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onomatopoeic with a sweaty handshake
Sunday, June 24 2012
Gretchen has been trying to help our friend Marissa come up with a name for the bun in her oven, a bun whose gender uncertainty wave function has already been collapsed down to the male state. I won't bore you with the list of names, but one stands out as uniquely horrible: Wayne. This morning I described that name as "onomatopoeic with a sweaty handshake," an expression Gretchen found funny enough to write down.
Later, as we were drinking our Sunday morning french press of coffee, Gretchen asked me a question from the crossword puzzle she was solving, and it led me to give her a little chemistry intro lecture. She'd slept and cheated her way through high school chemistry and hadn't ended up learning anything, probably because it had been taught poorly. But it turns out I'm actually a pretty good teacher of the subject and she found my telling engaging enough to hold her interest. I explained the two often-contradictory "desires" of an atom: the "desire" to have a full valence shell and the "desire" to have a neutral charge. These two desires cause most atoms (but not the noble gases) to seek communities with other atoms to form molecules. I explained the difference between oxygen's "desire" for two more electrons (and how this makes it like to bond with two hydrogen atoms) versus calcium's desire to eject its two valence electrons. It certainly helped for Gretchen that I was using the language of human relationships to model the physical propensities of atoms. Like any model, it was just an approximation, but it wasn't a bad one.
I've taken an interest in yet another internet scam, this one going by the name Power4Home. It's a multimedia package purportedly explaining the "secrets" of how to generate your own electricity in a way that even someone "who had never touched a screwdriver since high school shop class" could do it. The ads (I saw one on Facebook) claimed that these secrets were "making the power companies angry." Making {member of a profession} angry has become an essential meme in internet advertising, almost as much as "discovered by {your geographic adjective as determined by you IP address} mom." Others said to be angered in other internet ads include doctors, dermatologists, and weight loss coaches.
As with all massive internet marketing scams today, the advertising itself has been combined with a robust search engine optimization strategy complete with fake blogs, fake news articles, and fake discussion boards, many of which are found by using the search phrase "Power4Home scam." In these blog posts and articles, an initial whiff of skepticism is rapidly replaced with a full-throated marketing pitch. It's all quite transparent to anyone with any sense, but evidently there are enough suckers out there for such strategies to work.
The promotional video for the "Power4Home" is a long, rambling sales pitch designed to exploit people's paranoia about energy companies, scientists, and the government. We're told our electric bills are "criminally high," but not to worry, with this system, even Joey Allthumbs can whip himself up a solar panel using things "mostly found around the house" over the course of a single weekend and soon see his power meter "spinning backwards."
The only environment in which such scams can exist is one without bittorrent. Since bittorrent is a newish technology and the sort of thing one must usually learn about from peers, it largely doesn't exist for people over the age of 30. Those are the people most likely to get worked up about their power bills; unlike the slackers with their iPads crashing at their parents' house, they own houses and have to pay the bills.
After downloading Power4Home using bittorrent, I can't say I'm surprised by how thin its gruel turned out to be. For example, the plans for building a "solar panel" are basically carpentry plans for building a shallow plywood box. Into this box one is expected to mount dozens of hand-sized solar cells, all of which must be soldered together. Now I have a lot of things "just lying around" my house, including plywood and a soldering iron. What I don't have is boxes of solar cells, the aggregate prices of which accounts for the vast bulk of the price of a professionally-made and installed solar panel. They're also hard to source, even with the assistance of the internet. That anyone thinks he can save money by soldering together solar panels from individual cells, particularly if he has no soldering skills, is madness. To sell this as a path to energy independence is fraud.
The Power4Home package also includes instructions for making an electric windmill, but again the main component (the generator) is not something that people are going to have "just lying around" in their garage and it's not going to be easy to find on the internet either. But the biggest ommission in the Power4Home package is any description of what needs to be done to attach a solar panel or a windmill to a household circuit breaker. It's obvious why; that step is both dangerous and expensive.
Still, despite the obvious Nigerian-Prince-level scammitude of the Power4Home pitch, people seem to be falling for it. Admittedly, these will tend to be the least cognitively-endowed of the population, but nevertheless the breathtaking ignorance in their posts makes me worry about this country. I suppose it shouldn't come as surprise that a population that can't grok the simple elegance of descent with natural selection will never have a sense of what it would actually take to disconnect their house from the electrical power grid (particularly if they have "no skills").
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?120624 feedback
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