From: geni geniice@gmail.com On 11/23/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) alphasigmax@gmail.com wrote:

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For some inexplicable reason the media tend to stay away from perpetual motion machines, even though they go for all the other pseudoscience.

Not in this case. Couple of months back this was springing up all over the place. I though running cars on water went out decades ago.

Yes, but there's been all of this confusing stuff about the "hydrogen economy." Half the public seems to think that "hydrogen" is a source of energy rather than a way of storing and transporting energy. And the silly science reporters on TV always make a point of mentioning how much hydrogen there is "in" water, while neglecting the essential point that it takes enormous amounts of energy to get it out of the water. It's sort of like pointing out how many nutrients there are in shit... So I think the pinch of powder that turns water into automobile fuel is about ready for a comeback. After all, Detroit in its present weakened state can't suppress it forever.

There is nothing new under the sun.

I remember reading about 666, the Number of the Beast, in some book or another in the fifties, and thinking that was an interesting bit of obscure trivia... as indeed it was for a couple of decades, not re- entering the mainstream until about the seventies.

I thought homeopathic medicine was as dead as orgone energy, but nowadays you can go into any drugstore and buy a headache remedy whose active ingredient is .00000000000004% White Bryony, plus . 00000000000000000000000000000008% Golden Seal Hydrastis in the Extra Strength Sinus Formula. They should probably put "You Have Won!" inside the cap of the containers that actually contain a molecule of the Golden Seal Hydrastis. What I can never figure out about this stuff is who is checking to see whether these preparations actually contain what they are said to contain... and, for that matter, _how_ anyone _could_ check.

As for Wikipedia and stock manipulation, yes, this is a danger... and I continue to believe that the use of Wikipedia for commercial promotion represents one of the greatest long-term dangers to Wikipedia. It's really no different in kind from things like the articles on very small, very independent movies that show up a few months before the movie is released.