Official verdict: Steorn didn’t develop free energy technology
Back in
August 2006, the Irish company Steorn declared it had developed "revolutionary free energy technology." To back up its claim, they ran an ad in the
Economist inviting a jury of independent experts to scrutinize its claims.
It's been almost three years, but the jury has finally
delivered its verdict.
The unanimous verdict of the Jury is that Steorn's attempts to demonstrate the claim have not shown the production of energy. The jury is therefore ceasing work.
So the whole thing was a big waste of time. The mystery is why Steorn even bothered. What did they think they were gaining from this elaborate charade?
Posted By: Alex | Date:
Tue Jun 30, 2009 |
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Category:
Free Energy,
Technology
In 1945 there was a fake death craze following Roosevelt’s death
The fake celebrity death toll following Michael Jackson's death continues to rise. The body count so far:
Rick Astley (found dead in a Berlin hotel room),
Natalie Portman (fell off a cliff),
George Clooney (fell off a cliff), P. Diddy, Jeff Goldblum (fell off a cliff), Harrison Ford, Miley Cyrus, Britney Spears, Ellen DeGeneres, Louie Anderson.
The media is describing this death rumor craze as an internet phenomenon. Of course, the internet is the medium through which the rumors are circulating. However, such death rumor crazes are not unique to the internet. There have been similar crazes in the past. The only difference now is that, thanks to the internet, the rumors can spread faster, but also can be debunked faster. Consider this
April 14, 1945 report from the New York Times, excerpted below:
Flood of Rumors Gives City Jitters
Legitimate and Ludicrous Calls Swamp the Switchboards in Wake of Roosevelt Death
Widespread jitters bordering on mass hysteria seemed to sweep New York yesterday in the wake of Franklin D. Roosevelt's death, as rumors of killings, accidents and deaths involving prominent persons flooded the city.
Newspapers, radio stations, government offices, banks and corner drugstores were deluged with thousands of telephone calls asking "is it true?" that such and such a person had been killed. The telephone calls in some cases followed patterns so closely that some harassed switchboard operators were convinced the wave was organized as a possible attempt to hamper communications. But the prevailing theory was that irresponsible and flighty persons had fallen prey to their own gullibility.
The names of Van Johnson, film actor, and Comdr. Jack Dempsey were linked by the majority of callers, including two that Commander Dempsey and the actor had been killed together in an automobile accident. Other names mentioned were those of Mayor La Guardia, Harry Hopkins, Robert Taylor, Herbert H. Lehman, Charles Chaplin, Frank Sinatra, Al Jolson, Errol Flynn, Babe Ruth, Jack Benny and Jimmy Walker.
Posted By: Alex | Date:
Tue Jun 30, 2009 |
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Category:
Death
More Celebrity Death Hoaxes
It's been the week of the celebrity death hoax, triggered by the real-life deaths of a string of celebrities (Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, Michael Jackson, and Billy Mays).
The recent celebrity death hoaxes have included: Jeff Goldblum, Harrison Ford,
Louie Anderson,
Ellen DeGeneres,
Britney Spears, and Miley Cyrus.
In the case of Jeff Goldblum and Louie Anderson, the fake deaths were simply old rumors that were recycled. But in the case of Britney Spears, Ellen DeGeneres, and Miley Cyrus, pranksters hacked into their twitter accounts to post false death announcements.
Posted By: Alex | Date:
Mon Jun 29, 2009 |
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Category:
Celebrities,
Death
Museum of Hoaxes on Twitter
I recently created a
twitter page for the Museum of Hoaxes, so if you're on twitter, check it out.
I'm pretty inept at this social networking stuff. I created a personal twitter page months ago, but almost never posted to it. Hopefully I'll be more disciplined about tweeting on the MOH page.
There may be a bit of a learning curve, because I still haven't figured out all the twitter lingo. RT is the only abbreviation I understand.
But I'm excited that I already have nine "followers," and I hadn't even told anyone about the page yet.
Posted By: Alex | Date:
Sat Jun 27, 2009 |
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Category:
Miscellaneous
Where is my pond?
At 9 a.m. George Terry Dinnie left his house to walk Buckley, his bouvier des Flandres. When he returned, an hour-and-a-half later, he discovered that his 2500 gallon pond had disappeared. He figures someone took it, though he doesn't know why or how someone removed that much water: "They pumped the water out faster than I can fill it up again. It's as weird as weird can be." Something fishy is going on. That's for sure. [
morning call]
Posted By: Alex | Date:
Fri Jun 26, 2009 |
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Comments (7)
Category:
Pranks
Astrologer arrested for making prediction
The Sri Lankan government recently arrested the astrologer Chandrasiri Bandara. Unfortunately, it wasn't because he was peddling pseudoscience, but because his predictions had political implications they didn't like. He had foreseen that a planetary change on October 8 would be inauspicious for the government, and that it wouldn't be able to contain rising living costs. [
BBC]
Posted By: Alex | Date:
Fri Jun 26, 2009 |
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Comments (4)
Category:
Future/Time,
Politics
Students hoax Paris Match
A pair of French students attending Strasbourg university won first place in Paris Match's photoreporting competition, a prize that came with €5000. But upon receiving the prize, they revealed that all their photos had been staged. From the
British Journal of Photography:
Guillaume Chauvin and Rémi Hubert won for a reportage chronicling the harsh difficulties some poor students encounter while studying at the Strasbourg university. Their images showed students living in basements or offering sex to pay their rents. Another image portrayed a young man falling asleep in a bus as he embarked on a two-hour commute to his university. The reportage can be seen on Paris Match's website here.
The trick? All of the images had been faked, the two winners announced as they received the coveted prize on 24 June. ‘We though it was a bit caricatural,’ says one of the students to Le Monde newspaper. ‘We thought it would never win.’
Paris Match has now changed the rules of the competition to explicitly forbid fake reporting. You can see the photos
here.
Posted By: Alex | Date:
Fri Jun 26, 2009 |
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Comments (3)
Category:
Photos/Videos
Pranksters move Loch Ness signs
Pranksters in Inverness have made it even more difficult to find Nessie by moving the road signs for Loch Ness so that they point in the wrong direction. The leading suspects are concert-goers attending the RockNess music festival.
But here's the part of the article I found interesting. One resident "likened the alterations to World War II, when the authorities removed signs to prevent German soldiers from navigating their way round the country if they invaded."
I didn't know that had been done during WWII. I can't imagine that a lack of road signs would have significantly slowed down a German invasion. [
Press and Journal]
Posted By: Alex | Date:
Thu Jun 25, 2009 |
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Comments (12)
Category:
Places,
Pranks