Tag Archives: fraud

Understanding Electronics: The (Non)Magic of Free Energy

I fig­ured I’d make a brief post to wet my read­ers’ feet in the vast pond of elec­tron­ics engi­neer­ing. Here’s a real­ly inter­est­ing video about the sub­ject of free ener­gy, nar­rat­ed by a spe­cial­ist who actu­al­ly works in and under­stands elec­tron­ics, and is able to point out in fair­ly com­mon terms why and how free-ener­gy devices are not pos­si­ble to create.

TL;DR — it’s not because there exists any set of spe­cial workarounds to our exist­ing laws of physics, or that alter­nate laws of physics exist for well-known phe­nom­e­na that are some­how wait­ing to be writ­ten. Rather, it’s almost uni­ver­sal­ly the case that peo­ple, even well-mean­ing ones, tend to mis­in­ter­pret units of mea­sure, fail to prop­er­ly con­cep­tu­al­ize math­e­mat­i­cal equa­tions, and fail to incor­po­rate numer­ous sci­en­tif­ic pro­ce­dures and prin­ci­ples in their work. To add fuel to the fire, most peo­ple who cham­pi­on free ener­gy devices gen­er­al­ly choose to spend their time with those of the same mind­set, an effect which in time mul­ti­plies the shaky devi­a­tions of com­pre­hen­sion and foun­da­tion­al stud­ies, and fur­ther dimin­ish­es the capac­i­ty to be self-correcting.

Anti-Vaccine Crusader Andrew Wakefield Marked by Science Community as Discredited, Fraudulent

So … I was read­ing FARK today when I came across this: the man cit­ed as the ini­tia­tor for much of the cur­rent cli­mate of anti-vac­ci­na­tion fear has been called out as fraud­u­lent and dis­cred­it­ed by the British Med­ical Jour­nal (see also: cov­er­age via Seth Mnookin and NYT Mag­a­zine). Wake­field was the per­son who tried to claim that MMR vac­cines cause autism — an unproven alle­ga­tion that has unfor­tu­nate­ly car­ried a dis­pro­por­tion­ate amount of weight in the minds of some parents.

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