The secret is out. (via Pharyngula)
Good thing I have options
Category Archives: Antiscience
Magnets Gone Bad
Why is striking woo so easy on the internet?
My knee has been bothering me, and the knee brace I have used in the past (which AFAICT stabilizes against some lateral movement) wasn’t helping me. The problem appears to be consistent with patellar tendinitis, aka jumper’s knee (and yes, mister fancy-pants word-check software, thatisthe correct spelling for tendinitis). It’s not bad enough to send me to the doctor’s office — that event has a fairly high activation potential — so I bought a patellar knee strap, and it seems to be helping thus far.
But when you go out on the web and search on things like “knee pain brace,” you end up hitting a lot of sites selling magnetic therapy bracelets. And, of course, these are bunk — total crap. Now it’s not insane to wonder if magnetic fields will affect the body, but the explanations of the way the bracelets are supposed to work are just clearly bogus. The fields of these bracelets/wraps/jockstraps are weak, and hemoglobin isn’t ferromagnetic. Depending its the oxygenation state, you can get diamagnetic or paramagnetic behavior in the hemoglobin, which allows you to do functional MRI, but this uses fields several orders of magnitudes stronger to see effects. People have done tests that show that these devices don’t work, but it’s also true that these suffer from some problems, namely, that you can’t have a magnetic “placebo” device, since it isn’t difficult to tell if a bracelet is magnetic.
But there’s actually a deeper level to some of the shenanigans, and this is where the basic physics breaks down – badly. Continue reading
Holy crap, this is really scary!
Yes, I guess it’s scary that somebody reports on science with two articles in the business section. `Holy crap, this is really scary,’ inventor says of strange phenomenon. Thane Heins has a machine and an unexplained phenomenon, and people are starting to whisper, “perpetual motion,” and trying to be careful that the big, bad scientists don’t hear. We’re so unreasonable about things like this.
Now, I haven’t seen the device and I don’t know what’s going on. Apparently when you put some magnets near this motor, it spins faster. (Are you doing work moving the magnets? Is the system drawing more power? Did anyone bother to measure this?). The article also explains how one way of testing this would be to put a load on it (which, I must add, you should so after you use it to power itself). But there’s no mention of this simple test being conducted. Blech. This is what you get when you have a reporter asking the wrong questions.
“What I can say with full confidence is that our system violates the law of conservation of energy,” he says.
Well, I think you’re full of something, and to you it may seem like confidence. But conservation of energy stems from the time symmetry of the universe — the laws of physics are not changing. Nonconservation of energy requires the laws to change; this from Noether’s theorem.
The other bit is bad, too, especially because of the standard headline. Turning physics on its ear. Whoa, pardner. Nobody’s turned nuthin’ yet. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and all that. The thing about overturning physics with perpetual motion is this: it’s never been right. Not once.
What I want to know is this: is your house still hooked up to the grid, drawing energy? Why is that?