find it!

[setq]

Please do - these are always a laugh