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August 22, 2006

Free energy? Irish firm invites review of breakthrough; The art buried in books; Lieberman party? Time art critic trashes dead ex

Liz Donovan, retired now from the Miami Herald, blogs this:

Via Eat the Press, notice that one of the highest ranking searches on Technorati is 'Steorn'. What? Turns out this Irish company claims to have discovered a free source of energy, using magnetic fields (Observer story).
Their website says the number of scientists applying to test the process has risen to over 1300 in three days.

We have developed a technology that produces free, clean and constant energy.

This means never having to recharge your phone, never having to refuel your car. A world with an infinite supply of clean energy for all.

There's already a Wikipedia entry with links to more news coverage.

Futuristic illustrations of cars often envisioned magnetic highways. What's radical here is that what this company describes is a perpetual motion machine -- "...generator configurations that appeared to be over 100% efficient" -- which violates the first law of thermodynamics.

From the Our Technology section of Steorn's site:

"Steorn’s technology appears to violate the ‘Principle of the Conservation of Energy’, considered by many to be the most fundamental principle in our current understanding of the universe. This principle is stated simply as ‘energy can neither be created nor destroyed, it can only change form’.

Steorn is making three claims for its technology:

1. The technology has a coefficient of performance greater than 100%.
2. The operation of the technology (i.e. the creation of energy) is not derived from the degradation of its component parts.
3. There is no identifiable environmental source of the energy (as might be witnessed by a cooling of ambient air temperature).

The sum of these claims is that our technology creates free energy.

This represents a significant challenge to our current understanding of the universe and clearly such claims require independent validation from credible third parties."

The tech-savvy company has a forum discussion going, where the battle rages.

Art in books:

Tuba Detail

Jean Coulon, Belgium

This is from BibliOdyssey: Symphony of the Absurd, just one of many image collections at BiblioOdyssey, which bills itself as "Books~~Illustrations~~Science~~History~~Visual Materia Obscura~~Eclectic Bookart."

I imagine the blogger spending days in a rare-book library, mining the treasures of a time when talents were developed to fill lives that lacked TV, YouTube and endless opportunites to be merely a spectator.

The images on the blog's right side are a visual index of earlier posts -- a watercolor of Toltec calendar easily hobnobs with Automobile Manufacturer Catalogues, a 1922 theater poster, Ottoman Calligraphy and Fellini Caricatures.

Best of all, there's a blogroll of kindred blogs. Get lost here.

Jesse M. King

From A House of Pomegranates by Oscar Wilde.

The source is a StumbleUpon site by LotusGreen, a "58-year-old single woman" from Berkeley, Calif. -- less a blog than a place to collect and display such finds.

Party pooper? City Asked To Un-"Democrat" Lieberman: The New Haven Independent covers the challenge to the Democratic credentials of the Senate nominee of the Connecticut for Lieberman party.

Hell hath more fury...: An excerpt from an autobiography by Time magazine art critic Robert Hughes is packaged in the Times (U.K.) as a repudiation of the '60s (The curse of free love) but it's actually his vicious revenge on his first wife, who's now too dead to refute his version of their marriage.

Read it with the same fascination as watching a train wreck.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 10:07 AM | Permalink