Water power?

[Mike Arman]

>mike <mikemk40 at yahoo.com>
>Subject: RE: veggie oil?? -->> Try Water ?
>
>You might well scoff but my father knew someone who
>knew someone who invented a car that ran on tap water
>but the inventor got paid off and/or assassinated by
>the oil companies


That someone was feeding your father a load of BS.

This barely qualifies as an urban legend - it isn't even a good scam.

See #2 below.

I am reading all about greenfire plugs and other quantum leaps in 
gasoline engine technology, which if implemented would give me 1,000 
hp from 100cc with no maintenance whatsoever for 200 years, zero 
emissions and 4,250 miles per liter of 65 octane fuel mixed 50/50 
with used engine oil . . .

I am reading all about super-efficient carburetors which are 
suppressed by the car companies/the oil companies/George Bush Jr & 
Sr/the Cosa Nostra/you pick it, and somehow they are just always 
around the corner . . .

I am reading about miracle additives which I can buy off late night 
TV shows for $2.49 or $24.95 or $249.95 which I can simply pour into 
the oil filler cap of my rusty 1964 Ford Econoline van (6 cylinders, 
stick) which will promptly triple my horsepower, quadruple my fuel 
mileage, totally stop the oil burning, make the paint shine again and 
put tread back on the tires . . .

Truly, we live in wonderful times!

In the real world, however, we must deal with a mix of wishful 
thinking, greed, ignorant consumers, incompetent service, lack of 
understanding of basic physics, ignorance of 150 years of careful 
development of the internal combustion engine, car companies who 
would cheerfully sell their grandmothers to the Taliban in exchange 
for a .002% improvement in their overall fleet fuel consumption 
averages, and sometimes just plain outright fraud.

There ARE going to improvements in the internal combustion engine - 
but they are mostly going to be incremental. In a very few cases, 
engines of unconventional design (scotch yokes, etc.) may prove more 
practical due to improvements in materials or manufacturing 
technology, but that doesn't mean they will be economically viable in 
the marketplace. OK, so your improved ceramic block Miller Cycle 
electronically controlled 4-6-8 engine with all electronic everything 
gets 3% better fuel economy than the stone age cast iron inline four 
it replaces - but it only costs 10 times as much and NO ONE can fix 
it - so will it SELL??? The answer is going to be a resounding NO - 
the "gains" are not worth the effort. And you really can't build this 
in your garage in your spare time, either.

Things are improving - serpentine belts instead of multiple vee 
belts, more aluminum in engine castings, electronic spark and fuel 
control, better oil tightness, better metallurgy, but these are 
incremental improvements, not breakthroughs.

The technology is well understood, the physics are well understood, 
we have lots of well-funded, bright, motivated engineers looking 
very, very hard indeed for ways to make the gasoline engine run 
better - but guess what - all the easy gains, the low hanging fruit 
if you will, are already gone. Whatever we do now will be at the cost 
of greatly increased complexity, and lots more money.

Enthusiasm alone is not enough - I would never discourage enthusiasm, 
because that is what causes people to really LEARN about their 
subject, and then they can explore the bounds and borders of 
possibility without bothering with the known dead ends.


Here's a checklist to help us detect possible technological BS. It is 
from Quackwatch.org, written by Dr. Robert Park, PhD, who is a 
professor of physics at the University of Maryland at College Park 
and director of public information for the American Physical Society.





1. The discoverer pitches the claim directly to the media.

The integrity of science rests on the willingness of scientists to 
expose new ideas and findings to the scrutiny of other scientists. 
Thus, scientists expect their colleagues to reveal new findings to 
them initially. An attempt to bypass peer review by taking a new 
result directly to the media, and thence to the public, suggests that 
the work is unlikely to stand up to close examination by other scientists.

One notorious example is the claim made in 1989 by two chemists from 
the University of Utah, B. Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, that 
they had discovered cold fusion -- a way to produce nuclear fusion 
without expensive equipment. Scientists did not learn of the claim 
until they read reports of a news conference. Moreover, the 
announcement dealt largely with the economic potential of the 
discovery and was devoid of the sort of details that might have 
enabled other scientists to judge the strength of the claim or to 
repeat the experiment. (Ian Wilmut's announcement that he had 
successfully cloned a sheep was just as public as Pons and 
Fleischmann's claim, but in the case of cloning, abundant scientific 
details allowed scientists to judge the work's validity.)

Some scientific claims avoid even the scrutiny of reporters by 
appearing in paid commercial advertisements. A health-food company 
marketed a dietary supplement called 
<http://www.quackwatch.org/04ConsumerEducation/News/vitamino.html>Vitamin 
O in full-page newspaper ads. Vitamin O turned out to be ordinary saltwater.

<<See late night infomercials!!!>>



2. The discoverer says that a powerful establishment is trying to 
suppress his or her work.

The idea is that the establishment will presumably stop at nothing to 
suppress discoveries that might shift the balance of wealth and power 
in society. Often, the discoverer describes mainstream science as 
part of a larger conspiracy that includes industry and government. 
Claims that the oil companies are frustrating the invention of an 
automobile that runs on water, for instance, are a sure sign that the 
idea of such a car is baloney. In the case of cold fusion, Pons and 
Fleischmann blamed their cold reception on physicists who were 
protecting their own research in hot fusion.

<<BINGO!!!   100mpg carburetors suppressed by the government, anyone?>>



3. The scientific effect involved is always at the very limit of detection.

Alas, there is never a clear photograph of a flying saucer, or the 
Loch Ness monster. All scientific measurements must contend with some 
level of background noise or statistical fluctuation. But if the 
signal-to-noise ratio cannot be improved, even in principle, the 
effect is probably not real and the work is not science.

Thousands of published papers in para-psychology, for example, claim 
to report verified instances of telepathy, psychokinesis, or 
precognition. But those effects show up only in tortured analyses of 
statistics. The researchers can find no way to boost the signal, 
which suggests that it isn't really there.



4. Evidence for a discovery is anecdotal.

If modern science has learned anything in the past century, it is to 
distrust anecdotal evidence. Because anecdotes have a very strong 
emotional impact, they serve to keep superstitious beliefs alive in 
an age of science. The most important discovery of modern medicine is 
not vaccines or antibiotics, it is the randomized double-blind test, 
by means of which we know what works and what doesn't. Contrary to 
the saying, "data" is not the plural of "anecdote."

<<"mah brother in law saw this once when he was in the army in XXXX 
back in 'XX!">>



5. The discoverer says a belief is credible because it has endured 
for centuries.

There is a persistent myth that hundreds or even thousands of years 
ago, long before anyone knew that blood circulates throughout the 
body, or that germs cause disease, our ancestors possessed miraculous 
remedies that modern science cannot understand. Much of what is 
termed "alternative medicine" is part of that myth.

Ancient folk wisdom, rediscovered or repackaged, is unlikely to match 
the output of modern scientific laboratories.

<<not applicable for cars, but it could be if we changed "centuries" 
to "decades".>>



6. The discoverer has worked in isolation.

The image of a lone genius who struggles in secrecy in an attic 
laboratory and ends up making a revolutionary breakthrough is a 
staple of Hollywood's science-fiction films, but it is hard to find 
examples in real life. Scientific breakthroughs nowadays are almost 
always syntheses of the work of many scientists.

<<built it in my garage, all by myself!>>



7. The discoverer must propose new laws of nature to explain an observation.

A new law of nature, invoked to explain some extraordinary result, 
must not conflict with what is already known. If we must change 
existing laws of nature or propose new laws to account for an 
observation, it is almost certainly wrong.

<<perpetual motion is a good example>>

I began this list of warning signs to help federal judges detect 
scientific nonsense. But as I finished the list, I realized that in 
our increasingly technological society, spotting voodoo science is a 
skill that every citizen should develop.


Best Regards,

Mike Arman
Who doesn't say advances are impossible, but who does request to be 
SHOWN results instead of TOLD about them, and whose 90V8Q insists on 
gasoline, thank you.






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